SGA-fic: Ghost Walk 2/4 (John/Rodney, PG-13)
Water is the first concern. He has a mostly full canteen but in this heat, it isn’t going to last long. He tries to decide if it would be best to drink most of it at once or if he should ration. Going all that way without anything to even wet his mouth isn’t going to be pleasant. Okay, rationing it is.
John takes a deep swallow and then sloshes some water around between his teeth to try to get the taste of smoke out of his mouth. It isn’t working. His throat still feels raw, and he has to try to control his breathing unless he wants to start coughing again. He’s used the bandages to immobilise his arm the best he can, but every step jars the injured limb and the pain is wearing on him fast. McKay had the first-aid kit in his backpack and all John has is some Tylenol. He’s already dry-swallowed two but it’s barely taking the edge off and it’s only going to get worse.
He knew he was making a stupid decision even as he started to walk. All his desert survival classes had been clear - find shelter and water. Only there is no shelter around and he has no time to look for water so John had figured his best bet was to walk for a bit, see if he could find some shade, and then continue once the sun went down.
He’s left his tac-vest behind; too much unnecessary weight to carry. He must have dropped the P-90 inside the compound where it’s doing him absolutely no good. He still has his sidearm, but hopes he won’t run into something that will merit its use. Had there been anything in the briefing about the local fauna? John can’t remember, but keeps a close eye to the ground anyway to make sure he’s not putting his feet down on top of some potentially poisonous little critter.
The sun is like a heavy weight on his shoulders, pressing him down into the ground. At least the sand isn’t so deep here, but his thighs and calves still burn with every step. His skin is already turning red and John takes a moment to wish that he’d thought to steal some of Rodney’s sunscreen. At this rate, he’s going to be fried to a crisp before he makes it back to the gate. If he makes it. He doesn’t know how long he’s been walking and his watch must have broken when the building blew up.
The sunglasses provides at least a little protection from the sun and he's ripped the back out of his uniform shirt to wrap around his head in an improvised turban, keeping the sleeves on over the t-shirt underneath. No matter how tempting it is to lose as much clothing as possible, he knows he has to shield his bare skin.
His stomach is about to start devouring itself, and he feels almost sick with it. He still has the powerbars, but with so little water, he can’t risk eating. Digesting the food will use up fluids he can't afford to lose.
How far back to the gate? John has no idea and there are no real landmarks to speak of. This is beginning to feel like a worse idea with every step. He wishes he could know for sure what happened to Rodney and Ronon. If he only had a way to know they were okay, he wouldn’t be nearly as worried.
But right now, he’s alone. He might have lost his entire team and he has no idea how to even deal with that thought.
The only thing he can do is keep walking.
* * *
John knows he’s in trouble when he looks over his shoulder and sees the pale, withered figure of Colonel Sumner following him. The Colonel is not speaking, not doing anything in particular. He’s just there, trailing after John like a morbid imitation of a puppy.
At first, John tries to just ignore him. Head trauma, dehydration, it isn’t a big step from there to hallucinations.
“Thought that was supposed to be McKay’s schtick,” he mutters to himself, and throws a glare backwards, where Sumner’s wraith-fed face with those horrible dull, dead eyes won’t leave him alone.
It isn’t fair. McKay gets trapped in a jumper with a concussion and hallucinates a smart, beautiful woman. John just has to get stuck with the ghost of failures past instead. There are a whole lot of people he’d rather have as a travelling companion at the moment.
“It doesn’t even has to be a hot girl,” he says conversationally to Sumner, who doesn’t look amused. “Just someone a little more friendly than you. Is that too much to ask?”
Sumner doesn’t answer, he just keeps walking a few steps behind, his emaciated skeletal form fading in and out in a shimmering of heat. John stubbornly keeps going forward, doing his best not to turn around and talk to the man.
In hindsight, it was probably stupid to keep going. John knows he should have stopped somewhere and waited for nightfall, should have done his best to rig up some kind of shelter. He’s wasted precious energy and fluids struggling on like he’s been doing. But Rodney and Ronon... he needs to find out what had happened to them and he needs to find out fast. Hopefully in a few hours the sun will set, the temperature will drop and the journey will get a little easier.
He stops, takes another swallow of water, and shakes the canteen to find out how much is left. Maybe a third. At this rate, it will take a miracle to get him back to the gat. John can only hope that Rodney is still alive and in Atlantis, working on a brilliant rescue plan.
“Rodney’s good at miracles,” John tells Sumner, despite his resolution to pretend the pale shade of the Colonel isn’t there. “He always comes through in the end. I wish I was... wish I could do that.” He stops, turns around and finally meets Sumner’s eyes. “The only thing I seem to be good at is being too late.”
Sumner blinks slowly but remains silent. John looks away again and keeps walking, keeps thinking about how he single-handedly managed to screw up an entire galaxy within 24 hours of setting foot in it. There aren’t a lot of people who can put that on their resume.
There probably aren’t a lot a people with a list of screw-ups as long as John’s either. Rodney’s right to stay away. He deserves better. Then John remembers that he doesn’t even know if Rodney is still alive and wishes that he could have taken the time, sometime during the past few weeks, to tell Rodney exactly how important he’s become. That sometimes, being around him is like coming home. They don’t do those kinds of talks, never have, but John can’t stand the thought that Rodney might have died not knowing.
The next time he looks over his shoulder, Sumner is gone. John catches himself almost missing him.
* * *
The sun is like a burning living thing, intent on sapping every last ounce of energy from him. John’s face stings with sunburn and his lips are dry and cracked when he runs his tongue over them. He reaches a steep incline and stops for a moment at the bottom, staring up the ridge. He doesn’t want to climb it. He wants to lie down right here and do nothing at all until he dies from heatstroke or he gets rescued, whatever happens first.
There’s still some water left. John has tried to save it, but the smoke he inhaled earlier is still irritating his lungs, and a swallow of water every now and then is pretty much the only thing that’ll stop him from coughing until he pukes. In temperatures like this, he knows he ought to drink half a liter every hour but he has no way to tell the time and once the canteen is empty, he’ll be out of water altogether.
The slope in front of him seems impossible to climb. Then again, doing the impossible has ended up as something of a trademark of the Atlantis expedition. It would be stupid to just lie down and wait to die. That’s not the way John Sheppard does things.
He starts to climb and immediately regrets it. The sand is looser here and for every step forward it feels like he’s sliding two steps back.
“Maybe you should just turn around and walk back down again,” Lieutenant Ford says.
John looks up from his shoes. Ford stands in front of him, arms crossed over his chest and smiling. His face is unmarred and both eyes are normal. John’s heart does a twisty little thing in his chest and it almost hurts worse than his shoulder and his head and the godawful sunburn.
“Aiden,” he greets the new ghost. They never used first names with each other back when Ford was still himself, but it doesn’t matter now.
“You’re getting good at losing team members, Colonel,” Ford says, shaking his head with something that looks like pity.
John ignores him and trudges on uphill and Ford steps out of his way and flickers out of sight, only to reappear again a little further up.
“I mean, it’s not just me,” the Lieutenant continues. “Doctor Beckett and Doctor Weir, and now you managed to lose Teyla. How do you do it?”
“We looked for you,” John pants. He doesn’t have enough breath to talk, but he can’t keep quiet either.
“Sure you did,” Ford agrees. “Only, you seemed to be in quite a hurry to replace me. Got anyone lined up to take Teyla’s place already?”
It stings, more than John wants to admit, and he fights the urge to try to convince Ford that it wasn’t like that, not at all. Ronon wasn’t a replacement, he was a necessary addition.
“No one’s taking Teyla’s place,” he says instead. “We’re getting her back.”
He has to be halfway up the hill, he thinks, though he doesn’t want to turn his head and look back, afraid to discover that he’s only made it a few feet. His legs are trembling and his shoulder is a bright red point of pain that he can’t ignore. Usually, pain is something he’s learned to put away where it can’t bother him, but this is too persistent. One small broken bone shouldn’t hurt this much.
“So what’s the plan, Colonel?” Ford asks. “Do you even have one or are you just winging it as usual and hoping for a lucky break?” He’s moved a little ahead again, seemingly without effort. John realises that he’ll never be within reach.
“I have a plan,” John says. His tongue is dry like sandpaper in his mouth and he has to take another mouthful of water to be able to continue. “We have our ears to the ground all over the galaxy, sooner or later something will turn up. Our contacts...”
“Don’t you mean Teyla’s contacts?” Ford interrupts. “Face it, Colonel. You’re pretty useless without her, aren’t you?”
John doesn’t want to admit just how right this particular ghost is. Teyla is the reason they haven’t already died messily in some cultural misunderstanding. Without her, they’re nothing but a bunch of bumbling outsiders. Ronon knows the galaxy like the back of his hand but diplomacy is not his strong suit.
“Shut up,” John says, tries to sound forceful and authoritative but it comes out far weaker than he’d like. He’s running out of breath and he’s beginning to think that he might not make it up this damn hill. It rises in front of him like a wall and the top might just as well be a hundred miles away.
“Useless,” Ford echoes, much closer now, and John startles and falls to his knees.
The movement jars his injured shoulder and the pain he’s been trying so hard to ignore shoots through him, takes the last of his breath away. He blacks out for a moment, vision and hearing all but gone, the loud beating of his own heart the only thing he’s aware of.
When he comes back, he’s on hands and knees in the sand and he can’t find the energy or the will to get up again. Dying out here in the middle of nowhere would be stupid, but he might not have a choice any more.
“We looked for you,” he repeats, because he needs this Ford, at least, to know that, no matter how it turned out in real life. “We... I tried.”
“Not hard enough,” Ford says, and then he’s moved again, up to the top of the hill, so very far out of John’s reach.
He resists the urge to sink the rest of the way down to the ground and stay there. He starts to crawl instead, using his good arm to pull himself up and forward. It goes slow and the change in position is not helping the broken collarbone, but he’s moving. It’s going to have to be enough. Every now and then he raises his head enough to catch a glimpse of Ford, waiting at the top.
It takes time and it hurts so much that he’s close to throwing up, but he makes it. When he reaches the top he takes a moment to catch his breath, tries to find enough saliva to spit the blood from his cracked lip out of his mouth, and then looks up again.
Ford is gone. For some reason, it feels like defeat.
John just sits there for a while, waits for his head to stop spinning. When he’s reasonably certain he’s not going to pass out or puke, he climbs to his feet again and keeps going.
* * *
After Ford disappears, John begins to count his steps just to have something to think about other than the fact that his team is currently stuck in a box like Schrödinger’s cat, simultaneously dead and alive.
He’s reached one thousand, two hundred and sixteen when he comes across the old burned-out Russian helicopter. The sight makes him blink and scrub his eyes, wondering if he’s collapsed and fallen asleep somewhere along the way, because this is beginning to feel a lot more like a dream than a hallucination. When he opens his eyes again, the chopper is gone, so he decides that he probably isn’t going completely crazy after all.
A hundred and sixty three steps later, Holland materialises, bleeding into the sand. John gives him a glance and blinks again, hoping that he’ll disappear too if he just manages to clear the worst haze out of his eyes, but when he opens his eyes this time, Holland is still there.
“Hey buddy,” John says. “We did this one already, remember?”
Holland grins around a mouthful of bloody teeth. “Are we ever going to get done?”
John thinks about it and then shrugs. “Guess not. You gonna walk on your own this time? I don’t think I’m up to carrying you right now.”
“Nah, not necessary.” Holland stands up and spreads his arms. “I’d offer to return the favour but, you know, I’m not actually real.”
“That’s okay. I’ll make it.” Something’s running down John’s chin. When he wipes at it, his fingers comes away bloody. His lip must’ve split open again. He licks his fingers and then starts to suck at his lip, lapping up the blood. It’s not much, but it’s salty and liquid and better than nothing.
Holland looks doubtful. “Will you really? You never were very good at making smart decisions, Shep. At least not for yourself.”
“Or for anyone else,” John says. The taste of blood is heavy on his tongue and it makes him feel sick, like he swallowed a gallon of it instead of only a few drops.
“Nah. You know what’s the problem with you, buddy?” Holland falls into step with John, limping heavily on his injured leg. “You’ll always do whatever’s best for everybody but yourself.”
John doesn’t have the energy to argue with a dead man so he sets his eyes at the horizon and keeps walking. They go on in silence for a while. John sucks on his lip until it stops bleeding and wonders if he should drink those last mouthfuls of water or hold off a little longer.
“Are we even going in the right direction?” Holland asks.
John glares at him. “Always with the backseat driving.”
He’s lost count of his steps so he starts over again from the beginning. It’s getting harder and harder to keep track of what’s going on. The heat cramps hit some time ago and every now and then his muscles contract into excruciatingly painful spasms. At least it’s something to take his mind off the pain in his shoulder.
His legs feel like overcooked noodles and it’s getting harder and harder just to stay on his feet. He’s been walking downhill for a while and the ground seems to want to slide out from under him for every step. It’s only a matter of time until he falls.
He does, only a few moments later. His legs give out and he falls to his knees, letting out an involuntary cry of pain. His arm is about to fall off, he’s sure of it, and Holland is absolutely no help at all, ghost as he is. John gets up again, takes a few steps and only barely avoids falling flat on his face. He’s stumbling like a drunk and his vision is going weird. He imagines he can see something at the horizon, a large city with towers and spires, small aircrafts buzzing like flies around them.
A few steps more, and his knees buckle again. He reaches out with his good arm to try to catch himself, but it won’t hold his weight and he ends up rolling down, unable to stop himself. His injured shoulder hits the ground and the pain engulfs him, threatens to eat him whole.
It feels like forever, but he finally ends up on his back on the ground. The pain has stolen his breath and his thought and his focus and all he can do is lie there and exist and pray that the flashes of agony will fade.
Holland is standing over him, peering down curiously.
“You know you’re going to die out here, right?”
It sure looks that way, John wants to say, but he can’t get the words over his lips, his mouth is too dry and he lacks the energy to speak.
John can see Holland shake his head in a pitying motion, before he fades away into a haze.
The sun is a hot burning ball overhead. John closes his eyes and it’s still there, red behind his eyelids, until that fades too and he blacks out.
* * *
He dreams about the ocean, cool waves and the smell of salt. It’s nice at first, like he’s back in Atlantis, sharing a six pack with Rodney on the pier and he can almost taste the cold beer on his tongue, feel it run down his throat to wash away the sand and the smoke. Rodney’s talking, with his mouth and his hands, and John can’t hear what he’s saying but he knows he wants to stay.
Then a wave washes over them, and instead of cold, it’s steaming hot. John makes a grab for Rodney’s hand, but the moment their fingers are about to to touch, Rodney flickers in and out like static and disappears, and John is pulled down by the wave. He’s sinking, and he wonders what will happen first, if he’ll drown or if he’ll boil to death like a crab in a pot.
Eventually, he washes up on a beach and lies there, gasping for breath. Someone’s standing over him and John wishes that whoever it is could at least have the good grace to shade him from the godawful sun.
“So this is what you’ve been doing with your life?”
John recognises the voice. He doesn’t have to open his eyes to know who it is, but he does anyway. Probably some kind of masochistic desire to torment himself.
“Hi Dave,” he croaks, coughs again, and tries to swallow to ease the irritation in his throat. There is no moisture at all in his mouth and he ends up coughing again. “It’s part of the package,” he manages when he finally has enough breath to speak.
The figure looking down at him is a younger version of his brother, still with the awkward skinniness of youth. He’s wearing slacks and a button down and looks almost insolently cool and crisp in the desert heat.
“Seems like you picked the wrong package,” Dave says with the familiar little sneer John remembers so well. He’d seen traces of it the last time they met, at Dad’s funeral, and he has no doubt Dave is still capable of the real thing. Past Dave just never even bothered to hide it.
John closes his eyes. He has spent a very long time trying to bury the memories of all the fights they had before he signed up for the Air Force. Him against Dad and Dave, always two against one. There was no way he could ever win, so he just packed his bags and left instead. God, it is over twenty years ago but right now, seeing his little brother like this, it feels like yesterday.
“Picked the one that was right for me,” he mutters. “Couldn’t let Dad decide everything.”
“So you ran away instead.” Dave lets out an condescending little snort. John hated that obnoxious snort when they were growing up and it still makes him want to punch Dave hard in the face. “You always ran away, Johnny. From your family, from your wife, from Earth. Who does that? What kind of brother does that?”
John blinks up against the sky. He never told Dave about Atlantis so he shouldn’t know that. Then Dave shimmers above him, flickers in and out of existence for a moment, and solidifies again and John remembers that his brother isn’t really here.
“I had to,” he whispered. “I wanted to fly. I had to fly.”
The sky had been the only thing that made life worth living back then. The only thing that had offered a tiny little bit of freedom from the restraints of the cage he’d been born into.
Dave leans over him, hands on his thighs. “Maybe I wanted to fly too, did you ever think of that?”
John tries to swallow again, fails and chokes and presses his eyes shut. Dave was always the good son, the one who did what he was told without making a fuss. What dreams had he been forced to give up just so John could have his clear blue skies?
“I’m sorry,” he rasps. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
“A little late for that now, isn’t it?” Dave says, and John can hear the sneer creep back into his voice. “Your choice, Johnny boy. Now you get to live with the consequences.”
He tries to remind himself that this isn’t really his brother, just the image of him John has been carrying around in his head since he left home, but it’s so hard. He’s been living with this Dave a lot longer than the man Dave grew up to be. After the wake and the replicator and the funeral, the two of them talked for a long time and cleared the air of a lot of old crap. There is no way to change what happened in the past, but they agreed to at least try to mend some fences. Since then, they have exchanged a few e-mails, half-hearted attempts to keep in touch, but John can’t talk about half the stuff he’s doing and Dave is busy running the company. The patented Sheppard family strategy of dealing with the difficult subjects by pretending they don’t exist doesn’t seem to be effective in this particular case.
John can’t stop thinking about the questions he never asked. The questions he might never get a chance to ask now, if he gets himself killed out here. He’ll never get to know what it was like for Dave when John left. He’ll never get to share the memories he still has of Mom. He’ll never get the chance to ask, to beg his brother not to work so hard, to remember to spend time with his daughters and not make Dad’s mistakes all over again. He’ll never get the chance to apologise. What if he dies with Dave still resenting him?
“I never meant for it to be like this,” he whispers, voice broken and raw. His eyes are burning behind closed lids. If he wasn’t so dehydrated, he’d be crying.
Dave doesn’t answer and when John opens his eyes, his brother is gone and he’s alone again with nothing but the merciless sun for company.
“Wait,” he croaks. “Please don’t go. I want...” He runs out of words, has no idea what it is he wants. It’s not like it matters anyway. Since when has ever gotten anything he wanted? Every time he does, it just ends badly.
He should get up. It feels like he’s been walking forever and the gate can’t be that far away now. Maybe it’ll turn up behind the next dune. John shifts, tries to rise on his good elbow. His shoulder explodes in pain again and he can actually feel the broken edges of his collarbone move under the skin and slip even further out of alignment. His stomach makes a violent somersault, he has to breathe deep to keep from throwing up, and that makes him start coughing again, which intensifies the pain in his shoulder until the circle feeds itself.
Once he manages to catch his breath again, he’s too exhausted to move. He tries to keep his eyes open, but it’s a losing battle. Between one scattered thought and the next, that boiling hot wave washes over him again, and he’s lost to the darkness of the roaring ocean.
Part 3