Title: "Red was the color"
Author: Hecate
Fandom: SGA
Rating: PG 13
Pairing, Character: Elizabeth Weir
Summary: Who she was and who she is.
Disclaimer: Not mine. No money made.The title is taken from a poem (a part of it is quoted at the end of the story) but I can’t remember who wrote it.
Note: Thanks go to sandrine for help with the characterization and to emeraldsword for the beta.

She closes her eyes every morning and every evening when she pulls off her shirt, closes them against the red of the fabric, against the vertigo it gives her, the feeling of being bathed in blood, of blood running over her eyes. Into her eyes. She closes her eyes before she leaves her rooms and turns herself into Dr. Weir, leader of many, and she closes them when she´s back, when she tries to remember Elizabeth, scientist, idealist, dreamer.

It is harder to remember her with every passing week, with every decision she makes, with every time one of her people dies, when a team comes through the Stargate and the numbers don´t match up. There are days when she thinks Elizabeth is dead and buried, sucked out of her by the Wraith, by death, by loss. She remembers the other Elizabeth then, the one she truly buried, and she remembers her kind smile. She can´t smile like that anymore, she doesn´t remember how.

She doesn´t really need to anymore.

Sometimes, after another mission gone wrong and another decision that added a new fracture to who she was before, she looks into the mirror and sees only red. Then she sees herself, sees a woman that sends people into death, her own people, and that brought death to others. “Who are you?’ she wants to ask but she never says the words out loud. It´s been a long time since she had an answer to that question so she keeps quiet. She doesn´t want to wake the ghosts of the answers she had before, doesn´t want to see Elizabeth staring back at her, a broken and angry shadow. She won´t speak out loud until she can answer the question again, she promises herself this, and she wonders if she´ll like the answer when she has it. “What have you done?’

She met with Kavanagh only once after the almost torture, shortly before he left for earth, and he looked at her, really looked at her, for a long time. There was a gleam in his eyes, like old silver, and when he spoke his voice was hard and bitter. “You´re going down, Elizabeth,’ he said and back then she thought he meant her leadership, meant that she would lose Atlantis because of what she did. She didn´t, of course, because for once the military was behind her and words and phrases like “necessary’ and “only possible course of action’ filled letters to committees and whoever else it concerned. She hated herself a bit because all she felt was relief, relief for keeping Atlantis, and not anger about torture being accepted by the military, by John, by all the people she used to believe in. She doesn´t believe in them anymore.

She believes in John now, in his willingness to die for her, for Atlantis, for everybody in her city. She believes in his readiness to kill for all of them and sometimes it scares her. She never believed in blood before but her old beliefs rust away and her new religion is steel and red and keeping them alive. It feels like blasphemy. She tells herself it doesn´t matter. She knows it´s a lie.

She knows that SGC doesn´t understand Atlantis and probably doesn´t even try. She knows what a faded dream looks like and she sees it every time she´s back on earth. Sometimes she sees it in a mirror, dressed in red and wearing her face. When she remembers the relief and the lack of anger she starts to wonder what Kavanagh meant. She thinks she might have gotten the meaning wrong the first time.

She had forgotten some of the names of the people who died under her command, too many for her to grasp, too many to understand, and she had forced herself to relearn them after the first chance to send messages to earth, after she spoke about all of them into the camera, Ford becoming more and more distant with every word she said. She still learns them now, adds every name to her very own list, and repeats them in her head at night. Even now she forgets them sometimes, stumbles over one name or the other, messes up the order of their death. Some nights she´s too tired, too strung out, and she falls asleep before the last names, falls asleep after the first. Some nights she doesn´t care, there are so many ghosts in Atlantis, their own dead will never be lonely.

Her old self, the other old self, the one that died, she died for this. For giving her this chance, for living this life. To let the others live this life. At night, when the ceiling is closer than it really should be and the waves are loud in her ears she wonders if the other Elizabeth had wanted this. If she would have saved them if she had seen this coming. Sometimes she thinks she wouldn´t. Sometimes she hates her, herself, for saving them all. Sometimes she hates herself for thinking like this.

Sometimes she hates Atlantis.

She thinks of leaving after Kolya, after the Wraith attack, after the torture. Thinks about it and pushes it away. She can´t leave. She isn´t one to run away so she bites on her lips and gulps down her fear with every breath, eats her own anger and frustration. She won´t leave.

Atlantis needs her, needs someone who lets Atlantis be a city sometimes and not a battlefield, more than just the starting point of one military action after the other until all they brought to this galaxy is the awakening of the Wraith and their own wars.

She has to stay and make the tough decisions, the ones that creep up on her at night, the ones that make her dream of a Wraith with her face hidden under the sneer, the dreams in which she´s a soldier covered in blood. The dreams in which she fails because of who she has become. She has to keep Sheppard on a leash and let him loose, she has to stand up against the military and speak loudly of who they are and who they might become. She has to keep quiet sometimes.

She closes her eyes against the blood and lets it flow, let them all bleed to protect earth, to protect the one place she can hardly remember now. She doesn´t think anyone else could do this. She doesn´t want anybody else to do it. It hurts too much and it means too much and Atlantis belongs to her and she won´t give the city to anyone else. It´s under her skin now and in her blood and when she bleeds for it, when they bleed for it, the city hums beneath her. An elegy, a battle song, and she knows she´s ruined for everything and everywhere else now.

She stands on one of the balconies every morning and every evening, the days starting too early and ending too late, and she watches the sun rise and set, the light turning the waves into blood and the sky into a wound that never heals.

and then you remember, before the blood,
red was the color you loved