Post traumatic stress syndrome without the 'post', by americanleaguer, part 1/2
Title: Post traumatic stress syndrome without the 'post'.
Author: americanleaguer
Pairings: McKay/Todd (shit, I know!)
Rating: R
Word count: 12,250 (shit, I know!!)
Notes: Guys, I am so sorry. I don't even know. I think I wanted to write this story anyways and the challenge just gave me a framework in which to do it. I feel obligated to say that despite the pairing and general amount of Todd in this fic, it is not crack!fic. I also feel obligated to say that there's a load of McSheppy friendship going on here, so it's not like it's all Wraith all the time.
It had probably been a bad idea from the start, of course, but if Pegasus didn’t personally hate Dr. Rodney McKay it wouldn’t have been a problem. The planet was supposed to be uninhabited, the planet had an outpost where the Ancients had been researching nanite function, and neither he nor Todd had made much progress with the Replicator Problem lately. The solution had seemed obvious.
It should have been simple, even. Take scientist (McKay), take semi-captive semi-cooperative Wraith scientist (mostly by now responding to Todd, albeit with the Wraith equivalent of bemusement; real name unknown, possibly nonexistent), take ‘jumper pilot (Sheppard), take gun-toting Wraith babysitter (Ronon), bundle into puddlejumper, go to planet, check out Ancient doohickeys, get amazing intel, come back to Atlantis, perform miracles, save humanity. Rinse and repeat as needed.
They would have known better than to take Todd to an inhabited planet. That would have been a Spectacularly Bad Idea. But they were supposed to be the only people on the planet, and they were used to Todd-well, maybe not Ronon so much, but McKay’s mostly used to Todd, or used to Todd with a lot of guns pointed at him and a firm understanding that if he makes a wrong move he’ll get swiss-cheesed by genuine Earth-issue firearms. Other people, people not from Atlantis who didn’t know about the Replicators and the whole long, sordid situation leading to Todd’s presence on Atlantis in the first place, they wouldn’t be expected to react positively to Todd. Naturally.
Even so, this is all out of proportion. The inhabitants of this particular allegedly uninhabited planet aren’t just trying to kill Todd; they’re trying to kill McKay too. And Sheppard and Ronon, of course, but mostly they’re trying to kill McKay, probably either because they recognize his innate genius and realize how valuable he is, or because they saw him actually working side by side with Todd on an Ancient console. Maybe both.
The not-supposed-to-be-here locals have short, fat guns that squeeze off bursts of bright orange light. They’re out of synch with the rest of the décor and clothing, so obviously they’re scavenged from some other people: they don’t look Ancient or Goa’uld, so maybe Asgard, or one of those other uber-races. They’re kind of like the Genii, only more primitive in terms of clothing (any people who haven’t evolved above wearing animal skins are practically Neanderthals so far as McKay is concerned) and disturbingly more advanced in terms of sidearms.
The first time one of them opens fire, Todd snarls and backs off fast and generally acts like the orange burst is both the most surprising and the worst thing he’s seen in a long time-but not unfamiliar. He recognizes the weapons, that much is clear, and if they’re scary enough to worry a Wraith… McKay does not want to see them hit someone. Especially not himself.
Between bursts of P-90 fire, Sheppard yells at the world in general to get McKay out of there, which is simultaneously intelligent and practical (shooting! Shooting near McKay, that means leaving now) and obnoxious and patronizing (he has a gun too, doesn’t he? Why should Sheppard have a monopoly on stupidly risking his life in the face of overwhelmingly bad odds?). Ronon dives in among the locals, working with his knife in close quarters so that they can’t fire those orange bursts at him without hitting each other. That leaves McKay with Todd, who seems all too happy to get the hell out of there anyways, and doesn’t mind herding McKay along with him.
----
He doesn’t know where Sheppard and Ronon are. They’ve been running for what feels like 7 hours but is probably closer to one; one hour of running is still one hour too many for McKay. Running for his life is familiar and tolerable and should be confined to short frantic slices of time, not this long drawn-out panic of a death march through poorly lit hallways with stone floors (stone floors! No ‘civilization’ that’s still using stone floors should have guns like these).
He knows it’s bad when he realizes that he’s not even worried about being on his own with Todd; normally this would freak him out, but under the circumstances he’s actually more afraid of the assholes with guns, who definitely want to kill him, than the potentially hungry Wraith, who only probably wants to kill him.
The sounds behind them get louder, and Todd turns his head at the same time there’s a flash of orange. McKay gets one look at Todd’s slitted eyes opening wide before he feels something hit him in the middle of his back, lifting him off his feet and slamming him on his side a long way down the hall.
Everything looks dark and he wonders if he’s dead, but after a moment he realizes that this is only because he’s face down on the floor. He tries to lift himself up, but he can’t move. He can’t feel anything below his neck either and oh god, what if he’s paralyzed? What do those guns do? He can still hear screams and the throaty zap of the weapon’s fire, and he can feel the floor vibrating beneath his nose with pounding footsteps and the occasional dense thud of a body falling and not getting up again.
After a little while the sounds stop. Heavy footsteps approach him and pale hands with bad fingernails are lifting him, turning him over, propping him up against the wall. McKay can see four bodies sprawled on the floor. Two are wizened and dry and generally very fed-upon-looking. The other two are breathing shallowly, alive but evidently not going anywhere fast. Directly above him, lips pulled back and doing that aggressive/intimidating hiss thing he does, is Todd.
“This is not acceptable, McKay,” Todd says. McKay blinks at him, and Todd turns to the two remaining wannabe-Genii. He rips open one of their shirts, slams his palm down on the man’s chest, and sucks in a shuddering breath, tipping his head back and half closing his eyes.
To distract himself from this sight (not that McKay is feeling any particular sympathy for the guy; up until seconds ago he had been very busy trying to kill McKay, but still-Wraith, feeding) McKay looks down at himself, trying to assess his own wounds. What he’s seeing doesn’t make any sense, because he’s looking down at his own stomach, but he’s seeing stone-the rough join where the floor meets the wall. He wishes he had more time to wallow blissfully in incomprehension and disbelief, but he’s Rodney McKay, he doesn’t do incomprehension, and almost immediately he realizes a few things.
Even if Sheppard and Ronon somehow magically showed up and rescued them from this stinking stony pit, right now, they would still be an hour away from the ‘jumper on foot, and two hours away from the Stargate once they got to the ‘jumper. At the time, not knowing what sort of Ancient defensive systems might be in place around the base, this had seemed like a good idea.
He doesn’t have 3 hours.
The reason he can’t feel much of anything is because his body has gone into massive, comprehensive shock. It’s probably only the shock keeping him temporarily conscious.
The reason his body has gone into such traumatic shock is that the weapon fired at him has blown a hole clear through his abdomen, jaggedly round, about the size of a bowling ball.
The only reason he hasn’t immediately passed out from blood loss is that the weapon’s energy blast cauterized the edges of the hole, although now that it’s been a few minutes and his arteries have had time to realize that certain parts of them are no longer connected to certain other parts, he’s definitely bleeding out.
That doesn’t even begin to get into the massive organ failure due to the fact that several vital organs, and several more sections of other vital organs, are simply not there anymore.
He’s going to die.
What a stupid, horrible way to die-just some bad information, a trigger-happy bunch of locals, and a shot from behind while he was heroically running away. He dully watches Todd feed on the remaining man. He can’t bring himself to care. Go Todd. Feed away. Feast-o-rama.
Pain is now sneaking in around the edges of the shock, pain so huge that he’s starting to have trouble breathing, hearing, seeing. It comes into his consciousness on a wave that doesn’t crest-it just gets higher and higher and higher until there’s nothing in the universe except for pain. It can’t be much longer now.
“Completely unacceptable,” Todd says, his stupid gravelly Wraith voice cutting through the pain temporarily. He’s standing in front of McKay, staring down at him. McKay tries to ask what, but finds that he can’t. He tries to move his hand, and he can’t do that either. As a last resort he tries to blink rapidly at Todd, but he can’t even manage that much.
Todd kneels down in front of him and pushes McKay’s tac vest (what’s left of it) off his shoulders. He does the same for the rest of McKay’s shirt. “I have spent days-- weeks-- locked in a room with you, McKay, sitting feet away from me, berating me, harassing me, smelling delicious.” McKay wants to point out that it hasn’t exactly been a picnic for him either, but Todd probably wouldn’t much care. “It is unacceptable for you to die from a…” his lip curls up over his very, very bad gums, “…blaster wound. Fired by food. No, McKay, you have tormented me often enough. The only one allowed to kill you is me.”
That’s touching, in a psychotic, terrifying, Wraith-y way, and McKay almost, at this point, appreciates the sentiment. Todd’s hand alights on his chest just as his vision goes spotty and gray, and then solid black. His last thought before he dies is that getting killed by a Wraith at least makes for a better story than getting shot in the back by a bunch of people who are practically cavemen.
----
Heaven is noisy and warm and blessedly pain-free. McKay’s content to keep his eyes closed for now; he presumably has all of Eternity to see the place. The voices surrounding him don’t sound particularly angelic, though. They sound more… harassed, and strident, and annoyed, and one voice rises above all the others, insisting it’s fine, really, fine, and it sounds exactly like Colonel Sheppard.
So Sheppard’s dead too. That’s a pity, but McKay can’t be all that sympathetic when, hey! he’s also dead! At least he’ll have someone from the old days to hang out with once he gets tired of picking the ethereal brains of an entire history’s-worth of dead scientists. He’s tempted to go ahead and open his eyes, just so he can see Sheppard in his angel robe, which he’s absolutely certain Sheppard would look incredibly stupid in (McKay’s Heaven definitely includes Colonel Sheppard looking stupid), but he’s really so very comfortable like this.
It’s when he hears Todd’s voice that his eyes snap open, because if there’s a Wraith here, then wherever he is, it can’t be Heaven.
Heaven probably doesn’t look this much like the Atlantis infirmary anyways.
“McKay!” Sheppard’s face explodes into view as he leans over the bed, teetering like he’s woozy and off-balance. There’s a nasty-looking gash on his forehead and the blood dripping down from it has crusted one of his eyes closed. His face is smeared with dirt and there’s what looks like a lightly bleeding gravel burn high on one cheek. His lower lip is puffy and swollen and bleeding bright red where it isn’t black. Half of his hair is matted down with, McKay can only assume, more blood.
“Jesus Christ.” McKay squeezes his eyes closed again. “Come back from the dead and the first thing I have to see is that.”
“Nice to have you back too, Rodney,” Sheppard says, sarcasm dripping from his voice, but he’s snuck a hand under the sheet at McKay’s side and is squeezing his hand hard. McKay absolutely doesn’t squeeze back. Only a tiny little bit. Only because Sheppard looks like he probably needs it.
He lifts his other hand and nervously grabs the edge of the sheet. He opens one eye, takes a deep breath, lifts the sheet a bit and looks down.
There’s a reddish series of raised welts on his chest, and he’s incredibly dirty, the kind of dirtiness that someone can only achieve after spending a significant amount of time rolling around in a mixture of mud, dust, and various bodily fluids, human and otherwise. But the hole is gone. He slides his hand under the sheet and presses it against his stomach to be sure, but he can only feel a faint, faint mark, like an old scar.
“What….” he says, both eyes opening wide, and then he sees Todd, off to the side with his arms folded and his feet planted. When McKay looks at him, Todd bares all of his teeth without moving any other part of his face and does the hissy thing again. McKay stares. “You. You fed me. I was dying and you fed me life.” Which sounds absurd and cheesy, but is true. Todd inclines his head very slightly. “I thought you were feeding on me!”
“Please,” and the teeth are half-obscured in a sneer, “I had just fed.”
“Don’t you people have bottomless stomachs or something?”
“Yeah,” says a gruff voice from just beyond McKay’s field of view. “I never saw a Wraith get full.” So Ronon made it out alive too. That’s something.
“I could have kept feeding, yes,” Todd says evenly, addressing himself to the air over McKay’s head. “But it was no longer immediately necessary. I will be sustained for a long time by this… most recent feeding. And I have not… suffered through weeks with Dr. McKay just to have to start all over again with someone else. It would have been impractical to let him,” more teeth, “go to waste.”
“See, Rodney,” Sheppard says, slipping his hand surreptitiously out of McKay’s (god forbid the rest of the team see that he cares, and it’s all McKay can do to keep from rolling his eyes, because even Air Force Lieutenant Colonels are allowed to have friends so far as he knows) to thump him on the shoulder. “Now we’ve got something in common. We can start a ‘Cool Kids Get Fed by Wraith’ club.”
“Oh, great, just what I’ve always wanted,” McKay groans, pained, but he’s here. He’s here, he’s alive, and that’s what matters.
----
Todd is not allowed to go offworld again. Since they don’t exactly have time to waste, this means that McKay isn’t going offworld either; he’s spending all his available time in the labs with Todd, trying to solve that damn Replicator Problem. Sometimes Zelenka is there, but other than him McKay’s only company is the small rotating team of Marines who stand guard to make sure Todd doesn’t go on a feeding frenzy, and they’re not exactly great conversationalists. At least not when it comes to science.
Sheppard brings McKay little Ancient artifacts from missions to make up for the fact that McKay is Atlantis-bound. They’re nothing all that exciting, just small devices and sometimes scraps. Of course, without McKay on offworld missions, the team could probably walk right past a giant pile of ZPMs and never notice the power spike on their sensors. Sheppard’s offerings are appreciated, but every time he brings one McKay is tormented for days afterwards with the absolute certainty that technological treasure has been lost forever because he wasn’t out there to find it.
The most recent present is a device about the size of McKay’s palm and the shape of an American football, dull gray with a blue glass sphere set into the middle of it and some of those Mondrian-esque festival-of-right-angles decorations the Ancients like so much around the edges. Sheppard brought it in barehanded and left right afterwards for the debriefing, so McKay assumes it’s safe to touch.
He sets a new nanite-simulation program running on his computer, yawns spectacularly, does a routine peripheral vision check to make sure he knows where Todd is, picks the thing up, and--
----
Sunlight filters through the stained glass windows in Atlantis, highlighting the motes of dust that dance crazily through the disturbed air. There are chunks of wall and ceiling tile broken on the floor, smoking holes in their former positions. Far off, muffled by the walls, food is screaming.
It’s beautiful.
The food in this room is either moving quickly or not moving at all. They wear high-collared robes that were maybe once white but are now so mottled with brown and red and black that it’s hard to tell. The stationary ones aren’t interesting, but the moving ones, ah, the moving ones are full of vitality and determination and life.
One of the movers races to the side of a stationary one, lying in a bed, hooked up to a beeping machine that has just started beeping much faster. The upright food reaches into a pocket in its robe and pulls out a gray oval object. It presses the object to the prone food’s chest. A blue light begins to glow, and the beeping from the machine slows, settles into a smoother cadence.
The screaming gets louder, more immediate. Heads are turning, food fleeing. They’ve finally seen him. He steps forward with all the assurance of a conquering victor, hearing his hivemates coming in from the back. He reaches out and puts a hand on the one who had used the device, and presses hard--
----
‘Sir! Sir!” That’s Marine-speak if he ever heard it, and from the tone he can guess the actual meaning: something like, “Sir, if you don’t get up off the floor my ass is going to be grass so far as Colonel Sheppard is concerned so please be OK, sir!” McKay groans and puts a hand on his forehead, taking stock. Lying on the floor. Not dead. Not particularly injured. Marines agitated but confused, as usual.
He sits up, wincing a little at the series of protests his spine lodges against the maneuver. “I’m fine, I’m fine. What happened?”
The Marines look at each other uncomfortably. “We’re not sure, sir,” one of them says, rubbing the back of his neck. “One minute you were working and the next you were lying on the floor screaming.”
“And hissing,” another adds. “Hissing first, then screaming.” All of the Marines look sheepish, embarrassed, and McKay realizes that although they’re trying to not make a big deal out of it, about half of them have their guns pointed at him.
Which means that they thought he was acting like a-
Oh for fuck’s sake.
He glares peevishly at the heart-rate regulator for a minute before looking up at Todd. “I didn’t know you were on the team that sacked Atlantis.”
Todd stares. “I wasn’t. But one of my feed-Wraith was. If they don’t die in battle, when they have reached the limit of usefulness, if there is no hibernation pod readily available, we…” He dryly rubs his fingertips together and lifts his lips just over the tips of his teeth. McKay rolls his eyes. Wraith. Melodramatic freaks, on top of everything else.
He struggles to his feet, holding onto the seat of his chair and trying to crack his back on the way up. He’s going to have a miserable headache tomorrow morning. He narrows his eyes at Todd. “Why do I have Wraith memories in my head? Is this because you fed me? This is because you fed me, isn’t it? Sheppard doesn’t have Wraith memories in his head, though, unless he’s been hiding them in the finest repressed military tradition, which I wouldn’t put past him…“
The Marines all grip their guns a little tighter, and Todd does the little head tilt thing that’s apparently the rough Wraith equivalent of a shrug. “It happens occasionally. With some food. Not something we do enough to have a sample size sufficiently large to determine exactly why.” He sounds magnificently unconcerned, which means that McKay doesn’t have all of Todd’s memories in his head or anything like that. It’s probably only a few scattered memories. He concentrates really hard, thinking Wraith, Wraith, but nothing happens. So the memories have to be triggered, then, by something Todd is or was familiar with, like a piece of machinery. Maybe a place, or a face, or a phrase.
McKay has worked through all of this almost immediately, but the Marines are still looking at him like he’s about to leap up and start feeding on Innocent Atlantis Personnel. “I’m not going to turn into a Wraith,” he says, testily, brushing dust off his shirt. “I just have a few inconvenient Wraith memories in my head now thanks to Mr. Orthodontist’s Nightmare over there. This is a lot more traumatic for me than it ever will be for you, so why don’t you,” pointing to a Marine at random, “go tell Keller that I’ve got a heart-rate regulator down here if she wants it, and you,” pointing at another one, “can go tell someone in charge that Wraith memory transfer is a bitch and it’s making the head scientist cranky, and you,” pointing at the smallest, fastest-looking Marine, “go get me coffee before I start making everyone wish I was turning into a Wraith.” The niceties dispensed with, he turns back to his computer and checks on the simulation results.
There’s a confused pause-the Marines still aren’t used to taking orders from civilians, probably-and then the comforting sound of people going to do exactly what he’s told them to do.
Todd settles down at the computer across from him, and either McKay’s imagination is way overactive right now or Todd is giving him a look that, coming from anyone but a Wraith, might be considered appraising. McKay shoves it out of his mind and concentrates on the simulation data streaming down his screen, because if he stops working and starts really thinking about this, he’s going to start screaming again, and he’s not at all sure that he’ll be able to stop.
----
“There’s nothing physically wrong with him,” Keller says. “I don’t think there’s anything we can-or even should-- do. He would have died if he hadn’t been… fed. So, well, this really could be worse.”
Sheppard nods and looks relieved. Carter smiles encouragingly and pats McKay’s shoulder. Teyla tells him to come talk to her any time he wants to, because if anyone would understand, it would be her. The Marines all relax and head back to their posts.
“Am I going to black out every time I get a flashback?” McKay asks, after they’ve all left.
Keller concentrates on the electrode she’s gently removing from his forehead. “I don’t know. If you did the first time, I guess I don’t see any way to change that.” She wipes the sticky residue left by the electrode pad from his skin. “We don’t even know how often it’ll happen. You might be triggered again in an hour, or it might be months before you run into something that sets it off.”
“Very comforting,” McKay mutters. Medical doctors-- voodoo priests, the whole lot of ‘em.
“I’m sorry, Rodney,” Keller says, and actually sounds like she means it, which is somehow worse.
----
On a routine scouting mission, Lorne’s team stumbles into a clearing with a lot of tall Ancient machines sticking out of the ground. The whole Replicator mess might be reason enough to backburner the site until later (if they get a ‘later’), but when a Marine leans against one of the things and disappears in a flash of squiggly light, they can’t ignore it. A screen on the device seems to indicate a life sign, maybe stored within somehow, but Zelenka can’t make heads or tails of it, so someone (probably Sheppard) makes the executive decision to call in the big gun.
“I don’t know how long it’ll be, it depends on how complex these machines are, it’s basically impossible to tell from the descriptions the team sent back, probably because they’re all functionally blind and wouldn’t know an important component if it stood up and did a tap dance on their faces,” McKay says, dashing around the lab, snatching up data pads and scanners from the tables where they’ve scattered.
“I will keep working in your absence,” Todd says, sitting down at one of McKay’s computers. McKay stops rushing around to straighten up and look at him for a second, because, duh. Todd does a surprisingly passable imitation of a Sheppard smirk. “I will probably get more done without you here.”
It is, McKay realizes, a joke.
He shocks himself, Todd, and all the Marines by poking Todd in the shoulder with a pencil as he passes. “Yes, well, don’t go saving the universe without me. I didn’t put in all this work to have my name kept off the record by an uppity Wraith.”
Todd doesn’t leap over the Marines and rip McKay’s head off with his bare hands. He doesn’t start foaming at the mouth and promising to eat everyone on Earth. He scrolls a little down the file McKay had been working on and starts typing in corrections. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”.
“Do the Wraith even dream?” McKay asks, almost out the door but unable to resist the obvious Rodney-bait statement. “Because, I’ll be honest here, you don’t really seem like the dreaming kind of species, what with the whole hive mind thing and all.”
Todd looks up at him and grins, showing off every inch of his blackened gums and every gleamingly filthy tooth. The tattoo, or marking, or whatever it is around his right eye crinkles up at the corner.
“No,” he says, and turns back to the computer.
McKay’s glad to be getting out of the lab, getting offworld again, finally, but when the door swooshes closed behind him, he can’t help feeling briefly and oddly bereft.
----
Sheppard comes to fetch him from the ‘gate and walk him to the Ancient site, possibly because it makes sense to send someone who can both protect McKay if needed and handle a long walk with him without snapping his neck, but more likely because Sheppard was bored on-site and volunteered to get a break. McKay doesn’t mind; at least Sheppard is marginally more intelligent than the average American jarhead grunt.
“How’re things going with our little friend?” Sheppard asks, waggling his eyebrows. McKay spreads his hands as if to say, hey, not eaten yet, and Sheppard laughs. “Fair enough. I don’t know how you keep him from killing you, though.”
“It’s either my wonderful, scintillating company, or else the constant supervision by heavily armed Marines.”
“Who knows? He’s a Wraith, we don’t know how they work… maybe Wraith like obnoxious, loud, self-absorbed science geeks…”
“Truly an advanced civilization,” McKay grumbles. “If that’s the case, we have much to learn from them.”
Sheppard laughs again and socks McKay in the shoulder, making him teeter a little to the side before he rebalances. Sheppard’s keeping his eyes on the sky and the patch of forest in front of them, always alert for darts or enemies on foot. He cradles his P-90 with both of his hands lightly and easily. A couple of butterfly bandages over the gash on his forehead and a hint of the gravel burn on his cheek are all that remain of their ordeal with the wannabe-Genii. He’s smiling in that quirky, off-kilter Sheppard way, striding along with a gait that could almost be called ‘bouncy’, evidently just happy to have McKay back at his side for an offworld mission. Not that McKay blames him-it must of course be incredibly comforting to know that the smartest man in the galaxy is right there at your disposal to help you deal with whatever absurd situations may (almost certainly will) arise.
They hear the clashing murmurs of Marines and scientists long before they reach the clearing. It’s grown to be a comforting sound (he knows his scientists are OK if they’re bitching at the Marines, and he knows the Marines are OK if they’re bitching back), and when Sheppard looks over at him, McKay has to make a pretense of studying his scanner carefully so that Sheppard won’t see him grinning like an idiot. It does feel good to be back out here where the action is (Pegasus has definitely warped his mind), especially because no one’s shooting at them. He’s sure he can get the Marine out of wherever he’s been stored. That’s what he does.
They make it to the clearing without incident. “Ah, there you are,” Zelenka says, and McKay looks up to see if they’ve made any progress-
----
His hands are bound behind him, his shoulders pulled tightly and uncomfortably back. He tests the binding, but whatever it is, he can’t break it. There is food standing in front of him, all lined up in high-collared white robes. They’re surrounded by many pale grayish obelisks that rise out of the ground in concentric rings, glowing softly and casting a sickly yellow light over the scene. Past the obelisks are dark trees.
It’s night, and he strains his ears, listening hard for that familiar soothing whine, but there’s nothing there. He tries reaching out with his mind, but all he gets back is white noise, synaptic static.
“We should kill you,” one of them says, speaking in an even, almost musical cadence. “We could. But you did not feed on a man who was at your mercy, and so we have spared you until now. We would like to know why this happened.”
He stares out at these food-stuffs, these dolled-up meals, and their arrogance makes him want to hiss, to spit. They have no right to ask him this, or anything. What he’s done is between himself and his Queen, should he ever be so lucky as to see her again. Let them kill him if they wish.
The one who questioned him turns to the food next to it. “We must know,” it says. “Their motivations must be understood if we are to ever have a hope of winning this war.”
Another one of them-a female, he thinks, although it’s hard for him to tell sometimes with food-points a slender rod at him. Its end glows purple, almost black in the yellow ambient light, and he feels his mandible working against his will.
“My first battle,” he feels himself saying, thickly, through the resistance of his mind. No, no, no. Not to anyone, not to food, not this-- “I was not hungry. Did not. Need to eat. Eating when. Don’t need to. Should be unnecessary. I have always thought. It. Wasteful. Perhaps. Not. What we. Should do.” Damn them, damn them, and he knows he’s unfit for fighting, they should have left him in the hivelabs where he was meant to be, where he was hatched to be, but this is a War, they can’t spawn soldiers fast enough yet and until they can everyone must do his part to protect the Queen.
The food confer with each other for a long while. He tests his bonds again, but he knows that despite all their arrogance-which is why they will lose the War-they would not have left him unwatched and able to escape. That rod, making him talk, dragging his deepest thoughts and doubts out of him… he has never felt anything like that, and it was horrible. Horrible. He is sorry that he did not feed earlier. If he could get free right now, he would feed on every last one of them, slowly, until their screams made the very leaves quiver.
“We will not kill you,” the food says. “But neither can we let you go free. Instead we will imprison you here, and perhaps one day, when the war is over, we may speak again.”
He will not give them the satisfaction of speaking again. The maybe-female food touches a panel on the side of the nearest obelisk, enters a series of symbols. He watches closely; one day, when his Hive finds him, as it will (his tracker beeping reassuringly under his chestplate), they will need to know how to unlock these devices. Maybe he can broadcast the sequence from within the device.
The food always underestimates the mental connection that forms when in close proximity to a Queen’s calming, intelligent mind. It is inevitable; the mind of food is underdeveloped and weak in comparison, each food existing all by itself, all of the time. They could never understand the totality of the hive, the efficiency of an entire hive working together. This is why they are food.
Yellow squiggles of light descend from the top of the obelisk, enveloping him--
----
There are hands on his shoulders, gripping so hard that it’s painful. “C’mon Rodney, hey, we need you out here, you gotta wake up…”
McKay opens one eye and then immediately screws it shut; the sunlight streaming down into the clearing is painfully bright.
“Oh thank god,” Sheppard says, exhaling a lot of air and releasing his death grip on McKay’s shoulders. “He’s OK!” The crisp sounds of a lot of Marines backing up and returning to their posts fills the clearing.
“Oh yes, perfectly fine, I pass out and have vivid first-person Wraith experiences all the time. I’m sure this is doing something terrible to the inside of my brain. I mean, I’m talking serious brain damage here.” McKay sits up, shading his eyes with both hands. “Ow, ow, ow.”
“Dr. Keller said you were fine,” Sheppard says breezily, settling back on his heels. Apparently he’d been leaning over McKay. Probably would have started slapping him in the face if McKay had taken any longer to come around.
“Oh, what does she know, the woman’s a quack. They all are. Anyways, it’s probably cumulative. I was fine the first time, but each time it’ll get worse and worse and worse until I’m a drooling vegetable with no one for company except the legion of dead Wraith in my head.”
Sheppard pauses, and when he speaks again, he sounds worried. “You think so?”
McKay peers at him from under his hands. “It was longer this time, wasn’t it? And it was more intense.”
Sheppard’s face is blurry in the sunlight, but what McKay can see of it looks deeply concerned. “More intense? What did you see?”
“I saw…” Wait. McKay struggles to his feet. It takes Sheppard a second, but he catches on quickly enough to help McKay attain full upright status. McKay squints. “God. Which of these things did our idiot Marine get himself sucked into?”
“Maybe you should rest, Rodney…”
“I’m fine, Colonel, I just can’t see anything because I went from the black pit of night plus Wraithvision to the fucking sunniest day in Pegasus here.”
“Alright, well at least wait a minute until you can see again, champ.” McKay opens his mouth to protest, and Sheppard clamps two hands over his face-one over his eyes, and one over his jaw. McKay would bite his hand, but he doesn’t know where it’s been. Rooting around in some microbe-ridden alien dirt, no doubt.
Eventually his headache recedes a little and he makes an inarticulate grunting noise, the best he can do without exposing the delicate interior of his mouth to Sheppard-vectored germs. Sheppard takes the hand over his mouth away.
“Feeling better.”
“You sure?”
“Yes,” McKay says, a little more sharply than he’d maybe intended. Sheppard removes his other hand. McKay blinks once, his eyes going watery, and before he can wipe them Sheppard reaches up and swipes that stupid black wristband he wears across McKay’s face. “Oh, great, thanks a lot, I’m going to get the Pegasus version of pinkeye now.” He flaps his hands over his eyes and shakes his head. By the time he stops, Sheppard has stepped back into his own space, arms folded, looking far too amused for anyone’s sanity.
“He got sucked into the one over there, where Zelenka’s standing, if you’re finished. And I wipe my face with it all the time, Rodney, I haven’t gotten Pegasus pinkeye yet.”
“You say that as though it’s some kind of improvement to have Sheppard-sweat all over my eyeballs instead. I hate you so much,” McKay mutters, but he follows when Sheppard starts lazily strolling over to the indicated obelisk.
Zelenka shuffles nervously when they approach. He looks at McKay first, then at Sheppard, then back at McKay. “I’m not going to eat you,” McKay says, pushing over to look at the scanner he’s holding, then shoving around him to look at the panel set into the pale stone of the device. He hopes that what the Wraith saw was some kind of master keying sequence, not a specific key to a specific obelisk.
The panel lights up when his hand gets near it, displaying a menu of Ancient characters. He touches them in the order he remembers them-- the Wraith remembers them-- in the order someone remembers them, anyways.
Nothing happens. “You sure you’re feeling OK, Rodney?” Sheppard asks, that ‘let’s humor him but he might be deranged so be on the lookout’ tone edging its way into his voice.
“I’m fine,” McKay grinds out, glaring at the panel. Why won’t it-oh, of course. He enters the symbols in the reverse order.
Yellow squiggles spill out of the top of the device and pool on the empty patch of ground next to it. When they melt away, a bewildered-looking Marine is left sitting there, blinking in the sunlight for a second before he’s surrounded by a crowd of fellow Marines and doctors.
Sheppard and Zelenka are both staring at him. McKay sighs. “It’s an imprisoning device. No, obviously I don’t know exactly how it works, but I would guess it’s technology similar to the Wraith beaming rays, maybe even a relative of the Stargate technology itself.”
“I had got that much,” Zelenka says, still staring at McKay with wide eyes. “But how did you know what symbols to press?”
“I saw them,” McKay says. “A Wraith saw them, and somewhere down the line a Wraith ate that Wraith, and somewhere down the line Todd ate that Wraith, or something, and now it’s in my head. Woo fucking hoo.”
“Woah,” Sheppard says. “Cool.”
“Not especially,” McKay mutters.
“Is not such a bad thing,” Zelenka says thoughtfully. McKay gives him his very best ‘are you fucking serious’ look, but Zelenka, tenacious little bastard, only straightens up under the withering glare. “Well, Rodney, it isn’t. If you had not had Wraith in your head, maybe we never get stupid Marine out of machine.”
“You guys can’t keep ragging on my Marines like that,” Sheppard complains, but Zelenka’s right-it might have taken them months to figure out the keying sequence, and who knows what months inside that thing might do to a person. And of course he’s right about the Marines. The Marines are provably stupid.
On to Part 2.
Author: americanleaguer
Pairings: McKay/Todd (shit, I know!)
Rating: R
Word count: 12,250 (shit, I know!!)
Notes: Guys, I am so sorry. I don't even know. I think I wanted to write this story anyways and the challenge just gave me a framework in which to do it. I feel obligated to say that despite the pairing and general amount of Todd in this fic, it is not crack!fic. I also feel obligated to say that there's a load of McSheppy friendship going on here, so it's not like it's all Wraith all the time.
It had probably been a bad idea from the start, of course, but if Pegasus didn’t personally hate Dr. Rodney McKay it wouldn’t have been a problem. The planet was supposed to be uninhabited, the planet had an outpost where the Ancients had been researching nanite function, and neither he nor Todd had made much progress with the Replicator Problem lately. The solution had seemed obvious.
It should have been simple, even. Take scientist (McKay), take semi-captive semi-cooperative Wraith scientist (mostly by now responding to Todd, albeit with the Wraith equivalent of bemusement; real name unknown, possibly nonexistent), take ‘jumper pilot (Sheppard), take gun-toting Wraith babysitter (Ronon), bundle into puddlejumper, go to planet, check out Ancient doohickeys, get amazing intel, come back to Atlantis, perform miracles, save humanity. Rinse and repeat as needed.
They would have known better than to take Todd to an inhabited planet. That would have been a Spectacularly Bad Idea. But they were supposed to be the only people on the planet, and they were used to Todd-well, maybe not Ronon so much, but McKay’s mostly used to Todd, or used to Todd with a lot of guns pointed at him and a firm understanding that if he makes a wrong move he’ll get swiss-cheesed by genuine Earth-issue firearms. Other people, people not from Atlantis who didn’t know about the Replicators and the whole long, sordid situation leading to Todd’s presence on Atlantis in the first place, they wouldn’t be expected to react positively to Todd. Naturally.
Even so, this is all out of proportion. The inhabitants of this particular allegedly uninhabited planet aren’t just trying to kill Todd; they’re trying to kill McKay too. And Sheppard and Ronon, of course, but mostly they’re trying to kill McKay, probably either because they recognize his innate genius and realize how valuable he is, or because they saw him actually working side by side with Todd on an Ancient console. Maybe both.
The not-supposed-to-be-here locals have short, fat guns that squeeze off bursts of bright orange light. They’re out of synch with the rest of the décor and clothing, so obviously they’re scavenged from some other people: they don’t look Ancient or Goa’uld, so maybe Asgard, or one of those other uber-races. They’re kind of like the Genii, only more primitive in terms of clothing (any people who haven’t evolved above wearing animal skins are practically Neanderthals so far as McKay is concerned) and disturbingly more advanced in terms of sidearms.
The first time one of them opens fire, Todd snarls and backs off fast and generally acts like the orange burst is both the most surprising and the worst thing he’s seen in a long time-but not unfamiliar. He recognizes the weapons, that much is clear, and if they’re scary enough to worry a Wraith… McKay does not want to see them hit someone. Especially not himself.
Between bursts of P-90 fire, Sheppard yells at the world in general to get McKay out of there, which is simultaneously intelligent and practical (shooting! Shooting near McKay, that means leaving now) and obnoxious and patronizing (he has a gun too, doesn’t he? Why should Sheppard have a monopoly on stupidly risking his life in the face of overwhelmingly bad odds?). Ronon dives in among the locals, working with his knife in close quarters so that they can’t fire those orange bursts at him without hitting each other. That leaves McKay with Todd, who seems all too happy to get the hell out of there anyways, and doesn’t mind herding McKay along with him.
----
He doesn’t know where Sheppard and Ronon are. They’ve been running for what feels like 7 hours but is probably closer to one; one hour of running is still one hour too many for McKay. Running for his life is familiar and tolerable and should be confined to short frantic slices of time, not this long drawn-out panic of a death march through poorly lit hallways with stone floors (stone floors! No ‘civilization’ that’s still using stone floors should have guns like these).
He knows it’s bad when he realizes that he’s not even worried about being on his own with Todd; normally this would freak him out, but under the circumstances he’s actually more afraid of the assholes with guns, who definitely want to kill him, than the potentially hungry Wraith, who only probably wants to kill him.
The sounds behind them get louder, and Todd turns his head at the same time there’s a flash of orange. McKay gets one look at Todd’s slitted eyes opening wide before he feels something hit him in the middle of his back, lifting him off his feet and slamming him on his side a long way down the hall.
Everything looks dark and he wonders if he’s dead, but after a moment he realizes that this is only because he’s face down on the floor. He tries to lift himself up, but he can’t move. He can’t feel anything below his neck either and oh god, what if he’s paralyzed? What do those guns do? He can still hear screams and the throaty zap of the weapon’s fire, and he can feel the floor vibrating beneath his nose with pounding footsteps and the occasional dense thud of a body falling and not getting up again.
After a little while the sounds stop. Heavy footsteps approach him and pale hands with bad fingernails are lifting him, turning him over, propping him up against the wall. McKay can see four bodies sprawled on the floor. Two are wizened and dry and generally very fed-upon-looking. The other two are breathing shallowly, alive but evidently not going anywhere fast. Directly above him, lips pulled back and doing that aggressive/intimidating hiss thing he does, is Todd.
“This is not acceptable, McKay,” Todd says. McKay blinks at him, and Todd turns to the two remaining wannabe-Genii. He rips open one of their shirts, slams his palm down on the man’s chest, and sucks in a shuddering breath, tipping his head back and half closing his eyes.
To distract himself from this sight (not that McKay is feeling any particular sympathy for the guy; up until seconds ago he had been very busy trying to kill McKay, but still-Wraith, feeding) McKay looks down at himself, trying to assess his own wounds. What he’s seeing doesn’t make any sense, because he’s looking down at his own stomach, but he’s seeing stone-the rough join where the floor meets the wall. He wishes he had more time to wallow blissfully in incomprehension and disbelief, but he’s Rodney McKay, he doesn’t do incomprehension, and almost immediately he realizes a few things.
Even if Sheppard and Ronon somehow magically showed up and rescued them from this stinking stony pit, right now, they would still be an hour away from the ‘jumper on foot, and two hours away from the Stargate once they got to the ‘jumper. At the time, not knowing what sort of Ancient defensive systems might be in place around the base, this had seemed like a good idea.
He doesn’t have 3 hours.
The reason he can’t feel much of anything is because his body has gone into massive, comprehensive shock. It’s probably only the shock keeping him temporarily conscious.
The reason his body has gone into such traumatic shock is that the weapon fired at him has blown a hole clear through his abdomen, jaggedly round, about the size of a bowling ball.
The only reason he hasn’t immediately passed out from blood loss is that the weapon’s energy blast cauterized the edges of the hole, although now that it’s been a few minutes and his arteries have had time to realize that certain parts of them are no longer connected to certain other parts, he’s definitely bleeding out.
That doesn’t even begin to get into the massive organ failure due to the fact that several vital organs, and several more sections of other vital organs, are simply not there anymore.
He’s going to die.
What a stupid, horrible way to die-just some bad information, a trigger-happy bunch of locals, and a shot from behind while he was heroically running away. He dully watches Todd feed on the remaining man. He can’t bring himself to care. Go Todd. Feed away. Feast-o-rama.
Pain is now sneaking in around the edges of the shock, pain so huge that he’s starting to have trouble breathing, hearing, seeing. It comes into his consciousness on a wave that doesn’t crest-it just gets higher and higher and higher until there’s nothing in the universe except for pain. It can’t be much longer now.
“Completely unacceptable,” Todd says, his stupid gravelly Wraith voice cutting through the pain temporarily. He’s standing in front of McKay, staring down at him. McKay tries to ask what, but finds that he can’t. He tries to move his hand, and he can’t do that either. As a last resort he tries to blink rapidly at Todd, but he can’t even manage that much.
Todd kneels down in front of him and pushes McKay’s tac vest (what’s left of it) off his shoulders. He does the same for the rest of McKay’s shirt. “I have spent days-- weeks-- locked in a room with you, McKay, sitting feet away from me, berating me, harassing me, smelling delicious.” McKay wants to point out that it hasn’t exactly been a picnic for him either, but Todd probably wouldn’t much care. “It is unacceptable for you to die from a…” his lip curls up over his very, very bad gums, “…blaster wound. Fired by food. No, McKay, you have tormented me often enough. The only one allowed to kill you is me.”
That’s touching, in a psychotic, terrifying, Wraith-y way, and McKay almost, at this point, appreciates the sentiment. Todd’s hand alights on his chest just as his vision goes spotty and gray, and then solid black. His last thought before he dies is that getting killed by a Wraith at least makes for a better story than getting shot in the back by a bunch of people who are practically cavemen.
----
Heaven is noisy and warm and blessedly pain-free. McKay’s content to keep his eyes closed for now; he presumably has all of Eternity to see the place. The voices surrounding him don’t sound particularly angelic, though. They sound more… harassed, and strident, and annoyed, and one voice rises above all the others, insisting it’s fine, really, fine, and it sounds exactly like Colonel Sheppard.
So Sheppard’s dead too. That’s a pity, but McKay can’t be all that sympathetic when, hey! he’s also dead! At least he’ll have someone from the old days to hang out with once he gets tired of picking the ethereal brains of an entire history’s-worth of dead scientists. He’s tempted to go ahead and open his eyes, just so he can see Sheppard in his angel robe, which he’s absolutely certain Sheppard would look incredibly stupid in (McKay’s Heaven definitely includes Colonel Sheppard looking stupid), but he’s really so very comfortable like this.
It’s when he hears Todd’s voice that his eyes snap open, because if there’s a Wraith here, then wherever he is, it can’t be Heaven.
Heaven probably doesn’t look this much like the Atlantis infirmary anyways.
“McKay!” Sheppard’s face explodes into view as he leans over the bed, teetering like he’s woozy and off-balance. There’s a nasty-looking gash on his forehead and the blood dripping down from it has crusted one of his eyes closed. His face is smeared with dirt and there’s what looks like a lightly bleeding gravel burn high on one cheek. His lower lip is puffy and swollen and bleeding bright red where it isn’t black. Half of his hair is matted down with, McKay can only assume, more blood.
“Jesus Christ.” McKay squeezes his eyes closed again. “Come back from the dead and the first thing I have to see is that.”
“Nice to have you back too, Rodney,” Sheppard says, sarcasm dripping from his voice, but he’s snuck a hand under the sheet at McKay’s side and is squeezing his hand hard. McKay absolutely doesn’t squeeze back. Only a tiny little bit. Only because Sheppard looks like he probably needs it.
He lifts his other hand and nervously grabs the edge of the sheet. He opens one eye, takes a deep breath, lifts the sheet a bit and looks down.
There’s a reddish series of raised welts on his chest, and he’s incredibly dirty, the kind of dirtiness that someone can only achieve after spending a significant amount of time rolling around in a mixture of mud, dust, and various bodily fluids, human and otherwise. But the hole is gone. He slides his hand under the sheet and presses it against his stomach to be sure, but he can only feel a faint, faint mark, like an old scar.
“What….” he says, both eyes opening wide, and then he sees Todd, off to the side with his arms folded and his feet planted. When McKay looks at him, Todd bares all of his teeth without moving any other part of his face and does the hissy thing again. McKay stares. “You. You fed me. I was dying and you fed me life.” Which sounds absurd and cheesy, but is true. Todd inclines his head very slightly. “I thought you were feeding on me!”
“Please,” and the teeth are half-obscured in a sneer, “I had just fed.”
“Don’t you people have bottomless stomachs or something?”
“Yeah,” says a gruff voice from just beyond McKay’s field of view. “I never saw a Wraith get full.” So Ronon made it out alive too. That’s something.
“I could have kept feeding, yes,” Todd says evenly, addressing himself to the air over McKay’s head. “But it was no longer immediately necessary. I will be sustained for a long time by this… most recent feeding. And I have not… suffered through weeks with Dr. McKay just to have to start all over again with someone else. It would have been impractical to let him,” more teeth, “go to waste.”
“See, Rodney,” Sheppard says, slipping his hand surreptitiously out of McKay’s (god forbid the rest of the team see that he cares, and it’s all McKay can do to keep from rolling his eyes, because even Air Force Lieutenant Colonels are allowed to have friends so far as he knows) to thump him on the shoulder. “Now we’ve got something in common. We can start a ‘Cool Kids Get Fed by Wraith’ club.”
“Oh, great, just what I’ve always wanted,” McKay groans, pained, but he’s here. He’s here, he’s alive, and that’s what matters.
----
Todd is not allowed to go offworld again. Since they don’t exactly have time to waste, this means that McKay isn’t going offworld either; he’s spending all his available time in the labs with Todd, trying to solve that damn Replicator Problem. Sometimes Zelenka is there, but other than him McKay’s only company is the small rotating team of Marines who stand guard to make sure Todd doesn’t go on a feeding frenzy, and they’re not exactly great conversationalists. At least not when it comes to science.
Sheppard brings McKay little Ancient artifacts from missions to make up for the fact that McKay is Atlantis-bound. They’re nothing all that exciting, just small devices and sometimes scraps. Of course, without McKay on offworld missions, the team could probably walk right past a giant pile of ZPMs and never notice the power spike on their sensors. Sheppard’s offerings are appreciated, but every time he brings one McKay is tormented for days afterwards with the absolute certainty that technological treasure has been lost forever because he wasn’t out there to find it.
The most recent present is a device about the size of McKay’s palm and the shape of an American football, dull gray with a blue glass sphere set into the middle of it and some of those Mondrian-esque festival-of-right-angles decorations the Ancients like so much around the edges. Sheppard brought it in barehanded and left right afterwards for the debriefing, so McKay assumes it’s safe to touch.
He sets a new nanite-simulation program running on his computer, yawns spectacularly, does a routine peripheral vision check to make sure he knows where Todd is, picks the thing up, and--
----
Sunlight filters through the stained glass windows in Atlantis, highlighting the motes of dust that dance crazily through the disturbed air. There are chunks of wall and ceiling tile broken on the floor, smoking holes in their former positions. Far off, muffled by the walls, food is screaming.
It’s beautiful.
The food in this room is either moving quickly or not moving at all. They wear high-collared robes that were maybe once white but are now so mottled with brown and red and black that it’s hard to tell. The stationary ones aren’t interesting, but the moving ones, ah, the moving ones are full of vitality and determination and life.
One of the movers races to the side of a stationary one, lying in a bed, hooked up to a beeping machine that has just started beeping much faster. The upright food reaches into a pocket in its robe and pulls out a gray oval object. It presses the object to the prone food’s chest. A blue light begins to glow, and the beeping from the machine slows, settles into a smoother cadence.
The screaming gets louder, more immediate. Heads are turning, food fleeing. They’ve finally seen him. He steps forward with all the assurance of a conquering victor, hearing his hivemates coming in from the back. He reaches out and puts a hand on the one who had used the device, and presses hard--
----
‘Sir! Sir!” That’s Marine-speak if he ever heard it, and from the tone he can guess the actual meaning: something like, “Sir, if you don’t get up off the floor my ass is going to be grass so far as Colonel Sheppard is concerned so please be OK, sir!” McKay groans and puts a hand on his forehead, taking stock. Lying on the floor. Not dead. Not particularly injured. Marines agitated but confused, as usual.
He sits up, wincing a little at the series of protests his spine lodges against the maneuver. “I’m fine, I’m fine. What happened?”
The Marines look at each other uncomfortably. “We’re not sure, sir,” one of them says, rubbing the back of his neck. “One minute you were working and the next you were lying on the floor screaming.”
“And hissing,” another adds. “Hissing first, then screaming.” All of the Marines look sheepish, embarrassed, and McKay realizes that although they’re trying to not make a big deal out of it, about half of them have their guns pointed at him.
Which means that they thought he was acting like a-
Oh for fuck’s sake.
He glares peevishly at the heart-rate regulator for a minute before looking up at Todd. “I didn’t know you were on the team that sacked Atlantis.”
Todd stares. “I wasn’t. But one of my feed-Wraith was. If they don’t die in battle, when they have reached the limit of usefulness, if there is no hibernation pod readily available, we…” He dryly rubs his fingertips together and lifts his lips just over the tips of his teeth. McKay rolls his eyes. Wraith. Melodramatic freaks, on top of everything else.
He struggles to his feet, holding onto the seat of his chair and trying to crack his back on the way up. He’s going to have a miserable headache tomorrow morning. He narrows his eyes at Todd. “Why do I have Wraith memories in my head? Is this because you fed me? This is because you fed me, isn’t it? Sheppard doesn’t have Wraith memories in his head, though, unless he’s been hiding them in the finest repressed military tradition, which I wouldn’t put past him…“
The Marines all grip their guns a little tighter, and Todd does the little head tilt thing that’s apparently the rough Wraith equivalent of a shrug. “It happens occasionally. With some food. Not something we do enough to have a sample size sufficiently large to determine exactly why.” He sounds magnificently unconcerned, which means that McKay doesn’t have all of Todd’s memories in his head or anything like that. It’s probably only a few scattered memories. He concentrates really hard, thinking Wraith, Wraith, but nothing happens. So the memories have to be triggered, then, by something Todd is or was familiar with, like a piece of machinery. Maybe a place, or a face, or a phrase.
McKay has worked through all of this almost immediately, but the Marines are still looking at him like he’s about to leap up and start feeding on Innocent Atlantis Personnel. “I’m not going to turn into a Wraith,” he says, testily, brushing dust off his shirt. “I just have a few inconvenient Wraith memories in my head now thanks to Mr. Orthodontist’s Nightmare over there. This is a lot more traumatic for me than it ever will be for you, so why don’t you,” pointing to a Marine at random, “go tell Keller that I’ve got a heart-rate regulator down here if she wants it, and you,” pointing at another one, “can go tell someone in charge that Wraith memory transfer is a bitch and it’s making the head scientist cranky, and you,” pointing at the smallest, fastest-looking Marine, “go get me coffee before I start making everyone wish I was turning into a Wraith.” The niceties dispensed with, he turns back to his computer and checks on the simulation results.
There’s a confused pause-the Marines still aren’t used to taking orders from civilians, probably-and then the comforting sound of people going to do exactly what he’s told them to do.
Todd settles down at the computer across from him, and either McKay’s imagination is way overactive right now or Todd is giving him a look that, coming from anyone but a Wraith, might be considered appraising. McKay shoves it out of his mind and concentrates on the simulation data streaming down his screen, because if he stops working and starts really thinking about this, he’s going to start screaming again, and he’s not at all sure that he’ll be able to stop.
----
“There’s nothing physically wrong with him,” Keller says. “I don’t think there’s anything we can-or even should-- do. He would have died if he hadn’t been… fed. So, well, this really could be worse.”
Sheppard nods and looks relieved. Carter smiles encouragingly and pats McKay’s shoulder. Teyla tells him to come talk to her any time he wants to, because if anyone would understand, it would be her. The Marines all relax and head back to their posts.
“Am I going to black out every time I get a flashback?” McKay asks, after they’ve all left.
Keller concentrates on the electrode she’s gently removing from his forehead. “I don’t know. If you did the first time, I guess I don’t see any way to change that.” She wipes the sticky residue left by the electrode pad from his skin. “We don’t even know how often it’ll happen. You might be triggered again in an hour, or it might be months before you run into something that sets it off.”
“Very comforting,” McKay mutters. Medical doctors-- voodoo priests, the whole lot of ‘em.
“I’m sorry, Rodney,” Keller says, and actually sounds like she means it, which is somehow worse.
----
On a routine scouting mission, Lorne’s team stumbles into a clearing with a lot of tall Ancient machines sticking out of the ground. The whole Replicator mess might be reason enough to backburner the site until later (if they get a ‘later’), but when a Marine leans against one of the things and disappears in a flash of squiggly light, they can’t ignore it. A screen on the device seems to indicate a life sign, maybe stored within somehow, but Zelenka can’t make heads or tails of it, so someone (probably Sheppard) makes the executive decision to call in the big gun.
“I don’t know how long it’ll be, it depends on how complex these machines are, it’s basically impossible to tell from the descriptions the team sent back, probably because they’re all functionally blind and wouldn’t know an important component if it stood up and did a tap dance on their faces,” McKay says, dashing around the lab, snatching up data pads and scanners from the tables where they’ve scattered.
“I will keep working in your absence,” Todd says, sitting down at one of McKay’s computers. McKay stops rushing around to straighten up and look at him for a second, because, duh. Todd does a surprisingly passable imitation of a Sheppard smirk. “I will probably get more done without you here.”
It is, McKay realizes, a joke.
He shocks himself, Todd, and all the Marines by poking Todd in the shoulder with a pencil as he passes. “Yes, well, don’t go saving the universe without me. I didn’t put in all this work to have my name kept off the record by an uppity Wraith.”
Todd doesn’t leap over the Marines and rip McKay’s head off with his bare hands. He doesn’t start foaming at the mouth and promising to eat everyone on Earth. He scrolls a little down the file McKay had been working on and starts typing in corrections. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”.
“Do the Wraith even dream?” McKay asks, almost out the door but unable to resist the obvious Rodney-bait statement. “Because, I’ll be honest here, you don’t really seem like the dreaming kind of species, what with the whole hive mind thing and all.”
Todd looks up at him and grins, showing off every inch of his blackened gums and every gleamingly filthy tooth. The tattoo, or marking, or whatever it is around his right eye crinkles up at the corner.
“No,” he says, and turns back to the computer.
McKay’s glad to be getting out of the lab, getting offworld again, finally, but when the door swooshes closed behind him, he can’t help feeling briefly and oddly bereft.
----
Sheppard comes to fetch him from the ‘gate and walk him to the Ancient site, possibly because it makes sense to send someone who can both protect McKay if needed and handle a long walk with him without snapping his neck, but more likely because Sheppard was bored on-site and volunteered to get a break. McKay doesn’t mind; at least Sheppard is marginally more intelligent than the average American jarhead grunt.
“How’re things going with our little friend?” Sheppard asks, waggling his eyebrows. McKay spreads his hands as if to say, hey, not eaten yet, and Sheppard laughs. “Fair enough. I don’t know how you keep him from killing you, though.”
“It’s either my wonderful, scintillating company, or else the constant supervision by heavily armed Marines.”
“Who knows? He’s a Wraith, we don’t know how they work… maybe Wraith like obnoxious, loud, self-absorbed science geeks…”
“Truly an advanced civilization,” McKay grumbles. “If that’s the case, we have much to learn from them.”
Sheppard laughs again and socks McKay in the shoulder, making him teeter a little to the side before he rebalances. Sheppard’s keeping his eyes on the sky and the patch of forest in front of them, always alert for darts or enemies on foot. He cradles his P-90 with both of his hands lightly and easily. A couple of butterfly bandages over the gash on his forehead and a hint of the gravel burn on his cheek are all that remain of their ordeal with the wannabe-Genii. He’s smiling in that quirky, off-kilter Sheppard way, striding along with a gait that could almost be called ‘bouncy’, evidently just happy to have McKay back at his side for an offworld mission. Not that McKay blames him-it must of course be incredibly comforting to know that the smartest man in the galaxy is right there at your disposal to help you deal with whatever absurd situations may (almost certainly will) arise.
They hear the clashing murmurs of Marines and scientists long before they reach the clearing. It’s grown to be a comforting sound (he knows his scientists are OK if they’re bitching at the Marines, and he knows the Marines are OK if they’re bitching back), and when Sheppard looks over at him, McKay has to make a pretense of studying his scanner carefully so that Sheppard won’t see him grinning like an idiot. It does feel good to be back out here where the action is (Pegasus has definitely warped his mind), especially because no one’s shooting at them. He’s sure he can get the Marine out of wherever he’s been stored. That’s what he does.
They make it to the clearing without incident. “Ah, there you are,” Zelenka says, and McKay looks up to see if they’ve made any progress-
----
His hands are bound behind him, his shoulders pulled tightly and uncomfortably back. He tests the binding, but whatever it is, he can’t break it. There is food standing in front of him, all lined up in high-collared white robes. They’re surrounded by many pale grayish obelisks that rise out of the ground in concentric rings, glowing softly and casting a sickly yellow light over the scene. Past the obelisks are dark trees.
It’s night, and he strains his ears, listening hard for that familiar soothing whine, but there’s nothing there. He tries reaching out with his mind, but all he gets back is white noise, synaptic static.
“We should kill you,” one of them says, speaking in an even, almost musical cadence. “We could. But you did not feed on a man who was at your mercy, and so we have spared you until now. We would like to know why this happened.”
He stares out at these food-stuffs, these dolled-up meals, and their arrogance makes him want to hiss, to spit. They have no right to ask him this, or anything. What he’s done is between himself and his Queen, should he ever be so lucky as to see her again. Let them kill him if they wish.
The one who questioned him turns to the food next to it. “We must know,” it says. “Their motivations must be understood if we are to ever have a hope of winning this war.”
Another one of them-a female, he thinks, although it’s hard for him to tell sometimes with food-points a slender rod at him. Its end glows purple, almost black in the yellow ambient light, and he feels his mandible working against his will.
“My first battle,” he feels himself saying, thickly, through the resistance of his mind. No, no, no. Not to anyone, not to food, not this-- “I was not hungry. Did not. Need to eat. Eating when. Don’t need to. Should be unnecessary. I have always thought. It. Wasteful. Perhaps. Not. What we. Should do.” Damn them, damn them, and he knows he’s unfit for fighting, they should have left him in the hivelabs where he was meant to be, where he was hatched to be, but this is a War, they can’t spawn soldiers fast enough yet and until they can everyone must do his part to protect the Queen.
The food confer with each other for a long while. He tests his bonds again, but he knows that despite all their arrogance-which is why they will lose the War-they would not have left him unwatched and able to escape. That rod, making him talk, dragging his deepest thoughts and doubts out of him… he has never felt anything like that, and it was horrible. Horrible. He is sorry that he did not feed earlier. If he could get free right now, he would feed on every last one of them, slowly, until their screams made the very leaves quiver.
“We will not kill you,” the food says. “But neither can we let you go free. Instead we will imprison you here, and perhaps one day, when the war is over, we may speak again.”
He will not give them the satisfaction of speaking again. The maybe-female food touches a panel on the side of the nearest obelisk, enters a series of symbols. He watches closely; one day, when his Hive finds him, as it will (his tracker beeping reassuringly under his chestplate), they will need to know how to unlock these devices. Maybe he can broadcast the sequence from within the device.
The food always underestimates the mental connection that forms when in close proximity to a Queen’s calming, intelligent mind. It is inevitable; the mind of food is underdeveloped and weak in comparison, each food existing all by itself, all of the time. They could never understand the totality of the hive, the efficiency of an entire hive working together. This is why they are food.
Yellow squiggles of light descend from the top of the obelisk, enveloping him--
----
There are hands on his shoulders, gripping so hard that it’s painful. “C’mon Rodney, hey, we need you out here, you gotta wake up…”
McKay opens one eye and then immediately screws it shut; the sunlight streaming down into the clearing is painfully bright.
“Oh thank god,” Sheppard says, exhaling a lot of air and releasing his death grip on McKay’s shoulders. “He’s OK!” The crisp sounds of a lot of Marines backing up and returning to their posts fills the clearing.
“Oh yes, perfectly fine, I pass out and have vivid first-person Wraith experiences all the time. I’m sure this is doing something terrible to the inside of my brain. I mean, I’m talking serious brain damage here.” McKay sits up, shading his eyes with both hands. “Ow, ow, ow.”
“Dr. Keller said you were fine,” Sheppard says breezily, settling back on his heels. Apparently he’d been leaning over McKay. Probably would have started slapping him in the face if McKay had taken any longer to come around.
“Oh, what does she know, the woman’s a quack. They all are. Anyways, it’s probably cumulative. I was fine the first time, but each time it’ll get worse and worse and worse until I’m a drooling vegetable with no one for company except the legion of dead Wraith in my head.”
Sheppard pauses, and when he speaks again, he sounds worried. “You think so?”
McKay peers at him from under his hands. “It was longer this time, wasn’t it? And it was more intense.”
Sheppard’s face is blurry in the sunlight, but what McKay can see of it looks deeply concerned. “More intense? What did you see?”
“I saw…” Wait. McKay struggles to his feet. It takes Sheppard a second, but he catches on quickly enough to help McKay attain full upright status. McKay squints. “God. Which of these things did our idiot Marine get himself sucked into?”
“Maybe you should rest, Rodney…”
“I’m fine, Colonel, I just can’t see anything because I went from the black pit of night plus Wraithvision to the fucking sunniest day in Pegasus here.”
“Alright, well at least wait a minute until you can see again, champ.” McKay opens his mouth to protest, and Sheppard clamps two hands over his face-one over his eyes, and one over his jaw. McKay would bite his hand, but he doesn’t know where it’s been. Rooting around in some microbe-ridden alien dirt, no doubt.
Eventually his headache recedes a little and he makes an inarticulate grunting noise, the best he can do without exposing the delicate interior of his mouth to Sheppard-vectored germs. Sheppard takes the hand over his mouth away.
“Feeling better.”
“You sure?”
“Yes,” McKay says, a little more sharply than he’d maybe intended. Sheppard removes his other hand. McKay blinks once, his eyes going watery, and before he can wipe them Sheppard reaches up and swipes that stupid black wristband he wears across McKay’s face. “Oh, great, thanks a lot, I’m going to get the Pegasus version of pinkeye now.” He flaps his hands over his eyes and shakes his head. By the time he stops, Sheppard has stepped back into his own space, arms folded, looking far too amused for anyone’s sanity.
“He got sucked into the one over there, where Zelenka’s standing, if you’re finished. And I wipe my face with it all the time, Rodney, I haven’t gotten Pegasus pinkeye yet.”
“You say that as though it’s some kind of improvement to have Sheppard-sweat all over my eyeballs instead. I hate you so much,” McKay mutters, but he follows when Sheppard starts lazily strolling over to the indicated obelisk.
Zelenka shuffles nervously when they approach. He looks at McKay first, then at Sheppard, then back at McKay. “I’m not going to eat you,” McKay says, pushing over to look at the scanner he’s holding, then shoving around him to look at the panel set into the pale stone of the device. He hopes that what the Wraith saw was some kind of master keying sequence, not a specific key to a specific obelisk.
The panel lights up when his hand gets near it, displaying a menu of Ancient characters. He touches them in the order he remembers them-- the Wraith remembers them-- in the order someone remembers them, anyways.
Nothing happens. “You sure you’re feeling OK, Rodney?” Sheppard asks, that ‘let’s humor him but he might be deranged so be on the lookout’ tone edging its way into his voice.
“I’m fine,” McKay grinds out, glaring at the panel. Why won’t it-oh, of course. He enters the symbols in the reverse order.
Yellow squiggles spill out of the top of the device and pool on the empty patch of ground next to it. When they melt away, a bewildered-looking Marine is left sitting there, blinking in the sunlight for a second before he’s surrounded by a crowd of fellow Marines and doctors.
Sheppard and Zelenka are both staring at him. McKay sighs. “It’s an imprisoning device. No, obviously I don’t know exactly how it works, but I would guess it’s technology similar to the Wraith beaming rays, maybe even a relative of the Stargate technology itself.”
“I had got that much,” Zelenka says, still staring at McKay with wide eyes. “But how did you know what symbols to press?”
“I saw them,” McKay says. “A Wraith saw them, and somewhere down the line a Wraith ate that Wraith, and somewhere down the line Todd ate that Wraith, or something, and now it’s in my head. Woo fucking hoo.”
“Woah,” Sheppard says. “Cool.”
“Not especially,” McKay mutters.
“Is not such a bad thing,” Zelenka says thoughtfully. McKay gives him his very best ‘are you fucking serious’ look, but Zelenka, tenacious little bastard, only straightens up under the withering glare. “Well, Rodney, it isn’t. If you had not had Wraith in your head, maybe we never get stupid Marine out of machine.”
“You guys can’t keep ragging on my Marines like that,” Sheppard complains, but Zelenka’s right-it might have taken them months to figure out the keying sequence, and who knows what months inside that thing might do to a person. And of course he’s right about the Marines. The Marines are provably stupid.
On to Part 2.