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Timestamp meme: Killing Frost tag
Several people (namely Thady, Tipper and Derry) asked for a post-Killing Frost scene for the timestamp meme. Tipper specifically wanted a ficlet that dealt with the fallout of the various accusations in the story, and Derry wanted something with the OC's, Ling or Seavey. (Of course, Derry then changed her mind totally, but there is just no pleasing some people. *grin*)
If you haven't read Killing Frost, this is quite spoilery for it.
While searching for our missing people, Specialist Dex led us to a cave where--
Carol Ling raised her hands from the keyboard, and then slowly, deliberately, erased the line of copy she had just typed. A glance at the clock in the corner of the computer screen showed her that it was after 2 a.m., local time. In five hours she was due for a briefing with Caldwell and Weir before sending the final copy of their voluminous incident report to the SGC.
She had spent every spare moment in the last few days, in between helping in the infirmary with the many injured, hard at work on her own share of those reports. Next to Caldwell, she had to do the most paperwork on the Daedalus disaster -- a full assessment of the medical effects of the crash, including detailed reports and autopsies on all of the dead. Normally this was by far her least favorite part of her job. But this time, those reports were already finished and filed in a tidy folder on her desktop.
All but one.
By the time they'd been able to spare a jumper from the evacuation efforts to go look for Lt. Armstrong's body, there had been nothing left to retrieve. The planet's scavengers had made sure of that. But this did not change the fact that Major Carol Ling had been the ranking officer at the scene of the murder of an American citizen.
If only she could fall back upon the simple elegance of self-defense. She had not, after all, seen what had happened in the cave. Armstrong could have lain in wait for Ronon; he could have attacked when Ronon attempted to apprehend him. She wished that she hadn't allowed Ronon to overrule her better judgment, wished that she had gone with him when he went into the cave. At least that way she'd know what she was dealing with.
Just write the truth. You didn't see what happened. There will be an investigation, but it's out of your hands. Tell the truth; it's the right thing anyway; and then it won't be your problem anymore.
Except that she wasn't sure if telling the truth was the right thing. There would certainly be an investigation, and while she didn't have a clue how jurisdiction was interpreted out here, one thing she did know: the USAF was likely to take a very dim view of the death of an American serviceman at the hands of a Pegasus Galaxy native. It was true that there were several reliable witnesses (including Col. Caldwell) who could testify to Armstrong being a traitor and a murderer. But Ronon's brand of frontier justice had gone out of style in the U.S. a century ago.
They may hang him out to dry. I can't guarantee that they won't.
And how do I feel about that?
She leaned back in her chair, staring at the ceiling with eyes that burned from too little sleep.
Ronon frightened her. There was no getting around it. She was no fragile flower; she was forty-seven years old and had served as a medic in some of the most dangerous parts of the world. But there was something in him that was deeply, darkly alien to her. She hadn't seen what had happened in the cave, but she would bet the last dollar of her pension that Armstrong had been neither armed nor threatening when Ronon had shot him.
And the way she felt about that ... With a sigh, she laced her fingers behind her head, stretching shoulders that ached from hours hunched over the computer.
It's not just that I'm afraid of Ronon, although I am. I fear what he makes me see in myself.
Armstrong had betrayed his country and his planet; he'd been directly responsible for the deaths of every man and woman who had died on the Daedalus. Men and women she knew personally, whose blood had bathed her hands as she struggled to save them, whose dying gasps haunted her at night.
She could not honestly tell herself that, if she'd had a gun pointed at his head, she would not have done the same.
Sitting up straight, bending forward, she began to type rapidly, describing in terse and cold terms everything that had happened between the time that they'd left the Daedalus and when they'd found Caldwell, Sheppard and McKay. She described how Ronon had made her wait behind, with Seavey, while he went up to the cave. She described hearing gunshots, how Ronon had come out alone, how she and Seavey had continued to follow him until he backtracked Armstrong to the crashed jumper.
Then she scrolled up and, after gazing at the screen for a moment, inserted a paragraph return just after Ronon exited the cave. She typed quickly:
Seavey turned to follow Dex. I paused to look inside the cave and verify the circumstances of Armstrong's death. From the mouth of the cave, I could see that the body was lying on its stomach, holding a gun in one hand. This is consistent with Specialist Dex having fired in self-defense.
She sighed, read it over a couple of times, and then deleted it. Whatever she wrote here, she would need to be able to defend in court under cross-examination if necessary. She couldn't lie under oath. She wouldn't lie under oath.
The truth was, she hadn't looked. She should have. The fault lay not with Ronon, but in her, because she hadn't wanted to look, hadn't wanted to know. Any inquiry -- and there would surely be one -- was bound to ask that question. Why didn't you look in the cave, Major Ling?
Because I didn't want to know. If I didn't look, then I wouldn't have to lie. I wanted it to be someone else's problem.
As the ranking officer on the scene, she should have looked. It was her duty to look. And if the court of inquiry didn't ask her that, then they would have be deliberately looking the other way, because any fool could see the glaring omission.
She hit "Undo", restoring the polite lie that made Dex a hero, and herself a dutiful officer doing her job to the fullest extent possible.
She stared at it for a full minute. Then she deleted it and hit "Save".
Why tell the truth when the truth might well destroy her career, and Dex's life? Integrity, she thought. It was the single thing that divided her from people like Armstrong. Outside the cave, Dex had told her that her kind of justice didn't follow her to the Pegasus Galaxy, and she'd told him that he was wrong -- that she took it with her wherever she went.
It was time to find out if those were just pretty words, or if she truly believed them.
She spell-checked the file, and then closed it, with its damning truth intact. She spent a few minutes neatly arranging her reports in their folder so that she could access them quickly and easily, in the correct order, for Caldwell and Weir and later the SGC. Then she pushed the laptop away from her. 3 a.m. -- four hours 'til the briefing.
She should have been frightened or nervous, but instead she found that she was just ... relieved. She hadn't realized how this decision had been knotting up her stomach for days. Now that it was over and done, she found that she felt lighter and freer than she had since a twist of fate or human weakness had sent the Daedalus plowing into that nameless ice world. There would yet be consequences to bear, but she felt that she was capable of bearing them, up to and including the loss of her military career, if it came to that. And maybe, just maybe, she could catch a couple hours' sleep first.
If you haven't read Killing Frost, this is quite spoilery for it.
While searching for our missing people, Specialist Dex led us to a cave where--
Carol Ling raised her hands from the keyboard, and then slowly, deliberately, erased the line of copy she had just typed. A glance at the clock in the corner of the computer screen showed her that it was after 2 a.m., local time. In five hours she was due for a briefing with Caldwell and Weir before sending the final copy of their voluminous incident report to the SGC.
She had spent every spare moment in the last few days, in between helping in the infirmary with the many injured, hard at work on her own share of those reports. Next to Caldwell, she had to do the most paperwork on the Daedalus disaster -- a full assessment of the medical effects of the crash, including detailed reports and autopsies on all of the dead. Normally this was by far her least favorite part of her job. But this time, those reports were already finished and filed in a tidy folder on her desktop.
All but one.
By the time they'd been able to spare a jumper from the evacuation efforts to go look for Lt. Armstrong's body, there had been nothing left to retrieve. The planet's scavengers had made sure of that. But this did not change the fact that Major Carol Ling had been the ranking officer at the scene of the murder of an American citizen.
If only she could fall back upon the simple elegance of self-defense. She had not, after all, seen what had happened in the cave. Armstrong could have lain in wait for Ronon; he could have attacked when Ronon attempted to apprehend him. She wished that she hadn't allowed Ronon to overrule her better judgment, wished that she had gone with him when he went into the cave. At least that way she'd know what she was dealing with.
Just write the truth. You didn't see what happened. There will be an investigation, but it's out of your hands. Tell the truth; it's the right thing anyway; and then it won't be your problem anymore.
Except that she wasn't sure if telling the truth was the right thing. There would certainly be an investigation, and while she didn't have a clue how jurisdiction was interpreted out here, one thing she did know: the USAF was likely to take a very dim view of the death of an American serviceman at the hands of a Pegasus Galaxy native. It was true that there were several reliable witnesses (including Col. Caldwell) who could testify to Armstrong being a traitor and a murderer. But Ronon's brand of frontier justice had gone out of style in the U.S. a century ago.
They may hang him out to dry. I can't guarantee that they won't.
And how do I feel about that?
She leaned back in her chair, staring at the ceiling with eyes that burned from too little sleep.
Ronon frightened her. There was no getting around it. She was no fragile flower; she was forty-seven years old and had served as a medic in some of the most dangerous parts of the world. But there was something in him that was deeply, darkly alien to her. She hadn't seen what had happened in the cave, but she would bet the last dollar of her pension that Armstrong had been neither armed nor threatening when Ronon had shot him.
And the way she felt about that ... With a sigh, she laced her fingers behind her head, stretching shoulders that ached from hours hunched over the computer.
It's not just that I'm afraid of Ronon, although I am. I fear what he makes me see in myself.
Armstrong had betrayed his country and his planet; he'd been directly responsible for the deaths of every man and woman who had died on the Daedalus. Men and women she knew personally, whose blood had bathed her hands as she struggled to save them, whose dying gasps haunted her at night.
She could not honestly tell herself that, if she'd had a gun pointed at his head, she would not have done the same.
Sitting up straight, bending forward, she began to type rapidly, describing in terse and cold terms everything that had happened between the time that they'd left the Daedalus and when they'd found Caldwell, Sheppard and McKay. She described how Ronon had made her wait behind, with Seavey, while he went up to the cave. She described hearing gunshots, how Ronon had come out alone, how she and Seavey had continued to follow him until he backtracked Armstrong to the crashed jumper.
Then she scrolled up and, after gazing at the screen for a moment, inserted a paragraph return just after Ronon exited the cave. She typed quickly:
Seavey turned to follow Dex. I paused to look inside the cave and verify the circumstances of Armstrong's death. From the mouth of the cave, I could see that the body was lying on its stomach, holding a gun in one hand. This is consistent with Specialist Dex having fired in self-defense.
She sighed, read it over a couple of times, and then deleted it. Whatever she wrote here, she would need to be able to defend in court under cross-examination if necessary. She couldn't lie under oath. She wouldn't lie under oath.
The truth was, she hadn't looked. She should have. The fault lay not with Ronon, but in her, because she hadn't wanted to look, hadn't wanted to know. Any inquiry -- and there would surely be one -- was bound to ask that question. Why didn't you look in the cave, Major Ling?
Because I didn't want to know. If I didn't look, then I wouldn't have to lie. I wanted it to be someone else's problem.
As the ranking officer on the scene, she should have looked. It was her duty to look. And if the court of inquiry didn't ask her that, then they would have be deliberately looking the other way, because any fool could see the glaring omission.
She hit "Undo", restoring the polite lie that made Dex a hero, and herself a dutiful officer doing her job to the fullest extent possible.
She stared at it for a full minute. Then she deleted it and hit "Save".
Why tell the truth when the truth might well destroy her career, and Dex's life? Integrity, she thought. It was the single thing that divided her from people like Armstrong. Outside the cave, Dex had told her that her kind of justice didn't follow her to the Pegasus Galaxy, and she'd told him that he was wrong -- that she took it with her wherever she went.
It was time to find out if those were just pretty words, or if she truly believed them.
She spell-checked the file, and then closed it, with its damning truth intact. She spent a few minutes neatly arranging her reports in their folder so that she could access them quickly and easily, in the correct order, for Caldwell and Weir and later the SGC. Then she pushed the laptop away from her. 3 a.m. -- four hours 'til the briefing.
She should have been frightened or nervous, but instead she found that she was just ... relieved. She hadn't realized how this decision had been knotting up her stomach for days. Now that it was over and done, she found that she felt lighter and freer than she had since a twist of fate or human weakness had sent the Daedalus plowing into that nameless ice world. There would yet be consequences to bear, but she felt that she was capable of bearing them, up to and including the loss of her military career, if it came to that. And maybe, just maybe, she could catch a couple hours' sleep first.
no subject
I always liked Carol Ling because she was very human. She made mistakes but she *did* have a moral code and a sense of decency which you wonderfully showcase again here. Loved the way she considered her dilemna and her reactions to the various possibilities.
Of course, I still wouldn't mind seeing that other meme option we talked about... ;-P
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Yes ... of the various OCs I've written, I really loved Carol, and precisely because of what you point out. She's very flawed and yet has a very strong moral code, probably moreso than any character that I've written -- it very much defines who she is. And I really liked writing that. I was happy to get back inside her head.
I realized a very silly thing while I was working on this story -- if we must have a new doctor on Atlantis, I really want Carol for that role! LOL! Which will never happen, of course, because she doesn't exist except in my head. *snort* But I want her anyway! Until the show officially comes up with somebody, I'm tempted to have her reassigned from the Daedalus for my spring crop of fics. Not that she should be in it *much*, because I don't want her to be annoyingly intrusive. But it would just be kind of cool to have her there, just sort of in the background, being friends with Rodney and butting heads with Ronon and just kind of being there.
And I like the idea of writing your other request, too. In fact, I'm wooed by the idea of doing a rather long story in that particular AU world. Hmm...
Carol Ling as doctor
Give me Carol any day; at least she has the years and experience (both medical and command) under her belt!
no subject
Will you write more in this universe? Because I'm beyond curious to know what might happen next.
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Because I think that some people don't get the difference between antagonist and villain. That or they want there to be a clear cut choice - our guys are in the right and if you even consider something outside of that you are not only wrong but somehow bad. That sort of black and white thinking drives me right up a wall in fiction.
I love a well written antagonist. I may not agree with him/her, I may not want him/her to win, but at very least I should get the feeling that he/she is acting out his/her own moral code. (see my comment below for more of this)
On the show, I have always gotten that feeling from Caldwell. That he was thinking about the bigger (and that times more practical) picture. It just happen to collide with John's "We don't leave out people behind, even if we risk losing more people to get that person out of trouble, but that is not going to happen so why worry about it" mentality.
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And it's very unfortunate that so often the fans seem to come out with an incredibly black-and-white view of things, where Our Heroes have to wear the white hats (which in fact, they're not even being portrayed that way).
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Exactly. The way I saw it that was part of Caldwell's job. To present the a more pragmatic view or to remind Our Heroes of the danger, and maybe to get them proceed with a bit more care. It seems all to often that Sheppard doesn't think of the possible consequences of his choices - he is to focused on being the hero. He doesn't think much about what could happen if thing go wrong. .. sometimes that helps(Grace Under Pressure for example) but sometimes that sort of think can backfire in the worst way.
In Satdea John said that he would die to save one his new family - but I would love to see what would happen if in trying to save one of them - he lost one(or more) of the others? One of these I may write that fic.
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I even understood the need to put some conflict into the Sheppard/McKay friendship with Trinity, even though I didn't like it at first. But it added to their friendship in the end, and reminded us that the Rodney of '48 Hours' and 'Redemption' was still around. It also helped his character to grow, I think.
And our guys aren't always 100% pure - you know, Kavanagh and the almost torture bit, the retro-virus and Michael - not exactly cut and dried ethics there!
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You show Ling's dilemma very well. Does she tell the truth and risk not only her job/career as well that of Ronon's or does she lie to protect not only herself - but also Ronon who did what he thought was the right thing to do. (and if the USAF needed a scapegoat for the whole mess I am sure that for many Ronon would do just fine. (I am also sure that Sheppard would have something to say about that.)
I liked that she chose to stick by her moral code even as she worried about the possible consequences of those actions. And I wouldn't be surprised if Ronon supported her in her choice.
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I found this a very interesting tag to write, because I *did* write the characters into quite a dilemma without even really meaning to. (At the time, I was just trying to tie up the Armstrong part of the story!) But they ended up in a difficult situation and there's really still lots of story potential in resolving it.
Sigh
Thanks for those who asked for the aftermath tag. It was a good one!
Val
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I love tags to great fics!