Fic: Three Fates 2/36 {SGA]
Three Fates 2/36
Author: auburnnothenna & eretria
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Size: 8780 words [~ 161,700 words ]
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: Rising, Before I Sleep, The Brotherhood, The Defiant One, Hot Zone, The Siege I, II & III, Trinity
Disclaimer: Not ours, not profiting, written for entertainment purposes alone.
Characters: Elizabeth Weir, Rodney McKay, John Sheppard, Atlantis
Genre: AU, polyamorous
Pairings: McKay/Sheppard, McKay/Sheppard/Atlantis, McKay/Weir/Sheppard, Sheppard/Atlantis
Summary: "Worst case scenario?"
"We tear a hole in the fabric of the universe."
Trinity
There was no rational way to handle this.
Previous posts: 1a/36 and 1b/36.
Supplies got lower, low enough she had to start rationing and became frightened of what would happen when they ran out. All her searches for food in the sections of the city she could access were fruitless. She thought of the Wraith when her stomach growled and ached. Wondered if they felt the same after waking up from their sleep - always hungry, never properly nourished.
She gave up some of her rations when she had found Rodney in hypoglycemic shock, shivering and sweating on the floor, unable to remember his own name. That had frightened her more than the nightly screams, because in that very moment she was sure he was lost to them; brain damage inevitable. He came around after a hastily prepared glass of sugar water, after which she forced him to eat a whole MRE. Elizabeth swore to herself that she wasn't going to watch that again, helpless. She wasn't going to lose Rodney.
She needed assistance, but she went on her own, on long, futile trips that showed her just how limited her chances were. Transporters didn't work for her and without pre-initialized access to any of the computer terminals, the vastness of the city caused her to lose her way more than once. Corridors remained dark. Doors refused to open or opened on empty rooms almost randomly. The batteries in the flashlight she brought from the jumper's supplies dimmed and eventually died, curtailing her searches further.
Rodney still woke screaming, but now John stayed away. Elizabeth ran to his room and hovered in the doorway. John didn't come and Rodney huddled in his bed, shaking in the dark. She tried to go to him and he snarled at her to get out. He stopped staring into the distance during the days, at least, and started remembering to feed himself. He even showered and brushed his teeth, for which she was grateful. It seemed like she'd traded John's presence for a more aware and functional Rodney.
Her search for supplies in the city proved useless. She found kitchen facilities but they were bare, stripped and empty, no frozen or dried goods anywhere. It made sense, of course, she chided herself. The Ancients had left the city without any expectation of returning for thousands of years, so they had left it clean and empty. It made sense, but it felt deliberate, as if the city refused her, as though there were ghosts around every corner, mocking her efforts. The dark and the cold beyond the city shield seemed to hold something that watched through the walls and windows, that regarded three lost humans with hostile eyes.
Elizabeth stopped sleeping.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
Elizabeth came and went, a presence just on the fringes of Rodney's consciousness, urging him to eat sometimes. Other times Sheppard was there, silent but present. Rodney wasn't certain if he was the one leaning on Sheppard or if Sheppard was leaning into him some nights. He didn't suppose it mattered much.
Neither Elizabeth nor Sheppard could make any of this more bearable, could stop the wheels in his head turning and turning. He didn't deserve their help. Didn't even deserve their presence, even without their friendship.
Deep, deep down, he felt stirrings of an altogether different fear - that they would abandon him, not dissolving and disappearing into nothingness, but simply leave, turning away in disgust or indifference. Even worse than that, that the despair eating him inside might take them too.
A new nightmare filled his nights when Sheppard withdrew even his presence in the dark.
Rodney dreamed of Elizabeth cutting Sheppard's throat, the image vivid in his mind, the bloody river of Sheppard's life pumping out, Sheppard's eyes wide and already empty. He could never stem that tide and he woke to the smell of the blood on his hands; his hoarse screams rang in his own ears when the rest of the nightmare manifested itself even in his waking mind. He imagined Elizabeth taking the Beretta and turning it against herself, her brain spraying the wall behind her in crimson and gray.
His stomach revolted and he rolled over the edge of the bed to the floor, onto his hands and knees, heaving and spitting the meager remains of a Powerbar, until nothing but bile and saliva came up. His eyes watered and his arms quivered as he gasped and gagged, throat burning, helpless, head hanging.
The hand on his shoulder shook him out of it for a second, and he was hoping for it to be Sheppard; Sheppard, whose contact he needed like the air to breathe these days, but when he looked up, he saw Elizabeth.
Saw blood and brain fiber.
Saw her hand cutting Sheppard's throat, leaving him twitching and twisting and fighting for breath that would no longer fill his lungs.
Elizabeth's hand on his shoulder was wet with Sheppard's blood until he blinked and everything blurred.
He shrugged her away.
"Get out."
"Rodney, you -"
"Get the fuck out of here."
He cleaned up the vomit before crawling back on the bed, willing his mind to stop but not sleep. He didn't even close his eyes, but his mind kept showing him the same thing anyway: his own hands, wet with the blood of the universe.
His ghosts waited in the corners and the shadows. They were patient.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
On the fourth day after her confrontation with John, she locked her hand on Rodney's shoulder and shook, digging her fingers into the muscle painfully. John had been gone too long this time. "I need your help, Rodney. You have to stop this. You have to help me find John."
He tried to twitch away, but she wouldn't let go. Finally, Rodney asked rustily, "Why me?"
"Nothing works for me." How she hated admitting that.
He nodded at the admission. Then a frown creased his features. "Wait. Sheppard?"
"Isn't answering his radio, hasn't come back to his room. I think we need to find him, Rodney.You need to."
Rodney's breathing picked up. "Oh, no. No." He was unsteady on his feet, but moving, and moving for the transporter. Elizabeth followed him, laying a steadying hand against the small of his back.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
John's wandering had brought him to the chair room three times. It wasn't coincidence. He wanted to sit down and feel what Atlantis was like with three fully powered ZPMs to work with, not half-crippled and half-powered.
It felt like the city itself wanted him there. His restless pacing was always accompanied by the hum of it accompanying him, doors opening, lights coming on, but it seemed like the lights were brighter when his feet turned toward the chair room and dimmed with disappointment if he went another way.
He didn't need to use the command chair. But he hadn't forgotten what Elizabeth said about supplies. They were going to have to trade for food; it would be a good idea to find out what Atlantis had to offer in the way of possible trade goods.
It would be better to concentrate on that than the sick ache inside.
He was still so angry it frightened him, so that he'd taken to staying away from Rodney and Elizabeth, because he couldn't bite back the words that wanted to burst out anymore. It felt like the day when he came home to his mother's note - Sorry, baby, I can't take you with me - on the refrigerator door, like setting his helo down at the base that afternoon in Afghanistan with nothing to show for a career in ruins but dead bodies, like the feel of a ring and a letter in an envelope he never bothered to open. It felt like losing everything all over again.
He'd trusted Rodney.
John closed his eyes.
Despite everything, if Rodney were to look him in the eye and declare he could fix everything, John would want to believe him. He would trust him, still. It hurt like hell to think Rodney had used that. It seemed like he'd always trusted Rodney, even in Antarctica, because everything Rodney felt and thought was right out there. Had seemed to be, John cautioned himself.
John preferred someone who called him an idiot to kind words and hidden agendas.
He'd thought Rodney didn't have any hidden agendas. He'd been a fool and that wasn't Rodney's fault, but his, all his. Everyone had pieces of themselves they kept private.
He had to stay away, had to ignore Rodney's nightmares, because he couldn't let himself lose control. He thought if he did, he'd be in the same state Rodney was, breaking apart inside, cut to pieces and bleeding out fast. How did you grieve for a universe?
Cold was better, cold was numb, cold was Antarctica, empty, open and alone.
The chair looked innocuous. John looked at it for a long time. Half the times he'd been in the room, before, the city had been blacked out, the corners filled with shadows, equipment scattered around the base. With the lights on, he could see the walls were almost terracotta colored, angular metal designs overlaying them, shapes almost like chevrons, fitted together, and seeming to contain some meaning he couldn't discern.
The chair was more of the strange mixture everything Ancient displayed: a frame of precise curves and right angles supporting the silvery alloy of the seat. The arms and the back were solid crystal; the same, soapy-slick crystal that was used everywhere in Atlantis, in the jumpers and half the Ancient tech John had seen, only covered over with an organic or maybe fractal pattern of the alloy.
He'd never been afraid of the chair, not the one in Antarctica or this one, but it felt different now. John stared at it. They weren't identical, he realized. The one in Antarctica had been made or adjusted for someone shorter than him. The Atlantis command chair was proportioned exactly for him.
It was waiting for him.
John stepped onto the platform supporting it. The blue light that flared to life beneath his feet didn't even surprise him. He only hesitated for a moment, considering whether he should radio Elizabeth or even Rodney and tell them he was about to do this. There wasn't any reason. The command chair wasn't dangerous. Not to him.
He sat, placing his hands on the arms. The chair always looked hard and cold, but it wasn't. It molded itself to him exactly, sinking back into a position that supported his body perfectly.
The crystal behind him activated.
John caught his breath at the fluid ease with which the chair and the city responded to him. He thought about the information systems, asking for inventories, shield strength, weapons and status reports. The information flooded back faster than he could process, holographic displays lighting above him, the city hum rising, sharper and higher, peaking in a tone that cut through his thoughts as the lights flashed brighter and brighter. Too much, too fast, John thought and tried to slow it down, but couldn't. Something reached into his brain, poured in like a rain of quicksilver, clean and cold, but burning down all his nerves.
Joy and greeting ran through his mind and it wasn't his, wasn't human, but it knew him and loved him and it felt like flying as Atlantis threaded her way through his brain.
Who are you? he thought.
The name formed in his mind, plucked from his own memory, a gestalt of the consciousness that was meant to regulate Atlantis, that fitted itself to him as his DNA was fitted to it.
Atenë.
What do you want from me?
It all came too fast, a rush of Ancient, and he cried out, pain stabbing through his temples. He tried to lift his hands to his head and couldn't. He tried to scream and couldn't.
Stop. Please. Stop.
The remorse - he thought it was remorse, that was the closest human emotion he could assign to it - that followed was wordless, gentler and slower. The information overload receded, leaving John panting and limp, sweat-soaked, every limb shaking in reaction. He tried to get his eyes open, only to realize distantly they were open and burning, but he couldn't see the room, the input from Atlantis' systems usurping the pathways into his optic thalamus. Atlantis became his body, he could feel and hear and see with the city's sensors, draw on the data core like the information it held was his own memories. It was thrilling and terrifying.
Atenë was so eager to show him everything, to share all that she was, that John was rapidly losing track of himself. He tried to feel his own body and couldn't, couldn't discern fingers or toes. He didn't know if he was breathing and began to panic. Everything was so fast in Atenë's world, he didn't know how long he'd been merged with the crystal matrices that were her brain. He tried to tell her that if she'd usurped too much of his nervous system he was dying … or already dead.
The fear that flashed through them both at that made the entire city jolt. They bolted through its systems, rushing back to the chair room, finding the specific sensors that would show John's body.
He wondered what would happen to him if they were too late.
Would he be trapped in the matrices with Atenë or just fade away without his body to anchor his consciousness? When he'd shared with Chaya, she'd showed him so much, things he knew he couldn't remember consciously. Had she shown him how to ascend?
John didn't know.
Panic hit him, but there, instantly, were statistics, probabilities, a living array of processes charting every function of his body down to the energy each cell was burning. Reassurance. Atenë caught him up again and carried him forward on the tide of information.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
"Where is he?"
Rodney bent over the control room console, willing it to cooperate. Without a laptop or any translation program, he was working on the fly, guessing at the meanings of half the commands he gave the mainframe, following his instincts.
"Give me a minute," he muttered. His raw throat ached with every rasping word. His hands rattled over the controls - they wouldn't stop shaking - depressing one, deactivating another, the colored crystals lighting and fading under his touch. He assaulted the console with the desperation of something trapped and dying, frowning the entire time. He kept blinking to keep the sweat out of his eyes, unwilling to slow down even enough to wipe the perspiration away. He had to concentrate on the screen and not the shadows. He couldn't bring himself to sit in any of the chairs; his eyes insisted that Zhang and Edwards were already there.
A holographic schematic display of the city glowed to life in front of them.
"Got it," he said.
He pointed at a single life-sign glowing two towers away from the control tower. Realization of the significance of that tower hit him. "There." His voice cracked. "That's - " His voice disappeared entirely as the life-sign on the display flickered.
Lights all over the city pulsed, modulating between yellow and red. He knew, with nauseating certainty, that Sheppard was in the command chair. An atonal alarm began repeating, making Rodney's skin crawl with memories of the final, helpless moments of the first siege, when he'd watched another monitor and imagined Sheppard's death, torn to dust and memory soon to be lost, scattered across the cold, silent reaches. It reached through the haze of his own despair even now.
Sheppard was in trouble.
"Get the medical kit from the jumper!" he snapped and ran for the closest transporter. He thought he brushed by Bates' shade as he went.
The transporter door snapped open ahead of him, the destination schematic already displayed. Rodney spared a thought for the responsiveness of the city, then dismissed it. This Atlantis had ZPMs. That was all.
Every hall was brightly lit and thankfully empty. That was different enough to keep away any flashbacks as Rodney raced into the chair room. He skidded to a stop at the edge of the glowing platform.
He said, flat and calm as he could, "Elizabeth. Get that medical kit down here now."
"On my way." He could hear the thud of her boots and her breath speeding up through his earpiece. Then, a few seconds later, as though she only thought of asking now: "Can you give me some details? Tell me what to expect."
Sheppard's in the chair, he wanted to yell. The chair is in him. Silvery strands of metal twined over his hands and arms, running up under the sleeves of Sheppard's jacket. More of it curled over his shoulders, like hands, to hold him down. The part that made Rodney want to scream, though, were the delicate threads of it crawling over Sheppard's temples to the corners of his eyes, insinuated past the orbits. He imagined them creeping along the path of the optic nerve and into Sheppard's brain.
"Rodney? Rodney!?"
"Just hurry," he said and ignored Elizabeth's questions after that.
He couldn't actually imagine a way anything in the emergency kit could do any good, but it was what you did: you tried to do something with what you had. And you watched people die, because it was never good enough, never enough. He was frozen, watching Sheppard's body bow up and then shake in a soundless convulsion. He watched blood run red and wet from Sheppard's nostrils, watched it slip from his open mouth, watched him shake and couldn't move, any more than Sheppard could blink.
"Rodney, the transporters won't work for me! I'm going to have to walk. Do you have that much time?"
"Damn it …" Rodney squeezed his eyes shut. Couldn't the damn city cooperate for once? "Elizabeth, just stay there, I'll get the transporter working, I just need more time."
"Rodney, I can't do anything to help if I'm stuck."
"I know, I know, I'm trying to think of something!" He flexed his fingers, trying to trace, strictly in his mind, the command pathways he would need to rewrite to make the transporter operate independent of gene activation. He could do it, given enough time. There was never enough time … It should work anyway.
"Elizabeth, just get in the transporter. It will work."
"I'm trying it - "
"Elizabeth?"
"I'm locked in," she said, so much calmer than he would have been.
Elizabeth didn't have the gene. She was actually too healthy; her immune system had reacted to Beckett's gene therapy and fought it off like the infection it was.
She'd rejected Atlantis on a cellular level. Now it rejected her physically.
It didn't reject Sheppard. It embraced him so tightly it was going to kill him.
"I'm sorry, I can't … I've got to get Sheppard out here. Wait, just wait, okay?" he told her.
This was the end of the world, Rodney thought. The end of everything, beyond the despair of what he'd done already, he had to watch as Atlantis killed Sheppard. Elizabeth would never come, because somewhere in the city, it was killing her, too.
He would have stayed there, paralyzed by the sense of doom that had engulfed him since they arrived, except for the pink-tinged tears seeping from the corners of Sheppard's eyes. The hair at his temples was wet with them.
Rodney's feet were moving before he knew he'd made a decision. He was up onto the glowing platform, bent over Sheppard, his fingers moving over the metal holding down Sheppard's hands. He was afraid to touch the strands on his head. One jostle could be disastrous. The alloy looked cool, but felt warm: body temperature, Rodney thought.
"Sheppard," he whispered. "Can you come back? Can you shut it down?" He ducked his head, absently stroking his fingers over Sheppard's on the arm rest. "Can you hear me?"
The room lights flickered.
Rodney jerked his head.
"Was that you? Sheppard, if that was you, do it again!"
Rodney leaned closer, staring into blank hazel eyes, and held his breath. Sheppard's body had settled back into the chair, the seizures apparently over. The lights remained steady.
"Damn it, damn it, don't do this, you idiot," he said. His voice came and went, uneven and unsure. Would Sheppard even listen to him now, if he did hear? "Come on!"
"Rodney, talk to me. I can help." Her voice was too calm, he could hear the panic lurking under the surface. It was the last thing he needed now.
"Not now, Elizabeth."
Sheppard's pupils were contracted to pinpoints. Sheppard had such changeable eyes, sometimes dark, sometimes light; green one moment, gray or gold in the next. They were never blind, though; never empty like this. Rodney could map the ring of dark green around the edge of each iris, then a pale amber-green layer that darkened to golden-brown around the pupil. There were striations, spokes of gold, specks of brown and deeper green. Rodney stared into them and wanted only for them to narrow and fill with something, even if it was only the dark glitter of anger.
"Rodney, for God's sake, I know it's bad when you don't talk. Don't shut me out. What's happening? Is it John?"
Elizabeth's voice was escalating into impatience mixed with despair and he couldn't take the concern anymore. Rodney reached up and tapped his ear piece, turning her off.
"Come on, Sheppard," he said conversationally.Conversationally except for the crack and rise in his voice at the end."This is a shitty way to go, you know. You're always so disgustingly upbeat, telling everyone to keep trying, to not give up, you don't get to just lie back and die. It's absolutely unfair on all counts and I swear I will hound you into the afterlife if you do. I mean it. I'm willing to concede the existence of an afterlife, which means God or gods - and I don't mean the Goa'uld or the Ascended - just because I refuse to let you get away with this. I really hope you're listening to this and, hey, if you are, I'd like some kind of damned sign - "
The lights flicked off and on again.
Rodney stroked Sheppard's wrist and ignored Radek's phantom, shaking his head in disapproval and disappointment, in the corner.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
The sensors showed another life-sign in the chair room. The individual possessed just enough altered cells with the proper DNA to pass the activation threshold.
Sound waves registered. Modulations from a human throat. Language. But not Atlantis' language, not the beautiful mathematics of Atenë's thoughts, not the language John knew as Ancient, nor the stripped-to-basics trade tongue the stargates inserted into the brains of each traveler, not even Wraith. But he knew it, knew those morphemes, those structures, those rhythms.
He concentrated on the chair room. There was another life form in the city, but it didn't speak to her or him, and he ignored it. Atenë had it secured in one of the transporter kiosks.
"Can you hear me?"
English, John thought, it was English. He listened harder, wanting it to make sense, wanting to translate for Atenë because she was there beside him, within him, breath and heartbeat and thought buoyed up by her.
They responded, brightening and dimming the lights, wanting the one talking to go on.
" - is a shitty way to go, you know. You're always so disgustingly upbeat, telling everyone to keep trying, to not give up, you don't get to just lie back and die. It's absolutely unfair on all counts and I swear I will hound you into the afterlife if you do - "
Memory shifted and Atenë showed him a picture, eyes full of worry in a face hollowed and bruised, much too pale.
John found the name in his own memories, along with a knot of emotions that stung and cut, so that he almost recoiled back into the computer's matrices. He remembered Doranda and after.
McKay.
" - afterlife, which means God or gods - and I don't mean the Goa'uld or the Ascended - just because I refuse to let you get away - "
McKay seemed to think John was dying. He didn't think he was, but he couldn't feel anything. Couldn't reconnect with his body, which scared the hell out of him. John pulled away from Atenë, listening to McKay, because Rodney always figured things out, he always came up with a way to save all of them. Or he had until - John shied away from the thought. He had to trust Rodney and he couldn't do it if he thought too much about what had happened.
He reached and flickered the lights again.
Flickered and breathed. He couldn't feel that breath that filled his lungs, but the scent rushed through his olfactory receptors, real and stunningly separate from the data input from Atenë: blood and sweat and the sharp reek of fear, a familiar acid musk that was half his own scent and half Rodney.
" - Sheppard - "
John latched onto the smell and fell back into his body, the link with Atenë severing so abruptly he screamed.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
Rodney jerked his hand away from Sheppard.
The strands of alloy were sliding out of him. Rodney resisted to the urge to pry and tear at them, but grabbed Sheppard by the shoulders as the clamps released there. Sheppard was gasping for breath now, his entire body twitching. His hands flailed at Rodney's arms as the last silver threads withdrew. The instant they were out of Sheppard's eyes, Rodney jerked Sheppard upright and out of the chair.
Sheppard was a shuddering, dead-weight wreck and they both fell in a tangle of legs and arms.
The light in the chair crystal went out. Rodney pulled Sheppard around until he could see his face.
Sheppard's eyes were squeezed shut.
"Sheppard, Colonel, don't ever dare do that to me again," Rodney shouted at him.
Sheppard flinched at the close-in volume.
Rodney was two breaths from hysterics, much too loud, and he knew it. He couldn't have another meltdown. Not until he knew Sheppard was all right. He tightened his hands on Sheppard's shoulders and resisted the urge to shake him.
"McKay?" Sheppard asked hoarsely. His eyes were still shut and Rodney could feel the trembling running through his body like aftershocks from whatever he'd experienced.
"Yes, of course, who else would it be? You scared - you took a ridiculous risk. Why did you use the chair and what the hell happened? That wasn't normal. It's never done anything like that. I thought you were dying."
Sheppard slitted his eyes open. They gleamed with excitement. Rodney felt a jolt of fear. What if whatever had just happened to Sheppard had affected him permanently?
"Look, what's your name?"
Sheppard blinked.
"Sheppard?" Rodney said, starting to worry even more.
"John." One corner of Sheppard's mouth quirked up in the beginning of a smirk. "Sheppard."
"Oh, but I just said that, didn't I? Well, what's my name?"
"Didn't I just say that? McKay."
Rodney puffed a relieved breath.
"Well, excuse me for being a little concerned that you might have fried your brain," he snapped.
Sheppard closed his eyes again and nodded loosely, then slumped against Rodney.
They were both still sprawled on the chair platform. One of Sheppard's elbows was digging into Rodney's ribs and his tailbone hurt from hitting the floor under Sheppard's extra weight. He still wasn't in a hurry to let go and Sheppard was limp against him, not pulling away. He let himself sit there just a little longer, letting some of the adrenaline leach away.
"What happened?" he asked finally. "Do you know?"
Sheppard finally pulled away from him and ended up sitting propped against the command chair, which Rodney found vastly disturbing. He wiped at his bloody nose with a hand that still wasn't steady and grimaced.
"Yeah, I know." Sheppard looked up from his blood-smeared hand and his eyes were full of wonder. "McKay, she's aware."
"Who, she?"
Sheppard waved. "Atlantis. She's awake and … incredible." His lips parted. "It was like I was in her mind and her mind is so much more than you could ever imagine."
"Atlantis," Rodney said slowly, wondering if Sheppard had suffered some sort of brain damage. Radek's shadow was back, poking curiously at the chair, snickering at Rodney. He tried not to look. Sheppard still needed him and that meant being sane again.
Sheppard reached up and stroked the chair arm. "Atlantis," Sheppard repeated. His voice was husky. "It's all math. God, it's so pure and clean."
"Wait," Rodney interrupted, sitting forward. "You're talking about an AI."
"Yeah, what did you think I was talking about?"
"I was revisiting the fried brains theory. There's really an AI? Why didn't it interact with us before?"
Sheppard pulled his knees up and rested his arms on them, letting his hands dangle. The bones at his wrists nearly poked through his skin. Little dots of blood ran up his arms until they disappeared under his sleeves.
"Before before or before since we got here?"
"Either." Rodney frowned.
"Atenë was asleep when we got here. This time. Before … " Sheppard swallowed. "I think she died when the city started shutting down peripherals to save power for the shield."
"Oh."
Rodney raised a finger. "But what about Elizabeth. The first one. Why didn't the city - what did you call the AI?"
"Atenë."
"Right. Why didn't the AI interact with Elizabeth?"
"She doesn't have the ATA gene." Sheppard's expression blanked. "Shit. Elizabeth."
"What? What?"
Rodney remembered he'd turned off his radio.
"She's in a locked-down transporter."
Rodney tapped on the radio. "Elizabeth?"
Nothing. He looked at Sheppard, but Sheppard's eyes were squeezed shut.
"Elizabeth?" Rodney tried again.
The sound of a breath exhaled like a sob came through his earpiece.
"Rodney?"
"Are you okay?"
She laughed and it sounded bad, really bad. "Can you get the transporter to open for her?" he asked Sheppard.
"I'm trying. If I used the chair - "
"No, no, no. I don't care how happy-friendly-wonderful Atenë is, you're not getting back into that chair," Rodney overrode him.
"Rodney, is John all right?"
"As he ever was," Rodney replied.
"Then get me out of here!"
He could hear her composure slipping. He turned off his mic long enough to ask, "Can you get the transporter to let her off at the living quarters?"
Sheppard reached up again and touched the arm of the chair, fingers moving over the silvery alloy. It rippled under his touch. Rodney's stomach lurched.
Sheppard opened his eyes and let his hand fall away and into his lap. "Yeah. I've got it."
"Elizabeth? The transporter should be all right now. Just get out when the doors open."
"What about John?"
"Colonel Sheppard seems to be okay."
"The doors are opening now. Thank you, Rodney. - Are you sure John is all right?"
"Yes. We'll be there soon, just try not to worry," Rodney said.
He looked at Sheppard, really looked at him, and thought if he got up and walked out of the room, Sheppard would sit back down in the command chair and never come back. At the same time, his heart picked up speed just imagining what they could learn from the AI. There was so much they'd never learned from the Ancients' database because they hadn't known what questions to ask. With an AI it would be utterly different.
If they'd had the AI, maybe he would never have … Then again, what if they had never gone to Doranda in the first place, never found the Arcturus Project?
Rodney looked past Sheppard to the command chair. He licked his lips.
"Sheppard."
Sheppard leaned his sweat-matted head against the chair.
"Yeah?"
"We could wipe the gate address and galactic coordinates for Doranda from the database."
Sheppard went still. Rodney didn't say trust me. He just let Sheppard think it out himself, didn't even suggest the corollary: that they could go back to Doranda in this time. He was half afraid Sheppard would refuse simply because Rodney had thought of it.
"We could," Sheppard said very slowly. Something dark and merciless flickered behind his eyes. His mouth stretched into a hard, feral smile. "We could do better than that, Rodney."
Rodney waited.
"We can go back and take that damned place apart," Sheppard declared.
Rodney nodded jerkily. He'd do whatever Sheppard wanted. At least, Sheppard was talking to him again, and he'd said we.
"Tonight," Sheppard said. He levered himself to his feet and stood, swaying, looking at Rodney hard and intent. Blood still smeared through the stubble on his chin, bright and frightening.
Rodney caught his breath and nodded. "Okay." This was the Sheppard who scared him, the one that could pull the trigger without hesitation.
"I've convinced Atenë to stop locking Elizabeth out of most of the systems. There are still things that have to be at least initialized by you or me and the jumpers will never work for her, but she'll be okay while we're gone."
"Shouldn't we take her with us?"
Sheppard hung his head briefly. "We don't really know what we'll find there. She'll be safer here."
Sheppard sounded so determined, Rodney didn't even consider arguing. He followed Sheppard out, but hesitated at the door, looking back at Radek, who waved him off impatiently, still poking at the command chair, all intent and excitement. Rodney blinked again and Radek was gone.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
John glanced at Rodney as they stepped into a transporter. The destination schematic slid open, but neither of them activated it. He felt like hell, like crashing, every muscle in his body achy and exhausted. Rodney just looked like shit, pasty, unsteady. He'd cleaned up sometime in the last day, though: the beard was gone. His voice was still rough; maybe it always would be. John didn't know how long you had to scream until you did permanent damage, but Rodney's screams would echo through his head for the rest of his life.
It was just too damn much. He didn't want to think about any of it anymore. He didn't want to think about Atenë, either. If he did, he could almost feel the AI still in his mind, almost lose himself in the intricacies of the city, like he'd melt into alloy and crystal circuits if he didn't concentrate on staying in himself.
"You're talking to me again?" Rodney asked abruptly.
"I wasn't not - "
"Yes, you were."
John nodded and said, "It's hard, okay?"
Rodney didn't answer.
John was sure that Rodney's hands were shaking, his own still were; Rodney had shoved his in his pockets and slumped against the wall. The impulse to say something, to make Rodney look up and meet his eyes again, warred with his still simmering anger.
Every time he thought he had a handle on it, it came back to the realization that they had wiped out their universe. When he tried to sleep, it played against the back of his eyelids, the flare of light behind them as the rip began consuming Doranda's sun and the jumper threaded the eye of the stargate's needle. One second more and they would have been swept into nothingness, too.
If they had, they would never have known what they'd done. What Rodney had done, what he and Elizabeth had helped him do, what the Ancients had begun long before any of them were born.
He didn't blame Rodney alone, though he knew Rodney thought so.
He just didn't know how to live with it.
If he could just do something … Elizabeth wanted him to think about supplies and all he could think was it was pointless. But he'd latched onto the idea of going to Doranda like a lifeline. If they did this, then the fluke that had let them survive meant something. They could be more than ghosts of the future.
"We'll fix things," he said.
Rodney kept his gaze on the floor as he said, "Elizabeth will want to come with us." He flinched on the last word, as though he expected John to object to it.
John swallowed hard, grimacing at the taste of thick blood running down the back of his throat from his still bleeding nose. He slumped back against the wall opposite Rodney.
He looked away and said, "I know." He rubbed at the back of his neck, trying to loosen tight muscles.
John touched the icon for the transporter closest to their living quarters. The transporter's door slid shut and opened onto the familiar corridor. There was never time to feel their dissolution and reintegration, but John staggered, because for an instant, he was everywhere, spread through Atlantis, bodiless.
"Whoa," he murmured and Rodney's hand closed on his bicep, steadying him.
"Sheppard - "
"I'm okay."
"Oh, of course. You always go white and nearly fall on your face from what's essentially an elevator ride," Rodney snapped.
John locked his knees and whatever he'd felt dissolved into little more than a faint awareness of the city at the back of his mind, not much stronger than he'd always felt since first coming to Atlantis. Rodney's hand stayed on his arm. He let it. He didn't smile at the return of some of Rodney's normal attitude. He didn't, but for an instant he wanted to.
He wanted to go back to the way things had been between them before, the simple, comfortable friendship, but it wasn't that easy. If he was honest, it hadn't been easy for a while. The tension growing between them had simply been lost in all the other stresses.
There were things he couldn't afford. Things he never let himself even contemplate. Rodney was one of them, the same way Teyla became when she joined his team. Off limits, just like Elizabeth, because they had never needed that kind of trouble on top of all the other dangers they faced. He'd always been smart enough to avoid screwing up like that.
It was just one more thing he was not going to think about. He had a mission to plan. He was going to concentrate on that.
He shook off Rodney's hand. "I've got to clean up." He was more than a little ripe and suddenly couldn't stand himself.
"Figure out what supplies you'll need," he said as he walked away. "Then figure out what we've actually got." He didn't figure that was much, but the Arcturus facility probably had a self-destruct sequence Rodney could hack into.
"Fine, fine, sure," Rodney called. "I'll - I'll do that."
"Good," John said, ducking into his room as Elizabeth appeared at the door to hers.
"John?" she said.
He willed the doors to close behind him.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
The look on Elizabeth's face when he exited the room fifteen minutes later made John regret the way he'd been treating her. She was paler than Rodney, stick thin and terribly brittle. He'd resented her ambushing him, but what choice had he left her? Rodney was a fractured mess and John had done what he always did: he'd bolted. Now he just felt guilty.
"See?" Rodney said as John walked into the hall, showered, shaved and back in control. The lights in the hall brightened subtly for him, John noticed. Atenë was watching. In retrospect, he was a little disturbed by what had happened with the command chair, but he still felt warm at the thought that the AI was looking out for him. The fleeting thought that the city already loved him more than his mother ever had he pushed away.
Elizabeth had stationed herself opposite his door. She had on her jacket, zipped to the throat, and clutched at her elbows with her hands. Her knuckles were white.
Rodney leaned against the wall next to John's door. John looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
Rodney waved a hand at Elizabeth. "She didn't believe me." He sounded simply disgusted, but John saw that Elizabeth's doubt hurt.
John frowned. "Believe what?' he asked.
"That you're okay."
"What happened to you?" Elizabeth demanded, speaking over Rodney uncharacteristically. "Rodney said you're all right, but - "
"I am all right," John said softly. He caught Rodney's eye over Elizabeth's shoulder and mouthed, Go on.
"Rodney found me."
Rodney gave a jerky little nod and walked away fast, his step hesitating once as he detoured around something John didn't see. John hated the slump of his shoulders.
"It's okay," he said to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth leaned back against the wall. "No, no, it isn't," she murmured.
He wondered if she missed the comfort of being with someone. She never stepped outside the role of leader with anyone. She was calm and kind and concerned with everyone, because that was part of her command style. There was a difference between that and the personal. She had never wavered past the line, despite what she might feel inside. She still hadn't, even while he and Rodney were each doing their best to run away from the situation. He couldn't blame Rodney, but he knew he'd been unfair to her and knowing that had just made him angrier. He'd lashed out at her for being practical, for doing her job, because he felt like he'd failed at his.
He'd failed everybody. John's breath caught, an ache blooming in his chest so sharp it felt like a knife. All of them, all of them lost, except Rodney and Elizabeth. He missed Teyla and Ronon every time he thought of them.
"It will be," he promised, letting himself believe it, too. "We will be."
The heel of her fist hit the wall beside her. "You say that, but you weren't trapped in that transporter. I didn't know what was happening. Rodney stopped answering his radio." She slowed her words, breath hitching, and John felt an ache begin in his own throat. "The lights went out."
"It won't happen again," he said as comfortingly as he could. Once he and Rodney were back from Doranda, he'd use the command chair again and explain to Atenë how important Elizabeth was. He'd already made sure everything that didn't have to be operated with the gene was initialized for her. "It was a glitch. It's fixed."
Elizabeth slowly relaxed against the wall. Her eyes closed briefly. The light in the corridor wasn't kind. It etched new lines around her mouth, pinched and painted her face with exhaustion. She looked a decade older. Stress did that to people. John felt like he'd aged a century himself since coming to Pegasus.
"You scared the hell out of me. Both of you."
John hesitated, then acted. He caught her hand in his and held it. Her fingers locked into his in a hard, fierce grip, full of desperation she didn't let show on her face. He squeezed back carefully.
"Don't do that again," she said.
"Sorry," he said. He was. He always was when he acted like a prick, but by then it was always too late.
He recalled the time she'd hugged him in the gate room and he'd frozen up.
He'd thought about Elizabeth on more than one night. He'd stopped short of fantasizing, because he liked being able to look her in the eye at morning briefings, but she was beautiful and smart and he cared for her more than was wise, so he'd thought about being with her. Yet he'd never considered making any moves beyond some harmless flirting. He'd never held her, rarely touched her, and maintained a professional distance despite whatever rumors had run through the SGC.
Just holding her hand felt strangely intimate.
It felt like he'd been in a daze, a dim, powered-down mental setting since they'd returned to this empty Atlantis. It was about time he woke up and got his act together.
He repeated, "I am sorry."
Elizabeth lifted her head and met his eyes directly. "Are you?" she asked.
It wasn't like Chaya with Elizabeth. He respected Elizabeth. He hadn't even known Chaya. Everything he'd felt for Chaya had been a reaction imposed on him by physiology. Elizabeth was a friend, someone he knew as a good person, a decent person who cared about people and the big picture at the same time. Someone he lo - cared about already. It made a difference. He wasn't in love with her, but he did love her, he admitted to himself. And he'd been an asshole to her.
John had to catch his breath before answering hoarsely, "Yeah. For what I said the other night, too. We'll figure out something. I was trying to access the city, find out if there were any supplies we could use here, that's why I was in the chair room."
"You shouldn't have gone there alone."
"You're right. Next time, I'll have Rodney with me from the beginning. He did a good job, even though I scared him, too."
"Next time?" Elizabeth's eyes narrowed and she pulled her hand free of his.
He let her go without protest, but not without regret, though he was relieved at the same time. He focused on her words.
"Next time," John said and couldn't keep the anticipation out of his voice. "The city has an AI. I don't know what happened to her in our time, but she's here now and there's so much she showed me. It was amazing."
"You mean it did that to me on purpose?"
"No, she didn't realize." John noticed Elizabeth's shoulders. Too sharp, too thin, he noted. Loss of appetite was a sign of depression and they'd all been suffering from it. That was going to change. "It was just part of a security subroutine." He looked at her earnestly. "It's turned off now."
She let out an uneven breath and nodded acceptance. A small smile made its way onto her lips and John made himself smile back, even though he knew she'd likely misunderstood and thought the AI was shut down and not just the security protocol that dealt with non-ATA residents of the city. She was so pretty when she relaxed and wasn't worried. He couldn't bring himself to take that away from her for the sake of correcting her mistaken impression.
"Let's get Rodney and eat some of the MREs we still have," he said. "Okay? We'll figure out where we should go to look for some supplies and the rest of it."
Doranda, he added to himself, silently.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
She woke from a fitful half-drowse with the distinct feeling that something was wrong. Something subtly different in the sound of the city. Something missing.Her skin prickled along her arms, her breathing was too fast.
She was out of the bed before she had finished thinking about what was making her so uneasy. She picked up the Beretta John had given her when they arrived and carried it with her out of the room. Her subconscious knew - she couldn't hear John or Rodney. But Atlantis was humming. Humming louder and more distinctly, as though excited. The lights even flickered on for her.
She raced down the corridors, past the green bubbling conduits and darkened windows, up stairs that were chill under her bare feet, to the gate room, not knowing exactly why she was running, but following instinct.
The gate was active when she reached it, pouring bluish-white light into the otherwise darkened gate room. The roof to the jumper bay was open; she could feel the draft of air circulating on her bare arms, chilling her to the bone. The jumper, slowly descending, hummed quietly. Blue light gleamed off its dark, metallic curves.
Elizabeth tapped her earpiece. "John?"
There was no reply. The jumper eased lower, slowly rotating until the front viewport faced the control room balcony overlooking the gate room.
"John, where are you going?"
When his voice answered her, it was tired. "Go back to bed, Elizabeth. It's late."
Something in her flipped at his tone. It was probably supposed to be soothing, but it came across as nothing more than condescending.
"Where is Rodney?"
The jumper hovered in front of her now, and she could see both men in it, looking rumpled and tired beyond any measure; John hollow-eyed and Rodney pale and shaking. John met her eyes without flinching, though Rodney looked away, down at his instruments.
"Where are you going?" she demanded again, putting all of the authority she knew she no longer had into the question.
It was Rodney who answered, his voice so low that she barely heard the single word. "Doranda."
Elizabeth blinked, trying to absorb this. Doranda. They couldn't …
"Are you both insane? Wasn't what happened last time enough? Rodney, haven't you done enough damage?" She knew that she shouldn't continue, but it poured out in a jumble of words she no longer wished to hold back. "John. Are you so sick of your life that you're going to destroy the universe again, to let it take you with it?"
Rodney just lowered his head, his shoulders hunching. John's smile was a travesty of amusement. This was the John who pulled the trigger, the one the Air Force had trained and Pegasus had broken and reforged, a man with a soul like watermarked steel. Had he just been waiting for Rodney to pull himself together enough to drag him back there again?
"You're going to try again?" she repeated, disgust pouring into her voice.
John's mouth quirked up a bit more, into a humorless smile. "Not quite."
"Then what? What?"
Rodney breathed deeply and lifted his head again, finally meeting her eyes. Even through the jumper window, she could see how difficult the simple act was for him now. She'd broken the trust between them as surely as he had. He fastened his gaze on her. "We're going to make sure it won't happen again."
The simple declaration was like a blow to the face. They meant to change the timeline. Elizabeth's hands clenched around the gate room railing.
The implication was clear, needed no time to think about. "Why didn't you tell me?"
John's gaze focused past her and his hands moved, preflighting the jumper the same way he would have a helicopter or a jet on Earth, not really engaged with her at all. His mind was already through the gate.
"John!" her voice rose to make herself heard over the jumper's hum.
"Didn't want to disobey orders again." He looked at her, grim and determined but apologetic too. "We have to do this."
Fear seared through her, her mind filled with pictures of them failing, dying, leaving her alone in the city, the last one, all alone, no chance of ever getting out of Atlantis, of the city coming for her. She had to pull herself together viciously, push those images aside.
"Who -" She took a deep breath and forced her voice to sound calm and strong. "Who said I wanted to stop you?"
John's gaze snapped back up from the jumper controls he had concentrated on again. "You don't?" It sounded disbelieving.
"It's the only reason for our survival," Elizabeth declared, struggling to let herself believe.
John met her gaze and gave a decisive nod. When she shifted her gaze to him, Rodney looked terrified but just as resolute. She knew the way his chin came up and suddenly a wave of affection flooded through her for both men, for their different but equal bravery.
"Just promise me you'll come back."
"We will," Rodney swore.
She saw John swallow hard. "Like McKay said," he said quietly.
His hands on the jumper controls moved. The jumper descended further, aligning with the gate.
The jumper moved, sliding smoothly into the event horizon. The gate stayed open for a while longer, then the rippling, watery surface vanished.
Elizabeth's knees gave way.
Hands still clutching the railing, her face pressed against the cool metal, she stared at the empty ring of the stargate while the gate room sank back into darkness around her. Atlantis stopped humming.
She was alone, as utterly alone as any human being had ever been, and the fear spilled through her, icy and overwhelming.
All she could do was wait.
Next post 3/36
Author: auburnnothenna & eretria
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Size: 8780 words [~ 161,700 words ]
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: Rising, Before I Sleep, The Brotherhood, The Defiant One, Hot Zone, The Siege I, II & III, Trinity
Disclaimer: Not ours, not profiting, written for entertainment purposes alone.
Characters: Elizabeth Weir, Rodney McKay, John Sheppard, Atlantis
Genre: AU, polyamorous
Pairings: McKay/Sheppard, McKay/Sheppard/Atlantis, McKay/Weir/Sheppard, Sheppard/Atlantis
Summary: "Worst case scenario?"
"We tear a hole in the fabric of the universe."
Trinity
There was no rational way to handle this.
Previous posts: 1a/36 and 1b/36.
Supplies got lower, low enough she had to start rationing and became frightened of what would happen when they ran out. All her searches for food in the sections of the city she could access were fruitless. She thought of the Wraith when her stomach growled and ached. Wondered if they felt the same after waking up from their sleep - always hungry, never properly nourished.
She gave up some of her rations when she had found Rodney in hypoglycemic shock, shivering and sweating on the floor, unable to remember his own name. That had frightened her more than the nightly screams, because in that very moment she was sure he was lost to them; brain damage inevitable. He came around after a hastily prepared glass of sugar water, after which she forced him to eat a whole MRE. Elizabeth swore to herself that she wasn't going to watch that again, helpless. She wasn't going to lose Rodney.
She needed assistance, but she went on her own, on long, futile trips that showed her just how limited her chances were. Transporters didn't work for her and without pre-initialized access to any of the computer terminals, the vastness of the city caused her to lose her way more than once. Corridors remained dark. Doors refused to open or opened on empty rooms almost randomly. The batteries in the flashlight she brought from the jumper's supplies dimmed and eventually died, curtailing her searches further.
Rodney still woke screaming, but now John stayed away. Elizabeth ran to his room and hovered in the doorway. John didn't come and Rodney huddled in his bed, shaking in the dark. She tried to go to him and he snarled at her to get out. He stopped staring into the distance during the days, at least, and started remembering to feed himself. He even showered and brushed his teeth, for which she was grateful. It seemed like she'd traded John's presence for a more aware and functional Rodney.
Her search for supplies in the city proved useless. She found kitchen facilities but they were bare, stripped and empty, no frozen or dried goods anywhere. It made sense, of course, she chided herself. The Ancients had left the city without any expectation of returning for thousands of years, so they had left it clean and empty. It made sense, but it felt deliberate, as if the city refused her, as though there were ghosts around every corner, mocking her efforts. The dark and the cold beyond the city shield seemed to hold something that watched through the walls and windows, that regarded three lost humans with hostile eyes.
Elizabeth stopped sleeping.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
Elizabeth came and went, a presence just on the fringes of Rodney's consciousness, urging him to eat sometimes. Other times Sheppard was there, silent but present. Rodney wasn't certain if he was the one leaning on Sheppard or if Sheppard was leaning into him some nights. He didn't suppose it mattered much.
Neither Elizabeth nor Sheppard could make any of this more bearable, could stop the wheels in his head turning and turning. He didn't deserve their help. Didn't even deserve their presence, even without their friendship.
Deep, deep down, he felt stirrings of an altogether different fear - that they would abandon him, not dissolving and disappearing into nothingness, but simply leave, turning away in disgust or indifference. Even worse than that, that the despair eating him inside might take them too.
A new nightmare filled his nights when Sheppard withdrew even his presence in the dark.
Rodney dreamed of Elizabeth cutting Sheppard's throat, the image vivid in his mind, the bloody river of Sheppard's life pumping out, Sheppard's eyes wide and already empty. He could never stem that tide and he woke to the smell of the blood on his hands; his hoarse screams rang in his own ears when the rest of the nightmare manifested itself even in his waking mind. He imagined Elizabeth taking the Beretta and turning it against herself, her brain spraying the wall behind her in crimson and gray.
His stomach revolted and he rolled over the edge of the bed to the floor, onto his hands and knees, heaving and spitting the meager remains of a Powerbar, until nothing but bile and saliva came up. His eyes watered and his arms quivered as he gasped and gagged, throat burning, helpless, head hanging.
The hand on his shoulder shook him out of it for a second, and he was hoping for it to be Sheppard; Sheppard, whose contact he needed like the air to breathe these days, but when he looked up, he saw Elizabeth.
Saw blood and brain fiber.
Saw her hand cutting Sheppard's throat, leaving him twitching and twisting and fighting for breath that would no longer fill his lungs.
Elizabeth's hand on his shoulder was wet with Sheppard's blood until he blinked and everything blurred.
He shrugged her away.
"Get out."
"Rodney, you -"
"Get the fuck out of here."
He cleaned up the vomit before crawling back on the bed, willing his mind to stop but not sleep. He didn't even close his eyes, but his mind kept showing him the same thing anyway: his own hands, wet with the blood of the universe.
His ghosts waited in the corners and the shadows. They were patient.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
On the fourth day after her confrontation with John, she locked her hand on Rodney's shoulder and shook, digging her fingers into the muscle painfully. John had been gone too long this time. "I need your help, Rodney. You have to stop this. You have to help me find John."
He tried to twitch away, but she wouldn't let go. Finally, Rodney asked rustily, "Why me?"
"Nothing works for me." How she hated admitting that.
He nodded at the admission. Then a frown creased his features. "Wait. Sheppard?"
"Isn't answering his radio, hasn't come back to his room. I think we need to find him, Rodney.You need to."
Rodney's breathing picked up. "Oh, no. No." He was unsteady on his feet, but moving, and moving for the transporter. Elizabeth followed him, laying a steadying hand against the small of his back.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
John's wandering had brought him to the chair room three times. It wasn't coincidence. He wanted to sit down and feel what Atlantis was like with three fully powered ZPMs to work with, not half-crippled and half-powered.
It felt like the city itself wanted him there. His restless pacing was always accompanied by the hum of it accompanying him, doors opening, lights coming on, but it seemed like the lights were brighter when his feet turned toward the chair room and dimmed with disappointment if he went another way.
He didn't need to use the command chair. But he hadn't forgotten what Elizabeth said about supplies. They were going to have to trade for food; it would be a good idea to find out what Atlantis had to offer in the way of possible trade goods.
It would be better to concentrate on that than the sick ache inside.
He was still so angry it frightened him, so that he'd taken to staying away from Rodney and Elizabeth, because he couldn't bite back the words that wanted to burst out anymore. It felt like the day when he came home to his mother's note - Sorry, baby, I can't take you with me - on the refrigerator door, like setting his helo down at the base that afternoon in Afghanistan with nothing to show for a career in ruins but dead bodies, like the feel of a ring and a letter in an envelope he never bothered to open. It felt like losing everything all over again.
He'd trusted Rodney.
John closed his eyes.
Despite everything, if Rodney were to look him in the eye and declare he could fix everything, John would want to believe him. He would trust him, still. It hurt like hell to think Rodney had used that. It seemed like he'd always trusted Rodney, even in Antarctica, because everything Rodney felt and thought was right out there. Had seemed to be, John cautioned himself.
John preferred someone who called him an idiot to kind words and hidden agendas.
He'd thought Rodney didn't have any hidden agendas. He'd been a fool and that wasn't Rodney's fault, but his, all his. Everyone had pieces of themselves they kept private.
He had to stay away, had to ignore Rodney's nightmares, because he couldn't let himself lose control. He thought if he did, he'd be in the same state Rodney was, breaking apart inside, cut to pieces and bleeding out fast. How did you grieve for a universe?
Cold was better, cold was numb, cold was Antarctica, empty, open and alone.
The chair looked innocuous. John looked at it for a long time. Half the times he'd been in the room, before, the city had been blacked out, the corners filled with shadows, equipment scattered around the base. With the lights on, he could see the walls were almost terracotta colored, angular metal designs overlaying them, shapes almost like chevrons, fitted together, and seeming to contain some meaning he couldn't discern.
The chair was more of the strange mixture everything Ancient displayed: a frame of precise curves and right angles supporting the silvery alloy of the seat. The arms and the back were solid crystal; the same, soapy-slick crystal that was used everywhere in Atlantis, in the jumpers and half the Ancient tech John had seen, only covered over with an organic or maybe fractal pattern of the alloy.
He'd never been afraid of the chair, not the one in Antarctica or this one, but it felt different now. John stared at it. They weren't identical, he realized. The one in Antarctica had been made or adjusted for someone shorter than him. The Atlantis command chair was proportioned exactly for him.
It was waiting for him.
John stepped onto the platform supporting it. The blue light that flared to life beneath his feet didn't even surprise him. He only hesitated for a moment, considering whether he should radio Elizabeth or even Rodney and tell them he was about to do this. There wasn't any reason. The command chair wasn't dangerous. Not to him.
He sat, placing his hands on the arms. The chair always looked hard and cold, but it wasn't. It molded itself to him exactly, sinking back into a position that supported his body perfectly.
The crystal behind him activated.
John caught his breath at the fluid ease with which the chair and the city responded to him. He thought about the information systems, asking for inventories, shield strength, weapons and status reports. The information flooded back faster than he could process, holographic displays lighting above him, the city hum rising, sharper and higher, peaking in a tone that cut through his thoughts as the lights flashed brighter and brighter. Too much, too fast, John thought and tried to slow it down, but couldn't. Something reached into his brain, poured in like a rain of quicksilver, clean and cold, but burning down all his nerves.
Joy and greeting ran through his mind and it wasn't his, wasn't human, but it knew him and loved him and it felt like flying as Atlantis threaded her way through his brain.
Who are you? he thought.
The name formed in his mind, plucked from his own memory, a gestalt of the consciousness that was meant to regulate Atlantis, that fitted itself to him as his DNA was fitted to it.
Atenë.
What do you want from me?
It all came too fast, a rush of Ancient, and he cried out, pain stabbing through his temples. He tried to lift his hands to his head and couldn't. He tried to scream and couldn't.
Stop. Please. Stop.
The remorse - he thought it was remorse, that was the closest human emotion he could assign to it - that followed was wordless, gentler and slower. The information overload receded, leaving John panting and limp, sweat-soaked, every limb shaking in reaction. He tried to get his eyes open, only to realize distantly they were open and burning, but he couldn't see the room, the input from Atlantis' systems usurping the pathways into his optic thalamus. Atlantis became his body, he could feel and hear and see with the city's sensors, draw on the data core like the information it held was his own memories. It was thrilling and terrifying.
Atenë was so eager to show him everything, to share all that she was, that John was rapidly losing track of himself. He tried to feel his own body and couldn't, couldn't discern fingers or toes. He didn't know if he was breathing and began to panic. Everything was so fast in Atenë's world, he didn't know how long he'd been merged with the crystal matrices that were her brain. He tried to tell her that if she'd usurped too much of his nervous system he was dying … or already dead.
The fear that flashed through them both at that made the entire city jolt. They bolted through its systems, rushing back to the chair room, finding the specific sensors that would show John's body.
He wondered what would happen to him if they were too late.
Would he be trapped in the matrices with Atenë or just fade away without his body to anchor his consciousness? When he'd shared with Chaya, she'd showed him so much, things he knew he couldn't remember consciously. Had she shown him how to ascend?
John didn't know.
Panic hit him, but there, instantly, were statistics, probabilities, a living array of processes charting every function of his body down to the energy each cell was burning. Reassurance. Atenë caught him up again and carried him forward on the tide of information.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
"Where is he?"
Rodney bent over the control room console, willing it to cooperate. Without a laptop or any translation program, he was working on the fly, guessing at the meanings of half the commands he gave the mainframe, following his instincts.
"Give me a minute," he muttered. His raw throat ached with every rasping word. His hands rattled over the controls - they wouldn't stop shaking - depressing one, deactivating another, the colored crystals lighting and fading under his touch. He assaulted the console with the desperation of something trapped and dying, frowning the entire time. He kept blinking to keep the sweat out of his eyes, unwilling to slow down even enough to wipe the perspiration away. He had to concentrate on the screen and not the shadows. He couldn't bring himself to sit in any of the chairs; his eyes insisted that Zhang and Edwards were already there.
A holographic schematic display of the city glowed to life in front of them.
"Got it," he said.
He pointed at a single life-sign glowing two towers away from the control tower. Realization of the significance of that tower hit him. "There." His voice cracked. "That's - " His voice disappeared entirely as the life-sign on the display flickered.
Lights all over the city pulsed, modulating between yellow and red. He knew, with nauseating certainty, that Sheppard was in the command chair. An atonal alarm began repeating, making Rodney's skin crawl with memories of the final, helpless moments of the first siege, when he'd watched another monitor and imagined Sheppard's death, torn to dust and memory soon to be lost, scattered across the cold, silent reaches. It reached through the haze of his own despair even now.
Sheppard was in trouble.
"Get the medical kit from the jumper!" he snapped and ran for the closest transporter. He thought he brushed by Bates' shade as he went.
The transporter door snapped open ahead of him, the destination schematic already displayed. Rodney spared a thought for the responsiveness of the city, then dismissed it. This Atlantis had ZPMs. That was all.
Every hall was brightly lit and thankfully empty. That was different enough to keep away any flashbacks as Rodney raced into the chair room. He skidded to a stop at the edge of the glowing platform.
He said, flat and calm as he could, "Elizabeth. Get that medical kit down here now."
"On my way." He could hear the thud of her boots and her breath speeding up through his earpiece. Then, a few seconds later, as though she only thought of asking now: "Can you give me some details? Tell me what to expect."
Sheppard's in the chair, he wanted to yell. The chair is in him. Silvery strands of metal twined over his hands and arms, running up under the sleeves of Sheppard's jacket. More of it curled over his shoulders, like hands, to hold him down. The part that made Rodney want to scream, though, were the delicate threads of it crawling over Sheppard's temples to the corners of his eyes, insinuated past the orbits. He imagined them creeping along the path of the optic nerve and into Sheppard's brain.
"Rodney? Rodney!?"
"Just hurry," he said and ignored Elizabeth's questions after that.
He couldn't actually imagine a way anything in the emergency kit could do any good, but it was what you did: you tried to do something with what you had. And you watched people die, because it was never good enough, never enough. He was frozen, watching Sheppard's body bow up and then shake in a soundless convulsion. He watched blood run red and wet from Sheppard's nostrils, watched it slip from his open mouth, watched him shake and couldn't move, any more than Sheppard could blink.
"Rodney, the transporters won't work for me! I'm going to have to walk. Do you have that much time?"
"Damn it …" Rodney squeezed his eyes shut. Couldn't the damn city cooperate for once? "Elizabeth, just stay there, I'll get the transporter working, I just need more time."
"Rodney, I can't do anything to help if I'm stuck."
"I know, I know, I'm trying to think of something!" He flexed his fingers, trying to trace, strictly in his mind, the command pathways he would need to rewrite to make the transporter operate independent of gene activation. He could do it, given enough time. There was never enough time … It should work anyway.
"Elizabeth, just get in the transporter. It will work."
"I'm trying it - "
"Elizabeth?"
"I'm locked in," she said, so much calmer than he would have been.
Elizabeth didn't have the gene. She was actually too healthy; her immune system had reacted to Beckett's gene therapy and fought it off like the infection it was.
She'd rejected Atlantis on a cellular level. Now it rejected her physically.
It didn't reject Sheppard. It embraced him so tightly it was going to kill him.
"I'm sorry, I can't … I've got to get Sheppard out here. Wait, just wait, okay?" he told her.
This was the end of the world, Rodney thought. The end of everything, beyond the despair of what he'd done already, he had to watch as Atlantis killed Sheppard. Elizabeth would never come, because somewhere in the city, it was killing her, too.
He would have stayed there, paralyzed by the sense of doom that had engulfed him since they arrived, except for the pink-tinged tears seeping from the corners of Sheppard's eyes. The hair at his temples was wet with them.
Rodney's feet were moving before he knew he'd made a decision. He was up onto the glowing platform, bent over Sheppard, his fingers moving over the metal holding down Sheppard's hands. He was afraid to touch the strands on his head. One jostle could be disastrous. The alloy looked cool, but felt warm: body temperature, Rodney thought.
"Sheppard," he whispered. "Can you come back? Can you shut it down?" He ducked his head, absently stroking his fingers over Sheppard's on the arm rest. "Can you hear me?"
The room lights flickered.
Rodney jerked his head.
"Was that you? Sheppard, if that was you, do it again!"
Rodney leaned closer, staring into blank hazel eyes, and held his breath. Sheppard's body had settled back into the chair, the seizures apparently over. The lights remained steady.
"Damn it, damn it, don't do this, you idiot," he said. His voice came and went, uneven and unsure. Would Sheppard even listen to him now, if he did hear? "Come on!"
"Rodney, talk to me. I can help." Her voice was too calm, he could hear the panic lurking under the surface. It was the last thing he needed now.
"Not now, Elizabeth."
Sheppard's pupils were contracted to pinpoints. Sheppard had such changeable eyes, sometimes dark, sometimes light; green one moment, gray or gold in the next. They were never blind, though; never empty like this. Rodney could map the ring of dark green around the edge of each iris, then a pale amber-green layer that darkened to golden-brown around the pupil. There were striations, spokes of gold, specks of brown and deeper green. Rodney stared into them and wanted only for them to narrow and fill with something, even if it was only the dark glitter of anger.
"Rodney, for God's sake, I know it's bad when you don't talk. Don't shut me out. What's happening? Is it John?"
Elizabeth's voice was escalating into impatience mixed with despair and he couldn't take the concern anymore. Rodney reached up and tapped his ear piece, turning her off.
"Come on, Sheppard," he said conversationally.Conversationally except for the crack and rise in his voice at the end."This is a shitty way to go, you know. You're always so disgustingly upbeat, telling everyone to keep trying, to not give up, you don't get to just lie back and die. It's absolutely unfair on all counts and I swear I will hound you into the afterlife if you do. I mean it. I'm willing to concede the existence of an afterlife, which means God or gods - and I don't mean the Goa'uld or the Ascended - just because I refuse to let you get away with this. I really hope you're listening to this and, hey, if you are, I'd like some kind of damned sign - "
The lights flicked off and on again.
Rodney stroked Sheppard's wrist and ignored Radek's phantom, shaking his head in disapproval and disappointment, in the corner.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
The sensors showed another life-sign in the chair room. The individual possessed just enough altered cells with the proper DNA to pass the activation threshold.
Sound waves registered. Modulations from a human throat. Language. But not Atlantis' language, not the beautiful mathematics of Atenë's thoughts, not the language John knew as Ancient, nor the stripped-to-basics trade tongue the stargates inserted into the brains of each traveler, not even Wraith. But he knew it, knew those morphemes, those structures, those rhythms.
He concentrated on the chair room. There was another life form in the city, but it didn't speak to her or him, and he ignored it. Atenë had it secured in one of the transporter kiosks.
"Can you hear me?"
English, John thought, it was English. He listened harder, wanting it to make sense, wanting to translate for Atenë because she was there beside him, within him, breath and heartbeat and thought buoyed up by her.
They responded, brightening and dimming the lights, wanting the one talking to go on.
" - is a shitty way to go, you know. You're always so disgustingly upbeat, telling everyone to keep trying, to not give up, you don't get to just lie back and die. It's absolutely unfair on all counts and I swear I will hound you into the afterlife if you do - "
Memory shifted and Atenë showed him a picture, eyes full of worry in a face hollowed and bruised, much too pale.
John found the name in his own memories, along with a knot of emotions that stung and cut, so that he almost recoiled back into the computer's matrices. He remembered Doranda and after.
McKay.
" - afterlife, which means God or gods - and I don't mean the Goa'uld or the Ascended - just because I refuse to let you get away - "
McKay seemed to think John was dying. He didn't think he was, but he couldn't feel anything. Couldn't reconnect with his body, which scared the hell out of him. John pulled away from Atenë, listening to McKay, because Rodney always figured things out, he always came up with a way to save all of them. Or he had until - John shied away from the thought. He had to trust Rodney and he couldn't do it if he thought too much about what had happened.
He reached and flickered the lights again.
Flickered and breathed. He couldn't feel that breath that filled his lungs, but the scent rushed through his olfactory receptors, real and stunningly separate from the data input from Atenë: blood and sweat and the sharp reek of fear, a familiar acid musk that was half his own scent and half Rodney.
" - Sheppard - "
John latched onto the smell and fell back into his body, the link with Atenë severing so abruptly he screamed.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
Rodney jerked his hand away from Sheppard.
The strands of alloy were sliding out of him. Rodney resisted to the urge to pry and tear at them, but grabbed Sheppard by the shoulders as the clamps released there. Sheppard was gasping for breath now, his entire body twitching. His hands flailed at Rodney's arms as the last silver threads withdrew. The instant they were out of Sheppard's eyes, Rodney jerked Sheppard upright and out of the chair.
Sheppard was a shuddering, dead-weight wreck and they both fell in a tangle of legs and arms.
The light in the chair crystal went out. Rodney pulled Sheppard around until he could see his face.
Sheppard's eyes were squeezed shut.
"Sheppard, Colonel, don't ever dare do that to me again," Rodney shouted at him.
Sheppard flinched at the close-in volume.
Rodney was two breaths from hysterics, much too loud, and he knew it. He couldn't have another meltdown. Not until he knew Sheppard was all right. He tightened his hands on Sheppard's shoulders and resisted the urge to shake him.
"McKay?" Sheppard asked hoarsely. His eyes were still shut and Rodney could feel the trembling running through his body like aftershocks from whatever he'd experienced.
"Yes, of course, who else would it be? You scared - you took a ridiculous risk. Why did you use the chair and what the hell happened? That wasn't normal. It's never done anything like that. I thought you were dying."
Sheppard slitted his eyes open. They gleamed with excitement. Rodney felt a jolt of fear. What if whatever had just happened to Sheppard had affected him permanently?
"Look, what's your name?"
Sheppard blinked.
"Sheppard?" Rodney said, starting to worry even more.
"John." One corner of Sheppard's mouth quirked up in the beginning of a smirk. "Sheppard."
"Oh, but I just said that, didn't I? Well, what's my name?"
"Didn't I just say that? McKay."
Rodney puffed a relieved breath.
"Well, excuse me for being a little concerned that you might have fried your brain," he snapped.
Sheppard closed his eyes again and nodded loosely, then slumped against Rodney.
They were both still sprawled on the chair platform. One of Sheppard's elbows was digging into Rodney's ribs and his tailbone hurt from hitting the floor under Sheppard's extra weight. He still wasn't in a hurry to let go and Sheppard was limp against him, not pulling away. He let himself sit there just a little longer, letting some of the adrenaline leach away.
"What happened?" he asked finally. "Do you know?"
Sheppard finally pulled away from him and ended up sitting propped against the command chair, which Rodney found vastly disturbing. He wiped at his bloody nose with a hand that still wasn't steady and grimaced.
"Yeah, I know." Sheppard looked up from his blood-smeared hand and his eyes were full of wonder. "McKay, she's aware."
"Who, she?"
Sheppard waved. "Atlantis. She's awake and … incredible." His lips parted. "It was like I was in her mind and her mind is so much more than you could ever imagine."
"Atlantis," Rodney said slowly, wondering if Sheppard had suffered some sort of brain damage. Radek's shadow was back, poking curiously at the chair, snickering at Rodney. He tried not to look. Sheppard still needed him and that meant being sane again.
Sheppard reached up and stroked the chair arm. "Atlantis," Sheppard repeated. His voice was husky. "It's all math. God, it's so pure and clean."
"Wait," Rodney interrupted, sitting forward. "You're talking about an AI."
"Yeah, what did you think I was talking about?"
"I was revisiting the fried brains theory. There's really an AI? Why didn't it interact with us before?"
Sheppard pulled his knees up and rested his arms on them, letting his hands dangle. The bones at his wrists nearly poked through his skin. Little dots of blood ran up his arms until they disappeared under his sleeves.
"Before before or before since we got here?"
"Either." Rodney frowned.
"Atenë was asleep when we got here. This time. Before … " Sheppard swallowed. "I think she died when the city started shutting down peripherals to save power for the shield."
"Oh."
Rodney raised a finger. "But what about Elizabeth. The first one. Why didn't the city - what did you call the AI?"
"Atenë."
"Right. Why didn't the AI interact with Elizabeth?"
"She doesn't have the ATA gene." Sheppard's expression blanked. "Shit. Elizabeth."
"What? What?"
Rodney remembered he'd turned off his radio.
"She's in a locked-down transporter."
Rodney tapped on the radio. "Elizabeth?"
Nothing. He looked at Sheppard, but Sheppard's eyes were squeezed shut.
"Elizabeth?" Rodney tried again.
The sound of a breath exhaled like a sob came through his earpiece.
"Rodney?"
"Are you okay?"
She laughed and it sounded bad, really bad. "Can you get the transporter to open for her?" he asked Sheppard.
"I'm trying. If I used the chair - "
"No, no, no. I don't care how happy-friendly-wonderful Atenë is, you're not getting back into that chair," Rodney overrode him.
"Rodney, is John all right?"
"As he ever was," Rodney replied.
"Then get me out of here!"
He could hear her composure slipping. He turned off his mic long enough to ask, "Can you get the transporter to let her off at the living quarters?"
Sheppard reached up again and touched the arm of the chair, fingers moving over the silvery alloy. It rippled under his touch. Rodney's stomach lurched.
Sheppard opened his eyes and let his hand fall away and into his lap. "Yeah. I've got it."
"Elizabeth? The transporter should be all right now. Just get out when the doors open."
"What about John?"
"Colonel Sheppard seems to be okay."
"The doors are opening now. Thank you, Rodney. - Are you sure John is all right?"
"Yes. We'll be there soon, just try not to worry," Rodney said.
He looked at Sheppard, really looked at him, and thought if he got up and walked out of the room, Sheppard would sit back down in the command chair and never come back. At the same time, his heart picked up speed just imagining what they could learn from the AI. There was so much they'd never learned from the Ancients' database because they hadn't known what questions to ask. With an AI it would be utterly different.
If they'd had the AI, maybe he would never have … Then again, what if they had never gone to Doranda in the first place, never found the Arcturus Project?
Rodney looked past Sheppard to the command chair. He licked his lips.
"Sheppard."
Sheppard leaned his sweat-matted head against the chair.
"Yeah?"
"We could wipe the gate address and galactic coordinates for Doranda from the database."
Sheppard went still. Rodney didn't say trust me. He just let Sheppard think it out himself, didn't even suggest the corollary: that they could go back to Doranda in this time. He was half afraid Sheppard would refuse simply because Rodney had thought of it.
"We could," Sheppard said very slowly. Something dark and merciless flickered behind his eyes. His mouth stretched into a hard, feral smile. "We could do better than that, Rodney."
Rodney waited.
"We can go back and take that damned place apart," Sheppard declared.
Rodney nodded jerkily. He'd do whatever Sheppard wanted. At least, Sheppard was talking to him again, and he'd said we.
"Tonight," Sheppard said. He levered himself to his feet and stood, swaying, looking at Rodney hard and intent. Blood still smeared through the stubble on his chin, bright and frightening.
Rodney caught his breath and nodded. "Okay." This was the Sheppard who scared him, the one that could pull the trigger without hesitation.
"I've convinced Atenë to stop locking Elizabeth out of most of the systems. There are still things that have to be at least initialized by you or me and the jumpers will never work for her, but she'll be okay while we're gone."
"Shouldn't we take her with us?"
Sheppard hung his head briefly. "We don't really know what we'll find there. She'll be safer here."
Sheppard sounded so determined, Rodney didn't even consider arguing. He followed Sheppard out, but hesitated at the door, looking back at Radek, who waved him off impatiently, still poking at the command chair, all intent and excitement. Rodney blinked again and Radek was gone.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
John glanced at Rodney as they stepped into a transporter. The destination schematic slid open, but neither of them activated it. He felt like hell, like crashing, every muscle in his body achy and exhausted. Rodney just looked like shit, pasty, unsteady. He'd cleaned up sometime in the last day, though: the beard was gone. His voice was still rough; maybe it always would be. John didn't know how long you had to scream until you did permanent damage, but Rodney's screams would echo through his head for the rest of his life.
It was just too damn much. He didn't want to think about any of it anymore. He didn't want to think about Atenë, either. If he did, he could almost feel the AI still in his mind, almost lose himself in the intricacies of the city, like he'd melt into alloy and crystal circuits if he didn't concentrate on staying in himself.
"You're talking to me again?" Rodney asked abruptly.
"I wasn't not - "
"Yes, you were."
John nodded and said, "It's hard, okay?"
Rodney didn't answer.
John was sure that Rodney's hands were shaking, his own still were; Rodney had shoved his in his pockets and slumped against the wall. The impulse to say something, to make Rodney look up and meet his eyes again, warred with his still simmering anger.
Every time he thought he had a handle on it, it came back to the realization that they had wiped out their universe. When he tried to sleep, it played against the back of his eyelids, the flare of light behind them as the rip began consuming Doranda's sun and the jumper threaded the eye of the stargate's needle. One second more and they would have been swept into nothingness, too.
If they had, they would never have known what they'd done. What Rodney had done, what he and Elizabeth had helped him do, what the Ancients had begun long before any of them were born.
He didn't blame Rodney alone, though he knew Rodney thought so.
He just didn't know how to live with it.
If he could just do something … Elizabeth wanted him to think about supplies and all he could think was it was pointless. But he'd latched onto the idea of going to Doranda like a lifeline. If they did this, then the fluke that had let them survive meant something. They could be more than ghosts of the future.
"We'll fix things," he said.
Rodney kept his gaze on the floor as he said, "Elizabeth will want to come with us." He flinched on the last word, as though he expected John to object to it.
John swallowed hard, grimacing at the taste of thick blood running down the back of his throat from his still bleeding nose. He slumped back against the wall opposite Rodney.
He looked away and said, "I know." He rubbed at the back of his neck, trying to loosen tight muscles.
John touched the icon for the transporter closest to their living quarters. The transporter's door slid shut and opened onto the familiar corridor. There was never time to feel their dissolution and reintegration, but John staggered, because for an instant, he was everywhere, spread through Atlantis, bodiless.
"Whoa," he murmured and Rodney's hand closed on his bicep, steadying him.
"Sheppard - "
"I'm okay."
"Oh, of course. You always go white and nearly fall on your face from what's essentially an elevator ride," Rodney snapped.
John locked his knees and whatever he'd felt dissolved into little more than a faint awareness of the city at the back of his mind, not much stronger than he'd always felt since first coming to Atlantis. Rodney's hand stayed on his arm. He let it. He didn't smile at the return of some of Rodney's normal attitude. He didn't, but for an instant he wanted to.
He wanted to go back to the way things had been between them before, the simple, comfortable friendship, but it wasn't that easy. If he was honest, it hadn't been easy for a while. The tension growing between them had simply been lost in all the other stresses.
There were things he couldn't afford. Things he never let himself even contemplate. Rodney was one of them, the same way Teyla became when she joined his team. Off limits, just like Elizabeth, because they had never needed that kind of trouble on top of all the other dangers they faced. He'd always been smart enough to avoid screwing up like that.
It was just one more thing he was not going to think about. He had a mission to plan. He was going to concentrate on that.
He shook off Rodney's hand. "I've got to clean up." He was more than a little ripe and suddenly couldn't stand himself.
"Figure out what supplies you'll need," he said as he walked away. "Then figure out what we've actually got." He didn't figure that was much, but the Arcturus facility probably had a self-destruct sequence Rodney could hack into.
"Fine, fine, sure," Rodney called. "I'll - I'll do that."
"Good," John said, ducking into his room as Elizabeth appeared at the door to hers.
"John?" she said.
He willed the doors to close behind him.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
The look on Elizabeth's face when he exited the room fifteen minutes later made John regret the way he'd been treating her. She was paler than Rodney, stick thin and terribly brittle. He'd resented her ambushing him, but what choice had he left her? Rodney was a fractured mess and John had done what he always did: he'd bolted. Now he just felt guilty.
"See?" Rodney said as John walked into the hall, showered, shaved and back in control. The lights in the hall brightened subtly for him, John noticed. Atenë was watching. In retrospect, he was a little disturbed by what had happened with the command chair, but he still felt warm at the thought that the AI was looking out for him. The fleeting thought that the city already loved him more than his mother ever had he pushed away.
Elizabeth had stationed herself opposite his door. She had on her jacket, zipped to the throat, and clutched at her elbows with her hands. Her knuckles were white.
Rodney leaned against the wall next to John's door. John looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
Rodney waved a hand at Elizabeth. "She didn't believe me." He sounded simply disgusted, but John saw that Elizabeth's doubt hurt.
John frowned. "Believe what?' he asked.
"That you're okay."
"What happened to you?" Elizabeth demanded, speaking over Rodney uncharacteristically. "Rodney said you're all right, but - "
"I am all right," John said softly. He caught Rodney's eye over Elizabeth's shoulder and mouthed, Go on.
"Rodney found me."
Rodney gave a jerky little nod and walked away fast, his step hesitating once as he detoured around something John didn't see. John hated the slump of his shoulders.
"It's okay," he said to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth leaned back against the wall. "No, no, it isn't," she murmured.
He wondered if she missed the comfort of being with someone. She never stepped outside the role of leader with anyone. She was calm and kind and concerned with everyone, because that was part of her command style. There was a difference between that and the personal. She had never wavered past the line, despite what she might feel inside. She still hadn't, even while he and Rodney were each doing their best to run away from the situation. He couldn't blame Rodney, but he knew he'd been unfair to her and knowing that had just made him angrier. He'd lashed out at her for being practical, for doing her job, because he felt like he'd failed at his.
He'd failed everybody. John's breath caught, an ache blooming in his chest so sharp it felt like a knife. All of them, all of them lost, except Rodney and Elizabeth. He missed Teyla and Ronon every time he thought of them.
"It will be," he promised, letting himself believe it, too. "We will be."
The heel of her fist hit the wall beside her. "You say that, but you weren't trapped in that transporter. I didn't know what was happening. Rodney stopped answering his radio." She slowed her words, breath hitching, and John felt an ache begin in his own throat. "The lights went out."
"It won't happen again," he said as comfortingly as he could. Once he and Rodney were back from Doranda, he'd use the command chair again and explain to Atenë how important Elizabeth was. He'd already made sure everything that didn't have to be operated with the gene was initialized for her. "It was a glitch. It's fixed."
Elizabeth slowly relaxed against the wall. Her eyes closed briefly. The light in the corridor wasn't kind. It etched new lines around her mouth, pinched and painted her face with exhaustion. She looked a decade older. Stress did that to people. John felt like he'd aged a century himself since coming to Pegasus.
"You scared the hell out of me. Both of you."
John hesitated, then acted. He caught her hand in his and held it. Her fingers locked into his in a hard, fierce grip, full of desperation she didn't let show on her face. He squeezed back carefully.
"Don't do that again," she said.
"Sorry," he said. He was. He always was when he acted like a prick, but by then it was always too late.
He recalled the time she'd hugged him in the gate room and he'd frozen up.
He'd thought about Elizabeth on more than one night. He'd stopped short of fantasizing, because he liked being able to look her in the eye at morning briefings, but she was beautiful and smart and he cared for her more than was wise, so he'd thought about being with her. Yet he'd never considered making any moves beyond some harmless flirting. He'd never held her, rarely touched her, and maintained a professional distance despite whatever rumors had run through the SGC.
Just holding her hand felt strangely intimate.
It felt like he'd been in a daze, a dim, powered-down mental setting since they'd returned to this empty Atlantis. It was about time he woke up and got his act together.
He repeated, "I am sorry."
Elizabeth lifted her head and met his eyes directly. "Are you?" she asked.
It wasn't like Chaya with Elizabeth. He respected Elizabeth. He hadn't even known Chaya. Everything he'd felt for Chaya had been a reaction imposed on him by physiology. Elizabeth was a friend, someone he knew as a good person, a decent person who cared about people and the big picture at the same time. Someone he lo - cared about already. It made a difference. He wasn't in love with her, but he did love her, he admitted to himself. And he'd been an asshole to her.
John had to catch his breath before answering hoarsely, "Yeah. For what I said the other night, too. We'll figure out something. I was trying to access the city, find out if there were any supplies we could use here, that's why I was in the chair room."
"You shouldn't have gone there alone."
"You're right. Next time, I'll have Rodney with me from the beginning. He did a good job, even though I scared him, too."
"Next time?" Elizabeth's eyes narrowed and she pulled her hand free of his.
He let her go without protest, but not without regret, though he was relieved at the same time. He focused on her words.
"Next time," John said and couldn't keep the anticipation out of his voice. "The city has an AI. I don't know what happened to her in our time, but she's here now and there's so much she showed me. It was amazing."
"You mean it did that to me on purpose?"
"No, she didn't realize." John noticed Elizabeth's shoulders. Too sharp, too thin, he noted. Loss of appetite was a sign of depression and they'd all been suffering from it. That was going to change. "It was just part of a security subroutine." He looked at her earnestly. "It's turned off now."
She let out an uneven breath and nodded acceptance. A small smile made its way onto her lips and John made himself smile back, even though he knew she'd likely misunderstood and thought the AI was shut down and not just the security protocol that dealt with non-ATA residents of the city. She was so pretty when she relaxed and wasn't worried. He couldn't bring himself to take that away from her for the sake of correcting her mistaken impression.
"Let's get Rodney and eat some of the MREs we still have," he said. "Okay? We'll figure out where we should go to look for some supplies and the rest of it."
Doranda, he added to himself, silently.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
She woke from a fitful half-drowse with the distinct feeling that something was wrong. Something subtly different in the sound of the city. Something missing.Her skin prickled along her arms, her breathing was too fast.
She was out of the bed before she had finished thinking about what was making her so uneasy. She picked up the Beretta John had given her when they arrived and carried it with her out of the room. Her subconscious knew - she couldn't hear John or Rodney. But Atlantis was humming. Humming louder and more distinctly, as though excited. The lights even flickered on for her.
She raced down the corridors, past the green bubbling conduits and darkened windows, up stairs that were chill under her bare feet, to the gate room, not knowing exactly why she was running, but following instinct.
The gate was active when she reached it, pouring bluish-white light into the otherwise darkened gate room. The roof to the jumper bay was open; she could feel the draft of air circulating on her bare arms, chilling her to the bone. The jumper, slowly descending, hummed quietly. Blue light gleamed off its dark, metallic curves.
Elizabeth tapped her earpiece. "John?"
There was no reply. The jumper eased lower, slowly rotating until the front viewport faced the control room balcony overlooking the gate room.
"John, where are you going?"
When his voice answered her, it was tired. "Go back to bed, Elizabeth. It's late."
Something in her flipped at his tone. It was probably supposed to be soothing, but it came across as nothing more than condescending.
"Where is Rodney?"
The jumper hovered in front of her now, and she could see both men in it, looking rumpled and tired beyond any measure; John hollow-eyed and Rodney pale and shaking. John met her eyes without flinching, though Rodney looked away, down at his instruments.
"Where are you going?" she demanded again, putting all of the authority she knew she no longer had into the question.
It was Rodney who answered, his voice so low that she barely heard the single word. "Doranda."
Elizabeth blinked, trying to absorb this. Doranda. They couldn't …
"Are you both insane? Wasn't what happened last time enough? Rodney, haven't you done enough damage?" She knew that she shouldn't continue, but it poured out in a jumble of words she no longer wished to hold back. "John. Are you so sick of your life that you're going to destroy the universe again, to let it take you with it?"
Rodney just lowered his head, his shoulders hunching. John's smile was a travesty of amusement. This was the John who pulled the trigger, the one the Air Force had trained and Pegasus had broken and reforged, a man with a soul like watermarked steel. Had he just been waiting for Rodney to pull himself together enough to drag him back there again?
"You're going to try again?" she repeated, disgust pouring into her voice.
John's mouth quirked up a bit more, into a humorless smile. "Not quite."
"Then what? What?"
Rodney breathed deeply and lifted his head again, finally meeting her eyes. Even through the jumper window, she could see how difficult the simple act was for him now. She'd broken the trust between them as surely as he had. He fastened his gaze on her. "We're going to make sure it won't happen again."
The simple declaration was like a blow to the face. They meant to change the timeline. Elizabeth's hands clenched around the gate room railing.
The implication was clear, needed no time to think about. "Why didn't you tell me?"
John's gaze focused past her and his hands moved, preflighting the jumper the same way he would have a helicopter or a jet on Earth, not really engaged with her at all. His mind was already through the gate.
"John!" her voice rose to make herself heard over the jumper's hum.
"Didn't want to disobey orders again." He looked at her, grim and determined but apologetic too. "We have to do this."
Fear seared through her, her mind filled with pictures of them failing, dying, leaving her alone in the city, the last one, all alone, no chance of ever getting out of Atlantis, of the city coming for her. She had to pull herself together viciously, push those images aside.
"Who -" She took a deep breath and forced her voice to sound calm and strong. "Who said I wanted to stop you?"
John's gaze snapped back up from the jumper controls he had concentrated on again. "You don't?" It sounded disbelieving.
"It's the only reason for our survival," Elizabeth declared, struggling to let herself believe.
John met her gaze and gave a decisive nod. When she shifted her gaze to him, Rodney looked terrified but just as resolute. She knew the way his chin came up and suddenly a wave of affection flooded through her for both men, for their different but equal bravery.
"Just promise me you'll come back."
"We will," Rodney swore.
She saw John swallow hard. "Like McKay said," he said quietly.
His hands on the jumper controls moved. The jumper descended further, aligning with the gate.
The jumper moved, sliding smoothly into the event horizon. The gate stayed open for a while longer, then the rippling, watery surface vanished.
Elizabeth's knees gave way.
Hands still clutching the railing, her face pressed against the cool metal, she stared at the empty ring of the stargate while the gate room sank back into darkness around her. Atlantis stopped humming.
She was alone, as utterly alone as any human being had ever been, and the fear spilled through her, icy and overwhelming.
All she could do was wait.
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