Who's Left and Who's Leaving, by the_drifter (Amnesty 2007: Ways to Die Challenge)
Title: Who's Left and Who's Leaving
Author: the_drifter (fiercelydreamed)
Summary: "No names," Rodney tells them, one more time. "And no dates -- I'm serious about that. No one can know what anyone else is planning." John learns the structures of life and death.
Notes: 9500 words, vague spoilers through S4, mild language. Huge thanks to shaenie for betaing.
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Eight months into year seven, Rodney gets the memo from the SGC and radios all three of them. "My quarters. Soon as you can."
John's running a training seminar for new personnel ("Diplomacy in the Pegasus Galaxy," which he privately thinks of as "Eighteen Simple Rules for Probably Not Getting Shot") when he gets the call. After this long, he knows what that few words from Rodney means: whatever it is, it's bad, and it's the kind of bad that'll get much worse if John drops everything and goes pounding through the halls. So he just says, "Roger that," and picks the thread of the lecture up right where he dropped it, face friendly and blank.
He's the last one to get to Rodney's quarters, but Rodney doesn't even chide him for it. He just looks up from his seat on the end of the bed and hands John a tablet with an email from the SGC. Teyla's sitting on the edge of the couch. Ronon's leaning uneasily against the table. All three of them watch him as he reads it.
"It's a set of new research directives for the science departments," John says, scrolling downward.
"With a uniform deadline for completion," Rodney says. He doesn't wait for John to ask. "Two years."
John stares. "They're shutting down the expedition?"
Teyla bites her lower lip, knuckles pale where her hands are laced together on her lap. Ronon raises his eyebrows. "Or changing it," he says, and folds his arms a little more tightly across his chest.
That night, they make the pact.
*
"You have two weeks to take this to whoever needs to know about it," Rodney tells them. "Then give me a headcount. I don't want names."
John runs a hand through his hair, his fingers fisting in on themselves as soon as he lets go. "I can't. Rodney, I can't -- I'm the military second for the expedition--"
"No, right, of course not," Rodney says, eyes wide, and Teyla sets a hand on John's wrist and murmurs, "Tell me who -- I will talk to them."
"How long will it take you to get the stuff ready?" Ronon asks Rodney.
"And keep it quiet?" He scrubs a hand over his mouth, thinking hard. "Ten days. That's after I get the count."
"And you're sure we want to do this," John says, but he knows he isn't really asking, and so do they. He's been sure for years.
*
When they've gone through all the angles and talked about it as much as any of them can bear to, Teyla gets to her feet. She goes to Ronon and presses her forehead against his, one hand curving up behind his neck to guide his head down to meet hers. When she grips John's shoulders, he can feel the faint tremor running through her hands, and he closes his eyes and breathes in the smell of her until she steps away. Rodney fumbles his way into the gesture, awkward as usual, but once they're there the two of them stay like that for a long time. Rodney's the one who found out about this, and the one who came up with the plan, and the magnitude of all that must finally be hitting him, because when he moves again, it's to pull her into an abrupt hug before he steps away.
They all look at each other for a minute, letting her action stand in for all the things they're not saying.
"No names," Rodney tells them, one more time. "And no dates -- I'm serious about that. No one can know what anyone else is planning."
*
John lays awake for a long time that night, imagining all the different ways that this could go down.
*
Seventeen days later, the chime sounds in John's room a little after midnight. When he palms the door open, Rodney ducks in and waits for it to shut completely before pressing a black plastic box the size of a shaving kit into John's hand.
"That was fast," John says, blinking down at it.
Rodney shrugs jerkily, with only one shoulder. "I haven't made all of them yet. Just the first four."
"How many," he starts, and Rodney slices a hand through the air in negation, mouth pressing down. After a few seconds, his resolve folds, and his fingers curl in toward his palm.
"Eleven," he says.
John doesn't know what number he'd been expecting, and now that he has one he can't tell how he feels about it, so he just nods. The kit's heavier than he expected.
"Whatever you're -- you need to wait to pick a date. If you're picking one." Rodney's hands trace skittishly through the air, like he's searching for and discarding words, and finally he just tucks his fingers up under his arms. His eyes flicker back and forth across a spot a few feet away on the floor. "I -- don't think it's going to start for a couple months, but when it happens, wait at least another month after that. So we're sure everything's ready."
John straightens. "We've got a first?"
"Yes," Rodney says, and nods once as he looks back up at John, like the secondary confirmation in an initiation sequence. Armed and standing by for the go.
*
John had only given Teyla one name: Lorne's. There were more people he'd thought about offering this to, but he knew most of them wouldn't take it, and he was pretty sure that Rodney, Ronon, or Teyla would already be planning to approach the rest.
There's no way they can talk about it, but as the weeks tick by with nothing happening, he keeps wondering what Lorne decided. There's no safe way to ask.
One afternoon, when they're coming back from the third auxiliary armory, John waits until they step into the transport chamber and then says, casually, "You ever think about home?"
Lorne pauses, one hand hovering just over the touchscreen. His expression shifts subtly. "All the time," he says, and presses the pad of his middle finger firmly against the destination point.
*
On M6I-235, where the Athosians used to look for Ancient artifacts, they're five miles out from the jumper and forty out from the gate when Ronon frowns and says, "Is that smoke?"
Teyla slides her pack off and climbs a tree, thirty-five feet at least, then swarms down it so fast it's just this side of a controlled fall. "We need to move. Now," she says, and then grabs her pack and starts running.
They end up on a low island in the middle of a broad river delta, watching what looks like half the continent burn. A day into the firestorm, Teyla tightens down the straps on her vest and tells them, "If I follow the shore, I may be able to find a way back to the gate."
"Are you crazy?" Rodney yelps. "Who knows how far this stretches--"
She's sorting through the things in her pack, changing the arrangement of her supplies. "It's all right. I will be careful."
Rodney pushes up off his rock and goes to stand next to her, raising his voice a little higher over the roar of the flames. "No, seriously, I know you've never watched news reports on forest fires, but this kind of thing can go on for weeks. A blaze this big is definitely going to be able to generate its own wind storm and--"
The corners of her mouth come up as his pitch rises with the intensity of the explanation. It's a distracted expression, both fond and pained. "This is not the first fire I have seen," she says, repacking her supplies. "I promise I will keep as far from the edge as I can."
"--Far isn't going to cut it!" he insists, fumbling out his data tablet and frantically tapping at the touch screen. "It's over eight hundred degrees Celsius in there -- all it takes is for one of the hundreds of thousands of sparks that thing is setting off to catch and you'll be surrounded--"
"Rodney," she says, turning and catching his wrist. He stares at her, and then John sees it through the half-open zip of her pack: a small box, black plastic.
"Rodney," John echoes, and Teyla pushes Rodney's hand carefully down to his side.
"You need to let me go," she tells him. Her eyes flicker to John, and then past him to Ronon, who's slid off his log and onto his feet. "I will see if I can radio Atlantis, get some help," she says, with a strange, formal emphasis on the words. Rodney's staring at her with a lost look on his face.
John swallows and jerks his head in a nod. "Here," Ronon says, and tosses her a couple MREs, followed by his medkit. Her efficient hands slip them into her pack, pull the zipper tight. She swings it onto one shoulder and turns to look at all of them, John and Ronon and then Rodney.
Stepping backward, Teyla blinks hard and says, in an uneven voice, "Do not worry about me." Then she turns and jogs down into the river, one hand holding her pack aloft as she ducks below the surface. Fifteen yards later she emerges in shallower water, settles her pack onto her back, and wades toward the far-off ribbon of the shore without a backward glance. They watch her until her outline grows too indistinct to pick out from the gray-orange haze that has swallowed the horizon.
*
It's dawn the next day before the rescue jumper finds them. They search for hours, but there's no sign of her. She's gone.
*
Keller keeps the three of them in the infirmary for a day, worried about the after-effects of smoke inhalation. When she reluctantly clears them, they get Sam's authorization and dial the gate in New Athos.
They walk through the fall night in silence. John can't stop listening to the absence of her footsteps. When they get to the village, Halling rises from the fire to greet them, but his smile fades when he sees their faces.
"It's Teyla," John says, and abruptly he can't go any farther. They're coming back here with nothing: not her, not her body, not even her ghost. These people have been their friends since they came through the gate from Earth, and John doesn't know what to tell them. He can't even give them his word that she's dead.
Ronon speaks up from beside him. "There was a fire on Pallidrae. We got stranded. She tried to make it to the gate."
"We lost her," Rodney says. In his voice, John can hear the aching sting of the smoke.
Halling closes his eyes, and for a long minute age wears heavily on all the lines of his face. "It was her choice," he murmurs, and John wonders what he knows, if Teyla had told him. Kannia, he thinks suddenly, and hears a hiss of air before he realizes he's taken a breath. Oh christ, what am I going to--
Ronon's coat brushes against John's jacket as his hand comes to rest, for a second only, at the center of his back. John glances over and sees the calm look on Ronon's face, and then he exhales slowly. If Halling knows, then Mada and Firil may too, and if they don't, Teyla would have given Ronon instructions for what to tell her daughter and the cousins fostering her. She would have been prepared.
"Come," Halling says as he looks back up and holds a steady hand out to them. It's the gesture of someone who has had enough practice mourning that he knows what to do when grief invites itself in. "We must tell the others, and then we will celebrate the life she made for herself, and her passage from it."
John swallows. "Yeah," he says. When Halling clasps a hand around his shoulder, he mirrors the ritual motion, feeling its symbolism: the way it connects them around the vacant space between. Ronon and Rodney repeat it in turn, stepping into the start of the ceremony.
Something about the exchange tethers John against that anchorless feeling, and as they make their way to the fire, he's grateful to be here in Pegasus, among people who still know the structures of both life and death.
*
"She was the first, wasn't she?" John asks when they're back on Atlantis, watching the sky gray out over a balcony, dawn creeping in.
Rodney's sitting on the ground next to him, hands flattened against each other and forehead pressed against the back of his thumbs. "Yes," he whispers. "She asked me. She wanted to make sure the way was clear for the rest of us."
*
Five weeks later, they return to New Athos to fulfill their role as word-bearers, cut the mourning bracelets off the wrists of Teyla's relatives and scatter the beads into the river. Four days after that, SGA-1 -- Ronon, Rodney, John, and Sergeant Lilleman -- head out to investigate possible Wraith activity on M8H-834.
The Wraith and the Replicators have more or less battered each other down to rubble, and standing orders from Earth are for the Atlantis expedition to lay low and quietly keep tabs on the survivors. The mission is based on a pretty unlikely series of rumors, and John walks through the gate expecting the whole thing to be a bust. Forty-five minutes later, they're sprinting back, because crashed dart turns out to be more like downed goddamn hive ship.
Lilleman's twenty-six and broke a decade of MRCD speed records when she went through boot camp. She's got the wormhole up by the time the rest of them reach the clearing, and Rodney doesn't even slow down as he hits the event horizon. John sends her through next, backing from tree to bush to rock with his hands tight around his P90. The darts are still out of sight, but he can hear a pair of them screaming in toward their position. It's been months since he heard that sound. He hasn't missed it.
When he's just within lunging distance of the gate itself, he turns to wave Ronon through and finds himself staring directly into the barrel of Ronon's gun. "Sorry, Sheppard," Ronon says. In the uneven half-light of the wormhole, his grin is a wicked slice of white. "Gotta go."
John opens his mouth to say what the hell are you-- and then red crackles through his field of vision. He feels the distant ghost of Ronon's hand closing around his vest as the world drops out.
*
He wakes up in the infirmary.
"Ronon," he says immediately.
Keller, at the monitor by his bed, turns and calls, "He's awake," and Lorne and Sam break out of their conference and hurry over from the far end of the room, Rodney half a pace ahead of them.
"Ronon?" John repeats, pushing himself up, and Sam shakes her head. Lilleman's standing in the background, watching from just outside of earshot.
"We were hoping you could tell us," Sam says. "The gate closed right after you came through, and we haven't been able to dial the planet again."
"Fell through, is more like it," Rodney says. "Or were thrown through." He's stopped at the far end of the bed.
"How long was I out?" John asks, swinging his legs awkwardly off the side as Lorne steps back to give him room. The nerves in his hands and feet are still only halfway awake.
"Forty-six minutes," Rodney says in a flat voice.
Eight minutes too long for a busy signal. John drops heavily back onto the edge of the bed. "Dammit," he mutters. "He must have yanked the control crystal."
"So it was him," Rodney demands, and John can tell how those four words function in the context of the conversation -- so he was the one who sent you through -- but he can also tell what Rodney's asking.
"Yeah," John says, meeting Rodney's eyes as he answers both halves of the question at once. "It was him."
*
It's four days before the gate techs manage to establish a wormhole to the planet. When the rescue party goes through -- three cloaked jumpers manned by John, Rodney, Lorne's team, and a squad of Marines under Lilleman -- the hive ship is smoldering in the middle of a ragged crater. There are a dozen dead Wraith scattered through the woods, but there's no way to locate individual bodies in the mass of blackened tissue that's what's left of the ship. No darts, wrecked or otherwise. No response on the radio. No ping from an emergency beacon.
No Ronon.
*
In the next month, keeping tabs on the Wraith turns into recon, which turns into a nightmare of paperwork when SGA-5 go AWOL for six hours on M5E-942, kidnap a stray Wraith, and try to shoot Ronon's whereabouts out of it. There's no way for Sam and John to keep that one out of the rumor mill, not when Harriman gets knocked down a rank and the SGC recalls Dr. Steiler for psychiatric evaluation. John spends senior staff listening to the discussion of whether they ought to table off-world missions while they sort this mess out, unable to think of anything to say that could defuse the situation without blowing their cover. Finally, Sam pushes her chair back from the table and says, "Okay guys, let's put a lid on it for the next five minutes. We've got someone coming in with an event petition."
She palms the door open and Fatima al-Jalal is standing on the other side. The room gets quiet as she steps into the open ring of the tables, declining Sam's gestured invitation to sit. Fatima's been 2IC on the kitchen staff since 2006. She also spent most of the previous year as Ronon's girlfriend.
Once Sam's back in her chair, Fatima takes a deep breath and lifts her face, gaze leveled at the wall behind them. "It'll be forty-seven days on Wednesday," she tells them. No one has to ask since what. "I'd like permission to use the west tower gallery for the rayla-til."
*
Wednesday night, they drop the city back to a skeleton crew, and volunteers take over the second and third shifts to free up anyone who wants to attend. John goes, because he can't not, but he stays to the back of the crowd as Fatima lights the great keya candle, the flames from its four dozen wicks illuminating the room and fragmenting faces into yellow and deep black. She stares into the fire for a long minute, eyes dark and her face dry, and then she opens her mouth and starts to speak. John waits just long enough for everyone else to fall into the rhythm of it, laughing and murmuring reactions, and then he slips out the door.
He spends the next four hours on the observation ring above the gallery, watching people trade Ronon stories. This high up, he can make out faces and voices but not words, which is why he's up here. There are stories of his own that he could tell, but he doesn't want to, and he doesn't want to hear the things that will inevitably get said. He always said he wanted to go out fighting. Or I guess there's only so long you can beat the odds. Or every time the gate opens, part of me's waiting for his IDC.
When the crowd has fallen silent, thinned down from a hundred to a few dozen, Fatima reaches down and slides a small knife out of a sheath, and that's when John turns and walks out into the empty corridor. This is what a rayla-til is: everyone tells stories about the person until no one has anything left to say, and the ones who are left add their blood to the candle. Nick your left thumb for a friend, cut a line through your shirt and across your chest for a lover, and slice your right palm for family. One shallow cut only -- nothing that would injure you, just enough that you can shed a few drops of blood over the flames. Release part of yourself to go join them, so you won't have to miss them anymore.
This is what a rayla-til is: a ritual from a culture that had learned to heal fast and keep moving, from a galaxy where you couldn't count on having a body to lay to rest. John knows this might be the largest rayla-til since Sateda fell. But he can't watch it.
Sometime after three in the morning, John follows the edge of the southwest pier back in and climbs eleven flights of stairs to the gallery. When he steps through the open door, Rodney's the only one still there. He doesn't lift his eyes from the flames as John comes to stand not quite next to him, but his shoulders relax slightly inward, like he'd been waiting for something and now, for the moment, he isn't. The deep pool of wax in the heart of the keya is stained and spattered with red.
John doesn't see a mark on Rodney, and he has no desire to pick up the knife that, up close, he recognizes as one of Ronon's. They both know that whatever Ronon is now, he isn't missing.
They stay there until the candle burns out.
*
They lose people in the next few months. Not a lot, nowhere near the casualties they suffered during the Wraith siege or the flight from the Replicators. Few enough that in the reports back to the SGC, they still refer to the deaths as deaths and not as attrition. Still, even the slight increase has everyone on edge. John's on edge for a different reason, because the deaths are happening one by one, and every time he wonders if the accident is really something else. He's never been good at believing someone's absence is final, and now, whenever there are no remains to send home, he wonders if it's one of them. It makes it hard to write the letters to parents or spouses, hard to listen to the speeches, hard to feel anything but unease when the survivors walk through the gate to carry the news to Earth.
He's got a list in his head, eleven slots with only four names filled in permanently, and two more lists besides it: the people he can't see leaving this galaxy willingly, and the people they've lost since Teyla started the clock. He can't stop shuffling the people on those two lists through the open seven slots, testing combination after combination. It's a puzzle he's not supposed to solve, too many possibilities and too little information, and so he can't stop thinking about it.
*
They make it into year eight with no public indication from above that the expedition's slated to go through any kind of shakedown. John isn't surprised. The SGC and the IOA would have to be idiots not to realize that they've manned Atlantis with brilliant, adaptive, and phenomenally insubordinate loose cannons, and that the best way to rein them in is by withholding key pieces of information. If anything, the silence confirms what's coming.
It's spring on the mainland when they get a request for assistance from the Giallen, an industrial culture living around an old Ancient outpost on M6X-560. Their planet's hit one of its bicentennial cycles of seismic activity, and some of the old geothermal conduits they rely on are starting to rupture. Zelenka takes a science team over for a week to handle the repairs.
They're on their way home when a quake hits and the wormhole flickers, ripples unevenly, and blinks out.
Rodney and Sam spend six white-faced hours trying to figure out how to get their people out of the memory buffer in M6X-560's gate. After this long on the expedition, John's probably got a better layman's knowledge of stargate technology than anyone else without a doctorate, but everything they're doing is way beyond him -- and from the desperate edge in both their voices, it's pretty far beyond them too. In the end it almost seems to come together by accident: Rodney's retrieval program hasn't even finished initializing when suddenly the event horizon surges up and the science team comes stumbling through.
Half of the gate room has already started toward them before the other half finishes the headcount and realizes Zelenka isn't there.
*
John doesn't say much during the debrief afterward. It's likely that everyone assumes he's being stoic, but the only thing he's feeling is the intense discomfort of being one of the few people who understand what's really going on. After all, this is Zelenka: if he wanted to take himself out without leaving a trace, this was the perfect way to do it.
It doesn't occur to John to question his certainty until he stops by Rodney's quarters that night. He lets himself in without waiting for Rodney to answer his knock; they're a couple years past protocol at this point. Inside, Rodney's pacing broken polygons across the carpet, and when he turns, there are tight and anxious lines around the edges of his eyes.
The ground seems to shove suddenly upward under John's feet. "Wait. Wait. Do you think he actually--"
"I don't know," Rodney blurts in a voice with no foundation under it. "God, I don't know."
"You must have asked him," John insists, "Rodney, you can't tell me he turned you down--"
"No, no, he didn't. And that's -- Jesus." Rodney leans back against the wall and rubs his hands over his face. "He told me he was going to wait until after I went," he says from behind his palms. "To make sure things would be okay in the city. That was the plan."
John sits down hard on the edge of the bed. "... fuck," he breathes.
Rodney's gaze is leveled at the far wall, eyes unfocused like he's staring at something levels down and miles out. "Yes," he says, "exactly."
*
It's Rodney who puts on a dark suit and gives the eulogy at Zelenka's memorial, and it's Rodney who makes the trip to Brno to tell Zelenka's family. He comes back through the gate looking like he's aged a year in three days.
*
Nothing goes back to normal after that, and John's jaw aches from walking around with his teeth on edge. It's not that he hadn't thought about what he'd be giving up by doing this, but he never really considered what the period leading up to it would be like. He doesn't have Ronon to run with, or Teyla to kick his ass until he winds down. And as for Rodney, it's like Zelenka's death flipped some switch in his brain and he's a different person now.
He's taken himself off the mission roster and delegated most of his research to underlings. His work hours haven't gotten any shorter, but now he spends them orchestrating obsessive cycles of testing and maintenance, fine-tuning every system the city has. John doesn't say anything about it, but it comes up one day when he and Sam are reviewing the month's activity reports. "He never signed on to be a soldier, and he's been in the field a long time," she tells him, and pushes her hair back off her face. She looks tired all the time lately. "I think Rodney's started to feel his own mortality."
"If he's only feeling it now, then he's not as smart as he says he is," John says, defaulting to sarcasm. His only other option is to tell her she's a lot more right than she knows.
*
The problem is that John doesn't know if Rodney's doing this out of a sense of responsibility -- if it's preparation -- or if he's doing it because he's honestly scared that something else is going kill him first.
*
John's running Ronon's old training class on anti-Wraith fighting techniques when all of a sudden the klaxon sounds and Rodney comes in over an open channel, voice bright with panic. "This is an emergency -- section 12, tower 4, level 9 -- I need Sheppard, Carter, a munitions team, oh god, Ambrose, Davenport--"
"Talk to me, McKay," John interrupts as he runs out into the corridor. "What are we heading into here?"
"A bomb," Rodney answers, fast and garbled like he's got a mouthful of tools, "it was in stasis in Lab 6. It looked dormant, I took the containment chamber offline for recalibration, now I can't get it back on again--"
"Radiological?" Sam cuts in. "I'm in the control tower -- Rodney, do we need to get the shield--"
"No, no, I don't think so, but it's powering itself off the city systems and I can't get it to -- shit -- it's like it's sucking power out of the damn walls -- Sheppard, I need you to get to the control chair, see if you can override it--"
"On it," John says, skidding into the transport chamber and slapping the touchscreen, "just keep talking, tell me what I need to do--"
"Reyes here, leaving the equipment room in section 5, en route to your position--"
"McKay, it's Davenport, I'm almost to the tower, is that lab equipped with an EM disruptor field--"
People flatten back against the walls as John races past them, the klaxon still wailing. Nearly sliding into the door of the chair room as he swipes his hand across the sensor, he calls, "I'm there, Rodney, do you want me to cut power to that level or to the whole section--"
"--Munitions team's at the base, we're on our way up now--"
"--This is Ambrose, I'm right by the main lab, how much time do we--"
"Oh god," Rodney says as John throws himself into the chair, "oh god, I can't -- no, out, out, everyone back, Reyes, fall back -- I'm shutting bulkhead doors at level 7, Sheppard, it's not going to--" and then there's a burst of static that cuts off as a distant boom echoes through the walls.
"Rodney!" The chair locks into the lowered position and the city flares to life in John's head, but he can't get a picture of any of the tower's top four levels. "Rodney, goddammit, answer me--"
"--This is Reyes, my team's okay, but that was definitely an explosion and the doors aren't responding--"
"Rodney," Sam says, "Rodney, come in," and then, "John, we can't get a reading on that tower, can you get those doors open--"
John clenches his hands down on the chair's arms and just forces the city's systems, shredding through the protocol Rodney had used to lock the doors down against the blast. He can feel the burnt-out circuits and the peripheral damage, the way the doors grind in their frames, but he still can't see a thing above level 7.
"Done," he snaps, "Reyes, get your ass up there, somebody call Keller--"
"Colonel," Reyes starts, and then trails off.
"What, dammit," John snarls, right as Sam says, "What've you got?"
"Nothing," Reyes says, sounding defeated. "The blast ... everything above the level 7 bulkhead is just gone." The words come over the line just as John manages to commandeer the surveillance cameras for the entire section and then he can see it himself: there's no rubble around the base of the tower, only smoke and haze rising where the top of it used to be. Four levels reduced to their component molecules, literally vanished into thin air.
"Jesus," John chokes, and the klaxon trails into silence as he cuts the connection and the chair goes dark.
*
When the chime goes off in his quarters, John doesn't answer it, just sits there at the table and waits for the door to open. It rings again, and John realizes that he was waiting for Rodney to let himself in like usual. There's a moment where he nearly throws up. He locks his jaw down against it and calls out, "Yeah," through gritted teeth.
The door slides open and Sam steps through it, stopping partway across the room. John gets to his feet. "What is it," he says, and the words come out flat and distant, like a cassette tape worn thin.
She looks at him for a moment without answering, and then squints and swallows hard. "His sister," she says. "She doesn't know yet. I thought that -- you might want to be the one to--"
"No," he blurts, and Sam's eyes go wide. His fingernails are digging into his palms, and he turns away, grips the back of his chair. "I can't, I'm sorry. I can't go back there."
"Of course. I understand," Sam says with an automatic swiftness that tells him she doesn't, but that she's going to take it at face value anyway. They've been working together for five years now, and the one thing he's never seen her do is pry. "I'll do it."
Still facing away from her, he nods. After a pause, she says, "He left instructions. About his things here. If there's something you want before I pack them up ..."
Eyes shut, John starts to shake his head, then stops. It might just be an old instruction, but if it's not -- if Rodney changed it since they all decided -- then there might be something there. Something that could tell him what happened, what he's supposed to do now. He presses a hand against his forehead and mutters, "Yeah. I'll ... tonight."
"Okay," she answers. He hears her take a breath. For a horrible moment, he thinks she's going to tell him she's sorry, or offer some uninvited wisdom on how to watch your teammates get killed and get through it, or suggest he make an appointment to talk to Dr. Kim.
All she does is let the air quietly back out again. "Jesus," she murmurs. "What a year."
The door whispers open behind him, and her footsteps recede into the hall.
*
It's late when John leaves his quarters and walks to Rodney's. He detours through corridors and stairwells he knows will be empty, not wanting to see anyone along the way. By the time he gets there, he could almost convince himself that the entire city is deserted except for him.
The lights don't come on right away when John steps inside, and there's a moment in the dark where he's caught by the sudden certainty that Atlantis herself is gone too, that this whole place is just an empty shell left behind. Then he notices his hands are still fisted in his pockets. He pulls one out and waves it over at the sensor. The lights come on.
Rodney's quarters look exactly like they have for years: unmade bed and the laptop on the table, yesterday's socks on the carpet, academic degrees in their frames. There's a dirty coffee mug on the edge of the desk, like it had been set there carelessly by someone who'd planned to wash it later. No obvious signs that Rodney had started this day knowing how it would end, but then Rodney, of all people, wouldn't have left any. He would have known better than that.
When it becomes clear that John can't learn what he wants to know just by looking, he grits his teeth and starts systematically going through the place. He doesn't know what he's looking for, so he casts the net as wide as he can -- things missing, or put in the wrong spots, or hidden somewhere that only someone really looking would find them. He's boxed up a lot of people's stuff over his career, but he's always tried to ignore what he was handling. The invasive wrongness of this search leaves a greasy feeling just under his skin, but he can't get himself to break it off.
There's nothing to tell him what happened, and the longer he goes without finding anything, the more exhaustive he gets -- checking the mounting hardware on the lamps, tipping out the dirty laundry, scanning through the stack of notebooks on the desk. But if Rodney's left some kind of sign, it's not one John knows how to spot, and all the drawers and closets and cupboards are filled evenly, with no conspicuous absences beyond that of Rodney himself. He doesn't find the black plastic box, but that doesn't mean anything, because he knows Rodney never would have left that where anyone would ever look. As he searches, he can't escape the memory of the terror in Rodney's voice over the radio, how it broke as he yelled for the munitions team to pull back.
When John's finally gone through the last cabinet, he just stands in the middle of the room, feeling the echoing space left by all the people they've lost since he came to this city.
There's a picture on top of the bookshelf of Jeannie and Madison and Kaleb. He thinks about Sam boxing up the things in this room and taking whatever isn't classified back to Vancouver, ringing the doorbell in dress blues, sitting down with Jeannie and her family and telling them whatever she's going to tell them. It should be him going, and he knows it. He knows Jeannie won't understand how he could pass this off onto someone else. It doesn't matter.
Even if he knew what to tell her -- and he doesn't, he doesn't even know what the truth is -- there's no way he can go back there. After everything that's happened, there's no way he's ever setting foot on Earth again. He can't risk that he might get stuck there, that he might never make it back.
Then he remembers the rest of his conversation with Sam, the part about the provisions Rodney made for his belongings, and he turns and walks out the door empty-handed. There's nothing that he wants there. There's nothing there at all.
Back in his own room, he locks the door, turns off all the lights, and steps onto the bed. In the dark, he runs his hands over the seams of the ceiling tiles until he finds the one with the tiny notch in the lip. He slides a knife under the edge and pries it loose, then slips his hand into the gap and gropes until his fingers make contact with what he's looking for. He climbs back down, shuts the curtains, and flips the reading lamp on.
In his hands is the box Rodney had given him. He's never opened it, and he sits on the edge of the bed and stares at it for a long time: its matte surface and rounded corners, the featureless seam running around the edge. Feeling its remembered, still unexpected weight.
Almost without direction, his fingers close around the latch and pop it open.
Inside are two small devices. The one shaped like an ear thermometer deactivates the subcutaneous transmitter. The other hides life signs from Ancient, Asgard, and Earth technology. He knows what they are from the night Rodney got the memo, the one and only time they talked about what they'd need to pull this off. He also knows Rodney must have built these himself.
Underneath them is a folded slip of paper with a gate address and the following instructions: Wait 24 hours, then go here. Bring 3 days supplies.
The text is printed and anonymous, but under it is a very faint, penciled string of letters. John recognizes the cipher he and Rodney had developed back when they were held hostage on M0F-984, when they got so bored they started passing notes in code even though the guards were illiterate. It takes him a minute to remember how to translate it.
Rodney's note reads, If you get there before me, save me a seat.
John stares at it, then refolds it and sets it and the two devices back in the box. He clicks the latch shut and turns the light off, then stands on the bed to return it to its hiding place. Fitting the ceiling tile back into its niche, he runs his fingers over the edge until he's sure it's set flush with the tiles around it.
One hundred and seventy-three soldiers. Fifty-eight civilians. Sumner. Beckett. Ford. Elizabeth. Ronon and Teyla -- the closest people he's had to family in his adult life.
Rodney.
All of them gone, and somehow he's still here.
John Sheppard sits down on the edge of his bed, pushes the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, and cries.
*
Thirty-one days after Rodney's accident, John fakes his own death on M7K-385.
They've got a satellite in orbit there taking deep space telemetry, and he convinces Sam to let him do the scheduled flyover to upload the data. Once he's through the gate and the wormhole is closed, he lands the puddlejumper and pulls the control crystal out of the automatic data recorder, picks up his pack, and steps out onto the planet's surface. The air outside is brisk and astringent with unfamiliar smells, and he tosses his radio onto the jumper's floor as he closes the hatch. He takes the black plastic box out of his tac vest and activates the sensor scrambler, then sets the tip of thermometer-shaped device in the hollow behind his right ear and closes his eyes against the phantom buzz of low voltage as it melts the circuits of his subcutaneous transmitter.
In his pocket is the remote he and Rodney found back in year five, and John uses it to direct the jumper up out of the atmosphere and settle it into orbit right next to the satellite. Face raised toward the fine bright haze of the midday sky, he flips the override switch and triggers the self-destruct. Then he dials an uninhabited planet and walks through the wormhole without a second glance.
He doesn't know what the people on Atlantis will make of the wreckage. Maybe they'll think it was an ambush, or a freak malfunction, or they really will chalk it up to suicide. They'll lay out theories in official SGC reports and argue about it when they get drunk together, and eventually everyone will make up their minds one way or another, and somewhere down the line, they'll forget. Forget all of the confusion and uncertainty, the things that happened that no one could understand, until faces and voices fade like colors in a Polaroid, thinning into yellow and then to white.
None of that matters to him anymore.
*
When he dials the address on the paper twenty-four hours later, the wormhole takes him from the middle of one sparse forest to the outskirts of another. It's afternoon on the new planet instead of morning, and the dry bite in the air makes him think of autumn, right around the first frost. He climbs the ridge overlooking the gate and sees only more trees in all directions, thick in the creases of the rumpled valleys, thinning out where the tops of the hills flatten under the pale clouds.
The spot he chooses is about half a mile up the slope, just before the grade gets steep enough that it'd be tough to navigate in the dark. It's a small patch of level ground with a clear view of the gate, half-screened by underbrush and ringed by towering trees. He leaves his pack there and spends the last few hours of daylight gathering fallen sticks and dry limbs. By twilight he's got a stack about as high as his waist, and he clears out a space for a fire pit, drops a match into a pile of logs and kindling, and settles down to wait.
He doesn't really sleep much that first night, or if he does, all he dreams of is the woods around him: the small sounds of nocturnal animals, the unfamiliar constellations sliding behind the branches above him. He's awake when dawn slips through the underbrush, gradually watering the shadows down to an indeterminate gray.
The gate stays quiet all day long, and through the night after that, and the second day is a little colder, washing the woods with thin mist. He feeds the fire and keeps waiting. There are some kind of bird-squirrel things flitting through the trees, and he's caught a few glimpses of a pale gray animal like a badger with six legs. He's not very hungry, so it'll be a couple of days at least before he'll have to figure out if they're edible, but water's going to be an issue soon, and so will wood. He tries to calculate how long he can wait before he goes to gather more if he wants to be able to leave the fire burning while he goes out. It's not the best idea, and he'll have to clear the ground for a couple more meters around the pit if he doesn't want to send the woods up, but better that than douse it and risk that someone will come through, see no sign, and leave before he can catch them.
He wonders where the nearest creek is, and how cold it gets in the winter. He wonders how long he could make a go of it here, if he had to, because the note says three days, but things could have changed. It could take longer for them to get to him. He wonders if he could do a whole year here, long enough for the SGC's deadline to come and go, or longer, because if no one comes, if nothing else went like it was supposed to, then he can't think of anywhere in Pegasus he really wants to go. Better here in the quiet, he thinks, than among strangers and alone. And both of those better than Earth.
*
In the middle of the third night, not long after the second moon has crept above the horizon, there's a flare of blue light from the valley below, and John turns his head just in time to see the event horizon stabilize and a solitary figure come through.
He's too far up to identify who it is, or for them to be able to see him through the brush. Instead of standing, or walking over to the rock that juts out over the slope, or calling out, John pulls another log from the pile beside him and feeds it into the fire. Whoever it is will see the light and make their way up here. All he has to do is wait.
John stares into the flames for a while before he hears the first distant rustle of someone moving up the slope, and his mind is strangely empty but his heart is pounding fast and loud in his chest. He focuses on the crackle of the fire, its irregular flickering and the sparks lofting up on the smoke into the night, until his eyes are caught by motion in the shadows beyond it and Rodney steps forward out of the darkness.
It's not the longest they've gone without seeing each other since they first joined the expedition, but John finds his eyes adjusting to Rodney's presence as though to a sudden change in light. Rodney's in khakis and some thickly-spun brown sweater John's never seen before, with no holster on his hip, and his face is bright and clearly traced by the shifting light. His posture is a little tense, like he's holding himself ready for something, but there isn't the manic momentum John always remembers him having on Atlantis.
Rodney looks at him over the fire for a long silent minute, eyes wide and mouth just barely open, chest still rising and falling from the climb. Then he tucks his hands in his pockets and starts to circle around the fire to the log where John's sitting. John can't stop his head from turning to track Rodney, and it's only when Rodney sits down and the log shifts under his weight that John manages to drag his eyes away, back to the fire.
He reaches into the pile of tinder beside him and tosses one of the thorny branches into the fire, watching the leaves blacken and curl in the heat. The smoke takes on a complicated smell, like nutmeg and lemongrass. "I was starting to think I'd be here a while," he says, aiming for relaxed, ironic. The edges of the vowels come out cracked.
Rodney tucks his chin a little deeper into his chest. "Sorry. We've been staying pretty strict about the 'three day' thing, and I didn't--" He pauses, glances sideways. John doesn't look back, but he can feel Rodney's gaze moving over his face. "It's not like we have a way of determining ETAs."
John shrugs. "That's okay. It hasn't been too bad." He tips his face upwards and watching the sparks rise up toward the black-on-blue pattern of branches and sky. "Kind of like a vacation."
Rodney makes a small noise of amusement, more grunt than chuckle. "Right." He hunkers down a little, warming his hands on the fire. "If this is all it takes to merit the term from you, then wait'll you see what I have in store. Straw mats, four walls, well-water -- by your standards, practically a five-star resort on the Riviera."
"Yeah?" John's pulse kicks back up at the comment. They've never talked about this part before, what would happen after, and now that they're here, his mouth feels dry, silenced.
Rodney turns his face slightly in John's direction and straightens back up to sitting, knee bumping John's as he moves. "Well, intragalactic halfway house is probably more accurate," he explains, hands moving as he talks, catching the light. "It's an agriculture sanctuary run by the Mradesi -- they're kind of like monks, if monks were co-ed and had made it their religious vocation to help people start over in this life instead of rack up karmic points for the next one. Anyone who wants to can stay there for as long as they need to, in exchange for communal labor -- which they've waived for me, thank god, since I'm designing their new aqueduct system -- and then move on when they're ready."
"I don't remember them from the database," John says. Their shoulders aren't quite pressed together, but they're close enough that John can feel the solidity of Rodney, the faint warmth of his body starting to creep through the layers of their clothing, the cool night air.
Rodney shakes his head. "You wouldn't. They're not in there. The idea is that people who need to can go there and disappear, so there are some pretty steep taboos when it comes to talking about Mradi, and no one ever writes anything about it down. Ronon actually thought the Mradesi were a myth. That's why Teyla wanted to go first -- to make sure they'd take a group this big."
"Ronon and Teyla." John tries to sound low-key, but the breath he'd taken before speaking was too shallow and the names take all the air in his lungs.
"Yes," Rodney says quickly, "Zelenka too -- everyone's made it so far. You're number ten."
"Oh. Okay." John draws a slow, shaky breath, and it comes in cold and clean, filling his chest and sending the oxygen rushing straight to his head. From somewhere off in the woods there's a low hollow call, some kind of animal moving through the dark. He wants to ask about number eleven but doesn't, a year and a half of superstition stopping him from giving voice to the question.
Rodney shifts on the log again, like he's trying to get comfortable, and his leg brushes John's again but doesn't stay there. His tone is light when he asks, "So what'd you do?"
John feels a weird urge to shift his foot out towards Rodney's. He shrugs instead. "Blew up a jumper."
"Oh." Rodney thinks about this for a moment. "Use the remote?" John nods, and Rodney nods back.
"That bomb," John starts, and he runs out of air again, covers by clearing his throat. "How did you ..."
"A magician never reveals his secrets," Rodney says, but it comes out uncomfortable instead of pompous, like he doesn't really want to think about it.
John watches bark peeling off of the burning branches. "It was good. Really -- convincing."
"Yes, well," Rodney starts, and then stops. He drums his fingers on the log for a while, and then the near corner of his mouth slants upward. He swallows. "Sorry about that."
John nods, catching his lower lip between his teeth to give himself a reason not to be talking. The truth is that he hasn't said much to anyone for a month now, words evaporating in the absence of all the people who were gone.
Rodney picks at a patch of moss on the log and takes a breath. "Before I got there, I guess -- everyone was taking turns doing the trips here. I kind of took them over." He tilts his head back and studies the smoke winding upward into the trees. "Figured you'd be coming sooner or later. It's ..." He glances over at John again and smiles that lopsided smile. "Good to see you."
"Yeah," John says, and he can hear the rough edge in his voice again, two and a half days of breathing smoke. He licks his lips. "You too."
The fire crackles as the wind switches direction, shifting branches that have turned to charcoal, and the flames flare and settle into new configurations. Rodney moves next to him, and then his hand settles on John's shoulder, heavy and warm from the fire's heat, his arm resting along John's back.
After a few minutes he says, "Not that I want to interrupt your vacation or anything, but I didn't really factor in the wind chill here when I got dressed today, and I'm in favor of getting back to Mradi before winter actually comes."
"All right," John says, and Rodney's hand squeezes down for a moment before starting to pull away.
Without thinking, John reaches up and grabs it. He doesn't know where the impulse comes from, or what he'd meant to do -- squeeze and then let go, probably -- but their fingers tangle awkwardly and John finds himself gripping Rodney's hand tightly, curling his fingertips into the spaces between the knobs of Rodney's knuckles, the hollow of his palm sealing itself around the heel of Rodney's hand. The muscles of John's forearm are shaking a little with the force of his grip, it has to hurt, but all Rodney does is wrap his hand around John's and press back. His pulse beats steadily under John's thumb, in the notch where his hand meets his wrist, and the flesh of his palm is warm and alive. John hangs on for almost a minute before he can get himself to let go, and when he does, Rodney's hand settles into the space between John's shoulders for just a moment before he stands.
As John climbs to his feet, his back and legs twinge a little, registering the change in position after so long seated. He tilts his head all the way back and blinks up at the two pale moons tracking their slow course across the sky, then looks back at the fire, which he's tended silently for more than two days. Stooping, he sweeps up a handful of the sandy dirt at the edge of the fire pit, getting ready to toss it into the flames. Then he changes his mind and lets it sift back through his fingers, falling to the ground.
"Think I'll leave it burning," he tells Rodney, "the ground's pretty clear." He thinks about the eleventh person, whoever they are, and whether they'll find the pit and the wood when they get here, if they'll spot the tread of standard-issue boots ringing the edge. It feels right to leave this for them.
Brushing his hands off on his thighs, Rodney gives him an exasperated look and says, "You know, I thought your mediocre grasp of cause and effect might have improved under years of my influence, but now I see that I was sadly mistaken." He doesn't make any move to put out the fire, though, just bends and fusses with the wood pile a little, changing the arrangement of the branches so they're braced together more securely.
John shoulders his pack and waits for him to finish. When he does, they start picking their way down the hill toward the gate. He can just barely see the ground under his feet after so long staring into the fire, but Rodney seems to know where he's going and so John trails behind him like a shadow, down the slope and into the bright blue of the event horizon, following him through to the other side.
--
Soundtrack:
1. The Mountain Goats - Cotton
2. Andrew Bird - Sovay
3. The Weakerthans - Left and Leaving
4. Calexico - Pepita
5. Dawn Upshaw - Yah, Annah Emtza'cha
6. The Postal Service - This Place Is a Prison
7. The Mountain Goats - Shadow Song (Live)
8. Songs: Ohia - Two Blue Lights
9. The Mountain Goats - In Corolla
10. The Decemberists - I Don't Mind
11. The Mountain Goats - Love Love Love
If you've never had the pleasure of hearing the Mountain Goats before, I hope this soundtrack will be a good introduction. John Darnielle tells better stories than almost anyone writing or singing today.
Author: the_drifter (fiercelydreamed)
Summary: "No names," Rodney tells them, one more time. "And no dates -- I'm serious about that. No one can know what anyone else is planning." John learns the structures of life and death.
Notes: 9500 words, vague spoilers through S4, mild language. Huge thanks to shaenie for betaing.
Download the soundtrack.
Eight months into year seven, Rodney gets the memo from the SGC and radios all three of them. "My quarters. Soon as you can."
John's running a training seminar for new personnel ("Diplomacy in the Pegasus Galaxy," which he privately thinks of as "Eighteen Simple Rules for Probably Not Getting Shot") when he gets the call. After this long, he knows what that few words from Rodney means: whatever it is, it's bad, and it's the kind of bad that'll get much worse if John drops everything and goes pounding through the halls. So he just says, "Roger that," and picks the thread of the lecture up right where he dropped it, face friendly and blank.
He's the last one to get to Rodney's quarters, but Rodney doesn't even chide him for it. He just looks up from his seat on the end of the bed and hands John a tablet with an email from the SGC. Teyla's sitting on the edge of the couch. Ronon's leaning uneasily against the table. All three of them watch him as he reads it.
"It's a set of new research directives for the science departments," John says, scrolling downward.
"With a uniform deadline for completion," Rodney says. He doesn't wait for John to ask. "Two years."
John stares. "They're shutting down the expedition?"
Teyla bites her lower lip, knuckles pale where her hands are laced together on her lap. Ronon raises his eyebrows. "Or changing it," he says, and folds his arms a little more tightly across his chest.
That night, they make the pact.
*
"You have two weeks to take this to whoever needs to know about it," Rodney tells them. "Then give me a headcount. I don't want names."
John runs a hand through his hair, his fingers fisting in on themselves as soon as he lets go. "I can't. Rodney, I can't -- I'm the military second for the expedition--"
"No, right, of course not," Rodney says, eyes wide, and Teyla sets a hand on John's wrist and murmurs, "Tell me who -- I will talk to them."
"How long will it take you to get the stuff ready?" Ronon asks Rodney.
"And keep it quiet?" He scrubs a hand over his mouth, thinking hard. "Ten days. That's after I get the count."
"And you're sure we want to do this," John says, but he knows he isn't really asking, and so do they. He's been sure for years.
*
When they've gone through all the angles and talked about it as much as any of them can bear to, Teyla gets to her feet. She goes to Ronon and presses her forehead against his, one hand curving up behind his neck to guide his head down to meet hers. When she grips John's shoulders, he can feel the faint tremor running through her hands, and he closes his eyes and breathes in the smell of her until she steps away. Rodney fumbles his way into the gesture, awkward as usual, but once they're there the two of them stay like that for a long time. Rodney's the one who found out about this, and the one who came up with the plan, and the magnitude of all that must finally be hitting him, because when he moves again, it's to pull her into an abrupt hug before he steps away.
They all look at each other for a minute, letting her action stand in for all the things they're not saying.
"No names," Rodney tells them, one more time. "And no dates -- I'm serious about that. No one can know what anyone else is planning."
*
John lays awake for a long time that night, imagining all the different ways that this could go down.
*
Seventeen days later, the chime sounds in John's room a little after midnight. When he palms the door open, Rodney ducks in and waits for it to shut completely before pressing a black plastic box the size of a shaving kit into John's hand.
"That was fast," John says, blinking down at it.
Rodney shrugs jerkily, with only one shoulder. "I haven't made all of them yet. Just the first four."
"How many," he starts, and Rodney slices a hand through the air in negation, mouth pressing down. After a few seconds, his resolve folds, and his fingers curl in toward his palm.
"Eleven," he says.
John doesn't know what number he'd been expecting, and now that he has one he can't tell how he feels about it, so he just nods. The kit's heavier than he expected.
"Whatever you're -- you need to wait to pick a date. If you're picking one." Rodney's hands trace skittishly through the air, like he's searching for and discarding words, and finally he just tucks his fingers up under his arms. His eyes flicker back and forth across a spot a few feet away on the floor. "I -- don't think it's going to start for a couple months, but when it happens, wait at least another month after that. So we're sure everything's ready."
John straightens. "We've got a first?"
"Yes," Rodney says, and nods once as he looks back up at John, like the secondary confirmation in an initiation sequence. Armed and standing by for the go.
*
John had only given Teyla one name: Lorne's. There were more people he'd thought about offering this to, but he knew most of them wouldn't take it, and he was pretty sure that Rodney, Ronon, or Teyla would already be planning to approach the rest.
There's no way they can talk about it, but as the weeks tick by with nothing happening, he keeps wondering what Lorne decided. There's no safe way to ask.
One afternoon, when they're coming back from the third auxiliary armory, John waits until they step into the transport chamber and then says, casually, "You ever think about home?"
Lorne pauses, one hand hovering just over the touchscreen. His expression shifts subtly. "All the time," he says, and presses the pad of his middle finger firmly against the destination point.
*
On M6I-235, where the Athosians used to look for Ancient artifacts, they're five miles out from the jumper and forty out from the gate when Ronon frowns and says, "Is that smoke?"
Teyla slides her pack off and climbs a tree, thirty-five feet at least, then swarms down it so fast it's just this side of a controlled fall. "We need to move. Now," she says, and then grabs her pack and starts running.
They end up on a low island in the middle of a broad river delta, watching what looks like half the continent burn. A day into the firestorm, Teyla tightens down the straps on her vest and tells them, "If I follow the shore, I may be able to find a way back to the gate."
"Are you crazy?" Rodney yelps. "Who knows how far this stretches--"
She's sorting through the things in her pack, changing the arrangement of her supplies. "It's all right. I will be careful."
Rodney pushes up off his rock and goes to stand next to her, raising his voice a little higher over the roar of the flames. "No, seriously, I know you've never watched news reports on forest fires, but this kind of thing can go on for weeks. A blaze this big is definitely going to be able to generate its own wind storm and--"
The corners of her mouth come up as his pitch rises with the intensity of the explanation. It's a distracted expression, both fond and pained. "This is not the first fire I have seen," she says, repacking her supplies. "I promise I will keep as far from the edge as I can."
"--Far isn't going to cut it!" he insists, fumbling out his data tablet and frantically tapping at the touch screen. "It's over eight hundred degrees Celsius in there -- all it takes is for one of the hundreds of thousands of sparks that thing is setting off to catch and you'll be surrounded--"
"Rodney," she says, turning and catching his wrist. He stares at her, and then John sees it through the half-open zip of her pack: a small box, black plastic.
"Rodney," John echoes, and Teyla pushes Rodney's hand carefully down to his side.
"You need to let me go," she tells him. Her eyes flicker to John, and then past him to Ronon, who's slid off his log and onto his feet. "I will see if I can radio Atlantis, get some help," she says, with a strange, formal emphasis on the words. Rodney's staring at her with a lost look on his face.
John swallows and jerks his head in a nod. "Here," Ronon says, and tosses her a couple MREs, followed by his medkit. Her efficient hands slip them into her pack, pull the zipper tight. She swings it onto one shoulder and turns to look at all of them, John and Ronon and then Rodney.
Stepping backward, Teyla blinks hard and says, in an uneven voice, "Do not worry about me." Then she turns and jogs down into the river, one hand holding her pack aloft as she ducks below the surface. Fifteen yards later she emerges in shallower water, settles her pack onto her back, and wades toward the far-off ribbon of the shore without a backward glance. They watch her until her outline grows too indistinct to pick out from the gray-orange haze that has swallowed the horizon.
*
It's dawn the next day before the rescue jumper finds them. They search for hours, but there's no sign of her. She's gone.
*
Keller keeps the three of them in the infirmary for a day, worried about the after-effects of smoke inhalation. When she reluctantly clears them, they get Sam's authorization and dial the gate in New Athos.
They walk through the fall night in silence. John can't stop listening to the absence of her footsteps. When they get to the village, Halling rises from the fire to greet them, but his smile fades when he sees their faces.
"It's Teyla," John says, and abruptly he can't go any farther. They're coming back here with nothing: not her, not her body, not even her ghost. These people have been their friends since they came through the gate from Earth, and John doesn't know what to tell them. He can't even give them his word that she's dead.
Ronon speaks up from beside him. "There was a fire on Pallidrae. We got stranded. She tried to make it to the gate."
"We lost her," Rodney says. In his voice, John can hear the aching sting of the smoke.
Halling closes his eyes, and for a long minute age wears heavily on all the lines of his face. "It was her choice," he murmurs, and John wonders what he knows, if Teyla had told him. Kannia, he thinks suddenly, and hears a hiss of air before he realizes he's taken a breath. Oh christ, what am I going to--
Ronon's coat brushes against John's jacket as his hand comes to rest, for a second only, at the center of his back. John glances over and sees the calm look on Ronon's face, and then he exhales slowly. If Halling knows, then Mada and Firil may too, and if they don't, Teyla would have given Ronon instructions for what to tell her daughter and the cousins fostering her. She would have been prepared.
"Come," Halling says as he looks back up and holds a steady hand out to them. It's the gesture of someone who has had enough practice mourning that he knows what to do when grief invites itself in. "We must tell the others, and then we will celebrate the life she made for herself, and her passage from it."
John swallows. "Yeah," he says. When Halling clasps a hand around his shoulder, he mirrors the ritual motion, feeling its symbolism: the way it connects them around the vacant space between. Ronon and Rodney repeat it in turn, stepping into the start of the ceremony.
Something about the exchange tethers John against that anchorless feeling, and as they make their way to the fire, he's grateful to be here in Pegasus, among people who still know the structures of both life and death.
*
"She was the first, wasn't she?" John asks when they're back on Atlantis, watching the sky gray out over a balcony, dawn creeping in.
Rodney's sitting on the ground next to him, hands flattened against each other and forehead pressed against the back of his thumbs. "Yes," he whispers. "She asked me. She wanted to make sure the way was clear for the rest of us."
*
Five weeks later, they return to New Athos to fulfill their role as word-bearers, cut the mourning bracelets off the wrists of Teyla's relatives and scatter the beads into the river. Four days after that, SGA-1 -- Ronon, Rodney, John, and Sergeant Lilleman -- head out to investigate possible Wraith activity on M8H-834.
The Wraith and the Replicators have more or less battered each other down to rubble, and standing orders from Earth are for the Atlantis expedition to lay low and quietly keep tabs on the survivors. The mission is based on a pretty unlikely series of rumors, and John walks through the gate expecting the whole thing to be a bust. Forty-five minutes later, they're sprinting back, because crashed dart turns out to be more like downed goddamn hive ship.
Lilleman's twenty-six and broke a decade of MRCD speed records when she went through boot camp. She's got the wormhole up by the time the rest of them reach the clearing, and Rodney doesn't even slow down as he hits the event horizon. John sends her through next, backing from tree to bush to rock with his hands tight around his P90. The darts are still out of sight, but he can hear a pair of them screaming in toward their position. It's been months since he heard that sound. He hasn't missed it.
When he's just within lunging distance of the gate itself, he turns to wave Ronon through and finds himself staring directly into the barrel of Ronon's gun. "Sorry, Sheppard," Ronon says. In the uneven half-light of the wormhole, his grin is a wicked slice of white. "Gotta go."
John opens his mouth to say what the hell are you-- and then red crackles through his field of vision. He feels the distant ghost of Ronon's hand closing around his vest as the world drops out.
*
He wakes up in the infirmary.
"Ronon," he says immediately.
Keller, at the monitor by his bed, turns and calls, "He's awake," and Lorne and Sam break out of their conference and hurry over from the far end of the room, Rodney half a pace ahead of them.
"Ronon?" John repeats, pushing himself up, and Sam shakes her head. Lilleman's standing in the background, watching from just outside of earshot.
"We were hoping you could tell us," Sam says. "The gate closed right after you came through, and we haven't been able to dial the planet again."
"Fell through, is more like it," Rodney says. "Or were thrown through." He's stopped at the far end of the bed.
"How long was I out?" John asks, swinging his legs awkwardly off the side as Lorne steps back to give him room. The nerves in his hands and feet are still only halfway awake.
"Forty-six minutes," Rodney says in a flat voice.
Eight minutes too long for a busy signal. John drops heavily back onto the edge of the bed. "Dammit," he mutters. "He must have yanked the control crystal."
"So it was him," Rodney demands, and John can tell how those four words function in the context of the conversation -- so he was the one who sent you through -- but he can also tell what Rodney's asking.
"Yeah," John says, meeting Rodney's eyes as he answers both halves of the question at once. "It was him."
*
It's four days before the gate techs manage to establish a wormhole to the planet. When the rescue party goes through -- three cloaked jumpers manned by John, Rodney, Lorne's team, and a squad of Marines under Lilleman -- the hive ship is smoldering in the middle of a ragged crater. There are a dozen dead Wraith scattered through the woods, but there's no way to locate individual bodies in the mass of blackened tissue that's what's left of the ship. No darts, wrecked or otherwise. No response on the radio. No ping from an emergency beacon.
No Ronon.
*
In the next month, keeping tabs on the Wraith turns into recon, which turns into a nightmare of paperwork when SGA-5 go AWOL for six hours on M5E-942, kidnap a stray Wraith, and try to shoot Ronon's whereabouts out of it. There's no way for Sam and John to keep that one out of the rumor mill, not when Harriman gets knocked down a rank and the SGC recalls Dr. Steiler for psychiatric evaluation. John spends senior staff listening to the discussion of whether they ought to table off-world missions while they sort this mess out, unable to think of anything to say that could defuse the situation without blowing their cover. Finally, Sam pushes her chair back from the table and says, "Okay guys, let's put a lid on it for the next five minutes. We've got someone coming in with an event petition."
She palms the door open and Fatima al-Jalal is standing on the other side. The room gets quiet as she steps into the open ring of the tables, declining Sam's gestured invitation to sit. Fatima's been 2IC on the kitchen staff since 2006. She also spent most of the previous year as Ronon's girlfriend.
Once Sam's back in her chair, Fatima takes a deep breath and lifts her face, gaze leveled at the wall behind them. "It'll be forty-seven days on Wednesday," she tells them. No one has to ask since what. "I'd like permission to use the west tower gallery for the rayla-til."
*
Wednesday night, they drop the city back to a skeleton crew, and volunteers take over the second and third shifts to free up anyone who wants to attend. John goes, because he can't not, but he stays to the back of the crowd as Fatima lights the great keya candle, the flames from its four dozen wicks illuminating the room and fragmenting faces into yellow and deep black. She stares into the fire for a long minute, eyes dark and her face dry, and then she opens her mouth and starts to speak. John waits just long enough for everyone else to fall into the rhythm of it, laughing and murmuring reactions, and then he slips out the door.
He spends the next four hours on the observation ring above the gallery, watching people trade Ronon stories. This high up, he can make out faces and voices but not words, which is why he's up here. There are stories of his own that he could tell, but he doesn't want to, and he doesn't want to hear the things that will inevitably get said. He always said he wanted to go out fighting. Or I guess there's only so long you can beat the odds. Or every time the gate opens, part of me's waiting for his IDC.
When the crowd has fallen silent, thinned down from a hundred to a few dozen, Fatima reaches down and slides a small knife out of a sheath, and that's when John turns and walks out into the empty corridor. This is what a rayla-til is: everyone tells stories about the person until no one has anything left to say, and the ones who are left add their blood to the candle. Nick your left thumb for a friend, cut a line through your shirt and across your chest for a lover, and slice your right palm for family. One shallow cut only -- nothing that would injure you, just enough that you can shed a few drops of blood over the flames. Release part of yourself to go join them, so you won't have to miss them anymore.
This is what a rayla-til is: a ritual from a culture that had learned to heal fast and keep moving, from a galaxy where you couldn't count on having a body to lay to rest. John knows this might be the largest rayla-til since Sateda fell. But he can't watch it.
Sometime after three in the morning, John follows the edge of the southwest pier back in and climbs eleven flights of stairs to the gallery. When he steps through the open door, Rodney's the only one still there. He doesn't lift his eyes from the flames as John comes to stand not quite next to him, but his shoulders relax slightly inward, like he'd been waiting for something and now, for the moment, he isn't. The deep pool of wax in the heart of the keya is stained and spattered with red.
John doesn't see a mark on Rodney, and he has no desire to pick up the knife that, up close, he recognizes as one of Ronon's. They both know that whatever Ronon is now, he isn't missing.
They stay there until the candle burns out.
*
They lose people in the next few months. Not a lot, nowhere near the casualties they suffered during the Wraith siege or the flight from the Replicators. Few enough that in the reports back to the SGC, they still refer to the deaths as deaths and not as attrition. Still, even the slight increase has everyone on edge. John's on edge for a different reason, because the deaths are happening one by one, and every time he wonders if the accident is really something else. He's never been good at believing someone's absence is final, and now, whenever there are no remains to send home, he wonders if it's one of them. It makes it hard to write the letters to parents or spouses, hard to listen to the speeches, hard to feel anything but unease when the survivors walk through the gate to carry the news to Earth.
He's got a list in his head, eleven slots with only four names filled in permanently, and two more lists besides it: the people he can't see leaving this galaxy willingly, and the people they've lost since Teyla started the clock. He can't stop shuffling the people on those two lists through the open seven slots, testing combination after combination. It's a puzzle he's not supposed to solve, too many possibilities and too little information, and so he can't stop thinking about it.
*
They make it into year eight with no public indication from above that the expedition's slated to go through any kind of shakedown. John isn't surprised. The SGC and the IOA would have to be idiots not to realize that they've manned Atlantis with brilliant, adaptive, and phenomenally insubordinate loose cannons, and that the best way to rein them in is by withholding key pieces of information. If anything, the silence confirms what's coming.
It's spring on the mainland when they get a request for assistance from the Giallen, an industrial culture living around an old Ancient outpost on M6X-560. Their planet's hit one of its bicentennial cycles of seismic activity, and some of the old geothermal conduits they rely on are starting to rupture. Zelenka takes a science team over for a week to handle the repairs.
They're on their way home when a quake hits and the wormhole flickers, ripples unevenly, and blinks out.
Rodney and Sam spend six white-faced hours trying to figure out how to get their people out of the memory buffer in M6X-560's gate. After this long on the expedition, John's probably got a better layman's knowledge of stargate technology than anyone else without a doctorate, but everything they're doing is way beyond him -- and from the desperate edge in both their voices, it's pretty far beyond them too. In the end it almost seems to come together by accident: Rodney's retrieval program hasn't even finished initializing when suddenly the event horizon surges up and the science team comes stumbling through.
Half of the gate room has already started toward them before the other half finishes the headcount and realizes Zelenka isn't there.
*
John doesn't say much during the debrief afterward. It's likely that everyone assumes he's being stoic, but the only thing he's feeling is the intense discomfort of being one of the few people who understand what's really going on. After all, this is Zelenka: if he wanted to take himself out without leaving a trace, this was the perfect way to do it.
It doesn't occur to John to question his certainty until he stops by Rodney's quarters that night. He lets himself in without waiting for Rodney to answer his knock; they're a couple years past protocol at this point. Inside, Rodney's pacing broken polygons across the carpet, and when he turns, there are tight and anxious lines around the edges of his eyes.
The ground seems to shove suddenly upward under John's feet. "Wait. Wait. Do you think he actually--"
"I don't know," Rodney blurts in a voice with no foundation under it. "God, I don't know."
"You must have asked him," John insists, "Rodney, you can't tell me he turned you down--"
"No, no, he didn't. And that's -- Jesus." Rodney leans back against the wall and rubs his hands over his face. "He told me he was going to wait until after I went," he says from behind his palms. "To make sure things would be okay in the city. That was the plan."
John sits down hard on the edge of the bed. "... fuck," he breathes.
Rodney's gaze is leveled at the far wall, eyes unfocused like he's staring at something levels down and miles out. "Yes," he says, "exactly."
*
It's Rodney who puts on a dark suit and gives the eulogy at Zelenka's memorial, and it's Rodney who makes the trip to Brno to tell Zelenka's family. He comes back through the gate looking like he's aged a year in three days.
*
Nothing goes back to normal after that, and John's jaw aches from walking around with his teeth on edge. It's not that he hadn't thought about what he'd be giving up by doing this, but he never really considered what the period leading up to it would be like. He doesn't have Ronon to run with, or Teyla to kick his ass until he winds down. And as for Rodney, it's like Zelenka's death flipped some switch in his brain and he's a different person now.
He's taken himself off the mission roster and delegated most of his research to underlings. His work hours haven't gotten any shorter, but now he spends them orchestrating obsessive cycles of testing and maintenance, fine-tuning every system the city has. John doesn't say anything about it, but it comes up one day when he and Sam are reviewing the month's activity reports. "He never signed on to be a soldier, and he's been in the field a long time," she tells him, and pushes her hair back off her face. She looks tired all the time lately. "I think Rodney's started to feel his own mortality."
"If he's only feeling it now, then he's not as smart as he says he is," John says, defaulting to sarcasm. His only other option is to tell her she's a lot more right than she knows.
*
The problem is that John doesn't know if Rodney's doing this out of a sense of responsibility -- if it's preparation -- or if he's doing it because he's honestly scared that something else is going kill him first.
*
John's running Ronon's old training class on anti-Wraith fighting techniques when all of a sudden the klaxon sounds and Rodney comes in over an open channel, voice bright with panic. "This is an emergency -- section 12, tower 4, level 9 -- I need Sheppard, Carter, a munitions team, oh god, Ambrose, Davenport--"
"Talk to me, McKay," John interrupts as he runs out into the corridor. "What are we heading into here?"
"A bomb," Rodney answers, fast and garbled like he's got a mouthful of tools, "it was in stasis in Lab 6. It looked dormant, I took the containment chamber offline for recalibration, now I can't get it back on again--"
"Radiological?" Sam cuts in. "I'm in the control tower -- Rodney, do we need to get the shield--"
"No, no, I don't think so, but it's powering itself off the city systems and I can't get it to -- shit -- it's like it's sucking power out of the damn walls -- Sheppard, I need you to get to the control chair, see if you can override it--"
"On it," John says, skidding into the transport chamber and slapping the touchscreen, "just keep talking, tell me what I need to do--"
"Reyes here, leaving the equipment room in section 5, en route to your position--"
"McKay, it's Davenport, I'm almost to the tower, is that lab equipped with an EM disruptor field--"
People flatten back against the walls as John races past them, the klaxon still wailing. Nearly sliding into the door of the chair room as he swipes his hand across the sensor, he calls, "I'm there, Rodney, do you want me to cut power to that level or to the whole section--"
"--Munitions team's at the base, we're on our way up now--"
"--This is Ambrose, I'm right by the main lab, how much time do we--"
"Oh god," Rodney says as John throws himself into the chair, "oh god, I can't -- no, out, out, everyone back, Reyes, fall back -- I'm shutting bulkhead doors at level 7, Sheppard, it's not going to--" and then there's a burst of static that cuts off as a distant boom echoes through the walls.
"Rodney!" The chair locks into the lowered position and the city flares to life in John's head, but he can't get a picture of any of the tower's top four levels. "Rodney, goddammit, answer me--"
"--This is Reyes, my team's okay, but that was definitely an explosion and the doors aren't responding--"
"Rodney," Sam says, "Rodney, come in," and then, "John, we can't get a reading on that tower, can you get those doors open--"
John clenches his hands down on the chair's arms and just forces the city's systems, shredding through the protocol Rodney had used to lock the doors down against the blast. He can feel the burnt-out circuits and the peripheral damage, the way the doors grind in their frames, but he still can't see a thing above level 7.
"Done," he snaps, "Reyes, get your ass up there, somebody call Keller--"
"Colonel," Reyes starts, and then trails off.
"What, dammit," John snarls, right as Sam says, "What've you got?"
"Nothing," Reyes says, sounding defeated. "The blast ... everything above the level 7 bulkhead is just gone." The words come over the line just as John manages to commandeer the surveillance cameras for the entire section and then he can see it himself: there's no rubble around the base of the tower, only smoke and haze rising where the top of it used to be. Four levels reduced to their component molecules, literally vanished into thin air.
"Jesus," John chokes, and the klaxon trails into silence as he cuts the connection and the chair goes dark.
*
When the chime goes off in his quarters, John doesn't answer it, just sits there at the table and waits for the door to open. It rings again, and John realizes that he was waiting for Rodney to let himself in like usual. There's a moment where he nearly throws up. He locks his jaw down against it and calls out, "Yeah," through gritted teeth.
The door slides open and Sam steps through it, stopping partway across the room. John gets to his feet. "What is it," he says, and the words come out flat and distant, like a cassette tape worn thin.
She looks at him for a moment without answering, and then squints and swallows hard. "His sister," she says. "She doesn't know yet. I thought that -- you might want to be the one to--"
"No," he blurts, and Sam's eyes go wide. His fingernails are digging into his palms, and he turns away, grips the back of his chair. "I can't, I'm sorry. I can't go back there."
"Of course. I understand," Sam says with an automatic swiftness that tells him she doesn't, but that she's going to take it at face value anyway. They've been working together for five years now, and the one thing he's never seen her do is pry. "I'll do it."
Still facing away from her, he nods. After a pause, she says, "He left instructions. About his things here. If there's something you want before I pack them up ..."
Eyes shut, John starts to shake his head, then stops. It might just be an old instruction, but if it's not -- if Rodney changed it since they all decided -- then there might be something there. Something that could tell him what happened, what he's supposed to do now. He presses a hand against his forehead and mutters, "Yeah. I'll ... tonight."
"Okay," she answers. He hears her take a breath. For a horrible moment, he thinks she's going to tell him she's sorry, or offer some uninvited wisdom on how to watch your teammates get killed and get through it, or suggest he make an appointment to talk to Dr. Kim.
All she does is let the air quietly back out again. "Jesus," she murmurs. "What a year."
The door whispers open behind him, and her footsteps recede into the hall.
*
It's late when John leaves his quarters and walks to Rodney's. He detours through corridors and stairwells he knows will be empty, not wanting to see anyone along the way. By the time he gets there, he could almost convince himself that the entire city is deserted except for him.
The lights don't come on right away when John steps inside, and there's a moment in the dark where he's caught by the sudden certainty that Atlantis herself is gone too, that this whole place is just an empty shell left behind. Then he notices his hands are still fisted in his pockets. He pulls one out and waves it over at the sensor. The lights come on.
Rodney's quarters look exactly like they have for years: unmade bed and the laptop on the table, yesterday's socks on the carpet, academic degrees in their frames. There's a dirty coffee mug on the edge of the desk, like it had been set there carelessly by someone who'd planned to wash it later. No obvious signs that Rodney had started this day knowing how it would end, but then Rodney, of all people, wouldn't have left any. He would have known better than that.
When it becomes clear that John can't learn what he wants to know just by looking, he grits his teeth and starts systematically going through the place. He doesn't know what he's looking for, so he casts the net as wide as he can -- things missing, or put in the wrong spots, or hidden somewhere that only someone really looking would find them. He's boxed up a lot of people's stuff over his career, but he's always tried to ignore what he was handling. The invasive wrongness of this search leaves a greasy feeling just under his skin, but he can't get himself to break it off.
There's nothing to tell him what happened, and the longer he goes without finding anything, the more exhaustive he gets -- checking the mounting hardware on the lamps, tipping out the dirty laundry, scanning through the stack of notebooks on the desk. But if Rodney's left some kind of sign, it's not one John knows how to spot, and all the drawers and closets and cupboards are filled evenly, with no conspicuous absences beyond that of Rodney himself. He doesn't find the black plastic box, but that doesn't mean anything, because he knows Rodney never would have left that where anyone would ever look. As he searches, he can't escape the memory of the terror in Rodney's voice over the radio, how it broke as he yelled for the munitions team to pull back.
When John's finally gone through the last cabinet, he just stands in the middle of the room, feeling the echoing space left by all the people they've lost since he came to this city.
There's a picture on top of the bookshelf of Jeannie and Madison and Kaleb. He thinks about Sam boxing up the things in this room and taking whatever isn't classified back to Vancouver, ringing the doorbell in dress blues, sitting down with Jeannie and her family and telling them whatever she's going to tell them. It should be him going, and he knows it. He knows Jeannie won't understand how he could pass this off onto someone else. It doesn't matter.
Even if he knew what to tell her -- and he doesn't, he doesn't even know what the truth is -- there's no way he can go back there. After everything that's happened, there's no way he's ever setting foot on Earth again. He can't risk that he might get stuck there, that he might never make it back.
Then he remembers the rest of his conversation with Sam, the part about the provisions Rodney made for his belongings, and he turns and walks out the door empty-handed. There's nothing that he wants there. There's nothing there at all.
Back in his own room, he locks the door, turns off all the lights, and steps onto the bed. In the dark, he runs his hands over the seams of the ceiling tiles until he finds the one with the tiny notch in the lip. He slides a knife under the edge and pries it loose, then slips his hand into the gap and gropes until his fingers make contact with what he's looking for. He climbs back down, shuts the curtains, and flips the reading lamp on.
In his hands is the box Rodney had given him. He's never opened it, and he sits on the edge of the bed and stares at it for a long time: its matte surface and rounded corners, the featureless seam running around the edge. Feeling its remembered, still unexpected weight.
Almost without direction, his fingers close around the latch and pop it open.
Inside are two small devices. The one shaped like an ear thermometer deactivates the subcutaneous transmitter. The other hides life signs from Ancient, Asgard, and Earth technology. He knows what they are from the night Rodney got the memo, the one and only time they talked about what they'd need to pull this off. He also knows Rodney must have built these himself.
Underneath them is a folded slip of paper with a gate address and the following instructions: Wait 24 hours, then go here. Bring 3 days supplies.
The text is printed and anonymous, but under it is a very faint, penciled string of letters. John recognizes the cipher he and Rodney had developed back when they were held hostage on M0F-984, when they got so bored they started passing notes in code even though the guards were illiterate. It takes him a minute to remember how to translate it.
Rodney's note reads, If you get there before me, save me a seat.
John stares at it, then refolds it and sets it and the two devices back in the box. He clicks the latch shut and turns the light off, then stands on the bed to return it to its hiding place. Fitting the ceiling tile back into its niche, he runs his fingers over the edge until he's sure it's set flush with the tiles around it.
One hundred and seventy-three soldiers. Fifty-eight civilians. Sumner. Beckett. Ford. Elizabeth. Ronon and Teyla -- the closest people he's had to family in his adult life.
Rodney.
All of them gone, and somehow he's still here.
John Sheppard sits down on the edge of his bed, pushes the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, and cries.
*
Thirty-one days after Rodney's accident, John fakes his own death on M7K-385.
They've got a satellite in orbit there taking deep space telemetry, and he convinces Sam to let him do the scheduled flyover to upload the data. Once he's through the gate and the wormhole is closed, he lands the puddlejumper and pulls the control crystal out of the automatic data recorder, picks up his pack, and steps out onto the planet's surface. The air outside is brisk and astringent with unfamiliar smells, and he tosses his radio onto the jumper's floor as he closes the hatch. He takes the black plastic box out of his tac vest and activates the sensor scrambler, then sets the tip of thermometer-shaped device in the hollow behind his right ear and closes his eyes against the phantom buzz of low voltage as it melts the circuits of his subcutaneous transmitter.
In his pocket is the remote he and Rodney found back in year five, and John uses it to direct the jumper up out of the atmosphere and settle it into orbit right next to the satellite. Face raised toward the fine bright haze of the midday sky, he flips the override switch and triggers the self-destruct. Then he dials an uninhabited planet and walks through the wormhole without a second glance.
He doesn't know what the people on Atlantis will make of the wreckage. Maybe they'll think it was an ambush, or a freak malfunction, or they really will chalk it up to suicide. They'll lay out theories in official SGC reports and argue about it when they get drunk together, and eventually everyone will make up their minds one way or another, and somewhere down the line, they'll forget. Forget all of the confusion and uncertainty, the things that happened that no one could understand, until faces and voices fade like colors in a Polaroid, thinning into yellow and then to white.
None of that matters to him anymore.
*
When he dials the address on the paper twenty-four hours later, the wormhole takes him from the middle of one sparse forest to the outskirts of another. It's afternoon on the new planet instead of morning, and the dry bite in the air makes him think of autumn, right around the first frost. He climbs the ridge overlooking the gate and sees only more trees in all directions, thick in the creases of the rumpled valleys, thinning out where the tops of the hills flatten under the pale clouds.
The spot he chooses is about half a mile up the slope, just before the grade gets steep enough that it'd be tough to navigate in the dark. It's a small patch of level ground with a clear view of the gate, half-screened by underbrush and ringed by towering trees. He leaves his pack there and spends the last few hours of daylight gathering fallen sticks and dry limbs. By twilight he's got a stack about as high as his waist, and he clears out a space for a fire pit, drops a match into a pile of logs and kindling, and settles down to wait.
He doesn't really sleep much that first night, or if he does, all he dreams of is the woods around him: the small sounds of nocturnal animals, the unfamiliar constellations sliding behind the branches above him. He's awake when dawn slips through the underbrush, gradually watering the shadows down to an indeterminate gray.
The gate stays quiet all day long, and through the night after that, and the second day is a little colder, washing the woods with thin mist. He feeds the fire and keeps waiting. There are some kind of bird-squirrel things flitting through the trees, and he's caught a few glimpses of a pale gray animal like a badger with six legs. He's not very hungry, so it'll be a couple of days at least before he'll have to figure out if they're edible, but water's going to be an issue soon, and so will wood. He tries to calculate how long he can wait before he goes to gather more if he wants to be able to leave the fire burning while he goes out. It's not the best idea, and he'll have to clear the ground for a couple more meters around the pit if he doesn't want to send the woods up, but better that than douse it and risk that someone will come through, see no sign, and leave before he can catch them.
He wonders where the nearest creek is, and how cold it gets in the winter. He wonders how long he could make a go of it here, if he had to, because the note says three days, but things could have changed. It could take longer for them to get to him. He wonders if he could do a whole year here, long enough for the SGC's deadline to come and go, or longer, because if no one comes, if nothing else went like it was supposed to, then he can't think of anywhere in Pegasus he really wants to go. Better here in the quiet, he thinks, than among strangers and alone. And both of those better than Earth.
*
In the middle of the third night, not long after the second moon has crept above the horizon, there's a flare of blue light from the valley below, and John turns his head just in time to see the event horizon stabilize and a solitary figure come through.
He's too far up to identify who it is, or for them to be able to see him through the brush. Instead of standing, or walking over to the rock that juts out over the slope, or calling out, John pulls another log from the pile beside him and feeds it into the fire. Whoever it is will see the light and make their way up here. All he has to do is wait.
John stares into the flames for a while before he hears the first distant rustle of someone moving up the slope, and his mind is strangely empty but his heart is pounding fast and loud in his chest. He focuses on the crackle of the fire, its irregular flickering and the sparks lofting up on the smoke into the night, until his eyes are caught by motion in the shadows beyond it and Rodney steps forward out of the darkness.
It's not the longest they've gone without seeing each other since they first joined the expedition, but John finds his eyes adjusting to Rodney's presence as though to a sudden change in light. Rodney's in khakis and some thickly-spun brown sweater John's never seen before, with no holster on his hip, and his face is bright and clearly traced by the shifting light. His posture is a little tense, like he's holding himself ready for something, but there isn't the manic momentum John always remembers him having on Atlantis.
Rodney looks at him over the fire for a long silent minute, eyes wide and mouth just barely open, chest still rising and falling from the climb. Then he tucks his hands in his pockets and starts to circle around the fire to the log where John's sitting. John can't stop his head from turning to track Rodney, and it's only when Rodney sits down and the log shifts under his weight that John manages to drag his eyes away, back to the fire.
He reaches into the pile of tinder beside him and tosses one of the thorny branches into the fire, watching the leaves blacken and curl in the heat. The smoke takes on a complicated smell, like nutmeg and lemongrass. "I was starting to think I'd be here a while," he says, aiming for relaxed, ironic. The edges of the vowels come out cracked.
Rodney tucks his chin a little deeper into his chest. "Sorry. We've been staying pretty strict about the 'three day' thing, and I didn't--" He pauses, glances sideways. John doesn't look back, but he can feel Rodney's gaze moving over his face. "It's not like we have a way of determining ETAs."
John shrugs. "That's okay. It hasn't been too bad." He tips his face upwards and watching the sparks rise up toward the black-on-blue pattern of branches and sky. "Kind of like a vacation."
Rodney makes a small noise of amusement, more grunt than chuckle. "Right." He hunkers down a little, warming his hands on the fire. "If this is all it takes to merit the term from you, then wait'll you see what I have in store. Straw mats, four walls, well-water -- by your standards, practically a five-star resort on the Riviera."
"Yeah?" John's pulse kicks back up at the comment. They've never talked about this part before, what would happen after, and now that they're here, his mouth feels dry, silenced.
Rodney turns his face slightly in John's direction and straightens back up to sitting, knee bumping John's as he moves. "Well, intragalactic halfway house is probably more accurate," he explains, hands moving as he talks, catching the light. "It's an agriculture sanctuary run by the Mradesi -- they're kind of like monks, if monks were co-ed and had made it their religious vocation to help people start over in this life instead of rack up karmic points for the next one. Anyone who wants to can stay there for as long as they need to, in exchange for communal labor -- which they've waived for me, thank god, since I'm designing their new aqueduct system -- and then move on when they're ready."
"I don't remember them from the database," John says. Their shoulders aren't quite pressed together, but they're close enough that John can feel the solidity of Rodney, the faint warmth of his body starting to creep through the layers of their clothing, the cool night air.
Rodney shakes his head. "You wouldn't. They're not in there. The idea is that people who need to can go there and disappear, so there are some pretty steep taboos when it comes to talking about Mradi, and no one ever writes anything about it down. Ronon actually thought the Mradesi were a myth. That's why Teyla wanted to go first -- to make sure they'd take a group this big."
"Ronon and Teyla." John tries to sound low-key, but the breath he'd taken before speaking was too shallow and the names take all the air in his lungs.
"Yes," Rodney says quickly, "Zelenka too -- everyone's made it so far. You're number ten."
"Oh. Okay." John draws a slow, shaky breath, and it comes in cold and clean, filling his chest and sending the oxygen rushing straight to his head. From somewhere off in the woods there's a low hollow call, some kind of animal moving through the dark. He wants to ask about number eleven but doesn't, a year and a half of superstition stopping him from giving voice to the question.
Rodney shifts on the log again, like he's trying to get comfortable, and his leg brushes John's again but doesn't stay there. His tone is light when he asks, "So what'd you do?"
John feels a weird urge to shift his foot out towards Rodney's. He shrugs instead. "Blew up a jumper."
"Oh." Rodney thinks about this for a moment. "Use the remote?" John nods, and Rodney nods back.
"That bomb," John starts, and he runs out of air again, covers by clearing his throat. "How did you ..."
"A magician never reveals his secrets," Rodney says, but it comes out uncomfortable instead of pompous, like he doesn't really want to think about it.
John watches bark peeling off of the burning branches. "It was good. Really -- convincing."
"Yes, well," Rodney starts, and then stops. He drums his fingers on the log for a while, and then the near corner of his mouth slants upward. He swallows. "Sorry about that."
John nods, catching his lower lip between his teeth to give himself a reason not to be talking. The truth is that he hasn't said much to anyone for a month now, words evaporating in the absence of all the people who were gone.
Rodney picks at a patch of moss on the log and takes a breath. "Before I got there, I guess -- everyone was taking turns doing the trips here. I kind of took them over." He tilts his head back and studies the smoke winding upward into the trees. "Figured you'd be coming sooner or later. It's ..." He glances over at John again and smiles that lopsided smile. "Good to see you."
"Yeah," John says, and he can hear the rough edge in his voice again, two and a half days of breathing smoke. He licks his lips. "You too."
The fire crackles as the wind switches direction, shifting branches that have turned to charcoal, and the flames flare and settle into new configurations. Rodney moves next to him, and then his hand settles on John's shoulder, heavy and warm from the fire's heat, his arm resting along John's back.
After a few minutes he says, "Not that I want to interrupt your vacation or anything, but I didn't really factor in the wind chill here when I got dressed today, and I'm in favor of getting back to Mradi before winter actually comes."
"All right," John says, and Rodney's hand squeezes down for a moment before starting to pull away.
Without thinking, John reaches up and grabs it. He doesn't know where the impulse comes from, or what he'd meant to do -- squeeze and then let go, probably -- but their fingers tangle awkwardly and John finds himself gripping Rodney's hand tightly, curling his fingertips into the spaces between the knobs of Rodney's knuckles, the hollow of his palm sealing itself around the heel of Rodney's hand. The muscles of John's forearm are shaking a little with the force of his grip, it has to hurt, but all Rodney does is wrap his hand around John's and press back. His pulse beats steadily under John's thumb, in the notch where his hand meets his wrist, and the flesh of his palm is warm and alive. John hangs on for almost a minute before he can get himself to let go, and when he does, Rodney's hand settles into the space between John's shoulders for just a moment before he stands.
As John climbs to his feet, his back and legs twinge a little, registering the change in position after so long seated. He tilts his head all the way back and blinks up at the two pale moons tracking their slow course across the sky, then looks back at the fire, which he's tended silently for more than two days. Stooping, he sweeps up a handful of the sandy dirt at the edge of the fire pit, getting ready to toss it into the flames. Then he changes his mind and lets it sift back through his fingers, falling to the ground.
"Think I'll leave it burning," he tells Rodney, "the ground's pretty clear." He thinks about the eleventh person, whoever they are, and whether they'll find the pit and the wood when they get here, if they'll spot the tread of standard-issue boots ringing the edge. It feels right to leave this for them.
Brushing his hands off on his thighs, Rodney gives him an exasperated look and says, "You know, I thought your mediocre grasp of cause and effect might have improved under years of my influence, but now I see that I was sadly mistaken." He doesn't make any move to put out the fire, though, just bends and fusses with the wood pile a little, changing the arrangement of the branches so they're braced together more securely.
John shoulders his pack and waits for him to finish. When he does, they start picking their way down the hill toward the gate. He can just barely see the ground under his feet after so long staring into the fire, but Rodney seems to know where he's going and so John trails behind him like a shadow, down the slope and into the bright blue of the event horizon, following him through to the other side.
--
Soundtrack:
1. The Mountain Goats - Cotton
2. Andrew Bird - Sovay
3. The Weakerthans - Left and Leaving
4. Calexico - Pepita
5. Dawn Upshaw - Yah, Annah Emtza'cha
6. The Postal Service - This Place Is a Prison
7. The Mountain Goats - Shadow Song (Live)
8. Songs: Ohia - Two Blue Lights
9. The Mountain Goats - In Corolla
10. The Decemberists - I Don't Mind
11. The Mountain Goats - Love Love Love
If you've never had the pleasure of hearing the Mountain Goats before, I hope this soundtrack will be a good introduction. John Darnielle tells better stories than almost anyone writing or singing today.