Mud by Sealie

New fandom: Stargate Atlantis

Type: Genfic
Spoilers: none

Beta: LKY

Contact: sealie@trickster.org or sealie1@hotmail.com

Caveat lector

The ashes caught under his smoothly pared fingernails. Grains bit into the sensitive wicks at the edges of his nails turning the surgically scrubbed pink skin dark and grey. Slowly, Carson rubbed his fingers together and the fine, smooth cinders felt like tears but they weren’t wet.

Carson carefully hollowed out a second handful of broken down bones and flesh from the urn and cast it out over the Seas of Atlantis.

The remnants dispersed in a breath of wind like a puff of warm breath on a frosty November morning in Glasgow. He watched the ashes fall wondering if they would reach the slate grey sea or be carried to the far land to mix with the Athosians’ freshly tilled soil.

Then they would eat him.

Now was the moment to pass on the urn to the sentinel standing behind him waiting patiently for his turn.

Carson was supposed to say a few words. He felt that he should say those few words, but then tears would be inevitable.

The third handful felt much like the others, too dry and delicate for words. Body burnt and bones crushed. There was no land on Atlantis for burial and to cast a body into the sea might cause unparalleled destruction to the ecosystem that the group’s marine biologists had yet to plumb.

So fire and pestle rendered the people he knew and loved to ashes.

Rodney would probably prefer to be engulfed by the event horizon of an awakened stargate or cryogenically frozen and cast into space to be resurrected by aliens in some distant future.

It was hard to resurrect a desiccated husk when vitality and unparalleled laziness had been drained and drank.

Carson opened his palm and blew gently over the ashes. A harder, harsher breath was needed to blow all the ashes away and that didn’t fit into the solemnity of the last goodbye. He turned his hand over, palm down, so the ashes would fall.

Who was he going to tease?

“Carson?” Elizabeth said softly.

All gone. He turned and manufactured a smile which nobody would believe. Elizabeth met it with a twist of her top lip. He passed the urn to John and took his place amongst the grievers.

“You were the best bastard, McKay.” John threw his handful with all his might and then tucked the urn under his left arm and saluted, thumb tucked neatly, hand straight, wrist locked and elbow cocked. No sloppiness today.

Short, sharp and sweet.

Sheppard thrust the ashes at Weir – last to speak – the one with the prepared elegy. Carson tuned her out, knowing that the words would be appropriate and good, stylish and simplistic, when Rodney wanted pomp and circumstance, glitz, glamour and homage.

Resources and time were tight, Elizabeth had argued, too many bodies to create an individual ceremony and mechanism for each and every fallen to the Wraith.

So cremation and simple ceremony.

Carson brushed his hands together washing off Rodney.

Should have been stardust not mud.

fin