Switch, 4/?
Dec. 24th, 2007 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiercelydreamed*
"You're serious," Jo says.
Teyla sighs and swipes her hair back off her face. "Unfortunately."
Jo pinches the bridge of her nose. "So nobody remembers what happened over there--"
"Nope," says Ronon, arms still folded.
"--and we don't have any sensor data--"
"We sent a MALP through after you missed the check-in, but we couldn't get a signal from it," Carter offers.
"My data pad's just blank," Rodney mutters resentfully from his chair.
"--and medically, I'm perfectly normal--"
Keller shrugs. "Beyond the ATA gene and a pretty extensive collection of old injuries, all of which match your records."
"--so seriously." Jo raises her head and tries to keep her face neutral. "You're telling me that I was a man until we went through the gate, then six hours go by that no one on the team can account for, and when Ronon carries me back through the event horizon, I'm suddenly a woman?"
Carter grimaces and spreads her hands. "That sums it up."
Jo thinks about it for a minute. "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard."
This, finally, seems to snap Rodney out of it. "Oh, well, I'm so sorry that this incredibly disturbing turn of events doesn't meet your expectations for adequate causal theory," he snaps, sitting up as his hands sweep through the air in a gesture meant to demonstrate just how not sorry he actually is. "Welcome to my world."
Rolling her eyes, Jo drops her hips back against the counter and tells him, "You fire people for giving you explanations this lame. I mean, how can you even be sure something happened on the mission?"
"As opposed to -- are you suggesting there was a gate malfunction? Well, I suppose--" Rodney frowns, fingers moving and eyes tracking across the walls. "No, no. Maybe it's theoretically possible, but the statistical -- if something went that wrong, it'd be more likely that we wouldn't have come through at all--"
"No, that's not--" Jo groans. "I mean, how do you know that something happened to me at all?" Everyone in the room is looking at her again, and she scowls, flustered. "Couldn't the gate have tripped, I don't know, some kind of Ancient device or something that altered your memories--"
"--in exactly the same way for two hundred and thirty-odd people, leaving only yours mysteriously intact?" Rodney gapes at her. "That's your idea of a less stupid explanation?"
"If your only reason for shooting it down is Occam's Razor, which you hate--" The door slides open and Sgt. Currin jogs carrying a folder, slowing to an abrupt stop as he catches sight of her. Carter crosses to him and holds her hand out for the folder with a perfunctory smile and a thank you, Sergeant.
He backs slowly out of the infirmary, and Jo wrenches her eyes back to Rodney. "Fine," she concedes, folding her arm across her chest, "bad example, but I still don't get why no one's considering--"
Carter flips through the contents of the folder for a moment, then walks over to Jo. "I think this may help address that question, Colonel," she says, holding the folder out.
Taking it, Jo flips it around and glances down at the picture inside, which is of her. She's turning her head toward Carter again when some mental gear binds up and her mind lurches to a halt. She blinks, takes a breath through her nose, and forces herself to look back down at the picture.
It's like studying an optical illusion: there are two contradictory images in front of her, and her perceptions keep flipping back and forth between them, unable to grasp them both at the same time. For an instant all she sees is her own face, frowning slightly as she turns to look back over her own shoulder. It's a blown-up candid snapped in the first year of the expedition, after the Genii kidnapped them for the first time and Elizabeth decided it might be wise to keep current photographs on-hand. Then there's an abrupt shift, like the second hand ticking forward on the clock, and it's not her face anymore, it's a man's face, but all the features are hers, and then she's seeing herself again.
Her mind keeps ricocheting between the two split images, until finally she muscles it under control and studies the picture in pieces. Those are her eyes, complete with the bags under them, and the shape of the eyebrows is right but they're a little too thick, set just a fraction of an inch too low. The angles of the cheeks are off, but it's her mouth and chin set into a jaw that's only barely too long. The dark smudge of stubble is strange, jarring, as is the Adam's apple just visible above the collar of the uniform jacket -- which is hers too, she knows the scorch mark on the front of it, but it sits differently across wider shoulders. The sideburns should be weird, notching down like brackets, but her eyes are drawn instead to the architectural bristle at the crown of the head, and it's an act of willpower not to run her hand over her own hair to feel those cowlicks brush against the skin of her palm, the reason she kept the whole mess cropped almost to scalp for a long stretch of her twenties.
And there, like punctuation marks, are the angled-back ears and slanting Irish nose that one Sheppard's been passing to another like a bad family joke for as far back as she's seen pictures. The echo of her father would be inescapable if that weren't patently her frown and not his: sardonic instead of authoritarion, with a weary edge of okay, who dropped what.
That last jolt of recognition is what allows her to really look at the whole picture again: seeing all the small distortions that make it not her face, and the way that expression and posture overwrite those differences almost completely.
It's her personnel folder. It should be a picture of her. It isn't. It is. And there on the side tab is the printed text that reads:
SHEPPARD, JOHN F. -- LT-COL USAF
419-34-8407
Jo swallows, feeling her throat move with it, then breathes out steadily and pulls air slowly back in again. "Okay. Yeah," she says, without looking up. "I think I see what you mean."
*
[All installments archived here.]
"You're serious," Jo says.
Teyla sighs and swipes her hair back off her face. "Unfortunately."
Jo pinches the bridge of her nose. "So nobody remembers what happened over there--"
"Nope," says Ronon, arms still folded.
"--and we don't have any sensor data--"
"We sent a MALP through after you missed the check-in, but we couldn't get a signal from it," Carter offers.
"My data pad's just blank," Rodney mutters resentfully from his chair.
"--and medically, I'm perfectly normal--"
Keller shrugs. "Beyond the ATA gene and a pretty extensive collection of old injuries, all of which match your records."
"--so seriously." Jo raises her head and tries to keep her face neutral. "You're telling me that I was a man until we went through the gate, then six hours go by that no one on the team can account for, and when Ronon carries me back through the event horizon, I'm suddenly a woman?"
Carter grimaces and spreads her hands. "That sums it up."
Jo thinks about it for a minute. "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard."
This, finally, seems to snap Rodney out of it. "Oh, well, I'm so sorry that this incredibly disturbing turn of events doesn't meet your expectations for adequate causal theory," he snaps, sitting up as his hands sweep through the air in a gesture meant to demonstrate just how not sorry he actually is. "Welcome to my world."
Rolling her eyes, Jo drops her hips back against the counter and tells him, "You fire people for giving you explanations this lame. I mean, how can you even be sure something happened on the mission?"
"As opposed to -- are you suggesting there was a gate malfunction? Well, I suppose--" Rodney frowns, fingers moving and eyes tracking across the walls. "No, no. Maybe it's theoretically possible, but the statistical -- if something went that wrong, it'd be more likely that we wouldn't have come through at all--"
"No, that's not--" Jo groans. "I mean, how do you know that something happened to me at all?" Everyone in the room is looking at her again, and she scowls, flustered. "Couldn't the gate have tripped, I don't know, some kind of Ancient device or something that altered your memories--"
"--in exactly the same way for two hundred and thirty-odd people, leaving only yours mysteriously intact?" Rodney gapes at her. "That's your idea of a less stupid explanation?"
"If your only reason for shooting it down is Occam's Razor, which you hate--" The door slides open and Sgt. Currin jogs carrying a folder, slowing to an abrupt stop as he catches sight of her. Carter crosses to him and holds her hand out for the folder with a perfunctory smile and a thank you, Sergeant.
He backs slowly out of the infirmary, and Jo wrenches her eyes back to Rodney. "Fine," she concedes, folding her arm across her chest, "bad example, but I still don't get why no one's considering--"
Carter flips through the contents of the folder for a moment, then walks over to Jo. "I think this may help address that question, Colonel," she says, holding the folder out.
Taking it, Jo flips it around and glances down at the picture inside, which is of her. She's turning her head toward Carter again when some mental gear binds up and her mind lurches to a halt. She blinks, takes a breath through her nose, and forces herself to look back down at the picture.
It's like studying an optical illusion: there are two contradictory images in front of her, and her perceptions keep flipping back and forth between them, unable to grasp them both at the same time. For an instant all she sees is her own face, frowning slightly as she turns to look back over her own shoulder. It's a blown-up candid snapped in the first year of the expedition, after the Genii kidnapped them for the first time and Elizabeth decided it might be wise to keep current photographs on-hand. Then there's an abrupt shift, like the second hand ticking forward on the clock, and it's not her face anymore, it's a man's face, but all the features are hers, and then she's seeing herself again.
Her mind keeps ricocheting between the two split images, until finally she muscles it under control and studies the picture in pieces. Those are her eyes, complete with the bags under them, and the shape of the eyebrows is right but they're a little too thick, set just a fraction of an inch too low. The angles of the cheeks are off, but it's her mouth and chin set into a jaw that's only barely too long. The dark smudge of stubble is strange, jarring, as is the Adam's apple just visible above the collar of the uniform jacket -- which is hers too, she knows the scorch mark on the front of it, but it sits differently across wider shoulders. The sideburns should be weird, notching down like brackets, but her eyes are drawn instead to the architectural bristle at the crown of the head, and it's an act of willpower not to run her hand over her own hair to feel those cowlicks brush against the skin of her palm, the reason she kept the whole mess cropped almost to scalp for a long stretch of her twenties.
And there, like punctuation marks, are the angled-back ears and slanting Irish nose that one Sheppard's been passing to another like a bad family joke for as far back as she's seen pictures. The echo of her father would be inescapable if that weren't patently her frown and not his: sardonic instead of authoritarion, with a weary edge of okay, who dropped what.
That last jolt of recognition is what allows her to really look at the whole picture again: seeing all the small distortions that make it not her face, and the way that expression and posture overwrite those differences almost completely.
It's her personnel folder. It should be a picture of her. It isn't. It is. And there on the side tab is the printed text that reads:
SHEPPARD, JOHN F. -- LT-COL USAF
419-34-8407
Jo swallows, feeling her throat move with it, then breathes out steadily and pulls air slowly back in again. "Okay. Yeah," she says, without looking up. "I think I see what you mean."
*
[All installments archived here.]