Sabine Bauer - Mirror, mirror

It never happened.

Yet.

"But it's going to," he whispered, unable to say how or where he derived this certainty. "It's going to."

Part of him grasped that he was repeating that same little sentence over and over, hanging on to it as if to a lifeline. It was a lifeline. It meant he had a future. It meant that things could be changed, had to be changed, because to the best-or worst-of John's knowledge, Ronon Dex, like everyone else, had been killed by Charybdis. Or it meant that Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard had finally gone and done it and snapped.

Bug-crap crazy.

If this was crazy, it beat the hell out of sane.

There was only one problem with it..

Yeah, well, he'd have to solve it, wouldn't he?

Still wheezing a little, he eased himself back into a gentle jog and headed for his quarters. In the shower he bashed the problem around some more and finally arrived at the conclusion that there would be no easy or kind way of telling her. Meaning that he'd better get it over with right now.

Ten minutes later he'd pulled on clean clothes, crudely woven from plant fiber and the next best thing to wearing a loofah, and set off in search of Elizabeth. Usually she was easy to find, either hovering near to wherever he was, to make sure he didn't hatch any escape plans, or sometimes, when he managed to elude or plain bore her, in one of a handful of rooms.

This time it was the mess hall-she'd taken to calling it `the banquet room'-and she'd sure been busy. He stopped in the door for a moment to watch her, trying to keep the familiar tug of guilt and regret at bay. There was little left of the woman he'd known, of his friend, and he'd made her this way. Ultimately, the malfunction of the stasis chamber must have been caused by Charybdis-at the very least, Charybdis had produced the timeline where Elizabeth was condemned to this.

Every so often, without warning or apparent cause, there'd be flashes of who she'd been, of the real Elizabeth. He'd learned to dread those, because the contrast between who she'd been and what she'd become was unbearable, and after five minutes or an hour or however long it lasted, he'd lose her all over again. Lately these small windows of sanity had occurred few and far between. John tried very hard not to be grateful for it.

In fact, if anything, he'd need her to be lucid now, but it didn't look likely. Apparently they were going to celebrate Christmas, for the fifth time in the last little while. She'd dragged out that old dress again, the one he'd first found her in, and was busy garnishing a table with flowers she'd gathered the last time they'd been to the mainland. Though you'd be hard pushed to identify them as flowers now. The shriveled gray corpses were strewn among the crockery, glitter effect provided by what looked like small chunks of broken glass. Very-

"Oh no!" He let go of the doorframe, let that sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach propel him to the table. "Where did you get them, Elizabeth?" he asked, picking up a control crystal and struggling to keep his voice even. Yelling at her wouldn't help.

Head bent, she peered up through her lashes, like a child caught and put on the spot. "I found them," she mumbled, her fingers picking at a desiccated flower.

"Where?"

"On the little ships."

"Are you completely-" God, yes, of course she was out of her mind! And he should have known better than leaving her unsupervised. He'd never thought… Not that it mattered a blind damn just what he'd thought.

"There's lots and lots of them," she said brightly. "We won't miss these few."

No, of course we won't. Not unless we want to fly a jumper. Not unless we want to get out of this sub-oceanic tomb, make that non-memory happen, recover his life, and hers.

John felt his fingers clench, barely kept himself from shaking her. Instead he scooped up the crystals, checked on the chairs and under the table to make sure he had them all, stuffed them into his pockets. Fourteen, in all. That wasn't too bad. If he could get her to tell him exactly where she'd pulled them, he might be able to fix the damage. He grabbed her hand.

"Show me " Teeth grinding, he added, "Please."

"Not now." She frowned, digging her heels in. "We're expecting guests."

Great! Last time it'd been an invisible contingent from the State Department and a Dr. Simon Wallace who seemed to be part of her personal furniture. As far as stultifying evenings went, it'd been a riot. Largely because she'd insisted he carve a turkey that was as undetectable as the guests.

"They… phoned," he heard himself say. "They'll be running half an hour late."

"Oh." She wasn't convinced and let him know it. "Well, I'll need that time to straighten out the mess you've made. Honestly, John! And you could at least go and shave."

He'd love to, if she just told him where she'd hidden his knife. Probably somewhere along with the rest of his weapons-that particular midnight exploit of hers had taught him the value of insomnia. Still, the shaving issue was leverage of a kind. "I'll shave, if you come with me now and show me. We've got plenty of time."

"I don't know…"

"We can get more of these." He held out a crystal on his open palm, smiled. "You said there were lots and lots of them, remember?"

"Really?"

"Really."

Abruptly she set off, dragging him with her, almost at a run. They made it to the jumper bay in record time. The door slid open, and stepping through, taking in what had happened, what she had done, he felt as if he'd slammed into a wall. He let go of her, just stood there, trying to breathe, trying to hang on to that ounce of hope he'd found and feeling it drain away as if someone had pulled a plug.

It was no longer a question of the glass being half empty. More like the glass being broken to bits.

The hangar floor was littered with crystals, a few of them intact, many-too many-of them smashed. On each of the jumpers the hatch stood open, so she must have gotten to all of them. How had she…? Of course. She'd watched him release the hatch a dozen times or more.

"Elizabeth, what did you do?" he whispered.

"I don't like them," she pointed out with a sweeping gesture at the crippled jumpers. "We don't need them anymore. This is prettier." Smiling, she gathered a handful of splinters and let them tinkle to the floor again.

Barely paying attention-it wasn't as though she could add to the wreckage now-he stepped out into the bay, gingerly tiptoeing around glitzy ruin. The tip of his boot struck a shard, slightly bigger this one, and John realized that this crystal was still whole. He picked it up, numb and without really knowing why he bothered, and added it to the small hoard of survivors in his pockets. It was something to do, he supposed. It beat sitting on the floor, howling. Probably.

He found a total of twenty-three good crystals. They'd make a nice wind chime.

Straightening up, John stared at the nearest jumper. Might as well try, he guessed. More pertinently, he had no choice but to try. It wasn't just a question of being able to leave now. Without at least one ship, they'd starve to death-unless he disengaged the ZPMs, got the shield to fail and the city to rise, so they could go fishing on the pier. Until the Wraith dropped by for target practice.

Balancing his stack of crystals, he walked up the ramp.

"We have to go back!" There was a terse edge to Elizabeth's voice. "We have guests, remember?"

"They'll have to wait." He was utterly past caring to play house with her.

"They'll leave if we make them wait."

Excellent! He'd buy a beer for the first one out the goddamn door!

The interior of the jumper was a mess. He could see how she'd done it now: open every single hatch within reach and see what's in there. Aside from the main control junctions, she'd ransacked equipment stores, tool boxes, supply cabinets and strewn their contents over every square inch of flat surface inside the jumper. He harbored no illusions of any of the other jumpers looking any different. Where it came to stuff like this, Elizabeth was nothing if not methodical. The only piece of good news was that she hadn't gotten to the crystal banks that were hidden behind the seats' backrests.