Action/Adventure, Week 1: Call me Sheppard
Title: Call me Sheppard
Author: kriadydragon
Genre: Action/Adventure
Prompt: Rivers, oceans or waterways
Word Count: 8600
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Summary: "They were enduring a cliché, a practical real-life remake of jaws, complete with grizzled old sea veteran with a shark fetish. Except it wasn't a shark they were after."
Notes: Beta'd by the awesome wildcat88.
Art by hollow_echos
Call Me Sheppard
John could no longer wade through his self-denial - he didn't like boats. He'd never liked boats, but it was such an oxymoron to his swimming and surfing prowess that he hadn't been able to figure out why. He loved water, loved riding the waves and diving impossibly deep until his ears started to ache, but he drew the line at boats. Yes, granted, the majority of his experience with boats had mostly involved him being shoved overboard by Dave because Dave thought it was funny as hell, but John was pretty sure there was more to it than that. He'd eventually given up on trying to understand it, and avoided boats whenever possible to save himself the trouble.
The thing was, it wasn't that he was afraid of boats, and he sure as hell didn't get seasick. He just didn't like them. The bobbing, the rocking, the puttering along over choppy waves, the creaking; there was just something about it all that was like nails on a chalkboard to him. And right here, right now, being on a rickety piece of what should have been an out-of-commission alien trawler was like fifty nails on fifty chalkboards.
John ignored his issue as best he could, part out of duty, part because there was nothing he could do about it, and part to save face. The latter was the easiest, with Rodney monopolizing the majority of everyone's attention via his green complexion and miserable moans. The alien trawler Buessa (which, ironically enough, translated to “Everlast”) hobbled over the surface like an arthritic dog trying to rediscover its long lost puppy-hood. Its captain kept a death grip on the wheel, giving it a hard ninety degree twist simply to achieve a gentle turn around the myriad of rocky coasts surrounding them.
Rodney whimpered, his hand digging into his stomach as though trying to reach inside to stop it from churning.
John grimaced in understanding. Each jump and each turn made his heart jolt like being zapped with a weak taser. He said, with as much civility as he could muster, “Take it easy there, Cap. This isn't a race.”
Boatmaster Suvvle - aka Cap though John had no idea why since “captain” was foreign vernacular to these people - grunted in derision and spat over the side. He might have had a point; the boat could go only thirty on a good day, and today wasn't a good day.
Teyla, next to Rodney on the coil of rope at the prow and rubbing his back in comfort, tucked her bottom lip beneath her teeth, maybe in sympathy, maybe trying not to laugh at John's unease over Cap's driving. Ronon was wearing a hole in the deck pacing from one side to the other, watching the waves with fidgety, childlike enthusiasm. They were enduring a cliché, a practical real-life remake of Jaws, complete with a grizzled old sea veteran with a shark fetish. Except it wasn't a shark they were after.
Actually, John had no idea what the hell they were after. Something big, something hungry and something terrorizing the good people of Fersha. Fersha had saved Atlantis more times than John could remember that first lean year of the expedition, providing plenty of protein with fish, fish and more fish. All in exchange for chocolate and MREs, because they made good fish bait.
Cap gave the wheel another hard twist, one-eighty this time, cutting them close to the algae-caked edge of another mini-island. Fersha was odd, but in that totally cool right-out-of-sci-fi alien planet way that at first sight made you giddy as a kid at Disneyland. The all-sea terrain was pimpled with islands big and small, and trees - honest to goodness trees, twenty stories tall - growing right out of the water, their massive canopies fanned like giant umbrellas, sunlight filtering green through the broad leaves, making the sea feel more like a deep-water swamp.
Too bad the only way to see the place was on a boat.
John gripped the rail with one hand until his knuckles blanched. Ronon was too busy leaning precariously over the side to notice. Behind them, Rodney moaned and whimpered while Teyla soothed.
“Think whatever it is will attack us?” Ronon asked, all toothy smiles.
John frowned at him.
Rodney whimpered louder. “Please, please, please tell me you're joke-- oh, who the hell am I kidding, of course you're not.” He buried his head back in his hands.
John had to side with Rodney on this one. He appreciated that Ronon's head was forever in the game but his over-enthusiasm could be a little scary at times.
“Let's stick with hoping like crazy that it doesn't,” John said. Ronon just shrugged. No amount of being practical was going to ruin his day.
Teyla's lip was once again tucked back under her teeth. She was definitely trying not to laugh.
“There it is,” said Cap, his voice as grizzled as the rest of him. A pall of solemnity settled on them like smoke, choking even Ronon's high spirits. John moved to the prow to see them coasting toward a misshapen island, a collection of lumps like a face covered in mossy boils. Scattered across those lumps, caught on the algae and between the rocks, were the remains of another boat.
“The latest attack,” Cap said, unnecessary and foreboding. John had been there the night the SOS had come over the line. The radios had crackled and popped with shouts, someone screaming out coordinates and finally the animal cries of the dying. Team Sheppard had been up to their elbows in maps at the time, marking points of attack and attempting with little success to narrow down this thing's hideout. They'd warned the town to come back before dark. But fishing was best done after dark, the fishermen had said, and went out, anyway.
“And we know this thing isn't going to add our pieces to the rocks because?” Rodney said, voice quivering, and not because of nausea.
“Hasn't hit the same spot twice yet,” Cap said.
Rodney audibly gulped. “There's a first time for everything.”
“Which is why we stay on our guard and not stick around longer than necessary,” John said. His hands went to his P-90, gripping it as tight as he had the rail. It might not be much depending on how big this “thing” was, but having it in his hand always made him feel a hell of a lot better. Even Ronon's hand had come to rest on the butt of his blaster.
“Probably not much to see, anyway,” said Cap. It took several mad twists of the wheel to get the boat to follow the shore without scraping off some paint. He added, still with that unnecessary foreboding, “There never is.”
They weren't here to go island hopping. They were here to find survivors, if any. This had been the first attack close enough to an island for people to swim to shore if they'd been able.
John released his P-90, cupped his hand around his mouth and called out, “Hey! Anyone there! Hello!”
The island wasn't big, taking about two minutes to circle. If there was someone there, they would have heard, and John and company would have seen them. All they saw was more debris: wood bits and what looked like half the wheel.
“Told ya,” Cap said grimly. “This ain't a beast to waste what it takes.”
Rodney groaned, heel of his hand digging into his forehead. “Wonderful. It's probably the size of a whale and we're chasing it down in a dingy.” The color drained from his face. “Oh, crap. It's my dream coming true. Please tell me I'm currently under the influence of a crystalline entity.”
“What's that you're gibbering, softy!” Cap growled.
“I wasn't talking to you!” Rodney snapped with the ire of the miserable and terrified. He added under his breath, “You fish-stinking lunatic.”
“Settle down,” John snapped to no one in particular. Rodney speaking and Cap jumping down his throat in response had been the story since Cap's volunteering to help them hunt the “thing” down. Cap didn't have a lot of patience for people who couldn't handle the sea. Then again, Cap didn't have a lot of patience, period, and no amount of reasoning with him (civil or otherwise) could talk him out of it (and it wasn't like Cap was a member of John's team, so John had no authority over him. Not for lack of trying, which only seemed to spur Cap on). John once again grimaced in sympathy for Rodney's plight.
“So now what?” Ronon asked.
“We keep trollin',” Cap said. He grinned, bearing rotten teeth with a lot of gaps. “Make ourselves bait. Bring the bricker right to us.”
“Oh, hell, no,” Rodney moaned, his face once again seeking refuge behind his hands. Ronon grinned, Teyla rolled her eyes and John pressed his lips into a thin line of uncertainty. He was all for stopping the menaces of the deep, but Cap's enthusiasm was scarier than Ronon's, and it was making John nervous.
The town's equivalent of a sheriff had told John that Cap had been after the beast since it had first attacked three weeks ago, but the rangy old coot had been pretty passionate even before then. Each day the beast had eluded him was another day Cap had grown even more eccentric. John figured that was the sheriff's polite way of saying Cap was liable to pull a Captain Ahab - get the monster and most likely die trying.
This really was turning into Rodney's nightmare. Damn.
Cap made a sharp turn. John's hand returned to the rail.
“How about we head back in,” John said. “Add this site to the collection, figure out where this thing may be hiding, then take it down.” If this thing even was hiding. John would give a year's pay to be able to bring a jumper in, but the trees above and the rocks and roots below made getting around by air or submersible a test of even John's nerves. John knew; they'd tried and had the scratches on Jumper Eight to prove it. As it was, even the life sign's detector wasn't a big help; too much life to detect.
Cap swung the trawler around a larger swath of island covered in smaller trees like weeping willows. The ship hugged the shore, inciting John's fingers to clench the wood of the rail until he was sure he had splinters.
Something slithered over the shoreline, many somethings. Snakes, by the look, Anaconda-huge and long, getting longer and thicker as they slithered out of the water. Their bodies were iridescent and translucent, like oil on a gray puddle, sliding just as slickly across the mossy surface and up the trunk of the nearest willow. Their bodies were covered in suckers...
John's eyes popped wide. “Uh, guys!” He brought his P-90 up, ready to fire.
The boat came to a stop so sudden it jerked, throwing John against the rail, then over it. The panicked shouts of his team were lost when he slammed into the water, the force and cold a shock that made his lungs take an involuntary gasp. Trying to cough only brought in more water, suffocating him, and panic clouded his brain. John struggled and flailed, clawing for the rippling surface as darkness spread over his eyes. He felt, as that darkness coalesced, something thick cinch around his ribs. But terror was no longer enough to keep him awake, and John blacked out.
---------------------
And woke up sputtering, coughing, vomiting water and to the grudging acceptance that maybe being knocked overboard really was the reason he didn't like boats. The thought was lost to a cacophony of voices and someone pounding without mercy against his back, forcing his body to bring up more water.
He choked out between coughs, “What... h'pnd?”
“What happened? What happened!” Rodney wailed. “You fell overboard and flirted with a squid thing because it just saved your life, that's what happened!”
John's brain felt as water-logged as his body, registering the words overboard, flirting and squid but not necessarily in that order.
“I didn't flirt... what squid... what?” Then he coughed some more. The water was tenacious, sticking to his lungs like grease.
Teyla saved the day with, “Rodney, not now. John, breathe. Don't talk, just breathe; that's it.” She added a more gentle touch on his back, chafing lightly over his spine.
John happily took Teyla's advice and breathed, sucking in air between diminishing jags of hacking and spitting. His lungs finally found satisfaction in his efforts, and sweet oxygen cleared the fog from his brain. He then realized two things: One, that the boat was quiet, the wood beneath his cheek no longer vibrating from the sputtering engine. And, two, the boat wasn't moving, at all. Not even drifting.
Still coughing, John struggled toward the upright position, mostly hampered by the insistent hands of his overly-concerned teammates. Like hell John was having any of it. He'd just been knocked overboard, hugged by a giant tentacle and now the ship wasn't moving. And unless he'd been out long enough for them to make it to port, then it all added up to something being very, very wrong.
But seeing as how it seemed to take forever just to sit up, John saved himself the time by coughing out, “Status?”
“We're not moving,” Ronon replied unhelpfully.
John gave him a baleful look. “Yeah, obviously. Which begs the question, why aren't we moving?”
He then noticed a third thing: the gruff, sand-paper cursing of an irate captain carrying up to them from below deck. Cap himself soon followed, grease-stained and red with unchecked fury.
“Well, that buries it,” he snarled, throwing down a filthy rag as though it had the power to punish his stubborn boat. “Blasted engine's cracked. It can't be fixed. One more year I had on that thing, damn ceomite!” He looked at John and gave him a nod. “Good to see you not dead, Colonel. Now get on your feet, we're going to have to hoof it back.”
The run-around of explanations was giving John a headache. Maybe it was the growing pain behind his eyes making him squint or his dour look of confusion, but it didn't go unnoticed, and Teyla once again ended up his savior. As they helped John to his feet, she explained.
Apparently they hit something called a ceomite, a tentacled thing with a sweet-tooth for the fruit things that grew on the willow trees. They were generally peaceful, but had a thick, hard skin that wreaked havoc on fishing boats should they collide.
“They are harmless,” repeated Teyla as she eased John toward the rail, as though to drive home the fact that John had been in no danger from the creature. “Very inquisitive, though Cap finds it odd that one has come out so early during the day. He believes the beast might be frightening them from their normal habits.”
“Takes a lot to scare a ceomite,” Cap called as he and Ronon hefted the ramp onto the shore only inches away from the boat's side. “They don't even notice it when you hit 'em. Oversized wrigglers don't even have the common sense to get out of the brickin' way.”
“Or go away,” Rodney muttered under his breath. He piled their packs next to John, then folded his arms and lifted his chin toward the rail. “Either that or you really did flirt with it. First Ancients now alien wildlife. Seriously, Sheppard, have you no shame?”
John glared at Rodney's face twitching in its futile attempt to fight a grin. The sloppy splash of disturbed water pulled John's attention toward the prow and over the side, where something long, slick and iridescent curved out of the water. With most of the ocean shaded beneath the massive canopy, John was easily able to see the outline of both a massive body and massive tentacles, all together about the length of the boat, like a cuttlefish on too many steroids. The tentacles of its face slipped out of the water, stretching impossibly long as if made of rubber, and scraped off the Day-glo green barnacles clinging to the wood.
“It's the boat it's smitten with, McKay” John said. Rodney, his smirk having won the battle, merely cocked an eyebrow. John ignored him and looked at Teyla. “It really saved me?”
“Snuggled the water right out of you and everything,” answered Rodney. He was rocking back on his heels, practically giddy.
John glowered at him. “Gee, thanks, Teyla.”
Rodney held up his hands, “Hey, don't get pissy at me. Cap's the one who said it's good luck if a ceo-whatever finds favor with you enough to save your ass. Mostly they just flick you out of the way.”
“But you're not going to let me live it down.”
“Not yet, no.” At John's even darker glower, Rodney added a put-upon, “Hey, you'd totally do the same to me if roles were reversed!”
Touché, but it was the principle of the matter. John had almost drowned, a fourth of the ocean still sitting in his lungs and the headache spreading to the back of his skull. In other words, he wasn't in the mood. This must have finally registered to Rodney, who stopped rocking, stopped smiling and glanced around looking busy while muttering to himself about making sure they didn't leave anything important behind.
Teyla placed her hand on John's shoulder, her features oozing worry. “John, are you okay? You look pale.”
“Drowning'll do that to you,” John said. He forced a reassuring smile. “I'm fine.” Contradicting himself when he coughed.
With the ramp down and secured, they disembarked onto the squishy yet solid ground, moist moss squeaking under their feet. It was a relief, being anywhere but on a boat, especially a boat currently being fondled by a giant cuttlefish. Cap grumbled about the cost of having a boat towed back to shore, then grumbled louder about stupid ceomites and their stupid hard heads. John felt rather affronted by the latter. That ceomite had saved his life.
“So, uh.... how long before we reach the town on foot?” Rodney asked with the reluctance of someone terrified of the answer.
Cap sniffed, hiking up is dark blue slicker overalls. “Sun'll be going down soon, so about two days.”
Rodney audibly groaned.
Cap grunted in disgust and swatted the air dismissively. “Buck up, softy. We prepare around here. Should be a couple of good fishing huts not far. No insulting your delicate constitution by sleeping outside.”
Rodney sneered at him, but in a rare show of self-control, judiciously kept his mouth shut.
They gathered their things and trudged over the soft, slick surface of the island. It was the epitome of misery for John, his clothes refusing to dry in the humidity, the moss hiding potholes and treacherous stones, the headache pounding against his brain and his lungs feeling as though they were growing exponentially heavier. On the plus side (because John was staying positive even if it killed him) they could at least count on Cap to know where he was going. It was an erratic route, taking them across the small island to the other side, where even smaller islands that barely had room for three people or fewer were like stepping stones to the next island over.
“Hopping, we call it,” Cap said merrily, like this was a leisurely stroll and not the result of being stranded. “They say you can hop all the way to the other side of the world if you know the paths. That's how they explored in the ancient days before motorized boats and wind sails.”
Cap also told them about the plants, the animals, what to avoid and what not to worry about.
“Reed cats we call them,” Cap said, gesturing casually at a pair of large, green slitted eyes peering at them from behind something akin to bright-orange cattails. “Completely harmless. Might hiss and spit but mostly run off. Though they might make exception to you, softy, if you don't stop all that racket you're making.”
Rodney ceased snapping his fingers and making kissy noises and straightened, glaring daggers at Cap's back. A frog the size of a real cat leaped from a puddle of water right in front of McKay. Rodney's high-pitched yelp made Cap guffaw so loud the damn town could probably hear him.
Where there weren't stepping stones of islands, there were the giant trees, and you could see the roots twisted and tangled together in a massive column that stretched for yards before being swallowed by the murky depths. But here and there pieces of root jutted from the surface like loose strands of hair, thick enough to climb over to get to the next piece of land.
By late afternoon heading into evening, John would have given his P-90 for a place to curl up and lose consciousness. The headache had now extended its hammer-hard tap-dancing down his spine and his lungs felt stuffed with cotton. He was coughing more, and in turn made Teyla regard him with worry more. Rodney was one-more-barb-from-Cap away from murderous intent and Ronon... well, Ronon was the exception, animated as a sugar-high kid in a candy shop. He kept veering off, not quite running but definitely distracted by various noises and movements that he no doubt hoped turned out to be something dangerous he could shoot. He did run if the noise happened to be very loud splashing, still holding out for a monster head to tack on his wall.
About the third time he ran for the shore on one of the larger islands, he returned with the biggest smile on his face. That it was directed specifically at John made John suddenly uneasy.
“Your ceomite's following us,” he announced.
John managed not to grimace. He said, off-handed like he didn't care, because he didn't. “Sure it's the same one?”
He shrugged. “Looks about the same size.”
“Ha! Told you!” Rodney crowed.
John gritted his teeth until he thought he could hear them grinding. “Bite me, Rodney.”
“Oh, nice come back, Mr. Grouchy-puss. How long have you been working on that one?”
John turned his head and cocked an eyebrow. “Grouchy-puss?” But for such a simple action, it proved far more than his throbbing skull could take. He grunted and turned away.
“Hey, don't change the subject... you okay?” Rodney said, joviality lost to suspicion. He didn't allow
John to answer when he next called out, “Hey, psychotic old captain guy, how much further to these fishing huts?”
“Don't get your dainty panties in a twist, softy. We're close.”
“Don't get your dainty panties in a twist,” Rodney nasally mocked. He snorted. “You are such a cliché of every delusional fictional captain that has ever been penned, you parody.”
“Eh? What's that your lips are flappin' about, softy?”
“You heard me, you whale-hunting loon!”
“Ha! Your insults are gibberish, softy. Why don't you learn to lip-flap like a real man?”
“How about you both shut up!” John snarled, an even bigger mistake than cocking his eye, taking more oxygen than his lungs had to spare. He started coughing, pissing off his head that got its revenge by getting the world to swing too fast on its axis.
John stumbled and fell to his knees, surrounded by a chorus of “John!” and “Whoa!” and “Crap oh crap oh crap...!”
“I'm fine,” John gasped, trying weakly to shrug off the hands supporting him. “Jus' a little tired.”
“Just a little tired my ass,” Rodney squealed. A clammy hand, blessedly cool, pressed itself to John's forehead. “You're burning up!”
“It's the water,” said Cap from somewhere behind. “He breathed in too much. Can make you sick if you ain't used to it. Lift him up. There're huts not too far.”
John was pulled to his feet, but as careful as the others tried to be another wave of dizziness assaulted him. It passed quickly, allowing him to walk on his own two feet, Ronon keeping hold of his arm whenever he staggered or listed.
“Not far” was more like a thousand miles. By the time they reached the hut, John's legs had melted into jelly. Getting to the hut was going to suck, because it wasn't a hut, it was a tree house built on the lowest branch of a giant tree that had broken through the edge of the island - lowest branch being about two stories high, with only a questionable rope ladder to reach it.
****(break here in case the story is too long)****
They didn't climb right away, letting John rest for a little while. Twilight had come, bringing with it the chirps, chatters, and flutings of night animals. Cap had gone up ahead, and the windows of the tree house glowed softly with lamp light.
“Best get up here,” Cap called from one of those windows. “Lessen you want something nasty to get you. It's the nasty things that come out at night.”
Rodney didn't need to be told twice, taking a leap of faith by clamoring up a ladder that only moments ago he'd been eying dubiously while muttering about shoddy workmanship. Teyla went next, then John, then Ronon so he could grab John in case he fell. John didn't know which unnerved him more, falling to end up a smear on the moss (the tree house had been built in the crook of the branch over dry land) or whatever resulted from being caught midair one-handed. He had to pause every three steps to catch his breath and let his legs steady themselves. But he made it, with strength enough left for that final crawl onto the hut's porch. He collapsed in a shaking, panting heap just long enough for Ronon to arrive and get him back to his feet.
Inside, the hut was cozily small, a bed at one end, a table at the other and a squat, square wood burning stove in between. The ceiling, not too high to begin with, was made even lower by a collection of nets hanging from hooks, forcing even Teyla to duck.
Ronon dropped John onto the bed, currently devoid of blankets that now sat in a dusty pile in the corner. New blankets sat on the end, no doubt unearthed from the ornate chest stationed at the foot of the bed. Cap was tossing wood into the stove, blowing on it every so often to get the young flames going. When they were at last crackling, Cap straightened, clapped his hands together and rubbed them vigorously.
“So, who's up for a spot of fishing?”
“For fish, right?” Rodney asked warily. “Little harmless fish and not boat-eating monsters?”
“You think I'm daft, softy? You don't hunt beasts with nets and wire. You hunt them with spears! Course I mean fish.” Cap pulled a net from the ceiling. “You don't hunt beasts on an empty stomach. Teyla, love. there's a kettle under the bed. Make your Colonel some tea using any brown moss you can find. Gotta be brown or it'll make him puke up his lunch. Got it? Brown stuff'll help with the fever.”
Teyla nodded while retrieving the kettle from under the bed. Rodney busied himself getting the canteens from their packs, eying the room with distaste and grumbling about rickety old tree houses having been built by rickety old and senile sea captains. Ronon joined Cap for some fishing. They went through the door, onto the porch that must have been a wrap-around when John saw them through the window across from the bed. Cap lit lamps as he went, revealing a narrow walkway with rickety rails leading to a platform out over the water.
John watched, dazed by fever and exhaustion, all sound a muted mumble, as Cap lit a lamp and lowered it on a rope toward the water. The lamp would attract bugs, John's aching brain said, and the bugs would attract fish. Smart. He just hoped it didn't attract anything else.
“Here's an idea,” said Rodney, making John jump. “How about you lay down before you fall down.” McKay's heavy hand on John's shoulder gave him no choice. He eased onto the poky mattress, losing sight of Ronon and Cap waiting for the lone lamp to do its job and bring in the fish. So far, all the lamps seemed to do was call to arms clouds of bugs that Rodney cursed and slapped out of existence against his face and neck. Teyla seemed to easily ignore them as she filled the kettle with water from one of the canteens.
John, feeling too much like crap to notice the lesser hell of bug bites, was left to his thoughts. What he thought of was those ships reduced to scrap by some giant... thing. All those people sucked into the deep dark of the sea or, more likely, a giant mouth full of teeth. It made him relieved beyond words that they were up in a tree instead of out on the water.
But why boats? What would make some sea animal attack a boat? It wasn't like it knew right off the bat there'd been fresh meat aboard. And something hard and wooden wouldn't be all that attractive against an ocean full of soft, easy-to-digest prey. Was the thing pissed? Insane? Sick with some kind of sea rabies? Was it the noise, the lights...
John's eyes widened. He bolted upright, but the world tilted, tilting him with it onto his elbow.
“Sheppard!” Rodney yelped, hand on John's chest trying to push him down. “What the hell is wrong with you? Are you delirious?”
“Lights,” John coughed.
“Oh, hell, he is delirious.”
John shook his head. “No. The light. Tell Ronon to bring that light back up. Douse the lamps. Now!”
Thank goodness for their years spent working together, of seeing each other sick and out of their minds, sick and totally sane, and surviving crisis after crisis. Rodney briefly fumbled as he often did when given commands that didn't make a lick of sense but knowing better than to argue. He ran from the hut and around the porch to the platform. Teyla didn't waste a second, taking care of the lamps inside the hut, then grabbing the teapot and tossing its contents onto the fire.
“John, what is it?” she asked as she worked.
John, breathless from sitting up and staying up, flopped back onto the bed. “Fishing's done at night,” he panted, then coughed. Crap, his chest felt tight, like a tentacle crushing his ribs.
“What?” Teyla asked. Arguing voices carried to them from outside, Rodney's high-pitched but firm, Cap calling Rodney softy.
And within the cacophony of their bickering, a low, rumbling moan.
John threw himself from the bed, across the floor and to the window. He grabbed the sill, keeping him upright, thrust his head out and yelled at the top of his congested voice, “Get in here now!”
“Oh, not you, too,” Cap grumbled.
A tentacle rose up behind Cap like some charmed snake, swaying black against the darker backdrop. But Ronon saw it, and after a split second of wide-eyed alarm, body-slammed both Rodney and Cap onto the walkway at the same time the tentacle dropped, whistling through the air like a whip. It landed, cracking the platform into a thousand splinters, then rose and fell again. Ronon scrambled to his feet pulling both Cap and Rodney by their collars back up the walkway. The tentacle followed, ripping up the boards and crushing them in an explosion of wood.
“Faster!” John screamed. More boards vanished, Ronon, Rodney and Cap ran stumbling each time the tentacle hit, shaking the thick limb. It was getting closer, stretching toward their legs. They dove onto the porch. The tentacle wrapped around Ronon's boot.
Or tried to. Halfway around Ronon's ankle, it stopped. The limb, if it could be called a limb, had reached its stretching limit. Unable to get a good grip, it quivered and pulled away.
Ronon, Rodney and Cap scrambled to their feet, around the porch and through the front door, all three men gasping for air.
“Sheppard, I think your squid girlfriend's pissed,” Rodney quavered.
“Yeah somehow I doubt it,” John said, scanning the darkness for a snake-like silhouette. “That tentacle looked pretty damn big for stretching past its reach.” He pushed from the side window to the window on the right of the front wall. Though the porch mostly blocked his view he could still see some of the water, black in the night beneath the trees.
“It don't make sense,” he heard Cap say from behind, awestruck by confusion. “Ceomites ain't aggressive. Not even when they got kits. They ain't got no natural enemies.”
“Yes, well, either you're wrong or this ceo-thing as the aquatic version of distemper,” Rodney said.
“Who cares,” Ronon said. “It's what's been attacking the ship. We can take it down.”
John coughed, hard, phlegm burning the back of his throat. “Love to... buddy,” he choked. “But those things have skin like kevlar. The boat didn't even scratch that baby one.”
He heard the whine of Ronon's blaster. “Bet it can't stand up to heat.” John could hear the feral grin in his voice.
“Yes, let's piss it off more to test a theory,” Rodney whined.
John turned to face his team, but it didn't matter how slow, how careful, he tried to be, dizziness hit him with a vengeance, forcing him to grip some windowsill or drop. Ronon was immediately by his side, helping him up and over to the bed where he dropped gratefully.
“As long as we are up high, we are safe,” said Teyla, ever the voice of reason, thank goodness, because John was losing the will to be reasonable. He was finally getting blindsided by the effects of the fever, specifically the chills that made him feel like he'd been dipped in a glacier. He groped for the blanket and pulled it haphazardly around his quaking shoulders.
“Teyal's right,” he rasped, teeth chattering. “That thing can't reach us. We're safe.”
There was a moan, followed by a crack like a rifle shot, and the hut shook as though smack in the middle of a quake right off the Richter scale. It flung everything not nailed down off the floor to land in a thudding, snapping, clanging heap punctuated by pained grunts. One moment, John had been weightless, the next he was pinned by a tangle of arms and legs, shoulder digging into the floor and a sharp elbow digging into his solar plexus.
“What the hell was that!” Rodney yelped. Sometimes it paid to state the obvious, distracting them from their various aches, pains and, in John's case, inability to breathe and focus on the issue at hand - disentangling themselves and struggling their way to the window.
If this were a race, Ronon would have won, no surprises there. It was dark, but not so dark John couldn't see the whites of Ronon's wide eyes, and a wide-eyed Ronon looking unnerved didn't boost one's confidence.
“Sheppard! You'd better take a look.”
After a quick glance around the room ensuring that everyone was working their way upright, John struggled to his feet. He stumbled to the window and gaped.
Half the branch was gone, ten inches of stump between the porch and the serrated end like shards of bone poking from a severed arm.
Another moan and the hut shook, not as bad as last time but enough to drop John and force Ronon to cling for dear life to the window. When John attempted to rise, the tree shook again, then again.
Teyla struggled in between shakes to the front window on the left. She gasped. “It is attacking the tree itself! It is trying to pull it down!”
“Ha!” barked Cap, also staying wisely on the floor. “Good luck with that. Ain't no ceomite that strong.”
A series of cracks like thunder begged to differ. Gravity shifted, pulling John, everyone and everything toward the side wall. The tree groaned piteously, then they were falling, their shouts and cries drowned out by gunshot loud cracking and popping of the trunk. The stove slammed into the wall inches from their group. Ronon flipped the table, blocking them all from the bed and chest racing toward them as they huddled tightly together.
This was it. After everything they'd been through, this was how it was going to go down - death by alien cuttlefish.
Crashing, popping, ripping, certainty of demise, a bone-jarring and teeth rattling jolt, screaming then...
Stillness. The whisper of leaves. Harsh breathing. John opened one eye, not having realized he'd even closed his eyes. He then opened the other eye and looked around.
“We stopped,” he rasped. He would like to say that maybe the sensation of falling had been in their heads, except for the side wall currently acting as their floor and the table the only thing standing between them and the bed. He craned his neck toward the window and saw, rippling silver under the moonlight, the ocean. It took a little more craning to see why they weren't dead yet.
The giant tree had hit an even bigger tree, the bigger tree holding up the smaller like one buddy clinging to another. John let out a breath meant to be a laugh. It devolved into a cough that made his chest burn.
The monster moaned, the water sloshing just beneath the window. John slapped his hand over his mouth, stifling the cough, and the water stopped churning.
“Sheppard, why aren't we dead?” Rodney hissed. The creature moaned, the water churned and Sheppard slapped his hand over Rodney's mouth.
“John?” Teyla said, dazed. John uncovered his own mouth to silence her.
“Don't speak,” he whispered, suddenly glad for his rasping, weakened voice. “Don't make a sound.”
The silence that followed was so thick it was like a weight against John's ears. The water below them was still, shimmering with silver fragments of the reflected moon. Then a creak, the tree or house settling, and something rose slowly from the water, stretching upward. John's heart shot into his throat, dread ripping down his spine. He felt the muscles of Rodney's and Teyla's jaws tighten painfully.
But the tentacle drifted past the window, groping along the porch and vanishing around the other side. Only to reappear through the right-side window. It touched, it felt, it searched, painfully methodical as though it had all the time in the world.
It was only a theory, albeit a damn good one, that this thing survived on sight and sound. Possibly touch, too, but with the table and bed acting as a blockade, hopefully they wouldn't find out the hard way. As long as they stayed quiet, their chances of survival went up.
With one tree down, moonlight filtered through the holes punched through the walls from the impact of falling branches. The light landed on the tentacle. Maybe it was just a trick of that light, but there was something incredibly weird about that tentacle. It was hard to be sure, most of John's view obscured by the blockade.
When the tentacle next slid into sight along the floor, closer than before, John knew what it was.
The tentacle was opaque, a deep, dark silver, and jointed like vertebra with a stretchy, almost plastic-like skin in between.
It looked robotic.
John coughed. The tentacle reacted as though stung by a bee, whipping over their heads and ripping an opening in the wall from one end to the other. Ronon's large hand slapped over John's mouth. John nodded his thanks.
The thanks were premature, that small cough the first domino to fall in what would have been - what was going to be - a rip-roarer of a jag. He could feel it burning like acid in his chest. Trying not to breathe only provoked it until the burning became agony that made John shake and choke.
The tentacle groped overhead. Silently, slowly, Ronon pulled his blaster from its holster. John's lungs were about to explode, sweat dripping down his face, his chest, the canal of his spine. Crap, he couldn't take it. He was going to cough, needed to cough, and there was nothing Ronon's broad hand could do about it. He looked to Ronon, hoping the moonlight showed his silent apology.
Ronon shrugged. Then he shot the tentacle, two blasts melting the plastic connective material and severing off the tip. The beast moaned, the tentacle slipped away and John hacked until he was sure he'd brought up his lungs.
“What the hell did you do that for!” Rodney shrieked.
The shaking resumed, uninjured tentacles wrapping themselves around the hut and pulling. Below, the creature's head broke the surface in a halo of froth. It's body shimmered metallic in the moonlight, its mouth a perfect circle filled with teeth like the teeth of a band saw - a literal band saw, row after row spinning clockwise, counter-clockwise and clock-wise, friggin' meat grinder.
Ronon fired at it through the window, each hit scorching dark patches on the metal skin.
“That thing's going to eat us way before you can hit the sweet spot!” Rodney cried. The tree and hut shuddered.
“Then we need... to slow it down...” John managed between coughs. He scrabbled and flopped over to the stove rattling against the wall. “Help me with this!”
“Oh I see where you're headed, sonny!” Cap said with a feral grin to match Ronon's. They all joined John, with the exception of Ronon still firing away, and together shoved the heavy stove in increments toward the opening. One final shove tipped it over the side and it plummeted right into the gaping saw-mouth.
That mouth might have been able to reduce wood to scrap but John doubted it could do much against cast iron. And he was right, the stove knocking out a few teeth, bending others and doing damage to the inside in ways that made the beast go haywire, thrashing, splashing and moaning.
Another jolt shook them off balance. Cap tumbled out the window with a guttural bellow and would have fallen if Rodney hadn't caught him.
“Hold on!” Rodney cried.
“I am!” Cap snarled. John and Teyla added their grips to Rodney's. Little by little, inch by inch against the earthquake shaking, they pulled Cap in. Cap slumped against the wall, breathless, and clapped Rodney on the shoulder.
“What say we give that beasty more to chew on, eh?” he said. They broke the legs off the table and shoved it through, followed by the narrow bed, the chest, then net after net made of strong cords that tangled in the broken teeth. Ronon added shot after shot down the mechanical throat.
Above the moans and thrashing was a high-pitched whine, and it was growing. The beast stilled suddenly. Then it started to convulse, like it was caught in a seizure.
John's eyes bulged in panic. “Everyone down!”
They all dove to one side or the other and covered their heads. Below them, the beast rattled and the whine reached its final pitch.
The bitch about explosions wasn't so much the noise and concussive force that made you feel like you were imploding, it was that they lasted only seconds while they felt like an eternity. There was no sense of time, of space, no room for thought beyond the certainty of being dead. Once again John found himself weightless, pummeled by heat and debris.
The next thing he knew, he couldn't breathe, and thought for sure he was dead. When something cool and solid wrapped itself around his chest, he was sure it was the monster, that it hadn't exploded enough to kill it and that he was about to be ground into hamburger.
Then he was flying again, landing gracelessly on a soft, spongy surface smelling strongly of kelp. He coughed, sputtered, and coughed harder when something thick and viscous refused to dislodge from his lungs. But a heavy hand put dent after dent in his spine until the viscous crap gave up and slapped against the back of his raw throat.
When he turned to thank Ronon (because no one else had a hand that big and relentless) he startled badly at a nest of tentacles waggling his way.
“Easy, Sheppard,” Ronon said. He coughed a couple of times as well, though not as bad as John. “Easy. It's your ceomite.”
John almost laughed. His ceomite. But it looked to be about the same size. It was half out of the water like a curious dolphin checking out the happenings on dry land. It must have been quite the show - John's team and Cap, choking, wet, miserable but alive and slowly starting to realize it. John finally wheezed out that laugh.
“Thanks, buddy,” he said, giving the ceomite a two-fingered salute. Satisfied, the ceomite, slipped back into the water.
---------------------
Boats were backstabbing bastards. John didn't care if that was just the fever plus his busted wrist plus trudging from island to island back to town doing the thinking for him. He'd just been reminded of the precariousness of control, the lightning speed at which things could go from stable to monumentally bad, and that one minute you're high and dry and the next floundering for your life. He'd been dropped in the drink, twice. Any compassion he might have had for boats had been, literally, blown out of the water.
Boats and tree houses, which sucked because he'd always liked tree houses up until now. And aquatic robots mimicking sea life, but that one he could live with.
On the bright side, even he had to admit they got off pretty light: Ronon with bruised ribs, Teyla with a mild concussion, Rodney also with a mild concussion and all of them battered and scraped. Cap was the only one who seemed merely scraped. Hell, he was down right ecstatic, already rehearsing to regale the town with tales of monster slaying, and forcing Rodney to be his audience.
“Dark night, it was. Us holed up in a dinky little hut, with only a clean drop between us and the beast.” He elbowed Rodney in the flank. “Sound good so far, softy?”
“Yeah, sure, whatever,” Rodney groused. Cap paid no mind and regaled on.
They reached civilization at last before sunset. It was just like out of the movies, the local kids doing a little evening fishing dashing off to alert the townsfolk of the arrival. Not moments later, those townsfolk surged around like a mob of hope and concern, swallowing them up and herding them to the clinic. The equivalent of a sheriff broke off to go contact Atlantis.
No words could describes the joys of shedding wet clothes, of taking a hot shower, of dressing in something dry (yes, a gown, but a wonderfully dry gown) and curling up in a soft, warm bed, oxygen mask strapped to his face or not. Various drugs were pumped into John's veins and drinks poured down his throat that by the time he came out of his happy chemical haze, it was daytime and several of Keller's medics were talking with the local healers in the patient ward. The beds next to John's, once occupied by his team, were now empty. Seeing as how no one had been in horribly dire straits the other night, John easily took this as a good sign.
Rodney hurrying into the ward confirmed his suspicions.
“Oh, good, you're awake,” McKay said, harried and striding almost frantically to John's bedside. “You have to help me. That lunatic captain keeps insisting I ride along with him to retrieve the monster. He won't take no for an answer!”
“Rodney,” Keller admonished good naturedly, bumping Rodney a little to the side to get to John. “Colonel Sheppard just woke up. Give the man a moment to reorient, will you?”
It was with foot tapping impatience that Rodney waited for Keller to do the usual medical run-through: heart, lungs, and the reassurance that John would be fine now that he had antibiotics racing through his veins. She left, and Rodney dove desperately back in.
“Seriously, Sheppard, you have to stop him. Get Ronon to distract him, have someone give him a flying tour in a 'jumper, anything!”
John lifted his hands. “Do I look capable of doing anything?” He coughed, grimacing at the ache in his rib muscles. “Come on, Rodney. What do you expect? You saved the guy's life.” He grinned. “He likes you, now.”
Rodney groaned. Then stiffened when a familiar gruff voice cut through the softer chatter.
“Hey, softy! Ya ready or what!” No amount of nurses shushing could impede that bellowing enthusiasm.
John grinned. “Bet you'd take a friendly giant cuttlefish right about now.”
Rodney gave him a sour look, then stomped away at what only he perceived to be his doom.
But hours later saw Rodney return in higher spirits. The fake ceomite had been found, a machination of Ancient design, created for exploratory purposes, Rodney was sure, to study the local ceomite population. There were dents on the skin, the kind that no explosion could have caused.
“The way I see it,” Rodney explained to John, Ronon and Teyla, “One too many smacks on the head by local trawlers jolted it badly enough to wreak havoc on its programming. Just a theory, of course, but it would explain a lot.”
“In other words, it got the robot version of a concussion,” John said.
Rodney shrugged. “I suppose you could say that. We'll know for sure once we really start taking this thing apart.”
“But at least it is no longer functional,” Teyla said with a smile. “The people of this world can once more fish in peace.”
“Good to know,” John said, rubbing tiredly at his gritty eyes. "But next time they have a problem it better be where we can bring a jumper."
"Don't like boats, much?" Ronon said with a smirk.
John flopped his hand back onto the bed, the dry bed on blessedly dry and steady land. “Yeah, something like that.”
The End
A/N: I have nothing against boats, I swear. In fact, I quite enjoy them. But I remember hearing once something about how Joe F. wasn't too keen about being on boats, so I wanted to have a little fun with that. Poor boats.
Author: kriadydragon
Genre: Action/Adventure
Prompt: Rivers, oceans or waterways
Word Count: 8600
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Summary: "They were enduring a cliché, a practical real-life remake of jaws, complete with grizzled old sea veteran with a shark fetish. Except it wasn't a shark they were after."
Notes: Beta'd by the awesome wildcat88.
Art by hollow_echos
Call Me Sheppard
John could no longer wade through his self-denial - he didn't like boats. He'd never liked boats, but it was such an oxymoron to his swimming and surfing prowess that he hadn't been able to figure out why. He loved water, loved riding the waves and diving impossibly deep until his ears started to ache, but he drew the line at boats. Yes, granted, the majority of his experience with boats had mostly involved him being shoved overboard by Dave because Dave thought it was funny as hell, but John was pretty sure there was more to it than that. He'd eventually given up on trying to understand it, and avoided boats whenever possible to save himself the trouble.
The thing was, it wasn't that he was afraid of boats, and he sure as hell didn't get seasick. He just didn't like them. The bobbing, the rocking, the puttering along over choppy waves, the creaking; there was just something about it all that was like nails on a chalkboard to him. And right here, right now, being on a rickety piece of what should have been an out-of-commission alien trawler was like fifty nails on fifty chalkboards.
John ignored his issue as best he could, part out of duty, part because there was nothing he could do about it, and part to save face. The latter was the easiest, with Rodney monopolizing the majority of everyone's attention via his green complexion and miserable moans. The alien trawler Buessa (which, ironically enough, translated to “Everlast”) hobbled over the surface like an arthritic dog trying to rediscover its long lost puppy-hood. Its captain kept a death grip on the wheel, giving it a hard ninety degree twist simply to achieve a gentle turn around the myriad of rocky coasts surrounding them.
Rodney whimpered, his hand digging into his stomach as though trying to reach inside to stop it from churning.
John grimaced in understanding. Each jump and each turn made his heart jolt like being zapped with a weak taser. He said, with as much civility as he could muster, “Take it easy there, Cap. This isn't a race.”
Boatmaster Suvvle - aka Cap though John had no idea why since “captain” was foreign vernacular to these people - grunted in derision and spat over the side. He might have had a point; the boat could go only thirty on a good day, and today wasn't a good day.
Teyla, next to Rodney on the coil of rope at the prow and rubbing his back in comfort, tucked her bottom lip beneath her teeth, maybe in sympathy, maybe trying not to laugh at John's unease over Cap's driving. Ronon was wearing a hole in the deck pacing from one side to the other, watching the waves with fidgety, childlike enthusiasm. They were enduring a cliché, a practical real-life remake of Jaws, complete with a grizzled old sea veteran with a shark fetish. Except it wasn't a shark they were after.
Actually, John had no idea what the hell they were after. Something big, something hungry and something terrorizing the good people of Fersha. Fersha had saved Atlantis more times than John could remember that first lean year of the expedition, providing plenty of protein with fish, fish and more fish. All in exchange for chocolate and MREs, because they made good fish bait.
Cap gave the wheel another hard twist, one-eighty this time, cutting them close to the algae-caked edge of another mini-island. Fersha was odd, but in that totally cool right-out-of-sci-fi alien planet way that at first sight made you giddy as a kid at Disneyland. The all-sea terrain was pimpled with islands big and small, and trees - honest to goodness trees, twenty stories tall - growing right out of the water, their massive canopies fanned like giant umbrellas, sunlight filtering green through the broad leaves, making the sea feel more like a deep-water swamp.
Too bad the only way to see the place was on a boat.
John gripped the rail with one hand until his knuckles blanched. Ronon was too busy leaning precariously over the side to notice. Behind them, Rodney moaned and whimpered while Teyla soothed.
“Think whatever it is will attack us?” Ronon asked, all toothy smiles.
John frowned at him.
Rodney whimpered louder. “Please, please, please tell me you're joke-- oh, who the hell am I kidding, of course you're not.” He buried his head back in his hands.
John had to side with Rodney on this one. He appreciated that Ronon's head was forever in the game but his over-enthusiasm could be a little scary at times.
“Let's stick with hoping like crazy that it doesn't,” John said. Ronon just shrugged. No amount of being practical was going to ruin his day.
Teyla's lip was once again tucked back under her teeth. She was definitely trying not to laugh.
“There it is,” said Cap, his voice as grizzled as the rest of him. A pall of solemnity settled on them like smoke, choking even Ronon's high spirits. John moved to the prow to see them coasting toward a misshapen island, a collection of lumps like a face covered in mossy boils. Scattered across those lumps, caught on the algae and between the rocks, were the remains of another boat.
“The latest attack,” Cap said, unnecessary and foreboding. John had been there the night the SOS had come over the line. The radios had crackled and popped with shouts, someone screaming out coordinates and finally the animal cries of the dying. Team Sheppard had been up to their elbows in maps at the time, marking points of attack and attempting with little success to narrow down this thing's hideout. They'd warned the town to come back before dark. But fishing was best done after dark, the fishermen had said, and went out, anyway.
“And we know this thing isn't going to add our pieces to the rocks because?” Rodney said, voice quivering, and not because of nausea.
“Hasn't hit the same spot twice yet,” Cap said.
Rodney audibly gulped. “There's a first time for everything.”
“Which is why we stay on our guard and not stick around longer than necessary,” John said. His hands went to his P-90, gripping it as tight as he had the rail. It might not be much depending on how big this “thing” was, but having it in his hand always made him feel a hell of a lot better. Even Ronon's hand had come to rest on the butt of his blaster.
“Probably not much to see, anyway,” said Cap. It took several mad twists of the wheel to get the boat to follow the shore without scraping off some paint. He added, still with that unnecessary foreboding, “There never is.”
They weren't here to go island hopping. They were here to find survivors, if any. This had been the first attack close enough to an island for people to swim to shore if they'd been able.
John released his P-90, cupped his hand around his mouth and called out, “Hey! Anyone there! Hello!”
The island wasn't big, taking about two minutes to circle. If there was someone there, they would have heard, and John and company would have seen them. All they saw was more debris: wood bits and what looked like half the wheel.
“Told ya,” Cap said grimly. “This ain't a beast to waste what it takes.”
Rodney groaned, heel of his hand digging into his forehead. “Wonderful. It's probably the size of a whale and we're chasing it down in a dingy.” The color drained from his face. “Oh, crap. It's my dream coming true. Please tell me I'm currently under the influence of a crystalline entity.”
“What's that you're gibbering, softy!” Cap growled.
“I wasn't talking to you!” Rodney snapped with the ire of the miserable and terrified. He added under his breath, “You fish-stinking lunatic.”
“Settle down,” John snapped to no one in particular. Rodney speaking and Cap jumping down his throat in response had been the story since Cap's volunteering to help them hunt the “thing” down. Cap didn't have a lot of patience for people who couldn't handle the sea. Then again, Cap didn't have a lot of patience, period, and no amount of reasoning with him (civil or otherwise) could talk him out of it (and it wasn't like Cap was a member of John's team, so John had no authority over him. Not for lack of trying, which only seemed to spur Cap on). John once again grimaced in sympathy for Rodney's plight.
“So now what?” Ronon asked.
“We keep trollin',” Cap said. He grinned, bearing rotten teeth with a lot of gaps. “Make ourselves bait. Bring the bricker right to us.”
“Oh, hell, no,” Rodney moaned, his face once again seeking refuge behind his hands. Ronon grinned, Teyla rolled her eyes and John pressed his lips into a thin line of uncertainty. He was all for stopping the menaces of the deep, but Cap's enthusiasm was scarier than Ronon's, and it was making John nervous.
The town's equivalent of a sheriff had told John that Cap had been after the beast since it had first attacked three weeks ago, but the rangy old coot had been pretty passionate even before then. Each day the beast had eluded him was another day Cap had grown even more eccentric. John figured that was the sheriff's polite way of saying Cap was liable to pull a Captain Ahab - get the monster and most likely die trying.
This really was turning into Rodney's nightmare. Damn.
Cap made a sharp turn. John's hand returned to the rail.
“How about we head back in,” John said. “Add this site to the collection, figure out where this thing may be hiding, then take it down.” If this thing even was hiding. John would give a year's pay to be able to bring a jumper in, but the trees above and the rocks and roots below made getting around by air or submersible a test of even John's nerves. John knew; they'd tried and had the scratches on Jumper Eight to prove it. As it was, even the life sign's detector wasn't a big help; too much life to detect.
Cap swung the trawler around a larger swath of island covered in smaller trees like weeping willows. The ship hugged the shore, inciting John's fingers to clench the wood of the rail until he was sure he had splinters.
Something slithered over the shoreline, many somethings. Snakes, by the look, Anaconda-huge and long, getting longer and thicker as they slithered out of the water. Their bodies were iridescent and translucent, like oil on a gray puddle, sliding just as slickly across the mossy surface and up the trunk of the nearest willow. Their bodies were covered in suckers...
John's eyes popped wide. “Uh, guys!” He brought his P-90 up, ready to fire.
The boat came to a stop so sudden it jerked, throwing John against the rail, then over it. The panicked shouts of his team were lost when he slammed into the water, the force and cold a shock that made his lungs take an involuntary gasp. Trying to cough only brought in more water, suffocating him, and panic clouded his brain. John struggled and flailed, clawing for the rippling surface as darkness spread over his eyes. He felt, as that darkness coalesced, something thick cinch around his ribs. But terror was no longer enough to keep him awake, and John blacked out.
---------------------
And woke up sputtering, coughing, vomiting water and to the grudging acceptance that maybe being knocked overboard really was the reason he didn't like boats. The thought was lost to a cacophony of voices and someone pounding without mercy against his back, forcing his body to bring up more water.
He choked out between coughs, “What... h'pnd?”
“What happened? What happened!” Rodney wailed. “You fell overboard and flirted with a squid thing because it just saved your life, that's what happened!”
John's brain felt as water-logged as his body, registering the words overboard, flirting and squid but not necessarily in that order.
“I didn't flirt... what squid... what?” Then he coughed some more. The water was tenacious, sticking to his lungs like grease.
Teyla saved the day with, “Rodney, not now. John, breathe. Don't talk, just breathe; that's it.” She added a more gentle touch on his back, chafing lightly over his spine.
John happily took Teyla's advice and breathed, sucking in air between diminishing jags of hacking and spitting. His lungs finally found satisfaction in his efforts, and sweet oxygen cleared the fog from his brain. He then realized two things: One, that the boat was quiet, the wood beneath his cheek no longer vibrating from the sputtering engine. And, two, the boat wasn't moving, at all. Not even drifting.
Still coughing, John struggled toward the upright position, mostly hampered by the insistent hands of his overly-concerned teammates. Like hell John was having any of it. He'd just been knocked overboard, hugged by a giant tentacle and now the ship wasn't moving. And unless he'd been out long enough for them to make it to port, then it all added up to something being very, very wrong.
But seeing as how it seemed to take forever just to sit up, John saved himself the time by coughing out, “Status?”
“We're not moving,” Ronon replied unhelpfully.
John gave him a baleful look. “Yeah, obviously. Which begs the question, why aren't we moving?”
He then noticed a third thing: the gruff, sand-paper cursing of an irate captain carrying up to them from below deck. Cap himself soon followed, grease-stained and red with unchecked fury.
“Well, that buries it,” he snarled, throwing down a filthy rag as though it had the power to punish his stubborn boat. “Blasted engine's cracked. It can't be fixed. One more year I had on that thing, damn ceomite!” He looked at John and gave him a nod. “Good to see you not dead, Colonel. Now get on your feet, we're going to have to hoof it back.”
The run-around of explanations was giving John a headache. Maybe it was the growing pain behind his eyes making him squint or his dour look of confusion, but it didn't go unnoticed, and Teyla once again ended up his savior. As they helped John to his feet, she explained.
Apparently they hit something called a ceomite, a tentacled thing with a sweet-tooth for the fruit things that grew on the willow trees. They were generally peaceful, but had a thick, hard skin that wreaked havoc on fishing boats should they collide.
“They are harmless,” repeated Teyla as she eased John toward the rail, as though to drive home the fact that John had been in no danger from the creature. “Very inquisitive, though Cap finds it odd that one has come out so early during the day. He believes the beast might be frightening them from their normal habits.”
“Takes a lot to scare a ceomite,” Cap called as he and Ronon hefted the ramp onto the shore only inches away from the boat's side. “They don't even notice it when you hit 'em. Oversized wrigglers don't even have the common sense to get out of the brickin' way.”
“Or go away,” Rodney muttered under his breath. He piled their packs next to John, then folded his arms and lifted his chin toward the rail. “Either that or you really did flirt with it. First Ancients now alien wildlife. Seriously, Sheppard, have you no shame?”
John glared at Rodney's face twitching in its futile attempt to fight a grin. The sloppy splash of disturbed water pulled John's attention toward the prow and over the side, where something long, slick and iridescent curved out of the water. With most of the ocean shaded beneath the massive canopy, John was easily able to see the outline of both a massive body and massive tentacles, all together about the length of the boat, like a cuttlefish on too many steroids. The tentacles of its face slipped out of the water, stretching impossibly long as if made of rubber, and scraped off the Day-glo green barnacles clinging to the wood.
“It's the boat it's smitten with, McKay” John said. Rodney, his smirk having won the battle, merely cocked an eyebrow. John ignored him and looked at Teyla. “It really saved me?”
“Snuggled the water right out of you and everything,” answered Rodney. He was rocking back on his heels, practically giddy.
John glowered at him. “Gee, thanks, Teyla.”
Rodney held up his hands, “Hey, don't get pissy at me. Cap's the one who said it's good luck if a ceo-whatever finds favor with you enough to save your ass. Mostly they just flick you out of the way.”
“But you're not going to let me live it down.”
“Not yet, no.” At John's even darker glower, Rodney added a put-upon, “Hey, you'd totally do the same to me if roles were reversed!”
Touché, but it was the principle of the matter. John had almost drowned, a fourth of the ocean still sitting in his lungs and the headache spreading to the back of his skull. In other words, he wasn't in the mood. This must have finally registered to Rodney, who stopped rocking, stopped smiling and glanced around looking busy while muttering to himself about making sure they didn't leave anything important behind.
Teyla placed her hand on John's shoulder, her features oozing worry. “John, are you okay? You look pale.”
“Drowning'll do that to you,” John said. He forced a reassuring smile. “I'm fine.” Contradicting himself when he coughed.
With the ramp down and secured, they disembarked onto the squishy yet solid ground, moist moss squeaking under their feet. It was a relief, being anywhere but on a boat, especially a boat currently being fondled by a giant cuttlefish. Cap grumbled about the cost of having a boat towed back to shore, then grumbled louder about stupid ceomites and their stupid hard heads. John felt rather affronted by the latter. That ceomite had saved his life.
“So, uh.... how long before we reach the town on foot?” Rodney asked with the reluctance of someone terrified of the answer.
Cap sniffed, hiking up is dark blue slicker overalls. “Sun'll be going down soon, so about two days.”
Rodney audibly groaned.
Cap grunted in disgust and swatted the air dismissively. “Buck up, softy. We prepare around here. Should be a couple of good fishing huts not far. No insulting your delicate constitution by sleeping outside.”
Rodney sneered at him, but in a rare show of self-control, judiciously kept his mouth shut.
They gathered their things and trudged over the soft, slick surface of the island. It was the epitome of misery for John, his clothes refusing to dry in the humidity, the moss hiding potholes and treacherous stones, the headache pounding against his brain and his lungs feeling as though they were growing exponentially heavier. On the plus side (because John was staying positive even if it killed him) they could at least count on Cap to know where he was going. It was an erratic route, taking them across the small island to the other side, where even smaller islands that barely had room for three people or fewer were like stepping stones to the next island over.
“Hopping, we call it,” Cap said merrily, like this was a leisurely stroll and not the result of being stranded. “They say you can hop all the way to the other side of the world if you know the paths. That's how they explored in the ancient days before motorized boats and wind sails.”
Cap also told them about the plants, the animals, what to avoid and what not to worry about.
“Reed cats we call them,” Cap said, gesturing casually at a pair of large, green slitted eyes peering at them from behind something akin to bright-orange cattails. “Completely harmless. Might hiss and spit but mostly run off. Though they might make exception to you, softy, if you don't stop all that racket you're making.”
Rodney ceased snapping his fingers and making kissy noises and straightened, glaring daggers at Cap's back. A frog the size of a real cat leaped from a puddle of water right in front of McKay. Rodney's high-pitched yelp made Cap guffaw so loud the damn town could probably hear him.
Where there weren't stepping stones of islands, there were the giant trees, and you could see the roots twisted and tangled together in a massive column that stretched for yards before being swallowed by the murky depths. But here and there pieces of root jutted from the surface like loose strands of hair, thick enough to climb over to get to the next piece of land.
By late afternoon heading into evening, John would have given his P-90 for a place to curl up and lose consciousness. The headache had now extended its hammer-hard tap-dancing down his spine and his lungs felt stuffed with cotton. He was coughing more, and in turn made Teyla regard him with worry more. Rodney was one-more-barb-from-Cap away from murderous intent and Ronon... well, Ronon was the exception, animated as a sugar-high kid in a candy shop. He kept veering off, not quite running but definitely distracted by various noises and movements that he no doubt hoped turned out to be something dangerous he could shoot. He did run if the noise happened to be very loud splashing, still holding out for a monster head to tack on his wall.
About the third time he ran for the shore on one of the larger islands, he returned with the biggest smile on his face. That it was directed specifically at John made John suddenly uneasy.
“Your ceomite's following us,” he announced.
John managed not to grimace. He said, off-handed like he didn't care, because he didn't. “Sure it's the same one?”
He shrugged. “Looks about the same size.”
“Ha! Told you!” Rodney crowed.
John gritted his teeth until he thought he could hear them grinding. “Bite me, Rodney.”
“Oh, nice come back, Mr. Grouchy-puss. How long have you been working on that one?”
John turned his head and cocked an eyebrow. “Grouchy-puss?” But for such a simple action, it proved far more than his throbbing skull could take. He grunted and turned away.
“Hey, don't change the subject... you okay?” Rodney said, joviality lost to suspicion. He didn't allow
John to answer when he next called out, “Hey, psychotic old captain guy, how much further to these fishing huts?”
“Don't get your dainty panties in a twist, softy. We're close.”
“Don't get your dainty panties in a twist,” Rodney nasally mocked. He snorted. “You are such a cliché of every delusional fictional captain that has ever been penned, you parody.”
“Eh? What's that your lips are flappin' about, softy?”
“You heard me, you whale-hunting loon!”
“Ha! Your insults are gibberish, softy. Why don't you learn to lip-flap like a real man?”
“How about you both shut up!” John snarled, an even bigger mistake than cocking his eye, taking more oxygen than his lungs had to spare. He started coughing, pissing off his head that got its revenge by getting the world to swing too fast on its axis.
John stumbled and fell to his knees, surrounded by a chorus of “John!” and “Whoa!” and “Crap oh crap oh crap...!”
“I'm fine,” John gasped, trying weakly to shrug off the hands supporting him. “Jus' a little tired.”
“Just a little tired my ass,” Rodney squealed. A clammy hand, blessedly cool, pressed itself to John's forehead. “You're burning up!”
“It's the water,” said Cap from somewhere behind. “He breathed in too much. Can make you sick if you ain't used to it. Lift him up. There're huts not too far.”
John was pulled to his feet, but as careful as the others tried to be another wave of dizziness assaulted him. It passed quickly, allowing him to walk on his own two feet, Ronon keeping hold of his arm whenever he staggered or listed.
“Not far” was more like a thousand miles. By the time they reached the hut, John's legs had melted into jelly. Getting to the hut was going to suck, because it wasn't a hut, it was a tree house built on the lowest branch of a giant tree that had broken through the edge of the island - lowest branch being about two stories high, with only a questionable rope ladder to reach it.
****(break here in case the story is too long)****
They didn't climb right away, letting John rest for a little while. Twilight had come, bringing with it the chirps, chatters, and flutings of night animals. Cap had gone up ahead, and the windows of the tree house glowed softly with lamp light.
“Best get up here,” Cap called from one of those windows. “Lessen you want something nasty to get you. It's the nasty things that come out at night.”
Rodney didn't need to be told twice, taking a leap of faith by clamoring up a ladder that only moments ago he'd been eying dubiously while muttering about shoddy workmanship. Teyla went next, then John, then Ronon so he could grab John in case he fell. John didn't know which unnerved him more, falling to end up a smear on the moss (the tree house had been built in the crook of the branch over dry land) or whatever resulted from being caught midair one-handed. He had to pause every three steps to catch his breath and let his legs steady themselves. But he made it, with strength enough left for that final crawl onto the hut's porch. He collapsed in a shaking, panting heap just long enough for Ronon to arrive and get him back to his feet.
Inside, the hut was cozily small, a bed at one end, a table at the other and a squat, square wood burning stove in between. The ceiling, not too high to begin with, was made even lower by a collection of nets hanging from hooks, forcing even Teyla to duck.
Ronon dropped John onto the bed, currently devoid of blankets that now sat in a dusty pile in the corner. New blankets sat on the end, no doubt unearthed from the ornate chest stationed at the foot of the bed. Cap was tossing wood into the stove, blowing on it every so often to get the young flames going. When they were at last crackling, Cap straightened, clapped his hands together and rubbed them vigorously.
“So, who's up for a spot of fishing?”
“For fish, right?” Rodney asked warily. “Little harmless fish and not boat-eating monsters?”
“You think I'm daft, softy? You don't hunt beasts with nets and wire. You hunt them with spears! Course I mean fish.” Cap pulled a net from the ceiling. “You don't hunt beasts on an empty stomach. Teyla, love. there's a kettle under the bed. Make your Colonel some tea using any brown moss you can find. Gotta be brown or it'll make him puke up his lunch. Got it? Brown stuff'll help with the fever.”
Teyla nodded while retrieving the kettle from under the bed. Rodney busied himself getting the canteens from their packs, eying the room with distaste and grumbling about rickety old tree houses having been built by rickety old and senile sea captains. Ronon joined Cap for some fishing. They went through the door, onto the porch that must have been a wrap-around when John saw them through the window across from the bed. Cap lit lamps as he went, revealing a narrow walkway with rickety rails leading to a platform out over the water.
John watched, dazed by fever and exhaustion, all sound a muted mumble, as Cap lit a lamp and lowered it on a rope toward the water. The lamp would attract bugs, John's aching brain said, and the bugs would attract fish. Smart. He just hoped it didn't attract anything else.
“Here's an idea,” said Rodney, making John jump. “How about you lay down before you fall down.” McKay's heavy hand on John's shoulder gave him no choice. He eased onto the poky mattress, losing sight of Ronon and Cap waiting for the lone lamp to do its job and bring in the fish. So far, all the lamps seemed to do was call to arms clouds of bugs that Rodney cursed and slapped out of existence against his face and neck. Teyla seemed to easily ignore them as she filled the kettle with water from one of the canteens.
John, feeling too much like crap to notice the lesser hell of bug bites, was left to his thoughts. What he thought of was those ships reduced to scrap by some giant... thing. All those people sucked into the deep dark of the sea or, more likely, a giant mouth full of teeth. It made him relieved beyond words that they were up in a tree instead of out on the water.
But why boats? What would make some sea animal attack a boat? It wasn't like it knew right off the bat there'd been fresh meat aboard. And something hard and wooden wouldn't be all that attractive against an ocean full of soft, easy-to-digest prey. Was the thing pissed? Insane? Sick with some kind of sea rabies? Was it the noise, the lights...
John's eyes widened. He bolted upright, but the world tilted, tilting him with it onto his elbow.
“Sheppard!” Rodney yelped, hand on John's chest trying to push him down. “What the hell is wrong with you? Are you delirious?”
“Lights,” John coughed.
“Oh, hell, he is delirious.”
John shook his head. “No. The light. Tell Ronon to bring that light back up. Douse the lamps. Now!”
Thank goodness for their years spent working together, of seeing each other sick and out of their minds, sick and totally sane, and surviving crisis after crisis. Rodney briefly fumbled as he often did when given commands that didn't make a lick of sense but knowing better than to argue. He ran from the hut and around the porch to the platform. Teyla didn't waste a second, taking care of the lamps inside the hut, then grabbing the teapot and tossing its contents onto the fire.
“John, what is it?” she asked as she worked.
John, breathless from sitting up and staying up, flopped back onto the bed. “Fishing's done at night,” he panted, then coughed. Crap, his chest felt tight, like a tentacle crushing his ribs.
“What?” Teyla asked. Arguing voices carried to them from outside, Rodney's high-pitched but firm, Cap calling Rodney softy.
And within the cacophony of their bickering, a low, rumbling moan.
John threw himself from the bed, across the floor and to the window. He grabbed the sill, keeping him upright, thrust his head out and yelled at the top of his congested voice, “Get in here now!”
“Oh, not you, too,” Cap grumbled.
A tentacle rose up behind Cap like some charmed snake, swaying black against the darker backdrop. But Ronon saw it, and after a split second of wide-eyed alarm, body-slammed both Rodney and Cap onto the walkway at the same time the tentacle dropped, whistling through the air like a whip. It landed, cracking the platform into a thousand splinters, then rose and fell again. Ronon scrambled to his feet pulling both Cap and Rodney by their collars back up the walkway. The tentacle followed, ripping up the boards and crushing them in an explosion of wood.
“Faster!” John screamed. More boards vanished, Ronon, Rodney and Cap ran stumbling each time the tentacle hit, shaking the thick limb. It was getting closer, stretching toward their legs. They dove onto the porch. The tentacle wrapped around Ronon's boot.
Or tried to. Halfway around Ronon's ankle, it stopped. The limb, if it could be called a limb, had reached its stretching limit. Unable to get a good grip, it quivered and pulled away.
Ronon, Rodney and Cap scrambled to their feet, around the porch and through the front door, all three men gasping for air.
“Sheppard, I think your squid girlfriend's pissed,” Rodney quavered.
“Yeah somehow I doubt it,” John said, scanning the darkness for a snake-like silhouette. “That tentacle looked pretty damn big for stretching past its reach.” He pushed from the side window to the window on the right of the front wall. Though the porch mostly blocked his view he could still see some of the water, black in the night beneath the trees.
“It don't make sense,” he heard Cap say from behind, awestruck by confusion. “Ceomites ain't aggressive. Not even when they got kits. They ain't got no natural enemies.”
“Yes, well, either you're wrong or this ceo-thing as the aquatic version of distemper,” Rodney said.
“Who cares,” Ronon said. “It's what's been attacking the ship. We can take it down.”
John coughed, hard, phlegm burning the back of his throat. “Love to... buddy,” he choked. “But those things have skin like kevlar. The boat didn't even scratch that baby one.”
He heard the whine of Ronon's blaster. “Bet it can't stand up to heat.” John could hear the feral grin in his voice.
“Yes, let's piss it off more to test a theory,” Rodney whined.
John turned to face his team, but it didn't matter how slow, how careful, he tried to be, dizziness hit him with a vengeance, forcing him to grip some windowsill or drop. Ronon was immediately by his side, helping him up and over to the bed where he dropped gratefully.
“As long as we are up high, we are safe,” said Teyla, ever the voice of reason, thank goodness, because John was losing the will to be reasonable. He was finally getting blindsided by the effects of the fever, specifically the chills that made him feel like he'd been dipped in a glacier. He groped for the blanket and pulled it haphazardly around his quaking shoulders.
“Teyal's right,” he rasped, teeth chattering. “That thing can't reach us. We're safe.”
There was a moan, followed by a crack like a rifle shot, and the hut shook as though smack in the middle of a quake right off the Richter scale. It flung everything not nailed down off the floor to land in a thudding, snapping, clanging heap punctuated by pained grunts. One moment, John had been weightless, the next he was pinned by a tangle of arms and legs, shoulder digging into the floor and a sharp elbow digging into his solar plexus.
“What the hell was that!” Rodney yelped. Sometimes it paid to state the obvious, distracting them from their various aches, pains and, in John's case, inability to breathe and focus on the issue at hand - disentangling themselves and struggling their way to the window.
If this were a race, Ronon would have won, no surprises there. It was dark, but not so dark John couldn't see the whites of Ronon's wide eyes, and a wide-eyed Ronon looking unnerved didn't boost one's confidence.
“Sheppard! You'd better take a look.”
After a quick glance around the room ensuring that everyone was working their way upright, John struggled to his feet. He stumbled to the window and gaped.
Half the branch was gone, ten inches of stump between the porch and the serrated end like shards of bone poking from a severed arm.
Another moan and the hut shook, not as bad as last time but enough to drop John and force Ronon to cling for dear life to the window. When John attempted to rise, the tree shook again, then again.
Teyla struggled in between shakes to the front window on the left. She gasped. “It is attacking the tree itself! It is trying to pull it down!”
“Ha!” barked Cap, also staying wisely on the floor. “Good luck with that. Ain't no ceomite that strong.”
A series of cracks like thunder begged to differ. Gravity shifted, pulling John, everyone and everything toward the side wall. The tree groaned piteously, then they were falling, their shouts and cries drowned out by gunshot loud cracking and popping of the trunk. The stove slammed into the wall inches from their group. Ronon flipped the table, blocking them all from the bed and chest racing toward them as they huddled tightly together.
This was it. After everything they'd been through, this was how it was going to go down - death by alien cuttlefish.
Crashing, popping, ripping, certainty of demise, a bone-jarring and teeth rattling jolt, screaming then...
Stillness. The whisper of leaves. Harsh breathing. John opened one eye, not having realized he'd even closed his eyes. He then opened the other eye and looked around.
“We stopped,” he rasped. He would like to say that maybe the sensation of falling had been in their heads, except for the side wall currently acting as their floor and the table the only thing standing between them and the bed. He craned his neck toward the window and saw, rippling silver under the moonlight, the ocean. It took a little more craning to see why they weren't dead yet.
The giant tree had hit an even bigger tree, the bigger tree holding up the smaller like one buddy clinging to another. John let out a breath meant to be a laugh. It devolved into a cough that made his chest burn.
The monster moaned, the water sloshing just beneath the window. John slapped his hand over his mouth, stifling the cough, and the water stopped churning.
“Sheppard, why aren't we dead?” Rodney hissed. The creature moaned, the water churned and Sheppard slapped his hand over Rodney's mouth.
“John?” Teyla said, dazed. John uncovered his own mouth to silence her.
“Don't speak,” he whispered, suddenly glad for his rasping, weakened voice. “Don't make a sound.”
The silence that followed was so thick it was like a weight against John's ears. The water below them was still, shimmering with silver fragments of the reflected moon. Then a creak, the tree or house settling, and something rose slowly from the water, stretching upward. John's heart shot into his throat, dread ripping down his spine. He felt the muscles of Rodney's and Teyla's jaws tighten painfully.
But the tentacle drifted past the window, groping along the porch and vanishing around the other side. Only to reappear through the right-side window. It touched, it felt, it searched, painfully methodical as though it had all the time in the world.
It was only a theory, albeit a damn good one, that this thing survived on sight and sound. Possibly touch, too, but with the table and bed acting as a blockade, hopefully they wouldn't find out the hard way. As long as they stayed quiet, their chances of survival went up.
With one tree down, moonlight filtered through the holes punched through the walls from the impact of falling branches. The light landed on the tentacle. Maybe it was just a trick of that light, but there was something incredibly weird about that tentacle. It was hard to be sure, most of John's view obscured by the blockade.
When the tentacle next slid into sight along the floor, closer than before, John knew what it was.
The tentacle was opaque, a deep, dark silver, and jointed like vertebra with a stretchy, almost plastic-like skin in between.
It looked robotic.
John coughed. The tentacle reacted as though stung by a bee, whipping over their heads and ripping an opening in the wall from one end to the other. Ronon's large hand slapped over John's mouth. John nodded his thanks.
The thanks were premature, that small cough the first domino to fall in what would have been - what was going to be - a rip-roarer of a jag. He could feel it burning like acid in his chest. Trying not to breathe only provoked it until the burning became agony that made John shake and choke.
The tentacle groped overhead. Silently, slowly, Ronon pulled his blaster from its holster. John's lungs were about to explode, sweat dripping down his face, his chest, the canal of his spine. Crap, he couldn't take it. He was going to cough, needed to cough, and there was nothing Ronon's broad hand could do about it. He looked to Ronon, hoping the moonlight showed his silent apology.
Ronon shrugged. Then he shot the tentacle, two blasts melting the plastic connective material and severing off the tip. The beast moaned, the tentacle slipped away and John hacked until he was sure he'd brought up his lungs.
“What the hell did you do that for!” Rodney shrieked.
The shaking resumed, uninjured tentacles wrapping themselves around the hut and pulling. Below, the creature's head broke the surface in a halo of froth. It's body shimmered metallic in the moonlight, its mouth a perfect circle filled with teeth like the teeth of a band saw - a literal band saw, row after row spinning clockwise, counter-clockwise and clock-wise, friggin' meat grinder.
Ronon fired at it through the window, each hit scorching dark patches on the metal skin.
“That thing's going to eat us way before you can hit the sweet spot!” Rodney cried. The tree and hut shuddered.
“Then we need... to slow it down...” John managed between coughs. He scrabbled and flopped over to the stove rattling against the wall. “Help me with this!”
“Oh I see where you're headed, sonny!” Cap said with a feral grin to match Ronon's. They all joined John, with the exception of Ronon still firing away, and together shoved the heavy stove in increments toward the opening. One final shove tipped it over the side and it plummeted right into the gaping saw-mouth.
That mouth might have been able to reduce wood to scrap but John doubted it could do much against cast iron. And he was right, the stove knocking out a few teeth, bending others and doing damage to the inside in ways that made the beast go haywire, thrashing, splashing and moaning.
Another jolt shook them off balance. Cap tumbled out the window with a guttural bellow and would have fallen if Rodney hadn't caught him.
“Hold on!” Rodney cried.
“I am!” Cap snarled. John and Teyla added their grips to Rodney's. Little by little, inch by inch against the earthquake shaking, they pulled Cap in. Cap slumped against the wall, breathless, and clapped Rodney on the shoulder.
“What say we give that beasty more to chew on, eh?” he said. They broke the legs off the table and shoved it through, followed by the narrow bed, the chest, then net after net made of strong cords that tangled in the broken teeth. Ronon added shot after shot down the mechanical throat.
Above the moans and thrashing was a high-pitched whine, and it was growing. The beast stilled suddenly. Then it started to convulse, like it was caught in a seizure.
John's eyes bulged in panic. “Everyone down!”
They all dove to one side or the other and covered their heads. Below them, the beast rattled and the whine reached its final pitch.
The bitch about explosions wasn't so much the noise and concussive force that made you feel like you were imploding, it was that they lasted only seconds while they felt like an eternity. There was no sense of time, of space, no room for thought beyond the certainty of being dead. Once again John found himself weightless, pummeled by heat and debris.
The next thing he knew, he couldn't breathe, and thought for sure he was dead. When something cool and solid wrapped itself around his chest, he was sure it was the monster, that it hadn't exploded enough to kill it and that he was about to be ground into hamburger.
Then he was flying again, landing gracelessly on a soft, spongy surface smelling strongly of kelp. He coughed, sputtered, and coughed harder when something thick and viscous refused to dislodge from his lungs. But a heavy hand put dent after dent in his spine until the viscous crap gave up and slapped against the back of his raw throat.
When he turned to thank Ronon (because no one else had a hand that big and relentless) he startled badly at a nest of tentacles waggling his way.
“Easy, Sheppard,” Ronon said. He coughed a couple of times as well, though not as bad as John. “Easy. It's your ceomite.”
John almost laughed. His ceomite. But it looked to be about the same size. It was half out of the water like a curious dolphin checking out the happenings on dry land. It must have been quite the show - John's team and Cap, choking, wet, miserable but alive and slowly starting to realize it. John finally wheezed out that laugh.
“Thanks, buddy,” he said, giving the ceomite a two-fingered salute. Satisfied, the ceomite, slipped back into the water.
---------------------
Boats were backstabbing bastards. John didn't care if that was just the fever plus his busted wrist plus trudging from island to island back to town doing the thinking for him. He'd just been reminded of the precariousness of control, the lightning speed at which things could go from stable to monumentally bad, and that one minute you're high and dry and the next floundering for your life. He'd been dropped in the drink, twice. Any compassion he might have had for boats had been, literally, blown out of the water.
Boats and tree houses, which sucked because he'd always liked tree houses up until now. And aquatic robots mimicking sea life, but that one he could live with.
On the bright side, even he had to admit they got off pretty light: Ronon with bruised ribs, Teyla with a mild concussion, Rodney also with a mild concussion and all of them battered and scraped. Cap was the only one who seemed merely scraped. Hell, he was down right ecstatic, already rehearsing to regale the town with tales of monster slaying, and forcing Rodney to be his audience.
“Dark night, it was. Us holed up in a dinky little hut, with only a clean drop between us and the beast.” He elbowed Rodney in the flank. “Sound good so far, softy?”
“Yeah, sure, whatever,” Rodney groused. Cap paid no mind and regaled on.
They reached civilization at last before sunset. It was just like out of the movies, the local kids doing a little evening fishing dashing off to alert the townsfolk of the arrival. Not moments later, those townsfolk surged around like a mob of hope and concern, swallowing them up and herding them to the clinic. The equivalent of a sheriff broke off to go contact Atlantis.
No words could describes the joys of shedding wet clothes, of taking a hot shower, of dressing in something dry (yes, a gown, but a wonderfully dry gown) and curling up in a soft, warm bed, oxygen mask strapped to his face or not. Various drugs were pumped into John's veins and drinks poured down his throat that by the time he came out of his happy chemical haze, it was daytime and several of Keller's medics were talking with the local healers in the patient ward. The beds next to John's, once occupied by his team, were now empty. Seeing as how no one had been in horribly dire straits the other night, John easily took this as a good sign.
Rodney hurrying into the ward confirmed his suspicions.
“Oh, good, you're awake,” McKay said, harried and striding almost frantically to John's bedside. “You have to help me. That lunatic captain keeps insisting I ride along with him to retrieve the monster. He won't take no for an answer!”
“Rodney,” Keller admonished good naturedly, bumping Rodney a little to the side to get to John. “Colonel Sheppard just woke up. Give the man a moment to reorient, will you?”
It was with foot tapping impatience that Rodney waited for Keller to do the usual medical run-through: heart, lungs, and the reassurance that John would be fine now that he had antibiotics racing through his veins. She left, and Rodney dove desperately back in.
“Seriously, Sheppard, you have to stop him. Get Ronon to distract him, have someone give him a flying tour in a 'jumper, anything!”
John lifted his hands. “Do I look capable of doing anything?” He coughed, grimacing at the ache in his rib muscles. “Come on, Rodney. What do you expect? You saved the guy's life.” He grinned. “He likes you, now.”
Rodney groaned. Then stiffened when a familiar gruff voice cut through the softer chatter.
“Hey, softy! Ya ready or what!” No amount of nurses shushing could impede that bellowing enthusiasm.
John grinned. “Bet you'd take a friendly giant cuttlefish right about now.”
Rodney gave him a sour look, then stomped away at what only he perceived to be his doom.
But hours later saw Rodney return in higher spirits. The fake ceomite had been found, a machination of Ancient design, created for exploratory purposes, Rodney was sure, to study the local ceomite population. There were dents on the skin, the kind that no explosion could have caused.
“The way I see it,” Rodney explained to John, Ronon and Teyla, “One too many smacks on the head by local trawlers jolted it badly enough to wreak havoc on its programming. Just a theory, of course, but it would explain a lot.”
“In other words, it got the robot version of a concussion,” John said.
Rodney shrugged. “I suppose you could say that. We'll know for sure once we really start taking this thing apart.”
“But at least it is no longer functional,” Teyla said with a smile. “The people of this world can once more fish in peace.”
“Good to know,” John said, rubbing tiredly at his gritty eyes. "But next time they have a problem it better be where we can bring a jumper."
"Don't like boats, much?" Ronon said with a smirk.
John flopped his hand back onto the bed, the dry bed on blessedly dry and steady land. “Yeah, something like that.”
The End
A/N: I have nothing against boats, I swear. In fact, I quite enjoy them. But I remember hearing once something about how Joe F. wasn't too keen about being on boats, so I wanted to have a little fun with that. Poor boats.