Prompt 80.04

[bluflamingo.livejournal.com]

Five things their teammates wanted Ronon and Teyla to understand about Earth



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Comments

Five things their teammates wanted Ronon and Teyla to understand about Earth

[shinealightonme]

1. Look, Earth isn't perfect, but it's home. You can't really change that.

2. That isn't how you hold a fork, or a knife, or a – look, it's really not that hard, I'm sure even you could get this right. I am not overreacting! Because you're getting mashed potatoes everywhere, and it's disgusting. Did they not have utensils on Sateda? You know what, fine. Do your whole caveman thing. And yes, "caveman" is supposed to be an insult!

3. What, like McKay? No, he's not what people on Earth are like. He's one of a kind. Thankfully.

(Oh yes, very funny, Colonel "Surf's up, dudes." I'll have you know that Earth could really benefit from having more people of my brilliance around.

...Don't even joke about that, Rodney. Some things are just too scary to be funny.)

4. Originally, people thought that Earth was the center of the universe. They thought that it stayed perfectly in place while the sun and the stars and everything else orbited around it. It's a completely ridiculous theory that would be seen through easily by anyone who was bothering to pay the slightest bit of attention to the evidence, but everyone believed it anyway for a few thousand years until they finally realized how moronic that was and started trying to figure out how things really worked. So no one says they believe it anymore, that the Earth is the center of the universe. Of course, it's the founding principle of the Stargate program, with the good-old United States Air Force and the most Machiavellian bureaucrats the IOA can find to make sure that it stays there.

5. Look, Earth isn't perfect, but it's where we came from. You can't really change that.

Five things their teammates wanted Ronon and Teyla to understand about Earth

[bluflamingo.livejournal.com]

1. That, although people generally would band together in a crisis, they preferred not to, and weren’t all that great about it, and so telling them about the latest alien threat was more likely to end in mass panic and rioting than a coordinated response against it. Which, yes, seemed kind of impractical, but that was what you got when you tried to keep a secret from six billion people.

2. That individually people could be generous, courageous, wonderful human beings, but that collectively they were bastards. More the first part than the second, although only the second part worked as an explanation when they found out about things like millions of children starving in Africa, and wars that wrecked thousands of lives while no-one helped.

3. That if Ronon and Lorne kept kissing in public there – even in San Francisco – they were going to wind up either getting into a brawl and arrested, or with Lorne losing his job. John really wished he hadn’t had to remind Lorne of that as well, although Lorne seemed to find it hilarious. No wonder he’d fit into Atlantis so well – he was clearly as crazy as the rest of them.

4. That clowns were the root of all evil, and the product of a sick, twisted mind, perpetuated by delusional parents who didn’t understand their traumatising effect on small children. Okay, maybe that one was just John.

5. That, because it was still there, because they’d never had their entire population wiped out or their cities burned to the ground, Earth was special for all the little things: ice cream and popcorn, carnival rides, scientific conferences, access to as many marker pens or bullets as they needed, sunny days and cats and dogs in parks. And that, for all that Earth had all of those things, Atlantis was special, because it had Teyla and Ronon, Torren and Kanaan and Keller and Radek and Lorne, John’s marines and Rodney’s science teams and the Athosians on the mainland. And that they’d never give either one up.