TEAM AWAY: Weakest link, "All the Pharaoh’s Men"
Title: All the Pharaoh’s Men
Author: ladyamarra
Team: Away
Prompt: Weakest link
Pairing(s): McKay/Sheppard
Rating: R
Warnings: Scenes of violence (not graphic)
Summary: “Shut up and walk,” the guard grunts hoarsely and Rodney’s glad he’s bound to the man before him or he would fall and land in the blistering hot sand face first.
Notes: Thanks to ldyanne, tzzzz and quasar273 for the help with the first half, and of course to the wonderful oriolegirl who did last minute beta for the whole piece. Thank you all so much, without you all I'd never finished this in time!
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**
“This is hell.”
Rodney’s skin looks red and puffy in the merciless sunlight, sweat running down his neck gluing his shirt to his skin, plastering his messy hair to his brow and burning in his irritated eyes. He hates the heat, hates the sun, and most of all, hates intolerant, stupid, barbarian backwater hellholes like this one with a passion usually reserved for the most demented members of the human race.
“Hell,” he repeats.
Not that those who surround him would qualify very high on that particular scale anyway.
“I’m dead and gone to hell.”
The bulky slave behind him, bound by his wrists like Rodney is, bumps into him, shoving him forward hard.
“Shut up and walk,” he grunts hoarsely and Rodney’s glad he’s bound to the man before him or he would fall and land in the blistering hot sand face first.
Not a nice fate when he considers the pale bleached human bones they went past an hour or so ago. They lay there in the sun, old leathery skin still stretching over parts of the ribs and the bones of the lower arms still tied together, bound for eternity.
They would probably just cut him out of the line and leave him behind, him and whoever else might fall when he went down because of weakness and thirst. He closes his eyes and follows the pull of the line of men before him, dragging his feet through the sand while licking the salt off his lips in hopes of gathering any kind of moisture.
It’s by no means fair, he thinks, not at all.
It’s a waste of his genius to end in a hell like this, human work force for some crazy building project in the middle of nowhere. If he knows Pegasus people, it’s probably for defence against the Wraith or something equally hopeless. Seriously, as if a wall of large stone would draw more than a weak chuckle from them when they came to cull everyone and bomb the whole bastard planet to hell.
The real hell, not the miserably hot copy they have going.
“Move,” their guard growls above the whine of a hot breeze.
The wind is pressing more of the sand against Rodney’s skin, caking to the sweat on his arms and getting caught in his eyelashes when he blinks the sweat away. He tries to look up and over the heads before him anyway, peering at the monument that rises before him in the blue merciless sky through narrowed eyes. It’s mostly made of blinding white stone and looks a little like a misshapen Pyramid that is missing a large chunk on one side. He can’t see what’s going on at the top or how many people there are on the ramps that circle the monument, just the long lines of workers that are dragging smaller stones from a quarry further away and up the ramps.
“Move already you worthless creatures.”
The guard’s skin is dark and his face worn out and leathery from too many years in the bare sun.
“Move!”
He lets his whip crack above the heads of the first in line and chuckles as if he loves the job, yeah, he’s as cliché as the rest of the whole event. Like one of those 50s movies in which the surreal looking pyramids were painted in the background with bad actors wearing short skirts and hilarious wigs.
Rodney frowns for a moment, wondering how the sun makes him remember that he watched that stuff back in his childhood and how his mother loved costume films. It’s the heat, must be, he decides and shakes his head, figuring that he’s one of the Pharaoh's slaves now.
Their point of destination, a batch of tents in the shadow of the monument, comes closer with every step and it doesn’t look as if there’s more water to go around than in the camp Rodney had spent the last night in, huddled down between 50 or 60 other men who were all sweating like mad although it was bitterly cold in the darkness.
There are men working in plaster pits and men who shape stones higher than themselves into form. Others are pulling these larger stones in teams up on the ramps to get into their predestined slot. They can do basic math, so they're not all that stupid, but with this people’s tendency to pick strangers from planets all over the galaxy like they did Rodney, they probably just captured someone smarter than them and set them to work.
So many people and so much misery in their faces, he can’t see himself surviving for very long amongst them, not the way he is.
“You get some water and then you’ll be put to your work,” the guard announces as they arrive, curling his whip around his fist as he walks past. “If you try to run, don’t believe we'll stop you," he adds and the other guards, all clothed in black, chuckle in amusement.
Rodney looks out over the sand and fights against the sting in his eyes. It looks endless with the heat rippling the air like water in a pond. Even if he ran, where would he go?
The gate is almost two days of walking away. He has no way to tell Atlantis to lower the shield and anyway, without water to take with him, it would be impossible.
Dead man walking.
At least the others are safe, which is worth something he decides. It’s worth everything.
They’ll probably never find him again and he will end as a pile of bleaching bones in hell, but hey, Sheppard is okay. No suicidal stunt from him this time around and no worthless deaths this time around either.
Well, except for his perhaps.
But since his team - or Sheppard in this case - is safe the whole worthless part is… well, worthless to debate about?
Sometimes it’s funny what stupid things people do for each other.
His brain is more than obviously already failing, his blood sugar dwelling on the border of shock and he really doesn't want to know what his chances for skin cancer have elevated to with the amount of exposure to the sun but he will deal, he will.
At least until he dies of either heat stroke, dehydration, his blood sugar or at the whim of one of the friendly guards.
What a cheery prognosis.
The guards undo the chains and ropes the men around Rodney are tied up with, let them go free and vaguely point towards a corner of the camp.
The sun is starting to set already, but nothing of the hellish heat will subside until the night has fully settled on them, he remembers that from the night before. The other guards in the background had let most of the workers move away from the building site already, so it can’t be far out.
“These are the rules, and they are very easy…” The guard is more than amused as he points that out. “Water is only for those who work! Food is only for those who are strong enough to fight for it! If you can’t work you get neither…”
Rodney ignores the rest of the speech. He has a pretty good idea already what it will mean for him as he drags himself towards one of the tents, tired and falling to the sandy ground in one corner to just curl up, collapse and wait for the night.
It’s not that he's giving up on rescue or survival, it’s just that he is a man of math and the realism that comes with numbers, and when he calculates the likelihood of Sheppard riding in within the next few hours like fucking Prince Charming, adds the fact that the last time he saw him John was out cold and bleeding from a gash in his head as an escaping native dragged him through the gate to Atlantis… well, it’s just not very likely to happen.
But speaking of not very likely things…
Rodney playing heroic and pulling the attention to himself to help the others escape, yeah, not so very likely either. But he blames Sheppard and the cold surge of terror he caused with the head wound that bled all over Rodney’s hands. He more or less traded himself in to give the others a chance to escape from the slave hunters as they attacked, fell back and made as much noise as possible while Sheppard went with the villagers, and after that, the slave traders gated off the planet with him before Sheppard had a chance to come back… or wake up for that matter. Seriously, head wounds bleed a lot, Rodney knows from experience, and Sheppard is prone to be pretty dizzy after such things, he can’t expect the rescue to come fast.
And without Rodney to get the addresses out of the DHD it will certainly take even longer for rescue to come than it would otherwise.
The calm of the upcoming night gets rudely interrupted by another one of the guards, throwing something into the tent that lands in the middle of the men and leaves them in startled silence for a moment. It takes a few seconds until they register it is bread and then it’s total chaos.
Everyone throws themselves onto the bread and it’s more or less a fight that only the strongest can win, not Rodney, but that won’t keep him from trying.
“Hey,” he snaps, shoving at the other men with his elbows. “That’s mine you ape, hey, I need it, okay, I’ve got low blood sugar.”
They all grab at the pieces of bread like hungry hyenas until there’s barely more than crumbs left in the sand. Rodney might have had a chance against the weaker ones; he’s not that soft anymore with running for his life and all that, but with the dehydration and his low blood sugar the world spins too much around him to get more than a hand full of sand and crumbs.
And the staring looks of one or the other of the tent inhabitants.
One of them he knows by the name of Arol, chewing on his respectably sized chunk of dry bread while staring at Rodney with a smirk that makes the scientist’s blood boil but run cold as well, just from the height difference alone. He remembers the bulky frame, had walked before him for the entire path from gate to building site. Now he’s almost towering above him - even while still sitting -- and Rodney can’t help shrinking back a little even though he knows that showing weakness might bring him more trouble in these surroundings than he already has. He’s stubborn though -- he invented stubborn when it comes down to it -- and sets his jaw, staring back.
Sometimes that’s all it needs, John told him once, and not everything John said is stupid - he has survived until now after all. And Rodney doesn’t do idiots unless they are blond, willing and he's pretty drunk.
Another unlikely thing.
Arol narrows his eyes at him and Rodney tries his best not to falter as the other man’s lips form into a grin and almost succeeds.
So it’s sandy breadcrumbs for dinner and creepy staring inmates for the rest of the night.
It may prove to Sheppard that Rodney can be every bit the idiotic, self-sacrificing jerk in this relationship that John is, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a shitty situation and that he wishes - selfish as it is - to rather be the one riding to the rescue than being the one needing it.
And if that train of thoughts alone doesn’t prove that his brain is fried beyond repair, man, then he doesn't know what would.
****
The next day is as hot as the previous ones were. They get some water before being pushed to the building site and Rodney more stumbles than actually walks, even with the water, or rather mud since it feels on the tongue almost like too liquid pudding.
Gross, he thinks, but as long as there’s no lemon he swallows it down.
Something however is in it that gives him some of his strength back and calms his blood sugar enough to not make him fall into the pit with the plaster he is meant to stomp around in. It has a makeshift roof over the pit to keep it from drying out and over the day he becomes thankful for that much. Not for long since the smell is murderous and as he climbs in slipping into the soft warm mud to mid thigh, it feels like walking around in something he doesn't want to think about.
And before he can even start to question how to mix that stuff without having a river nearby for the water or why it smells like someone died in it (which is still a good possibility), one of the Guards just pees into the muddy residue not three feet away.
Rodney can’t even form the words to describe how fucking much the place resembles hell (not just because he holds his mouth and nose closed), he hates it so much, so fucking much.
****
He sees it as a heroic achievement that he has not vomited by noon, growing a little numb to the smell but not to the sight of every one in the fucking camp peeing into the pit. But the absolute low point of the day - aside from his blood sugar acting up, walking in a pit full of piss and sand for hours and the merciless sun -- comes around noon as it’s time for another round of liquid mud pudding. The broad shouldered guys who hand it out have truly unspeakable names and scoff at him that he should get the fuck away from them already and make use of the water in his pit instead. That’s annoying enough, but seemingly being built tall and muscled is the best way to guarantee survival, at least when it comes down to fighting for food and water, and he doesn’t make himself popular with holding up the line with his bitching either, which makes the shove that comes from behind him seem inevitable…
“Hey, watch where you’re walking you…”
Rodney has his mouth regretfully working without filter system, now more than usual, and grunts at the tall oaf who pushes him aside before he can think. It’s enough effort to stay upright as it is and he doesn’t need to be pushed around more.
The guy looks down at him. “What…”
“Uhm…” Rodney swallows.
The man has startling grey eyes with which he stares down at Rodney as if they could kill, and there is no doubt he’d be able to do that, too. Perhaps not with his eyes but very well with the plaster encrusted hands the man has.
One of the men dragging the plaster up the ramps Rodney notes.
“Get away you waste of water,” he says disgustedly and shoves Rodney a second time so hard he stumbles and falls into the sand.
The men in line laugh and someone compliments the oaf, who seemingly is named Inmi, for his perfect manners when it comes to standing in line. Rodney would argue now if the world didn't spin around him so madly, or damn, if he had a chance at all against the larger man, but the crack of the whip and the angry yells of the guards just let him get back on his feet and half crawl to the end of the line in a hopeless attempt to avoid more injury to his body.
That’s how his day continues, hot and unbearably smelly. He is amazed his body can hold up, even more so that he actually manages to drag himself into the tent and swallow the handful of crumbs he can manage to snag.
He falls asleep wishing for Sheppard to move it already, knowing fairly well the chances are slim, even missing John's skinny elbows in the far too small beds back at home so much he dreams of bitching about them.
****
He counts the second day, or day four of his capture, and doesn’t even mind everyone pissing into the plaster pit anymore. At least he’s in the shade when the worst of the sun hits and when he avoids the taller men like Inmi in the water line, he can use the smell he has all over for his own advantage.
Still his mind wanders when he looks the monument from his position in the pit, his brain not able to shut up even fried and dehydrated.
There are whispers about it; a tomb for their leaders, a sacred place for the secrets of their ancestors (hey, and doesn’t that sound familiar), a defence system, something like that, but nothing is clear. He stomps his plaster and watches the men pulling the stones up to make it higher and higher as if it would help something, and he just can’t for the life of him figure out what the thing may be good for to begin with.
Whatever it is, it seems to be well planned and the bunch of blond men who hurry about with plans and the guards, although slaves, too, seem important enough to get water when they need it, not just when everyone else gets it.
Asking them, however, when they stop by to do their business is just not the way to go. The one time he tried to ask, since he was just too curious not to, earned him nothing but strange looks from everyone around and the feeling that he might be better off looking down and at his work than anywhere else for a while.
It’s almost time for water again as loud voices draw attention to the ramp and he can't help but look up again.
Rodney can see the accident happen before it takes place, the angle of the levers is just plain wrong and the ropes will never hold that weight without the proper use of the laws of physics. No matter how much the guards might crack their whips at the men pulling the piece of stone.
It becomes a real event as the leader of the guards walks over, yelling commands to move or face the punishment, all the time calling for more men and the lines of the plaster makers around Rodney break up to follow the order.
Rodney moves, too, but the scientist in him just plain revolts at keeping his mouth shut at so such an obviously wrong application of physics. It’s called the laws of physics for a reason he thinks in annoyance; if you try to break them you get a mostly painful punishment for your stupidity.
As the guards order some of the taller slaves to move behind the stone to push it up the ramp, of all insane measures, Rodney snaps and lets go of his piece of rope to march over to the closest guard.
“Okay, listen! That…” He points at the stone. “Is never going to work!”
The guard is actually so surprised that he doesn’t instantly crack his whip or beat Rodney over the head. Some of the men holding the ropes perk up at what he tries to say as well, throwing each other looks that range from curiosity for his next step, up to placing wordless bets on which way the guards may kill him.
“You need to change the point of leverage and need more ropes, and the people down there have to go away!” He waves his hands, plaster crusted over them and tries his best, really, but of course Argar, the chief guard, has no ears for a mere slave.
The next thing Rodney knows is the handle of Argar’s whip colliding hard with the side of his head, sending him spiralling to the ground, and his whip hitting Rodney’s back several times over.
He tries to argue still, but it’s already too late, something rips with a sickening sound and the fibres of the rope unravel within a split second. There’s nothing that could be done before the main rope holding the stone on track rips in two, snapping back so fast it hits a line of workers and two of the guards who happen to stand in its path.
After that, all of hell’s demons break loose.
Literally.
The stone plows through the lines of screaming men and downwards towards the tents; men fling themselves over the side of the ramp and out of the way and the stone just keeps running over those who don’t until it lands hard in a group of men and presses them up against another pile of smaller stones.
It’s entirely quiet for what seems like a very long moment of shock before the first people start running towards the place where the stone has landed. Rodney, fueled by the will to solve the whole mess like it usually is his job, is among them.
Some of the tall men try to shove at the smaller stones, take the pressure off the workers that are caught and pull them out, but the pressure of the large block welcomes every smaller stone lifted aside to push in on the men harder.
Rodney needs a few moments until he understands that they'll never get them men out that way, unless they get a hold of the stone block. He pulls on the arm of the first man in sight to stop the workers from making it worse.
“Get off me!” the man growls at him, and Rodney recalls him as the creepy guy that stared at him in the tent, Arol.
“No, listen!” He moves to hang himself on his arm. “They'll get crushed if you do this! We need to keep the block from moving first!” Rodney yells over the screams of the fallen and voices of the people trying to help.
Arol narrows his eyes for a moment before he nods.
Not that stupid after all, Rodney thinks, and with Arol on his side the throwing of ropes around the stone’s top in the right way to hold it until the men can be dug out goes with a minimum amount of disaster. Most men are holding the block in position while the other group digs out the crushed men fast and pulls them - as far as possible - out of the way before they let go of the block again.
In the end, Rodney stands alongside the other men, watching the wounded and mangled get carried or guided towards their tents. It is not very likely that many of them will survive through the next night with no doctors around or medicine, but Rodney has done what he could to help.
That’s something.
Arol approves of that, too, looking down at him.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Doctor Rodney McKay.”
One corner of the bigger man’s mouth curves upwards, “I’m Arol.”
Rodney nods, terribly reminded of Ronon.
The pain in his back catches up to Rodney as the adrenaline of the day leaves his system. His back is aching like it’s completely in shreds and after a while he becomes so damn tired that he doesn’t have the energy to bitch about it anymore, let alone get the tiniest of handful of crumbs as the guards come with the bread.
He hears Sheppard in his mind as he mocks Rodney for his backaches after being hunched over laptops all day long, almost sees him sit on the corner of his narrow bed when he squints his eyes just right. It’s a hallucination and Rodney knows that there neither is a bed nor a messy haired Colonel but doesn’t care. He had expected the delusions to come earlier. He doesn’t even wonder as he feels hands touch his back and soothe the pain a little, like Sheppard would soothe it when digging his fingers into the petrified muscles that usually annoy McKay at the base of his neck.
“Hold still,” someone grumbles above him and Rodney becomes aware enough again to see that it’s not Sheppard but Arol spreading something surprisingly cool on the wounds.
He follows the command and closes his eyes again, drifting but waiting in vain for sleep to come and claim him. He blearily opens his eyes again a while later and finds Arol still by his side, watching him.
“What...” he mumbles feeling a little better as he moves to lift his head from the sandy ground. “Uh? What did you put on my back?”
Arol doesn’t say anything and just breaks the slice of bread he secured earlier in two to hand one half over to Rodney, eyes dark and unreadable.
“Eat,” he grunts in yet another fair imitation of Ronon.
Rodney hesitates but his low blood sugar wins out against everything else and he takes the dry piece, carefully cradling it in his hand before starting to pick crumbs from it, making it last, he thinks and smiles weakly at the other man.
“Thanks,” he mumbles and Arol just nods his head.
It turns dark above their heads and the guards start the fires. Several of the tents have been destroyed and the stone block still looms in the middle of the camp like a monument to what happened that the afternoon.
A symbol of the uselessness of the entire almost-pyramid building in Rodney’s eyes, and while he rests in the sand on his side, watching blearily how the sky turns from red to pitch black, he can’t help but wonder what the sense of it all may be. He watches people move around the camp, enjoys the relative painlessness of his back and the weight of bread heavy in his empty stomach, contemplating.
On Earth they were landing bases for Goa’uld ships, tombs for the Kings and places to sacrifice to the gods. Here, well, it doesn’t look like any of the above, but it doesn’t look like a classic pyramid either - and a defence system? Okay, but what would that bring?
He turns his head a little, looking another way to find Inmi heading his way.
His arm is swollen, turning purplish black where it’s poking out of the makeshift bandage someone has put on it, and he carries a bundle of cloth in his good hand.
“McKay,” he says, sitting down. “What you did today was brave,” he adds, probably knowing the name from Arol.
Rodney shrugs the shoulder that doesn’t sting so much. “I’d call it stupid, but if you’d like to go with brave.”
Inmi’s laugh comes as a surprise and seems startling loud in the upcoming night. Rodney figures it’s the pretty Sheppard-ish reply that causes it and tries awkwardly to get one arm under his hurting body to push himself into a half sitting position.
“Oh it was stupid, too,” Arol adds. “There is no doubt that the guards will keep an eye on you now that they know you don’t hesitate to open your mouth.”
Just what Rodney needs, he thinks, more attention. “People love me for that,” he says grumpily. “Always have.”
Inmi sets the bundle of cloth down before Rodney and smiles, the look of disapproval from the other day missing completely as he watches him.
“I was wrong about you,” he says and shakes his head before rising to his feet again. “Your water might not be a total waste.”
Rodney wants to explain how much he’s worth exactly, but that seems in a completely different life and so he just nods, says nothing and accepts the cloth. It’s a fresh shirt, supposed to keep what insects there are off the wounds in the night and he curls up into the ditch in the sand on his stomach after putting it on, arms curled around his body to absorb what warmth the sand offers.
Arol is still sitting vigil by the ditch’s side as Rodney wakes the next morning.
So seemingly he got himself adopted by yet another giant.
And that’s not the only change.
The broad shouldered men with the unspeakable names hand him his water wordlessly this time and, opposite to what he expects, he doesn’t end up stomping the plaster while being pissed at either. Well, not that he actually is of much use with the way he can not really move as he is supposed to with his aching back, but he can’t pick his job around here.
It becomes only stranger as one of the blond guys with the papers appears before him and mumbles something about yesterday and orders and that he should follow him up the ramps. They walk all the way up to the top level and Rodney feels almost smug about the way his genius has been acknowledged by Argar until they walk past one of the blonds he has seen before, strung up over the side of a stone block in a position that is not physically possible - at least not while still being alive.
“What happened to him?” he asks, staring up at the bloody and beaten corpse.
The blond guy cringes and avoids looking up. “He was in charge yesterday,” he says and walks on, and after a moment of hesitation Rodney follows.
That explains why Argar put him on this group then; he probably counts on stringing Rodney up the same way pretty soon.
By the time Rodney reaches the top of the pyramid smug has been replaced fully by the cold and heavy feeling in his stomach, that this may not be the relief it promised to be, even although he gets some water and a place to sit down before he collapses now, one mess up and he knows who will bleed for it.
That’s how Rodney ends up sitting in the shadow of a tent on top of a half finished pyramid, hands curling around a cup full of muddy water. He marvels at the sight of nothing but sand and sparkling ripples all around for a very long time while catching his breath and comes to the understanding that perhaps they're just building the thing to build it.
There is nothing as far as he can see, and perhaps it’s just a sign that they were there at one point and nothing else.
“Come into the tent!” one of the pale haired guys says, head poking out from behind the tent opening and Rodney follows before the guard at the side becomes twitchy.
The plans the men are looking over are rough drawings of what their monument is supposed to look like at some point in the future; they lack the fine structure of a normal blueprint and it’s a miracle that the walls are even standing as they do now.
The entire building probably holds only with the help of its own weight and the tons of plaster and sand stomped in between the stone walls. Countless lines show corrections in the plans over several periods of time and he is sure there have been too many senseless deaths like those yesterday to properly count painted into the coal lines as he traces them.
“We will have the next five outer wall blocks delivered by the end of the next lunar circle,” another man says and unfurls a map that, as it turns out, is a lot more interesting than the other ones.
It’s not as crude as the previous papers and looks more like one of the blueprint readouts from back on Atlantis, full of Ancient writing and perfect math in every way. Rodney trails a hand over the symbols, reading energy converter and circuits, feeling a little like touching a little piece of home.
“Are there more blueprints like this?” he asks curiously.
“Yes,” the one who has unfurled the printout says and produces a pile of other maps and blueprints.
Nothing is as old as the Ancient blueprint is, but Rodney can see at which point they turned away from what the original plan was and what they're making of it now. Somewhere along the way someone has taken an Ancient building, probably an old base, and built a stone structure around it. The next generation added another one and the leader after that wanted to make it even bigger.
He can’t tell what kind of base it was, not by the one proper blueprint alone, but perhaps it is still there and that makes him hope, all improbability aside.
“How old is this plan?” he asks and lifts the Ancient blueprint from the piles before him.
“Older than the old kings,” one says. “They have ordered to erect this place.”
“We have been building this monument for many generations since theses days,” another one says. “Do you know the writings?”
“Yeah,” Rodney says, not giving away more.
“That’s great,” another one says, looking exited. “We have tried to do that since a while now, but never managed to really understand them. Perhaps you can help us decipher them finally!”
“We would be able to finish so much fast then,” the first agrees, but Rodney doubts that.
The third pale haired nods his agreement to his companions and wanders out of the tent and to the guard without any hesitation. It’s a matter of a few more minutes before another handful of guards appears to accompany them.
The pyramid entrance is on the side of the monument without the ramp and they climb down a series of stone steps that have been built into the surface and down towards a hole.
Rodney curses his curiosity and sees dots and strange shadows dancing across his vision all the way down, clings to the wall and already imagines how it will be to fall off at one side or the other as he finally reaches the opening and the stairs beyond, too.
The guard, satisfied that they will hardly run from here, stays behind at the opening as they start their descent. It’s becomes colder the further down they climb and while Rodney is as good as blind from the difference in light and temperature the others seem so used to this place that they know the stairs blindly.
By the time they reach the ground level - and Rodney is sure it must in fact be several feet below the actual ground level outside - the temperature is so low in comparison to outside it sends goose bumps over his skin and makes the pain in his back a sharp reminder that he’s still alive.
“This is the tomb of the great ancestors,” one of the men says and steps forward to a door that looks suspiciously familiar.
And Rodney knows why as he crosses the threshold and all lights around turn on. They flicker and show the effort the age old machinery puts into responding to Rodney’s mind, but they are responding and that’s the most important part.
The room is full of stone coffins and most of the consoles are pilled high with trinkets and jewellery that he swipes aside quickly. The pain and the dots become temporarily unimportant as he checks over consoles and keyboards, calls screens awake under his hands and eagerly checks for location, purpose and energy level off the outpost he obviously is in.
“Can you read the texts?”
“Yes, I can,” Rodney says turning to the one standing directly behind him.
“You can’t right? Nobody ever could! That’s why your moronic leaders built your graves here… to be with their ancestors or some shit.”
The man isn’t even taken aback. “I don’t know why we make the monument,” he admits and his eyes sparkle in the light of the screens. “We just build it. We were brought here like many others before and told to complete it for the old kings and the new kings, that’s all. It’s the same for countless generations…”
He reaches out a hand to touch the crystals of one console amazed at the way it responds. “It never did this before.”
“Once it’s initiated everyone can work with it,” Rodney says and waves the man away with a gesture of his hand. “Leave it alone!”
“What does it do?” another man asks.
The shock seems to be over and they all trail their hands over consoles and screens like little children that see something bright and wonderful for the first time.
“Stop that, stop that all of you!” He yells and waves his hands at them to stop before they actually do something they shouldn’t.
And they do, too used to listening to commands to not do it. His minions never did that so easily so he’s actually a little taken aback, blinking for a second.
“Okay, look I have to find out first what this place does, you could blow us all up or something when you hit the wrong button!”
“Could it defend us against the Wraith?” one asks.
Cutting directly to the chase there, well, a good question given that the slave camps sits pretty much on a silver platter come a Wraith attack. It probably is why the people of this world get slaves to man the building site, too. Why waste their own work force on something as insane as a pyramid in the middle of nowhere? He don’t even wants to start with why building a pyramid over a perfectly good outpost to begin with, really.
“Perhaps,” Rodney mumbles and turns back to his screens. “I can’t tell yet,” he adds and types a few strings of commands into the console.
It’s a rundown shielding unit. A big stationary version of what there is on the planet with the kids to cover an entire planet, perhaps an entire system with the number of empty ZPMs sitting in the unit below.
“You’ve got a shielding system here,” he says and calls up the energy readings finding them at less than 4%. “But it’s not good for much anymore…”
Except for sending a signal when he boosts it with the remaining energy and codes it so it calls Atlantis on a frequency the Wraith mostly ignore.
“That’s it!” He snaps his finger at one of the guys and pushes him away from another console.
He ducks under it, ignoring his back for the sake of possible rescue while hunching over and peels the cover off the circuits, handing it wordlessly to one of the men.
“What are you doing?” he asks holding the cover awkwardly.
“Well, the thing doesn't have enough power to form a working shield anymore,” he says, wincing at the sting in his back. “But with a little luck I can rig up a signal and call some of my friends. When they know where I am they’ll come and bring help along!”
“Help?”
“Yeah,” Rodney says and plucks a crystal from its socket. “A ride out of this hell hole…” And back home to messy haired Colonels, the good drugs from the infirmary and his bed.
The promise of someone coming to help does miracles for the camp inhabitants or so Rodney thinks as he and the other men emerge again. The small group of blond men is like exchanged for a bolder set. They lie straight to the faces of the guards, pointing at the arms full of blueprints they have randomly taken on their way out and once on top again the word seems to spread like wildfire.
Rodney don’t knows how the gossip around the camp works or what it will cause with all the desperate inmates, he just hopes it will work the way it should and waits for Zelenka or someone else to figure the signal out before the Wraith do.
“Don’t worry,” Arol says the following night, sharing his bread with Rodney. “You gave them hope, that’s all they need.”
And seemingly it is, because they all seem to hold their heads a little higher as they drag their stones and stomp their plaster. It’s ironic to some degree, how one small promise of a chance to leave this world can change everything.
But it’s not that alone.
It really isn’t. It’s a tiny shift in the entire community, a shift Rodney had caused but that works now all on its own, bubbling just below the surface. Argar must sense it, but the promise of faster progress seems to momentarily blind him to the way the men change around him and his guards, or it’s just ignorance, Rodney doesn’t know.
****
It works for three days until the whole thing goes south.
Rodney takes a short look over the Ancient machinery in the dark heart of the stone wall, two of the blonds standing watch at the top of the stairs and the third by his side as the guards pick up on their little plan.
It was a matter of time for the gossip to reach them too, after all.
The two blonds end up thrown from the side of the monument for their struggles before they can even voice a word of warning and Rodney, bowed over the glowing console is not surprised to find Argar’s men less than gentle as they pull him up roughly and drag him out. The last thing he sees before the sun blinds him again is how they beat the crystals of the consoles to pieces.
The third man puts up a struggle and ends like his companions, screaming as he is thrown over the edge.
Outside, and once down the ramp, Rodney finds Arol to be the second one to suffer. They have dragged him from where he had pulled the large blocks up the ramp before and beaten him up badly.
It’s a spectacle that nobody wants to miss as they drag both along the sandy ground, one guard holding to each of their arms, their knees scraping over the sand and finally drop them down in the quarry where the rest of the guards already wait.
Argar is the kind of man who takes his sweet time cooking up a fitting punishment and this, Rodney is sure as the first whip hits him, gives the guy a really special kind of pleasure.
Rodney bites his lips and thinks of rescue as the whip eats away at the flesh on his back for the first time, but can’t keep in the cries afterwards. And he’s so fucking glad as he blacks out, that he’s actually quite content with the idea of not waking up again, even more so after he does.
Argar takes Rodney down after the beating is over, throwing him into the sand as if he is already dead. It may not be far from the truth with the way Rodney is bleeding and hurting all over, but Rodney is still lucid enough to notice how the crowd doesn’t fall back as the guards crack their whips.
In fact they seem to be more than eager to stay for the rest of the show.
Inmi steps forward spate in hand and his eyes narrowed, Rodney can see that much. His words are blurry for his ears, something about blood, about water and forefathers, something about the sun and freedom. He has heard all of it before in a movie, or thinks he has, as people close in around him.
“You’re no longer controlling us!” is the gist of it, Rodney understands that much.
Argar laughs roughly, whip in hand. “You want to leave, nobody is stopping you, do me a favour and go!” He points out at the ocean of sand around them. “Get out of my sight!”
Inmi grins and straightens his spine.
And perhaps that is the moment in which understanding dawns in Argar’s eyes, in which he, for a change, starts to think instead of yelling, starts to calculate that he has surrounded himself and his guards with a couple of hundred angry slaves that have nothing to lose and finally have seen that much themselves.
The look is funny, very funny.
Rodney would laugh, if his jaw didn't hurt so much, so he settles for resting in the sand and watching as a wave of angry men crash over the guards and swallow them whole.
He wakes two days later in the shadow of a tent, the smiling bruised face of Arol above him and a cup of water close to his lips.
“Your plan worked,” he says. “Drink some more.”
Rodney’s brain is too fuzzy for a moment until he recalls the beacon and the way he had tinkered with it and how Argar’s guards had smashed it to bits in their anger.
He has no clue how Arol can tell it has worked and can’t make his voice work quite right to ask either, but as one of the water guys with the unspeakable names pokes his head into the tent, calling for Arol he starts to understand.
“They’re here!” The boy grins and Arol nods approvingly, leaning over Rodney to hoist the weaker man up by his shoulder.
“Come on, Rodney McKay,” he says. “You might want to see this.”
The sun is setting outside and it doesn’t hurt Rodney’s eyes as much as it should any longer to look up into the sky; it’s still empty, no ships around, but that’s not important. The work has stopped outside and everyone gives him, of all people, a respectful berth as Arol guides him past them.
Inmi welcomes him at the edge of the quarry with a broad smile. “Are they your friends?” he asks.
And Rodney blinks to focus his vision and sees three Jumpers parked in line down by the piles of stones and the plaster pit. Several dozen of the workers surround them and the dozen or so people in grey black uniform who stand around the ships seem a little lost in their middle.
“Yeah,” he grins weakly.
Inmi lifts his good arm, waves at the men below and the lines around the Jumpers break, giving way for the soldiers to move.
The one with the spiky hair and slightly pointy ears is among the first in line, big aviator glasses on his nose, stitches in his brow and gun ready to defend himself or his men. Rodney can vividly imagine the argument with the Doctors until Sheppard was allowed to go. He’s always playing the big soldier, always hands himself over willingly to the bad guys to rescue his people, always plays tough and Rodney can see the worry in the way he walks and holds to his gun like a lifeline because the sides are turned around this time. Rodney has grown stronger over the years but John still thinks of him as the physically weaker one, the one who needs to be protected all the time because he’s just not Teyla or Ronon or him.
“Rodney,” John calls and darts forward as he sees him, running up the path to where Rodney is held up by Arol.
“Sheppard,” Rodney croaks and doubts John hears him as he takes him and sets him carefully on the ground.
He must look horrible with his skin flaking and bruises blooming all over his body, the gashes from the whip on his back and his hair bleached out by the sun, but Sheppard, fucking Prince Charming to the rescue, doesn’t mind.
Rodney’s seen as the weakest link of their team more often than not, but really isn’t anymore.
**
Poll Vote for this story
Author: ladyamarra
Team: Away
Prompt: Weakest link
Pairing(s): McKay/Sheppard
Rating: R
Warnings: Scenes of violence (not graphic)
Summary: “Shut up and walk,” the guard grunts hoarsely and Rodney’s glad he’s bound to the man before him or he would fall and land in the blistering hot sand face first.
Notes: Thanks to ldyanne, tzzzz and quasar273 for the help with the first half, and of course to the wonderful oriolegirl who did last minute beta for the whole piece. Thank you all so much, without you all I'd never finished this in time!
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**
“This is hell.”
Rodney’s skin looks red and puffy in the merciless sunlight, sweat running down his neck gluing his shirt to his skin, plastering his messy hair to his brow and burning in his irritated eyes. He hates the heat, hates the sun, and most of all, hates intolerant, stupid, barbarian backwater hellholes like this one with a passion usually reserved for the most demented members of the human race.
“Hell,” he repeats.
Not that those who surround him would qualify very high on that particular scale anyway.
“I’m dead and gone to hell.”
The bulky slave behind him, bound by his wrists like Rodney is, bumps into him, shoving him forward hard.
“Shut up and walk,” he grunts hoarsely and Rodney’s glad he’s bound to the man before him or he would fall and land in the blistering hot sand face first.
Not a nice fate when he considers the pale bleached human bones they went past an hour or so ago. They lay there in the sun, old leathery skin still stretching over parts of the ribs and the bones of the lower arms still tied together, bound for eternity.
They would probably just cut him out of the line and leave him behind, him and whoever else might fall when he went down because of weakness and thirst. He closes his eyes and follows the pull of the line of men before him, dragging his feet through the sand while licking the salt off his lips in hopes of gathering any kind of moisture.
It’s by no means fair, he thinks, not at all.
It’s a waste of his genius to end in a hell like this, human work force for some crazy building project in the middle of nowhere. If he knows Pegasus people, it’s probably for defence against the Wraith or something equally hopeless. Seriously, as if a wall of large stone would draw more than a weak chuckle from them when they came to cull everyone and bomb the whole bastard planet to hell.
The real hell, not the miserably hot copy they have going.
“Move,” their guard growls above the whine of a hot breeze.
The wind is pressing more of the sand against Rodney’s skin, caking to the sweat on his arms and getting caught in his eyelashes when he blinks the sweat away. He tries to look up and over the heads before him anyway, peering at the monument that rises before him in the blue merciless sky through narrowed eyes. It’s mostly made of blinding white stone and looks a little like a misshapen Pyramid that is missing a large chunk on one side. He can’t see what’s going on at the top or how many people there are on the ramps that circle the monument, just the long lines of workers that are dragging smaller stones from a quarry further away and up the ramps.
“Move already you worthless creatures.”
The guard’s skin is dark and his face worn out and leathery from too many years in the bare sun.
“Move!”
He lets his whip crack above the heads of the first in line and chuckles as if he loves the job, yeah, he’s as cliché as the rest of the whole event. Like one of those 50s movies in which the surreal looking pyramids were painted in the background with bad actors wearing short skirts and hilarious wigs.
Rodney frowns for a moment, wondering how the sun makes him remember that he watched that stuff back in his childhood and how his mother loved costume films. It’s the heat, must be, he decides and shakes his head, figuring that he’s one of the Pharaoh's slaves now.
Their point of destination, a batch of tents in the shadow of the monument, comes closer with every step and it doesn’t look as if there’s more water to go around than in the camp Rodney had spent the last night in, huddled down between 50 or 60 other men who were all sweating like mad although it was bitterly cold in the darkness.
There are men working in plaster pits and men who shape stones higher than themselves into form. Others are pulling these larger stones in teams up on the ramps to get into their predestined slot. They can do basic math, so they're not all that stupid, but with this people’s tendency to pick strangers from planets all over the galaxy like they did Rodney, they probably just captured someone smarter than them and set them to work.
So many people and so much misery in their faces, he can’t see himself surviving for very long amongst them, not the way he is.
“You get some water and then you’ll be put to your work,” the guard announces as they arrive, curling his whip around his fist as he walks past. “If you try to run, don’t believe we'll stop you," he adds and the other guards, all clothed in black, chuckle in amusement.
Rodney looks out over the sand and fights against the sting in his eyes. It looks endless with the heat rippling the air like water in a pond. Even if he ran, where would he go?
The gate is almost two days of walking away. He has no way to tell Atlantis to lower the shield and anyway, without water to take with him, it would be impossible.
Dead man walking.
At least the others are safe, which is worth something he decides. It’s worth everything.
They’ll probably never find him again and he will end as a pile of bleaching bones in hell, but hey, Sheppard is okay. No suicidal stunt from him this time around and no worthless deaths this time around either.
Well, except for his perhaps.
But since his team - or Sheppard in this case - is safe the whole worthless part is… well, worthless to debate about?
Sometimes it’s funny what stupid things people do for each other.
His brain is more than obviously already failing, his blood sugar dwelling on the border of shock and he really doesn't want to know what his chances for skin cancer have elevated to with the amount of exposure to the sun but he will deal, he will.
At least until he dies of either heat stroke, dehydration, his blood sugar or at the whim of one of the friendly guards.
What a cheery prognosis.
The guards undo the chains and ropes the men around Rodney are tied up with, let them go free and vaguely point towards a corner of the camp.
The sun is starting to set already, but nothing of the hellish heat will subside until the night has fully settled on them, he remembers that from the night before. The other guards in the background had let most of the workers move away from the building site already, so it can’t be far out.
“These are the rules, and they are very easy…” The guard is more than amused as he points that out. “Water is only for those who work! Food is only for those who are strong enough to fight for it! If you can’t work you get neither…”
Rodney ignores the rest of the speech. He has a pretty good idea already what it will mean for him as he drags himself towards one of the tents, tired and falling to the sandy ground in one corner to just curl up, collapse and wait for the night.
It’s not that he's giving up on rescue or survival, it’s just that he is a man of math and the realism that comes with numbers, and when he calculates the likelihood of Sheppard riding in within the next few hours like fucking Prince Charming, adds the fact that the last time he saw him John was out cold and bleeding from a gash in his head as an escaping native dragged him through the gate to Atlantis… well, it’s just not very likely to happen.
But speaking of not very likely things…
Rodney playing heroic and pulling the attention to himself to help the others escape, yeah, not so very likely either. But he blames Sheppard and the cold surge of terror he caused with the head wound that bled all over Rodney’s hands. He more or less traded himself in to give the others a chance to escape from the slave hunters as they attacked, fell back and made as much noise as possible while Sheppard went with the villagers, and after that, the slave traders gated off the planet with him before Sheppard had a chance to come back… or wake up for that matter. Seriously, head wounds bleed a lot, Rodney knows from experience, and Sheppard is prone to be pretty dizzy after such things, he can’t expect the rescue to come fast.
And without Rodney to get the addresses out of the DHD it will certainly take even longer for rescue to come than it would otherwise.
The calm of the upcoming night gets rudely interrupted by another one of the guards, throwing something into the tent that lands in the middle of the men and leaves them in startled silence for a moment. It takes a few seconds until they register it is bread and then it’s total chaos.
Everyone throws themselves onto the bread and it’s more or less a fight that only the strongest can win, not Rodney, but that won’t keep him from trying.
“Hey,” he snaps, shoving at the other men with his elbows. “That’s mine you ape, hey, I need it, okay, I’ve got low blood sugar.”
They all grab at the pieces of bread like hungry hyenas until there’s barely more than crumbs left in the sand. Rodney might have had a chance against the weaker ones; he’s not that soft anymore with running for his life and all that, but with the dehydration and his low blood sugar the world spins too much around him to get more than a hand full of sand and crumbs.
And the staring looks of one or the other of the tent inhabitants.
One of them he knows by the name of Arol, chewing on his respectably sized chunk of dry bread while staring at Rodney with a smirk that makes the scientist’s blood boil but run cold as well, just from the height difference alone. He remembers the bulky frame, had walked before him for the entire path from gate to building site. Now he’s almost towering above him - even while still sitting -- and Rodney can’t help shrinking back a little even though he knows that showing weakness might bring him more trouble in these surroundings than he already has. He’s stubborn though -- he invented stubborn when it comes down to it -- and sets his jaw, staring back.
Sometimes that’s all it needs, John told him once, and not everything John said is stupid - he has survived until now after all. And Rodney doesn’t do idiots unless they are blond, willing and he's pretty drunk.
Another unlikely thing.
Arol narrows his eyes at him and Rodney tries his best not to falter as the other man’s lips form into a grin and almost succeeds.
So it’s sandy breadcrumbs for dinner and creepy staring inmates for the rest of the night.
It may prove to Sheppard that Rodney can be every bit the idiotic, self-sacrificing jerk in this relationship that John is, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a shitty situation and that he wishes - selfish as it is - to rather be the one riding to the rescue than being the one needing it.
And if that train of thoughts alone doesn’t prove that his brain is fried beyond repair, man, then he doesn't know what would.
****
The next day is as hot as the previous ones were. They get some water before being pushed to the building site and Rodney more stumbles than actually walks, even with the water, or rather mud since it feels on the tongue almost like too liquid pudding.
Gross, he thinks, but as long as there’s no lemon he swallows it down.
Something however is in it that gives him some of his strength back and calms his blood sugar enough to not make him fall into the pit with the plaster he is meant to stomp around in. It has a makeshift roof over the pit to keep it from drying out and over the day he becomes thankful for that much. Not for long since the smell is murderous and as he climbs in slipping into the soft warm mud to mid thigh, it feels like walking around in something he doesn't want to think about.
And before he can even start to question how to mix that stuff without having a river nearby for the water or why it smells like someone died in it (which is still a good possibility), one of the Guards just pees into the muddy residue not three feet away.
Rodney can’t even form the words to describe how fucking much the place resembles hell (not just because he holds his mouth and nose closed), he hates it so much, so fucking much.
****
He sees it as a heroic achievement that he has not vomited by noon, growing a little numb to the smell but not to the sight of every one in the fucking camp peeing into the pit. But the absolute low point of the day - aside from his blood sugar acting up, walking in a pit full of piss and sand for hours and the merciless sun -- comes around noon as it’s time for another round of liquid mud pudding. The broad shouldered guys who hand it out have truly unspeakable names and scoff at him that he should get the fuck away from them already and make use of the water in his pit instead. That’s annoying enough, but seemingly being built tall and muscled is the best way to guarantee survival, at least when it comes down to fighting for food and water, and he doesn’t make himself popular with holding up the line with his bitching either, which makes the shove that comes from behind him seem inevitable…
“Hey, watch where you’re walking you…”
Rodney has his mouth regretfully working without filter system, now more than usual, and grunts at the tall oaf who pushes him aside before he can think. It’s enough effort to stay upright as it is and he doesn’t need to be pushed around more.
The guy looks down at him. “What…”
“Uhm…” Rodney swallows.
The man has startling grey eyes with which he stares down at Rodney as if they could kill, and there is no doubt he’d be able to do that, too. Perhaps not with his eyes but very well with the plaster encrusted hands the man has.
One of the men dragging the plaster up the ramps Rodney notes.
“Get away you waste of water,” he says disgustedly and shoves Rodney a second time so hard he stumbles and falls into the sand.
The men in line laugh and someone compliments the oaf, who seemingly is named Inmi, for his perfect manners when it comes to standing in line. Rodney would argue now if the world didn't spin around him so madly, or damn, if he had a chance at all against the larger man, but the crack of the whip and the angry yells of the guards just let him get back on his feet and half crawl to the end of the line in a hopeless attempt to avoid more injury to his body.
That’s how his day continues, hot and unbearably smelly. He is amazed his body can hold up, even more so that he actually manages to drag himself into the tent and swallow the handful of crumbs he can manage to snag.
He falls asleep wishing for Sheppard to move it already, knowing fairly well the chances are slim, even missing John's skinny elbows in the far too small beds back at home so much he dreams of bitching about them.
****
He counts the second day, or day four of his capture, and doesn’t even mind everyone pissing into the plaster pit anymore. At least he’s in the shade when the worst of the sun hits and when he avoids the taller men like Inmi in the water line, he can use the smell he has all over for his own advantage.
Still his mind wanders when he looks the monument from his position in the pit, his brain not able to shut up even fried and dehydrated.
There are whispers about it; a tomb for their leaders, a sacred place for the secrets of their ancestors (hey, and doesn’t that sound familiar), a defence system, something like that, but nothing is clear. He stomps his plaster and watches the men pulling the stones up to make it higher and higher as if it would help something, and he just can’t for the life of him figure out what the thing may be good for to begin with.
Whatever it is, it seems to be well planned and the bunch of blond men who hurry about with plans and the guards, although slaves, too, seem important enough to get water when they need it, not just when everyone else gets it.
Asking them, however, when they stop by to do their business is just not the way to go. The one time he tried to ask, since he was just too curious not to, earned him nothing but strange looks from everyone around and the feeling that he might be better off looking down and at his work than anywhere else for a while.
It’s almost time for water again as loud voices draw attention to the ramp and he can't help but look up again.
Rodney can see the accident happen before it takes place, the angle of the levers is just plain wrong and the ropes will never hold that weight without the proper use of the laws of physics. No matter how much the guards might crack their whips at the men pulling the piece of stone.
It becomes a real event as the leader of the guards walks over, yelling commands to move or face the punishment, all the time calling for more men and the lines of the plaster makers around Rodney break up to follow the order.
Rodney moves, too, but the scientist in him just plain revolts at keeping his mouth shut at so such an obviously wrong application of physics. It’s called the laws of physics for a reason he thinks in annoyance; if you try to break them you get a mostly painful punishment for your stupidity.
As the guards order some of the taller slaves to move behind the stone to push it up the ramp, of all insane measures, Rodney snaps and lets go of his piece of rope to march over to the closest guard.
“Okay, listen! That…” He points at the stone. “Is never going to work!”
The guard is actually so surprised that he doesn’t instantly crack his whip or beat Rodney over the head. Some of the men holding the ropes perk up at what he tries to say as well, throwing each other looks that range from curiosity for his next step, up to placing wordless bets on which way the guards may kill him.
“You need to change the point of leverage and need more ropes, and the people down there have to go away!” He waves his hands, plaster crusted over them and tries his best, really, but of course Argar, the chief guard, has no ears for a mere slave.
The next thing Rodney knows is the handle of Argar’s whip colliding hard with the side of his head, sending him spiralling to the ground, and his whip hitting Rodney’s back several times over.
He tries to argue still, but it’s already too late, something rips with a sickening sound and the fibres of the rope unravel within a split second. There’s nothing that could be done before the main rope holding the stone on track rips in two, snapping back so fast it hits a line of workers and two of the guards who happen to stand in its path.
After that, all of hell’s demons break loose.
Literally.
The stone plows through the lines of screaming men and downwards towards the tents; men fling themselves over the side of the ramp and out of the way and the stone just keeps running over those who don’t until it lands hard in a group of men and presses them up against another pile of smaller stones.
It’s entirely quiet for what seems like a very long moment of shock before the first people start running towards the place where the stone has landed. Rodney, fueled by the will to solve the whole mess like it usually is his job, is among them.
Some of the tall men try to shove at the smaller stones, take the pressure off the workers that are caught and pull them out, but the pressure of the large block welcomes every smaller stone lifted aside to push in on the men harder.
Rodney needs a few moments until he understands that they'll never get them men out that way, unless they get a hold of the stone block. He pulls on the arm of the first man in sight to stop the workers from making it worse.
“Get off me!” the man growls at him, and Rodney recalls him as the creepy guy that stared at him in the tent, Arol.
“No, listen!” He moves to hang himself on his arm. “They'll get crushed if you do this! We need to keep the block from moving first!” Rodney yells over the screams of the fallen and voices of the people trying to help.
Arol narrows his eyes for a moment before he nods.
Not that stupid after all, Rodney thinks, and with Arol on his side the throwing of ropes around the stone’s top in the right way to hold it until the men can be dug out goes with a minimum amount of disaster. Most men are holding the block in position while the other group digs out the crushed men fast and pulls them - as far as possible - out of the way before they let go of the block again.
In the end, Rodney stands alongside the other men, watching the wounded and mangled get carried or guided towards their tents. It is not very likely that many of them will survive through the next night with no doctors around or medicine, but Rodney has done what he could to help.
That’s something.
Arol approves of that, too, looking down at him.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Doctor Rodney McKay.”
One corner of the bigger man’s mouth curves upwards, “I’m Arol.”
Rodney nods, terribly reminded of Ronon.
The pain in his back catches up to Rodney as the adrenaline of the day leaves his system. His back is aching like it’s completely in shreds and after a while he becomes so damn tired that he doesn’t have the energy to bitch about it anymore, let alone get the tiniest of handful of crumbs as the guards come with the bread.
He hears Sheppard in his mind as he mocks Rodney for his backaches after being hunched over laptops all day long, almost sees him sit on the corner of his narrow bed when he squints his eyes just right. It’s a hallucination and Rodney knows that there neither is a bed nor a messy haired Colonel but doesn’t care. He had expected the delusions to come earlier. He doesn’t even wonder as he feels hands touch his back and soothe the pain a little, like Sheppard would soothe it when digging his fingers into the petrified muscles that usually annoy McKay at the base of his neck.
“Hold still,” someone grumbles above him and Rodney becomes aware enough again to see that it’s not Sheppard but Arol spreading something surprisingly cool on the wounds.
He follows the command and closes his eyes again, drifting but waiting in vain for sleep to come and claim him. He blearily opens his eyes again a while later and finds Arol still by his side, watching him.
“What...” he mumbles feeling a little better as he moves to lift his head from the sandy ground. “Uh? What did you put on my back?”
Arol doesn’t say anything and just breaks the slice of bread he secured earlier in two to hand one half over to Rodney, eyes dark and unreadable.
“Eat,” he grunts in yet another fair imitation of Ronon.
Rodney hesitates but his low blood sugar wins out against everything else and he takes the dry piece, carefully cradling it in his hand before starting to pick crumbs from it, making it last, he thinks and smiles weakly at the other man.
“Thanks,” he mumbles and Arol just nods his head.
It turns dark above their heads and the guards start the fires. Several of the tents have been destroyed and the stone block still looms in the middle of the camp like a monument to what happened that the afternoon.
A symbol of the uselessness of the entire almost-pyramid building in Rodney’s eyes, and while he rests in the sand on his side, watching blearily how the sky turns from red to pitch black, he can’t help but wonder what the sense of it all may be. He watches people move around the camp, enjoys the relative painlessness of his back and the weight of bread heavy in his empty stomach, contemplating.
On Earth they were landing bases for Goa’uld ships, tombs for the Kings and places to sacrifice to the gods. Here, well, it doesn’t look like any of the above, but it doesn’t look like a classic pyramid either - and a defence system? Okay, but what would that bring?
He turns his head a little, looking another way to find Inmi heading his way.
His arm is swollen, turning purplish black where it’s poking out of the makeshift bandage someone has put on it, and he carries a bundle of cloth in his good hand.
“McKay,” he says, sitting down. “What you did today was brave,” he adds, probably knowing the name from Arol.
Rodney shrugs the shoulder that doesn’t sting so much. “I’d call it stupid, but if you’d like to go with brave.”
Inmi’s laugh comes as a surprise and seems startling loud in the upcoming night. Rodney figures it’s the pretty Sheppard-ish reply that causes it and tries awkwardly to get one arm under his hurting body to push himself into a half sitting position.
“Oh it was stupid, too,” Arol adds. “There is no doubt that the guards will keep an eye on you now that they know you don’t hesitate to open your mouth.”
Just what Rodney needs, he thinks, more attention. “People love me for that,” he says grumpily. “Always have.”
Inmi sets the bundle of cloth down before Rodney and smiles, the look of disapproval from the other day missing completely as he watches him.
“I was wrong about you,” he says and shakes his head before rising to his feet again. “Your water might not be a total waste.”
Rodney wants to explain how much he’s worth exactly, but that seems in a completely different life and so he just nods, says nothing and accepts the cloth. It’s a fresh shirt, supposed to keep what insects there are off the wounds in the night and he curls up into the ditch in the sand on his stomach after putting it on, arms curled around his body to absorb what warmth the sand offers.
Arol is still sitting vigil by the ditch’s side as Rodney wakes the next morning.
So seemingly he got himself adopted by yet another giant.
And that’s not the only change.
The broad shouldered men with the unspeakable names hand him his water wordlessly this time and, opposite to what he expects, he doesn’t end up stomping the plaster while being pissed at either. Well, not that he actually is of much use with the way he can not really move as he is supposed to with his aching back, but he can’t pick his job around here.
It becomes only stranger as one of the blond guys with the papers appears before him and mumbles something about yesterday and orders and that he should follow him up the ramps. They walk all the way up to the top level and Rodney feels almost smug about the way his genius has been acknowledged by Argar until they walk past one of the blonds he has seen before, strung up over the side of a stone block in a position that is not physically possible - at least not while still being alive.
“What happened to him?” he asks, staring up at the bloody and beaten corpse.
The blond guy cringes and avoids looking up. “He was in charge yesterday,” he says and walks on, and after a moment of hesitation Rodney follows.
That explains why Argar put him on this group then; he probably counts on stringing Rodney up the same way pretty soon.
By the time Rodney reaches the top of the pyramid smug has been replaced fully by the cold and heavy feeling in his stomach, that this may not be the relief it promised to be, even although he gets some water and a place to sit down before he collapses now, one mess up and he knows who will bleed for it.
That’s how Rodney ends up sitting in the shadow of a tent on top of a half finished pyramid, hands curling around a cup full of muddy water. He marvels at the sight of nothing but sand and sparkling ripples all around for a very long time while catching his breath and comes to the understanding that perhaps they're just building the thing to build it.
There is nothing as far as he can see, and perhaps it’s just a sign that they were there at one point and nothing else.
“Come into the tent!” one of the pale haired guys says, head poking out from behind the tent opening and Rodney follows before the guard at the side becomes twitchy.
The plans the men are looking over are rough drawings of what their monument is supposed to look like at some point in the future; they lack the fine structure of a normal blueprint and it’s a miracle that the walls are even standing as they do now.
The entire building probably holds only with the help of its own weight and the tons of plaster and sand stomped in between the stone walls. Countless lines show corrections in the plans over several periods of time and he is sure there have been too many senseless deaths like those yesterday to properly count painted into the coal lines as he traces them.
“We will have the next five outer wall blocks delivered by the end of the next lunar circle,” another man says and unfurls a map that, as it turns out, is a lot more interesting than the other ones.
It’s not as crude as the previous papers and looks more like one of the blueprint readouts from back on Atlantis, full of Ancient writing and perfect math in every way. Rodney trails a hand over the symbols, reading energy converter and circuits, feeling a little like touching a little piece of home.
“Are there more blueprints like this?” he asks curiously.
“Yes,” the one who has unfurled the printout says and produces a pile of other maps and blueprints.
Nothing is as old as the Ancient blueprint is, but Rodney can see at which point they turned away from what the original plan was and what they're making of it now. Somewhere along the way someone has taken an Ancient building, probably an old base, and built a stone structure around it. The next generation added another one and the leader after that wanted to make it even bigger.
He can’t tell what kind of base it was, not by the one proper blueprint alone, but perhaps it is still there and that makes him hope, all improbability aside.
“How old is this plan?” he asks and lifts the Ancient blueprint from the piles before him.
“Older than the old kings,” one says. “They have ordered to erect this place.”
“We have been building this monument for many generations since theses days,” another one says. “Do you know the writings?”
“Yeah,” Rodney says, not giving away more.
“That’s great,” another one says, looking exited. “We have tried to do that since a while now, but never managed to really understand them. Perhaps you can help us decipher them finally!”
“We would be able to finish so much fast then,” the first agrees, but Rodney doubts that.
The third pale haired nods his agreement to his companions and wanders out of the tent and to the guard without any hesitation. It’s a matter of a few more minutes before another handful of guards appears to accompany them.
The pyramid entrance is on the side of the monument without the ramp and they climb down a series of stone steps that have been built into the surface and down towards a hole.
Rodney curses his curiosity and sees dots and strange shadows dancing across his vision all the way down, clings to the wall and already imagines how it will be to fall off at one side or the other as he finally reaches the opening and the stairs beyond, too.
The guard, satisfied that they will hardly run from here, stays behind at the opening as they start their descent. It’s becomes colder the further down they climb and while Rodney is as good as blind from the difference in light and temperature the others seem so used to this place that they know the stairs blindly.
By the time they reach the ground level - and Rodney is sure it must in fact be several feet below the actual ground level outside - the temperature is so low in comparison to outside it sends goose bumps over his skin and makes the pain in his back a sharp reminder that he’s still alive.
“This is the tomb of the great ancestors,” one of the men says and steps forward to a door that looks suspiciously familiar.
And Rodney knows why as he crosses the threshold and all lights around turn on. They flicker and show the effort the age old machinery puts into responding to Rodney’s mind, but they are responding and that’s the most important part.
The room is full of stone coffins and most of the consoles are pilled high with trinkets and jewellery that he swipes aside quickly. The pain and the dots become temporarily unimportant as he checks over consoles and keyboards, calls screens awake under his hands and eagerly checks for location, purpose and energy level off the outpost he obviously is in.
“Can you read the texts?”
“Yes, I can,” Rodney says turning to the one standing directly behind him.
“You can’t right? Nobody ever could! That’s why your moronic leaders built your graves here… to be with their ancestors or some shit.”
The man isn’t even taken aback. “I don’t know why we make the monument,” he admits and his eyes sparkle in the light of the screens. “We just build it. We were brought here like many others before and told to complete it for the old kings and the new kings, that’s all. It’s the same for countless generations…”
He reaches out a hand to touch the crystals of one console amazed at the way it responds. “It never did this before.”
“Once it’s initiated everyone can work with it,” Rodney says and waves the man away with a gesture of his hand. “Leave it alone!”
“What does it do?” another man asks.
The shock seems to be over and they all trail their hands over consoles and screens like little children that see something bright and wonderful for the first time.
“Stop that, stop that all of you!” He yells and waves his hands at them to stop before they actually do something they shouldn’t.
And they do, too used to listening to commands to not do it. His minions never did that so easily so he’s actually a little taken aback, blinking for a second.
“Okay, look I have to find out first what this place does, you could blow us all up or something when you hit the wrong button!”
“Could it defend us against the Wraith?” one asks.
Cutting directly to the chase there, well, a good question given that the slave camps sits pretty much on a silver platter come a Wraith attack. It probably is why the people of this world get slaves to man the building site, too. Why waste their own work force on something as insane as a pyramid in the middle of nowhere? He don’t even wants to start with why building a pyramid over a perfectly good outpost to begin with, really.
“Perhaps,” Rodney mumbles and turns back to his screens. “I can’t tell yet,” he adds and types a few strings of commands into the console.
It’s a rundown shielding unit. A big stationary version of what there is on the planet with the kids to cover an entire planet, perhaps an entire system with the number of empty ZPMs sitting in the unit below.
“You’ve got a shielding system here,” he says and calls up the energy readings finding them at less than 4%. “But it’s not good for much anymore…”
Except for sending a signal when he boosts it with the remaining energy and codes it so it calls Atlantis on a frequency the Wraith mostly ignore.
“That’s it!” He snaps his finger at one of the guys and pushes him away from another console.
He ducks under it, ignoring his back for the sake of possible rescue while hunching over and peels the cover off the circuits, handing it wordlessly to one of the men.
“What are you doing?” he asks holding the cover awkwardly.
“Well, the thing doesn't have enough power to form a working shield anymore,” he says, wincing at the sting in his back. “But with a little luck I can rig up a signal and call some of my friends. When they know where I am they’ll come and bring help along!”
“Help?”
“Yeah,” Rodney says and plucks a crystal from its socket. “A ride out of this hell hole…” And back home to messy haired Colonels, the good drugs from the infirmary and his bed.
The promise of someone coming to help does miracles for the camp inhabitants or so Rodney thinks as he and the other men emerge again. The small group of blond men is like exchanged for a bolder set. They lie straight to the faces of the guards, pointing at the arms full of blueprints they have randomly taken on their way out and once on top again the word seems to spread like wildfire.
Rodney don’t knows how the gossip around the camp works or what it will cause with all the desperate inmates, he just hopes it will work the way it should and waits for Zelenka or someone else to figure the signal out before the Wraith do.
“Don’t worry,” Arol says the following night, sharing his bread with Rodney. “You gave them hope, that’s all they need.”
And seemingly it is, because they all seem to hold their heads a little higher as they drag their stones and stomp their plaster. It’s ironic to some degree, how one small promise of a chance to leave this world can change everything.
But it’s not that alone.
It really isn’t. It’s a tiny shift in the entire community, a shift Rodney had caused but that works now all on its own, bubbling just below the surface. Argar must sense it, but the promise of faster progress seems to momentarily blind him to the way the men change around him and his guards, or it’s just ignorance, Rodney doesn’t know.
****
It works for three days until the whole thing goes south.
Rodney takes a short look over the Ancient machinery in the dark heart of the stone wall, two of the blonds standing watch at the top of the stairs and the third by his side as the guards pick up on their little plan.
It was a matter of time for the gossip to reach them too, after all.
The two blonds end up thrown from the side of the monument for their struggles before they can even voice a word of warning and Rodney, bowed over the glowing console is not surprised to find Argar’s men less than gentle as they pull him up roughly and drag him out. The last thing he sees before the sun blinds him again is how they beat the crystals of the consoles to pieces.
The third man puts up a struggle and ends like his companions, screaming as he is thrown over the edge.
Outside, and once down the ramp, Rodney finds Arol to be the second one to suffer. They have dragged him from where he had pulled the large blocks up the ramp before and beaten him up badly.
It’s a spectacle that nobody wants to miss as they drag both along the sandy ground, one guard holding to each of their arms, their knees scraping over the sand and finally drop them down in the quarry where the rest of the guards already wait.
Argar is the kind of man who takes his sweet time cooking up a fitting punishment and this, Rodney is sure as the first whip hits him, gives the guy a really special kind of pleasure.
Rodney bites his lips and thinks of rescue as the whip eats away at the flesh on his back for the first time, but can’t keep in the cries afterwards. And he’s so fucking glad as he blacks out, that he’s actually quite content with the idea of not waking up again, even more so after he does.
Argar takes Rodney down after the beating is over, throwing him into the sand as if he is already dead. It may not be far from the truth with the way Rodney is bleeding and hurting all over, but Rodney is still lucid enough to notice how the crowd doesn’t fall back as the guards crack their whips.
In fact they seem to be more than eager to stay for the rest of the show.
Inmi steps forward spate in hand and his eyes narrowed, Rodney can see that much. His words are blurry for his ears, something about blood, about water and forefathers, something about the sun and freedom. He has heard all of it before in a movie, or thinks he has, as people close in around him.
“You’re no longer controlling us!” is the gist of it, Rodney understands that much.
Argar laughs roughly, whip in hand. “You want to leave, nobody is stopping you, do me a favour and go!” He points out at the ocean of sand around them. “Get out of my sight!”
Inmi grins and straightens his spine.
And perhaps that is the moment in which understanding dawns in Argar’s eyes, in which he, for a change, starts to think instead of yelling, starts to calculate that he has surrounded himself and his guards with a couple of hundred angry slaves that have nothing to lose and finally have seen that much themselves.
The look is funny, very funny.
Rodney would laugh, if his jaw didn't hurt so much, so he settles for resting in the sand and watching as a wave of angry men crash over the guards and swallow them whole.
He wakes two days later in the shadow of a tent, the smiling bruised face of Arol above him and a cup of water close to his lips.
“Your plan worked,” he says. “Drink some more.”
Rodney’s brain is too fuzzy for a moment until he recalls the beacon and the way he had tinkered with it and how Argar’s guards had smashed it to bits in their anger.
He has no clue how Arol can tell it has worked and can’t make his voice work quite right to ask either, but as one of the water guys with the unspeakable names pokes his head into the tent, calling for Arol he starts to understand.
“They’re here!” The boy grins and Arol nods approvingly, leaning over Rodney to hoist the weaker man up by his shoulder.
“Come on, Rodney McKay,” he says. “You might want to see this.”
The sun is setting outside and it doesn’t hurt Rodney’s eyes as much as it should any longer to look up into the sky; it’s still empty, no ships around, but that’s not important. The work has stopped outside and everyone gives him, of all people, a respectful berth as Arol guides him past them.
Inmi welcomes him at the edge of the quarry with a broad smile. “Are they your friends?” he asks.
And Rodney blinks to focus his vision and sees three Jumpers parked in line down by the piles of stones and the plaster pit. Several dozen of the workers surround them and the dozen or so people in grey black uniform who stand around the ships seem a little lost in their middle.
“Yeah,” he grins weakly.
Inmi lifts his good arm, waves at the men below and the lines around the Jumpers break, giving way for the soldiers to move.
The one with the spiky hair and slightly pointy ears is among the first in line, big aviator glasses on his nose, stitches in his brow and gun ready to defend himself or his men. Rodney can vividly imagine the argument with the Doctors until Sheppard was allowed to go. He’s always playing the big soldier, always hands himself over willingly to the bad guys to rescue his people, always plays tough and Rodney can see the worry in the way he walks and holds to his gun like a lifeline because the sides are turned around this time. Rodney has grown stronger over the years but John still thinks of him as the physically weaker one, the one who needs to be protected all the time because he’s just not Teyla or Ronon or him.
“Rodney,” John calls and darts forward as he sees him, running up the path to where Rodney is held up by Arol.
“Sheppard,” Rodney croaks and doubts John hears him as he takes him and sets him carefully on the ground.
He must look horrible with his skin flaking and bruises blooming all over his body, the gashes from the whip on his back and his hair bleached out by the sun, but Sheppard, fucking Prince Charming to the rescue, doesn’t mind.
Rodney’s seen as the weakest link of their team more often than not, but really isn’t anymore.
**
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