wickedwords

Title: Le Beau En Stasis
Author: Rachael Sabotini (

wickedwords)
Other Info: McKay/Sheppard, PG-13, AU, Humor, Crossover with SG-1, 2500 words
Summary: "Oh, for cryin' out loud," Jack moaned. "I like lemons. I like lemonade. Couldn't it have been something halfway dangerous, like a spindle?"

A/N: Many thanks to

movies_michelle,

sherrold and

kimberlite for their betas; all the remaining errors are my own. This story originated as an idea for

undermistletoe last year, and then I tried to make the

sga_flashfic deadline for the Fairy Tales challenge, but that didn't quite work out. Good thing fan fic has no "sell by" date.

Le Beau En Stasis

Depending on who you talked to, the whole thing was either Jack’s or Radek's fault. King Jack was the one who said: "If I had a kid, they'd never scream like that," and Radek insisted that he was only following standard Fairy--well, Sprite--protocol by granting the implied wish.

Jack muttered, "Damned fairies," and let it go at that.

When Jack made his unfortunate pronouncement, Radek barely hesitated before slinking off to one of the houses in the village. With a wicked smile and a complete lack of conscience, he took their newly born male child, and left him at the door to the King's chamber with a note saying 'best wishes from the fairy folk to the new king'.

The child's natural parents didn't notice, so pleased were they with the quiet behavior of the clay doll left in its place. The King, though, didn't get off so easy.

"It's not my kid!" Jack said, again and again that first night. He'd never had any intention of having children, and explained as much to both Queen Samantha and Queen Daniel in detail.

They sent him to sleep on the Royal couch.

The second night, Jack decided on a different tack, insisting that as he never slept with any of the fairies, of course the kid couldn't be his.

The couch was even more uncomfortable the second night than it had been the first, and Jack tossed and turned and stared at the ceiling until dawn.

Teal'c, Champion of the Realm, raised an eyebrow and rumbled 'Indeed' in a skeptical manner when King Jack tried to explain the whole 'fairy' thing over draughts of beer on the third night.

"You must live up to your responsibilities, O'Neill," Teal'c said, laying his hand on Jack's shoulder. "The child is yours to deal with."

"Fine," the King said after his third night on the sofa. "You want to raise him, we can raise him. But I get to name him."

"Sure," said Queen Daniel.

"Okay," said Queen Samantha.

"Is that wise?" said Champion Teal'c.

Jack stared at the bright blue eyes of his child, and his chubby pink cheeks, and listened to his wheezy little breath. He held his hand out so the child could grip it. "I'm gonna name him Meredith. With a name like that, he'll grow up tough. Hey, it worked for the Duke, right?"

He grinned at his consorts, who collectively rolled their eyes, but the deed was done. Prince Meredith joined their family, and in no time at all, King Jack was proved wrong, oh, so utterly wrong, about a child of his screaming like that.

After the child survived his first year at court, his name day arrived. The royal family invited the fairies of the realm to the celebration, as after that hell year, they figured Meredith'd need all the help he could get. They sent invitations to Teyla the Wise, Ronon the Hunter, and Radek the Trickster, but forgot about Ba'al the Vain.

Kinda.

Okay, they decided not to invite him since he'd made a pain in the ass of himself the last time, and King Jack's unmentionables had taken several days to sort themselves out, much to the disgust of the Queens and the Champion.

"So let me get this straight, that's how you lost your pants?"

"I told you he had a thing for fairies."

“Indeed.”

But Ba'al came anyway, as he was a dedicated gate crasher and knew how to get into the castle unobserved. He threw on an old Holocaust cloak that he had lying around, and waved his fingers at the guards, causing them to cramp up with sudden gastrointestinal distress that they later blamed on the camp cooks.

No one noticed when Ba'al took his place toward the end of the blessing line, and after the usual wit, beauty, and musical talent gifts--it was his turn. Smiling brightly, he looked down at the vicious little creature and said: "I give you two gifts. The first is the gift of language so that you are never at a loss for words, much to the regret of everyone around you. And the second is that when you are sixteen, you will bite into a lemon and die."

"Oh, for cryin' out loud," Jack moaned. "I like lemons. I like lemonade. Couldn't it have been something halfway dangerous, like a spindle?"

Ronon the Hunter was the tallest of the fairies, and therefore the last in the line for the blessing. His usual gift was great courage, but this time, he modified his gift to try and minimize the curse. "He won't die," Ronon said, picking one of the christening cakes from off of the catering table. "The threat of death will loom large in his life, but he should be able to think his way out of it. And if he does suck a lemon, he'll fall into a deep sleep for a few years."

"How many's a few?" Daniel asked cautiously.

"Uh, seven?" Fairy Teyla gave Ronon a stern look. "Or so."

"Or so." Daniel sighed and rubbed his hand over his face. "Yeah, I was afraid of that."

The years flew by, and the little Prince grew up to be the smartest man in the kingdom, and he made sure everyone knew it.

"When we asked the fairies for their blessings, why didn't we think to ask for humility?" Samantha could be heard to mutter weakly, and weekly, from deep within her laboratory.

Everyone was careful to keep Prince Meredith away from any sort of citrus fruit, but on his sixteenth birthday, he snuck away from his tutors--who were all a bunch of idiots anyway--and came to this huge room where one of the servants was helping to prepare supper. A thick yellow sauce boiled over the fire, and the scent of caramelized sugar wafted through the air, along with a refreshing scent that the Prince couldn't place.

"That smells good," Meredith--though he really preferred being called Rodney--said as he entered the room. "What are you cooking?"

"Sweetened sour chicken," the servant said. "It's a delicacy from my hometown. Have you ever tried it before?"

"No, give me a taste!" Rodney grabbed the spoon out of the servant’s hand, and bit into the yellow, sticky mixture. Instantly, he turned bright red, gasped for breath, and passed out on the floor.

Vala blinked twice, looked at the food and the spoon, and grabbed her cloak. Then she grabbed a loaf of bread, the candelabra, and as much of the silverware as she could stuff in her pockets, and headed out into the night.

Sir Cameron discovered the Prince and hurried to tell the King. The King's brow furrowed at the news. "Sleeping, huh. Yeah, that's too bad."

Samantha scowled at him.

"Okay, tell you what. Let's get all those wizards and doctors and stuff in here to take a look at him, see what they can find out." The smartest people in the land were brought to the palace, but there was nothing that they could do. The prince could not be awakened from his deep sleep.

"We could bleed him," Dr. Frasier said hopefully.

"Aye, nothing better than a good bleeding," Dr. Beckett agreed. "Lets all the bad humors out."

"I think we should consult about sunspot activity," said Scholar Lee.

"If we wanted him bled, we'd call a barber," said Jack. "That's it. I'm going to talk to the fairies." He called for his men, and the entire royal family and a fair assortment of guards headed into the enchanted forest. It took more than a day to find someone who could tell them the precise symbols to choose to find Ronon the Hunter, and they had to visit many odd locations and speak to odder folk--Kavanagh, Lord of the Swamp comes to mind--but eventually, they stood before the great Fairy ring. Queen Samantha pressed the keys on the dialing device, and with a blue whooosh like a sideways waterfall, the gate into the fairy realm opened.

Stepping through, the team quickly found the cavern where Ronon the Hunter lived.

"When do you think he will waken?" Daniel asked, squatting next to Ronon at the fire.

Ronon shrugged. "Don't know."

"One year? Two?" Samantha asked eagerly.

"Maybe a hundred. Maybe more."

"What kind of "good fairy" are you anyway?" Jack said.

"I'm more of a runner, really."

Teyla the Wise broke in on their so-called conversation. "He will waken early if a man of ancient spirit were to fall in love with him."

"Ancient spirit?" said Daniel.

"In love?" said Samantha

"A man?" said Jack.

"I used a standard counter-curse and couldn't change the gender," Ronon said apologetically.

Jack muttered, "Damned fairies," and let it go at that.

"Something wrong, Jack?" Daniel looked pretty annoyed.

"No, no. Nothing." Jack drummed his fingers on his thighs. "I was just thinking, since Meredith's sleeping, he can't talk, right? That should make that whole 'falling in love' thing a lot easier."

With nods of agreement, they headed back to the palace. The slumbering prince was taken to his room and laid out in state in a crystalline chest, draped in elegant fabrics and surrounded by books and his favorite pictures of himself. His cat, Cocoa, took to sleeping on the chest, covering the solemn display with cat hair.

Still, Rodney looked good when he was asleep, peaceful and innocent, without the air of anxiety that haunted him when he was awake. Teyla the Wise came to see how the royal family was managing, and once she saw the arrangement, she wondered what would happen when the boy awakened.

The fairies had done poorly by this child, that was true. Taking him from his impoverished birth family and giving him to the royal family was to have been a great jest, according to Radek, and it was to have improved the child's circumstance. But now, when he awakened, all he would have would be strange faces and people he didn't know, in a land quite changed from the one of his youth. Even his great intellect might not help him survive that.

So out of compassion, Teyla cast a spell, and everyone--the King, the Queens, the Champion, wizards, squires, cooks and knights--all fell deeply asleep. "Now when he awakens, the whole palace shall come alive, and everything will proceed from there." So she left the castle to its silent waiting as even the clocks slowed their ticking and eventually stopped. No mice rustled in the pantry, no birds crowed from the henhouse; all was still, as if time had stopped.

Years passed, and the trees and bushes outside the spell grew tall and thick. Grass seeped into the courtyards and blackberry tendrils gripped tight the castle walls. A hundred years passed for the sleepers, and a dense forest grew, hiding it from sight. Both humans and elves forgot about Prince Meredith and the others as the earth wrapped a blanket of greenery around it.

One day, a young Elvish warrior, handsome and melancholy, came into the forest seeking solitude. He had just returned from battle, and the silence of his family had greeted him, angered as they were over his rash decision to help the mortals. Rather than face their censure, he wandered into the woods looking for those things he could no longer find among his people: sincerity, enthusiasm, and trust.

Slowly, he made his way through the forest on his trusty steed Pajalanuratirehaln--"Puddlejumper" in the vulgar human tongue-- hacking and struggling through the thick tangle of brush. The worse it got, the more the elf struggled, the fight making him grin more than he had in days. Still, the struggle grew long, and the elf was a lazy sort and the heat of the day pressed upon him.

"Why didn't I think to bring more water?" he asked his horse. "It's not like there are open wells just hanging out--oops!" By the skin of his teeth, John managed to not fall into the gaping cistern.

After drinking his fill, John straightened, whistling long and low as he took in his surroundings. In front of him was not only a well, but a huge tower of blue and green stone, with spires that reached out of the forest and up to the sky. "What a cool place," John murmured aloud. "Wonder who owns it?"

The way to the palace was clear now that they were through the forest, and John led Puddlejumper toward the castle, crossing over the drawbridge and into the main courtyard. It was a little creepy, he thought, staring at the motionless guards as he walked by, but at least no one was attacking him. He checked the first few to verify that the spark of life still bloomed within them, becoming more confused the further he progressed.

"They're all asleep," he said, looking at the cooks and their assistants, the maidservants and the footmen collapsed on benches and cobblestones outside of the kitchen. "Seriously freaky."

He tied Puddlejumper to a railing and carefully entered through the servants' hall, climbing over two sleeping dogs as he did. Something tugged at him, as though taking his hand and leading him on, past the sleeping lords and ladies, knights and pages, and up, up, up staircase after staircase to the tallest part of the tower.

All of it eerily silent, vaguely forbidding, and wickedly cool.

John finally reached the room where Prince Rodney (nee Meredith) lay sleeping, and stilled utterly, wondering how human eyelashes grew long like that. He looked so peaceful, so full of serenity with that little patch of dried drool at the corner of his really-quite-nice-looking lips, that John was overcome with an intense feeling of connection, warmth, and hope. John slid back the crystalline lid, stooped down and kissed him.

Rodney's eyes flew open as he awakened from his long, long sleep. "Oh, hey!" he said, licking the sweetened sour sauce from his lips. "I'd like more of that."

So John kissed him again. This time, he put some real effort into it--tongue, too--and Rodney looked a little dazed when John pulled back. "Yeah," Rodney said, a little breathlessly. "Just like that."

And so the spell was broken. Rodney shakily got to his feet as John helped him rise. Soon the whole castle was awake, everyone staring around them in amazement. When they realized what had happened and saw Rodney and John leaning into one another, bumping shoulders, a great shout went up among the members of the court. Bells were rung, and the Queens called for musicians, striking up an impromptu country dance with the young lovers.

From his throne, the King observed all of the festivities and sighed. As John and Rodney kissed under the glow of the palace lights, Jack muttered, "Damned fairies."

And I think we shall let it go at that.