Chapter Text
The incident was nearly over, soon to be yet another AAR to be filed under “alien entities screwing with the city.” Repairs were underway, and thankfully, not too many were needed. No one had been seriously injured. The city was nearly back to normal a mere 26 hours after the chaos.
Nearly.
John was pacing in Colonel Carter’s office, unable to sit. It had been at least five hours since Doctor David Glennie had come through the gate. Three since his own interview with the man. And now the doctor was with Lorne in his quarters, deciding his fate.
“Should it take this long?” he asked, probably for the twentieth time since Carter had called him into her office. She had kept a not-so-subtle close eye on him since Glennie’s arrival. Probably didn’t want him meddling with the investigation.
Carter, who was working at her desk and mostly ignoring his presence (she didn’t actually need him for any reason other than to babysit him), glanced up at him and sighed. “Just relax, Colonel. Taking a long time isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”
For as pissed as John had been about the entire incident, Carter had kept a much more level head upon returning to find her city in total chaos. Well, not total chaos. By the time she and McKay had returned from their excursion, everything was mostly under control. All personnel had been accounted for, damage had been cataloged and prioritized, and clean up was already underway. At that point, it was really just absorbing the shock of what had happened in the ten or so hours that she had been absent.
Even after hearing the entire tale and looking at the readings taken during the power surges, Carter and McKay weren’t able to fully explain what had happened. It seemed that Lorne was the only one who would be able to shed some light on that, but Carter had forbade John from seeing him after his initial visit in the infirmary. It seemed they would have to wait to hear his version of events.
John had tried to convince her not to call the SGC, but Carter couldn’t just ignore the situation. It had been her idea to call in the civilian psychologist to assess Lorne’s mental state and determine how much of his actions had been his own versus under the influence of an alien life form. John wasn’t convinced it would be enough, was worried that the higher ups would just see the acts of insubordination and put him through a court martial, or at least remove him from Atlantis. He knew how it worked.
But the whole thing was crap. Yeah, Lorne had gone off the rails a bit, but honestly, who hadn’t? He had read AARs for SG teams back on Earth, and they’d already had plenty of their own weird alien encounters in the Pegasus Galaxy. To John, it was clear that this had all just been one of those scenarios, and he was ready to write it off as such and move on with life as usual.
Except, bureaucracy demanded an investigation. Officers, especially ones who were second-in-command of a military operation in a remote galaxy, couldn’t be allowed to just attack fellow soldiers and hold up their superior officers at gunpoint and get away with it. There had to be consequences. But, dammit, John hoped those consequences didn’t include Lorne being shipped out.
Carter had been way too calm about the entire thing, very by-the-book, which had made John even more agitated. He was under the impression that she liked the major, that they had even been acquaintances back in Colorado Springs, if not exactly friends, but he couldn’t tell now if she didn’t care what happened to him or just didn’t think there was cause for concern. It was infuriating.
John and Lorne weren’t best friends by any means, but they’d been working closely together for two years now, and they worked well together. Lorne was the by-the-book compliment to John’s off-the-wall approach, the discipline to John’s impulsive nature. He anticipated needs and fulfilled them before John even realized what they were. Not to mention, he’d saved John’s ass more times than he could count. Okay, so maybe they were pretty good friends.
He thought back to his brief conversation with the major when he had first woken up after the incident. The guy had clearly felt terrible about the whole thing, and more than that, knew he was screwed. Which had John even more convinced that the imprisonment and investigation were completely unnecessary. He would have never acted the way he did if he hadn’t been under some kind of alien influence.
John had done his own little investigation, cornering Heightmeyer and basically interrogating her until Teyla stepped in and made him calm down. Once Kate gathered her wits (he hadn’t realized he made her cry until Teyla pointed it out), she walked him through the events from her perspective.
They’d gone to Lorne’s quarters, which were in a shocking state, to say the least, and Kate had explained what happened during the hypnosis and piecing together the puzzle afterward. And if the paintings weren’t enough, Kate had also recorded the hypnosis session, which was all kinds of disturbing to listen to, but also cemented in John’s mind that his XO had definitely been out of his mind.
The whole time they were there, John couldn’t stop staring at the smears of blood on the floor, remembering how Lorne had looked when he showed up in Ops. How could he have been having seizures, bleeding out of his face, and neither of them tried to get help?
Teyla told him later that Kate would be facing her own investigation. As angry as he was about how events had played out, John thought it would be a shame if she was sent back to Earth. It had taken guts to go along with Lorne’s crazy theory to save the city, even if it hadn’t been conducted the way it should have been.
Carter held her hand up to her ear, listening to her radio, and John froze to watch her face for any clues about what was happening. She kept her expression passive as she thanked whoever was on the other end. “Doctor Glennie finished his interview,” she informed him. “He’s going to use the conference room to piece together the testimonies he collected and write up a report to send back to Earth.”
“Great,” John said, taking that as his cue to leave.
“Colonel,” she called after him, making him stop and turn back. “Don’t interfere with him. You had your interview.” She gave him a serious look, the kind that meant she wasn’t messing around.
“Yes, ma’am,” John agreed, wondering if he ever got put into a position like hers if he would have to be that... Impartial. He doubted they would ever promote him that high.
He made a beeline for Lorne’s quarters, determined to have a proper conversation with him now that he had given his testimony and couldn’t be coerced or coached to say anything else. John’s own testimony had been a frustrating experience. He felt the doctor had asked all the wrong questions and twisted his words back on themselves until he wasn’t even sure what he had said in the end. He hoped things had gone better for Lorne.
About half way there he spotted the psychologist walking down the hall with one of the social scientists, Richardson or something. John made eye contact, trying to read from Doctor Glennie’s expression anything about how the interview had gone.
“Colonel,” Glennie greeted, which John took as an invitation to stop and talk with him.
“Doctor,” he responded. “How did it go?” Asking how it went wasn’t interfering.
“You know I’m not allowed to discuss it with you,” the doctor said, but then he sighed at John’s hopeful look. “But, off the record, I don’t think you should be too concerned.”
John felt a weight lift off his shoulders as a grin spread across his face. “See?” he said, as if he was proving a point. “Not a big deal. Crazy stuff happens here all the time.”
“Yes, it does seem that way,” Glennie said slowly with a vaguely amused expression on his face. “Sounds like Major Lorne had quite the experience.” He stuck out a hand to shake. “Well, anyway, I need to write up my report.”
“Thanks, Doc,” John said, returning the handshake.
He continued on his way with a bit more pep in his step. When he got to Lorne’s quarters, he couldn’t help but smile brightly at Sergeant Riley, who was stationed outside the door. “Afternoon, Sergeant. I’m here to see the prisoner.”
Lorne was sorting canvases when he entered, but he stopped to stand at attention when he saw his CO.
John waved him off dismissively. “Just ran into the doc out in the hall,” he said.
Lorne pursed his lips, turning back to the paintings. “He say I’m crazy?” he asked darkly.
John picked up a canvas that was near the door, studying the crazy swirls of colors. “Nope.” It was actually kind of engrossing. He liked the way the blues and greens mixed. And that little splotch of yellow in the corner. For some reason it made him feel happy.
Lorne was watching him now, waiting for him to expound.
“He still has to write his report,” John said, glancing up from the painting with a mischievous smile.
Lorne rolled his eyes, knowing he wasn’t going to get a clear answer from John about his fate. “Is everything back to normal out there?” he asked, changing the subject. “They don’t give us newspapers in the clink.”
John continued to gaze at the painting, noticing now how the ring of red looked kind of like a Ferris wheel. He liked Ferris wheels. “Yeah,” he said distractedly. “Still a lot of repairs, especially on some of the lower levels that flooded when we were sinking, but mostly back to normal.” He wasn’t usually into abstract art, but something about this painting he liked. “Can I have this?” he asked, turning it slightly so Lorne could see.
It was worth asking purely for the befuddled look on Lorne’s face. “Umm, sure, sir,” he answered slowly.
John smiled and set it back down. “So, care to share what happened yesterday?”
The major crossed his arms across his chest and leaned up against his desk. “I figured by now you’ve probably heard most of it.”
John flopped down into one of the chairs Lorne had set up. “Yeah, Heightmeyer gave some insight. Said some alien thing was talking to you through your pictures here. But no one ever said exactly what the alien was or what it made you do.”
“It didn’t really make me do anything,” Lorne said, wincing. “Just... Told me it needed help. So I helped it.”
“But what was it, exactly?”
Sitting down across from him, Lorne ran a hand through his hair. “It’s a little hard to explain.”
“Try me,” John said.
He took a deep breath. “Okay... So theoretically there are tons of different dimensions, right? And in some of those, the laws of physics are different. Like, we live in four dimensions, but they have, say, eight or something. And in this other dimension, there are the places, like cities, except they’re alive, and their consciousnesses are way more complex than anything we can understand. Our brains just aren’t wired to comprehend them. We would go insane if we tried.”
John raised an eyebrow at the “going insane” part, but Lorne ignored him.
“So these cities reproduce by growing a spark of consciousness inside of them for, I don’t know, millennia, before that spark eventually becomes self aware and is released so it can create a body for itself. And so this one city was expecting a child, but they’re fighting a war, so the parent city starts opening portals to other dimensions to find a safe place to put its baby. It just so happens to open one to a world that has the perfect place. An abandoned, silent city.”
“Atlantis,” John supplied, proud that he was actually keeping up with this explanation.
Lorne nodded. “So it puts its child in Atlantis and then goes back to the battle, and closes the portal behind it. And the child grows, still unaware. When we get here, we don’t even notice it, and it doesn’t notice us. So we just live together, sharing the city, totally oblivious to each other.
“But eventually, the child starts to wake up, except its parent isn’t here. It can’t talk to us because we can’t even begin to understand its language, and its scared, doesn’t know what’s happening to it. It’s just a baby. So for whatever reason it talked to me.”
“Through the paintings,” John clarified.
“And the visions,” Lorne added.
John was silent for a minute as he pondered this. “So... baby alien city?” he finally asked.
“Simply put,” Lorne responded.
“And the power surges and the city going crazy...”
“Its version of crying, I guess.”
“Huh.” Full out tantrum, more like it. “And when you sent that message?”
“So the parent could find its child,” Lorne said. “And it did.”
John nodded slowly, staring into space, trying to imagine living cities. It was definitely one of the weirder things they’d encountered in Pegasus, but he knew better than to doubt it was true, even if he couldn’t really wrap his head around it. And it made perfect sense to him that the thing had picked Lorne to talk to. John didn’t pretend to know a thing about art, but he knew the major saw something in Atlantis that no one else quite understood.
Shaking off the tangent of thoughts, John gestured to the mosaic on the ceiling. “You know, you’re going to have to clean that up.”
Lorne followed his gaze and grimaced. “Yeah. I know.”
John stood, adding, “But first, get some sleep. You still look like crap.”
“Thanks, sir,” Lorne answered dryly, also getting up.
Picking up the canvas, John hesitated at the door. “You know,” he said, “if you need a break from painting, you’re always welcome to join me for golf sometime.”
Lorne grinned at him. “I’ll consider that, sir.”
End