No. 35

Prompt: Stargate Multiverse, Any, trailer park AU
http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/707714.html?thread=93516674#t93516674

The radio next to the bed went off. Elizabeth groaned and reached for it. “Go for Weir.”

“Ma’am.” It was Chuck. Why a trailer park had a neighborhood patrol Elizabeth couldn’t even begin to guess, but she didn’t want to get into it too much. She was too tired for that. “The Scientists are at it again.”

“If they’re making noise or noxious fumes call the cops, not me.”

“They’re making a bomb I think, ma’am.”

“Then call the cops!”

“Ma’am, I think you need to see this.”

Elizabeth groaned and hauled herself out of the bed. “Fine. Be right there.” She rolled out of bed and pulled on the cleanest clothes she could find.

Atlantis Park was the dumping ground for the government’s rejects. Cam Mitchell in Unit 1 had lost both his legs in a crash as a USAF test pilot. He spent most of his days knitting blankets and scarves and sweaters and reminiscing about the good old days. John Sheppard had also once been a USAF pilot, but he’d crashed a chopper or something in A-stan and been sent home. He didn’t like to talk about it, tended to hang out on the porch of his little trailer and play his guitar and occasionally have screaming phone calls with his ex-wife. Jack O’Neill’s ex-wife had made an appearance only once in his entire time at the park. They’d had a quiet conversation, and after she’d left, O’Neill had broken three years of sobriety by getting blind drunk off of Carson Beckett’s scotch, and these days he wasn’t around much, leaving at dawn to fish somewhere and coming back with no fish and lots of empty beer cans. He’d had a girlfriend for a while, a pretty woman named Samantha, but she hadn’t shown up recently. Daniel Jackson was a disgraced archaeologist who taught ESL out of his trailer to hordes of illegal immigrants. Once in a while he and O’Neill would play chess, but he didn’t seem to otherwise have friends. McKay said Daniel thought the pyramids had been built by aliens, and he’d been laughed out of academia.

McKay didn’t have much room to talk, because he was living in Atlantis too.

And apparently he and Zelenka were building bombs.

“False alarm,” McKay said when Elizabeth stomped over to the little fire pit McKay and Zelenka had set up between their trailers. “Not bombs. Just s’mores.”

They had graham crackers and chocolate bars and bags of giant marshamallows.

“But you can make bombs out of sugary things,” Zelenka said, and Rodney glared at him.

Chuck stepped out of the shadows, flanked by Sheppard and O’Neill and Jackson, and Mitchell wheeled in beside him, holding up a sign.

Happy Birthday Elizabeth!

And this...this was why she’d never go back to working for the UN.