Rebuilding Babel [2/3], by the_drifter (wordless challenge)
Title: Rebuilding Babel
Author: the_drifter (fiercelydreamed)
Summary: He wondered if this was how it felt to go crazy -- you didn't lose your mind, it just stopped synching up with the world around you. The Pegasus galaxy makes Rodney an expert in what he can survive without.
Details: 21,000 words, Sheppard/McKay, adult/explicit. Spoilers through S2.
Notes: Huge thanks to secrethappiness and cathexys for betaing (thoroughly and within time constraints -- man, but they're kind people), and to cindyjade, shaenie, and celli for audiencing. Also, two counts of thanks to cesperanza for using the prompt and for extending the challenge deadline.
Download the soundtrack.
[Go back to Part 1.]
The night before the mission, Rodney stared at the ceiling for an hour and a half before finally contacting Sheppard. He sent the most subdued of their standard greetings, just a quiet tap at the door, because it was late and part of him hoped that Sheppard had already gone to bed, that he'd missed his window to ask this. But Sheppard was on the line right away, answering with puzzlement and faint concern. Rodney took a deep breath and tried to drain as much of the anxiety out of his thoughts as possible. It was hard to filter out emotional content, sometimes, and he'd woken up yelling for the last two nights running, with panic attacks for encores during the day. Either this was going to calm him down or send him completely over the edge.
When he'd gotten himself as close to neutral as he could manage, he laid out the memories like transparencies on an overhead projector. Walking into the temple on Tisros. Running a scanner over the central idol, the one that had given off the energy readings. Reaching out to lay a hand on it. The guard's outraged shout. The sharp pinch of the dart sinking into the muscle over his shoulder blade. Lights going off in the edges of his vision as the toxin swept through his veins like hot sand.
He cut the memory off before the searing touch of corrosion started, before his knees hit the ground and his spine yanked itself back into an arch so tight he'd thought his neck was going to break. He'd already been on his way to blacking out by then, and there were some things Sheppard didn't need to know. Instead, he finished the sequence with blankness, and placed his question into it.
Over a minute went by with no response. Rodney wondered if Sheppard had understood what Rodney was asking, if he was going to acknowledge the question at all. It was possible Sheppard had already closed the line. Then the briefest flicker of input washed over him, a blast of heat and noise that was gone almost as soon as it hit. Before he could put together a response, he got a ceiling-down image of himself pulling the covers up, clicking the lamp off, peacefully asleep. An analogue clock showing tomorrow's ETD. Go to bed, Rodney, like the rest of the conversation hadn't happened, and then Sheppard's hand rising to remove an earpiece. End of transmission.
This was the reason the Ancients had stopped development on the device: you couldn't always tell what was literal and what was figurative. Fact and emotion bled together. The flare of the explosion, the smoke rising around the rubble of the temple, the screaming as the Tisari scattered -- there was no way to know if that had happened or not. It had come across so fast that Rodney couldn't be sure Sheppard had meant to send it at all. But the rage that had burned through in that split second: that was real. Whether or not Sheppard had tossed a grenade into that temple on the way out, he'd wanted to.
That thought held Rodney wide awake in the dark for another two hours, mind circling around and coming up with nothing. But when he finally fell asleep, he slept hard and didn't dream.
Crossing the event horizon brought the same mild rush of disorientation as always, but when as Rodney squinted into the glare of yet another alien sun, it felt like something lost had come back through the wormhole with him, something he'd misplaced. The euphoria only lasted until they came into view of the village, and then he broke into a clammy sweat. There wasn't any sign of a threat, but post-traumatic stress didn't really respond to rationality, especially when your triggering experience was, say, assault and extensive brain damage.
As the first of the locals approached them, his team unexpectedly fell into formation around him -- Sheppard to the front, Ronon and Teyla bracketing him on either side. They didn't even seem to notice that they'd done it, and the unconscious protectiveness of the move knocked him out of the spiraling fright. He looked at the three of them for half a minute before noticing that the opening conversation was already well underway. Now, of course, was when he remembered a detail they'd forgotten to work out in advance: how the hell the team was going to explain Rodney's condition to the locals. This mission was a milk-run, renewing a trade agreement that SGA-1 had brokered last year while Rodney was city-bound with the flu, but God knew he'd managed to screw up simpler missions by running his mouth off. Who could predict how badly he might antagonize people with his silence?
Sheppard seemed to have it covered, though -- he'd finished reintroducing Teyla and Ronon, and now he was gesturing to Rodney and saying something that made the village elders nod and murmur in understanding. They turned to Rodney and performed low salutes of greeting, which he mimicked as best he could. Everyone started in toward the central hall, and Rodney shot Sheppard a confused look. The corner of Sheppard's mouth twitched, and he sent Rodney a five-second clip of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.
Rodney scowled and imagined himself elbowing Sheppard in the ribs so vividly that next to him, Sheppard actually flinched. After that, it was relatively easy to summon a nice, non-threatening idiot-savant smile whenever one of the locals caught his eye.
The mission ended without a hitch, and the next few were just as uneventful. His flashes of hyper-vigilance got fewer and farther between, and his team slowly relaxed as well. By the fourth mission, Ronon had stopped looming anytime someone got too close to Rodney, and Sheppard and Teyla weren't subtly shifting to block the line of sight of anyone who looked at him too long. (The people on planet #3 had apparently decided he was something between a holy man and a mob boss and started addressing all the negotiations directly to him. Teyla took shameless advantage of the mistake, making veiled threats in his name while Sheppard had him cross his arms and glower. They wrangled a dirt-cheap deal on some kind of legume, but the technique probably wouldn't work out that well every time, and besides, holding a fixed glare that long gave him a migraine.) Elizabeth looked suspicious during the debriefings, but there wasn't even anything questionable to edit out. Regression toward the mean, Rodney figured -- Tisros had gone about as badly as it could have without any of them dying; this was just the shift back to statistical normalcy.
Of course, "normal" for them was less smooth sailing and more barely averted disaster. On the fifth mission, the locals threw some traditional feast (really, the only perk of losing all linguistic ability was that now no one could expect him to remember the name of whatever backwards pack of Pegasus natives they were dealing with that week, let alone their religious holidays). The great hall was way too hot, the alcohol was strong, and the food was fantastic. They stumbled up to their rooms well after midnight, and Rodney only meant to close his eyes for a minute before taking off his boots.
The next thing he knew, the sky was just starting to go gray through the curtains and someone was slamming their shoulder against his locked door like they meant to break it down. The room swam around him as he sat up -- god, was he still drunk? -- but he could hear Ronon snarling something on the other side of the door and Teyla's voice over his earpiece. He staggered across the room and shot the bolt back, and Ronon stormed inside. He grabbed Rodney by the collar and shook him, which was the last thing his head needed, but over Ronon's shoulder he caught sight of Teyla. There was something -- the tight look on her face, the way she was leaning on the doorframe, or maybe the otherwise empty hall -- and then some of the jumbled pieces locked into place.
Drugged. They'd been drugged. And now Sheppard wasn't with them.
His gun was out and in his hand before he knew he'd gone for it. The ground was still tilting under his feet, geometry bending in his peripheral vision, but he could feel the adrenaline spike chasing the drug out of his system. He was pretty sure that it was anger that was making his grip shake, because he'd been doped and shot up and fucking poisoned by how many different people now? And this time they'd taken Sheppard (again) which -- no, just no.
Pushing herself into the room, Teyla said something urgent and pointed to his arm -- to the device, right, and god but he hated mind-altering chemicals, because everything other than caffeine just made him stupider than he could ever afford to be. He closed his eyes and tried Sheppard, starting with the crackle of a radio, moving to a fist pounding on a door, then a flare of light, and finally just a prolonged blast of undifferentiated sensory noise. No response, and he jerked his chin to the side to signal the negative.
Ronon had one of his knives out, the biggest one, and he'd angled himself toward the door in a way that made it pretty clear he was itching to go beat Sheppard's location out of whoever he could get to first. Rodney was about to gesture his agreement when Teyla grabbed his face and turned it back towards her. She pointed out the window to where the sun was rising, swept her arm out towards the hall and brought her outstretched fingers swiftly inward to stop short at her other palm, which she'd held up in warding. She circled her index finger twice over Rodney's pack and jerked a thumb toward the window again. He scrubbed a hand over his face and nodded, because she had a point. Whatever these assholes were planning, they clearly intended the remaining three-quarters of SGA-1 to sleep until the morning; grabbing their gear and sneaking out now was the best strategic move they had.
They spent a tense hour and a half hidden in the woods to the south of the town before Rodney finally managed to raise Sheppard. Whatever drug they'd used had taken him down hard; his responses were slow and distorted, almost unintelligible. To help him focus, Rodney called upon every bit of the vocabulary they'd established and threw himself into a really satisfying silent rant about how Sheppard was a goddamn lightweight who'd clearly forgotten that his job was to stay alert and, you know, not get kidnapped because his more important job, as he'd also forgotten, was to come to the rescue when technologically impoverished demi-civilizations kidnapped Rodney for his magnificent brain. Only now thanks to Sheppard's failure in the line of duty, Rodney had to orchestrate his rescue, which he was infinitely less suited to -- and did Sheppard realize how incredibly infuriating it was that when they finally saved his ass, Rodney wouldn't even have the option of telling these idiots each and every way this had been the stupidest move they'd made in their long and inglorious history of stupid--
Sheppard slapped a nearly tangible mental hand over Rodney's mouth (they were getting pretty good at faking sensation), waited a moment, and followed it up with a picture of himself smacking Rodney upside the head. More relieved than he was willing to admit, Rodney sent an eye-roll to Sheppard while he snapped for Ronon and Teyla's attention. Both of them were already watching him, and he pointed to the device and flashed an OK to signal that the Colonel was awake and back to his normal jackass self. They exchanged thankful looks while Sheppard suggested to Rodney that hey, now would be a really great time for them to get him out of here. Rodney tossed Sheppard the overly-amazed expression that meant no, seriously, that hadn't occurred to me, why THANK you for pointing that out as he dug the small whiteboard out of his pack, and then the four of them hunkered down to come up with a plan.
Planning turned into a lot of waiting, because Sheppard was locked in some basement with three inch ventilation slits for windows. It took hours to piece together enough information (street noises, glimpses of foot traffic, changing angle of the sun) for Teyla, who'd been the only one paying attention during the tour, to make a couple of guesses about where he was. In the meantime, though, the local dignitaries were kind enough to drop by his cell and run their mouths off for a while.
From what Sheppard could read between the lines of their grand pronouncements, the settlement relied on some kind of Ancient agrarian monitoring system to optimize their farm output. Of course, the whole thing had taken a ridiculous mystical spin over the centuries, so now the system was the voice of the gods, and the gene carriers who used it were the holy priests. Only there hadn't been a new gene carrier identified in a long time, and the last in the line was on his way out the door. Cue SGA-1's arrival and Sheppard accidentally lighting up an innocuous crystal sculpture (this was where Rodney buried his face in his hands and thought, oh my god, my city's survival depends on a guy who can't quit flirting with the knick-knacks). The feast had actually been in his honor -- funny how their hosts had neglected to mention that at the time -- and soon the whole thing would commence in a ceremony where he'd be anointed as the new priest, hosannas would be sung, and they'd fit him with the holy equivalent of an ankle monitor which would prevent him from ever passing through a gate again.
There wasn't really a way to relay this to Teyla and Ronon, but then again, the explanation didn't matter. Those two were deep into a discussion of strategy and tactics; Rodney couldn't follow most of it, but as Sheppard was literally pacing at the other end of the line, he flagged them down whenever they reached an agreement on some point and made them map out what they'd decided. By the early afternoon, they'd sketched out a plan for each of three neighborhoods they thought Sheppard might be stashed in. The next step was for Teyla to swipe a set of clothes and do a pass through the city, to confirm Sheppard's location and get the details they needed to finish the rescue plan.
She was maybe thirty meters into the brush when all of a sudden Rodney got hit with a surge of alarm from Sheppard, and then he had a direct pipeline to everything Sheppard was seeing. He started snapping frantically; when Teyla didn't turn around, Ronon stuck his thumb and index finger into his mouth and let out a high, birdlike whistle. That got her attention, and she started running back as Rodney whirled to Ronon and gestured wildly.
Now. They were moving Sheppard. The ceremony was about to start.
The three of them raced for the city, where Sheppard was being led up to the dais in the great hall. He kept the line open as the ceremony began, and though he was maintaining his outward cool, the first edges of suppressed panic were starting to trickle into what Rodney was getting from him. They made it into the building undetected, came up with half a plan -- but god, it was complicated, there was too much to keep track of. The damn brain damage meant he couldn't string more than four or five hand signals together before he started losing the thread, and with the time pressure Teyla and Ronon kept forgetting to break their communications into chunks like they'd practiced.
The more he missed, the more rushed they got, and meanwhile he was trying to keep Sheppard in the loop, trying to keep two sets of visual information separated, what he was getting from his own eyes and what he was getting from Sheppard. Rodney was used to multitasking in a crisis, but this wasn't multitasking, it was fucking juggling, with six different mental and physical balls in the air. When the man leading the ceremony slid the knife out of the ornate sheath at his belt, Sheppard reined in his own flinch but Rodney didn't, and the crash of the urn he knocked over rang out through the halls.
Three seconds later, both sides of the corridor were clogged with armed guards, carrying bolt-projectiles and wicked-looking scythes. The three of them were disarmed and escorted into the main hall, where the leader magnanimously forgave them the interruption and consented to let them watch the rest of the holy occasion. He used the knife to slice a thin knotted cord of the wrist of the old priest (stupid, Rodney thought to himself furiously, idiot, moron, stupid, stupid) and turned to dab some kind of oil onto Sheppard's forehead and throat. They'd taken Sheppard's uniform jacket and replaced it with a floor-length robe, heavy with beading and embroidery. It should have looked ridiculous but instead it made the whole thing more real, because even from fifty meters back Rodney could see that it was old, probably centuries. This wasn't just wacky local hijinks, this was religious orthodoxy -- there were over two thousand people crammed into the hall with thousands more in the courtyard outside, and all of them were probably ready to kill anyone who tried to take their new priest from them.
Up front, the leader stepped up onto the raised platform behind Sheppard and lifted his hands in the air, chanting loudly. Through Sheppard's eyes, Rodney could see the grim looks on Ronon and Teyla's faces, his own alarmed expression, and dammit, there had to be something he could do, there had to be someone else here who could--
He cut the visual link to Sheppard, and when he felt a phantom hand dig into his bicep as if to shake him, Rodney blocked that off too, flashed a stop sign at Sheppard -- shut up, now, I have to concentrate. He shut his eyes tight for a moment, opened them again, and then as clearly as he could, pictured a glow starting to emanate from the leader's hands. He sent the image out on an open channel, with the glow turning into search beams that moved over the crowd, and filled the transmission with a sense of expectation, of urgency. Nothing happened -- no response, no movement from the auditorium -- and Rodney upped the ante, made his image of the dais radiate a golden light, pictured the crowd turning to beckon the unseen viewer forward. Still there was nothing, and an attendant was handing the leader a thick, Ancient-looking cuff, obviously the monitor they'd mentioned to Sheppard, and fuck, they were out of time. Rodney pulled out all the stops, picturing farms springing up fertile and lush around the city, people rejoicing, small children being lifted towards the sun by ecstatic hands. He broadcast the Hallelujah Chorus, gilded his impatience into hope and sent that out too, promised in every way he could think of that this was the time, that everyone was waiting to welcome the person who could hear this message, so rise and come forward to be blessed but goddammit do it now now now now now--
A murmur rippled through the back of the crowd, and Rodney jerked against the hands of the guards to see a plain, colorless woman wandering up the aisle with a confused expression on her face. Up front, the leader was frowning, gesturing for her to go away. Her footsteps hesitated, and Rodney held his breath and kept his siren song going, urging her forward until she was maybe five meters from the dais. As a pair of guards stepped down to remove her, Sheppard darted forward to snatch the crystal sculpture off the altar and threw it in a low arc. She fumbled and nearly dropped it, but as her fingers closed around it, it started to glow.
Two hours later, the leader sent SGA-1 off with a generous trade agreement on grain and some kind of flax-like material. Sheppard smiled insincerely as he accepted the man's thanks (for finding the new priest) and apology (for withdrawing the offer of holiness, of course, not for almost enslaving him), and the four of them snagged their gear out of the woods and beat a grateful retreat back to the jumper. They spent the walk back bickering about just how far down this rescue attempt fell on the scale set by previous missions, but as they moved to their respective chairs, Sheppard dropped his hand to the top of Rodney's shoulder and squeezed once before stepping past him to the pilot's seat.
Rodney could feel the weight and warmth of the touch all the way through the debrief.
The next day he came back from lunch to find a large, colorful cartoon taped up in grand isolation on one of the lab walls: Sheppard in black and white clerical robes and Rodney dressed like some kind of Biblical prophet, both of them wrestling over a golden halo. He stomped around and gestured threateningly, but everyone feigned ignorance as to how it had gotten there. It had been months since Rodney had been the target of one of the anonymous pranks that flourished in the city in peacetime. He kept up the show of annoyance for the rest of the day, but only because he was taken aback by how good it felt to be included in this; he didn't know how to act, and since infuriated McKay was obviously the intended result, he decided he should oblige. Until he could figure out who'd done it and return the favor, it was the least he could do.
Two days after that, he was just starting to narrow down a list of suspects when Sheppard burst into the lab, grabbed him by the upper arm, and dragged him at a run into the gate room -- just in time to see Lorne and his team step out of a jumper, Parrish cradling a ZPM in his reverent hands.
Every scientist was practically vibrating with excitement by the time they got the ZPM installed in the power room, and the mood swept rapidly through the rest of the city. If one ZPM in wartime meant survival, then a second in peacetime meant discovery -- more off-world missions, more time with the control chair, more exploration within the city. The kitchen staff broke out the good stuff at dinner (chocolate cake with real chocolate, Rodney knew they'd been holding out on him), and everyone who was off-shift or had a break congregated in the mess hall. Rodney didn't need Sheppard to translate the conversations happening around them, and he didn't ask him to. He'd participated in enough of them himself after the Wraith siege had ended and everyone had finally realized that they'd lived to research another day.
Watching the entire science contingent gleefully plan their next three months felt like squeezing a deep bruise or a cut that had only half-healed. He'd painstakingly reinserted himself into the more important long-term projects, but there wasn't much he could do in the way of improvisation or discussion. Couldn't review the new research proposals to ensure efficient resource allocation. Couldn't be more than a secondary presence in the expansion into new facilities. Couldn't search the Ancient database for information on new artifacts. Unless Miko became spontaneously fluent with the device (right now she was at a kindergarten level at best), or the SGC decided Sheppard was best put to use as Rodney's dedicated translator (and God, he wished, but it wasn't going to happen), he was going to stay the slow cog in the city's accelerating machinery, and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it.
He didn't meet his team's eyes as he got up from the table, and their conversation faltered, but they didn't try to stop him. He dumped his tray and took the long way around the mess hall so he could avoid the traffic down the central aisle where people were approaching Radek in twos and threes, campaigning for project pre-approval. As he headed for the door, he caught Radek watching him as Neves talked his ear off. Rodney jerked his head down to avoid his gaze. Tomorrow, or maybe the day after that, he'd go and, fuck, shake Radek's hand or something, find some way to let him know that Rodney didn't begrudge him the rise in fortune that had come at Rodney's expense. Which he did, of course he did, but keeping his teeth clenched on that kind of pettiness was simpler now that he didn't have another option, and since he couldn't do the job anymore, the least he could do was get out of Radek's way.
Rodney was just about to swipe his hand in front of the door sensor when the overhead lights flickered subtly. He blinked and waited: nothing, and then just as he reached out, they did it again. Turning, he found Radek staring at him with a wary expression on his face. Rodney frowned at him and pointed a finger carefully upward, and Radek pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and started making his way down the aisle. Right as he reached Rodney, the lights flared for a fraction of a second and a distant alarm started. Rodney threw himself through the door as it slid open and sprinted for the transport chamber, Radek's footsteps pounding just behind his own.
[Go to part 3 ...]
Author: the_drifter (fiercelydreamed)
Summary: He wondered if this was how it felt to go crazy -- you didn't lose your mind, it just stopped synching up with the world around you. The Pegasus galaxy makes Rodney an expert in what he can survive without.
Details: 21,000 words, Sheppard/McKay, adult/explicit. Spoilers through S2.
Notes: Huge thanks to secrethappiness and cathexys for betaing (thoroughly and within time constraints -- man, but they're kind people), and to cindyjade, shaenie, and celli for audiencing. Also, two counts of thanks to cesperanza for using the prompt and for extending the challenge deadline.
Download the soundtrack.
[Go back to Part 1.]
The night before the mission, Rodney stared at the ceiling for an hour and a half before finally contacting Sheppard. He sent the most subdued of their standard greetings, just a quiet tap at the door, because it was late and part of him hoped that Sheppard had already gone to bed, that he'd missed his window to ask this. But Sheppard was on the line right away, answering with puzzlement and faint concern. Rodney took a deep breath and tried to drain as much of the anxiety out of his thoughts as possible. It was hard to filter out emotional content, sometimes, and he'd woken up yelling for the last two nights running, with panic attacks for encores during the day. Either this was going to calm him down or send him completely over the edge.
When he'd gotten himself as close to neutral as he could manage, he laid out the memories like transparencies on an overhead projector. Walking into the temple on Tisros. Running a scanner over the central idol, the one that had given off the energy readings. Reaching out to lay a hand on it. The guard's outraged shout. The sharp pinch of the dart sinking into the muscle over his shoulder blade. Lights going off in the edges of his vision as the toxin swept through his veins like hot sand.
He cut the memory off before the searing touch of corrosion started, before his knees hit the ground and his spine yanked itself back into an arch so tight he'd thought his neck was going to break. He'd already been on his way to blacking out by then, and there were some things Sheppard didn't need to know. Instead, he finished the sequence with blankness, and placed his question into it.
Over a minute went by with no response. Rodney wondered if Sheppard had understood what Rodney was asking, if he was going to acknowledge the question at all. It was possible Sheppard had already closed the line. Then the briefest flicker of input washed over him, a blast of heat and noise that was gone almost as soon as it hit. Before he could put together a response, he got a ceiling-down image of himself pulling the covers up, clicking the lamp off, peacefully asleep. An analogue clock showing tomorrow's ETD. Go to bed, Rodney, like the rest of the conversation hadn't happened, and then Sheppard's hand rising to remove an earpiece. End of transmission.
This was the reason the Ancients had stopped development on the device: you couldn't always tell what was literal and what was figurative. Fact and emotion bled together. The flare of the explosion, the smoke rising around the rubble of the temple, the screaming as the Tisari scattered -- there was no way to know if that had happened or not. It had come across so fast that Rodney couldn't be sure Sheppard had meant to send it at all. But the rage that had burned through in that split second: that was real. Whether or not Sheppard had tossed a grenade into that temple on the way out, he'd wanted to.
That thought held Rodney wide awake in the dark for another two hours, mind circling around and coming up with nothing. But when he finally fell asleep, he slept hard and didn't dream.
Crossing the event horizon brought the same mild rush of disorientation as always, but when as Rodney squinted into the glare of yet another alien sun, it felt like something lost had come back through the wormhole with him, something he'd misplaced. The euphoria only lasted until they came into view of the village, and then he broke into a clammy sweat. There wasn't any sign of a threat, but post-traumatic stress didn't really respond to rationality, especially when your triggering experience was, say, assault and extensive brain damage.
As the first of the locals approached them, his team unexpectedly fell into formation around him -- Sheppard to the front, Ronon and Teyla bracketing him on either side. They didn't even seem to notice that they'd done it, and the unconscious protectiveness of the move knocked him out of the spiraling fright. He looked at the three of them for half a minute before noticing that the opening conversation was already well underway. Now, of course, was when he remembered a detail they'd forgotten to work out in advance: how the hell the team was going to explain Rodney's condition to the locals. This mission was a milk-run, renewing a trade agreement that SGA-1 had brokered last year while Rodney was city-bound with the flu, but God knew he'd managed to screw up simpler missions by running his mouth off. Who could predict how badly he might antagonize people with his silence?
Sheppard seemed to have it covered, though -- he'd finished reintroducing Teyla and Ronon, and now he was gesturing to Rodney and saying something that made the village elders nod and murmur in understanding. They turned to Rodney and performed low salutes of greeting, which he mimicked as best he could. Everyone started in toward the central hall, and Rodney shot Sheppard a confused look. The corner of Sheppard's mouth twitched, and he sent Rodney a five-second clip of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.
Rodney scowled and imagined himself elbowing Sheppard in the ribs so vividly that next to him, Sheppard actually flinched. After that, it was relatively easy to summon a nice, non-threatening idiot-savant smile whenever one of the locals caught his eye.
The mission ended without a hitch, and the next few were just as uneventful. His flashes of hyper-vigilance got fewer and farther between, and his team slowly relaxed as well. By the fourth mission, Ronon had stopped looming anytime someone got too close to Rodney, and Sheppard and Teyla weren't subtly shifting to block the line of sight of anyone who looked at him too long. (The people on planet #3 had apparently decided he was something between a holy man and a mob boss and started addressing all the negotiations directly to him. Teyla took shameless advantage of the mistake, making veiled threats in his name while Sheppard had him cross his arms and glower. They wrangled a dirt-cheap deal on some kind of legume, but the technique probably wouldn't work out that well every time, and besides, holding a fixed glare that long gave him a migraine.) Elizabeth looked suspicious during the debriefings, but there wasn't even anything questionable to edit out. Regression toward the mean, Rodney figured -- Tisros had gone about as badly as it could have without any of them dying; this was just the shift back to statistical normalcy.
Of course, "normal" for them was less smooth sailing and more barely averted disaster. On the fifth mission, the locals threw some traditional feast (really, the only perk of losing all linguistic ability was that now no one could expect him to remember the name of whatever backwards pack of Pegasus natives they were dealing with that week, let alone their religious holidays). The great hall was way too hot, the alcohol was strong, and the food was fantastic. They stumbled up to their rooms well after midnight, and Rodney only meant to close his eyes for a minute before taking off his boots.
The next thing he knew, the sky was just starting to go gray through the curtains and someone was slamming their shoulder against his locked door like they meant to break it down. The room swam around him as he sat up -- god, was he still drunk? -- but he could hear Ronon snarling something on the other side of the door and Teyla's voice over his earpiece. He staggered across the room and shot the bolt back, and Ronon stormed inside. He grabbed Rodney by the collar and shook him, which was the last thing his head needed, but over Ronon's shoulder he caught sight of Teyla. There was something -- the tight look on her face, the way she was leaning on the doorframe, or maybe the otherwise empty hall -- and then some of the jumbled pieces locked into place.
Drugged. They'd been drugged. And now Sheppard wasn't with them.
His gun was out and in his hand before he knew he'd gone for it. The ground was still tilting under his feet, geometry bending in his peripheral vision, but he could feel the adrenaline spike chasing the drug out of his system. He was pretty sure that it was anger that was making his grip shake, because he'd been doped and shot up and fucking poisoned by how many different people now? And this time they'd taken Sheppard (again) which -- no, just no.
Pushing herself into the room, Teyla said something urgent and pointed to his arm -- to the device, right, and god but he hated mind-altering chemicals, because everything other than caffeine just made him stupider than he could ever afford to be. He closed his eyes and tried Sheppard, starting with the crackle of a radio, moving to a fist pounding on a door, then a flare of light, and finally just a prolonged blast of undifferentiated sensory noise. No response, and he jerked his chin to the side to signal the negative.
Ronon had one of his knives out, the biggest one, and he'd angled himself toward the door in a way that made it pretty clear he was itching to go beat Sheppard's location out of whoever he could get to first. Rodney was about to gesture his agreement when Teyla grabbed his face and turned it back towards her. She pointed out the window to where the sun was rising, swept her arm out towards the hall and brought her outstretched fingers swiftly inward to stop short at her other palm, which she'd held up in warding. She circled her index finger twice over Rodney's pack and jerked a thumb toward the window again. He scrubbed a hand over his face and nodded, because she had a point. Whatever these assholes were planning, they clearly intended the remaining three-quarters of SGA-1 to sleep until the morning; grabbing their gear and sneaking out now was the best strategic move they had.
They spent a tense hour and a half hidden in the woods to the south of the town before Rodney finally managed to raise Sheppard. Whatever drug they'd used had taken him down hard; his responses were slow and distorted, almost unintelligible. To help him focus, Rodney called upon every bit of the vocabulary they'd established and threw himself into a really satisfying silent rant about how Sheppard was a goddamn lightweight who'd clearly forgotten that his job was to stay alert and, you know, not get kidnapped because his more important job, as he'd also forgotten, was to come to the rescue when technologically impoverished demi-civilizations kidnapped Rodney for his magnificent brain. Only now thanks to Sheppard's failure in the line of duty, Rodney had to orchestrate his rescue, which he was infinitely less suited to -- and did Sheppard realize how incredibly infuriating it was that when they finally saved his ass, Rodney wouldn't even have the option of telling these idiots each and every way this had been the stupidest move they'd made in their long and inglorious history of stupid--
Sheppard slapped a nearly tangible mental hand over Rodney's mouth (they were getting pretty good at faking sensation), waited a moment, and followed it up with a picture of himself smacking Rodney upside the head. More relieved than he was willing to admit, Rodney sent an eye-roll to Sheppard while he snapped for Ronon and Teyla's attention. Both of them were already watching him, and he pointed to the device and flashed an OK to signal that the Colonel was awake and back to his normal jackass self. They exchanged thankful looks while Sheppard suggested to Rodney that hey, now would be a really great time for them to get him out of here. Rodney tossed Sheppard the overly-amazed expression that meant no, seriously, that hadn't occurred to me, why THANK you for pointing that out as he dug the small whiteboard out of his pack, and then the four of them hunkered down to come up with a plan.
Planning turned into a lot of waiting, because Sheppard was locked in some basement with three inch ventilation slits for windows. It took hours to piece together enough information (street noises, glimpses of foot traffic, changing angle of the sun) for Teyla, who'd been the only one paying attention during the tour, to make a couple of guesses about where he was. In the meantime, though, the local dignitaries were kind enough to drop by his cell and run their mouths off for a while.
From what Sheppard could read between the lines of their grand pronouncements, the settlement relied on some kind of Ancient agrarian monitoring system to optimize their farm output. Of course, the whole thing had taken a ridiculous mystical spin over the centuries, so now the system was the voice of the gods, and the gene carriers who used it were the holy priests. Only there hadn't been a new gene carrier identified in a long time, and the last in the line was on his way out the door. Cue SGA-1's arrival and Sheppard accidentally lighting up an innocuous crystal sculpture (this was where Rodney buried his face in his hands and thought, oh my god, my city's survival depends on a guy who can't quit flirting with the knick-knacks). The feast had actually been in his honor -- funny how their hosts had neglected to mention that at the time -- and soon the whole thing would commence in a ceremony where he'd be anointed as the new priest, hosannas would be sung, and they'd fit him with the holy equivalent of an ankle monitor which would prevent him from ever passing through a gate again.
There wasn't really a way to relay this to Teyla and Ronon, but then again, the explanation didn't matter. Those two were deep into a discussion of strategy and tactics; Rodney couldn't follow most of it, but as Sheppard was literally pacing at the other end of the line, he flagged them down whenever they reached an agreement on some point and made them map out what they'd decided. By the early afternoon, they'd sketched out a plan for each of three neighborhoods they thought Sheppard might be stashed in. The next step was for Teyla to swipe a set of clothes and do a pass through the city, to confirm Sheppard's location and get the details they needed to finish the rescue plan.
She was maybe thirty meters into the brush when all of a sudden Rodney got hit with a surge of alarm from Sheppard, and then he had a direct pipeline to everything Sheppard was seeing. He started snapping frantically; when Teyla didn't turn around, Ronon stuck his thumb and index finger into his mouth and let out a high, birdlike whistle. That got her attention, and she started running back as Rodney whirled to Ronon and gestured wildly.
Now. They were moving Sheppard. The ceremony was about to start.
The three of them raced for the city, where Sheppard was being led up to the dais in the great hall. He kept the line open as the ceremony began, and though he was maintaining his outward cool, the first edges of suppressed panic were starting to trickle into what Rodney was getting from him. They made it into the building undetected, came up with half a plan -- but god, it was complicated, there was too much to keep track of. The damn brain damage meant he couldn't string more than four or five hand signals together before he started losing the thread, and with the time pressure Teyla and Ronon kept forgetting to break their communications into chunks like they'd practiced.
The more he missed, the more rushed they got, and meanwhile he was trying to keep Sheppard in the loop, trying to keep two sets of visual information separated, what he was getting from his own eyes and what he was getting from Sheppard. Rodney was used to multitasking in a crisis, but this wasn't multitasking, it was fucking juggling, with six different mental and physical balls in the air. When the man leading the ceremony slid the knife out of the ornate sheath at his belt, Sheppard reined in his own flinch but Rodney didn't, and the crash of the urn he knocked over rang out through the halls.
Three seconds later, both sides of the corridor were clogged with armed guards, carrying bolt-projectiles and wicked-looking scythes. The three of them were disarmed and escorted into the main hall, where the leader magnanimously forgave them the interruption and consented to let them watch the rest of the holy occasion. He used the knife to slice a thin knotted cord of the wrist of the old priest (stupid, Rodney thought to himself furiously, idiot, moron, stupid, stupid) and turned to dab some kind of oil onto Sheppard's forehead and throat. They'd taken Sheppard's uniform jacket and replaced it with a floor-length robe, heavy with beading and embroidery. It should have looked ridiculous but instead it made the whole thing more real, because even from fifty meters back Rodney could see that it was old, probably centuries. This wasn't just wacky local hijinks, this was religious orthodoxy -- there were over two thousand people crammed into the hall with thousands more in the courtyard outside, and all of them were probably ready to kill anyone who tried to take their new priest from them.
Up front, the leader stepped up onto the raised platform behind Sheppard and lifted his hands in the air, chanting loudly. Through Sheppard's eyes, Rodney could see the grim looks on Ronon and Teyla's faces, his own alarmed expression, and dammit, there had to be something he could do, there had to be someone else here who could--
He cut the visual link to Sheppard, and when he felt a phantom hand dig into his bicep as if to shake him, Rodney blocked that off too, flashed a stop sign at Sheppard -- shut up, now, I have to concentrate. He shut his eyes tight for a moment, opened them again, and then as clearly as he could, pictured a glow starting to emanate from the leader's hands. He sent the image out on an open channel, with the glow turning into search beams that moved over the crowd, and filled the transmission with a sense of expectation, of urgency. Nothing happened -- no response, no movement from the auditorium -- and Rodney upped the ante, made his image of the dais radiate a golden light, pictured the crowd turning to beckon the unseen viewer forward. Still there was nothing, and an attendant was handing the leader a thick, Ancient-looking cuff, obviously the monitor they'd mentioned to Sheppard, and fuck, they were out of time. Rodney pulled out all the stops, picturing farms springing up fertile and lush around the city, people rejoicing, small children being lifted towards the sun by ecstatic hands. He broadcast the Hallelujah Chorus, gilded his impatience into hope and sent that out too, promised in every way he could think of that this was the time, that everyone was waiting to welcome the person who could hear this message, so rise and come forward to be blessed but goddammit do it now now now now now--
A murmur rippled through the back of the crowd, and Rodney jerked against the hands of the guards to see a plain, colorless woman wandering up the aisle with a confused expression on her face. Up front, the leader was frowning, gesturing for her to go away. Her footsteps hesitated, and Rodney held his breath and kept his siren song going, urging her forward until she was maybe five meters from the dais. As a pair of guards stepped down to remove her, Sheppard darted forward to snatch the crystal sculpture off the altar and threw it in a low arc. She fumbled and nearly dropped it, but as her fingers closed around it, it started to glow.
Two hours later, the leader sent SGA-1 off with a generous trade agreement on grain and some kind of flax-like material. Sheppard smiled insincerely as he accepted the man's thanks (for finding the new priest) and apology (for withdrawing the offer of holiness, of course, not for almost enslaving him), and the four of them snagged their gear out of the woods and beat a grateful retreat back to the jumper. They spent the walk back bickering about just how far down this rescue attempt fell on the scale set by previous missions, but as they moved to their respective chairs, Sheppard dropped his hand to the top of Rodney's shoulder and squeezed once before stepping past him to the pilot's seat.
Rodney could feel the weight and warmth of the touch all the way through the debrief.
The next day he came back from lunch to find a large, colorful cartoon taped up in grand isolation on one of the lab walls: Sheppard in black and white clerical robes and Rodney dressed like some kind of Biblical prophet, both of them wrestling over a golden halo. He stomped around and gestured threateningly, but everyone feigned ignorance as to how it had gotten there. It had been months since Rodney had been the target of one of the anonymous pranks that flourished in the city in peacetime. He kept up the show of annoyance for the rest of the day, but only because he was taken aback by how good it felt to be included in this; he didn't know how to act, and since infuriated McKay was obviously the intended result, he decided he should oblige. Until he could figure out who'd done it and return the favor, it was the least he could do.
Two days after that, he was just starting to narrow down a list of suspects when Sheppard burst into the lab, grabbed him by the upper arm, and dragged him at a run into the gate room -- just in time to see Lorne and his team step out of a jumper, Parrish cradling a ZPM in his reverent hands.
Every scientist was practically vibrating with excitement by the time they got the ZPM installed in the power room, and the mood swept rapidly through the rest of the city. If one ZPM in wartime meant survival, then a second in peacetime meant discovery -- more off-world missions, more time with the control chair, more exploration within the city. The kitchen staff broke out the good stuff at dinner (chocolate cake with real chocolate, Rodney knew they'd been holding out on him), and everyone who was off-shift or had a break congregated in the mess hall. Rodney didn't need Sheppard to translate the conversations happening around them, and he didn't ask him to. He'd participated in enough of them himself after the Wraith siege had ended and everyone had finally realized that they'd lived to research another day.
Watching the entire science contingent gleefully plan their next three months felt like squeezing a deep bruise or a cut that had only half-healed. He'd painstakingly reinserted himself into the more important long-term projects, but there wasn't much he could do in the way of improvisation or discussion. Couldn't review the new research proposals to ensure efficient resource allocation. Couldn't be more than a secondary presence in the expansion into new facilities. Couldn't search the Ancient database for information on new artifacts. Unless Miko became spontaneously fluent with the device (right now she was at a kindergarten level at best), or the SGC decided Sheppard was best put to use as Rodney's dedicated translator (and God, he wished, but it wasn't going to happen), he was going to stay the slow cog in the city's accelerating machinery, and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it.
He didn't meet his team's eyes as he got up from the table, and their conversation faltered, but they didn't try to stop him. He dumped his tray and took the long way around the mess hall so he could avoid the traffic down the central aisle where people were approaching Radek in twos and threes, campaigning for project pre-approval. As he headed for the door, he caught Radek watching him as Neves talked his ear off. Rodney jerked his head down to avoid his gaze. Tomorrow, or maybe the day after that, he'd go and, fuck, shake Radek's hand or something, find some way to let him know that Rodney didn't begrudge him the rise in fortune that had come at Rodney's expense. Which he did, of course he did, but keeping his teeth clenched on that kind of pettiness was simpler now that he didn't have another option, and since he couldn't do the job anymore, the least he could do was get out of Radek's way.
Rodney was just about to swipe his hand in front of the door sensor when the overhead lights flickered subtly. He blinked and waited: nothing, and then just as he reached out, they did it again. Turning, he found Radek staring at him with a wary expression on his face. Rodney frowned at him and pointed a finger carefully upward, and Radek pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and started making his way down the aisle. Right as he reached Rodney, the lights flared for a fraction of a second and a distant alarm started. Rodney threw himself through the door as it slid open and sprinted for the transport chamber, Radek's footsteps pounding just behind his own.
[Go to part 3 ...]