SGA fic: Breathe You Deep

[hth]

Breathe You Deep
by Hth

109k
various pairings
it's gen, it's het, it's slash, it's a floor wax!
Summary: Cold and flu season, like many other things, sucks more in space.
Warnings: A for Angst. The astute reader will notice that I hardly ever warn for angst, and might then imagine I mean rather a *lot* of angst. That's your warning. All sales final.

Special thanks to cesperanza for beta ("You're at about an eight, and I need you at about a four...") and as per usual to marythefan for encouragement and general evil ("What, you think I'm going to tell you *not* to do it?")

"You’re standing here telling us that half the galaxy, not to mention our friends, could fall over dead by Christmas, and you’re bringing us what, exactly, to deal with this problem? Amoxicillin and chicken soup?"

Comments

(incidental stuff not fitting in the first post)

[linabean.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, feel free to skip this part, since it's not feedback, per se, and isn't necessarily interesting. But--and, hey, speaking of poetry--shortly before I'd read your story, I'd been thinking about how some poems could apply really well to Teyla and Ronon in Atlantis, under the right circumstances. And then it turned out the circumstances in your story matched up, I thought, really well with the poems I'd looked at for Teyla.

They're by Anna Akhmatova, one an excerpt from "Requiem" and the other an untitled poem, and while they're a lot better in Russian, where they've got rhyme and meter and all that, I think they're still pretty good in English.

* * * *
No, not under the vault of alien skies,
And not under the shelter of alien wings--
I was with my people then,
There, where my people, unfortunately, were.

* * * *
I am not with those who abandoned their land
To the lacerations of the enemy.
I am deaf to their coarse flattery,
I won't give them my songs.

But to me an exile is forever pitiful,
Like a prisoner, like a sickpatient.
Dark is your road, wanderer,
The bread of strangers smells of wormwood.

But here, in the blinding smoke of the conflagration
Destroying the remains of youth,
We have not deflected from ourselves
One single blow.

And we know that in the final accounting,
Each hour will be justified...
But there is no people in the world more tearless
More simple and proud than us.