Atropos
Atlantis
Pegasus Galaxy
2005
"And you believe you can finish their work? You think you can solve something the Ancients failed at?"
"Yes! The Ancients weren't any smarter than us. They just knew more."
"But they couldn't make it wo – "
"Because they ran out of time!"
"Colonel?"
"I agree with McKay."
"Why?"
"Because if we can't beat what the Ancients did, we can't beat the Wraith."
"All right."
"You won't regret this. Trust me. All it will take is the Colonel and me –"
"And me. I'm coming with you."
"Elizabeth – "
"Colonel. Dr. McKay isn't military. He doesn't answer to you. He answers to me."
"Look, you won't be sorry, I swear."
Doranda System
Pegasus Galaxy
2005
The weapon wasn't firing anymore. Elizabeth dug her fingers into the back of the co-pilot's seat in the jumper and felt a moment of hope. That had to be a good sign. She refused to think about the alternative.
"Dial the gate," Sheppard told Rodney in a tight voice.
Rodney didn't look at him, just followed the order, and Elizabeth immediately knew something was still very, very wrong. The triangles with the Pegasus gate symbols lit a warm yellow beneath his hands. Hands that were shaking, and she'd never seen that; for all Rodney moved and used his hands constantly, they were always sure and steady.
Sheppard's expression was set and intent; he was completely focused on flying the jumper, no longer taking evasive action, just pushing its velocity to the maximum. They were arrowing toward the distant blue speck of the orbital stargate at a breakneck speed that would stress the inertial dampeners to their limits when they arrived in Atlantis.
Rodney's hands jittered over the co-pilot's controls, bringing up three different heads-up displays. Elizabeth couldn't make any sense of them. One showed a red-line spiking higher and higher, the graph frantically resizing itself to accommodate its continuous rise. The second showed a blue-white sphere expanding, swallowing lines that symbolized the orbits of planets, almost reaching the dot that was their jumper, and the stargate. The third was just a cascade of numbers. Sheppard's eyes lit on that one and he grimaced.
Elizabeth tightened her hand on the chair back again, alarmed as she actually felt the jumper buffeted through the dampeners. She realized Sheppard was struggling to keep them on a straight course. Rodney's hands were locked tight, white-knuckled, on the arms of the co-pilot's seat.
The red-line display topped out and an alarm began wailing through the jumper.
"Elizabeth," Sheppard said tonelessly, "radio Atlantis."
She reached up and activated the radio headset she wore as regularly as shoes, switching to the command channel.
"Atlantis, this is Weir. Respond."
"Dr. Weir, this is Atlantis Control."
Edwards' voice was lighter than Grodin's had been. He'd moved into first shift smoothly and projected a similar air of competency, but she never stopped expecting to hear Peter.
"Disengage the shield," Elizabeth said with forced calm. The alarm still screamed through the jumper cockpit. "Jumper One is inbound. I don't think we have much time." She breathed deeply when she heard her voice edged higher with the terror she felt clawing its way inside of her and steeled it into a calm she didn't feel. "There was a problem with the second test. Dr. Zelenka appears to have been correct."
"I'm sure he'll be thrilled when he realizes exactly what being right means in this case," Rodney snarled under his breath. He was watching the second display. The blue sphere had turned sullen red and was rapidly collapsing back to Doranda. Faster than it had expanded.
"Shut up, McKay," Sheppard snapped.
"Jumper One is cleared through the stargate. Shield down."
The jumper angled over, lining up with the quicksilver blue of the open stargate.
Rodney's mouth opened, but no words followed. His eyes focused on the display and widened.
A stream of light traced across the display, an arm reaching from the Dorandan primary to the planet.
"What is that?" Elizabeth asked.
"Solar plasma," Rodney replied quietly.
"Rodney, what have you done?"
He raised his head.
"You didn't," Sheppard yelled. "You bastard, tell me you didn't!"
Rodney's mouth worked and his eyes were wide, blinded with something so horrible Elizabeth felt sick herself. It went beyond panic.
"Oh, God."
Fierce white light filled the jumper cockpit. Sheppard threw up his arm. Elizabeth lost her footing and fell back as the jumper seemed to lurch in space before sliding into the stargate.
Her last sight was of Rodney, his face bleached bone white, his mouth and eyes black holes full of absolute despair.
~*~
It was the worst trip through a stargate Elizabeth had ever experienced, including stepping between the Milky Way and Pegasus the first time. Normal stargate travel didn't include awareness. She cupped her hand over her mouth, fighting the need to throw up. She'd always experienced the Pegasus Galaxy wormholes as a synesthetic roller coaster ride, an infinite green instant that was over even as she braced herself for it.
She had felt it this time. She'd been a tearing stream of dissociated atoms and consciousness ripped apart, shot through with searing plasma, crimson sparks flaring through a body that was so elongated it neither began nor ended.
She'd tasted time.
Still holding her hand over her mouth, trying to catch a breath that had never been lost, she looked up as the jumper wavered. Looked out the front port, expecting to see the gate room, the lit steps, the stained glass, the marines standing guard, Col. Caldwell, perhaps, glaring down from the control room level.
"What the hell – ?" John exclaimed. He looked green, lit by the jumper's interior lights. His hand shook on the stick, the only time Elizabeth had ever seen him less than sure in flight. He was staring out the front port, too.
Into the thick, cloying darkness of walls and caves and oceanic depths.
"McKay," John said, his voice gritty with anger.
Rodney had bowed over, a smooth curve of blue-clad back, his face buried in his hands. He raised his head and looked. "I don't understand," he whispered. "I dialed Atlantis. The effect shouldn't reach that far for days. Weeks."
Elizabeth swallowed hard and suggested, "All right, let's focus. The jumper has exterior lighting, right?"
"Yeah," John said.
The lights came on. All three of them caught their breaths.
They were in Atlantis. A sleeping Atlantis, without any sign of the expedition in the gate room. Elizabeth recognized the dust covers they'd swept off consoles when they first arrived.
"Where is everybody?" John murmured. His face had the dangerously set expression Elizabeth had only glimpsed a few times; notably, when he shot Acastus Kolya. Narrowed, dark eyes settled on Rodney.
Rodney just shook his head. "What? I have no idea. This is – this is – I don't know, Colonel. I do not know." He turned his eyes back to the front port.
John surveyed the darkened, empty gate room again. His hands moved over the jumper's controls, smooth and sure again, and it settled soundless to the floor. "Time to find out what's going on here," he said. He rose and settled the P90 lower on its sling, closer to his hand.
"I don't think you should go out there alone," Elizabeth said.
"And I don't think you or McKay are in any shape to come with me," John replied. His gaze moved over Rodney, who still looked blindly out the front port.
"I don't like it."
John's eyebrows went up, telegraphing wordless incredulity.
"Uh huh."
"Then be careful," Elizabeth insisted. She followed him into the rear compartment.
"It's Atlantis," he said. He grinned at her. "What's going to happen?"
It was supposed to be that cocky grin, she knew, the one that had at times either infuriated or shored her up, but it was a terrible failure and it faded from his features fast. John was as rocked as she was, as Rodney was, and forcing himself forward anyway.
"Exactly," Elizabeth snapped. Because they both knew Atlantis had never been safe and certainly didn't appear to be now.
"Well, we can't stay in the jumper forever."
Elizabeth folded her arms. She couldn't stop him without marshaling better arguments and right now, she didn't have any, apart from the feeling of wrong, wrong, wrong that had settled in her stomach. John rummaged in an overhead compartment and pulled down a heavy case. He opened it and drew out a pistol. Took out the clip, checked the action, narrow fingers moving over it expertly. He loaded the clip again, checked the safety again, and offered it to her, grip first.
"John – "
"Just in case."
Reluctantly, she accepted the handgun, surprised by its weight as always, surprised that it didn't feel colder. She'd been a gun control supporter all her life. Just the feel of the Beretta made her ill at ease.
He nodded back toward Rodney, who had dropped his face into his hands again, and had begun to shake.
"He's in shock."
"I know."
He wiped at his face, just a thoughtless movement, but it betrayed for an instant all the fractures he kept hidden. "Just stay with him," he said quietly. "I won't go far."
"Okay."
John looked at her for another long moment, "Hey, no worries," and walked toward the back of the jumper. He switched the P90's targeting light on and raised it into ready position. The ramp dropped open with a clank that echoed.
Elizabeth retreated to the cabin of the jumper. She set the pistol in the pilot's seat, then set her hand on Rodney's broad shoulder, needing the contact with something human and alive as much as Rodney needed whatever comfort she could provide.
Outside, John quartered the gate room, searching for any threats, then started up the stairs.
Elizabeth caught her breath.
The step lit. It lit, and each one after it, as John walked up. It wasn't just the steps. Lights everywhere were coming up, blazing into life, a hundred times brighter than the first time they'd set foot in Atlantis.
"My God," she whispered.
Rodney looked up, blinked dazedly and said:
"It knows him."
Home.
John paused at the first landing and turned in a slow circle. He raised his eyes to the window that dominated the stairs, the stained glass still dark, and pulled in a breath at the vista beyond.
Lights sparked to life in the towers and spires of the city, their brilliance shining off the shield domed above the city. Beyond the shield, shining like night's black mirror, was the deep.
They were underwater again.
He stared up, caught by the same wonder he'd felt the first time, amazed, feeling like he'd finally found his place when he'd been lost all his life. The rightness of it hummed through his veins and soothed his worries and suspicions. He thought he could almost hear the city whispering welcome, welcome.
The P90 dangled from its strap, half-forgotten.
The lights at one of the transporters brightened, calling to him, and he started toward the doors.
"John?"
The crackling transmission through his radio ear piece drew him up. He shook his head. He switched on his transmitter.
"I'm here."
"Are you all right?"
"Yeah," he said softly. He could still feel the humming rightness inside, lulling and promising, smoothing the edges of his worry and anger. Telling him he belonged here; he'd come home again. "Yeah, I'm good."
"Have you found anything?"
"Not yet. Looks like no one's home."
"See if you can access the control consoles," Rodney said.
"No laptop or translators here," John replied.
He loped up the second flight of stairs to the control room level anyway and swept a dust sheet off the main console.
"Play dumb some other time, Colonel," Rodney snapped. He almost sounded normal, but not. Still in shock, John knew, just like he was. "You've picked up more Ancient than anyone besides the linguists. You're looking for numbers anyway. The city has an internal dating system. It will indicate how long it has been powered down. There will be a log. It should offer some explanation of what has happened."
John brushed his hand over the console and it lit. The main screen behind him activated and swirled with color that resolved into numbers. He stared at them until something clicked behind his eyes and they made sense. He read them again to be sure. Such a long, lonely time in the dark, sleeping and waiting, but he'd finally come and there was life again.
He unsnapped the P90 and set it down. He needed both hands to work the console, shape the chords, so that the hum became music as he read the main city operations log.
"Sheppard? Sheppard!"
"What!?" he snapped, jolted by Rodney's shout in his ear.
"You've been quiet for twenty minutes, John," Elizabeth said.
He shook his head. It couldn't have been that long. He checked his watch. It had been.
"Yeah. Sorry. McKay? I think you need to get up here and look at this."
"What is it?"
"According to what I'm reading, the city's been shut down and underwater for about nine hundred sixty-three years."
"What? That's not possible. We left yester – " Rodney's voice had been rising toward hysteria, but it cut off. That meant he'd thought of something important enough to derail his usual doom and panic response. He came back on the radio sounding detached and strangely calm. "I'm coming up there."
"Good idea."
John picked up the P90, clipping it back onto the carry sling. He paused, frowning. What had possessed him to put it down in a potentially hostile situation? Nothing except his instinct that he was in no danger. Stupid. No use taking chances. He tapped his radio transmitter again.
"Elizabeth, you'd better stay with the jumper."
"And do what, John? Twiddle my thumbs? I'm coming with Rodney. I can at least translate."
He opened his mouth to protest and stopped. He didn't mind Rodney joining him, but he didn't want Elizabeth in the control room. It felt wrong. It made no sense.
"Okey-dokey," he said with forced casualness.
In the back of his head, he still felt it, the city singing, welcome, welcome, welcome.
Home.
He looked at the data again. Incredible. He'd figured it out in the jumper, before he and Elizabeth had joined Sheppard in the control room, but he'd wanted to confirm it. It hadn't changed. Wasn't going to change, but he was still looking at the screen, because as long as he did that, he didn't have to look at Sheppard or Elizabeth. He wasn't sure he could survive what he'd see on their faces. Not once he told them.
It wasn't his own words that kept beating in his head. It was Sheppard's: You didn't. You didn't. You didn't. Tell me you didn't. Faster and faster, tell me you didn't, louder and louder, tell me you didn't, like a roller coaster ride to hell. Tell me, his heart raced, tell me, and his lungs couldn't pull in any air, you didn't, his palms were sweating, tell, but his skin was too cold, me, too tight, and his stomach dropped and twisted violently: you didn't, didn'tdidn'tdidn't. He was going to be sick right here in the control room if he didn't, didn'tdidn'tdidn't, stop it. He braced his hand against the edge of the console and concentrated on pulling in air that tasted of ozone and salt. Breathe, he told himself, don't think. The lighted crystals blurred and juddered through his watering eyes.
"Rodney?" Elizabeth managed to inject concern and a question both in just his name.
He waited but Sheppard didn't ask anything. Sheppard probably didn't care if he was all right, because Sheppard had figured it out. Oh God. No, if Sheppard had figured it out, he would have done something, said something. Rodney let his head drop forward.
Elizabeth said his name again, sharper. He jerked upright. His fingers left dark, sweaty marks on the console.
"What? What?"
You didn't. Tell me you didn't.
"Do you know what's happened?"
He forced himself to turn and look at her. He opened his mouth, but it was too dry to speak. He could barely swallow. He didn't know how he was going to explain. He tried again.
"I – yes. I know." It felt like his entire face was being dragged down. He wondered if he wasn't having a stroke. That would be… He would deserve it.
Tell me you didn't.
"I – " He stopped and stared at Sheppard.
"Rodney?" Elizabeth prompted.
"Colonel?" he said quietly. Miserably.
Elizabeth turned and looked at Sheppard.
Sheppard wasn't even listening to them. He was leaning his hip against another console halfway across the control room, his head tipped to the side. He'd set his P90 down. His eyes were unfocused, half-closed.
Elizabeth crossed the room and touched his arm.
Sheppard's attention snapped back to them; he tensed and looked at them both warily. His hand moved to the P90. Rodney thought he'd infinitely preferred Sheppard's abstraction to this sharp-eyed attention. He wished he could look away.
"Still with us, Colonel?"
Like a rat in a cage, running and running on a wheel and going nowhere, play the role, pretend to be all right, sarcasm is always good, don't let them see you're not certain. Batter and insult and push, push, push, but don't think anymore about – you didn't, you didn't – because God, oh, God you did. Just don't think about it, concentrate on Sheppard, on Elizabeth, on now, and not the wild, wheezing panic of knowing. Because Elizabeth and Sheppard don't know yet, and you have to keep them at a distance, because when they do, they'll turn on you.
Sheppard's eyebrows rose. "Looks like it." He even sounded tired. Rodney could see him pulling himself back into the present from wherever his mind had strayed, drawing on energy that wasn't really there.
This had to be happening to someone else, not to Rodney McKay. This wasn't him, standing in the darkened control room of Atlantis of the past, and he could handle it if he just kept it like that. Far away, beyond thick, muffling glass walls and his old friend disdain. Weren't they stupid for not figuring it all out themselves? If only they never would ...
"You want to explain, McKay?"
"We're nine thousand years or so in our past."
Blurt it out and his voice was quavering. Don't think, just tell them. Concentrate on the little, tiny details. On the loose thread in the stitching of Sheppard's T-shirt collar, on the glint of Elizabeth's necklace – she always wore that, wonder who gave it to her? – on the blood pounding in his temples, a thump thump thump like the drum beat from the Dead March, Danny Deever. Oh God. Look at Sheppard, look at Elizabeth.
"I don't understand," Elizabeth said. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. "How could this happen?"
Don't look, look away, and it won't be real just yet. Not yet. Not until you've confessed all of what it means.
Sheppard noticed Elizabeth shivering, too. He shrugged off his tac vest, stripped off his jacket and handed it to Elizabeth. "Here."
Rodney winced. It wouldn't have occurred to him to give Elizabeth his jacket. He might have tried to readjust the environmental controls or complained for both of them, but the simple gentlemanly gesture always escaped him. He couldn't offer Sheppard his jacket either, though Sheppard was now in that thin black shirt he favored and Rodney knew from off-planet missions that Sheppard was miserable in the cold. He never complained, but Rodney had noticed.
"Thank you, John," Elizabeth said.
Sheppard nodded, looking distracted again. It softened the intent lines of his face, but it frightened Rodney. Sheppard's focus didn't normally drift. Rodney's didn't, either, but his mind kept skittering off on tangents.
The hum of the city, that Rodney had felt since he'd stepped out of the jumper, grew deeper. The ozone scent grew sharper. A warm draft of air swirled through the chilled control room. The city breathed. On the Daedalus, always aware of the thin skin between their lives and vacuum, Rodney had first understood that, listening to the fans and the re-circulators in the dark of his cramped cabin bed. Atlantis breathed, pushing air through ventilation shafts and filters, warming and cooling, balancing the atmosphere perfectly for them. Warming it because Sheppard was cold, he thought, and wondered if Sheppard even knew how closely they were entwined.
"So if we moseyed down to the stasis room, we'd find Elizabeth in one of those pods?"
"Right next to the DeLorean," Rodney snapped, but it lacked his usual venom. He scrubbed at his face. His heart was still racing out of control. He was going to lose this, too, the comfortable mockery, the way Sheppard deliberately set up the opportunities for a good insult and enjoyed the results. But he had to go on. "Of course not. We've created, albeit inadvertently, a third timeline, exactly as Elizabeth created a second one – ours – by extending the lifespan of the ZPMs and persuading the Ancients to set up a failsafe program to raise the city."
Sheppard frowned.
"We're using power right now, aren't we?"
"Yes."
"No failsafe, no one to maintain the ZPMs, the city's going to be in worse shape than when the first timeline's expedition arrived," Elizabeth said, voice distant as though marveling at a picture. For a brief moment, Rodney hated her for understanding what so many others wouldn't have grasped.
"We've doomed ourselves – ourselves in this future – this timeline's versions of us," Rodney added. "Just by being here. Now."
Elizabeth paled further. She knew, even if she didn't know the full extent. "What exactly happened?" she asked and he could see her fighting for control. The question was rhetorical. It held the terrible gentleness that asked him to admit what he'd done.
"But how did we… what happened?" she asked again.
Rodney straightened his back. He squared his shoulders and laced his fingers together behind his back, where Sheppard and Elizabeth wouldn't see.
"According the SGC's records, a wormhole intersecting with a solar flare resulted in SG-1 returning to the stargate in 1969. Furthermore, in an attempt to return to our own time, SG-1 dialed home in coincidence with another solar flare only to arrive ten years into their future. They were able to return, obviously, but that isn't the point."
"Maybe you could get to the point," Sheppard said. "Sometime soon."
"Right. Right. When we – when I – lost control of Arcturus, it, well, it ripped a hole in our universe. It started a chain reaction that began expanding and at the same time pulling in matter. Including solar plasma from the Dorandan primary," Rodney explained.
Elizabeth looked at him blankly; Rodney couldn't guess if she grasped what he'd said or not. Sheppard's face showed he did understand.
"I believe when we dialed the gate, the wormhole was destabilized in a manner similar to what SG-1 experienced, on a vastly greater scale, resulting in our temporal dislocation."
Rodney licked his lips and waited.
"Then we could just as easily been tossed forward ten thousand years?" Elizabeth asked.
"Nine thousand thirty-seven," Sheppard said.
"And no," Rodney added.
Sheppard glared at him.
Elizabeth looked back and forth between them. "Why?"
Rodney raised his chin and answered. "Domino effect."
"There's no there then, in the future," Sheppard said. His hazel eyes never left Rodney. "There's no universe. That hole just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and smaller and smaller, until everything is gone, and there is no universe. Right, Rodney?" He drawled out Rodney's name with the same disdain that imbued his voice whenever he mentioned Kolya. It cut deep, just the way Rodney had known it would.
The panic went away. There was nothing left to panic over, he knew. All gone. All that was left was a scream boiling up from his soul, the litany of his personal blasphemy, an entreaty to a deity he never believed in. Oh God, oh God, but if such a God existed, that let one man destroy everything in creation, then there could never be mercy from that quarter.
"Right," he replied. His voice cracked. "I destroyed our universe."
"No one destroys the universe, Rodney," Elizabeth said, very reasonably.
"McKay does."
"You can't be serious." Elizabeth looked around the control room. "That isn't possible."
"It's possible," Rodney said.
"And you knew?"
He watched Elizabeth's hands curl into fists. Her mouth thinned furiously. Her voice would begin rising next, until it cut through the cloudy numbness Rodney had been holding around his thoughts. It would cut through and he would hear the hate and see the look in Sheppard's eyes and everything he was would just bleed out onto the floor.
Somehow, he answered anyway, keeping his voice flat and nearly normal. He twisted his fingers against each other, feeling bones threaten to crack inside his hands. "That the possibility – the infinitely small possibility – existed? Yes."
"Are you insane? How could you?" Elizabeth shouted. "What have you done?"
"The chance of what happened happening was so statistically improbable as to be nonexistent."
"But it existed!"
"Of course, it existed," Rodney said. "Elizabeth, it was in the briefing."
"Hidden inside a bunch of numbers you knew she wouldn't read," Sheppard said.
"Yes," he admitted.
"My God," Elizabeth said, shaking her head, "Everyone… everything." She pressed her palm over her mouth, visibly, obviously, fighting nausea. She swayed and pressed her eyes shut, but then she seemed to get her bearings again, collect her emotions and put them away. Watching her grapple for control like that was frightening, because Elizabeth never lost control. He had always admired that. He still did, right then envying her ability to lock everything down, because he wanted to do that, too.
"If we hadn't been knocked into the past, we'd be in Atlantis, waiting for the end," Rodney stated. "Or gone already."
When she spoke again, her face was a façade of forced calm and determination. "How do we fix it?"
He looked Elizabeth helplessly. "We don't. We can't."
"That's not good enough, Rodney. We have to do something." When he didn't say anything, Elizabeth started toward him. Rodney waited where he was.
"Elizabeth," Sheppard said, his voice tight and angry. "Stop."
"No," she snapped and her hand came up, slapping Rodney's face with all her strength. The inside of his cheek caught against a tooth and he tasted blood.
"Elizabeth," Sheppard said again. He came across the room with deceptive speed and caught her arm before she could hit Rodney again.
"Let her," Rodney blurted.
Sheppard gave him a burning glance.
"Let go, John," Elizabeth said.
He released her wrist and stepped back. "Just… stop."
Elizabeth turned away from them both.
"Elizabeth – "
Sheppard touched her shoulder tentatively, apparently as aware of the fractures in Elizabeth's usually so strong façade as Rodney was, but Elizabeth shrugged him away. "Don't touch me."
Rodney stared at the main display screen, probing the cut in his mouth with his tongue, focusing on the pain, bright and small and completely his.
Sheppard turned and looked at him. Rodney could see him shutting down, shutting everything and everyone out. He hadn't realized before, that he'd always been inside the walls Sheppard kept up around himself. Before.
Sheppard didn't say anything.
Rodney looked back at him, unblinking, but didn't let himself see more than a blur of pallor and darkness, colors bleeding into each other. He didn't let himself see the wounds behind Sheppard's eyes, because he was already breaking. His eyes began to burn, but he didn't close them until he heard Sheppard walk away.
Then there were just the sounds of Elizabeth breathing, and the city humming against his nerves, until Elizabeth went away, too. He glimpsed her face as she walked by him, despite himself, and it was set, hard and unforgiving as chiseled marble.
He didn't need them there. He could still hear them.
What have you done?
Over and over.
Tell me you didn't.
He didn't remember leaving the control room, but he stumbled to a stop on the stairs when his knees gave in to the quaking shudders running through his body. He sank down and stared at nothing. Nothing.
"Oh God."
She found him on the gate room steps, staring at the jumper still sitting in front of the ring, after she'd spent hours inside the jumper, trying to formulate some kind of plan.
She handed him a Powerbar from the jumper's emergency supplies and brusquely ordered him to eat it. He obeyed.
Rodney's eyes were almost dead, but the blue held a manic gleam, as though he wanted to do nothing more than laugh and laugh until it killed him. She didn't blame him and yet she did. She wanted to tell him to behave like a normal person, but couldn't find a single thing a normal person would have done under the circumstances. She hated him and worried at the same time. They had destroyed the universe. There was no rational way to handle that.
She remembered the look on his face: the horrified disbelief, the panic so deep that it had left him frozen and nearly wordless. There had been only that small, horror-struck: "Oh, God." The look on his face in the jumper, not in the control room when he told her and John – though that had been bad enough.
She tapped the radio transmitter on and called John. He didn't answer but the nearest transporter opened shortly and he appeared. He didn't speak and he didn't look at Rodney.
Elizabeth told them she thought they should use the same living quarters they'd occupied before. Rodney nodded. John shrugged. She couldn't think of anything else to say and stared at them both. After a while, John straightened up and boarded the jumper. He emptied all their supplies onto the floor and left them there. The ceiling above the gate room opened and the jumper rose into the bay, leaving the space before the gate bare except for that pitiful pile of gear and food.
Elizabeth pretended to sleep, supine on her narrow bed, hands folded over her breastbone, laid out like a saint on a tomb, except her eyes were wide open. She had locked her door open, unable to bear the crypt-like darkness and silence of her room without the promise of escape. Buried under the sea, there wasn't even the lap of the waves to lull her, just the oppressive thrum of the shield. She imagined it failing, all of Atlantis drowning, the cold wash of water filling her lungs. She thought she was already drowning, helpless and adrift from her own time and place.
Feeling sorry for herself was what she was doing, she knew, but she couldn't summon the will to push away the fancies and the self-pity yet.
A wordless scream knifed through the silence and catapulted her upright.
The screaming brought Elizabeth to her feet and out the door, the sound rising and falling and echoing up and down the hollow corridors. She ran barefoot down the hall and saw John, pale and shirtless, disappear through the dim doorway into Rodney's room. She waited for the sound of his voice, but there was just that keening, awful sound from Rodney, that made her want to clap her hands over her ears.
She walked into the room, ready to do something, anything to make those screams stop, wondering why John wasn't saying anything. Three steps in, she stopped, feeling like an intruder. She watched him catch Rodney's wrists in his hands as Rodney clawed at something only he saw, holding them and pulling Rodney up against him, rocking wordlessly, until the keening just stopped, abruptly as it had begun.
It took a deep breath and curling her hands into fists, digging her nails into her palms, to center herself, but she squared her shoulders and readied herself to speak. Rodney was still her responsibility. So was John. She couldn't indulge in tears. Still, any words caught in her throat.
John looked up and saw her, but said nothing. Elizabeth's feet were cold and she still felt the city looming, huge and heavy, making her nerves crawl. John's eyes were dark hollows and unreadable. She waited for him to nod, to speak, to gesture for her to join them, but he only stared until Elizabeth couldn't bear it.
"Is – "
Rodney reacted, flinching when she spoke. She would have touched his back, just lightly, as she'd done more than once before, but the memory of the slap lingered too strongly between them, in the way John angled himself into the space between them. Feeling painfully helpless, she watched as John pulled Rodney closer, warned away by his silent head shake.
She waited until Rodney sank into a miserable half-doze and retreated into the hall with John.
When she would have spoken to him, he held up his hand between them, and she gave up for the moment. Rodney might accept comfort. John never had or would. She would try to talk to him tomorrow.
That first day, she felt paralyzed. Couldn't do anything but move mechanically and think, play everything over and over in her mind while the looming darkness of Atlantis and the knowledge of thousands of feet of water above her made her skin crawl.
The universe, everything, all the planets, all the stars, billions of lives – lost. So many cultures – gone.
Her family – gone. Her parents, her brother, her aunt Alison and her cousin Marguerite. Simon. Her house and the old rocking chair she had inherited from her grandmother. Her dog, Sedge.
Sunset over the mountains and fog in the valleys. Christmas. Chinese food. Flowers. Bach. Einstein. Kant. Michelangelo. Nothing left but what was in her own memory.
The Taj Mahal where Simon had first told her he loved her. The sinking sun had set the beautiful building and the lake before it on golden fire. She had laughed at his sentimentality, while Simon chided her for being unable to relax and be romantic instead of a hard-nosed diplomat, but he had laughed, too. They had kissed, still laughing. In memory, she could almost feel the humidity and relive the scent of flowers that had later filled their hotel room.
She had let him tell her he loved her, but she had never told him what he wanted to hear. Couldn't tell him now, because he had moved on. No more moving on now, and she mourned every lost opportunity, every wasted moment of her past.
Sorrow morphed into questions morphed into horror and disgust over what Rodney had done. What she hadn't stopped him from doing. But one look at him showed her that he didn't need disdain and resentment. Rodney knew what he'd done and what it had cost. Knew it better than anyone else ever would, including herself and John.
The worst knowledge was that of culpability. It was his fault – simple and complicated as that – his hand that had tipped the first stone in the chain. Her hand that hadn't stopped his. The truth was undeniable: the one not stopping the events was just as guilty as the one starting them. Maybe even more so because he had seen it coming. Every single wiped out existence was on their conscience.
If she sometimes believed she could hear the screams of her people on Atlantis as the darkness took them, it had to be a thousand times worse for Rodney. She wondered why he hadn't gone mad yet. She watched him carefully for the signs, seeing only some she recognized from Marguerite's breakdown in college. Marguerite had suffered from schizophrenia though, while Rodney was suffering from reality.
She wasn't ready to feel pity for him, because she had none for herself. Pity might come later, maybe one day even the need to comfort him and reach out and be reached out for, but not yet.
They all deserved to live with what they had done.
She was being cruel, she knew it, and it pained her. Elizabeth had been many things in her life: cold, calculating, stubborn, level-headed, dismissive – but never cruel. She didn't want to start now that her integrity was the only thing she had left.
She couldn't handle this like John and Rodney were – or rather, weren't. She wasn't going to give up. At least, one of them had to be strong if they didn't plan on dying here.
She recognized the signs of depression developing in John as well as Rodney as the days passed. Self-imposed isolation, a lack of appetite or care for appearance. Silence. He showered, but he hadn't shaved since their arrival. Rodney didn't do that much and she'd begun to think she'd have to make him clean up the way she made him eat. He couldn't be bothered to even brush his teeth and his breath smelled sick.
Elizabeth understood that reaction, even when all she could think of was getting clean. She stood under the shower sometimes for close to an hour, scrubbing at her skin like Lady MacBeth, until it was red and raw. It never made her feel clean, never washed away anything. She couldn't wash away the memories plaguing her. She tried, knowing it wouldn't work, hiding in the shower, in the comfort of warm water and steam and illusory safety. She wished she could just close her eyes and cry, but the tears wouldn't come. All her tears were gone, dried up by the desert inside.
There was too much in Atlantis that reminded her of every single mistake she had ever made. If she didn't find a way to handle the memories, they would eat her alive, slow and from the inside, send her down the same path Marguerite had gone: tortured by delusions until she couldn't stand it anymore and tried to kill herself. Her family had never spoken about it, but Elizabeth remembered watching her cousin change from a lively and beautiful young woman into a thin shell of who she used to be, tortured by paranoia, flinching whenever someone touched her or spoke to her. Marguerite had been haunted by the voices only she heard.
Marguerite had been so smart, she'd been aware of her own degeneration, but helpless to fight it. She couldn't shut the voices up, couldn't shut them out, even knowing they weren't real – until they became as real to her as the reality everyone else experienced. She'd seen Marguerite flinch and listen to what only she heard. Now she had to watch Rodney cringe, his eyes darting to and away from something Elizabeth couldn't see.
She could guess, though, with Rodney. She had no clue to John's demons. Whatever form they took, he kept to himself, pulling away from her and Rodney. That he was haunted too, she had no doubt.
She started searching the city for food supplies the next night, while John sat silently with Rodney, after the screaming.
The next night and the next night were horrifying repeats, Rodney's screams an eerie counterpoint to his utter silence during the day. John sprinted breathless and half-panicked to Rodney's room each night, almost grateful to be released from his own wide awake nightmares.
Elizabeth hung back outside his door, looking in, then left. It was selfish, but John was glad she wasn't interfering. He'd made it clear she wasn't welcome, without admitting he needed the comfort of holding on to Rodney, too, no matter how he acted during the arbitrary hours of their 'days'. The light never changed and it was all too easy to lose track; day and night were conventions supported by their watches and nothing more.
He'd never felt this isolated, this lost, and holding onto Rodney felt better than it had any right to under any circumstances. The constant, low grade tingle at the back of his mind kept him distracted and uneasy all the time. It felt too good, too natural, and set his instincts, at war with each other. Everything in him responded to the city and wanted to trust it, while his mind insisted just feeling like that meant something was wrong. He couldn't rest by himself. It pricked at him, urging him to do something, but he didn't know what. It sent him wandering through Atlantis during the interminable hours.
He had no explanation for his need to keep Elizabeth at bay. It wasn't anything she'd done. He was reacting to nothing. It was sleep deprivation – he was probably getting less than Rodney, lying awake, waiting for the screaming to begin. He wished he could just lie down next to Rodney, just be within reach of another living person, but there was no excuse. Atlantis had echoed hollowly at times with over two hundred personnel inhabiting her, with just two of them there was so much space they needn't ever encounter each other again.
It felt like they were washed up here. Human flotsam, with no purpose or reason for their survival and no will to find one.
Elizabeth was waiting in the corridor on the third night, when John finally walked out of Rodney's room. She'd been there the previous night, too, ready to take John's place if he couldn't help Rodney. It irritated him. He knew she'd try to talk to Rodney, make him talk, while John couldn't. He wasn't ready to talk about anything himself.
"Is he okay?" she asked.
"Not by any definition."
"Are you?"
He shrugged. It was a stupid question. She knew he wasn't. Neither was she. If this hadn't messed her up, then she was insane. He didn't say any of that. He lied without bothering to sound truthful.
"I'm fine."
She nodded.
"Of course you are."
John gave her a wary look. She hadn't sounded sarcastic, but she couldn't really believe that, could she? She was just willing to go along with his pretense for now. He didn't look forward to when she stopped, when she started pushing for him to start thinking and doing again. She was going to pull rank and he was going to blow up.
"We have to take care of each other now."
"Sure," he drawled.
Because he'd done such a good job taking care of his people up to now. He missed Teyla and Ronon with a physical ache, the way an amputee must miss a limb. With them, with Rodney, the team had felt invincible, a whole, and without them what did he have to offer? He couldn't help himself, so how could he help anyone else?
She walked away, carrying a flashlight and her PDA, and he didn't care enough to ask where she was going. He watched her back recede until she turned a corner, then went back into Rodney's room.
They were there all of the time – flashes, pictures, memories, ghosts – torture.
Rodney tried to let the steady thrum of Atlantis become his heartbeat, his thought-stream, his breath, but failed miserably, every time.
They were everywhere, everywhere he looked: his ghosts. Some of them saw him, some of them spoke to him, raged and screamed and wept soundlessly. Some of them were oblivious; they didn't know what he'd done. None of them ever heard him. They were dead. He knew they were dead; he'd killed them.
He wanted to run, to scream, to slam his head against the nearest wall until his brain shut down, but instead, he forced himself to lie or sit still, to stare and endure the images his mind dragged up.
Familiar faces, strangers' faces he'd seen even once, people he'd never known, all jumbled together, enemies, lovers, the people who had become his family, he saw them one after the other. His penance was to see them everywhere.
The ones who might have known it was coming, the ones who never knew why, they were all on his conscience.
Miko bent over a journal in the mess hall. Major Lorne perched on the edge of a conference table, listening to a briefing. Simpson at a departmental meeting, rolling her eyes at Kavanagh during one of his interminable monologues. Louise Biro cheerfully telling a Marine she was better with dead bodies as she bandaged him up. Bates, Stackhouse, Corrigan, Collins, Edwards, Caldwell, Novak… Wiped away. Had any of them screamed? He was screaming for them every night, but it would never be enough.
Radek staring at the data-readouts with wide eyes, pushing his glasses up with one finger to study the computer better, seeing but not believing. Clever Radek might have had time to understand and curse the day Rodney McKay was born, to tell the others, before he was just… gone.
Did Earth see it coming, did Atlantis have time to warn them of the end? His imagination conjured more faces to condemn him. Carter, Jackson, O'Neill, Teal'c – they must have wished they'd killed him instead of sending him to Siberia. Svetlana Markova, smoke trickling from her nostrils, dark eyes snapping with Slavic temper, Siler, Harriman, his neighbor, his first math professor, Lam, Mitchell, Paul Davis, the scientists he'd worked with at Groom Lake ... Oh God, all wiped out of existence, never was, never will be, gone into the nothingness, unraveled, erased, undone.
Gone.
Ronon, Teyla, Ford, Carson…
Rodney blinked back tears and stared at the tiled ceiling.
Ronon would have listened silently, shrugged, and walked away. Out of all of them, Ronon would be the least surprised; the Wraith had taught him to expect death every day. No screams of outrage or denial from him.
Teyla wouldn't fall apart. No screams, no tears, just that quiet acceptance that characterized her. Maybe she'd bowed her head and recited one of her people's prayers to the Ancestors, but she would have faced the end eyes open wide. Rodney saw her haloed in the light pouring through Atlantis' stained windows from the dying sun. Haloed in red fire, brief brightness, then…
Gone.
Gone into nothingness. Non-existence, never existence.
He pictured Ford, lost somewhere they'd never reached, looking up to the sky through that darkened eye, from his darkened soul, without comprehension, alone, then no more.
Carson… Carson wouldn't have understood what was happening until it was too late, and Rodney felt glad for him, for that, for the other man's naiveté. It was a small consolation that Carson wouldn't have grasped the enormity, that he had died quickly, never understood that everything, everything he had ever thought about his life and its point and his future would be gone, too.
Gone. No longer. No future, no past. Gone.
Jeannie.
Rodney tried to suppress the picture of Earth, caught as the sun flared unimaginably brighter for an instant, seared the solar system, stripped planets to atoms in its last agony. He held his eyes open and told himself that would be better. Better than the long slow heat death of the universe, when the stars all consumed their fuel and fell into themselves, when planets grew cold and dark and dead. Better to burn than to smolder, to molder, to rot… my love hath no decay, even to dust, there were no worms to squirm their way in and out, no corpse nor maggots to feast. No flies; the buzz in his brain was insanity, laughing because he'd cured the common cold and cancer and the Wraith, the Goa'uld, the Ori, none of them were any threat now. Laughing, but it sounded like screaming. Screaming with laughter, he'd heard that somewhere, some time, some when…
Better, much better, to never see it coming. But no, no, that was a rationalization.
The end was too much for anyone to grasp, but he did; Rodney could see it all and his hand that tipped the domino, the cascade of events.
Gone. Jeannie.
What was left was silence. Silence and knowledge. All his ghosts, his accusers, all around him.
He had always wondered how it would feel to know too much. Whether it would be an elation, like flying blind but reaching out with more senses than you had before, understanding that there were no boundaries, that everything was connected and beautiful.
He knew too much now, and it was nothing like he had expected it to be. The knowledge was eating him up from inside, slowly gnawing at his mind, stripping away layer after layer until everything was raw and open and unable to resist the loop in his head, the nightmares, the horrors.
Teyla next to his bed, kissing him goodnight with half of her face missing, swirling into chaos and nothingness.
A Wraith, caressing him, trying to take his life-force but flinching back as though stung when it tried to feed. They couldn't feed off the destroyer. Even the Wraith abhorred him.
Jeannie, singing him a lullaby, her voice echoing in a vastness that couldn't produce an echo and yet it did, louder and louder, the familiar song twisting into a cacophony of screams of outrage and fear from billions of beings in the universe, until he woke and the screams tore free.
He couldn't breathe, couldn't stop his heart, but he was gasping, forcing his lungs to work even though he didn't know why, his body fighting and clawing for survival while his mind wanted nothing but to shut down, but he couldn't run away and he didn't deserve to die this easily and he couldn't, couldn't, couldn't. Behind the magnitude of what had happened, he was still hanging on to his life, his own, worthless, murderous, genocidal life. He wasn't strong enough to end it.
He wasn't in the nothingness that had taken the universe he destroyed and he felt a wild exhilaration about that, that he was still alive. Knowing that, despite everything that had happened, he was glad to be here with Elizabeth and Sheppard and that he hadn't died. It sickened him so much that his hand had been on the Beretta more than once – why hadn't they taken it away from him, Elizabeth and Sheppard, maybe they knew, maybe they wanted him to use it – but it had always trembled, never even released the safety. He hated himself, but not enough, and that made the loathing all the deeper, but still not effective enough.
John's idea of taking care of each other seemed to be keeping his radio headset on, though never answering it, and coming back to the same room at night. Elizabeth wasn't sure if he even ate every day; she had to remind Rodney, which was deeply frightening. Even so, the MREs from the jumper disappeared at an alarming rate.
It looked like John had given up too, when Rodney had imploded. Nothing else explained the way he walked the city alone, avoiding Rodney and her. She'd thought they had a better relationship than that. She'd been wrong. She couldn't read John and that chilled her.
So did his silence. He barely spoke to her and didn't speak to Rodney at all during the days.
Rodney sat and stared into an emptiness Elizabeth was terrified of seeing. She sat with him and talked at him, napped uneasily when she couldn't fight off sleep, because otherwise she was alone herself. She was profoundly afraid of what Rodney might do if she left him to his own devices. It was too easy to imagine finding him dead and her own screams ringing through the deserted city, unheard. Still, she resisted the urge to ask John to stay with them during the day, and confined her own explorations of the city to the nights.
They never discussed it, but after the first night, they fell into a routine. One of them watched Rodney all the time.
Elizabeth wanted to shake John, too, yell at him that he wasn't suffering alone, that Rodney wasn't the only one shattered and she needed someone, too, but she couldn't.
One look at Rodney told her he needed John far more than she did, stilled every urge she had to ask for comfort for herself. And even if it had been different, she wouldn't know how to ask for it in the first place. Rodney was traumatized and John was fractured, barely holding himself together by retreating from almost all contact. John's eyes weren't as empty as Rodney's, but they were dulled and cloudy as ice. John was frozen almost to the bone; cold, so cold, like the deep emptiness of space. He had nothing left beyond what he gave Rodney, nothing to offer her.
When she looked into the mirror in her room – her old, new, old room – she wondered if they saw the same emptiness in her eyes when they looked at her.
Ironically, the nights were easier to bear than the long, pointless days. She kept her door open to hear Rodney and John, to wait for the already familiar sound of Rodney, ripped from sleep by his nightmares. John would bolt past her room to Rodney's and she would follow. It was the same each time: Rodney clinging to John – eyes squeezed shut, shivering, sweating – in an embrace tight enough to bruise. At least, at night, John offered some comfort.
He wouldn't speak to Rodney, but he held on through the worst nightmares, and stayed until Rodney fell back asleep. The sweep of his hand down Rodney's back, the slow rock she doubted John was even aware of, spoke of a connection that still endured, despite everything.
Once she knew they were together, she would head out, continuing her futile search.
Desolation seemed to feed on itself. Desolation and desperation breeding frustration that boiled in a sick ball in her stomach, growing and growing with every day that passed, because she could do nothing. For an entire week, the city thwarted Elizabeth, turned her away, closed itself off from her. The frustration twisted into a simmering anger that turned toward the one the city did welcome. Damn him, anyway. John had no understanding of what it meant to not have the gene. Elizabeth hated him – it – hated it, hated the lack in herself.
She didn't hate John. No. But she was so very angry with him and Atlantis.
She was sick of John's damned sulking. The MREs in the jumper emergency kit were running out. When she tried to access the city mainframe to find out if there were any supplies still in existence, it refused her access. When she tried to use a transporter, it wouldn't work. She'd been so angry she'd tried dialing the gate. The entire control room had gone dead on her.
The gate had remained empty.
She'd wanted to shriek at the city and would have thrown something at the windows, if she'd had anything to throw. She'd ended up sitting on the steps, holding clenched fists against her temples and counting her breaths just to calm down. She'd missed Peter Grodin so badly in that moment, his calm, his dedication, his blessed sanity. Edwards was a good man, but he'd never taken Peter's place with her. The reminder took her breath away all over again.
When she could think again, she decided John had had enough time.
She waited in the hall outside Rodney's room, while John soothed Rodney through another bout of night terrors, until Rodney's breathing had settled into the steadiness of sleep and John slipped away. He was looking at the floor as he walked out and stopped when he saw her. She couldn't see him well enough to read his expression, but his body stiffened, which told her enough.
"John," she said. "We need to talk."
His eyes narrowed and he turned away. Dim green light slipped over the angles and hollows of his face. He'd lost weight. All three of them had. She darted forward before he could walk away and grabbed his wrist. He jerked free of her hand so fast she stumbled.
"Damn it, Colonel. You still answer to me – "
"No."
"What?"
He turned slowly and looked at her. Elizabeth took a step back. John was angry, reined in, always reined in, but burning with it, so it seemed to smoke off him.
"I said no. Elizabeth." Her name rolled off his tongue, edged with irony. "There's no Air Force, no SGC, no expedition, and no authority – get it? Just three people who fucked everything up." The words were low, but forceful.
"Three people who are going to starve to death if someone doesn't do something about getting us some supplies!" she shouted, losing her own temper.
He folded his arms.
"Why don't you do something?"
"I can't! I can't fly a jumper, I can't make anything here work!"
"So what the hell can you do, Elizabeth?" John asked silkily. "Talk?" His eyebrow rose. "Talk."
"John – "
"See, you're talking, but I'm not listening."
You never listen, John.
Elizabeth bit back a flood of words. He never listened when it was all she did. It was her job to listen and learn, to discern what people really meant from what they said. She was a negotiator, a diplomat, first, and then a leader. None of those were about just giving orders.
"What's wrong with you?"
Because something was wrong with John; she hadn't seen him this… this out of control before. She knew he had trust issues, but he had a handle on them, usually. This wasn't the time to indulge him, though, or try to heal whatever was damaged inside. She needed him functioning. She needed to shock him back to his old self.
He tipped his head. "Tell me you didn't just ask that."
"Spare me your sarcasm. I can see that you're feeling as bad as I do. But you're a commanding officer, John. You should know how to handle a situation like this. You've done it before, haven't you? Assumed command? Why don't you now that it really matters?
"I don't want the fucking command!"
"You're the one with the ATA gene, John. You're the one who can fly the jumper, use the command chair, right? It would make sense," Elizabeth pointed out, holding her breath, hoping she still knew him well enough to predict his response.
John shook his head. "No!" He ran his hand over his already wild hair and added bitterly, "What command, anyway? The three of us? That's a joke."
She closed her eyes against the pain of that reminder. Pushing down her grief left room for her mind to stray, to contemplate the differences between Atlantis that was and this one. It wouldn't cooperate with her. If Atlantis that was had been like this…
The potential stratification of Atlantis based on who had the ATA gene and who didn't would have become fact, even with the addition of those the gene therapy succeeded on. Given long enough, anyone without the gene would become something less. Second class citizens ... or not citizens at all, not – in the eyes of the Ancients – evolved enough. How long until those with the gene would have begun to think the same way?
But why was this Atlantis so… not hostile, but reluctant and uncooperative? The city had never been so unwelcoming before, and Elizabeth had to wonder if it was a result of being at full power. Could – would it have rejected most of the expedition the way it did her, if it hadn't been in hibernation when they arrived? Had it responded even then to John and obeyed because he did? Was it refusing because he was rebelling against her now?
Why was John suddenly having a problem with her authority now?
"Why are you so angry at me?"
"I'm not just angry at you."
"You said it yourself: I can't do anything. But you can. So do it," she insisted and saw his temper snap. Something in her words had done it. Good. They needed to lance the festering wounds between them. At least, she thought so, but the way John moved into her space, the way his face tightened into a mask of anger, told her she'd miscalculated.
"Because you could have stopped it!" John yelled.
She was instantly taken aback at the fury on his voice. "You're blaming me?"
John's voice dropped in volume, but not intensity. "You insisted on coming to Doranda with us for just that reason. You said. It was really about the power games though, wasn't it? You were afraid you'd lose control of Rodney, lose Arcturus, afraid I'd turn it over to Caldwell and the military. When Zelenka warned us, you knew Rodney wouldn't stop, you knew I would back him, and you let us go through with it because you wanted the power. That's bad enough. But when you knew it was going wrong, you still weren't willing to make the call, because if we'd disobeyed, you would have looked bad."
"You should know exactly how important appearance can be, Colonel," she snapped back. "You wouldn't even have your rank if it weren't for – "
"For you?" John leaned so close she felt his words as warmth against her face. "Don't think that makes me grateful, because all it means is you wanted someone who owed you in command of the military." His voice dropped to a bleak whisper. "Do you know why the brass wanted Caldwell and not me? Because they thought I was sleeping with you and you going over their heads, forcing them to promote me, just confirmed it for them. You're a great negotiator, you know how to talk the talk and play power games, but you're a lousy leader."
Elizabeth flushed red with humiliation and anger.
"And you're an insubordinate bastard that I couldn't trust to take orders unless I was right there!"
"You didn't give the damn order!"
"Like you have such an outstanding history of following my orders in a crunch." It was a low blow and she knew it. She didn't care.
"I said he asked me to trust him," John snapped. "I did. I'm not a genius. Rodney is. And he was part of my team. A team can't function if you don't trust and back up your people. That was my job."
"I backed you up. I even went to Doranda with you."
"After Col. Caldwell goaded you into trying to prove something."
"Stop it!"
Elizabeth and John both jerked around and saw Rodney leaning against the doorway into his room. He looked ghastly in the green light. His eyes were dilated and his voice, raw with screaming and awkward with words unused for too long, rasped and quivered. But he was looking at them, seeing them, and that was more than he'd done in weeks.
"Rodney," she exclaimed and stepped toward him, only to have him shy back.
"Both of you, please. Just stop it," Rodney said. "It was my fault. All my fault."
"Of course," John snapped. "Because it's always about Rodney McKay. Who else destroyed a universe?"
"Believe me, Colonel, I'd be happy to share the blame, but the truth is I used you. I knew exactly what arguments would convince you to back me on the second test. Everything I said to you when I asked you to trust me was calculated."
John stepped back from Elizabeth, angling his body toward Rodney, much of the anger dissolving out of him. What it left wasn't much better, just a weary bitterness that echoed of giving up.
"McKay… "
Rodney's mouth turned down.
"That's done it, hasn't it? Do you see now? What kind of – of friend does that?" He looked down.
"You really think I'm that stupid?" John asked quietly. He looked bleak. "I knew what you were doing then."
Rodney swallowed hard. "You asked me. You asked me what the worst case scenario was, and I made a joke of it."
John stared at him.
"Okay," he said at last. "All your fault." He brushed past Elizabeth. "Sweet dreams," he added as he walked away.
Rodney glanced at Elizabeth and then away. She was shaking.
"Rodney." She tried again. "Rodney, he'll – "
He stepped back and the door closed, leaving her outside in the hall, alone.
She thought of what she should have said, because she'd always been able to handle Rodney, save him from his social gaffs and arrogance, but this time it was too late.
She didn't know what to say to Rodney and she didn't know what to say to John.
She'd always thought she knew how to get through to John; he wasn't a man with a hunger for power, he didn't want her position as leader of the expedition. He kept himself under careful control and presented a smile to the world, and if she could appeal to his almost crippling sense of responsibility, he would come around. It had been clear from his files when she read them and working with him had only confirmed what kind of man he was, while at the same time proving the real John Sheppard was far more private than the appearance he cultivated. She'd fallen for the act though, along with everybody else, at least sometimes, forgotten the intransigent bastard who had torpedoed his career over his principles, who rebelled against any orders. How much control did it take for John to make himself obey when his first instinct was always to balk? She'd forgotten that John demanded as much from his superiors as he did from himself. If he considered that she was blaming only Rodney and not herself… Then he would act just this way.
Carry the weight.
Give the orders; take the blame. Something that was swirling in her head every minute of every day since they arrived here, but he didn't know that: She could have stopped the second test of Arcturus.
They were all three to blame.
Supplies got lower, low enough she had to start rationing and became frightened of what would happen when they ran out. All her searches for food in the sections of the city she could access were fruitless. She thought of the Wraith when her stomach growled and ached. Wondered if they felt the same after waking up from their sleep - always hungry, never properly nourished.
She gave up some of her rations when she had found Rodney in hypoglycemic shock, shivering and sweating on the floor, unable to remember his own name. That had frightened her more than the nightly screams, because in that very moment she was sure he was lost to them; brain damage inevitable. He came around after a hastily prepared glass of sugar water, after which she forced him to eat a whole MRE. Elizabeth swore to herself that she wasn't going to watch that again, helpless. She wasn't going to lose Rodney.
She needed assistance, but she went on her own, on long, futile trips that showed her just how limited her chances were. Transporters didn't work for her and without pre-initialized access to any of the computer terminals, the vastness of the city caused her to lose her way more than once. Corridors remained dark. Doors refused to open or opened on empty rooms almost randomly. The batteries in the flashlight she brought from the jumper's supplies dimmed and eventually died, curtailing her searches further.
Rodney still woke screaming, but now John stayed away. Elizabeth ran to his room and hovered in the doorway. John didn't come and Rodney huddled in his bed, shaking in the dark. She tried to go to him and he snarled at her to get out. He stopped staring into the distance during the days, at least, and started remembering to feed himself. He even showered and brushed his teeth, for which she was grateful. It seemed like she'd traded John's presence for a more aware and functional Rodney.
Her search for supplies in the city proved useless. She found kitchen facilities but they were bare, stripped and empty, no frozen or dried goods anywhere. It made sense, of course, she chided herself. The Ancients had left the city without any expectation of returning for thousands of years, so they had left it clean and empty. It made sense, but it felt deliberate, as if the city refused her, as though there were ghosts around every corner, mocking her efforts. The dark and the cold beyond the city shield seemed to hold something that watched through the walls and windows, that regarded three lost humans with hostile eyes.
Elizabeth stopped sleeping.
Elizabeth came and went, a presence just on the fringes of Rodney's consciousness, urging him to eat sometimes. Other times Sheppard was there, silent but present. Rodney wasn't certain if he was the one leaning on Sheppard or if Sheppard was leaning into him some nights. He didn't suppose it mattered much.
Neither Elizabeth nor Sheppard could make any of this more bearable, could stop the wheels in his head turning and turning. He didn't deserve their help. Didn't even deserve their presence, even without their friendship.
Deep, deep down, he felt stirrings of an altogether different fear – that they would abandon him, not dissolving and disappearing into nothingness, but simply leave, turning away in disgust or indifference. Even worse than that, that the despair eating him inside might take them too.
A new nightmare filled his nights when Sheppard withdrew even his presence in the dark.
Rodney dreamed of Elizabeth cutting Sheppard's throat, the image vivid in his mind, the bloody river of Sheppard's life pumping out, Sheppard's eyes wide and already empty. He could never stem that tide and he woke to the smell of the blood on his hands; his hoarse screams rang in his own ears when the rest of the nightmare manifested itself even in his waking mind. He imagined Elizabeth taking the Beretta and turning it against herself, her brain spraying the wall behind her in crimson and gray.
His stomach revolted and he rolled over the edge of the bed to the floor, onto his hands and knees, heaving and spitting the meager remains of a Powerbar, until nothing but bile and saliva came up. His eyes watered and his arms quivered as he gasped and gagged, throat burning, helpless, head hanging.
The hand on his shoulder shook him out of it for a second, and he was hoping for it to be Sheppard; Sheppard, whose contact he needed like the air to breathe these days, but when he looked up, he saw Elizabeth.
Saw blood and brain fiber.
Saw her hand cutting Sheppard's throat, leaving him twitching and twisting and fighting for breath that would no longer fill his lungs.
Elizabeth's hand on his shoulder was wet with Sheppard's blood until he blinked and everything blurred.
He shrugged her away.
"Get out."
"Rodney, you –"
"Get the fuck out of here."
He cleaned up the vomit before crawling back on the bed, willing his mind to stop but not sleep. He didn't even close his eyes, but his mind kept showing him the same thing anyway: his own hands, wet with the blood of the universe.
His ghosts waited in the corners and the shadows. They were patient.
On the fourth day after her confrontation with John, she locked her hand on Rodney's shoulder and shook, digging her fingers into the muscle painfully. John had been gone too long this time. "I need your help, Rodney. You have to stop this. You have to help me find John."
He tried to twitch away, but she wouldn't let go. Finally, Rodney asked rustily, "Why me?"
"Nothing works for me." How she hated admitting that.
He nodded at the admission. Then a frown creased his features. "Wait. Sheppard?"
"Isn't answering his radio, hasn't come back to his room. I think we need to find him, Rodney.You need to."
Rodney's breathing picked up. "Oh, no. No." He was unsteady on his feet, but moving, and moving for the transporter. Elizabeth followed him, laying a steadying hand against the small of his back.
John's wandering had brought him to the chair room three times. It wasn't coincidence. He wanted to sit down and feel what Atlantis was like with three fully powered ZPMs to work with, not half-crippled and half-powered.
It felt like the city itself wanted him there. His restless pacing was always accompanied by the hum of it accompanying him, doors opening, lights coming on, but it seemed like the lights were brighter when his feet turned toward the chair room and dimmed with disappointment if he went another way.
He didn't need to use the command chair. But he hadn't forgotten what Elizabeth said about supplies. They were going to have to trade for food; it would be a good idea to find out what Atlantis had to offer in the way of possible trade goods.
It would be better to concentrate on that than the sick ache inside.
He was still so angry it frightened him, so that he'd taken to staying away from Rodney and Elizabeth, because he couldn't bite back the words that wanted to burst out anymore. It felt like the day when he came home to his mother's note – Sorry, baby, I can't take you with me – on the refrigerator door, like setting his helo down at the base that afternoon in Afghanistan with nothing to show for a career in ruins but dead bodies, like the feel of a ring and a letter in an envelope he never bothered to open. It felt like losing everything all over again.
He'd trusted Rodney.
John closed his eyes.
Despite everything, if Rodney were to look him in the eye and declare he could fix everything, John would want to believe him. He would trust him, still. It hurt like hell to think Rodney had used that. It seemed like he'd always trusted Rodney, even in Antarctica, because everything Rodney felt and thought was right out there. Had seemed to be, John cautioned himself.
John preferred someone who called him an idiot to kind words and hidden agendas.
He'd thought Rodney didn't have any hidden agendas. He'd been a fool and that wasn't Rodney's fault, but his, all his. Everyone had pieces of themselves they kept private.
He had to stay away, had to ignore Rodney's nightmares, because he couldn't let himself lose control. He thought if he did, he'd be in the same state Rodney was, breaking apart inside, cut to pieces and bleeding out fast. How did you grieve for a universe?
Cold was better, cold was numb, cold was Antarctica, empty, open and alone.
The chair looked innocuous. John looked at it for a long time. Half the times he'd been in the room, before, the city had been blacked out, the corners filled with shadows, equipment scattered around the base. With the lights on, he could see the walls were almost terracotta colored, angular metal designs overlaying them, shapes almost like chevrons, fitted together, and seeming to contain some meaning he couldn't discern.
The chair was more of the strange mixture everything Ancient displayed: a frame of precise curves and right angles supporting the silvery alloy of the seat. The arms and the back were solid crystal; the same, soapy-slick crystal that was used everywhere in Atlantis, in the jumpers and half the Ancient tech John had seen, only covered over with an organic or maybe fractal pattern of the alloy.
He'd never been afraid of the chair, not the one in Antarctica or this one, but it felt different now. John stared at it. They weren't identical, he realized. The one in Antarctica had been made or adjusted for someone shorter than him. The Atlantis command chair was proportioned exactly for him.
It was waiting for him.
John stepped onto the platform supporting it. The blue light that flared to life beneath his feet didn't even surprise him. He only hesitated for a moment, considering whether he should radio Elizabeth or even Rodney and tell them he was about to do this. There wasn't any reason. The command chair wasn't dangerous. Not to him.
He sat, placing his hands on the arms. The chair always looked hard and cold, but it wasn't. It molded itself to him exactly, sinking back into a position that supported his body perfectly.
The crystal behind him activated.
John caught his breath at the fluid ease with which the chair and the city responded to him. He thought about the information systems, asking for inventories, shield strength, weapons and status reports. The information flooded back faster than he could process, holographic displays lighting above him, the city hum rising, sharper and higher, peaking in a tone that cut through his thoughts as the lights flashed brighter and brighter. Too much, too fast, John thought and tried to slow it down, but couldn't. Something reached into his brain, poured in like a rain of quicksilver, clean and cold, but burning down all his nerves.
Joy and greeting ran through his mind and it wasn't his, wasn't human, but it knew him and loved him and it felt like flying as Atlantis threaded her way through his brain.
Who are you? he thought.
The name formed in his mind, plucked from his own memory, a gestalt of the consciousness that was meant to regulate Atlantis, that fitted itself to him as his DNA was fitted to it.
Atenë.
What do you want from me?
It all came too fast, a rush of Ancient, and he cried out, pain stabbing through his temples. He tried to lift his hands to his head and couldn't. He tried to scream and couldn't.
Stop. Please. Stop.
The remorse – he thought it was remorse, that was the closest human emotion he could assign to it – that followed was wordless, gentler and slower. The information overload receded, leaving John panting and limp, sweat-soaked, every limb shaking in reaction. He tried to get his eyes open, only to realize distantly they were open and burning, but he couldn't see the room, the input from Atlantis' systems usurping the pathways into his optic thalamus. Atlantis became his body, he could feel and hear and see with the city's sensors, draw on the data core like the information it held was his own memories. It was thrilling and terrifying.
Atenë was so eager to show him everything, to share all that she was, that John was rapidly losing track of himself. He tried to feel his own body and couldn't, couldn't discern fingers or toes. He didn't know if he was breathing and began to panic. Everything was so fast in Atenë's world, he didn't know how long he'd been merged with the crystal matrices that were her brain. He tried to tell her that if she'd usurped too much of his nervous system he was dying … or already dead.
The fear that flashed through them both at that made the entire city jolt. They bolted through its systems, rushing back to the chair room, finding the specific sensors that would show John's body.
He wondered what would happen to him if they were too late.
Would he be trapped in the matrices with Atenë or just fade away without his body to anchor his consciousness? When he'd shared with Chaya, she'd showed him so much, things he knew he couldn't remember consciously. Had she shown him how to ascend?
John didn't know.
Panic hit him, but there, instantly, were statistics, probabilities, a living array of processes charting every function of his body down to the energy each cell was burning. Reassurance. Atenë caught him up again and carried him forward on the tide of information.
"Where is he?"
Rodney bent over the control room console, willing it to cooperate. Without a laptop or any translation program, he was working on the fly, guessing at the meanings of half the commands he gave the mainframe, following his instincts.
"Give me a minute," he muttered. His raw throat ached with every rasping word. His hands rattled over the controls – they wouldn't stop shaking – depressing one, deactivating another, the colored crystals lighting and fading under his touch. He assaulted the console with the desperation of something trapped and dying, frowning the entire time. He kept blinking to keep the sweat out of his eyes, unwilling to slow down even enough to wipe the perspiration away. He had to concentrate on the screen and not the shadows. He couldn't bring himself to sit in any of the chairs; his eyes insisted that Zhang and Edwards were already there.
A holographic schematic display of the city glowed to life in front of them.
"Got it," he said.
He pointed at a single life-sign glowing two towers away from the control tower. Realization of the significance of that tower hit him. "There." His voice cracked. "That's – " His voice disappeared entirely as the life-sign on the display flickered.
Lights all over the city pulsed, modulating between yellow and red. He knew, with nauseating certainty, that Sheppard was in the command chair. An atonal alarm began repeating, making Rodney's skin crawl with memories of the final, helpless moments of the first siege, when he'd watched another monitor and imagined Sheppard's death, torn to dust and memory soon to be lost, scattered across the cold, silent reaches. It reached through the haze of his own despair even now.
Sheppard was in trouble.
"Get the medical kit from the jumper!" he snapped and ran for the closest transporter. He thought he brushed by Bates' shade as he went.
The transporter door snapped open ahead of him, the destination schematic already displayed. Rodney spared a thought for the responsiveness of the city, then dismissed it. This Atlantis had ZPMs. That was all.
Every hall was brightly lit and thankfully empty. That was different enough to keep away any flashbacks as Rodney raced into the chair room. He skidded to a stop at the edge of the glowing platform.
He said, flat and calm as he could, "Elizabeth. Get that medical kit down here now."
"On my way." He could hear the thud of her boots and her breath speeding up through his earpiece. Then, a few seconds later, as though she only thought of asking now: "Can you give me some details? Tell me what to expect."
Sheppard's in the chair, he wanted to yell. The chair is in him. Silvery strands of metal twined over his hands and arms, running up under the sleeves of Sheppard's jacket. More of it curled over his shoulders, like hands, to hold him down. The part that made Rodney want to scream, though, were the delicate threads of it crawling over Sheppard's temples to the corners of his eyes, insinuated past the orbits. He imagined them creeping along the path of the optic nerve and into Sheppard's brain.
"Rodney? Rodney!?"
"Just hurry," he said and ignored Elizabeth's questions after that.
He couldn't actually imagine a way anything in the emergency kit could do any good, but it was what you did: you tried to do something with what you had. And you watched people die, because it was never good enough, never enough. He was frozen, watching Sheppard's body bow up and then shake in a soundless convulsion. He watched blood run red and wet from Sheppard's nostrils, watched it slip from his open mouth, watched him shake and couldn't move, any more than Sheppard could blink.
"Rodney, the transporters won't work for me! I'm going to have to walk. Do you have that much time?"
"Damn it …" Rodney squeezed his eyes shut. Couldn't the damn city cooperate for once? "Elizabeth, just stay there, I'll get the transporter working, I just need more time."
"Rodney, I can't do anything to help if I'm stuck."
"I know, I know, I'm trying to think of something!" He flexed his fingers, trying to trace, strictly in his mind, the command pathways he would need to rewrite to make the transporter operate independent of gene activation. He could do it, given enough time. There was never enough time … It should work anyway.
"Elizabeth, just get in the transporter. It will work."
"I'm trying it – "
"Elizabeth?"
"I'm locked in," she said, so much calmer than he would have been.
Elizabeth didn't have the gene. She was actually too healthy; her immune system had reacted to Beckett's gene therapy and fought it off like the infection it was.
She'd rejected Atlantis on a cellular level. Now it rejected her physically.
It didn't reject Sheppard. It embraced him so tightly it was going to kill him.
"I'm sorry, I can't … I've got to get Sheppard out here. Wait, just wait, okay?" he told her.
This was the end of the world, Rodney thought. The end of everything, beyond the despair of what he'd done already, he had to watch as Atlantis killed Sheppard. Elizabeth would never come, because somewhere in the city, it was killing her, too.
He would have stayed there, paralyzed by the sense of doom that had engulfed him since they arrived, except for the pink-tinged tears seeping from the corners of Sheppard's eyes. The hair at his temples was wet with them.
Rodney's feet were moving before he knew he'd made a decision. He was up onto the glowing platform, bent over Sheppard, his fingers moving over the metal holding down Sheppard's hands. He was afraid to touch the strands on his head. One jostle could be disastrous. The alloy looked cool, but felt warm: body temperature, Rodney thought.
"Sheppard," he whispered. "Can you come back? Can you shut it down?" He ducked his head, absently stroking his fingers over Sheppard's on the arm rest. "Can you hear me?"
The room lights flickered.
Rodney jerked his head.
"Was that you? Sheppard, if that was you, do it again!"
Rodney leaned closer, staring into blank hazel eyes, and held his breath. Sheppard's body had settled back into the chair, the seizures apparently over. The lights remained steady.
"Damn it, damn it, don't do this, you idiot," he said. His voice came and went, uneven and unsure. Would Sheppard even listen to him now, if he did hear? "Come on!"
"Rodney, talk to me. I can help." Her voice was too calm, he could hear the panic lurking under the surface. It was the last thing he needed now.
"Not now, Elizabeth."
Sheppard's pupils were contracted to pinpoints. Sheppard had such changeable eyes, sometimes dark, sometimes light; green one moment, gray or gold in the next. They were never blind, though; never empty like this. Rodney could map the ring of dark green around the edge of each iris, then a pale amber-green layer that darkened to golden-brown around the pupil. There were striations, spokes of gold, specks of brown and deeper green. Rodney stared into them and wanted only for them to narrow and fill with something, even if it was only the dark glitter of anger.
"Rodney, for God's sake, I know it's bad when you don't talk. Don't shut me out. What's happening? Is it John?"
Elizabeth's voice was escalating into impatience mixed with despair and he couldn't take the concern anymore. Rodney reached up and tapped his ear piece, turning her off.
"Come on, Sheppard," he said conversationally.Conversationally except for the crack and rise in his voice at the end."This is a shitty way to go, you know. You're always so disgustingly upbeat, telling everyone to keep trying, to not give up, you don't get to just lie back and die. It's absolutely unfair on all counts and I swear I will hound you into the afterlife if you do. I mean it. I'm willing to concede the existence of an afterlife, which means God or gods – and I don't mean the Goa'uld or the Ascended – just because I refuse to let you get away with this. I really hope you're listening to this and, hey, if you are, I'd like some kind of damned sign – "
The lights flicked off and on again.
Rodney stroked Sheppard's wrist and ignored Radek's phantom, shaking his head in disapproval and disappointment, in the corner.
The sensors showed another life-sign in the chair room. The individual possessed just enough altered cells with the proper DNA to pass the activation threshold.
Sound waves registered. Modulations from a human throat. Language. But not Atlantis' language, not the beautiful mathematics of Atenë's thoughts, not the language John knew as Ancient, nor the stripped-to-basics trade tongue the stargates inserted into the brains of each traveler, not even Wraith. But he knew it, knew those morphemes, those structures, those rhythms.
He concentrated on the chair room. There was another life form in the city, but it didn't speak to her or him, and he ignored it. Atenë had it secured in one of the transporter kiosks.
"Can you hear me?"
English, John thought, it was English. He listened harder, wanting it to make sense, wanting to translate for Atenë because she was there beside him, within him, breath and heartbeat and thought buoyed up by her.
They responded, brightening and dimming the lights, wanting the one talking to go on.
" – is a shitty way to go, you know. You're always so disgustingly upbeat, telling everyone to keep trying, to not give up, you don't get to just lie back and die. It's absolutely unfair on all counts and I swear I will hound you into the afterlife if you do – "
Memory shifted and Atenë showed him a picture, eyes full of worry in a face hollowed and bruised, much too pale.
John found the name in his own memories, along with a knot of emotions that stung and cut, so that he almost recoiled back into the computer's matrices. He remembered Doranda and after.
McKay.
" – afterlife, which means God or gods – and I don't mean the Goa'uld or the Ascended – just because I refuse to let you get away – "
McKay seemed to think John was dying. He didn't think he was, but he couldn't feel anything. Couldn't reconnect with his body, which scared the hell out of him. John pulled away from Atenë, listening to McKay, because Rodney always figured things out, he always came up with a way to save all of them. Or he had until – John shied away from the thought. He had to trust Rodney and he couldn't do it if he thought too much about what had happened.
He reached and flickered the lights again.
Flickered and breathed. He couldn't feel that breath that filled his lungs, but the scent rushed through his olfactory receptors, real and stunningly separate from the data input from Atenë: blood and sweat and the sharp reek of fear, a familiar acid musk that was half his own scent and half Rodney.
" – Sheppard – "
John latched onto the smell and fell back into his body, the link with Atenë severing so abruptly he screamed.
Rodney jerked his hand away from Sheppard.
The strands of alloy were sliding out of him. Rodney resisted to the urge to pry and tear at them, but grabbed Sheppard by the shoulders as the clamps released there. Sheppard was gasping for breath now, his entire body twitching. His hands flailed at Rodney's arms as the last silver threads withdrew. The instant they were out of Sheppard's eyes, Rodney jerked Sheppard upright and out of the chair.
Sheppard was a shuddering, dead-weight wreck and they both fell in a tangle of legs and arms.
The light in the chair crystal went out. Rodney pulled Sheppard around until he could see his face.
Sheppard's eyes were squeezed shut.
"Sheppard, Colonel, don't ever dare do that to me again," Rodney shouted at him.
Sheppard flinched at the close-in volume.
Rodney was two breaths from hysterics, much too loud, and he knew it. He couldn't have another meltdown. Not until he knew Sheppard was all right. He tightened his hands on Sheppard's shoulders and resisted the urge to shake him.
"McKay?" Sheppard asked hoarsely. His eyes were still shut and Rodney could feel the trembling running through his body like aftershocks from whatever he'd experienced.
"Yes, of course, who else would it be? You scared – you took a ridiculous risk. Why did you use the chair and what the hell happened? That wasn't normal. It's never done anything like that. I thought you were dying."
Sheppard slitted his eyes open. They gleamed with excitement. Rodney felt a jolt of fear. What if whatever had just happened to Sheppard had affected him permanently?
"Look, what's your name?"
Sheppard blinked.
"Sheppard?" Rodney said, starting to worry even more.
"John." One corner of Sheppard's mouth quirked up in the beginning of a smirk. "Sheppard."
"Oh, but I just said that, didn't I? Well, what's my name?"
"Didn't I just say that? McKay."
Rodney puffed a relieved breath.
"Well, excuse me for being a little concerned that you might have fried your brain," he snapped.
Sheppard closed his eyes again and nodded loosely, then slumped against Rodney.
They were both still sprawled on the chair platform. One of Sheppard's elbows was digging into Rodney's ribs and his tailbone hurt from hitting the floor under Sheppard's extra weight. He still wasn't in a hurry to let go and Sheppard was limp against him, not pulling away. He let himself sit there just a little longer, letting some of the adrenaline leach away.
"What happened?" he asked finally. "Do you know?"
Sheppard finally pulled away from him and ended up sitting propped against the command chair, which Rodney found vastly disturbing. He wiped at his bloody nose with a hand that still wasn't steady and grimaced.
"Yeah, I know." Sheppard looked up from his blood-smeared hand and his eyes were full of wonder. "McKay, she's aware."
"Who, she?"
Sheppard waved. "Atlantis. She's awake and … incredible." His lips parted. "It was like I was in her mind and her mind is so much more than you could ever imagine."
"Atlantis," Rodney said slowly, wondering if Sheppard had suffered some sort of brain damage. Radek's shadow was back, poking curiously at the chair, snickering at Rodney. He tried not to look. Sheppard still needed him and that meant being sane again.
Sheppard reached up and stroked the chair arm. "Atlantis," Sheppard repeated. His voice was husky. "It's all math. God, it's so pure and clean."
"Wait," Rodney interrupted, sitting forward. "You're talking about an AI."
"Yeah, what did you think I was talking about?"
"I was revisiting the fried brains theory. There's really an AI? Why didn't it interact with us before?"
Sheppard pulled his knees up and rested his arms on them, letting his hands dangle. The bones at his wrists nearly poked through his skin. Little dots of blood ran up his arms until they disappeared under his sleeves.
"Before before or before since we got here?"
"Either." Rodney frowned.
"Atenë was asleep when we got here. This time. Before … " Sheppard swallowed. "I think she died when the city started shutting down peripherals to save power for the shield."
"Oh."
Rodney raised a finger. "But what about Elizabeth. The first one. Why didn't the city – what did you call the AI?"
"Atenë."
"Right. Why didn't the AI interact with Elizabeth?"
"She doesn't have the ATA gene." Sheppard's expression blanked. "Shit. Elizabeth."
"What? What?"
Rodney remembered he'd turned off his radio.
"She's in a locked-down transporter."
Rodney tapped on the radio. "Elizabeth?"
Nothing. He looked at Sheppard, but Sheppard's eyes were squeezed shut.
"Elizabeth?" Rodney tried again.
The sound of a breath exhaled like a sob came through his earpiece.
"Rodney?"
"Are you okay?"
She laughed and it sounded bad, really bad. "Can you get the transporter to open for her?" he asked Sheppard.
"I'm trying. If I used the chair – "
"No, no, no. I don't care how happy-friendly-wonderful Atenë is, you're not getting back into that chair," Rodney overrode him.
"Rodney, is John all right?"
"As he ever was," Rodney replied.
"Then get me out of here!"
He could hear her composure slipping. He turned off his mic long enough to ask, "Can you get the transporter to let her off at the living quarters?"
Sheppard reached up again and touched the arm of the chair, fingers moving over the silvery alloy. It rippled under his touch. Rodney's stomach lurched.
Sheppard opened his eyes and let his hand fall away and into his lap. "Yeah. I've got it."
"Elizabeth? The transporter should be all right now. Just get out when the doors open."
"What about John?"
"Colonel Sheppard seems to be okay."
"The doors are opening now. Thank you, Rodney. – Are you sure John is all right?"
"Yes. We'll be there soon, just try not to worry," Rodney said.
He looked at Sheppard, really looked at him, and thought if he got up and walked out of the room, Sheppard would sit back down in the command chair and never come back. At the same time, his heart picked up speed just imagining what they could learn from the AI. There was so much they'd never learned from the Ancients' database because they hadn't known what questions to ask. With an AI it would be utterly different.
If they'd had the AI, maybe he would never have … Then again, what if they had never gone to Doranda in the first place, never found the Arcturus Project?
Rodney looked past Sheppard to the command chair. He licked his lips.
"Sheppard."
Sheppard leaned his sweat-matted head against the chair.
"Yeah?"
"We could wipe the gate address and galactic coordinates for Doranda from the database."
Sheppard went still. Rodney didn't say trust me. He just let Sheppard think it out himself, didn't even suggest the corollary: that they could go back to Doranda in this time. He was half afraid Sheppard would refuse simply because Rodney had thought of it.
"We could," Sheppard said very slowly. Something dark and merciless flickered behind his eyes. His mouth stretched into a hard, feral smile. "We could do better than that, Rodney."
Rodney waited.
"We can go back and take that damned place apart," Sheppard declared.
Rodney nodded jerkily. He'd do whatever Sheppard wanted. At least, Sheppard was talking to him again, and he'd said we.
"Tonight," Sheppard said. He levered himself to his feet and stood, swaying, looking at Rodney hard and intent. Blood still smeared through the stubble on his chin, bright and frightening.
Rodney caught his breath and nodded. "Okay." This was the Sheppard who scared him, the one that could pull the trigger without hesitation.
"I've convinced Atenë to stop locking Elizabeth out of most of the systems. There are still things that have to be at least initialized by you or me and the jumpers will never work for her, but she'll be okay while we're gone."
"Shouldn't we take her with us?"
Sheppard hung his head briefly. "We don't really know what we'll find there. She'll be safer here."
Sheppard sounded so determined, Rodney didn't even consider arguing. He followed Sheppard out, but hesitated at the door, looking back at Radek, who waved him off impatiently, still poking at the command chair, all intent and excitement. Rodney blinked again and Radek was gone.
John glanced at Rodney as they stepped into a transporter. The destination schematic slid open, but neither of them activated it. He felt like hell, like crashing, every muscle in his body achy and exhausted. Rodney just looked like shit, pasty, unsteady. He'd cleaned up sometime in the last day, though: the beard was gone. His voice was still rough; maybe it always would be. John didn't know how long you had to scream until you did permanent damage, but Rodney's screams would echo through his head for the rest of his life.
It was just too damn much. He didn't want to think about any of it anymore. He didn't want to think about Atenë, either. If he did, he could almost feel the AI still in his mind, almost lose himself in the intricacies of the city, like he'd melt into alloy and crystal circuits if he didn't concentrate on staying in himself.
"You're talking to me again?" Rodney asked abruptly.
"I wasn't not – "
"Yes, you were."
John nodded and said, "It's hard, okay?"
Rodney didn't answer.
John was sure that Rodney's hands were shaking, his own still were; Rodney had shoved his in his pockets and slumped against the wall. The impulse to say something, to make Rodney look up and meet his eyes again, warred with his still simmering anger.
Every time he thought he had a handle on it, it came back to the realization that they had wiped out their universe. When he tried to sleep, it played against the back of his eyelids, the flare of light behind them as the rip began consuming Doranda's sun and the jumper threaded the eye of the stargate's needle. One second more and they would have been swept into nothingness, too.
If they had, they would never have known what they'd done. What Rodney had done, what he and Elizabeth had helped him do, what the Ancients had begun long before any of them were born.
He didn't blame Rodney alone, though he knew Rodney thought so.
He just didn't know how to live with it.
If he could just do something … Elizabeth wanted him to think about supplies and all he could think was it was pointless. But he'd latched onto the idea of going to Doranda like a lifeline. If they did this, then the fluke that had let them survive meant something. They could be more than ghosts of the future.
"We'll fix things," he said.
Rodney kept his gaze on the floor as he said, "Elizabeth will want to come with us." He flinched on the last word, as though he expected John to object to it.
John swallowed hard, grimacing at the taste of thick blood running down the back of his throat from his still bleeding nose. He slumped back against the wall opposite Rodney.
He looked away and said, "I know." He rubbed at the back of his neck, trying to loosen tight muscles.
John touched the icon for the transporter closest to their living quarters. The transporter's door slid shut and opened onto the familiar corridor. There was never time to feel their dissolution and reintegration, but John staggered, because for an instant, he was everywhere, spread through Atlantis, bodiless.
"Whoa," he murmured and Rodney's hand closed on his bicep, steadying him.
"Sheppard – "
"I'm okay."
"Oh, of course. You always go white and nearly fall on your face from what's essentially an elevator ride," Rodney snapped.
John locked his knees and whatever he'd felt dissolved into little more than a faint awareness of the city at the back of his mind, not much stronger than he'd always felt since first coming to Atlantis. Rodney's hand stayed on his arm. He let it. He didn't smile at the return of some of Rodney's normal attitude. He didn't, but for an instant he wanted to.
He wanted to go back to the way things had been between them before, the simple, comfortable friendship, but it wasn't that easy. If he was honest, it hadn't been easy for a while. The tension growing between them had simply been lost in all the other stresses.
There were things he couldn't afford. Things he never let himself even contemplate. Rodney was one of them, the same way Teyla became when she joined his team. Off limits, just like Elizabeth, because they had never needed that kind of trouble on top of all the other dangers they faced. He'd always been smart enough to avoid screwing up like that.
It was just one more thing he was not going to think about. He had a mission to plan. He was going to concentrate on that.
He shook off Rodney's hand. "I've got to clean up." He was more than a little ripe and suddenly couldn't stand himself.
"Figure out what supplies you'll need," he said as he walked away. "Then figure out what we've actually got." He didn't figure that was much, but the Arcturus facility probably had a self-destruct sequence Rodney could hack into.
"Fine, fine, sure," Rodney called. "I'll – I'll do that."
"Good," John said, ducking into his room as Elizabeth appeared at the door to hers.
"John?" she said.
He willed the doors to close behind him.
The look on Elizabeth's face when he exited the room fifteen minutes later made John regret the way he'd been treating her. She was paler than Rodney, stick thin and terribly brittle. He'd resented her ambushing him, but what choice had he left her? Rodney was a fractured mess and John had done what he always did: he'd bolted. Now he just felt guilty.
"See?" Rodney said as John walked into the hall, showered, shaved and back in control. The lights in the hall brightened subtly for him, John noticed. Atenë was watching. In retrospect, he was a little disturbed by what had happened with the command chair, but he still felt warm at the thought that the AI was looking out for him. The fleeting thought that the city already loved him more than his mother ever had he pushed away.
Elizabeth had stationed herself opposite his door. She had on her jacket, zipped to the throat, and clutched at her elbows with her hands. Her knuckles were white.
Rodney leaned against the wall next to John's door. John looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
Rodney waved a hand at Elizabeth. "She didn't believe me." He sounded simply disgusted, but John saw that Elizabeth's doubt hurt.
John frowned. "Believe what?' he asked.
"That you're okay."
"What happened to you?" Elizabeth demanded, speaking over Rodney uncharacteristically. "Rodney said you're all right, but – "
"I am all right," John said softly. He caught Rodney's eye over Elizabeth's shoulder and mouthed, Go on.
"Rodney found me."
Rodney gave a jerky little nod and walked away fast, his step hesitating once as he detoured around something John didn't see. John hated the slump of his shoulders.
"It's okay," he said to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth leaned back against the wall. "No, no, it isn't," she murmured.
He wondered if she missed the comfort of being with someone. She never stepped outside the role of leader with anyone. S