Convalescence by Zabbers, Earthside Challenge
Title: Convalescence, by zabbers
Rating: PG?
Sheppard/McKay, mostly Sheppard
~3,900 words
Summary: John tells his story, with scenes from the episodes mentioned below
Spoilers:Hide and Seek, The Storm, The Eye, Grace Under Pressure, Allies
Disclaimer: I love Atlantis, but it's not mine.
“Was that-is that a friend of yours?” the girl asked.
John ran his thumb very gently over the embossing on the little flag. "Rodney,” he said. “The best damn friend I've ever had."
"McKay!" The energy being thing is a roiling sea on the floor of the gateroom, sucking energy out of the naquadah generator who knows how quickly. It is impossible to see whether the MALP has gone through the 'gate or not, only that the energy being hasn’t. John turns to cast a worried glance at his friend and realizes with a start that McKay isn’t at the control console like he expected. The personal shield, John thinks, and he dashes over to the steep stairs, where Rodney McKay, who fainted, fainted when confronted with the idea that he might die, either from starving because he couldn't deactivate the personal shield he'd found in the labs or from being burned by the energy being Jinto had accidentally let out, is walking eyes-open right into the very center of the being, shield sparking green against the massive energies. "Rodney!" someone, Elizabeth yells, and then the darkness goes through the 'gate, and the wormhole shuts down, and McKay is lying on the floor of the gateroom, unconscious.
He looked up at Sara, trying to tell this in a way that a stranger could understand. "Atlantis is an international venture, partly civilian. Rodney...was the head scientist, and we were teammates. My job was to protect him so he could do his. You get close to someone, working with them day in and day out under dangerous circumstances. I was close to everyone on my team."
John runs, it seems he has been running forever, through the empty corridors of Atlantis. He has just killed up to sixty men by activating the forcefield guarding the stargate while a company of Genii soldiers came through, but he is not nearly ready to process that thought yet. He can’t afford to; Elizabeth is dead, but Rodney is still in Kolya’s clutches, and from the sound of what John could make out of Rodney’s outraged bitching, he’s hurt. John can’t really think about that, either. He has to keep moving, he has to disable the generators, he has to take out more of Kolya’s men because crippling the bastard is going to be the only way he can take back the City and keep his friend. Kolya’s words echo in his head: “How's this for credibility? Weir is dead…Stay out of my way. Or McKay will join her.”
Later, when Atlantis is safe, Elizabeth turns out to be alive after all, and John comes down from the long adrenaline high, Rodney shows him the jagged cut on the inside of his elbow, still livid and moist. He tries to play it off as another cool scar to share with the guys, but John remembers the quiver in his voice over the radio, and he can see it in his eyes now; Kolya tortured Rodney, bringing home yet again what a risk it is in Pegasus to be as expert as he is and as important as he is, but, amazingly, it is the fact that he broke that’s bothering him so much. John is appalled at the injury, unspeakably impressed with Rodney, and wishes he could have spared him the pain. But he doesn’t know how to say all this, so what he does, all he can do, is reach out to help when Rodney clumsily tries to re-do his dressing.
“It’s hard to explain. We lived in a very closed community, at first about a hundred of us and then maybe double that. We had very little contact with-” Earth, of course, but he couldn’t say that. And not home, home was Atlantis. “The rest of the world. I can’t tell you the details because a lot of it is classified, but we were all very dependent on one another. A lot of active service can be like that. We worked together, we took R&R together, we lived and died together.” He stared past Sara at the vaguely olive-colored wall, lost in the litany of names, service members and civilians alike, dying in absurdly imaginative ways, millions of light years from their friends and family. The fear of that, that terrible aloneness, was part of why the Expedition, and more importantly, the Team, became family. Families took care of one another, or were supposed to. Having a family on Atlantis meant you could have faith that they would come for you, even when you didn’t believe it…
The ‘jumper is more than two thousand feet underwater, and John is freaking out inside because Zelenka says John’s plan isn’t going to work. Jumper Six has taken on too much water, and the grappling cable won’t take the strain when they try to lift it through to a depth at which they can get McKay and Griffin out with a cutting team and rescue divers. Rodney’s jumper has no power, and both the cockpit and the rear compartment are flooded, and dammit, John won’t let Rodney drown with help so ineffectually close by.
“I'm not coming this far without doing something!” Zelenka’s strongarmed into coming up with an idea, because he’s probably just as smart as Rodney, just unaccustomed to working in the field, and soon they’re touching down next to Jumper Six on a ridge in the godamned ocean, and John is walking across like he’s paying a social visit to the next door neighbors. He doesn’t even know if Rodney’s still alive. John keys his radio and almost combusts when he hears his name in the familiar voice, hysterical and distant and so definitely living. John’s relieved and concerned at the same time, but for Rodney’s sake tries to mask it with an air of casualness, as though he rescues his best friend from under sixty pressures of ocean water every day.
“Hey, buddy! What say you lower your door?” At first, Rodney won’t, and John stands there outside his ‘jumper, trying not to look up. When he does open the door, more water than John can believe will fit in the ‘jumper gushes out to create a shallow layer of ocean at his feet, and Rodney is lying on the floor of the rear compartment, soaked and gasping, a nasty gash dripping blood from his forehead into all the seawater. Griffin’s dead in the long-flooded cockpit, and John shuts out of his mind how that could have been Rodney, how they almost didn’t get there in time or at all, and Rodney’s a brave man under all that whining and healthy concern for his own well being, and it could have gone the other way, Rodney could have pushed Griffin into the rear compartment and sealed the hatch.
“All right,” he says, holding onto his friend’s arm a little too tightly as he and Zelenka help him over to their puddlejumper. “Let's get you home.”
John was a little embarrassed that he was telling all this to a girl he’d just met in a restaurant in some town; she didn’t know him, couldn’t possibly care more than in a concern-for-fellow-man kind of way. Besides, he wasn’t sure if he could explain just what it was that had brought him and Rodney together. “We lost a lot of people, some in the field and some who couldn’t handle it. So those of us who’d been there from the beginning and who stayed…” No, that wasn’t it, exactly. He looked back down at the patch in his hands. He was going about it all wrong, trying to tell her what he could about the Expedition in veiled descriptions and half explanations. Once more, he glanced up at Sara. She looked so tentative, yet so eager to help, to listen. If only he could tell her the whole story. If only he didn’t feel so completely out of place here on Earth. Not that he ever hadn’t felt out of place, not until Atlantis, not until Rodney McKay.
“Let me start over,” he said to the stranger, who probably innocently thought she was making friends with someone whose life was normal. It looked normal, from the things around him. This house, on the wrong beach, overlooking the wrong ocean, made him seem like just another guy spending his vacation somewhere warm and sunny. But there were the injuries-obvious for anyone who wanted to look, outward manifestations of a pain that was festering inside, needing to be told.
“Rodney drove me crazy sometimes. The first thing he ever said to me, before we’d been introduced, was an order. Which might not be so strange if he outranked me, but-not from a civilian.” And then I threw him off a balcony. “And then once I got to know him, I found out that Rodney complained and whined and bitched and insulted everyone within a ten mile radius as soon as he opened his mouth. Because of his great intelligence, he’d berate everyone who couldn’t keep up, and with his terrible social skills, he’d offend the ones that could.” John found himself smiling wistfully at the thought. “But each time we were in danger, he came through. He’d always demonstrate this huge concern for his personal well-being over the costs and inconvenience to others, but when it came down to it, he could pull three-day shifts on stimulants to keep us afloat. He’d hold up the falling sky with his own shoulders if it was the only way to save the day. Though his real specialty would usually be to pull technological solutions out of the mostly-empty bag.
“We baited each other all the time. He stole my pudding cup. I dorkslapped him on the next mission. He called me an air-headed, scrawny-assed idiot savant who shouldn’t be allowed to fly. I gave him twenty pushups at geek bootcamp. He turned off the hot water to my quarters. I told all the women he’d picked up some kind of rash on our last off-base mission. He could be really smug, and I kept him in line. He kept me on my toes. We saved each other’s asses a lot.” He shrugged apologetically at Sara, then went on. “I guess he just bulldozed his way past the walls I’d built over the years, especially after Afghanistan. Which…is a whole other story.” Afghanistan was when he’d learned that ‘leave no man behind’ wasn’t always the popular way to do things, and that it was the only way he could do them, the right way. Atlantis was when he’d found proof that it really was.
He’s flying, but he isn’t happy about it, because there are Wraith Darts on his tail, and the hive ship with Rodney and Ronon on it could go into hyperdrive any second, leaving the Daedalus crippled and unable to follow. He banks up sharply, skimming the shields of the huge ship looming before him, and one of the Darts slams into the side in a bright fireball that barely leaves a dent in the hive ship’s armor. The other Dart follows his F-302, sending rapid-fire shots at his six, and John wishes the gliders, Earth’s space-worthy versions of fighter planes, were more like the puddlejumpers, responding to his every thought with helpful automated tasks like launching a nice drone weapon at his pursuer. As it is, he has to depend on his own piloting skills and the rudimentary flight computer to stay alive, disable the hive ships, and rescue his teammates.
It’s not gonna be enough.
He’s too close to the hive ship for the Wraith to turn their huge guns on him, but he’s dodging fire from the Daedalus as well as from the Dart, and it’s as he tilts the wings of the F-302 to do just that that he has his idea for getting the remaining Dart off his tail. A moment later, he’s free, the Dart lured into the Daedalus’ line of fire. He’s keeping a low profile along the flank of the hive ship as he tries to come up with an idea for how to rescue his friends, heading in the general direction of the hyperdrive engines, when he’s half-blinded by the light of the engines powering up, and it’s too late, too late, he’s not going to be able to save Rodney (loathe as he is to admit it, this is all about Rodney. Ronon was a Runner, he can take care of himself). The Wraith are going to feed on him, suck out every ounce of that giant intelligence, take all the vivacity and humor and strength, and John can’t let that happen. He watched them feed on Sumner, who was practically a stranger, and he’s damned if they’re going to do it to someone he loves, someone who’s part of the close-knit family he now has on Atlantis. It was bad enough a year and a half ago when he’d thought Kolya had killed Elizabeth, and after everything that’s happened, after the deep bond that was forged between them all when Atlantis was under siege, John’s not sure he can stand it now. He has to go after Rodney McKay, wherever the Wraith take him.
So, when the hive ships jump into hyperspace, John’s 302 is right there with them, surfing the wake of their hyperspace tunnel.
“But then there was this one mission.” John could hear the hitch in his voice as he ventured into this other territory. “There was a really bad accident and a whole lotta blood, and I almost died. But he was there, Rodney was there, the whole time, scared shitless, but so damn brave, keeping it together because he had to, for my sake. I was in and out of consciousness the whole time, but every time I was lucid enough to register what was going on, Rodney was there, holding me up so I wouldn’t choke on my own blood, telling me one story after another about his ‘idiot minions’, rubbing my limbs to try to keep me warm. And his hands-constantly in motion, as they always were, but they were all I could focus on at the time. Actually, they were making me a little dizzy. So, before I had a chance to even think about it, I’d reached out and grabbed one of them to hold it still for a second, and we looked at each other, and…”
John grinned. “I think both of our mouths formed those little surprised Os you think only exist in cartoons. And the thing was, by that time, apparently it wasn’t even this big revelation to anyone anymore. Though it certainly was to me. I mean, all of it. I’d always thought it was a possibility for me, but I’d never actually been with another man before.” He hoped fervently that he wasn’t making a mistake, telling her about all this. Who was she, really? Just someone in a diner who’d thought he was cute, and who maybe cared just enough to hear him out even now? For all he knew, she could have a homophobic freak out and go and rat on him, and he could get in a lot of trouble. “We had to be discreet, though, because yeah Atlantis is mostly civilian-run, and yeah all our friends knew about it before we even did, but there were still Marines and airmen everywhere. I guess that’s why all I have are a couple of jacket patches that could’ve belonged to anybody and a few photos in an envelope in the other room.”
John was aware he’d been keeping up a steady monologue for too long, and he hadn’t even begun to talk about what had happened, towards the end. He wasn’t sure he could. And that was what Sara’s question was really about, wasn’t it? What had happened. How had he, John Sheppard, ended up like this, all alone, back on Earth? He shifted in the armchair, sitting back and wrapping his own space around him, trying to find the words.
“A few months ago, I was on a rescue mission to go after a team that had been captured with some vital information. As it turned out, it was a trap. They tried to get information from me.”
And of course it had to be more complicated than that. Because John had gotten sick, too, while in the Wraith camp. The retrovirus that Carson had designed to suppress the Iratus bug DNA in the genomes of Wraith had mutated. The retrovirus could only be transmitted through injection or a high-concentration gas, but the virus that had evolved from it was airborne. It had decimated whole hives soon after it appeared, before the Wraith had developed protocols to keep it from spreading. It had helped that the hives had been divided already by the civil war that had arisen from the race to lay claim to an entirely insufficient food source (and a little nudging on John’s part).
The quarantines had helped to contain the virus, but those Wraith who remained had sought out the ones they saw as at fault for creating the epidemic. Hoping for a cure. Looking for retribution. There was a part of John who didn’t blame them: the virus had been devastating, its effects ghastly on the Wraith who were infected. Luckily for the humans of Pegasus, it wasn’t transmittable across species.
And then John had gotten sick.
He had been infected when a Wraith had tried to feed on him, sometime during his nightmarish captivity. Later, Beckett theorized that it was because of John’s history with the retrovirus.
“So, I ended up needing rescuing myself, and Rodney came after me.” John tried to swallow past the hard knot in his throat, the one that matched the other one in his stomach.
He’s so out of it, what with the interrogations and the beginnings of the Wraith virus working on him, he barely registers that Rodney is there, except for the part where he’s clinging limply to a warm shoulder because Rodney has actually picked him up in his arms, and the part where he is really, really angry at him for putting himself in the path of much danger for a half-baked rescue attempt.
“We got out, just barely, but…”
Somehow, they steal a Dart, which John’s in no condition to fly, but since Rodney can’t, has to. So Rodney situates him in the pilot’s seat and climbs back out, and John swings the Dart around to beam Rodney into the computer, and then they get the hell out of there. John never has the chance to rematerialize Rodney, though, because thirty minutes and a satisfying amount of strafing weapons fire later, he crashes the Dart into the camp in a glorious fireworks show. He rips the computer out of the fiery remains of the Dart and crawls the rest of the way to the Stargate, and the last thing he remembers is dialing home and sending his IDC.
“We both ended up in comas.” John’s voice was rough, even to his own ears, and he was speaking so lowly, he was just barely making any sounds. “I came around a couple of weeks later. He didn’t.”
John wakes up in the Infirmary, and the moment he does, he’s in too much pain to hold in, and Beckett rushes over in response to his groans. Hours of surgery have mostly taken care of all the broken bones and burns and lacerations, but the Wraith virus is in full attack mode now, and Beckett still has no idea what to do about it. But that pain is nothing compared to what he feels when he asks about Rodney and gets an answer he doesn’t want to hear. The sort of engineer’s surgery that Zelenka and the rest of the science team have been doing on the Dart recorder and leftover parts from the last time they needed to jury-rig the Wraith beaming device had taken even longer than Beckett’s work on John, but eventually they had hooked it up to the Stargate and rematerialized the one signature in the buffer. Rodney’s body is fine, but there’s no brain activity. John’s frantic. It’s his fault, he didn’t know which pieces of the Dart equipment were really necessary, he left some vital component in the wreckage. There’s nothing for Beckett or Zelenka to say to that, because for all they know it could be true.
He let his head fall against the chair. “They won’t declare him dead, but he isn’t alive, either. He’s stuck in this, this limbo, and I’m stuck there with him. That’s what this town is. Limbo. See, I don’t have any family except the one I made with the people I’ve been living and working with for the last three years, and I can’t stay with them because I’m useless in the field and dangerous and in danger like this.” He gestured at himself, his wrecked body, but his hands were shaking, and he was afraid he’d drop the flag patch he still had clutched in his fingers. “So the Air Force told me to pick somewhere for them to send me to recover. Only I don’t know that I ever will, not enough that they’ll send me back. And that’s where I need to be.”
Rodney’s breathing is steady, but John knows that that’s the Ancient medical equipment keeping him alive, doing everything for him that his brain can’t. It’s conspicuous in the mechanical precision of it, the perfect rhythm of machine and flesh. John watches his chest rise and fall from his own bed, which he’s convinced the nurses to wheel into Rodney’s part of the Infirmary so John can see him for himself, one last time before the Daedalus comes to take him to Earth, tomorrow. Rodney in a coma doesn’t look anything like Rodney asleep; even in sleep he usually looks like he’s up to something. But now he’s completely at rest, face expressionless, hands, disturbingly, so still.
They’re talking about moving him to one of the stasis pods, like the one they found time-traveled Dr. Weir in, to better preserve him while they work on the problem. Which means the research is going nowhere, and they’re going for the last-ditch hope that they’ll learn something new in the future that will allow them to come back to it. Which means they’ve basically given up hope. Elizabeth insists that that’s not what it means, and Heightmeyer tries to get him to accept it, but what John really wants to do is run out and catch himself a Wraith and make it fix this, make it bring Rodney back. And then he wants to kill it, leave it in a holding cell until it starves to death without any humans to feed on. Because he feels so helpless for not being able to do anything when his geek needs him.
The little Canadian flag swam in John’s vision, and he knew it wasn’t because he was tired. He tried to blink it away, and leaned forward to set the patch gently next to his own flag, but he kept his hand on it. He didn’t look up at his guest. “That was probably more story than you wanted to hear or asked for.” He snorted, wryly. “Can you imagine how much longer it would have been if I’d been able to tell you any of the classified stuff?”
Rating: PG?
Sheppard/McKay, mostly Sheppard
~3,900 words
Summary: John tells his story, with scenes from the episodes mentioned below
Spoilers:Hide and Seek, The Storm, The Eye, Grace Under Pressure, Allies
Disclaimer: I love Atlantis, but it's not mine.
“Was that-is that a friend of yours?” the girl asked.
John ran his thumb very gently over the embossing on the little flag. "Rodney,” he said. “The best damn friend I've ever had."
"McKay!" The energy being thing is a roiling sea on the floor of the gateroom, sucking energy out of the naquadah generator who knows how quickly. It is impossible to see whether the MALP has gone through the 'gate or not, only that the energy being hasn’t. John turns to cast a worried glance at his friend and realizes with a start that McKay isn’t at the control console like he expected. The personal shield, John thinks, and he dashes over to the steep stairs, where Rodney McKay, who fainted, fainted when confronted with the idea that he might die, either from starving because he couldn't deactivate the personal shield he'd found in the labs or from being burned by the energy being Jinto had accidentally let out, is walking eyes-open right into the very center of the being, shield sparking green against the massive energies. "Rodney!" someone, Elizabeth yells, and then the darkness goes through the 'gate, and the wormhole shuts down, and McKay is lying on the floor of the gateroom, unconscious.
He looked up at Sara, trying to tell this in a way that a stranger could understand. "Atlantis is an international venture, partly civilian. Rodney...was the head scientist, and we were teammates. My job was to protect him so he could do his. You get close to someone, working with them day in and day out under dangerous circumstances. I was close to everyone on my team."
John runs, it seems he has been running forever, through the empty corridors of Atlantis. He has just killed up to sixty men by activating the forcefield guarding the stargate while a company of Genii soldiers came through, but he is not nearly ready to process that thought yet. He can’t afford to; Elizabeth is dead, but Rodney is still in Kolya’s clutches, and from the sound of what John could make out of Rodney’s outraged bitching, he’s hurt. John can’t really think about that, either. He has to keep moving, he has to disable the generators, he has to take out more of Kolya’s men because crippling the bastard is going to be the only way he can take back the City and keep his friend. Kolya’s words echo in his head: “How's this for credibility? Weir is dead…Stay out of my way. Or McKay will join her.”
Later, when Atlantis is safe, Elizabeth turns out to be alive after all, and John comes down from the long adrenaline high, Rodney shows him the jagged cut on the inside of his elbow, still livid and moist. He tries to play it off as another cool scar to share with the guys, but John remembers the quiver in his voice over the radio, and he can see it in his eyes now; Kolya tortured Rodney, bringing home yet again what a risk it is in Pegasus to be as expert as he is and as important as he is, but, amazingly, it is the fact that he broke that’s bothering him so much. John is appalled at the injury, unspeakably impressed with Rodney, and wishes he could have spared him the pain. But he doesn’t know how to say all this, so what he does, all he can do, is reach out to help when Rodney clumsily tries to re-do his dressing.
“It’s hard to explain. We lived in a very closed community, at first about a hundred of us and then maybe double that. We had very little contact with-” Earth, of course, but he couldn’t say that. And not home, home was Atlantis. “The rest of the world. I can’t tell you the details because a lot of it is classified, but we were all very dependent on one another. A lot of active service can be like that. We worked together, we took R&R together, we lived and died together.” He stared past Sara at the vaguely olive-colored wall, lost in the litany of names, service members and civilians alike, dying in absurdly imaginative ways, millions of light years from their friends and family. The fear of that, that terrible aloneness, was part of why the Expedition, and more importantly, the Team, became family. Families took care of one another, or were supposed to. Having a family on Atlantis meant you could have faith that they would come for you, even when you didn’t believe it…
The ‘jumper is more than two thousand feet underwater, and John is freaking out inside because Zelenka says John’s plan isn’t going to work. Jumper Six has taken on too much water, and the grappling cable won’t take the strain when they try to lift it through to a depth at which they can get McKay and Griffin out with a cutting team and rescue divers. Rodney’s jumper has no power, and both the cockpit and the rear compartment are flooded, and dammit, John won’t let Rodney drown with help so ineffectually close by.
“I'm not coming this far without doing something!” Zelenka’s strongarmed into coming up with an idea, because he’s probably just as smart as Rodney, just unaccustomed to working in the field, and soon they’re touching down next to Jumper Six on a ridge in the godamned ocean, and John is walking across like he’s paying a social visit to the next door neighbors. He doesn’t even know if Rodney’s still alive. John keys his radio and almost combusts when he hears his name in the familiar voice, hysterical and distant and so definitely living. John’s relieved and concerned at the same time, but for Rodney’s sake tries to mask it with an air of casualness, as though he rescues his best friend from under sixty pressures of ocean water every day.
“Hey, buddy! What say you lower your door?” At first, Rodney won’t, and John stands there outside his ‘jumper, trying not to look up. When he does open the door, more water than John can believe will fit in the ‘jumper gushes out to create a shallow layer of ocean at his feet, and Rodney is lying on the floor of the rear compartment, soaked and gasping, a nasty gash dripping blood from his forehead into all the seawater. Griffin’s dead in the long-flooded cockpit, and John shuts out of his mind how that could have been Rodney, how they almost didn’t get there in time or at all, and Rodney’s a brave man under all that whining and healthy concern for his own well being, and it could have gone the other way, Rodney could have pushed Griffin into the rear compartment and sealed the hatch.
“All right,” he says, holding onto his friend’s arm a little too tightly as he and Zelenka help him over to their puddlejumper. “Let's get you home.”
John was a little embarrassed that he was telling all this to a girl he’d just met in a restaurant in some town; she didn’t know him, couldn’t possibly care more than in a concern-for-fellow-man kind of way. Besides, he wasn’t sure if he could explain just what it was that had brought him and Rodney together. “We lost a lot of people, some in the field and some who couldn’t handle it. So those of us who’d been there from the beginning and who stayed…” No, that wasn’t it, exactly. He looked back down at the patch in his hands. He was going about it all wrong, trying to tell her what he could about the Expedition in veiled descriptions and half explanations. Once more, he glanced up at Sara. She looked so tentative, yet so eager to help, to listen. If only he could tell her the whole story. If only he didn’t feel so completely out of place here on Earth. Not that he ever hadn’t felt out of place, not until Atlantis, not until Rodney McKay.
“Let me start over,” he said to the stranger, who probably innocently thought she was making friends with someone whose life was normal. It looked normal, from the things around him. This house, on the wrong beach, overlooking the wrong ocean, made him seem like just another guy spending his vacation somewhere warm and sunny. But there were the injuries-obvious for anyone who wanted to look, outward manifestations of a pain that was festering inside, needing to be told.
“Rodney drove me crazy sometimes. The first thing he ever said to me, before we’d been introduced, was an order. Which might not be so strange if he outranked me, but-not from a civilian.” And then I threw him off a balcony. “And then once I got to know him, I found out that Rodney complained and whined and bitched and insulted everyone within a ten mile radius as soon as he opened his mouth. Because of his great intelligence, he’d berate everyone who couldn’t keep up, and with his terrible social skills, he’d offend the ones that could.” John found himself smiling wistfully at the thought. “But each time we were in danger, he came through. He’d always demonstrate this huge concern for his personal well-being over the costs and inconvenience to others, but when it came down to it, he could pull three-day shifts on stimulants to keep us afloat. He’d hold up the falling sky with his own shoulders if it was the only way to save the day. Though his real specialty would usually be to pull technological solutions out of the mostly-empty bag.
“We baited each other all the time. He stole my pudding cup. I dorkslapped him on the next mission. He called me an air-headed, scrawny-assed idiot savant who shouldn’t be allowed to fly. I gave him twenty pushups at geek bootcamp. He turned off the hot water to my quarters. I told all the women he’d picked up some kind of rash on our last off-base mission. He could be really smug, and I kept him in line. He kept me on my toes. We saved each other’s asses a lot.” He shrugged apologetically at Sara, then went on. “I guess he just bulldozed his way past the walls I’d built over the years, especially after Afghanistan. Which…is a whole other story.” Afghanistan was when he’d learned that ‘leave no man behind’ wasn’t always the popular way to do things, and that it was the only way he could do them, the right way. Atlantis was when he’d found proof that it really was.
He’s flying, but he isn’t happy about it, because there are Wraith Darts on his tail, and the hive ship with Rodney and Ronon on it could go into hyperdrive any second, leaving the Daedalus crippled and unable to follow. He banks up sharply, skimming the shields of the huge ship looming before him, and one of the Darts slams into the side in a bright fireball that barely leaves a dent in the hive ship’s armor. The other Dart follows his F-302, sending rapid-fire shots at his six, and John wishes the gliders, Earth’s space-worthy versions of fighter planes, were more like the puddlejumpers, responding to his every thought with helpful automated tasks like launching a nice drone weapon at his pursuer. As it is, he has to depend on his own piloting skills and the rudimentary flight computer to stay alive, disable the hive ships, and rescue his teammates.
It’s not gonna be enough.
He’s too close to the hive ship for the Wraith to turn their huge guns on him, but he’s dodging fire from the Daedalus as well as from the Dart, and it’s as he tilts the wings of the F-302 to do just that that he has his idea for getting the remaining Dart off his tail. A moment later, he’s free, the Dart lured into the Daedalus’ line of fire. He’s keeping a low profile along the flank of the hive ship as he tries to come up with an idea for how to rescue his friends, heading in the general direction of the hyperdrive engines, when he’s half-blinded by the light of the engines powering up, and it’s too late, too late, he’s not going to be able to save Rodney (loathe as he is to admit it, this is all about Rodney. Ronon was a Runner, he can take care of himself). The Wraith are going to feed on him, suck out every ounce of that giant intelligence, take all the vivacity and humor and strength, and John can’t let that happen. He watched them feed on Sumner, who was practically a stranger, and he’s damned if they’re going to do it to someone he loves, someone who’s part of the close-knit family he now has on Atlantis. It was bad enough a year and a half ago when he’d thought Kolya had killed Elizabeth, and after everything that’s happened, after the deep bond that was forged between them all when Atlantis was under siege, John’s not sure he can stand it now. He has to go after Rodney McKay, wherever the Wraith take him.
So, when the hive ships jump into hyperspace, John’s 302 is right there with them, surfing the wake of their hyperspace tunnel.
“But then there was this one mission.” John could hear the hitch in his voice as he ventured into this other territory. “There was a really bad accident and a whole lotta blood, and I almost died. But he was there, Rodney was there, the whole time, scared shitless, but so damn brave, keeping it together because he had to, for my sake. I was in and out of consciousness the whole time, but every time I was lucid enough to register what was going on, Rodney was there, holding me up so I wouldn’t choke on my own blood, telling me one story after another about his ‘idiot minions’, rubbing my limbs to try to keep me warm. And his hands-constantly in motion, as they always were, but they were all I could focus on at the time. Actually, they were making me a little dizzy. So, before I had a chance to even think about it, I’d reached out and grabbed one of them to hold it still for a second, and we looked at each other, and…”
John grinned. “I think both of our mouths formed those little surprised Os you think only exist in cartoons. And the thing was, by that time, apparently it wasn’t even this big revelation to anyone anymore. Though it certainly was to me. I mean, all of it. I’d always thought it was a possibility for me, but I’d never actually been with another man before.” He hoped fervently that he wasn’t making a mistake, telling her about all this. Who was she, really? Just someone in a diner who’d thought he was cute, and who maybe cared just enough to hear him out even now? For all he knew, she could have a homophobic freak out and go and rat on him, and he could get in a lot of trouble. “We had to be discreet, though, because yeah Atlantis is mostly civilian-run, and yeah all our friends knew about it before we even did, but there were still Marines and airmen everywhere. I guess that’s why all I have are a couple of jacket patches that could’ve belonged to anybody and a few photos in an envelope in the other room.”
John was aware he’d been keeping up a steady monologue for too long, and he hadn’t even begun to talk about what had happened, towards the end. He wasn’t sure he could. And that was what Sara’s question was really about, wasn’t it? What had happened. How had he, John Sheppard, ended up like this, all alone, back on Earth? He shifted in the armchair, sitting back and wrapping his own space around him, trying to find the words.
“A few months ago, I was on a rescue mission to go after a team that had been captured with some vital information. As it turned out, it was a trap. They tried to get information from me.”
And of course it had to be more complicated than that. Because John had gotten sick, too, while in the Wraith camp. The retrovirus that Carson had designed to suppress the Iratus bug DNA in the genomes of Wraith had mutated. The retrovirus could only be transmitted through injection or a high-concentration gas, but the virus that had evolved from it was airborne. It had decimated whole hives soon after it appeared, before the Wraith had developed protocols to keep it from spreading. It had helped that the hives had been divided already by the civil war that had arisen from the race to lay claim to an entirely insufficient food source (and a little nudging on John’s part).
The quarantines had helped to contain the virus, but those Wraith who remained had sought out the ones they saw as at fault for creating the epidemic. Hoping for a cure. Looking for retribution. There was a part of John who didn’t blame them: the virus had been devastating, its effects ghastly on the Wraith who were infected. Luckily for the humans of Pegasus, it wasn’t transmittable across species.
And then John had gotten sick.
He had been infected when a Wraith had tried to feed on him, sometime during his nightmarish captivity. Later, Beckett theorized that it was because of John’s history with the retrovirus.
“So, I ended up needing rescuing myself, and Rodney came after me.” John tried to swallow past the hard knot in his throat, the one that matched the other one in his stomach.
He’s so out of it, what with the interrogations and the beginnings of the Wraith virus working on him, he barely registers that Rodney is there, except for the part where he’s clinging limply to a warm shoulder because Rodney has actually picked him up in his arms, and the part where he is really, really angry at him for putting himself in the path of much danger for a half-baked rescue attempt.
“We got out, just barely, but…”
Somehow, they steal a Dart, which John’s in no condition to fly, but since Rodney can’t, has to. So Rodney situates him in the pilot’s seat and climbs back out, and John swings the Dart around to beam Rodney into the computer, and then they get the hell out of there. John never has the chance to rematerialize Rodney, though, because thirty minutes and a satisfying amount of strafing weapons fire later, he crashes the Dart into the camp in a glorious fireworks show. He rips the computer out of the fiery remains of the Dart and crawls the rest of the way to the Stargate, and the last thing he remembers is dialing home and sending his IDC.
“We both ended up in comas.” John’s voice was rough, even to his own ears, and he was speaking so lowly, he was just barely making any sounds. “I came around a couple of weeks later. He didn’t.”
John wakes up in the Infirmary, and the moment he does, he’s in too much pain to hold in, and Beckett rushes over in response to his groans. Hours of surgery have mostly taken care of all the broken bones and burns and lacerations, but the Wraith virus is in full attack mode now, and Beckett still has no idea what to do about it. But that pain is nothing compared to what he feels when he asks about Rodney and gets an answer he doesn’t want to hear. The sort of engineer’s surgery that Zelenka and the rest of the science team have been doing on the Dart recorder and leftover parts from the last time they needed to jury-rig the Wraith beaming device had taken even longer than Beckett’s work on John, but eventually they had hooked it up to the Stargate and rematerialized the one signature in the buffer. Rodney’s body is fine, but there’s no brain activity. John’s frantic. It’s his fault, he didn’t know which pieces of the Dart equipment were really necessary, he left some vital component in the wreckage. There’s nothing for Beckett or Zelenka to say to that, because for all they know it could be true.
He let his head fall against the chair. “They won’t declare him dead, but he isn’t alive, either. He’s stuck in this, this limbo, and I’m stuck there with him. That’s what this town is. Limbo. See, I don’t have any family except the one I made with the people I’ve been living and working with for the last three years, and I can’t stay with them because I’m useless in the field and dangerous and in danger like this.” He gestured at himself, his wrecked body, but his hands were shaking, and he was afraid he’d drop the flag patch he still had clutched in his fingers. “So the Air Force told me to pick somewhere for them to send me to recover. Only I don’t know that I ever will, not enough that they’ll send me back. And that’s where I need to be.”
Rodney’s breathing is steady, but John knows that that’s the Ancient medical equipment keeping him alive, doing everything for him that his brain can’t. It’s conspicuous in the mechanical precision of it, the perfect rhythm of machine and flesh. John watches his chest rise and fall from his own bed, which he’s convinced the nurses to wheel into Rodney’s part of the Infirmary so John can see him for himself, one last time before the Daedalus comes to take him to Earth, tomorrow. Rodney in a coma doesn’t look anything like Rodney asleep; even in sleep he usually looks like he’s up to something. But now he’s completely at rest, face expressionless, hands, disturbingly, so still.
They’re talking about moving him to one of the stasis pods, like the one they found time-traveled Dr. Weir in, to better preserve him while they work on the problem. Which means the research is going nowhere, and they’re going for the last-ditch hope that they’ll learn something new in the future that will allow them to come back to it. Which means they’ve basically given up hope. Elizabeth insists that that’s not what it means, and Heightmeyer tries to get him to accept it, but what John really wants to do is run out and catch himself a Wraith and make it fix this, make it bring Rodney back. And then he wants to kill it, leave it in a holding cell until it starves to death without any humans to feed on. Because he feels so helpless for not being able to do anything when his geek needs him.
The little Canadian flag swam in John’s vision, and he knew it wasn’t because he was tired. He tried to blink it away, and leaned forward to set the patch gently next to his own flag, but he kept his hand on it. He didn’t look up at his guest. “That was probably more story than you wanted to hear or asked for.” He snorted, wryly. “Can you imagine how much longer it would have been if I’d been able to tell you any of the classified stuff?”