SGA rec - Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left To Lose

Well. I had run out of things to read, eretria and auburnnothenna had already posted today's part of Three Fates, ts5000 and I had had a lovely dinner and watched a very glitched copy of Allies, where we had to keep jogging the picture to put video and audio back in sync, and then Tess was gone, I was alone with the cat, nothing on tv and nothing new on my f'list. What to do? So I went and stalked eretria's f'list. Bullseye... *g*

This story is a heartbreaker, both sad and uplifting, while skirting just short of an out and out sad or happy ending. The last 6 paragraphs made me cry sob. Twice. I had to get up, wash my face, return to the story, and then repeat the whole process two paragraphs later. Then I started crying while typing feedback. I have now deaded two tissues.

The safest thing to say is that it is Rodney, post-Atlantis. I won't give the author's summary but, instead, the short prologue to the piece.

There is a gravestone in Arlington National Cemetery. It sits watch over an empty grave, and there is a vine with small blue flowers, one the gardeners can't identify from any book, twining up its side.

It is an utterly unremarkable memorial, name and rank and dates, no different from the thousands of others save for the verse that graces its face:


Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea.


Every year, a few more flowers bloom.

Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose by synecdochic