![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
TITLE: Monday's Child
AUTHOR:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kellifer_fic
SUMMARY: Monday's Child is Fair of Face
CATEGORY: Gen
RATING: PG13
SPOILERS: None
NOTES: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
auficathon
REQUIREMENTS: Written forazarsuete who wanted SGA characters as elem. school kids playing at Atlantis. The "discovery" of Atlantis...who has the idea for the game, where do they play it and why did they pick that place?
Thanks to my beta Superfox.
The Jumper was in a flat spin and John, slumped sideways, was bleeding out. Through the haze he could hear Rodney vaguely screaming at him to "Wake up, wake the hell up!" but he just couldn't oblige right then.
He needed to... he couldn't remember.
It had seemed important at the time.
Monday's child is fair of face ...
John Sheppard always got to give out the roles. He was the leader by pure chance of lucky birth, a natural charisma bestowed upon him that made the other children naturally listen and follow his lead. He did actually try to hand over the leadership every now and again, but the game would fall down and all would be in disarray. He would sigh with a heaviness on his shoulders that was older than he was and then go back to being the organiser, arranging everyone the way he liked them.
"Because I said so," he snapped, a response he had learned from his father and abused with great alacrity. The others hated it, but would always snap to when he used it. It was tall speak and none of the others had quite mastered it the way he had.
He never got to be the leader at home. Oftentimes, his father, bellowing out orders, would cuff John for moving too slowly. Only last year, John had thought it high time he stood up to his overbearing father and earned a broken nose for his trouble.
His mother had been devastated because John was her shining glory, the good looking boy that she could lord over the other military wives with their more homely children and he had been ruined.
She was later greatly relieved to find that the slightly crooked nose only gave John's face more character and therefore added to his appeal. She went straight back to crowing about his various and sundry achievements. She lamented his unfortunate lack of intelligence because he hid it carefully from her. Unlike his face, this was an easy thing to do.
"I get to be the pilot." John advised his tone more serious than his tender years should have allowed. He grinned around at the others who groaned and kicked at the dusty ground because they would not protest.
They wouldn't dare.
Besides, he was the best so they would just have to deal with it.
He loved playing Atlantis.
Carefully easing John sideways, Teyla took the opportunity to put hands on his wound to check how deep. She inhaled sharply when four fingers went in all the way to the knuckle. She looked about the ship but the way it was spinning, everyone else was a blur. Only she and John were stable in her mind.
It felt like hours had passed but Teyla knew it was actually only seconds.
An eternity falling in a single moment.
Tuesday's child is full of grace...
Teyla Emmagen always ignored what John said and just did what she liked anyway. With her exotic looks, he was likely to award her the role of either alien or villain, which was usually the case. She would agree and then end up doing something that would make him yell and tell her to 'just play properly ok?' in such a wounded tone, that she would behave again... for all of about three seconds.
She was happy though, because there was a new kid at school and he had a similar look to her so she was hoping that he would have to be the alien this time.
She was just hoping she actually got to finish playing today.
Her mother, a woman of hard feature and harder life, would either start drinking too early in the day and wander up to the playground to yell at Teyla to "Get her ass home and clean up the pigsty they lived in" or she would start too late and not show up to get Teyla at all. Those days were the best because Teyla would play until dark and then run home, her schoolbag banging on the back of her legs the whole way, the wind in her hair.
For those few moments, she would feel free.
She loved the lazy, afternoons after school more than anything.
John, standing tall and running a hand through his hair, was up to assigning roles. Teyla grinned, knowing that for once she would get something different.
"Teyla, you and Ronon can be the aliens."
Teyla rolled her eyes and huffed.
Perfect.
Ronon was pressed up against the inner hull of the jumper, trying to stop the contents of his stomach from joining their group in the ship's interior. He had been once told by Teyla to pick a spot and keep his eyes focused on it to stop from getting dizzy, but his spot was moving as fast as he was so it wasn't helping much.
He looked down and saw a piece of shrapnel was imbedded in his thigh which he didn't even remember feeling. He wondered vaguely if perhaps the jumper's spin wasn't the only thing making him dizzy.
When he slumped the G forces kept him upright.
Wednesday's child is full of woe...
He was standing hunched on the side of the group, enjoying the simple act of just being included. Kids like Ronon Dex either were bullies from the start, or became cripplingly shy and gentle. Ronon had become the latter and although he was bigger than most kids his age, the bullies among them would sense his unwillingness to use his size to his advantage and would prey on him.
John had caught some kids backing Ronon into a corner that day and had simply dismissed them, the underlying threat that if they didn't was all too clear.
"Why didn't you just smack 'em one?" he'd asked incredulously. "You would've been able to lay all four out cold."
Ronon didn't really want to explain how every now and again, he would do just that, but he would hurt the kids badly enough that parents would be frightened and teacher's angry. He'd now moved five schools in three years because people just didn't leave him alone.
John was the first person who had ever approached him in friendship.
It was a strange group that hung out after school and Ronon wasn't sure how any of them connected. He guessed he fit in just because he didn't.
He was okay with that.
"I can do the splits, you know," the girl who'd been introduced as Teyla, bragged.
“Yeah? Prove it."
She dropped to the ground with a flourish, one leg stretched out in front and one behind. She raised her arms in the air and gave a prim little wave at the end that said, Tada.
"Don't you split your pants doing that?" he asked and she giggled. He hadn’t meant to be funny but his older brother was always telling him that he was always so straight forward and literal, that he just seemed funny.
"Hey, if we're aliens, do we get to speak our own language?" he asked, excited at the prospect despite himself.
”No," Teyla sighed, a grumpy set to her mouth. "John says everyone talks English in Atlantis."
"Weird," Ronon sighed.
Teyla nodded.
He hated flying and only did it under duress, and always, always, ALWAYS when John was actually conscious.
"Wake up!" he tried again, but Teyla only gave Rodney a plaintive look as she slid him out of the pilot's chair.
Thursday's child has far to go…
Rodney McKay would be sitting under a tree, his nose buried in a book, when he would inevitably be kicked, punched, or manhandled until he agreed to come and play Atlantis with them.
It wasn’t a surprise when John pointed his way and said “Science officer.”
Rodney would harrumph good-naturedly, and although he suspected he was getting a little old for the game, if not in age then in mind, he still liked the basic concept and also how he would confound the other kids when it was time to explain what they were doing and how it worked.
They would usually grow bored quickly and start playing that the Wraith were attacking, and although John and the feisty little Teyla usually got to play act that they were saving the day, every now and again he would be allowed to save the city they had built in their imaginations, each adding a touch.
That it was in the Pegasus Galaxy was Rodney’s doing. John, of course, stuck the city in the middle of the ocean, therefore necessitating the presence of a shield.
“Can’t the Atlanteans just breathe underwater?” Ronon, the new kid, had asked.
“They’re not Atlanteans, they’re Ancients,” Rodney had corrected patiently.
“Are they really old?”
Rodney had desperately wished for his book.
She hated waiting for them, always waiting. She had taken to wringing her hands, a trait she had hated when her mother did it.
“Colonel Sheppard, please come in?” she tried again, although most in the control room looked at
her, already having given up.
She never did.
Friday's child is loving and giving…
“Why do I have to be back in the city?” Elizabeth asked. John smiled, the way he always did.
“Because you’re the smartest,” John answered. She heard Rodney snort and John winced. “The smartest girl,” he clarified, which earned him an unpleasant glare from Teyla. “Except for her,” he flicked his head at Teyla and now Elizabeth was glaring. “Just get up in the tree will ya?” he snapped, tired of pleasing everyone.
She had to be given a boost, being slighter than most and she didn’t know how she was going to get down again, but while she was there, she thought she might as well climb to the higher branches.
Once issued a challenge, Elizabeth Weir always had to surpass expectations.
Next time I’m asked on a field mission, I’ll decline, Carson was thinking, as he struggled to make it from one end of the ship to the other, seeing that there were two people in trouble.
He supposed it was a bit useless trying to tend to the wounded when their ship was hurtling towards the land below, but he figured he might as well go out doing what he had devoted his life to.
Easing pain.
Saturday’s child works hard for his living…
“Because you have a funny accent.”
Carson crossed his arms over his chest, rising to his tiptoes so he could be eye level with John. “I don’t have an accent, it’s you all that have the accents,” he replied huffily.
“The medic is the cool job. You run into the battle but you don’t get shot at.” John tried to
soothe.
“Who says? I’ve got a great big target on me!”
“That’s a red cross. It means not to shoot at you. That’s what my Dad told me,” John tugged at the white armband with a red cross scratched across it in thick magic marker.
Carson didn’t look convinced.
“Liz isn’t in the ship either,” Teyla came to the rescue, but Carson simply scowled at them.
“Yeah, but she gets to be up a tree,” he huffed.
The jumper would pull out of its spin at the last moment. Everyone knew that.
Although John’s vision was blacking out at the edges.
Although Teyla was trying to hold his insides together with her bare hands.
Although Ronon would have slumped to the jumper floor if not held fast by the motion.
Although Rodney was trying to wrestle a ship he barely knew how to fly out of a tailspin.
Although Elizabeth was waiting for them all back in the glorious, shining city.
Although Carson knew that it would get harder every time he had to patch up people who had become family.
Despite all this, somehow, everything would turn out in the end.
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day…
John smiled at them all when they were finishing off for the day, the lowering sun behind him, burnishing him gold.
“It’s a world of our own making,” he said. “It works out, because we make the rules.”
AUTHOR:
kellifer_ficSUMMARY: Monday's Child is Fair of Face
CATEGORY: Gen
RATING: PG13
SPOILERS: None
NOTES: Written for
auficathonREQUIREMENTS: Written for
azarsuete who wanted SGA characters as elem. school kids playing at Atlantis. The "discovery" of Atlantis...who has the idea for the game, where do they play it and why did they pick that place?Thanks to my beta Superfox.
The Jumper was in a flat spin and John, slumped sideways, was bleeding out. Through the haze he could hear Rodney vaguely screaming at him to "Wake up, wake the hell up!" but he just couldn't oblige right then.
He needed to... he couldn't remember.
It had seemed important at the time.
Monday's child is fair of face ...
John Sheppard always got to give out the roles. He was the leader by pure chance of lucky birth, a natural charisma bestowed upon him that made the other children naturally listen and follow his lead. He did actually try to hand over the leadership every now and again, but the game would fall down and all would be in disarray. He would sigh with a heaviness on his shoulders that was older than he was and then go back to being the organiser, arranging everyone the way he liked them.
"Because I said so," he snapped, a response he had learned from his father and abused with great alacrity. The others hated it, but would always snap to when he used it. It was tall speak and none of the others had quite mastered it the way he had.
He never got to be the leader at home. Oftentimes, his father, bellowing out orders, would cuff John for moving too slowly. Only last year, John had thought it high time he stood up to his overbearing father and earned a broken nose for his trouble.
His mother had been devastated because John was her shining glory, the good looking boy that she could lord over the other military wives with their more homely children and he had been ruined.
She was later greatly relieved to find that the slightly crooked nose only gave John's face more character and therefore added to his appeal. She went straight back to crowing about his various and sundry achievements. She lamented his unfortunate lack of intelligence because he hid it carefully from her. Unlike his face, this was an easy thing to do.
"I get to be the pilot." John advised his tone more serious than his tender years should have allowed. He grinned around at the others who groaned and kicked at the dusty ground because they would not protest.
They wouldn't dare.
Besides, he was the best so they would just have to deal with it.
He loved playing Atlantis.
Carefully easing John sideways, Teyla took the opportunity to put hands on his wound to check how deep. She inhaled sharply when four fingers went in all the way to the knuckle. She looked about the ship but the way it was spinning, everyone else was a blur. Only she and John were stable in her mind.
It felt like hours had passed but Teyla knew it was actually only seconds.
An eternity falling in a single moment.
Tuesday's child is full of grace...
Teyla Emmagen always ignored what John said and just did what she liked anyway. With her exotic looks, he was likely to award her the role of either alien or villain, which was usually the case. She would agree and then end up doing something that would make him yell and tell her to 'just play properly ok?' in such a wounded tone, that she would behave again... for all of about three seconds.
She was happy though, because there was a new kid at school and he had a similar look to her so she was hoping that he would have to be the alien this time.
She was just hoping she actually got to finish playing today.
Her mother, a woman of hard feature and harder life, would either start drinking too early in the day and wander up to the playground to yell at Teyla to "Get her ass home and clean up the pigsty they lived in" or she would start too late and not show up to get Teyla at all. Those days were the best because Teyla would play until dark and then run home, her schoolbag banging on the back of her legs the whole way, the wind in her hair.
For those few moments, she would feel free.
She loved the lazy, afternoons after school more than anything.
John, standing tall and running a hand through his hair, was up to assigning roles. Teyla grinned, knowing that for once she would get something different.
"Teyla, you and Ronon can be the aliens."
Teyla rolled her eyes and huffed.
Perfect.
Ronon was pressed up against the inner hull of the jumper, trying to stop the contents of his stomach from joining their group in the ship's interior. He had been once told by Teyla to pick a spot and keep his eyes focused on it to stop from getting dizzy, but his spot was moving as fast as he was so it wasn't helping much.
He looked down and saw a piece of shrapnel was imbedded in his thigh which he didn't even remember feeling. He wondered vaguely if perhaps the jumper's spin wasn't the only thing making him dizzy.
When he slumped the G forces kept him upright.
Wednesday's child is full of woe...
He was standing hunched on the side of the group, enjoying the simple act of just being included. Kids like Ronon Dex either were bullies from the start, or became cripplingly shy and gentle. Ronon had become the latter and although he was bigger than most kids his age, the bullies among them would sense his unwillingness to use his size to his advantage and would prey on him.
John had caught some kids backing Ronon into a corner that day and had simply dismissed them, the underlying threat that if they didn't was all too clear.
"Why didn't you just smack 'em one?" he'd asked incredulously. "You would've been able to lay all four out cold."
Ronon didn't really want to explain how every now and again, he would do just that, but he would hurt the kids badly enough that parents would be frightened and teacher's angry. He'd now moved five schools in three years because people just didn't leave him alone.
John was the first person who had ever approached him in friendship.
It was a strange group that hung out after school and Ronon wasn't sure how any of them connected. He guessed he fit in just because he didn't.
He was okay with that.
"I can do the splits, you know," the girl who'd been introduced as Teyla, bragged.
“Yeah? Prove it."
She dropped to the ground with a flourish, one leg stretched out in front and one behind. She raised her arms in the air and gave a prim little wave at the end that said, Tada.
"Don't you split your pants doing that?" he asked and she giggled. He hadn’t meant to be funny but his older brother was always telling him that he was always so straight forward and literal, that he just seemed funny.
"Hey, if we're aliens, do we get to speak our own language?" he asked, excited at the prospect despite himself.
”No," Teyla sighed, a grumpy set to her mouth. "John says everyone talks English in Atlantis."
"Weird," Ronon sighed.
Teyla nodded.
He hated flying and only did it under duress, and always, always, ALWAYS when John was actually conscious.
"Wake up!" he tried again, but Teyla only gave Rodney a plaintive look as she slid him out of the pilot's chair.
Thursday's child has far to go…
Rodney McKay would be sitting under a tree, his nose buried in a book, when he would inevitably be kicked, punched, or manhandled until he agreed to come and play Atlantis with them.
It wasn’t a surprise when John pointed his way and said “Science officer.”
Rodney would harrumph good-naturedly, and although he suspected he was getting a little old for the game, if not in age then in mind, he still liked the basic concept and also how he would confound the other kids when it was time to explain what they were doing and how it worked.
They would usually grow bored quickly and start playing that the Wraith were attacking, and although John and the feisty little Teyla usually got to play act that they were saving the day, every now and again he would be allowed to save the city they had built in their imaginations, each adding a touch.
That it was in the Pegasus Galaxy was Rodney’s doing. John, of course, stuck the city in the middle of the ocean, therefore necessitating the presence of a shield.
“Can’t the Atlanteans just breathe underwater?” Ronon, the new kid, had asked.
“They’re not Atlanteans, they’re Ancients,” Rodney had corrected patiently.
“Are they really old?”
Rodney had desperately wished for his book.
She hated waiting for them, always waiting. She had taken to wringing her hands, a trait she had hated when her mother did it.
“Colonel Sheppard, please come in?” she tried again, although most in the control room looked at
her, already having given up.
She never did.
Friday's child is loving and giving…
“Why do I have to be back in the city?” Elizabeth asked. John smiled, the way he always did.
“Because you’re the smartest,” John answered. She heard Rodney snort and John winced. “The smartest girl,” he clarified, which earned him an unpleasant glare from Teyla. “Except for her,” he flicked his head at Teyla and now Elizabeth was glaring. “Just get up in the tree will ya?” he snapped, tired of pleasing everyone.
She had to be given a boost, being slighter than most and she didn’t know how she was going to get down again, but while she was there, she thought she might as well climb to the higher branches.
Once issued a challenge, Elizabeth Weir always had to surpass expectations.
Next time I’m asked on a field mission, I’ll decline, Carson was thinking, as he struggled to make it from one end of the ship to the other, seeing that there were two people in trouble.
He supposed it was a bit useless trying to tend to the wounded when their ship was hurtling towards the land below, but he figured he might as well go out doing what he had devoted his life to.
Easing pain.
Saturday’s child works hard for his living…
“Because you have a funny accent.”
Carson crossed his arms over his chest, rising to his tiptoes so he could be eye level with John. “I don’t have an accent, it’s you all that have the accents,” he replied huffily.
“The medic is the cool job. You run into the battle but you don’t get shot at.” John tried to
soothe.
“Who says? I’ve got a great big target on me!”
“That’s a red cross. It means not to shoot at you. That’s what my Dad told me,” John tugged at the white armband with a red cross scratched across it in thick magic marker.
Carson didn’t look convinced.
“Liz isn’t in the ship either,” Teyla came to the rescue, but Carson simply scowled at them.
“Yeah, but she gets to be up a tree,” he huffed.
The jumper would pull out of its spin at the last moment. Everyone knew that.
Although John’s vision was blacking out at the edges.
Although Teyla was trying to hold his insides together with her bare hands.
Although Ronon would have slumped to the jumper floor if not held fast by the motion.
Although Rodney was trying to wrestle a ship he barely knew how to fly out of a tailspin.
Although Elizabeth was waiting for them all back in the glorious, shining city.
Although Carson knew that it would get harder every time he had to patch up people who had become family.
Despite all this, somehow, everything would turn out in the end.
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day…
John smiled at them all when they were finishing off for the day, the lowering sun behind him, burnishing him gold.
“It’s a world of our own making,” he said. “It works out, because we make the rules.”
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Good fic.
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What a neat neat neat read!
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An absolutely awesome way to end an absolutely awesome fic.
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Thanks for reading. :)
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*in awe of your icon coolness*
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Love your icon!! I love that shep expression. Hee!!
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And it's all so compact and casual that it succeeds in being completely dreamlike. But because it's fic, instead of an actual episode, I was deeply worried for their lives... but it is like an actual show... and your story makes me appreciate the actual show all the more.
Really well done. Thank you.
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Oh, I love your icon... *loves Kaylee*
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Thanks!
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And each one's reaction to their assigned rolls.
nicely done!
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Again, a powerful story. Thank you.
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Really glad you enjoyed and thanks for reading. :)
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The other thing I really love about this fic - which I'm going to cock up explaining and end up being all rambly so I apologise in advance - is the fact that if you take SGA as actual events rather than a TV show, Its pretty unbelievable. Not even talking about the life-sucking aliens, or the city rising from the ocean, or even the wormholes in space for gods sake. It's the fact that these people get themselves in danger and situations that they irrefutably cannot get out of. Yet they do. And there isn't ever a reason given to the fact that they have outrageous good luck or at least great timing.
This fic, in my mind at least, explains why they live. Why they again and again triumph.
“It works out, because we make the rules.”
Pure and simple.
Like I said, rambly and incoherent, but it came from a good place. I'm really glad I stopped to read your fic.
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