New Fic: The Room, by kuonji (G) [Halloween challenge]
Title: The Room
Author: kuonji
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, (cameos by Carson Beckett and Elizabeth Weir)
Rating: G
Spoilers: very vague for Sanctuary, Letters From Pegasus, Siege III, Aurora, and the movie Sixth Sense
Summary: He heard the voice a split-second before the world fuzzed out and back in on the dimmed room. The woman was there again, arms reaching out for him. The right side of her face was melted away, and her right shoulder was jagged bone with tatters of intermixed flesh and cloth.
A/N: This was literally inspired by a dream. Not a nightmare, but it freaked me the heck out, so I thought I share. :D
A/N: Unbetaed but complete!
The Room
by kuonji
John woke up standing, which was strange enough in itself. He wasn't the sort of person who sprang to his feet at the first sign of danger. He was more the sort to regain consciousness without any sign of doing so. He'd like to say that he had trained himself that way for stealth operations and such, but the actual truth was, he just didn't like to cause a fuss.
Plus, eavesdropping was a secret enjoyment of his.
What was stranger than waking up upright was that he was not in his own bedroom. Nor was he in any bedroom, as far as he could tell. It was a dusky off-white chamber, no more than about ten feet square, with a metal rack to the side stacked with what looked like Ancient machinery. Looking around, he saw no way in or out of the room.
"Cool," he said.
John figured if bad aliens had beamed him out, they wouldn't have put him in a storage closet, much less one with equipment he might use to break free with. And if he'd been sleepwalking (which he didn't do, ever) it'd have been a sight getting himself in here. So this was, obviously, a lucid dream.
He'd always wanted to have one of those.
Just to experiment, he stepped toward the shelf, to see what kinds of things his subconscious had put in here for him to play with. He was hoping for a gun like Ronon's (manly pride prevented him from being jealous), or maybe a reality remote control -- like that thing in the movie with what's-his-face.
His body refused to move forward with his foot, and when he yanked his foot back to rebalance himself, he kicked something soft with his heel.
"What the--?" He windmilled his arms, but his left hand hit something soft and his right hand hit something hard, and when he finally swung himself around to see what the hell was behind him, he felt a sickening lurch and some giant, invisible, unforgiving thing slammed into him full-on.
A wall, he realized, shaking himself out of his daze. Cloaked or something, because all he could see was air between himself and the three or four feet to the blank wall behind where he had 'woken up'.
He started to get worried.
"I don't think we're in Kansas anymore," he muttered. He'd injured himself in his dreams before, even died a few times and seen some wacky versions of the Sheppard Afterlife, but it'd never hurt like this before.
"John..."
John whirled around at the feminine voice, expecting Teyla, or a persuasive native, or maybe a nice glowy Ancient here to explain to him what was going on.
What reached out for him was an iridescent woman, about in her late forties, wearing a white and green uniform, who could have been pretty if she were maybe ten years younger -- and if she weren't missing half her charred and bleeding face.
***
"I don't think you have anything to worry about."
John scowled at the well-meaning doctor, staring obstinately into Carson's brain-reading lightscope thing-a-ma-jig. "It wasn't a dream," he said again. But even he was losing his conviction on that point.
Carson turned off the light on his instrument and frowned down at it in the esoteric way that all doctors had. "Normal..." he muttered. Then, louder: "I honestly don't have anything else for you, Colonel. All your readings are perfectly fine from a physician's standpoint. Now, I've advised Elizabeth for you to be off-duty today, just in case, and a bit of bed rest never hurt anyone. If this is still troubling you, I would recommend you speak to Dr. Heightmeyer about it."
"I'm not hallucinating," John growled. "I felt actual pain there; it wasn't just some figment of my imagination."
Carson looked meaningfully at John's bruised hand, where he had evidently hit his dresser, just before rolling out of bed and taking a nosedive to the floor.
John sighed.
He'd wanted a lucid dream, right?
"Thanks, doc."
***
"John..."
He heard the voice a split-second before the world fuzzed out and back in on the dimmed room. The woman was there again, arms reaching out for him. The right side of her face was melted away, and her right shoulder was jagged bone with tatters of intermixed flesh and cloth.
John had seen enough horror movies to know what would happen if a zombie -- even an Ancient zombie -- got a hold of him.
"Get away from me!" he growled loudly and slightly more high-pitched than usual (John didn't scream, ever, either). He tried to back away, flailing as he met with resistance once again. The woman took a step towards him.
Okay. Think about this. Enemy approaching straight-on, obstruction to the rear, what does one do?
"Side," John muttered to himself, as he ducked and dove to the right.
He didn't move.
"Crap!"
There wasn't any purchase under his feet. The floor he was standing on was illusion!
"John..."
Panicking (John did panic sometimes, just a little), he reached for his sidearm -- and encountered a ragged, soft resistance. Another zombie!
John whirled on this new threat, but couldn't see anything but air between himself and the far wall. Something unseeable squeezed at his chest and knees, pushing against him, and he couldn't breathe. It felt like something was smothering his face, pressing up his nose, strangling him...!
Wait.
John turned his head to the side, and breathing became clear again. He raised one hand and felt the air beside his ear.
Soft. Warm. Cloth. The soft resistance he'd felt before, but with more give. It felt exactly like... his pillow?
"Jesus." He was still in bed, for crying out loud. "Okay. This is a dream. Wake up. Just, wake up," he told himself.
"John..."
John turned (rolled) around and discovered the woman was no more than two feet in front of him. The dim room behind her was a real as ever. Her one remaining eyeball stared soulfully out at him, and he could see the blackened edges of her scalp where her skin was fused to the remains of her skull.
"Jesus!" he said again, this time with more feeling. He felt franticly behind him, found his pillow, dragged it out (up?), and flung it at the woman. Predictably, the invisible object didn't have any impact. Where the hell was his sidearm?
"John..." the moaning voice continued, and she reached out -- and something struck his feet.
Moving on pure instinct, John rolled to the side. He felt the edge of his bed pass under him as he bumped over it, and he held out his arms to try to break his fall. Of course, he landed on his back, momentarily knocking the breath out of him.
The woman paused, perhaps daunted by his sudden shift backwards, then continued toward him. The woman moved slowly and with a limp, he saw, but that didn't count for much. He hadn't bought more than a few feet of space between them.
"You're in your room," John told himself sternly. "Wake up, goddammit!"
He didn't wake, but he realized suddenly that if he were really in his room he was hardly immobile. With a wrench, he sat up.
And the world tilted dangerously.
There was nothing but a semi-metallic floor in front of him. Looking down, he saw that he was seated on thin air. Looking up, he saw the woman, closer than ever. But she had stopped, and she looked as confused as a zombie could look.
Taking this scant opportunity, John slid forward -- sideways, down, whatever! -- and flipped himself onto his hands and knees, not trusting his equilibrium to walking at right angles to gravity.
"John...!" The zombie seemed to be getting more desperate. Well, so was he!
He crawled forward, toward the questionable solidity of the floor of his cracked-up dream world, but his head crashed into something solid before he reached it. Cursing, he felt ahead of him -- metal, wheels, rectangular face... his dresser! He was trapped.
Looking over his shoulder, he saw that the woman was still watching his seemingly gravity-defying moves. He was sure she wouldn't be stunned for long, though.
Think, John, think!
He could feel the real floor of what he presumed was his room underneath him, even though visual input told him he was floating about four feet above the wall. The zombie, however, was walking on the floor, and nothing he could touch in the real world could hurt her. Logical conclusion: He had to defend himself with something from this dream world, which meant he had to find some way over to the rack of equipment and see what he could use there.
Squeezing his eyes shut, John tried to picture his surroundings. He had to map the layout of his room to the layout of this one, because apparently he could only go wherever the two of them overlapped.
Cold fingers brushed his ankles.
John yelped and pushed himself to his feet without thought. He leapt to the side, his room solid in his mind. Two more yards to the wall, before he would be trapped again. Then only one. John turned, his back to what should be his Johnny Cash poster, and opened his eyes.
He was back.
***
"John, you look terrible."
John jumped at the female voice, feeling ridiculous when Elizabeth widened her green eyes in surprise. He didn't have the energy to apologize verbally, so he just waved one hand in a vaguely off-putting manner.
"That means that he's sorry for being an ass, Elizabeth, but his masculine image was damaged this morning when he fell out of bed from a nightmare."
John glared at McKay, wishing he hadn't told the bastard anything.
"Sounds exciting," Elizabeth said diplomatically. "What were you dreaming about?"
"Oh, the usual, glowy Ancient women after him."
"Yeah, except for the part where she was half-dead and probably wanted to eat my brains or something." Somehow, John's explanation didn't seem to make it sound any less ridiculous. It was difficult to describe the full freakiness of the... vision. (It couldn't just be a dream, dammit.)
Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. "Is that why you're off duty today?"
John watched as she stabbed a miniature tuber with a fork. It made him think of boiled eyeballs. He put his face in his hands.
***
"Oh, but my favorite part must be where you hit yourself with your own pillow and jumped a mile. There's some things that are just priceless in the history of..."
John grit his teeth, trying to out-distance McKay without seeming to be running away. He couldn't exactly fault McKay for egging him about this, since it was, after all, just what they did on a normal basis. But John wasn't usually this on edge, and also, he was sure he was never quite such an ass about it.
"John..."
Oh, F-ing Hell.
The world fuzzed back in, and John was standing where he had started out the first two times, in the middle of the room with the rack of equipment to his right side. The woman faded into view at the far wall and like any good B-movie antagonist, she started stumbling toward him with arms outstretched.
So, definitely not a dream.
This time, John was fully awake, and he was more angry than freaked out. He was starting to get pretty tired of this. He put out his right hand and verified that he could still feel the hallway under his hand, even though all he could see beneath his fingers was thin air.
He couldn't think what he had done last time to get out of it. Any mental effort on his part still didn't have any effect. Maybe it was just a time issue; she tried to spook him for, say, two minutes, and then the vision cut out by itself.
Now he just had to figure out how to hold her off.
There was no way for him to get to the rack of equipment this time, with the real life wall in the way, so he'd just have to play cat-and-mouse.
John shuddered, remembering the bone-cold touch from before. He was absolutely alone in the dim lighting, with the grim spectre implacably reaching for him. He felt cold sweat slide down his back.
"John..."
"Dammit, what the hell do you want?" John said, taking a nervous step backwards. Lead her forward, then double back, avoid the corners, he strategized franticly. But the room was so small, further constricted by the size of the hallway he'd been walking down, that it'd be almost impossible to get past her.
Suddenly, something gripped his shoulders, invisible skeleton fingers clinging and digging into his flesh. The force shook him, rattling, then he felt something sting him across the face. He raised his arms, trying to fend it off, but it came again and he cried out in frustration and real fear. What was happening to him?!
He stumbled backwards under the onslaught, barely aware, until he was against the wall of the room, and then he took yet another step -- and he stepped through a gray threshold and he was out.
"--nel! Sheppard!"
Blinking in the bright lights, John lowered his arms and saw Rodney in front of him, one hand raised as if to slap him again. The normally snide and arrogant scientist was wide-eyed, pupils dilated. He looked more than a little freaked out himself. The hand that was still on John's shoulder spasmed once before releasing.
John did something he never imagined he would do. He seized McKay by the lapels, dragging him in, and said, desperate,
"McKay, you have to help me!"
***
"Have you ever thought, maybe she just wants your help."
"Huh?" John looked up from where he was twiddling with the AC adapter for something or other. He was fidgety, wondering when he'd next be dumped back into the The Room.
"You know, like in Sixth Sense. The kid was all freaking out, when really all he had to do was help them out and they'd go away."
John frowned. "I thought you didn't see that movie."
McKay looked confused, but John cut him off with an extra-sarcastic, "So I should help out the nice zombie lady, and she'll float away in gratefulness?" McKay, thankfully, snorted and crossed his arms.
"I'm not saying fiction is at all a good guide to real life, but they just might have their merits when we're faced with the unexplainable."
John didn't think McKay would really mind John having seen his last desperate video, but John wasn't up to talking about cleaning out Ford's room.
"Unexplainable like... time travel?" This time, it wasn't just a distraction. It was always great to sit back and watch McKay puff up.
"No, not like time travel. Like ghosts. And, I don't know, child psychology."
"According to the movies, though, I should also take a chainsaw to her." McKay got red in the face, and John felt almost normal again.
He held up one hand before McKay would kick him out of his room, and John would have to suffer his next 'attack' alone again and in public. "Okay, so let's say I try to help her. What do you think she wants? She won't say anything other than my name."
"Have you asked?"
"Huh?"
"Have you tried to communicate intelligently with her. Or was it just, eek! get away! I'm scared! Where's my gun!"
John shot him a dirty look but answered the admittedly valid question. "No."
"Well, there you go."
John doubted it was that easy, but before he could make further comment, the world fuzzed out again. "Oh, perfect."
The room looked as before, and like a reset amusement park ride, the zombie woman reappeared and came toward him. Nerving himself not to run, John addressed her directly.
"Look, ma'am. Uh. I don't want to be here, and you're probably not real happy yourself. How about you tell me what's wrong, and I'll see what I can do to help."
The woman paused, actually seeming to listen to him. She gestured unintelligibly, then said a few words that John didn't understand. "John..." she said, seeming to sigh. She came toward him again.
"Whoa!" John had been somewhat encouraged by how she had kept her distance while trying to talk to him. He wasn't keen on making a close encounter of the third kind.
According to the last experience, he could get out of the vision by walking out of its walls. There was just one problem. He could feel the chair he'd been sitting on, even though in the vision he was standing, and he wasn't sure what would happen if he stood up.
"Um, can I go and consult with my friend?" he attempted. The woman, ignoring him, continued to advance. The trails of her right sleeve blew away with the motion, showing seared flesh, red with still-oozing burns.
A yard away, John lost his cool and rolled to the side. His knees hit Rodney's bed, and his vision tilted crazily before he squeezed his eyes shut, tumbling blindly over the bed to the floor on the other side. He squinted his eyes open, expecting to see the woman's feet still shuffling toward him, and heaved a sigh when he found only McKay peering down at him with an anxious expression.
"This... is not working," John told him.
***
"Oh my god, we're idiots."
John grunted as he paced the length of Rodney's room, not much up to conversation. His nerves hadn't been this shot since... never. Even in Afghanistan he had had some sort of control over the situation. He was spinning out of it now.
"Listen, you said you saw what looked like Ancient equipment, right?"
John grunted again, but McKay didn't really need acknowledgement when he was on a spiel.
"And the room you described, it sounds just like something the Ancients built. Even the quote-unquote 'ghost', she was wearing a uniform. Like, like a military uniform? Like the uniforms we saw on the Aurora?"
John blinked. "Now that you mention it... yeah."
"See, that's it!" McKay leaped for his desk, firing up his laptop, brow already furrowed in concentration.
John was bewildered. "What's it? Rodney!"
"Hm? Oh, yeah, see, this is the thing. The Ancients and the Wraith were at war for, what, decades? centuries? There had to have been some casualties on their side, or even just, you know, accidents. Atlantis is basically a giant flying warship. That's obviously why we have the shields and the chair and the puddlejumpers."
John nodded along in agreement. "Okay."
"So, don't you get it? That room you're seeing, that woman you're seeing, they might be in Atlantis."
"What, so there's a rotting corpse somewhere that's looking for me?"
McKay rolled his eyes in the surrounded-by-idiots manner John was used to. "She's not looking for you. You're looking for her. At least, that's what she wants."
John pursed his lips, considering. "Then why didn't she just say so?"
"You said you couldn't understand her."
"Well, yeah..."
"She must have been speaking Ancient."
"But--"
"But we can understand Chaya, etc. Yes. But this was over ten thousand years ago. The language may have evolved. Plus, she may have been just some janitor, or weapons tech."
John decided not to comment on the difference between people who cleaned floors and people who calibrated sensitive combustible machinery.
"Ascended or half-ascended, hell, even on-their-way-to-ascended Ancients can probably make themselves understood, but there has to be some shallow-on-the-gene-pool menial laborers on board. She had burn marks, right? It didn't have to be offensive explosives that killed her. Maybe a kitchen fire, anything could have caused that."
John doubted that. The wounds had been pretty severe. But McKay was making sense.
"So we find the room she was at, get her properly buried or something, and she'll be happy, right?"
"That's the theory."
John nodded, relieved to have a path of action. "Let's do it."
***
Half an hour later, he was less enthused. "How hard is it to find one room?" he exclaimed.
"Oh, only about as hard as finding one particular room in all of Manhattan, from just knowing what it looks like on the inside," McKay groused back.
"We don't--" John cut off as the world changed around him again. This was becoming uncomfortably familiar.
The dim room came back, and the ghost limped forward once more. John sighed. He closed his eyes, envisioning his position in McKay's room in his head. He'd been standing with McKay's desk in front of him, and the wall to his left. That meant he simply had to walk backwards a couple of yards and he should step out.
Before he could make his move, however, something slammed into him from the back and hung on like an invisible limpet. "What--" The vise-like grip tightened around him, locking his arms around his torso. Opening his eyes, he saw the woman advancing on him with her unsteady gait. At her rate, if he remained stationary, she would reach him inside of five seconds!
John lurched forward and moved his right leg to hook his attacker's. He'd forgotten about the desk, however, and he only succeeded in stumbling and throwing himself prostrate across the phantom surface. His arms were immediately wrenched backwards, and one leg inserted between his to anchor the hold.
He was utterly defenseless and worse than blind, with the different reality messing with his senses. The ghost had stopped not a foot away, giving his waist-high face and excellent view of her lacerated torso.
"McKay!" Where the hell was the man of the last-minute rescues now?
As the woman stretched out one charbroiled hand, John swore that if he survived this he was going to kick McKay's ass all the way back to the Milky Way.
The cold touch he remembered slid through his hair, then down his cheek in a death-colored caress. John couldn't escape a whimper as the woman's fingers came to rest on his neck. "John..."
And then... the world changed again.
***
"Are you okay? What happened? Did it work?"
John took a shuddering breath. He had been breathing both here and in the vision, of course, but he felt as if he'd just come up for air from a warm, glowing ocean. "Rodney?" he croaked. He became aware that he was still draped across McKay's desk, although his arms were no longer held.
Wait a minute.
No one else was in the room, and John had never felt anything that hadn't turned out as originating from the real world, which meant... McKay had held him down for a nightmare ghost to maul.
John snapped up with a snarl. "McKay!"
Rodney was in his face immediately, bubbling with obvious excitement. He was not in the least intimidated by John's dark mood.
"Did she show you?" he asked. "Do you know where the room is?"
"You little--" John paused. "What the hell... How did you know?"
"Remember the 'sharing' thing you did with Chaya?" McKay said, making the airquotes with needless exaggeration.
John scowled. There were a lot of things John wished he hadn't told McKay.
"I'll take that as a yes. Well, it occurred to me that if I were an Ancient and I couldn't talk to you, but there was something I really had to get across, hey! Mutual telepathy! You said she kept trying to touch you. Now, Kirk you may be, but c'mon, she can't have waited over ten thousand years just to get a piece of ass. So, 'sharing'."
McKay sat back, looking smug. John massaged the crick out of his neck.
"And you couldn't have just told me."
"I only just thought of it, and I didn't want to lose the chance. Besides, I doubt you would have agreed to test out the idea." John didn't want to admit it, but McKay was making sense. He wasn't sure he could have stood still for that on his own.
Which totally wasn't the point.
"What if you had been wrong?" McKay looked startled.
"Um? I mean, hm, what do you mean?"
"I mean, what if she hadn't wanted to Share with me. What if she just wanted to crack my skull open and eat my brains?"
"Oh, that. Well, according to how you've described how you interact with your visions, I'm sure it's not even possible to do that."
"Only about as impossible as going to another galaxy through an antique alien donut!" John seethed.
McKay was not deterred. "It worked, didn't it?" Taking John's fuming, inarticulate silence as an affirmative, he nodded smartly and picked up his datapad. "So, where is that room exactly? Lead on!"
***
The room was, as it turned out, not only the place where the ghost (Lenn) had had her remains stored. It was a mortuary of sorts for the most dedicated of the casualties of war -- those who wished to serve even after death.
The Ancients had jettisoned the bodies, apparently not deeming them of significance, but had placed the 'souls' in something resembling the energy-trap that the Expedition had run afoul of that first week in Atlantis. In this case, it had not been the intent to trap them there, but to hold them safely until the city could be brought to life once again, i.e. when the help of these deceased soldiers would become needed again.
The technology was limited, but once the holding unit was fully charged (as it had finally been after two years, talk about trickle charge) the souls could come out just about once a month to offer their advice. Only problem was, they had to be let out, and they'd been getting pretty antsy when no one did that.
Good thing John was an 'almost-Ancient', as McKay put it.
Elizabeth and the rest of the scientists were practically buzzing at the news. It was everyone's dream to speak to real, live (or actually dead) Ancients. It didn't matter to them that said Ancients were mostly disfigured, mutilated, walking corpses.
"Scientists," John muttered, swiping open the door to his bedroom in disgust. He could just imagine the report he was going to have to write tomorrow.
"John..."
John sat up and stared around his room. "What the fuck?!"
At least a dozen uniformed glowing women, in various states of undress and dismemberment, were crowded around him. He could hear murmurings but couldn't understand the words. Lenn -- who, by the way, had been a jumper pilot and not a janitor -- reached out and touched his arm, and a soft glow surrounded them.
Sharing didn't let them talk, exactly, but he could pick up the gist: Did I tell you I think you have pretty hair?
John groaned and fell back on the bed. "Somebody kill me now."
At least he'd have the dubitable satisfaction of telling Rodney that he was wrong about one thing.
End.
Author: kuonji
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, (cameos by Carson Beckett and Elizabeth Weir)
Rating: G
Spoilers: very vague for Sanctuary, Letters From Pegasus, Siege III, Aurora, and the movie Sixth Sense
Summary: He heard the voice a split-second before the world fuzzed out and back in on the dimmed room. The woman was there again, arms reaching out for him. The right side of her face was melted away, and her right shoulder was jagged bone with tatters of intermixed flesh and cloth.
A/N: This was literally inspired by a dream. Not a nightmare, but it freaked me the heck out, so I thought I share. :D
A/N: Unbetaed but complete!
The Room
by kuonji
John woke up standing, which was strange enough in itself. He wasn't the sort of person who sprang to his feet at the first sign of danger. He was more the sort to regain consciousness without any sign of doing so. He'd like to say that he had trained himself that way for stealth operations and such, but the actual truth was, he just didn't like to cause a fuss.
Plus, eavesdropping was a secret enjoyment of his.
What was stranger than waking up upright was that he was not in his own bedroom. Nor was he in any bedroom, as far as he could tell. It was a dusky off-white chamber, no more than about ten feet square, with a metal rack to the side stacked with what looked like Ancient machinery. Looking around, he saw no way in or out of the room.
"Cool," he said.
John figured if bad aliens had beamed him out, they wouldn't have put him in a storage closet, much less one with equipment he might use to break free with. And if he'd been sleepwalking (which he didn't do, ever) it'd have been a sight getting himself in here. So this was, obviously, a lucid dream.
He'd always wanted to have one of those.
Just to experiment, he stepped toward the shelf, to see what kinds of things his subconscious had put in here for him to play with. He was hoping for a gun like Ronon's (manly pride prevented him from being jealous), or maybe a reality remote control -- like that thing in the movie with what's-his-face.
His body refused to move forward with his foot, and when he yanked his foot back to rebalance himself, he kicked something soft with his heel.
"What the--?" He windmilled his arms, but his left hand hit something soft and his right hand hit something hard, and when he finally swung himself around to see what the hell was behind him, he felt a sickening lurch and some giant, invisible, unforgiving thing slammed into him full-on.
A wall, he realized, shaking himself out of his daze. Cloaked or something, because all he could see was air between himself and the three or four feet to the blank wall behind where he had 'woken up'.
He started to get worried.
"I don't think we're in Kansas anymore," he muttered. He'd injured himself in his dreams before, even died a few times and seen some wacky versions of the Sheppard Afterlife, but it'd never hurt like this before.
"John..."
John whirled around at the feminine voice, expecting Teyla, or a persuasive native, or maybe a nice glowy Ancient here to explain to him what was going on.
What reached out for him was an iridescent woman, about in her late forties, wearing a white and green uniform, who could have been pretty if she were maybe ten years younger -- and if she weren't missing half her charred and bleeding face.
***
"I don't think you have anything to worry about."
John scowled at the well-meaning doctor, staring obstinately into Carson's brain-reading lightscope thing-a-ma-jig. "It wasn't a dream," he said again. But even he was losing his conviction on that point.
Carson turned off the light on his instrument and frowned down at it in the esoteric way that all doctors had. "Normal..." he muttered. Then, louder: "I honestly don't have anything else for you, Colonel. All your readings are perfectly fine from a physician's standpoint. Now, I've advised Elizabeth for you to be off-duty today, just in case, and a bit of bed rest never hurt anyone. If this is still troubling you, I would recommend you speak to Dr. Heightmeyer about it."
"I'm not hallucinating," John growled. "I felt actual pain there; it wasn't just some figment of my imagination."
Carson looked meaningfully at John's bruised hand, where he had evidently hit his dresser, just before rolling out of bed and taking a nosedive to the floor.
John sighed.
He'd wanted a lucid dream, right?
"Thanks, doc."
***
"John..."
He heard the voice a split-second before the world fuzzed out and back in on the dimmed room. The woman was there again, arms reaching out for him. The right side of her face was melted away, and her right shoulder was jagged bone with tatters of intermixed flesh and cloth.
John had seen enough horror movies to know what would happen if a zombie -- even an Ancient zombie -- got a hold of him.
"Get away from me!" he growled loudly and slightly more high-pitched than usual (John didn't scream, ever, either). He tried to back away, flailing as he met with resistance once again. The woman took a step towards him.
Okay. Think about this. Enemy approaching straight-on, obstruction to the rear, what does one do?
"Side," John muttered to himself, as he ducked and dove to the right.
He didn't move.
"Crap!"
There wasn't any purchase under his feet. The floor he was standing on was illusion!
"John..."
Panicking (John did panic sometimes, just a little), he reached for his sidearm -- and encountered a ragged, soft resistance. Another zombie!
John whirled on this new threat, but couldn't see anything but air between himself and the far wall. Something unseeable squeezed at his chest and knees, pushing against him, and he couldn't breathe. It felt like something was smothering his face, pressing up his nose, strangling him...!
Wait.
John turned his head to the side, and breathing became clear again. He raised one hand and felt the air beside his ear.
Soft. Warm. Cloth. The soft resistance he'd felt before, but with more give. It felt exactly like... his pillow?
"Jesus." He was still in bed, for crying out loud. "Okay. This is a dream. Wake up. Just, wake up," he told himself.
"John..."
John turned (rolled) around and discovered the woman was no more than two feet in front of him. The dim room behind her was a real as ever. Her one remaining eyeball stared soulfully out at him, and he could see the blackened edges of her scalp where her skin was fused to the remains of her skull.
"Jesus!" he said again, this time with more feeling. He felt franticly behind him, found his pillow, dragged it out (up?), and flung it at the woman. Predictably, the invisible object didn't have any impact. Where the hell was his sidearm?
"John..." the moaning voice continued, and she reached out -- and something struck his feet.
Moving on pure instinct, John rolled to the side. He felt the edge of his bed pass under him as he bumped over it, and he held out his arms to try to break his fall. Of course, he landed on his back, momentarily knocking the breath out of him.
The woman paused, perhaps daunted by his sudden shift backwards, then continued toward him. The woman moved slowly and with a limp, he saw, but that didn't count for much. He hadn't bought more than a few feet of space between them.
"You're in your room," John told himself sternly. "Wake up, goddammit!"
He didn't wake, but he realized suddenly that if he were really in his room he was hardly immobile. With a wrench, he sat up.
And the world tilted dangerously.
There was nothing but a semi-metallic floor in front of him. Looking down, he saw that he was seated on thin air. Looking up, he saw the woman, closer than ever. But she had stopped, and she looked as confused as a zombie could look.
Taking this scant opportunity, John slid forward -- sideways, down, whatever! -- and flipped himself onto his hands and knees, not trusting his equilibrium to walking at right angles to gravity.
"John...!" The zombie seemed to be getting more desperate. Well, so was he!
He crawled forward, toward the questionable solidity of the floor of his cracked-up dream world, but his head crashed into something solid before he reached it. Cursing, he felt ahead of him -- metal, wheels, rectangular face... his dresser! He was trapped.
Looking over his shoulder, he saw that the woman was still watching his seemingly gravity-defying moves. He was sure she wouldn't be stunned for long, though.
Think, John, think!
He could feel the real floor of what he presumed was his room underneath him, even though visual input told him he was floating about four feet above the wall. The zombie, however, was walking on the floor, and nothing he could touch in the real world could hurt her. Logical conclusion: He had to defend himself with something from this dream world, which meant he had to find some way over to the rack of equipment and see what he could use there.
Squeezing his eyes shut, John tried to picture his surroundings. He had to map the layout of his room to the layout of this one, because apparently he could only go wherever the two of them overlapped.
Cold fingers brushed his ankles.
John yelped and pushed himself to his feet without thought. He leapt to the side, his room solid in his mind. Two more yards to the wall, before he would be trapped again. Then only one. John turned, his back to what should be his Johnny Cash poster, and opened his eyes.
He was back.
***
"John, you look terrible."
John jumped at the female voice, feeling ridiculous when Elizabeth widened her green eyes in surprise. He didn't have the energy to apologize verbally, so he just waved one hand in a vaguely off-putting manner.
"That means that he's sorry for being an ass, Elizabeth, but his masculine image was damaged this morning when he fell out of bed from a nightmare."
John glared at McKay, wishing he hadn't told the bastard anything.
"Sounds exciting," Elizabeth said diplomatically. "What were you dreaming about?"
"Oh, the usual, glowy Ancient women after him."
"Yeah, except for the part where she was half-dead and probably wanted to eat my brains or something." Somehow, John's explanation didn't seem to make it sound any less ridiculous. It was difficult to describe the full freakiness of the... vision. (It couldn't just be a dream, dammit.)
Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. "Is that why you're off duty today?"
John watched as she stabbed a miniature tuber with a fork. It made him think of boiled eyeballs. He put his face in his hands.
***
"Oh, but my favorite part must be where you hit yourself with your own pillow and jumped a mile. There's some things that are just priceless in the history of..."
John grit his teeth, trying to out-distance McKay without seeming to be running away. He couldn't exactly fault McKay for egging him about this, since it was, after all, just what they did on a normal basis. But John wasn't usually this on edge, and also, he was sure he was never quite such an ass about it.
"John..."
Oh, F-ing Hell.
The world fuzzed back in, and John was standing where he had started out the first two times, in the middle of the room with the rack of equipment to his right side. The woman faded into view at the far wall and like any good B-movie antagonist, she started stumbling toward him with arms outstretched.
So, definitely not a dream.
This time, John was fully awake, and he was more angry than freaked out. He was starting to get pretty tired of this. He put out his right hand and verified that he could still feel the hallway under his hand, even though all he could see beneath his fingers was thin air.
He couldn't think what he had done last time to get out of it. Any mental effort on his part still didn't have any effect. Maybe it was just a time issue; she tried to spook him for, say, two minutes, and then the vision cut out by itself.
Now he just had to figure out how to hold her off.
There was no way for him to get to the rack of equipment this time, with the real life wall in the way, so he'd just have to play cat-and-mouse.
John shuddered, remembering the bone-cold touch from before. He was absolutely alone in the dim lighting, with the grim spectre implacably reaching for him. He felt cold sweat slide down his back.
"John..."
"Dammit, what the hell do you want?" John said, taking a nervous step backwards. Lead her forward, then double back, avoid the corners, he strategized franticly. But the room was so small, further constricted by the size of the hallway he'd been walking down, that it'd be almost impossible to get past her.
Suddenly, something gripped his shoulders, invisible skeleton fingers clinging and digging into his flesh. The force shook him, rattling, then he felt something sting him across the face. He raised his arms, trying to fend it off, but it came again and he cried out in frustration and real fear. What was happening to him?!
He stumbled backwards under the onslaught, barely aware, until he was against the wall of the room, and then he took yet another step -- and he stepped through a gray threshold and he was out.
"--nel! Sheppard!"
Blinking in the bright lights, John lowered his arms and saw Rodney in front of him, one hand raised as if to slap him again. The normally snide and arrogant scientist was wide-eyed, pupils dilated. He looked more than a little freaked out himself. The hand that was still on John's shoulder spasmed once before releasing.
John did something he never imagined he would do. He seized McKay by the lapels, dragging him in, and said, desperate,
"McKay, you have to help me!"
***
"Have you ever thought, maybe she just wants your help."
"Huh?" John looked up from where he was twiddling with the AC adapter for something or other. He was fidgety, wondering when he'd next be dumped back into the The Room.
"You know, like in Sixth Sense. The kid was all freaking out, when really all he had to do was help them out and they'd go away."
John frowned. "I thought you didn't see that movie."
McKay looked confused, but John cut him off with an extra-sarcastic, "So I should help out the nice zombie lady, and she'll float away in gratefulness?" McKay, thankfully, snorted and crossed his arms.
"I'm not saying fiction is at all a good guide to real life, but they just might have their merits when we're faced with the unexplainable."
John didn't think McKay would really mind John having seen his last desperate video, but John wasn't up to talking about cleaning out Ford's room.
"Unexplainable like... time travel?" This time, it wasn't just a distraction. It was always great to sit back and watch McKay puff up.
"No, not like time travel. Like ghosts. And, I don't know, child psychology."
"According to the movies, though, I should also take a chainsaw to her." McKay got red in the face, and John felt almost normal again.
He held up one hand before McKay would kick him out of his room, and John would have to suffer his next 'attack' alone again and in public. "Okay, so let's say I try to help her. What do you think she wants? She won't say anything other than my name."
"Have you asked?"
"Huh?"
"Have you tried to communicate intelligently with her. Or was it just, eek! get away! I'm scared! Where's my gun!"
John shot him a dirty look but answered the admittedly valid question. "No."
"Well, there you go."
John doubted it was that easy, but before he could make further comment, the world fuzzed out again. "Oh, perfect."
The room looked as before, and like a reset amusement park ride, the zombie woman reappeared and came toward him. Nerving himself not to run, John addressed her directly.
"Look, ma'am. Uh. I don't want to be here, and you're probably not real happy yourself. How about you tell me what's wrong, and I'll see what I can do to help."
The woman paused, actually seeming to listen to him. She gestured unintelligibly, then said a few words that John didn't understand. "John..." she said, seeming to sigh. She came toward him again.
"Whoa!" John had been somewhat encouraged by how she had kept her distance while trying to talk to him. He wasn't keen on making a close encounter of the third kind.
According to the last experience, he could get out of the vision by walking out of its walls. There was just one problem. He could feel the chair he'd been sitting on, even though in the vision he was standing, and he wasn't sure what would happen if he stood up.
"Um, can I go and consult with my friend?" he attempted. The woman, ignoring him, continued to advance. The trails of her right sleeve blew away with the motion, showing seared flesh, red with still-oozing burns.
A yard away, John lost his cool and rolled to the side. His knees hit Rodney's bed, and his vision tilted crazily before he squeezed his eyes shut, tumbling blindly over the bed to the floor on the other side. He squinted his eyes open, expecting to see the woman's feet still shuffling toward him, and heaved a sigh when he found only McKay peering down at him with an anxious expression.
"This... is not working," John told him.
***
"Oh my god, we're idiots."
John grunted as he paced the length of Rodney's room, not much up to conversation. His nerves hadn't been this shot since... never. Even in Afghanistan he had had some sort of control over the situation. He was spinning out of it now.
"Listen, you said you saw what looked like Ancient equipment, right?"
John grunted again, but McKay didn't really need acknowledgement when he was on a spiel.
"And the room you described, it sounds just like something the Ancients built. Even the quote-unquote 'ghost', she was wearing a uniform. Like, like a military uniform? Like the uniforms we saw on the Aurora?"
John blinked. "Now that you mention it... yeah."
"See, that's it!" McKay leaped for his desk, firing up his laptop, brow already furrowed in concentration.
John was bewildered. "What's it? Rodney!"
"Hm? Oh, yeah, see, this is the thing. The Ancients and the Wraith were at war for, what, decades? centuries? There had to have been some casualties on their side, or even just, you know, accidents. Atlantis is basically a giant flying warship. That's obviously why we have the shields and the chair and the puddlejumpers."
John nodded along in agreement. "Okay."
"So, don't you get it? That room you're seeing, that woman you're seeing, they might be in Atlantis."
"What, so there's a rotting corpse somewhere that's looking for me?"
McKay rolled his eyes in the surrounded-by-idiots manner John was used to. "She's not looking for you. You're looking for her. At least, that's what she wants."
John pursed his lips, considering. "Then why didn't she just say so?"
"You said you couldn't understand her."
"Well, yeah..."
"She must have been speaking Ancient."
"But--"
"But we can understand Chaya, etc. Yes. But this was over ten thousand years ago. The language may have evolved. Plus, she may have been just some janitor, or weapons tech."
John decided not to comment on the difference between people who cleaned floors and people who calibrated sensitive combustible machinery.
"Ascended or half-ascended, hell, even on-their-way-to-ascended Ancients can probably make themselves understood, but there has to be some shallow-on-the-gene-pool menial laborers on board. She had burn marks, right? It didn't have to be offensive explosives that killed her. Maybe a kitchen fire, anything could have caused that."
John doubted that. The wounds had been pretty severe. But McKay was making sense.
"So we find the room she was at, get her properly buried or something, and she'll be happy, right?"
"That's the theory."
John nodded, relieved to have a path of action. "Let's do it."
***
Half an hour later, he was less enthused. "How hard is it to find one room?" he exclaimed.
"Oh, only about as hard as finding one particular room in all of Manhattan, from just knowing what it looks like on the inside," McKay groused back.
"We don't--" John cut off as the world changed around him again. This was becoming uncomfortably familiar.
The dim room came back, and the ghost limped forward once more. John sighed. He closed his eyes, envisioning his position in McKay's room in his head. He'd been standing with McKay's desk in front of him, and the wall to his left. That meant he simply had to walk backwards a couple of yards and he should step out.
Before he could make his move, however, something slammed into him from the back and hung on like an invisible limpet. "What--" The vise-like grip tightened around him, locking his arms around his torso. Opening his eyes, he saw the woman advancing on him with her unsteady gait. At her rate, if he remained stationary, she would reach him inside of five seconds!
John lurched forward and moved his right leg to hook his attacker's. He'd forgotten about the desk, however, and he only succeeded in stumbling and throwing himself prostrate across the phantom surface. His arms were immediately wrenched backwards, and one leg inserted between his to anchor the hold.
He was utterly defenseless and worse than blind, with the different reality messing with his senses. The ghost had stopped not a foot away, giving his waist-high face and excellent view of her lacerated torso.
"McKay!" Where the hell was the man of the last-minute rescues now?
As the woman stretched out one charbroiled hand, John swore that if he survived this he was going to kick McKay's ass all the way back to the Milky Way.
The cold touch he remembered slid through his hair, then down his cheek in a death-colored caress. John couldn't escape a whimper as the woman's fingers came to rest on his neck. "John..."
And then... the world changed again.
***
"Are you okay? What happened? Did it work?"
John took a shuddering breath. He had been breathing both here and in the vision, of course, but he felt as if he'd just come up for air from a warm, glowing ocean. "Rodney?" he croaked. He became aware that he was still draped across McKay's desk, although his arms were no longer held.
Wait a minute.
No one else was in the room, and John had never felt anything that hadn't turned out as originating from the real world, which meant... McKay had held him down for a nightmare ghost to maul.
John snapped up with a snarl. "McKay!"
Rodney was in his face immediately, bubbling with obvious excitement. He was not in the least intimidated by John's dark mood.
"Did she show you?" he asked. "Do you know where the room is?"
"You little--" John paused. "What the hell... How did you know?"
"Remember the 'sharing' thing you did with Chaya?" McKay said, making the airquotes with needless exaggeration.
John scowled. There were a lot of things John wished he hadn't told McKay.
"I'll take that as a yes. Well, it occurred to me that if I were an Ancient and I couldn't talk to you, but there was something I really had to get across, hey! Mutual telepathy! You said she kept trying to touch you. Now, Kirk you may be, but c'mon, she can't have waited over ten thousand years just to get a piece of ass. So, 'sharing'."
McKay sat back, looking smug. John massaged the crick out of his neck.
"And you couldn't have just told me."
"I only just thought of it, and I didn't want to lose the chance. Besides, I doubt you would have agreed to test out the idea." John didn't want to admit it, but McKay was making sense. He wasn't sure he could have stood still for that on his own.
Which totally wasn't the point.
"What if you had been wrong?" McKay looked startled.
"Um? I mean, hm, what do you mean?"
"I mean, what if she hadn't wanted to Share with me. What if she just wanted to crack my skull open and eat my brains?"
"Oh, that. Well, according to how you've described how you interact with your visions, I'm sure it's not even possible to do that."
"Only about as impossible as going to another galaxy through an antique alien donut!" John seethed.
McKay was not deterred. "It worked, didn't it?" Taking John's fuming, inarticulate silence as an affirmative, he nodded smartly and picked up his datapad. "So, where is that room exactly? Lead on!"
***
The room was, as it turned out, not only the place where the ghost (Lenn) had had her remains stored. It was a mortuary of sorts for the most dedicated of the casualties of war -- those who wished to serve even after death.
The Ancients had jettisoned the bodies, apparently not deeming them of significance, but had placed the 'souls' in something resembling the energy-trap that the Expedition had run afoul of that first week in Atlantis. In this case, it had not been the intent to trap them there, but to hold them safely until the city could be brought to life once again, i.e. when the help of these deceased soldiers would become needed again.
The technology was limited, but once the holding unit was fully charged (as it had finally been after two years, talk about trickle charge) the souls could come out just about once a month to offer their advice. Only problem was, they had to be let out, and they'd been getting pretty antsy when no one did that.
Good thing John was an 'almost-Ancient', as McKay put it.
Elizabeth and the rest of the scientists were practically buzzing at the news. It was everyone's dream to speak to real, live (or actually dead) Ancients. It didn't matter to them that said Ancients were mostly disfigured, mutilated, walking corpses.
"Scientists," John muttered, swiping open the door to his bedroom in disgust. He could just imagine the report he was going to have to write tomorrow.
"John..."
John sat up and stared around his room. "What the fuck?!"
At least a dozen uniformed glowing women, in various states of undress and dismemberment, were crowded around him. He could hear murmurings but couldn't understand the words. Lenn -- who, by the way, had been a jumper pilot and not a janitor -- reached out and touched his arm, and a soft glow surrounded them.
Sharing didn't let them talk, exactly, but he could pick up the gist: Did I tell you I think you have pretty hair?
John groaned and fell back on the bed. "Somebody kill me now."
At least he'd have the dubitable satisfaction of telling Rodney that he was wrong about one thing.
End.