Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Next time we go through the ‘gate, remind me to check the seven-day weather forecast first,” grumbled Lt. Colonel John Sheppard. He wiped at the water on his face, not trusting his vision because he knew the rain wasn’t the problem.

“I don’t have time to tell you how impossible it would be to set up a MALP for that, so shut up,” returned Rodney McKay. The scientist was a special kind of grumpy as he huffed along through the mud. They were still two miles from the stargate, soaked to the bone and shivering as they sweat under their gear, and - just to make things truly interesting - hiding from Wraith scouts.

John had put Ronon Dex in charge, let their own scout and former Runner call the shots under the circumstances. He and Teyla Emmagan had lifetimes of experience to lead from, and John trusted them to do it, especially when their team was so far behind unexpectedly enemy-fortified lines with limited options. He knew running wasn’t their chief scientist’s favorite pass-time, but McKay was stuck with it just like the rest of them, and he seemed to be okay so far. Their luck just had to hold out a little while longer.

It, and Ronon’s instincts, got them half a mile further in the right direction. They dodged through trees and under broad umbrella-like leaves that made it hard to keep a solid line on their destination and their footing, especially in the rain, but they stayed hidden and hadn’t been stunned and paralyzed yet.

That’s when Rodney started showing signs of trouble. He slipped a few times, slid over mud and tripped over tree branches he didn’t see fast enough to jump. John had their six and was a few steps too far back to keep him going through the near-misses. He caught his friend by the back of the vest and encouraged him to keep going, pushing when he couldn’t run alongside. They started to lag behind, but John could still see Ronon dodging branches, so he split his attention to keep them on track.

Rodney suddenly stopped, his body jerking sideways into John, dodging something only he had seen. Sheppard caught him by the shoulders to keep them both upright and risked letting him stop to catch his breath. He leashed him in again to keep him from running the wrong way, kept him mostly facing him so as to not lose their direction. John shifted slightly to keep the rest of their team in sight and nearly slid in the mud but Rodney caught him and they didn’t fall.

The rain had them both squinting at each other, Sheppard's hands on Rodney's shoulders to make him look at him. The Colonel kept his attention on the forest but he made sure that he claimed Rodney's.

"What?" John asked, keeping his voice quiet but loud enough to be heard over the tin-roof cacophony of broad-leafed plants being pounded by the rain that surrounded them. "What was that?"

Rodney pointed past John's shoulder into the thick grove of trees. There was nothing there. Rodney seemed confused and dangerously close to panic. He had seen something, obviously spooked by it, and now it wasn't there. That was an entirely different level of spooked because it meant he had seen the shadows of the Wraith, which were so much worse than just seeing those ugly bastards' faces spying back. The shadows meant the Wraith were close, stalking and herding, instead of just chasing.

"We're just tired," John said, panting and frustrated. He tugged Rodney back out to the muddy animal trail. "Let's go."

The problem was that Rodney didn't move with him. He dug in and caught at John’s arm, shaking his head. “No.”

“What the hell- Rodney… Listen-” John began, but Rodney cut him off, refusing.

“They’re right there. We- we stay here,” he said. John stepped back toward him, careful, listening to his friend’s tired breathing. He kept blinking, wiping at the water in his eyes, and seemed stuck. It had been a long twenty-four hour trip through the ‘gate this time, and it had rained for a lot of it. The guy was probably exhausted and John didn’t blame him for it, but Rodney had probably picked the worst place possible to freak out on him. He clasped his shoulder and squeezed, stepping back in to try to get Rodney’s attention off the unknown shadows in the storm.

“Come on, man. Let’s go catch up,” he said, trying one more time to coax his friend the easy way. He still had a good idea of where Ronon and Teyla had gone, he could still find them, if Rodney would just start moving again. Rodney looked at him, clear eyed and suddenly immune to the rain as he made a fist in John’s jacket collar. There was a sudden shout from up ahead, Teyla’s voice dragging John’s attention away from Rodney and back to the trail.

“Rodney! No!” Teyla yelled, just barely audible over the sound of the storm and the distance between them. John frowned, confused, as he looked back at Rodney. His friend still had a firm hold on his jacket and his expression changed, cloudy and distant; the man was not in control. He had seen it before, when Teyla had interacted with the Wraith on their handy long-distance spy-line, and he didn’t like it any more on Rodney’s face than he’d been tolerant of it on Teyla’s; they were his team, his friends, and not puppets for the Wraith.

Sheppard jerked his shoulder back, ordinarily not a problem when Rodney was still rusty at offensive fighting instead of defense, but Rodney caught hold of his hair from the hold on his jacket. His friend took a hard swing at his jaw with his free hand, packing more power than seemed remotely natural, and stepped in to follow it up with a leg between his knees to bring him down. Thanks to sheer surprise alone, it worked. And it was probably an unavoidable fact that his jaw was going to hurt for a day or two. Shit.

The mud sucked him down, his gear painfully twisting Sheppard down to his side. At least his head didn’t bounce off anything on the way down, and he managed to get his arms under him quickly, to pull himself out of the muck.

“Oh no. Oh shit,” came Rodney’s voice as his friend seemed to come back to his own brain.

John scowled at the ground and shoved up to look back at him, only to instead see the sharp, stabby-end of a Wraith stunner inches from his eyes. A quiet, electric whomp announced another Wraith stunner being used and John flinched reflexively at the power that hit somewhere over his head, taking Rodney down. He stumbled forward, slamming into John’s shoulder, and that was gonna hurt when he woke up. The double-bladed, curved bayonet point spun away from John to keep McKay from landing on it. It wasn’t much of a reprieve, though, as a second later, John’s entire nervous system lit up like a Christmas tree and he blacked out.

Chapter Text

Even after a stunner-provided nap, the exhaustion of the last few days left John irritable and tired. Rodney was his best friend but sitting in the Wraith cell, listening to him bitch about their impossible situation, he thought really seriously about returning the favor of the busted jaw. McKay hadn’t taken a full hit from the stunner, so he was up and walking and moving before John had full control of his toes back. Maybe Sheppard was getting too old for this shit; his jaw hurt, his back hurt, and the muddy clothes chaffed him up in places he didn't want to go chaffing, damn it. He was almost glad the Wraith had taken their vests because that probably would have hurt, too.

After one more logical complaint that they were never getting out of their current predicament without Ronon's useful hidden stash of knives, John barked at Rodney to stop pacing and shut up. Rodney blinked at him for a moment, considered it, and then moved to sit next to him, snug up against his shoulder so they both sat along the weird, alien-fleshy wall.

"I'm just saying, I don't see how we aren't well and truly screwed," Rodney grumbled. At least he was quieter. It was more agreeable to John's headache that way.

"You're not exactly wrong, McKay. It's just… I don't exactly want to hear about it anymore, that's all," John replied, speaking very carefully around his sore face. "Let's pretend some flash of genius will strike and that miracles happen and just… roll with it."

Rodney pursed his lips and set his jaw against his opinion on that and reluctantly nodded. Glad for the momentary peace, John leaned into his friend.

"Besides," Rodney went on. He had made it almost a full minute of quiet. "Teyla and Ronon aren't here. They made it out. Someone will… do something."

John scoffed. That was, admittedly, an adorably naïve outlook. “I usually have to threaten Elizabeth to let me go after anyone, you realize that, don’t you?”

Rodney balked. “Well, yes, but Ronon likes us. Or you. He likes you. He’ll… threaten. Elizabeth. On this.”

John shrugged and nodded; he certainly had a point. Rodney allowed the quiet for another moment before he raised a hand, shook a finger in John’s general direction. “And just for the record, it’s beyond ridiculous that you have a usual for these scenarios. It implies there’s a serious problem with our livelihood and our prospects for survival.”

“So far we’re not doing bad on the odds,” John replied.

“The odds aren’t exactly useful in this situation,” said Rodney, volume threatening to go up again. John winced and waved him back down. The man glared at him, which was preferable to anything louder.

John rolled his eyes. “Well, when I can feel my feet again, I’ll go pace in front of the door, because that’s useful in this situation.”

The call-out settled in and Rodney turned his glare out on the empty cell again instead.

“Come to think on it, I liked it better when you were passed out,” he grumbled back.

John nodded, gingerly touched his aching face before crossing his arms against the cold. “So did I.”

The quiet won out for a little while after that. John started to shake off some of the tingling, fried-feeling and tried to walk off the last dregs of it, because pacing in front of the gate was actually useful for something, not that John would admit that out loud. It also put him helpfully between the apparently psychic-sensitive Rodney and the Wraith when their keepers showed up.

Given that the Alien Bastards could apparently mind-hack John's favorite genius, he wanted to keep them as far away from Rodney as he could. He grabbed onto the bone-like bars of the gate, as casually annoyed as he could manage, and glared out at the three Wraith who showed up.

"You could have left us with our food, you know," Sheppard pointed out, rather than bother with the usual fake niceties. "It's a bad idea to starve your food. Removes the nutritional value and all that."

"You are from Atlantis, correct?" Apparently the new Wraith didn't want to play, either.

"What do you care? Food's food, right?" John asked, wary.

"We are not, as of yet, in search of a meal. I asked a very direct question," the Wraith replied. The slight reprieve didn't spell out anything good for the two Earthlings in their care, however. John clenched his hands around the bars and figured he would have to pick the fight to keep it away from Rodney.

"John Sheppard, Lieutenant Colonel, USAF. I'll skip the serial number since it's not likely you'd understand anyway." He smiled out at the Wraith. "There you go. A very direct answer. Now can I have my PowerBars back?"

It wasn't the answer the Wraith wanted. And in short order it got John the fight he was spoiling for. The gates fluttered open in their eerie, halting swing, and the Wraith in front reached over the threshold to grab Sheppard by the arm. He shrugged out of the hold before the sharp, pointy manicure could stab into his sleeve and instead got in a little-too-high angled tackle to shove two of them away from the gate. All three of them were armed and John just had to get hands on something, even if it was just a knife, if he was going to have a shot in hell at getting them off the Wraith ship. They just needed to get to a Dart, then they could fake it from there, and it had to start with a weapon.

John heard the gates close behind him as he took the Wraith down with the grapple around the ribs, managed a short jab against alien body armor that hurt more than he was counting on, and was shoved off before they even hit the ground. He had definitely taken the lead Wraith to the floor, but damn, the thing had faster reflexes than Ronon. And the knife hilt cut John's knuckles when he hit too close to it, but close wasn't good enough to win him any prizes.

John found himself on the ground and looking up at Wraith again, this time with one of them kneeling on his ribs and a hand at his collar, dangerously close to the feeding-zone, and another Wraith standing over them with a boot on his wrist. It wasn't exactly where John had been hoping to end up when he picked the fight.

"You misunderstood me when I said we weren't hungry," the Wraith leaning on him said, pointy teeth dripping as he smiled. "We feed when we want… we would just prefer you stay alive a little longer."

"Important clarification," John replied, trying not to be breathed on by the alien in his space. He jerked to the side, trying to get out from under the hand at his chest, and the Wraith dug his nails in. The hand just below his collar shifted to cover his heart, his shirt tugging at his neck sharply. It was a drawn out threat and Sheppard scowled up at him. He was scared out of his damn mind but he could project as much breathless "Fuck you, asshole" with a glare as anybody else. That was about all he could do.

The pain hit then to let him know it wasn't just a threat. A few long seconds of electric, crushing, boiling pain that John remembered well enough from the iratus bug bite months earlier. It wasn't that different, but it went a lot deeper than his neck, or a cut on the arm. He closed his eyes and tried not to scream.

Then suddenly it was over. The pain was still there, but not as sharp, just a shadow, and it eased off the jarring seizure in his spine so that, overall, he could breathe again. The Wraith lifted up off his chest and John curled his arm back in to block the thing having easy access to another meal. He turned a wary eye on the Wraith still kneeling over him, surprised to see the normally green-pallor of the Wraith's skin had turned rather… blue.

"What the hell-" John tried to back away as the Wraith started to convulse, like a silent sneeze or the hiccups or something, that seemed to rattle his whole body. He hissed and narrowed his eyes and reached for John. There was an ineffective scuffle before the Wraith again had fingernails dug into John's chest. The pain was different this time, warm instead of sharp, pulling together instead of apart, and nothing got crushed. John could breathe through it, and he stared up at the Wraith in confusion. The alien released him and shoved him toward the guard who had been so handy with the boots.

"What are you?" the Wraith demanded. "What did you do?"

The guard hauled John up like a rag doll, but surprisingly, nothing hurt at all. Even the bruised jaw from Rodney hitting him had gone away. John risked a glance over at McKay, still tucked safely behind the cell doors and staring back at him, wide eyed. There was something seriously weird going on but even the genius didn’t have the answers. John went back to ignoring him so the Wraith would leave him out of it.

"I didn't do anything," John said, as belligerent as possible despite the shock. The Wraith who had fed on him got in his face then, ready to hiss out something or other, but John cut him off. "Why are you blue?"

"That is exactly my concern." The Wraith's non-feeding hand reached out and clamped around John's neck, a perhaps more real threat than the feeding would be for a while, and Sheppard hurried to block despite the guard holding him in place.

"Oh my god," came Rodney's voice, at probably the worst possible time to remind the Wraith he was there. "The virus. The… the anecdote from the bite before… it must still be in your system…"

"What is he talking about?" the Wraith in his face wanted to know. John tugged on the hand around his neck as a hint and the Wraith backed off, slightly, but kept hold of him. In light of the threat, John tried to keep his explanation simple.

"A kid bit me a few weeks ago. One of your kids. I started turning blue and scaly, so our doctor came up with an antivirus thing to kick your venom stuff or whatever out of my system. Worked out… pretty good…"

The Wraith growled, a hard, rumbling sound that John felt in the hand at his neck. Then the clawed fingers tightened and tugged him away from the guard. Rodney jumped back as the cell doors unfolded and John was shoved inside. They collided, neither minding so much as they stumbled back and away from the threat on the outside. The blue-faded Wraith stared in at Rodney, teeth bared and eyes just barely not glowing.

"Don't look at me!" Rodney said quickly. "I got the shots too."

Approving of the quick thinking, John nodded. "You're gonna be allergic to both of us. Might as well send us back where you found us," he said. The Wraith let out another frustrated, incomprehensible noise, and stomped from the cell. The doors shuttered closed behind him. All three of them stalked off, the blue one stumbling a little in his hurry. Probably off to whatever passed for a Wraith doctor. John raised an eyebrow and looked over at Rodney.

"Are you shitting me?" he asked, careful to keep his voice down. "Is that really freaking possible?"

"Why not? He built the damn thing off the iratus bugs and what he already had from Hoff. It had to get the… well, the building blocks of the Wraith DNA out of your system to get you back to normal. Genetics aren't my area, but it makes sense they wouldn't respond to it any better than that virus did," Rodney whispered back at him. John caught his arm and tugged him back, away from the gates, back to their earlier spot against the wall.

"Let's go with that then, but something tells me it's not going to convince them to send us home," he said. Rodney nodded. He was distracted, though, and reached over to pull John's shirt away from his chest. John looked down, seeing what he had noticed: the feeding mark had been partially healed.

"What the-"

"He drained you, and then... gave it back. It was weird," said Rodney, frowning as he looked back up at John's face. His eyes were searching, studying John all over, like he didn't trust what he was seeing.

"So I'm not old or anything?" It sounded stupid, but John asked it anyway. "I feel fine…"

Rodney harrumphed at him and crossed his arms, muttering something about Kirk syndrome under his breath. John lightly smacked his shoulder.

"I'm not the one who thought the Wraith spy-chick was hot," he shot back. Rodney silently mocked him for it, glaring at the gate rather than look at him.

Chapter Text

His watch said they had been gone for forty-eight hours, and the tension stressing his muscles as he sat on the hard, cold floor tended to agree. All the paralyzed coma from the stunner weapon had done was kill time, there was no relief in that sleep. Since then, John had paced himself to exhaustion and he was hungry and angry.

The Wraith didn't seem to know what to do with them, once they found out Sheppard could turn them blue. They didn't see the blue guy again to find out how permanent the trouble was, but there were the random onlookers who showed up, stuck their heads between the bone-bars, and squinted their eyes at the poisonous humans.

None of them thought to bring food for their prisoners, though.

It was cold in the cell, like it had been outside of it, which John reasoned meant the Wraith weren't actually cold-blooded, like their appearance and lifestyles would have otherwise indicated. John and Rodney had both been stripped of their jackets when their gear and vests had been taken. Or left behind. Who knew. They woke up without them, either way, and missed them as they shivered in the cell.

It became a larger problem the further they got from Rodney's last meal. On top of his general default irritability clashing with John's pent-up anger, he started to get the shakes, and his attitude turned back toward panic. John searched his baggy pockets and found a piece of gum and an unopened jawbreaker that had been missed. The gum was enough to back off the shaky balance and the jaw breaker was small but it would get McKay through the next blood-sugar drop.

They stayed quiet, conserving energy as much as not having anything to say. It wasn't like they hadn't been in impossible situations before. They had said it all and heard it all and there was no sense replaying the classics. And John's jaw did that annoying shivering clack any time he tried to talk anyway; he had fully acclimated to the temperate weather on Atlantis and now couldn't for the life of him remember how he had survived McMurdo.

Somehow Rodney heard the chatter over the sound of his own chewing every last bit of glucose out of the gum. He pulled on John's arm as he sat beside him.

"Come here," he said, an order if ever John had heard one. He raised an eyebrow at him.

"What? I'm right here," John replied.

"Yes, and you're shivering. And I'm overheating. You're too far away for us to help each other," said Rodney, slowly because he was apparently having to explain a difficult concept to a moron. "You're wasting a perfectly useful human ice cube. Come here."

Rodney was a human space-heater so John didn't exactly mind being called an ice cube, but it was an awkward enough suggestion. They were just supposed to hug it out until the Wraith brought them a blanket? Maybe a meal? John frowned at his knees as he debated it. Rodney tugged on his arm again. There was an element of personal pride keeping him where he was, too; John had been through every idea he had toward getting them out of the cell, none had yielded any results, and he really did want a hug. Especially from his friend. John would gladly take any small comfort to make him feel better about being trapped behind organic, alien bars he couldn't even gnaw his way through. It was pitiful and allowing himself that seemed stupid.

Rodney tried again and John relented, rolling up onto a knee and hesitating, not sure where he was supposed to go to get closer. Still sitting up against the wall, Rodney shifted around a little and then tugged him in, John's shoulder against his chest and back against one updrawn knee. The other crossed John's lap, and the two were fully entangled, arms draped at each other's waists.

It would be a very compromising position if any US military contingent were to show up to save the day. But that wasn't likely. And Rodney was warm. John slumped into the hug, relaxed in the cold quiet of the Wraith cell. He told himself not to overthink it, just take the mutual comfort on offer, and warmed his frozen hands tucked up against Rodney's stomach. Rodney's hands clasped together at his hip, despite the fact that John's shirt had ridden up a little, so warm skin against cold skin felt welcomed.

"Good idea," John said after a few minutes, when he was warmer and his teeth didn't chatter. Rodney nodded but surprisingly didn't gloat. John fell asleep curled into his friend, despite the danger of the Wraith prison around them. They were still human, they needed rest to survive. Just then, they were as safe as they were going to get for a while.

Chapter Text

Even after as close to actual sleep as either of them were likely to get, John woke up feeling worn down. Rodney was shaky and sweating in the cold, blinking more than natural for him as he fought back the disoriented fog that came from too long without food. The jawbreaker was a gamble; it might work or it might not. He kept the wrapper and kept spitting it out rather than burn through the whole thing at once. He kept quiet and it wasn't normal. He wasn't okay. John paced, keeping an eye on his friend, but ultimately useless to him.

He found he could climb the weird gate, tear fleshy chunks off the walls and weaken certain spots, but it didn't give under his weight at all. The walls just healed as he dropped down. It left Sheppard's hands covered in a gross slime and caused a foul, burnt smell throughout the cell. Given that the smell could be a poisonous gas as easily as anything else, John gave up on the effort again. It was back to pacing the floor, checking in with Rodney when the man got too quiet.

"Look, I'm not feeling great," Rodney said eventually. "I think - well, if I get bad enough- do you know what to do with seizures?"

John shook his head. "Nope. And I'm not going to have to. You won't get that bad."

"Don't be stupid," returned McKay with a scoff. "You can't bully me out of a seizure if it comes to it."

"Positive thinking, Rodney. Not bullying," John clarified, just as sharp as Rodney had been about it. But John was out of ideas and he wasn't going to listen to anything about seizures when he couldn't stop them to be much help there, either.

Maybe Rodney was on his way out if he didn't get food soon, but John still had enough in him to pick a fight. Barely; he wasn't sure how long he could last if he had to watch Rodney crash any further than he already was. Health-stuff wasn't his area, and neither was watching friends die slow.

But the Wraith seemed to have forgotten about them and things were definitely getting worse. So John resorted to the timeless classics: grabbing the bars and shouting for attention. It eventually worked, but not before he had pissed off Rodney and nearly shouted himself hoarse in the process.

The blue-tinted Wraith was the one who eventually showed up. He was still splotchy blue and pissed off. Good, John thought, not even trying to keep it off his face.

“The food needs food,” Sheppard informed him.

“There’s none in the offering,” the Wraith replied, smiling through his drippy, creepy teeth. “We have nothing edible for your kind. And our usual methods for dealing with this issue are not available, given that were we to let you near the pods, you would poison the hive.”

“Then what are we still here for?”

“You may be useful. Eventually.”

“Not if we die first,” John pointed out, just barely keeping his tone civil and not a growl. “Get him food or he dies soon. That’s how this works. Humans need food. Need water.”

“And I told you, we have neither-”

“Then get some!” John kicked the gate between them. “Find a planet, get food.”

The Wraith was somehow entertained by the noise, his smile never fading. But he didn’t give in to the petulant demands of his prisoner, either. The bastard started backing away until he casually turned and left. John kicked the gate again, shouted after him to make sure the alien knew he was a cowardly bastard blue-faced piece of shit. The addition of the name-calling didn't seem ultimately effective, only managed to make Rodney mad at him.

"Are you trying to get us killed?" he wanted to know. John ignored him and went back to kicking the gate. It wasn't metal, it was some kind of organic, so maybe it would eventually break.

"You realize these things are thousands of years old, right? Which means their ships are probably going to outlast your boots and all you're accomplishing is adding to my migraine," Rodney pointed out, annoyance obvious. John stopped making noise then, because he wasn't accomplishing anything, and he wasn't in it to hurt McKay. He leaned against the gate and glared out at the shadowed hallways that led off to places he couldn't reach.

It was a few more minutes before the Wraith showed up again. This time he brought his guards, and the gates swooped open in front of John.

"You. Out." The blue-faced Wraith waved a hand in gracious invitation. John didn't trust it.

"Why?"

In answer, one of the guards lowered their stunner weapon. Rather than threaten Sheppard with it, though, the Wraith simply pointed it at Rodney and fired. John ran forward then, charging the one with the big gun to get it away from the cell. He didn't know if McKay had been hit, but he wasn't risking a second shot hitting him if the first hadn't. The trouble was, John was two days without food, he was angry, and he was physically exhausted; his movements were clumsier than he realized and he didn't have the strength to even leave a bruise on the likes of the Wraith.

Instead, he got knocked in the head and stumbled, seeing stars for a moment as he caught himself on his knees. The guards dragged him up by the arms and he was half-carried along the halls. He was still disoriented when they dragged him into a room with multiple raised tables, weird half-walls in random places, and the Wraith's fleshy-machinery scattered around.

Not a good place to be.

Sheppard dug in his heels and started to fight. The Wraith stepped close and caught him by the back of the neck, leaned in face to face close enough to bite. "You wanted your food. This is how to obtain it. Be still."

The threat was probably worse than the reward, but John was low on options. And the promise of food was going to be bullshit, but… what if it wasn't? Curiosity and hope did him in, and John didn't fight. He was instead slammed down, face-first, on one of the weird tables, the things built the same as the gates of their cell. A smooth hybrid of organic material and metal, unnatural against his skin. It smelled terrible. And just like the gates, the sides folded and unfolded at the whim of the Wraith, and John was pinned down by boney, fleshy bars that fluttered out from nowhere and trapped him under criss cross pieces. His hands were free but his arms were trapped at his sides, with no wiggle-room at all around any of the bars. Panic had him shoving the back of his shoulders into the bars, but nothing moved, no give at all, no corner to wriggle into.

There were more of the bastard-Wraith then, not just the blue-splotched one and the guards with the weird masks. One of them caught John by the back of the head, a handful of hair tugged up between the bars to make him show his face.

"I think this is folly," the Wraith said, though he wasn't talking to John.

"They must be useful for something. And we can't risk them poisoning the ship," said Ol' Blue. He approached carrying something that looked like a hollow spike, tapping it against his hand. Then he and it disappeared from John’s view, messing with one of the alien machines nearby.

"The risk to the ship is why they should be dead," said the other one.

"These are from Atlantis. We need the location and their defenses first," replied Blue. "They stay alive."

"Fuck off," John spat at them. He tensed as his head was bounced down off the table. He lost track of the Wraith around him for a moment, his ears ringing to match his swimming vision.

"Be still," came the warning from Blue, and John didn't care to listen. A moment later, though, something stabbed into him. A sharp pressure bit down into his back, just at the edge of his shoulder blade, along his spine. It struck fast and then stayed there, with something digging around against his bones. It took a minute for John to realize he was shouting; he couldn't hear his own voice through the rush of pain screaming louder in his head and down his limbs. There was a new terror when he realized he couldn't feel his hands anymore, or much of anything else except the pain just to the right of his spine.

Someone had the brilliant idea to remind Sheppard to breathe, but he couldn’t figure it out, too focused on the pressure against his spine that threatened to cripple him. When it finally eased up - leaving behind the sharp burning sensation but at least taking away the heavy weight centered over his shoulder blade - John managed to pull in air and remember basic necessity other than processing pain. He still couldn’t move, and it wasn’t just because of the barred net that pinned him down. Nothing was communicating out along his limbs, other than how much everything hurt. John seethed, face trapped against the weird table and neck pinned under the trap of a bar. Even he couldn’t understand the efforts he made at swearing and it all came out as angry noise.

The Wraith shushed at him, just a hissing noise, and moved closer to the table. He looked distastefully down at Sheppard before reaching out to put a hand against his back, under his collar and dragging the shirt back to put his hand over the spot that hurt the most, that felt like a gaping wound over his shoulder blade, blood soaked and slick until the Wraith dug in claws. The pain changed then, just a memory of it clinging to him, and John could actually feel his fingers again. He jerked against the bars trapping him down, angry and afraid of it happening again more than actually able to move.

“I told you to be still. You didn’t listen,” said Blue. John glared at him. But he went still. The Wraith stayed back from him, the one who had healed John’s back looking down at his blood-covered hand, lip curled in disgust. Blue lines crawled up like veins under his jacket, so whatever was still in John’s system was working against any of them who touched him. It was a small relief, considering there was no way to communicate that to anyone back at Atlantis.

“I don’t like this,” said the new Wraith.

“He presents a challenge,” said Blue. “We should adapt.”

The Wraith wiped his hand on John’s shirt sleeve. “Take him back where he was. Away from here.”

Blue was happy to oblige, especially when he discovered John couldn’t quite keep his feet under him. Everything felt like jelly-soaked cotton. Nothing worked. And John wanted to get away from them so he didn’t argue as the guards all but carried him off.

Chapter Text

The Wraith dumped Sheppard back in the cell with Rodney, who thankfully hadn't been shot with the stunner. He had dodged and slammed his head against something on the way down, so he had some new color and grime on his jaw, but he was conscious. And their hosts had remembered the PowerBars and MREs they had stolen with their gear, which was also returned to them, minus the weapons. Rodney had a PowerBar sticking out of his mouth when he rushed over to where John stumbled after being shoved into the cell.

"What happened?" Rodney asked, voice muffled by the food. He hurried to swallow it and put the remainder in the wrapper in a pocket as he caught John's arm. He was a welcome balancing point and John accepted the help, still not steady on his feet. Rodney got a palm smeared with blood for the effort though and started swearing. "What happened to your back? John? Talk-"

John nodded. "Gimmie a minute."

Rodney hurried him to the corner where he had set out their gear on the emergency blankets he had pulled out. They weren't exactly comfy but they would be warm, so John didn't argue when he sat him down and shoved the blanket at him. It was left with a bloody handprint on the silver surface. Still startled by it, Rodney wiped the mess on his pants leg and tugged at the hole in the back of John's shirt, trying to find the source of the damage.

"They stabbed me with something. Hurt like hell," John said, his arms huddled into the blanket as he leaned into his knees. Rodney gave him the half-eaten PowerBar.

"Eat. There's more. And your shirt in your bag. And our jackets." He certainly sounded more aware than he had been ten minutes earlier, but now worried and frantic because there was visible blood and it was now on him. Rodney started pulling awkwardly on John's shirt. "Get this off. If you're bleeding, we have to stop it-"

"Okay, okay." John was shaky from hunger and shock but he didn't think he was bleeding anymore. All the same, he followed orders, tugged the ruined shirt off to let Rodney check the damage on his back. Using it as a towel, McKay wiped the shirt all around his right shoulder, cleaning up the mess. And John crunched on the half of the energy bar. It helped a little.

"There is nothing here. Just… wait. This is barely healed…" Rodney poked very near the point on his back that had been the source of trouble. John couldn't see it but he could sure as hell feel it and he jerked his shoulder out from under the touch. Rodney dropped down off his knees to sit at John's side, facing him. He looked almost green, his eyes wide as he put things together in his head. He held up his hand, thumb and finger rounded together in a circle about an inch and a half in diameter.

"It's about that size. Already healing. Not bleeding," he reported, sounding somehow more miserable. "Look, I didn't see the one Carson took out of Ronon, but you don't think… I mean-"

John just nodded, chin tucked into the blanket folded over his arms. He could feel something move whenever he moved his shoulder. It had to be the tracker. Maybe he was imagining it. The tracker was certainly the most positive, least doomsday-scenario his imagination could provide, anyway. "Tracker."

Rodney stared at him, frowning, before finally digging into one of the packs for John's other shirt. Blanket still over his knees, Sheppard reluctantly sat up to put it on. He was out of backups, but at least he wasn't stuck in the bloody one, and hopefully the tee would last longer. He took his jacket back, too, and then draped under the emergency blanket again. It wasn't much, but it helped keep off the shakes.

He watched Rodney dig for more food, mechanically accepted the new, unopened energy bar he was handed. When Rodney pulled out the radio earpiece, John snagged it and put it on, more habit than usefulness, and Rodney dug around again until he could find his. It wasn't much, it didn't even work for anything other than to talk to each other in the same cell, but it was a small tie to home.

They were in trouble. The food would only last a few days, and then what? John couldn't go anywhere near Atlantis with a tracker in his back, even if they could steal a Dart, and he was the only one who had ever flown one before. And they would be lucky if Rodney could keep the Wraith out of his head that long.

When it came to the Wraith, John wasn't exactly any more of an expert than Rodney was. They probably both had the same technical knowledge of the aliens and their tricks, though Sheppard had gone hand to hand with them more often than Rodney. But if they were after information, that was something John figured he had important experience with that Rodney didn't.

"Look, they said they want to know about Atlantis. They want a location, they want defenses," he began. Rodney looked up at him, PowerBar slowly crunching.

"Wait, that was torture? They stabbed you for information?" he asked. "What'd you tell-"

"Nothing. But that's the thing, Rodney. They didn't ask me. They don't have to. When they figure it's safe to try, they'll just try hacking your brain again. Right now, they're worried about the antivirus still in my blood, but my point is, we don't know how long that will last. They keep trying-" John stopped and shook his head. "Look. When they try to get in your head, think of something else. Like, a brick wall. Or a beach. Or… or flying-"

"So things I don't like?"

"No- nothing you're scared of- shit. Nothing with, like, emotional attachment… shit." John didn't know how to explain it and it was too important to screw up. "I saw them do it to Sumner so I kinda… I just went the opposite of anywhere the voice in my head went. Her voice - the Wraith, she sounded different. Do the opposite…"

Rodney was trying to follow, John could see the wheels turning in his genius brain, but he was still sluggish from starving. Just like John was trying to think how to explain when he was shaking from adrenaline, hungry, and still scared of the pain he had just come down from. They were working from a disadvantage, and who knew how much time they had to waste.

"When you hit me, what did you hear? In your head. What made you deck me?" he asked, looking for anything more useful than what his own head was giving him just then.

"You weren't listening, you were going right for them," said Rodney. John nodded.

"Except I wasn't… so something told you I was, and you listened and they took over. Remember what that was that like."

Rodney sat with that puzzle for a little while, eating and thinking, which John hoped would be the combination to pay off in the end. It was something else to think about instead of the cell around them, anyway. John reached for the pack and found the water bottle; it was frigid like everything else, but water was water.

"Okay, but I'm shit at lying," Rodney said after a minute.

"Don't lie. Go somewhere else. Redirect. Think of what you want to think of, not what they want," replied John, shaking his head. "Lie and they'll get you. I don't know, recite pi or something."

"I can do that," said Rodney, suddenly excited to have a plan, any plan, in the midst of the absolute nothing presented by starvation in a Wraith prison cell. John nodded, as much agreement as approval, and huddled under the blanket, his shoulders trembling up to his jaw. The quiet was welcome, even the sound of Rodney eating was reassuring. They were still together, they had food, and they had a plan; that was all actually an improvement.

"Why the tracker though?" Rodney worried out loud. John looked over at him, chin tucked in against his elbow, and gave a slight shake of his head. The only answer he had there was one he didn't like, so he wasn't going to say it. He would deal with it when he had to. Just then, he was working through shock, his body still adjusting to the leftovers from the pain, from whatever had been shoved into his shoulder. While he could recognize the response and logically understand it, that didn't make it any easier to think through as the adrenaline spiked.

He zoned out staring at the shiny edge of the blanket wobbling as he breathed, and Rodney shuffling closer brought him back a little. His friend was frowning at him, the concerned face again, as he settled in at John's side, shoulder to shoulder. He set a careful hand to his arm, patting in an awkward effort at reassurance, and John tipped toward him. Rodney shifted to catch him as John leaned in for a hug, his brain too fuzzy on all the details to remember why he wasn't supposed to curl up on Rodney. His friend was safe, helping, and warm, and John wanted to be in his space. Rodney let him in, so he stayed there until he started to feel at least a little recovery.

Eventually he let Rodney up again and the scientist started pacing. John stayed slouched under the foil blanket and they both stayed quiet. There was a tension there; they were both waiting, and they didn't know exactly what for. But there wasn't anything else to do.

Because they liked to be helpful, the Wraith showed up before too long to answer that for them. The cell doors opened and two of the guards let themselves in to stand just inside the gate.

“John Sheppard. Get up,” ordered Blue. John hardly had a chance to get to his feet before Rodney was standing bodily between him and the Wraith.

"Take me instead-" he tried. John stared up at his back, jaw slack. What the hell, Rodney? Still, John shoved himself up to stand behind him, not about to let him be stupid on his own.

"In due time," said Blue, lurking in the hallway beyond the gates. "For now, if the two of you are to eat, your friend will have to provide it. As you may imagine, we are not welcome around your kind and do not have access to what you need to survive. You may keep what he finds for you."

That was not the expected response. Rodney hesitated, glancing over at John, uncertain. It wasn't that they trusted the Wraith… but on the issue of obtaining food in a prison cell, they couldn't exactly afford not to, either.

Steeling himself for a very long day, John took a breath and edged past Rodney. He checked the packs on the floor, finding his and emptying it out onto the blanket he was leaving behind. He kept some water and an MRE and left the rest, making plenty of room to bring back whatever he could find that wasn't some kind of citrus. Then he very gingerly shouldered the bag, testing it out. He could handle it. He was better.

Rodney didn't like it, based on the very deep lines on his face, and the way he opened his mouth to argue. But words didn't actually come out. He grasped at John's jacket sleeve, just a little tug, but then crossed his arms and hung back. "Fine."

"I'm sure I'll be back before dinner," John offered lightly.

"Oh, you're crazy if you think I'm waiting on that," replied Rodney. "After the last day? Oh no. No way."

"Good call," said John, and he felt at least a little better about it. Rodney wasn't going to keel over from shock or seizures while John was gone. He still was uneasy as he reported to the Wraith at the cell doors, not quite sure what he was in for.

Chapter Text

It had only been two days. That wasn't a long time, when it came to most off-world activity. AR-1 had been gone for two days before Ronon and Teyla returned with the news, so two days wasn't terrible. There was still a chance.

But this two days felt different to Elizabeth Weir. It was two days without her chief science officer and two days without the military lead for the entire expedition. They were vital members of her team, and they weren't just off-world. They were missing. The threat of the Wraith that Ronon and Teyla had reported made it even worse; the Wraith had been in the area, though there was no guarantee that they had found Colonel Sheppard and Rodney. It would be hard to believe they hadn't been found, however, after Teyla's report.

All of these things played over and over in Elizabeth's mind, every time she tried to close her eyes to sleep. She needed sleep, the human body required it, and under stressful situations it became especially important. She knew all this, knew she had a responsibility to her team and to the expedition to take care of herself especially now that two of the other ranking members of the expedition were unaccounted for. She had to stay sharp, had to be able to process logically despite the high emotions stirred up by their missing friends. When her body demanded it, she had to sleep.

But the lists of everything that had gone wrong, everything that could go wrong, everything that might go wrong because of it… they all demanded her mental attention the moment she tried to take care of herself. John and Rodney couldn't afford to sleep in peace, if they were still alive. They didn't have the luxury of sheets and hand-stitched quilts, or the comfort of pajamas to sleep in. It was wrong that she could, when her mind told her very clearly there were hundreds of things to be worried about and taking care of in her friends' absence. She kicked the blankets back, too hot anyway, too stressed.

Teyla had a sensitive, telepathic ability when it came to the Wraith. When they broadcast their shadows and tried to sneak into people's minds, Teyla could pick up on it, whether the aliens were just talking silently to each other or they were trying to manipulate a victim. And Teyla had reported, very firmly and confidently, that she had experienced the Wraith manipulating Rodney. She had heard their whispering and tuned in, but she said she had been too late to get through to him. The Wraith had broken her connection to them, but that didn't mean they had left Rodney alone. She had said they were close. To Elizabeth, it sounded almost impossible that Sheppard and McKay had not been caught in whatever net the Wraith had set out. It sat there in her mind, a certainty, burning away.

Elizabeth finally sat up, head in her hands, as she gave up on sleep. Her mind was too busy. There was so much work to do. She needed rest, she was physically tired and wouldn't last the long Atlantis days without it. But if Teyla was right, the attack didn't make sense. It wasn't how the Wraith usually operated. They usually culled a planet with Darts in the air, longer ranged weapons causing chaos that they could control, and the technology that captured their victims with minimal risk.

According to Ronon, they put teams on the ground when they were hunting Runners, specific targets. Surgical strike teams weren't interested in culling. And the village that AR-1 had spent time with hadn't been culled. They were far from the stargate and secluded, and Lorne had taken a Puddlejumper out to check on them, so the community was still whole and safe. The Wraith hadn't been there for a feeding frenzy. And Ronon didn't like the fact that he and Teyla had been allowed to get to the stargate themselves and leave; he said he figured it meant they had gotten what they came for.

Elizabeth found the comfort of her robe and went out to the balcony outside her room. She stared down at the city from high above, seeing the glowing lights everywhere and the shadows that fell across the ship's walking paths. Atlantis was an amazing, beautiful place, especially at night, under the stars.

And the Wraith, presumably, remembered that. Their culture was old. Their bodies were old, from what Carson had learned. If the Wraith had gone after AR-1 on some kind of hunt, it was Atlantis they were after. And they had caught John and Rodney, Elizabeth couldn't kid herself on that no matter how much she wanted it to not be true. The two people who became most dangerous to the city in enemy hands were now assumed to be in the hands of the Wraith. The Wraith, with their ships, and their hives, and their mind control and their life-draining feedings.

Elizabeth sunk against the railing, elbows against the wide, cool metal, and set her head in her hands. She didn't know what to do. But she was certain on one thing: she had to somehow plan to defend Atlantis against John Sheppard and Rodney McKay, not just the Wraith who held them.

Chapter Text

Trusting the Wraith to actually do what they promised wasn't exactly easy, but Sheppard paid attention as he was marched to the section of the ship that held the Darts and left on his own out on a platform. Blue and the guards hung back, supervising, and John stood by, waiting, not being shot at. The Dart flying over was the last thing he saw before he was suddenly out in an open field, in broad daylight, a high contrast to the cold dark of the spaceship. He stumbled to the ground, disoriented as he materialized on the Dart's demand. It was warm, and there was tall grass around that hid him, and John took a moment to just wait, get his bearings, and breathe.

He could deal with planets. Especially if they had a stargate. John couldn't go home, but he could put out the call for help. They were still alive and their friends needed to know that. The logical assumption was that there would be a 'gate somewhere nearby, that the Dart had probably arrived by one, and also that they would have put him down somewhere near civilization if he was actually supposed to find food. If it was all some weird ruse to start him running like Ronon had gone through, the rules were probably different, but John had never pried into the man’s life to figure out what the rules might be. So without anything to the contrary, he was going with the assumption that he was supposed to find food.

All in one piece and not being shot at, John headed out in search of either a village or a stargate. The planet he had been dropped on looked a lot like Hoff, with some of the same fruit trees scattered around. They were almost like apples, but softer, with ridges like oranges, and they smelled sour. He just didn’t remember if the fruit was actually edible or not. Just in case it was, he paused long enough to pick some that looked like they didn’t have a lot of bugs on them. He tried a few berries that seemed safe enough, wishing at once that he had paid more attention on previous trips to other planets and grabbed more food from the stash on the ship. He was burning energy, in a hurry, and getting hungrier than his single MRE was going to satisfy. Considering he didn’t know how long he would have on the planet before the Dart showed up to scoop him up again, he didn’t want to take the time to eat until he found more food.

He stumbled across a run-down looking brick and stone house eventually and John scouted around it, looking for signs of life nearby. The closest thing he had to a weapon was a sharp rock, heavy enough to do some damage as long as he didn’t accidentally cut himself on it. With no other humans or otherwise in the area, he approached the hut carefully. The door was unlocked and opened into an empty home, the contents looking about as developed as anything he had seen on Hoff or that he would have expected from the Genii. There were drying herbs hanging from strings across the ceiling and various sizes of funny shaped bottles lining the windowsills and along every shelf in the room he let himself into. A working table near the door had scraps of material all over it, including tools like scissors and knives. The knife was too big to be hidden, though, so John left it where it was.

John quickly spotted a cabinet with cupboard spaces behind a table that looked close enough to a kitchen area and headed for it. He discovered wrapped blocks of what seemed like cheese, and linen bags with dried fruits and grain-stuff that looked like cereal, probably some kind of trail mix, and chunks of what seemed like jerky. Fresher foodstuff sat in baskets arranged as drawers inside the cabinet. He had hit the jackpot on the first try and felt actually terrible about it as he stuffed the cheese and the jerky in his pack. Some of the fruits he had collected on his walk sat in the baskets, so he left a few of the things he had picked off in trade. They must be edible if someone set up so well had a stash of them, but it worried him a little that he didn’t see among their collection any of the berries that he had been eating on the way in.

Letting himself back out, John tried to latch the door the way he had found it. He poked around the porch area curiously and found more scraps of burlap-like material, snagging some for his rock. The little house revealed a set of pathways heading away from it and John tracked the one that looked widest and the most well-traveled. As he walked, he wrapped the material around his broken chunk of rock, tying it up to keep the sharp edge away from his hand, turning it into something he could swing around and not lose track of. The knife would have been better, but getting caught with it on the ship was still trouble he didn’t want. Because he was going back. John wasn’t leaving Rodney on that ship alone longer than he had to.

Following the trail eventually led him to a larger community, a little town, with multiple little run-down houses and other buildings. They had brick frames and glass windows, covered porches, the whole nine yards. The street wasn’t paved, but it had rock all over it, a gravel covering against the rain, and little narrow flower bed boxes. It was a quaint little village that, under other circumstances, John and Teyla could have probably gotten some good trade out of. Now, John was on his own, unarmed, and hoping that their cute, well-trained public rose bushes meant they were friendly enough to give him free food and point him in the direction of the nearest stargate. It was, in hindsight, probably a good thing Rodney had cleaned him up and he wasn’t covered in blood anymore.

A few people stopped and stared as John strode down the center of the community’s main road. He tried to smile and offered a wave that he hoped was a universal enough greeting.

"Hey, folks," John said, cautious as he made his way along, step by step further into their territory. He hadn't come though the stargate and there was no telling if their languages in this place would translate at all. There were a few awkward glances between the locals, no one exactly volunteering to get stuck helping out a stranger. Finally someone walked out to greet him. John stopped moving as the other man took a trajectory to block him. He held his hands up to show they were empty; the rock was tied to the strap of his backpack and easy enough to get to, but not exactly a threat yet.

"I'm just… looking for help," he said, experimenting with honesty under the circumstances. The stranger who approached him frowned at his words and looked him over. The blond man carried a broom, of all things, like a shopkeeper from the old west, and was probably no older than John.

"What manner of help?" he asked. John smiled, breathing a little easier as he understood the man's words.

"I'm just trying to get home, but I need food," he said. It seemed smart to avoid mentioning the Wraith or the tracker in his back just then. "And directions to get back to the stargate… I got a bit turned around and lost…"

"Stargate?"

"Uh… Ancestral ring? It's this big circle-thing, sometimes lights up…" Sheppard stupidly pantomimed a circle with his hands. Being trapped on another planet felt very different when he was alone, without his team and without a P90 in case his mouth got him in trouble. He had to be careful in ways he was a little out of practice with.

"The Well?" asked the local. "You came from the Well?"

John was sure he remembered other planets referring to the stargate as the Well before and he nodded. "Yeah, that. I got lost trying to get back to it, is the thing."

"Very lost," said the man. "It's a full day's journey from here. Back along the way you came."

That was not good news. John had already been gone an hour. Hiding his frustration, he scrounged up a smile anyway. "Is there a road to it?"

"Somewhat, yes. And with the dawn, the Chancellor will take the offering to the Well, should you need a guide to ensure you don't get lost again."

The escort would be welcome but the timing didn't really help much. John wanted to stay as far away from other humans as he could, not knowing when the Darts would return.

"Thanks for the offer, but I need to head back before then," he said. "So it sounds like I need to start walking…"

"You won't make it to the Well before night. It's not smart to risk it," said the man. Various onlookers nodded their agreement, some clucking at John's decision. He stomped down the surge of anger from their useless opinions and tried to shrug it off.

"I don't have a lot of choice," he replied. "I'm due back home two days ago, and I don't have the food to keep me out another two days as it is. No place is safe to stay-"

"There's raiders on the roads at night. Not to mention the animals," replied the stranger. He shook his head. "We can pull together the food, but you'll lose it to one or the other. It won't do any good."

"I'll take my chances, and any help I can get," said Sheppard. But he felt his stomach twist at the warning. He had already survived the Wraith... maybe raiders and wild animals added to the equation were pushing his luck. But he had to be back out and away from people whenever the Darts showed up again.

The man with the broom nodded and introduced himself as Cyrwin, and a moment later escorted John to another house that looked a lot like the one he had already snuck into. There, he was introduced to the man's wife and kids, and their dog, and renewed John's determination to get the hell out of town before any Wraith showed up to look for him. Sera, Cyrwin's wife, wasn't quite as comfortable with helping out the strange man who didn't want to accept any hospitality, but she still scrounged up a few days worth of meals for John to take with him. Breads and some kind of bean paste in a little jar and a bag of nuts like a trail mix… John was so hungry his stomach hurt but he put everything she gave him directly in his pack. He would eat when he got back out of town.

She saw him making room around the apple-like fruits and frowned at him. "You walked from the Parfel Orchards?"

Not knowing the answer to that, John shrugged. "There were a few kinds of trees there, but I don't know any of the names," he said. He held up one of the fruits from his bag. "Are these actually edible?"

"Those, yes. But nothing else from that land is… the fruits of nearly every other tree and bush there are foul. The animals refuse to go near the orchard entirely. They should not be eaten. If you go through that way again…"

John went still. "I ate a batch of berries near where I picked these."

Cyrwin took notice of their conversation then. "Oh. That's… not good."

"How much not good?" asked John. "The dead kind?"

"Well, you should certainly see the doctor…" began Cyrwin. John was quick to interrupt him.

"That's not exactly an option. I just… need to know what to expect here. I'll figure it out on the road if it hits me."

The two strangers were nice about it, but John's insistence on leaving was making them wary and they stopped trying to convince him what was good for him. They warned him of the dangers of food poisoning and, while it didn't sound like any kind of fun, it seemed like John could live through anything that hit him. They packed extra food, though, because they didn't think he would keep anything down for a day or so.

"I think I'll be fine," John assured them, shrugging into the loaded pack. "It's been a couple of hours. I would have been knocked down by now if it was going to."

Sera gave him an unimpressed smile and just reminded him to steer clear of the Parfel Orchards this time, stick to the road Cyrwin set him on. She probably knew he was lying, that the stomach ache he had blamed on being hungry and anxious for two hours was maybe not just that. But until John started losing his lunch, he was operating under the assumption that he would be fine. He had to be. He had to get to the 'gate.

Cyrwin and the dog walked John out to the road he needed to take and then down along it for a few minutes, offering up last minute wisdom on how to avoid trouble with the raiders, and what to look out for in terms of the night animals. John had a flashlight and lighter in his gear, so one way or another he could make sure he kept the road in sight, even if he had to make a torch the old fashioned way.

Before he parted company, though, Cyrwin left John with a knife. Nothing too big, but the right size to do more damage than his rock sling, and small enough to hide in his jacket or boot. It was odd to be met with such kindness, in John's experience, and he kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, like with the Hoff or the Genii. But he appreciated it.

Cyrwin headed back to his home and the dog kept along following John. He tried sending him home, shooing and trying to give the order, but the big rust-colored mutt with the funny face just trotted along beside him. Sheppard called back up along the road at Cyrwin, gesturing to the dog rather than try to explain.

"He'll be home for dinner, always is," Cyrwin shouted back. So John ended up with an alien dog for an escort and kept on along the road. He kicked a stick and the dog chased it, brought it back to him, and John entertained the both of them along their walk by playing fetch. That was definitely a new experience, playing fetch with an alien dog, alone on another planet. John wasn't supposed to be having fun just then, he had work to do, to make sure he survived and that Rodney made it off of a Wraith ship. It just happened as an accident and John didn't argue.

He had been walking about forty minutes when he realized he had slowed down. He wiped sweat off his forehead even though the sun hid behind an overcast sky. His best guess said he still had hours of daylight left, but he had no way of knowing for certain. The dog trotted along beside him, occasionally hitting his knee with the stick to ask to play.

There was a moment of concern when John finally realized that he couldn’t multitask on walking and playing with the dog because he couldn’t focus. He felt disoriented and stopped to look up and down the road, making sure he was still going the right direction, that he hadn’t gotten turned around when he had thrown a stick somewhere along the path.

The dog thwapped him with the stick again and John looked down at him. It wasn’t the heat or the dog that was messing with his head. This… was much worse.

“This is the damn berries, isn’t it?” he asked the dog.

The dog wagged his tail, completely unhelpful. John blinked at him, confused, as he briefly thought the dog had a third eye in the center of its fluffy forehead that he somehow hadn’t noticed over the course of the past few hours. It was just a normal, two-eyed dog, though. That was definitely the berries. John looked out at the fields around the road, trying to sort out if there were any safe places to go to ground, eat some food, before whatever trip he was about to take off on kicked in.

The worst part was the tension in his stomach, whether it was the stress from the warning about the berries or the actual berries themselves he didn't know, but it was a definite distraction from the rest of his assortment of odd symptoms. He could handle getting high and seeing three eyed dogs for a little while, but the other symptoms Cyrwin and his wife had listed off were not going to be easy to keep walking through.

John dug into the bag for the water and drank as much as he dared. He tried to keep walking as he did, mostly because he was stupidly stubborn and he needed to find the stargate, not get sick. He pulled out a piece of the bread he had been given, though, even shared a shred of it with the three-eyed dog.

At some point, however, his legs stopped working. He stared down at his boots, at a loss for why he wasn't able to make them move. His stomach clenched painfully and he pitched over as he wrapped his arms around himself, trying to contain the pain. The dog bouncing and barking around his legs tripped him the rest of the way into the rocky dirt and John stayed there, stuck. He looked out at the fields and saw little red Wraith popping their heads up over the grass, one even sitting in a tree twenty-five yards away, all just staring at him. Wide smiles with creepy sharp teeth.

The dog pounced on him, making everything worse with noise and claws that dug into his shoulder. John heard the barking but it slowly warped out like a broken synthesizer version of what a dog was supposed to sound like. It was a bad trip, with the bonus of food poisoning, and nothing like John had ever dealt with as a stupid college student, experimenting with uppers to get through exams, and later long days on the job in Afghanistan trying to stay awake for days. The purple-colored sky was kind of cool, but it definitely wasn't fun.

The dog disappeared at some point, zapped up by a beam from a Wraith Dart, and Sheppard tried to crawl to the side of the road furthest away from the threat of the little red Wraith demons. He didn't lose his lunch through any of it. But he did pass out.

He woke up at least a little bit when someone started talking to him, tapping his face, shaking him by the jacket, but actual consciousness still wasn't possible. His vision swam and he saw strange colors, not quite able to focus on the human faces interacting with him. He knew everything hurt.

It was safer to stay where he was, oblivious to everything that felt wrong when he opened his eyes. So he did.

Chapter Text

It was still bright out when John realized it was safe to open his eyes. His head wanted to split in four pieces at odd, unnatural angles, but he was back to seeing colors on the spectrum he was familiar with. His internal organs were all still on fire, too, and he felt like he was drenched in sweat, or maybe he had just rolled himself into a bog, who the hell knew. He hid his face behind his hands and tried to focus on figuring out how to move in order to sit up and lose whatever was left of his last paltry meal.

"Careful, you're close to the edge again," said someone, and John startled, promptly discovering exactly what edge they had been warning him about as he fell off of it and onto a hardwood floor. He squinted up at something that looked like a bed. Oh no.

"That's the third time you've done that this morning," chided the voice. John looked over as Sera walked up to where he had crashed. She knelt to tug at his shoulder and pull him back up to the furniture that was probably more comfortable than the floor. He tried to wave her off as soon as he was upright because of an automatic surge of nausea that came with being vertical, but she kept a fist in the shoulder of his shirt and pulled a bucket down off the bed. Her timing was perfect and saved John from having to feel bad about being sick on her floor.

"A few more hours, you'll start to feel better," she said. She pulled a towel down from the bed then, too, so he could wipe his face.

"Are you a nurse or something?" John asked, once he thought he had his voice back.

"No, I work with animals, not people," she replied. She patted his shoulder. "You're just getting predictable."

Confused by the comment, John tried to pull himself up onto the bed next to him. Sera helped with minimal fussing, but she checked his forehead for fever like he was a child and frowned at him. "Well, maybe a bit more than a few hours. But you are closer."

"What- how did-" he trailed off, not sure where to start.

"This is your second morning here, Colonel," Sera replied. "The doctor has been in to see you four times. You've eaten a few meals but don't seem to be able to keep anything down yet."

John stared at her, jaw slack. "I don't remember any of that."

"For a little while, you didn't remember your own name," Sera replied. "This is the most aware I've seen you since you first got here."

John felt anything but aware just then, mostly cotton-brained and sore all over. But it was definitely an improvement over the past two days, apparently.

"Well… thanks," he managed. Sera patted his shoulder, muttered something as she walked away that John didn't quite catch. He was suddenly too concerned with the way his stomach lurched and he had to grab the bucket again. He needed to get out of their house and away from town again, but he couldn't even sit up without getting sick. Walking was definitely not happening.

He dozed in and out, only realizing it because the room got darker in between the times he opened his eyes. Eventually he woke up to a clatter of noise as Sera and Cyrwin and the dog and the kids rushed around the room in the dark. They didn't speak but they crashed into chairs and each other and scrambled to collect things from different places around the house. They had a lantern between the four of them. John stayed down, not understanding what was going on and opting to close his eyes again.

“Hey, hey... this is no time to sleep!” Cyrwin caught his shoulder and shook him awake again. "We have to move!"

"Move what?" John asked, blurry. Cyrwin frowned at him.

"You haven't paid attention to anything we said, have you?" he asked. John blinked back at him.

"You were talking?"

"Yes. Now move!" Cyrwin did not explain himself further, only caught John by the arm to pull him up and inserted himself under his shoulder to help him stand. John tried to keep up, relieved when he wasn't sick the moment he was on his feet, and stumbled alongside the man around the couch - couch, not bed. Boy, was he out of it. - to another part of the room. There was a hole in the floor and an overturned piece of furniture, and John realized it was a trapdoor down into a cellar because the lantern light was glowing from the opening. Sera's head and shoulders poked out above it, the woman waiting with a hurried frown. Okay, hiding. They were hiding. He could figure this out. John stumbled down the stone steps, using the wall to support himself and leaving Cyrwin and Sera to close the hatch door.

It was nicer in the dark, very damp, and John realized he didn't have a fever anymore because he could actually notice the difference. He breathed a little easier as he slumped against a wall in the shadows, looking back at the two kids huddled with the dog, and all of them watching Cyrwin and Sera close off the stairs behind another set of doors. The lantern was moved far from the sealed off opening. The room was tense and John was the only one not afraid, because he didn't know what he was supposed to be afraid of. It reminded him of a storm cellar and he listened for tornado warning sirens somewhere up above them on the street. All he heard was quiet, but he didn't exactly trust his senses yet.

He looked around at the room they were in, guessing it was about the same size as the main room of the house John had seen when he had first arrived in town. The room John had apparently been sleeping in for two days. It didn't have any of the drying herbs or flowers hanging from the ceiling like it did upstairs, though. There was another pantry-cabinet with bottles stacked in the open cupboard spaces, and baskets that probably had some kind of food in them. There was a doorway to what looked like a bathroom, but it was hard to tell from the lantern at the back of the room. The main difference was that there were no doorways to bedrooms, so the back wall had a couple of bunk beds built into it. That was where the family had retreated to, leaving a perfectly useable set of couches and chairs in the middle of the room, untouched.

Not sure what they were hiding from, and afraid to ask because even the eight-year-old child and the dog were being silent, John stayed where he was, sitting against the stone-lined wall on the floor. He might have passed out a few times as they waited. There was something hitting him as wrong about the whole thing, something he was forgetting, a reason why curling up against the wall wasn't really a good option, but Sheppard couldn't remember what it was. He was better, but he was still blurry. He would figure it out eventually.

Chapter Text

Rodney didn't trust his watch anymore. It seemed to keep time, seemed to show the hours ticking away, but it felt too slow. At the same time, it seemed to be going too fast. It was impossible that the Colonel had been gone for two days. That didn't make sense. They had sent him down somewhere for food, they said, and nobody had really bothered Rodney since. Not that he missed the Wraith's company, but that wasn't… natural. Was it?

They just left their prisoner alone, with his food stash and his foil blankets, only peeking in to smile at him every so often. Rodney was starting to feel like a pie in a bakery window case.

Where was Sheppard? If anyone should be a pie, it should be the guy whose name sounded like “Shepherd” anyway. Not that Rodney was volunteering the man for anything, but he was hungry, and John and his stupid hair and his other parts added up to a certain kind of edible package, if he was being honest with himself. And what was with the man being cuddly on him, damn it, that hadn’t been fair at all, either. Maybe it had been Rodney’s idea, but that didn’t mean John had to listen to him.

Crap. Moving on.

If John had been gone for two days, then they had both been gone from Atlantis for roughly six days, and separated from their team for four of those. Elizabeth wasn't going to be happy. Zelenka was going to be panicked about keeping the city afloat without help. The stupid off-world trips weren't supposed to last a week, and the end-goal definitely wasn't to end up forgotten in a Wraith jail cell.

Forgotten was, admittedly, the safer option, though, and Rodney tried to stay quiet and unnoticed. He wasn't going to start kicking the gates and yelling for attention again until he ran out of food. He had worked it all out and between his pack and Sheppard's, he had six more days of rationed meals, because they had starved for two, and John wasn't currently there to eat any of it.

In the interests of staying quiet and busy, Rodney ran down the battery on his laptop trying to find comparable data signals that would let him hack the Wraith ship or communicate with Atlantis or anything useful at all. There was nothing there to find, but he tried. And a dead laptop battery was a good thing because it meant there was no possible way for the Wraith to access the information on it. Soon his laptop and tablet were both just five pounds of dead weight bricks. He kept them in his backpack afterwards anyway, just in case a miracle happened and he got to grab his gear and go home.

Once they were dead, though, he was left with nothing to do except worry and stress. He did manage some sleep, thankfully, but that only got him so far. Two days was a long time. There was pacing and rambling to himself and a couple of anxiety attacks that he wasn't sure he would survive. Rodney was used to doing things. He could work through stressful situations by literally working, his hands repairing technology and his brain running the math to make it work.

There wasn't anything that Rodney could do where he was, locked in a cell, surrounded by Wraith, on his own. The possibility that he would never see Atlantis again became suddenly real. He might not see John again, because the Colonel was supposed to be with him still, and something had already gone wrong there.

Out of ideas, Rodney went back to the old idea, trying to break into the wall to reroute the locks. It wasn't much different than the previous efforts, but this time, Rodney got caught at it. The Wraith that John had turned blue checked up on him while he was elbow-deep in the biomechanics of the wall, and all Rodney could do about it was shuffle back and try to hide the mess on his arms. The Wraith didn’t seem pleased to start with, the usual gloating smile more like a sneer, and Rodney messing with the door just seemed to light a fuse. He opened the gate and was on Rodney before he could take more than two steps back. He didn’t even wait for the guard with the mask to step in, oh no, just had to get all hands-on himself.

“Your kind are not usually so much trouble,” he growled. He grabbed Rodney by the arm, just under the shoulder, and marched him out of the cell.

“It’s a mental stimulation thing - I was just bored…” Rodney managed to say, not quite as affronted by the accusation as his voice made him sound. He was scared because Wraith claws hurt and he didn’t exactly like pain, or his prospects in general, but what else did they expect him to do with his time? “Hey, ow-ow-ow…”

“The ship will heal. It is an annoyance,” the Wraith replied. “Your Colonel Sheppard is missing. That requires more work.”

Rodney tripped over his boots and dragged a step, accidentally landing himself in a square-off with an angry Wraith. “Wait-wait. He’s missing- you said missing?”

The Wraith growled at him and tugged his arm again, rougher than was strictly necessary, but Rodney managed to catch up without having anything dislocated. “But the tracker- you put in the tracker, right?”

“Yes. A tracker. Which is apparently not strong enough to withstand the poison of your biological system,” replied the Wraith. He was very unhappy and likely to take it out on Rodney. He jerked Rodney's arm to make him walk again.

“Right, my system, too. Same stuff. It’ll do the same thing to me,” Rodney said, lying for everything he was worth.

“Yes. Again, an annoyance,” replied the Wraith. He was not at all making Rodney feel any better. “We have to be very careful with our systems because of this.”

"Then where are we going?"

"When there are little buzzing insects creating problems, the problem gets removed," said the Wraith.

"Oh... I'm a dead man," Rodney said, barely breathing.

"Not yet," replied the Wraith.

And Rodney supposed at least that was true, he was technically still alive, and he had Wraith claws digging into his jacket to prove it. But he still ended up in a hallway along a section of organic wall, in what seemed like a darkened, dead section of the ship. Everything was colder than the cells, and Rodney saw a Dart fly past the far end of the hallway, so he was somewhere near the ship's version of a flight deck. Random, unidentifiable things were stored in dark spaces along the walls, in contrast to other areas of the ship where there had been human bodies stashed away in little, fleshy, stasis pods.

For a moment Rodney considered the Darts and their storage capacity. Being sucked into a Dart's computer was probably preferable to anything else, so Rodney almost relaxed. Maybe he would be zapped into millions of pieces but at least he wouldn't know about it.

But no, that was not to be the problem-removal. He was instead shoved into the wall, in a crevice filled with the same stinking, organic skin that Rodney had dug into when he tried to get at the door controls in the wall.

"Nononono," Rodney muttered, catching hold of the edge of the pod-like hole in the wall to try to pull himself back out. The Wraith caught him by the neck and shoved him further into the shallow pod. The dead space lit up faintly around him as he struggled with the fingers wrenched around his neck. The flaps of organic material started to grow and heal across the pod just as they had every time Rodney and the Colonel had torn into the wall.

The hand with the claws traded off for weird tendrils of the wall pinning Rodney back into the pod, just as he had layers of the stuff folded over his arms and chest. The layers across the opening closed up when the Wraith pulled his hand back and Rodney was stuck squirming to get loose inside the pod. It was warmer as the layers stacked up, wrapped around his limbs as fast as he could shake them loose, and he couldn't get the stuff off his neck.

It sealed up like a coffin, if a coffin had walls of fluff that grew and attacked and entwined and buried a person away from reaching the lid. The more Rodney pulled at the material wrapping around his neck, the tighter it wrenched itself. His wrists and arms were as tightly trapped and he lost the fight when the panic took hold. He suddenly had to focus on breathing.

That was when he noticed the smell. It was foul and sharp, like sulfur, definitely poison. Trying to tell himself not to breathe made it worse. The glowing light in the pod was enough to show the wisps of purple colored gas filling the chamber. Rodney actually felt the panic turn off then as he watched the smoke around him. The pod closed tight and snug around his arms and chest, closed over the top of his head, and he slumped into the back of it as his legs gave out, the rest of him very warm and… floaty. His eyes drifted closed, blinking and heavy from the grit of the purple air.

Chapter Text

Cyrwin and his family had been pretty damn scared when John had seen them last, but he couldn't ask them what the problem was. Whether it was the raiders they warned him about, or maybe even Wraith, the policy in the hidden bunker was silence, no talking, no moving, nothing to attract attention. Sheppard stayed low, crawled away from the wall to lay down on the couch in the middle of the room, in the dark, and listened to the quiet until he fell asleep. Ignorance was bliss when he was still sick and hungover and his shoulder hurt; he wasn't useful for much unless he had to be, but even then he knew it would be a short fight, so he took his chances on the couch.

After some solid, clueless, sleep in the basement, John woke up on the couch again, this time remembering how he had gotten there. Unlike when he had passed out, he was the only one in the room, which gave him a moment's pause. He found his pack at the end of the couch, still stuffed with food. That reminded him of what he needed to be getting back to, sooner rather than later, and John, tired and sore, slung the bag over his shoulder. He was way past late. He was still sick but he could walk, he was getting better, so he would figure it out on the road.

They had left the door open for him and John reluctantly risked the steep stairs, only a few stumbles from the threatening vertigo. He poked his head up through the hole in the floor and was promptly licked in the face by a dog. John patted the friendly beast and scritched his ears as he climbed out. Cyrwin looked up at him from the home's small kitchen area where he was working with some kind of dough, probably bread.

"You're awake then?" The greeting was pleasant enough, no trace of the earlier emergency that had them all hidden away underground.

"I think so," replied Sheppard. "How long was I out this time?"

"Well, it's morning again," the man replied. John swore and fisted his hands in his pockets.

"Look, I really gotta get back to the… the well?" His foggy brain couldn't remember what they called it. "I've been gone for days now. It's… not good."

"I'm sure they'll understand. You were mighty sick-"

"They won't. If I don't get back where I need to be, my friend could be killed. I was just sent out to get us food, not to disappear on him," John said, frustrated at himself. Cyrwin frowned, stilled his easy work with the baking.

"You're in trouble?"

"You could say that, yeah," replied John, nodding. "Wasn't kidding when I said I needed help, anyway. Nothing I want to drag anybody into. But I have to get to the well to try to sort it out."

"What kind of trouble?"

John weighed it out, opting to stick with the truth. It had gotten him through so far. "The Wraith have my friend. I have to get him back. We have friends through the well who can do that. I hope."

After tossing the bread dough into a stone pan, Cyrwin started cleaning his hands off on a towel. He looked over at John, face sober and concerned.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know," he said. "We should have seen you to the well the first day. You should have been gone days ago. You were who they were here for last night."

The man might as well have kicked Sheppard in the gut. The Wraith had been there to collect him and he hadn't been found. He was supposed to be where they left him, supposed to get food and go back. There was a damn tracker in his shoulder for a reason, and it wasn’t for John’s health. He had to go back, had to get to his science geek and make sure nothing happened to him. And all John had to do was sit in a hole in the ground, sick as a dog, and the Wraith couldn’t find him. What did that mean for Rodney?

"They- we were hiding from the Wraith?" John pointed to the trap door in the floor, still lying open. Cyrwin nodded.

"They stayed longer than usual. Didn't send anyone into the village, only flew over. No one was pulled away. It was odd, and I would guess you're why," he said.

That didn't make sense to John. The Wraith should have known where he was. They should have been able to track him. He didn't point that out to his host, however. "Look, I didn't mean to bring them here. You've helped me, I don't want anybody to get hurt… I just need to ask for help to get back on the road to the stargate so it doesn't happen again. Just… point me in the right direction again. I should make it this time."

Cyrwin nodded again. He did better than point John in the right direction, though. He got a horse and cart and drove him out to the place. Even with the horse doing all the work, and the dog running along beside, barking and clearing the way of lizards and birds on the road, it took hours. It was a rough ride, especially as nauseous as John was, but it got him there far faster than he would have been able to walk in the heat of the day.

He thanked Cyrwin for the help and tried to send him on his way, but the man seemed reluctant to leave John out on his own.

"What if your friends through the well can't help?" he asked.

"Then they can't help. I still have to get this food back to McKay. We're not dead yet. We can figure something out," John replied.

Cyrwin waved to the stargate, confused. "You could get away, be gone, and you're going to wait for them?"

"Not leaving my friend behind," said John. He pointed the man's attention back to the road. "And I've already dragged too much trouble to your family. So you need to go before anything else happens."

It seemed to get through that time and Cyrwin wished him luck before clicking his horse and cart back toward the village. John waited by the DHD until he was sure the man had gone before he dug into his pack and pulled out the radio earwig. He had to get the team back at Atlantis looped in on his shitty situation and hope they hadn't written anybody off as dead yet. John had no idea how many days they had been gone but it was definitely too long. He dialed the symbols and hoped somebody at home had left the porch light on for him.

Chapter Text

The sun kept dodging behind clouds, just enough to keep away the threat of storms but not enough to promise imminent sunburn. There was no wind at all, which meant the chances of precipitation fell even lower. It was a little muggy and stuffy maybe, but Rodney could live with that. He was warm but not melting, comfortable even.

He usually didn't go out onto the balconies in Atlantis on his own without reason, but there he stood at the railing, no reason at all to be there. No binoculars in hand, no gadgets taking readings, no noise from some underling in his ear demanding he return to fix something. He just stood in the sun, staring out over the edge of the city, across the water that marked the horizon line.

There was probably something he was supposed to be doing. In that moment, though, he didn't care to remember. Rodney was comfortable and relaxed. He wanted to stay that way.

His view of the world flashed, briefly, a misty overlay of glowing blue warping the distant sunset. It was gone in a heartbeat but he noticed it. Rodney frowned and started to reach for the railing, intending to lean against it and look down, to be sure he hadn't seen some echo of an explosion. Something caught his wrist and wrapped around, pulling him back and away from the edge instead.

"Rodney," said John Sheppard's voice, just behind him. John was back, things were fine again. Rodney relaxed and let the man keep hold of his hand then.

"Where were you?" he asked. "I'm on my own out here…"

John seemed to wrap around him as they stood on the balcony, arms around his ribs, chin tucked over Rodney's shoulder. His body snugged up behind, fitting easily against Rodney like they made a habit of public cuddles. Rodney sunk into his hold and smiled. He liked that. He felt the brush of scruff against his jaw and then open-mouthed kisses on his neck, just to make it perfect.

He wasn't certain he remembered when he and the Colonel had been upgraded from first-names friends to cozy-sunset partners, but Rodney felt it was long overdue.

They stood there until Rodney was weak in the knees from the attention his neck and throat and jaw and ear received. His stomach hurt from the need it kicked up. He tried to turn in John's hold, to suggest they go inside while he could still walk, but John moved with him, stayed where he was, just out of reach for any return touch. He caught at Rodney's wrists again, pulling them across his chest.

The world flashed blue again, crisscrossing shades of purple tendrils around it. Rodney tried to look out at the ocean and couldn't move his head. He felt like a pile of mush with an exoskeleton keeping him together, but it was just John.

When the world flashed the next time, there was no ocean horizon at all. Rodney couldn't see past the glowing material at the end of his nose. It was blue-gray with veins of green and purple, soft and smothering compared to the view he had just been enjoying. He was awake, his eyes were wide open, and he had stared out at a still sunset until the moment the switch flipped and the view changed. Purple grit stuck to the fleshy layers around him, teasing his nose with sharp, gagging smells. His stomach hurt, because he was hungry, and he was shaky because he hadn't had food in… he didn't know how long.

Rodney wrestled with the layers of Wraith-ship-guts that wrapped around him, because it definitely hadn't been Sheppard who held him. Oh god was that going to make his life awkward now. He had a healthy imagination and had not at all ever given it permission to feel like reality, to look like reality, and what was he going to do when he saw John again? He was going to apologize, because his mouth tended to work without permission, and that was just the kind of stupid, awkward situation his brain-to-mouth disconnect would put him in.

The imagined horror story of having to explain the apology kept Rodney distracted from the fact that he could not get loose from the fleshy layers of gooey material that had wrapped around him. He just kept trying, frustrated at himself for the warp in reality, taking it out on the stuff that trapped him in the pod. Working. He had something to work on again. Different layers to outsmart. It would work. He was starving and shaking, so something had to work.

Until, of course, the powdery purple gas leaked back into the pod and Rodney couldn't think anymore.

Chapter Text

Since Teyla and Ronon had returned without Rodney and the Colonel, no teams had gone through the stargate. The one that had been out had been called back in. The city had been in lockdown for a week as they focused their efforts on locating a Wraith ship in proximity to the planet their men had been taken from. It was a fool's errand, given that the Wraith used space gates themselves, but it was the only potential lead they had. There was nothing helpful on the planet itself. The stargate on the planet they had disappeared from had no dial-outs between the visits from the Atlantis teams, so either the Wraith ships somehow bypassed the known dialing process, or they had simply flown in without the need of a stargate. All possibilities were being explored, and the Daedalus was on the way for any assist they may need.

The fact of it was that Atlantis was on the lookout for a threat lurking, more so than they were looking to undertake a rescue. It had been over a week; John and Rodney's odds weren't good. They had discussed briefly the possibility that their missing crew were already dead, but no one, least of all Elizabeth, was really ready to commit to the concept as a potential reality.

In terms Elizabeth assumed Sheppard would approve of, the plan in the meantime was that they could play defense and still hope for an opportunity to bring the offense.

Lockdown, however, was still lockdown. No one was expecting the stargate to activate in the middle of the night. Elizabeth had changed her schedule around because of her recent troubles sleeping, so when the alert came in, she was just heading back from a late dinner in the mess. She ran up the stairs to see Hariman at the comms, with Chuck already gone for the day. The man seemed relieved to see her reappearance and quickly reported the gate status; the iris was engaged and so far no signals had come through.

"Well, I guess we'll wait. I'm almost hoping it's a misdial," Elizabeth replied. There were three immediate possibilities that came to mind, the first being that it was her missing team members coming home without a radio or an IDC to offer, or it was a misdial, or it was a distraction before an attack. They weren't ready for an attack, let alone one that tied up the stargate and made it impossible to relocate the expedition if necessary. And she hoped it wasn't her missing teammates because there was no way in hell she was opening the iris without some confirmation of life. That left the option of a misdial, because there was certainly a first time for everything.

There was a crackling in the earwig radio and Elizabeth ducked her head, cupped her hand over it to hear it better. The channel was staticky and quiet, but something was clicking through.

"-lantis…" came a far-away voice through the radio. It wasn't usually that distorted by the stargate. Elizabeth looked to the others in the room, making sure they heard the noise, too. Both of them nodded. Elizabeth frowned and looked over at the watery gate. She triggered her mic.

"You aren't getting through," she said. "Try again, or try another channel."

There was more static on the active line. The words came more clearly that time but they were still layered under white noise and space. "Atlantis, do you read-"

"That's better. Who are you?" Elizabeth asked, not sure yet what to make of the call. She looked again at the screen in front of the comms technician and the screen still showed no VHF, no other data transmission. The barely comprehensible radio call was the only thing coming through.

"-Ant Colonel John Shepp-"

"What the hell-" Elizabeth was beyond frustrated now. Their radios ordinarily had no problems with communication through the stargate. And now, when it was a missing member of her expedition trying to call home, the damn things wouldn't let him get through a full sentence. She looked to the tech in Chuck's chair.

"Was that Colonel Sheppard?" she asked. The man shook his head.

"I wouldn't know, honestly…" he admitted, appropriately uncomfortable, considering he apparently didn't work very often with Sheppard or his team. The other on-duty scientist just shook her head, just as unhelpful. Neither of them recognized the voice. Elizabeth held her hand over her ear again and opened her mic.

"John? If that's you, you aren't getting through-"

"-alive, Elizabeth. We're still alive-" The crackling was going to drive her mad, but she could almost recognize John's voice that time. She had the radio mashed to her ear but she was finally able to hear more than ghost-words under static. "They got-"

Out of patience, Elizabeth ordered the iris open, hoping it would clear up the radio signal. The tech hurried to comply. It helped, but not a lot.

"-but I don't know." That was definitely Sheppard's voice. Elizabeth frowned at the stargate.

"You are hardly getting through, John. Are you alright? Where's Rodney?" she asked.

"I just said-" the static distorted his voice again. "-with the Wraith."

"Where are you?"

"Some planet. I don't know."

"Then come through, we'll figure something out with Colonel Caldwell-" It was a risk, Colonel Sheppard had been gone over a week, but there was something wrong here. He wasn't asking to step through the 'gate.

"Can't, Lizabeth. Tracker. Wraith tracker. Ask Ronon," said John. It almost sounded like he was half yelling to make himself understood. She almost hoped she had misunderstood.

"Then we can send Dr. Beckett-"

"Can't. I gotta get back to Rodney. But we're alive, okay? Don't lock us out yet. We'll figure something out. I promise," said John. "Gonna close the 'gate. We'll check back."

There was a wash of anger that Elizabeth blamed on her lack of sleep and she glared at the wall of blue that stood between her and the annoying Colonel. That was not the answer she wanted, Wraith tracker or not, and he wasn't even going to let her try to argue him out of the idiotic plan to close them off from help. A hardly decipherable radio call was not a proof of life. She needed a location, she needed to know what had happened to her team. She needed solid answers and he was literally giving her static. "Colonel!"

A moment later, the stargate snapped closed. She was only half sure it had locked John Sheppard up on the other side of it. And all Elizabeth was left with were questions.

Chapter Text

Sheppard waited until Cyrwin and the dog were long gone, preferring not to advertise the address of where he was dialing in to, precisely because the kind stranger offering him a ride to the stargate had also offered the address of the planet he was on. The guy knew how the stargates worked. John had tucked the information away in his mind but he didn't plan to use it for anything; there was no way he could risk telling anyone in Atlantis where he was when there was a chance the Wraith would swoop down on him. He had to keep it short, had to resist the urge to just go home while it was right there.

He wasn't leaving Rodney behind, and that was all there was to it.

His radio had been shot at and missed too many times over the last week alone, with Rodney knocking him in the head, with the Wraith handling it, shoving it in and out of their packs and pockets, everything a fragile piece of technology wasn't built to handle. The call to Elizabeth had been frustrating more than helpful, with too much static. He heard her just fine, but she hadn't heard him. All he had to do was let her know they were still alive. It was all he had time to do, in case the Wraith showed up.

The sun was still up when John dialed Atlantis. From what Cyrwin had said, he expected hours of daylight still to go. The man still had to get himself and his cart home in what he said was safety, because the roads weren't safe after dark, he had said. He and his wife had both made that quite clear. Darkness brought trouble on the roads.

So it didn't make sense to John when he did get the stargate open, in the middle of the day, on his own and away from the road, why he had the distinct impression he was being watched. It added to his instinct to close the 'gate and kept the call even shorter than he had planned.

He heard the first shouting hardly a minute after he closed the stargate. A wild, raucous whoop that seemed like the kind of signal that would set off more of them. John wasn't that far from seeing blood-red demon-Wraith in the corner of Cyrwin's basement, so at first, it wasn't clear that he had heard anything at all, but the call set off a rustling across the field from the stargate and John turned to see a line of men running toward from from the trees.

The stargate was right there and the smart retreat for an unarmed man would have been to dial out and hope for a better place to hide than the middle of an open valley surrounded by flat grassland and crops and orchards. But John couldn't dial his way back to McKay. So instead, he ran. He turned on his boot heel and took off across the tall grass toward an overgrown orchard and hoped he still had a little luck left.

He didn't know where to go, other than away from the group of angry-sounding humans in their weird rags and fashionable hunting-blind bog-jackets. John wasn't stupid, he knew they had to be as human as Cyrwin and his family had been, but the tangles of rags and branches and weird moss-looking coats and ponchos the group wore could probably have fooled someone into screaming about monsters and aliens. It was just camouflage and John was glad his military had outgrown the need for rolling in a bog as a disguise. But six to one weren't great odds, crazy camo choices notwithstanding. So John kept running.

He didn't make it far before he heard a faint whistle on the air. Again, Sheppard second-guessed himself, not sure he heard what it sounded like. He looked over his shoulder and saw the group from the woods barreling down on him... and a Wraith Dart flying low and headed his way just past them.

He didn't quite risk stopping, but he did turn around and start waving his arms at the sky like an idiot. It made him an easier target for the people chasing him, too, but John was more worried about catching a ride back to Rodney than he was about the local marauders. All the same, he felt something stab at his ribs under his open jacket and fell, twisting to land on his ass. Just before he made contact with the earth, though, the Dart's handy demolecuralizing beam-thingy worked its magic. Suddenly John was landing on his ass on a Wraith ship's delivery pad like fast food dropped off by a drone.

John climbed up to his knees, not quite making it to his feet before the guards stomped out onto the platform. He held his arms up to show he was still unarmed, instantly regretting it as he felt a sharp pain in his chest and up into his arm. He grimaced through it and set his jaw.

"I got food!" he reported, even though he had no idea if the faceless guard goons even talked to understand him. They yanked his pack off his shoulder and pulled him up. John glanced down and saw his shirt had been torn, and he thought he felt blood, so he pulled his jacket closed and held his right arm tight up against his chest. He stumbled along with the guards and was dumped back in the cell. All of Rodney's stuff was still there, including a few days of food, but there was no McKay.

"Hey!" John said, angry and worried as he realized the cell was empty. He turned on the gate as it closed and shoved at the boney bars. "Where's McKay?"

The guards just grunted at him. They took his pack and left. Rather than hurt his ribs again by pushing with his arms and shoulders, John kicked the gate. It was completely ineffective, but it made him feel a little better. Not much, though. He moved back to the nest of foil blankets and backpack-stuff and sank down on it to check his ribs. Something had sliced him, pretty good, too. He fished around for his other ruined shirt to use to clean up the mess. While he was at it, he took the gifted knife out of his boot and tucked it in Rodney's pack; easily reached but much better hidden.

Whatever the marauders had been throwing, it managed to get Sheppard good, straight along his ribs with a big gash. It was a clean slice, even cut his jacket as it flew. It could have just been a rock as easily as a narrowly missed arrow. John was still a little woozy all over so he wouldn't necessarily notice if it had been poisoned, but the skin around the bloody cut didn't seem to have turned any funny colors. It didn't feel too deep, he just had to get it to stop bleeding.

“This is not my fuckin’ week,” John complained, wincing as he wiped at the cut. He folded the already ruined and crusty shirt up into a mostly-flat wad of cloth and tucked it against the wound, under the shirt he wore. It was just as ripe and John probably stunk more than anything, it had been days of living in the same shirt and he was sick the whole time, but he didn’t have a lot of options. He was bloody and dirty, either way. He had forgotten how cold the ship was, though, and he was left on his own to it this time. So he zipped up his jacket and pinned the makeshift bandage to his side under his arm, hugging his elbow tight up against him to keep it in place. Then he slouched back against the wall and glared at the gates, worried about Rodney now that he knew the blood that had soaked his side wasn’t anything fatal.

That was where Blue found him when the Wraith showed up to snarl at him through the boney gates. He tossed the pack through the holes but didn’t bother opening the gate to get in his face. John didn’t feel like standing up to get yelled at so he stayed where he was, holding the rag out of sight under his jacket and hoping the general smell of him distracted from the scent of blood that had probably dragged the space-vampire out of hiding.

“Where were you?” Blue demanded. John blinked at him.

“Where you put me. Not my damn fault you couldn’t find me,” John returned. It really wasn’t Sheppard’s fault, and he didn’t feel like quibbling over the details with the guys who wanted to eat him. He pointed to the pack next to Blue inside the gate. “I got food like you told me. Days ago. So where’s McKay?”

“Without food, he had to be put in a pod, to be sure he stayed alive,” said Blue, but he sounded rather snively about it and John narrowed his eyes.

“Well, I brought food, so bring him back,” he replied.

Behind the gate, Blue crossed his arms and stood a little taller. “You have yet to answer my question.”

John rolled his eyes. “Fine. What question?”

“Where were you?”

“I told you! On the planet, where you put me. And I ate something that made me sicker than I’ve been in my life, so I don’t know anything more than that. I should have been easy to find,” he said. He was maybe okay with rubbing salt on that particular wound for the Wraith. Blue squinted in at him and unfolded a little.

“You smell foul. This means you’re sick?”

“Bad sick. I am really not a good meal for you guys, seriously,” John said, shaking his head. “Just send us home, save yourselves the indigestion-”

Blue scowled and stomped as he turned on his heel and left. John smirked after him, taking the small triumphs he was allowed. Reminded of food, he stood up to drag the pack over and plopped down again with it propped between his knees, dug out a bit of bread. He had tried little bits of food throughout the day so he was pretty sure he could keep it down this time.

A few minutes later, Blue came back. And, thankfully, he was dragging a dazed-looking Rodney who seemed a little pink and sweaty, his own kind of sick. He needed food. When the gate was opened and Rodney stumbled in, John made room on the emergency blanket to share and waved him over.

“Rodney! C’mere,” he said quickly. Rodney blinked at him and then diverted course. He stopped at the edge of the blanket and squinted at him when John held up a wedge of some kind of white cheese. “Are you real this time?”

That caught Sheppard by surprise and he paused to take stock for himself. It had been a pretty sketchy few days but he was pretty sure he was real this time. He nodded.

“Yeah, Rodney. I’m me,” he said, waving him over with the cheese again. Rodney dropped to his knees and crawled forward the extra couple of feet before he could crash down on the wall next to John. He slumped heavily against his shoulder and was way too warm again; definitely needed to eat food. Rodney took the cheese and John tugged the pack closer to start digging for the jerky-stuff he knew was hidden in the bag somewhere.

“What took so long?” Rodney asked, a familiar complaint that John had certainly been expecting. It made him feel a little better to hear it.

“I got sick, and they couldn’t find me,” he said. “Not my fault they suck.”

Rodney nodded hearty agreement with that. “They suck,” he said around a mouthful of cheese.

“Literally, I guess, but let’s try to avoid any more of that for a while still,” John added. Rodney was out of it because he let out a snort of laughter. John handed him the dried-out chunk of sugar-and-salt scented meat and Rodney shoved the cheese at him in trade. There was something that sounded like a “Thanks” in there somewhere but the guy was busy with more important things.

John wrapped the cheese again and put it back in the bag. He slouched carefully back against the wall after setting the bag away and Rodney leaned in on him again. It pinned John’s arm a little more snug against the cut in his side so he figured maybe Rodney was helping with more than just getting him to warm back up. That changed when Rodney wedged his arm under John’s and pulled him in, a one-armed hug as he curled toward him, like he was cold too. He laced his fingers with John’s, despite the fact that John’s were covered in dried mud and blood. Rodney didn’t seem to notice, he just stared at the gate, spaced out and eating his food. John stayed still, not sure what he had returned to suddenly.

“You okay?” he asked carefully. Rodney nodded, waved with the handful of jerky chunks.

“Much better. Good. All good,” he replied. He frowned a little, seeming to notice the dirt and grass stains on John for the first time. “You?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” John said. He saw a line of purple powder-stuff on Rodney’s face, just off the corner of his eye and reached up to wipe it off with a bit of his jacket sleeve cuff that wasn’t a mess. Rodney didn’t fuss at him for it and settled back to staring at the gate. Well, this is new, John thought, scrunching his nose as he turned his attention to the hall, too. He should probably figure out how to ask about it, as Rodney normally had a much bigger space-bubble. But he didn’t have any ideas that weren’t what he’d already tried, and he didn’t exactly have any complaints, either. They’d figure it out later, when Rodney was a little more like himself.

Chapter Text

The Wraith left them alone again. Apparently they decided food was a sufficient babysitter for their problematic, unwilling houseguests. John wasn't exactly bought off by the food itself; him and food weren't friends again yet even if he wasn't bad off. He remembered being sick and that was enough for him for the time being. But he was bought off by the chance to rest and not be sick, and not be worried about Rodney, and not be worried about missing something.

Maybe where he was at sucked, but he at least had a clear view of his immediate future, and until the Wraith or Rodney opened the doors for him, his future looked like weird walls and sitting still. Aside from that, Rodney had fallen asleep on him, so he existed as a pillow at the moment and was in no hurry to be anything else until he had to be.

When Rodney woke up, he was more like himself, a little of the sharp glare to his expression and general demeanor than he had been when he was coming down off whatever had drugged him in the pods. He kept hold of John's hand though.

"You're sure you're okay?" John asked, eyebrow raised at his friend's friendlier-than-usual attachment. Rodney frowned over at him; that was definitely the usual Rodney-face.

"Aside from the fact that we're stranded on a Wraith ship until they can figure out a safe way to kill us without turning themselves blue, sure, of course, this is entirely fine. Just another Tuesday, for all I know. Which, for the record, I don't know what day of the week it is because we have been here for actual days at this point-"

John harrumphed at him. "Rodney."

"What."

"Not what I meant."

"Then what-" Rodney went quiet in his surprised way as John held their hands up from where Rodney had wrenched them between their sides. He didn't let go, but he was at least trying to illustrate the remaining bit of un-Rodney lurking after the nap. Rodney very noticeably did not let go, either.

"What? You started it," Rodney replied. John blinked at him.

"I started- don't try to pin this on me. You grabbed me," he said in his own defense.

"Well, you kissed me," Rodney replied. John stared at him, jaw slack.

"I did what now?" he asked. "I kissed you- when? What- how?"

"How?!" Rodney echoed, which John wasn't sure he wasn't mocking him, and it might have been fair, but he was allowed to be a little surprised.

"I'm pretty sure I would remember that sort of thing, Rodney-"

"Well, I certainly do," replied Rodney, sounding reasonably offended. John was feeling cornered and he hadn't even done anything for once. He tugged on their hands, trying to get Rodney to see logic telepathically since words weren't working.

"But how? I was on another planet!"

The point seemed to register and Rodney stared at him, the offended, wounded expression fading off to surprise.

"Oh god. You were. You were gone. For days," he remembered. John winced and nodded. He hadn't meant to start a panic. Rodney seemed to process that he still held on to John's hand and then dropped it, waving his hands ineffectively in the air between them as he tried to make reality line up with wherever he had been that he was kissing John Sheppard.

"I'm… I'm sorry, Colonel," he said, very formal, considering it was Rodney when he was trying to hold off some kind of anxiety attack. John frowned at him and then looked down at his boots. He shrugged.

"I mean, there's nothing to be sorry for. I just… think it's shitty there's a me somewhere running around kissing people and it's not me. One of those things where if I'm gonna get stuck with the time, I should at least have done the crime."

"You what?"

"Well, you seemed to be okay with it, so I must not be that bad," John reasoned. Rodney stammered at him, not making any actual words happen. John shrugged, stuck in his head about it; Rodney seemed perfectly fine with him when he thought there had been kissing involved at some point, which seemed like it was a thing that could happen, if John weren't a chicken shit about things that were complicated. And now Rodney was going to be weird about it.

"I was hallucinating, Colonel. There was this… purple stuff. It wasn't real," Rodney clarified, like John was dim. John rolled his eyes and nodded.

"And when you weren't hallucinating, you were fine with it, that's all I'm getting at. So I must have been okay," he replied. It made sense to him, it wasn't his fault the genius wasn't catching on. Rodney made more huffy, frustrated noises and started to stand up, moving away. He paused on his knees though, facing John like there was another lecture coming, and instead caught him by the jacket front to pull him off the wall. John was quickly distracted by the cut at his ribs and the sloppy bandage over it and didn't actually realize Rodney's intent until he felt lips over his own, breath on his face, a nose nuzzled at his cheek.

Well. That was nice. John relaxed. He liked that. Maybe a lot, as he leaned into it, caught at Rodney's jacket blindly to keep him there. When he eased back from the kiss, John didn't let go, and Rodney stared at him, eye to eye.

"That wasn't a hallucination," John pointed out helpfully. "Pretty sure. I didn't bring any of the tripping berries."

"So… that was just us then?" Rodney asked, still sounding uncertain and frustrated about it. John nodded.

"Yeah, that works," he replied. He kissed Rodney then, just to make sure they were even.

Chapter Text

The entire Wraith-ship experience was surreal, completely unwanted, and cold. Rodney thought about volunteering to sort out their ventilation system just for the sake of his own survival, but he didn't have the first clue how their ships functioned to make the argument. They were biological and mechanical and gross. And Rodney stunk bad enough as it was, he didn't need to go adding more ships-guts to it. They barely got drinking water rations from their captors, so asking for access to a shower was out of the question. He and Sheppard had been stuck in the same clothes for over a week, and the Colonel was quite literally crusty from dried blood and mud, and Rodney's nose couldn't take any more than his miserable living conditions already marinated in.

The worst part, though, was that aside from the faceless guards who showed up to drop off the refilled canteens, they seemed to have been forgotten. Not that he missed the Wraiths' company, but they had to have been picked up for something, and it wasn't likely that the reasoning was to simply stink up one of the cells. The Wraith wanted something. They had just given up on trying to get it. And Sheppard still said he didn't know for certain what it was, not exactly. He said it was something to do with access to Atlantis, but that was a pretty broad target for the Wraith to aim for. Holding hostages in their brig wasn't going to magically make the stargate open for them, and Rodney preferred to think that even the immortal humanoid insects were smart enough to know that.

John had woken up swearing a few times. He had taken to only napping because of what were probably dreams, setting his watch alarm to vibrate every twenty minutes so even if he fell asleep, he wouldn't get far under. He said the Wraith were trying to hack his brain when he slept, warned Rodney to be careful about dreaming. Dreams weren't exactly his area of expertise, but Rodney had been able to tap into his own dreams to unlock solutions to particularly nasty equations and technical bugs in the past, so he planned to try again if there were any signs of Wraith shadows while he slept. Lucid dreaming wasn't that hard, he could figure out some kind of work-around that wasn't the sleep-deprivation John was going to end up with.

The Colonel was pretty rough, all around, not just the missed night's sleep. On top of the poisoning he had survived on the planet, he had a cut along his ribs that they had no way to care for. The first aid kits in their packs had been confiscated when they first arrived. The best he had was a bloody shirt, folded up different ways to find a clean-enough patch to protect the injury from his shirt and jacket. Rodney's shirt had traces of the purple hallucinogenic on it and was not to be sacrificed to the bandaging after the mess that the powdery gas in the pods had already caused.

It was a mess, too. There had been many kisses exchanged since Rodney's bent reality had bent the rules, and neither of them seemed to be sorry for it. John was constantly cold, because they were lucky if their cell was twelve degrees Celsius, and it was a wonderful way to pass the time and keep each other warm. The messy part was that it was John, his best friend, and there were rules back home that were very definitely not in their favor when it came to continuing what they had very definitely started.

Assuming they ever made it home. Which was starting to look sketchy as another day passed without a chance to get as far as out of the cell.

By Rodney's best guess, piecing together his own distracted monitoring of his wrist watch, and John's patched-together recollection of his time on another planet, they hadn't seen Atlantis in over ten days. And hour by hour, as they paced the cell, ate their way through their limited rations, even made out like teenagers a few times, Rodney kept track as that number kicked ever closer to twelve days. Elizabeth was going to lock up the 'gate and never let them back through. John's call back to Atlantis probably only made the woman more paranoid; it would have made Rodney change the codes if he had been in her place.

"I had to do something, McKay. Kinda limited on options, here," John pointed out, and he wasn't wrong. But Rodney still worried about it. John left him to it, standing up to pace again, even checking the cut on his ribs in the better light near the gate. He curled his lip at it and folded the shirt up over it, zipped his jacket closed determinedly right up to his chin. Rodney started to ask what he had seen of the wound but boots sounded in the hall and John's attention went sharply to the world beyond the cell door.

Blue showed up, and he was still noticeably paler. A little less blue, but still a lot less Wraith-green. He seemed cranky about that, too.

"You're not looking healthy there… you sure you're okay?" John asked, a polite taunt but still baiting the monster. Rodney stood up but stayed back. There was a knife in their pack, but it was not exactly the best way to win a fight with an angry Wraith.

"What is the status of your supplies?" Blue asked, very intentionally not responding to the question.

"Food's getting low, and we need water, like usual," replied John. The Wraith beyond him waved toward the packs.

"Then get your things. You will have exactly thirty hours this time. When we return, you will be where we leave you or you will be left there and your friend will starve. Is that clear?"

John glanced back at Rodney then. Like he was asking for a second opinion. Rodney shut his mouth, offered a nervous shrug. He didn't like the idea, but he didn't see how they had a lot of room to argue. It seemed to be enough and John looked back out at Blue and nodded.

"Fine," he said. He went back to grab the food pack - the one the knife had been moved to - and shoved one of the foil blankets inside, unfolded and taking up space. There were probably a few MREs still in the pack being left behind so Rodney kept his mouth shut about the loss. He dug through the pockets on the other pack until he found a compass, which would maybe, hopefully, be enough to get John an origin point to return to, and handed it over to the guy who would maybe actually need it. John took the tool and hesitated on the way back to the gate this time, met Rodney face to face, like he had something to say. He didn't quite manage it, instead gave up, leaned in for a kiss. It seemed like saying goodbye and Rodney frowned as he moved away. That wasn't why Rodney had kissed him when they started; even when he was hallucinating, Rodney knew those were for hello, not goodbye.

Still, John went to stand in front of the gates to be let out so that he could chase down another few days of food. The gates opened and he stepped out, unhassled as he adjusted the pack on his back. The gates stayed open, though. Blue waved at Rodney.

"You, too. You will wait in the pods. As before," Blue said. And the Wraith said it with his creepy dripping teeth in a smile before looking over at John. The first hint of a protest from the Colonel had him pulled roughly aside by one of the guards, and John bit his tongue, glared at the Wraith instead.

"I really think it would be better if I stayed in here," Rodney said, a token effort more than an argument. If it worked, great, but if it didn't, well… he at least had more nice things to hallucinate about this time.

"I disagree," said Blue. He curled a hand to invite Rodney out, and it seemed like a good idea, so Rodney went along with the order. When he was out in the hall, he recognized the Wraith suggestion he had gone along with, belatedly sorted out the different thoughts in his head, and looked to John for help. The plan to think of other things only worked when he recognized the Wraith were in his head in the first place. What were they getting out of him when he was under the purple-influence? What had they already dug out?

"Oh boy," he muttered, suddenly fighting an urge to run even though he knew there was nowhere to go. John looked at him for a moment before he caught his hand and tugged him bodily away from the three Wraith around them.

"That wasn't my idea," Rodney said, just for the record. He wasn't sure how else to warn the Colonel that he was so far oh-for-two on keeping the Wraith out of his head. John just squeezed his hand as they were escorted through the ship. Rodney had already seen the route and it didn't hold his attention past the worry about the purple gas-pod he was moving closer to.

When they got to the pod, John kept hold of him. He pointed their joined hands down the hall, at the docking bay just barely visible.

"We're going down there, right?" he asked. The Wraith smiled at him.

"Momentarily."

"Well, then let him see me go. He'll calm down, the whole pod-situation will work out better," John said.

"No," said Blue, not at all interested in negotiating the arrangements.

"Come on. He's gonna keep panicking. And when humans panic, we burn energy, and he's gotta go without food for thirty hours, so he's gotta be calm when you stick him in the pod or he'll burn up energy too fast and be sicker when he gets out," John argued. Blue stared at him and then slid his glare over to Rodney, considering it. Then he relented.

"Fine."

It didn't actually make Rodney any calmer to be led down the hall further to the cavernous ship loading area with the multiple levels of landing pads and the dark drop around them. A few minutes reprieve would still put him back in the pod when Sheppard was gone. But John had an absolutely unrelenting grip on his hand so Rodney went along with it. The Wraith marched them out to a short drop-off pad that jutted out from the side of the cave and then hung back to trap them on it. Blue caught Rodney’s elbow to make him stop, and John stopped when he did, apparently content to wait. There was only one way off the platform and they blocked it, leaving Rodney with John not even halfway to the drop-off pad at the end of the weird dock.

John stood calmly at the neck of the walkway, like he was fine with the arrangement. He kept hold of Rodney's hand, their fingers laced together, and watched the upper levels. He pointed out an approaching Dart with a nod of his head.

"There's our ride," he said quietly. Rodney blinked, not sure he had heard him.

"What-" But suddenly John was moving and dragging Rodney with him.

"Run. Don’t look back,” the Colonel ordered. He pulled Rodney ahead of him and started to push as the Wraith behind them seemed to catch on. The Dart sweeping overhead engaged the beam and Rodney ran for it. He jumped into it, still hanging on to John, and had to hope there wouldn't be any weird entanglements when they got kicked out of the Dart later.

As soon as the thought processed, however, Rodney was dropping down from his jump onto dirt and grass. John Sheppard stumbled along with him, a smile on his face and their hands still folded together.

Chapter Text

The new planet was warmer, more humid than cold. They could run, they had food, so Rodney picked a direction and John followed. The goal was to find a stargate. If not, a city that could point them toward one. Lacking either of those, John just wanted a cave or something to take cover in before the Wraith got a lock on the tracker in his shoulder. There was no way Blue was going to let them stay down on the planet's surface after that dumb trick; John was amazed the Dart that had caught them up hadn't been immediately instructed to put them down again. Blue probably didn’t have the authority he pretended he did. John wasn't going to go complaining about the fact that the Wraith were shit at internal command communications, he was just surprised. And a little tired.

There would be no napping, however, until they found the stargate and a planet somewhere else to hide on. In the meantime, Sheppard was jumpy, on alert for Darts and Wraith troops. It was very different now. Trying to keep Rodney away from the Wraith was nothing at all like looking out for the Darts because they were the only way back to him.

"Maybe when you get home, you guys could put together some kind of 'gate Finder, like a compass or something that always points at the stargates," John suggested at one point, maybe a little too tired for his own good.

"Oh, right. Tuck that one in right after the zedpm and the data crystals. Should only take us a few decades," Rodney replied dryly. John nodded back; it sounded good to him.

An hour later, they still hadn't been scooped up by the Darts. Not a single one had even shown up looking for them. John wasn't sure what to make of it. They didn't find any villages or cities, either, on their trek. Only foothills and trees, and something smelled like water, which made John think maybe they were close to a lake. Eventually the lake came into view and John experienced a sudden change in plans. It was clear water, almost blue in places, and smelled sweet. He was dehydrated and exhausted and there was a whole lake he could drink.

"You don't know if that's safe," Rodney pointed out. John was already shedding the food pack and unzipped his jacket. He climbed out onto some rocks, with the water lapping in and out between them, and stared down at the open water where the rocky edge gave away, thought very seriously about just jumping in.

"I'm gonna worry about that later," Sheppard replied. But he did touch the water with his hand first, waited for any hint of some kind of weird acidic burn or other reaction, and then started washing his hands in it. A few small fish poked their mouths up at him to investigate, but there was no biting. He scooped up a little of the water to taste then. It was a bit salty maybe, but it was fine. John stood up again and moved back across the rocky beach to the dirt and grass where Rodney waited. "We're good."

"Says you and what chemical test?" said Rodney, looking at him like he had lost his mind. John shrugged it off, along with his dirty shirt.

"My nose," he said. He got his shoes and socks off and left them and his pants with his shirt on the pack. Rodney hesitated, looking him awkwardly up and down as John stood there in boxers, bare feet on wet rocks. It took a minute for John to catch on; they had shared rooms and tents before, stripped for emergency quarantine safety washdowns, even found swimming holes on planets that Teyla knew to be safe, and it had all been different then. It didn't maybe-matter then.

John squared his shoulders and looked back at Rodney with a slight grin. It didn't matter now, either.

"Get busy, McKay. We've got shit to do. This is a bath, not a striptease," he said, smug even though he all-over felt like a pile of stale and stinky Wraith-bait. Rodney shut his mouth at least. Cheating just a little, John stepped in long enough to steal a kiss before heading back out over the rocks to the drop off into deeper water. He could see the bottom, crystal clear water warning of any lurking bugs and fish and whatevers that the planet wanted to throw at him. Then he jumped in, because he was tired of over a week of grime and blood and dirt messing with his head. It stung on the cut across his ribs, but not enough to chase him out of the water.

Rodney waited around a few minutes to make sure he wasn't eaten or attacked by leeches before joining him, right around the time John was missing surfboards and the ocean and thinking he needed to get back on solid land. But he kindly waited for Rodney rather than abandon him.

It wasn't like they were on vacation or anything, but a few minutes of not worrying about running seemed like a risk they could take. Especially when Rodney went out to meet John where he was swimming, out where they could barely touch the bottom of the lake, and he caught him in a hug. Then McKay got him back for saying they were too busy for stripteases, with a thorough kiss that hit a lot different when they were little better than naked under the shifting pressure of the lake's idle tide.

Before too long, though, they were back in dirty clothes and hiking along in search of either a stargate or someone who could point them in the direction of one. They snuck food out of the pack along the way rather than risk another stop.

The sun was sinking lower as they took out walking across an overgrown, grassy field. It wasn't the safest course, but Sheppard could see a smoke trail sneaking up into the sky somewhere beyond some trees in that direction and he didn't want to lose the lead. They could stomp down grass as tall as their hip if it would get them home faster, they just had to be careful about it. John led the way, using the pack as a blunt shield to help cut a wider trail.

The trouble, though, hit once they were through. The field was bordered by a long, narrow hill, like a levee or a natural wall. Climbing out wasn't hard, it was only ten feet or so, but the back side of the thing dropped off fast while the grass still disguised the ground below them. John fell on his ass and slid down on his hip, getting tangled in the pack he held out in front of him.

"Ow…" came the report from Rodney a moment later. John had heard him fall, too. He pushed himself back up to his feet and looked out at a well-tended, loose-dirt field, no grass, aside from the occasional weeds. It was farmland, which meant there had to be people somewhere.

Rodney, though, was still making unhappy, pained noises, and John looked over to see he hadn't yet stood up. He moved over to check on him.

"You okay?"

"Peachy," replied Rodney, in a tone that sounded more like pained and angry. He was very carefully trying to pull his jacket away from his arm and that couldn't be a good sign. John crouched beside him to try to help. Rodney allowed it and then immediately started fussing at him for it.

"Oww! Oww- not-"

"Knock it off a minute, Rodney," John grouched back at him. By the time they peeled the jacket sleeve away, Rodney's arm had already started to swell slightly a few inches above the wrist. Sheppard winced in sympathy. "I'm guessing that hurts, huh?"

"What was your first clue," returned Rodney. He was definitely growling. He had probably broken it, because Rodney normally bounced up from his various hits and misses across their bad luck, and this time he hadn't even tried to stand up yet. After a week away from home on questionable rations, he was looking a little leaner than usual and a broken bone might slow him down. Either way, they were both in for a bad time because they had no way to care for it, not even tape, and it was going to make their search for the 'gate that much more difficult.

"It'll be fine until we can get Carson," Rodney said, trying to stubborn his way through it. But he still curled in over the arm, didn't move to stand and leave. John shook his head, held out his hand as he knelt beside him.

"I'm not Carson but lemme check it first," he replied. He had seen his share and knew what to look for, how much they could push it, if at all. There was no blood, no bones sticking out, but if they needed to splint it, they would take the time. Rodney grumbled at him but caught his hand. He could barely grasp back and reacted instantly when John carefully slid his other hand anywhere near the swelling. That was enough and John settled his arm back against Rodney's leg before starting to shrug out of his jacket.

"What are you-"

"Swelling is bad, we've got nothing to work with here, so we're gonna fake it to keep it down. Means elevate it. This is the best we've got for a sling, right?" As he spoke, John set the jacket out and started digging through the food pack for the knife he was very grateful not to have fallen on with the way their luck was going.

"It's your jacket," replied Rodney. "You need that."

John shrugged. "I'm operating under the assumption that we'll be off this planet by dinner and at least one of us will be back in Atlantis for the supply run. I'll get a new jacket later."

"Yeah but you don't have to kill the jacket-" Rodney stopped complaining about it when John actually took the knife to the jacket. It wasn't likely an end to the complaining, just a resignation that there was no point arguing about the loss of the jacket once it was already murdered. He watched and huffed a few times as John cut a few long pieces that he could work out a sling with and some shorter ones to fake a brace to try to apply pressure. Rodney guarded his arm close, squinted at the number of strips being cut up. John finally figured he had stalled enough, tossed the knife back into the pack before he looked back over at his friend.

"Look, this is gonna suck," he said, waving the handful of material. "But it'll help, and we can keep moving. So… let's go."

Rodney sulked, hung onto his arm to keep it out of John's easy grasp, before reluctantly nodding a minute later. He reached for the material John had cut up and started trying to figure out how to wrap his arm himself. John let him fight with it briefly before taking over the project.

"Let me get it, McKay," he said, quiet.

"I can do it," Rodney said. John rolled his eyes.

"You can barely hold the thing. You're shaking, Rodney. If you mess it up, it's just going to hurt worse," John pointed out. Rodney still tried to glare at him but John had stopped paying attention to that face a few years earlier.

"Fine," Rodney said, grousing. John reached over and brushed Rodney's messy, damp hair back as an excuse to pull him into a kiss, just to momentarily distract them both onto something that didn't suck. They were still together, and if they got to the stargate soon enough, maybe they could stay that way. They just had to get Rodney moving again first.

Chapter Text

To the surprise of no one, as the day wore on, so did Rodney's bleak outlook on their whole situation. He kept up a steady rambled complaint, at one point completely, genuinely, unaware of the fact that he was saying anything out loud at all and not caring when he discovered the running monologue hadn't been all in his head. He had tried to keep it there, for what it was worth, but his arm hurt. A lot.

"Yeah, well, breaks do that," John told him, because the Colonel was nothing if not helpful with known facts. Rodney scowled at the back of his head briefly before dropping his attention back to the terrain; one fall was more than enough for the day, thank you. They were still chasing a smoke column, and it had led them out of the grass fields and into an orchard, with fruit on the limbs that looked suspiciously citrusy. Rodney figured John could follow the damn smoke and he would pay more attention to avoiding adding anaphylactic shock to the list of Very Bad Things that had happened since the last time he saw Atlantis.

"Sonuvabitch."

The oath from Sheppard was accompanied by a sudden stop and Rodney nearly walked into the backpack John was wearing. He glanced up in time and angled his body away to protect his pinned arm in case John reversed course from so close. He squinted around them, still seeing only gnarled orchard trees and the random gangling evergreen varieties.

"What?" he asked. John shifted, catching Rodney by the uninjured shoulder to hold him in place as the Colonel started looking around, back at where they had come from, comparing it to the break in the trees Rodney now saw was just ahead of them. The smoke, it turned out, was coming from a quaint little brick and clay house with actual framed glass windows and a tiled roof. Rodney's eyes went wide and he pointed at what John was ignoring. "That's a house!"

"Yeah, I stole from it last time," John replied. He sounded very frustrated. Rodney blinked at him.

"Last time? This- you were here, before?" he asked, unconsciously lowering his voice because John had mentioned food theft, which Rodney knew from experience was no safer crime in the Pegasus galaxy than it was in the Milky Way. John nodded.

"Not the whole time, but for a few minutes. The village is over that way," John said, seeming to get his bearings. He pointed off to the left of the house at a naturally carved trail that was guarded against disappearing in the mud by a few stepping stones and a break in the otherwise overgrown vines and branches of the wild berry bushes. Rodney had seen a few of the bushes along the way so far, but they were in close proximity to lemony-looking fruits and he hadn't investigated. John still hung back, behind the treeline of the orchard, but he didn't look happy about it. Rodney rolled his eyes.

"Look, we need help, so, let's go just… ask. For help. You've been here before, so-" he began, but John shook his head.

"I think the gate's that way," he said, pointing a good ninety-degrees off from the trail by the house. "But I was a little too messed up. I can't… I'm not sure."

Rodney waved at the house with the hand that wasn't tied to his shoulder. "That's why we go ask them. There is fire. There is someone there."

"Yeah, but I had to tell Cyrwin about the Wraith. I don't exactly expect a warm welcome back," John said. Rodney scowled about it again. He wanted cooked food and hospitality and pain medications and there was a house right there-

"Hey, wait. Who's Cyrwin?" Rodney asked, suddenly very concerned that John had been off on another planet for entire days and ended up on any-kind-of-name-basis with the locals.

"The guy who gave me the food-"

"Gave you food? You stole food and they gave you food?"

"Well, I asked nicely at the other place, no one was here," John replied, lowering his volume quite drastically.

"How nicely?" Rodney asked, eyes narrowed. "I was locked in a tentacle-pod for entire days and you took the time to-"

"Oh for fu-" John bit his tongue and walked out of the orchard rather than answer, which did not make Rodney feel any better at all.

"How nicely?" Rodney repeated, heading after him. John turned just enough to glare at him but kept walking toward the house. A minute later he was knocking on the door frame as Rodney caught up. They both looked like they had just gone swimming and then fallen down a dirt hill, so Rodney had the presence of mind to stop glaring at John. He actually put effort into trying to look pitiful, because all he really wanted from anyone, on any planet, was an anti-inflammatory, and he figured looking pitiful and nice was the easier way to achieve that.

The door opened rather quickly and Rodney was startled by John stepping back from it. Two women stood there, an older spinster-looking sort who held the door, and a younger woman beside her, about their age if Rodney had to guess, looking quite surprised.

"Cyrwin said you were gone," said the younger one. She had her arms crossed over her chest, which tended to indicate when a woman was not happy. Rodney looked to John, eyes once again narrowed. How many people did he piss off when he was on the planet for entire days, on his own, unsupervised? Rodney should have interrogated the man rather than kiss him back when he had the chance. John gave an effort at a smile and was very determined to ignore Rodney's silent questions. He motioned vaguely in Mckay's direction, though.

"I was. And now I'm back, and I brought my friend Rodney-" he began. The woman's eyebrows inched up toward her hair-kerchief.

"The one you talked about?" she asked. John paused, scrunched up brow looking confused and pained, and stumbled over an answer of "Maybe? Probably."

"You were asleep at the time," the woman said. John didn't seem to appreciate that addition any more than Rodney did. He was glaring at his friend as John pointedly turned to Rodney to wave introduction to the woman.

"Rodney, this is Sera. Cyrwin's wife. Who gave us the food last time I was here," he said, with very intentional emphasis. Rodney settled slightly but he still was going to want answers later. John placed a hand on his shoulder carefully to turn him toward the women again. "Sera, this is my friend Rodney. Who I probably talked about while I was high on the poison-berries. And we were wondering if we could ask another favor, like last time, but… without the berries."

The Sera-person looked a little wary of offering favors, but the woman who held the door opened it a little wider. "You both look a mess. In. We will see what we can do," said the one with the streaks of white-gray in her hair.

John looked to Sera first, getting her approval before carefully nudging Rodney into the house. Sera let out a frustrated, quiet sigh and stood aside to be sure they followed orders.

"Mawa, this is our guest of a few days ago. I recognize the backpack, so I'm going to make a guess that the favor involves food again," Sera said. She moved to a big cupboard and started looking through baskets, pulling out things that looked suspiciously like foodstuffs. Other things cluttered the homey room, from hanging herbs scenting the air to rows of glass bottles lining the windows and tops of cupboards, and Sera moved around everything without disturbing any of it. Rodney was feeling very confused and crowded closer to John; the woman’s tone of voice suggested anger, but her actions suggested she was going to help.

"Well, food wouldn't be turned down, but we really just need pointed toward the Well," said John. He was being very careful and seemed as confused as Rodney, but he was rolling with it. Mawa closed the door and moved to stand beside Rodney, an actual smile on the woman's face.

"And you should see a doctor," she said, a factual observation, outright cheerful compared to the frustration from Sera.

"He refused it last time," Sera said. "We had to bring Fristy in while he was passed out and feverish because he wouldn't listen to us before then. And Fristy won't come out this far this late in the day."

"We haven't eaten anything since we've been here," John said, like he could reassure them. Sera didn't seem convinced. She tossed something at John and he caught it, some kind of alien apple, and it seemed to pass her test. She hmmmed and went back to pulling food items into a basket. John shuffled the fruit awkwardly, like he wasn’t sure if he was to keep it or give it back, but then he took a bite. He snuck in a second and then handed it to Rodney. On behalf of the woman he had just stolen from, Rodney glared. But then hesitantly tried the fruit since John probably hadn’t given it to him to throw away.

"So you do need care then," said Mawa. "Though thankfully not for the berries, this time."

"If we can get to the Well, we can get help, medical care, on the other side of it," replied John.

"It's an afternoon's walk away from the Well, Colonel," said Mawa. Rodney blinked at her; what did John do, leave a business card behind with these people? But Sheppard looked unsettled by the use of the title, too. The woman carried on. "And from what I can see, you do not have that time."

“Well, not if we’re supposed to be off the roads before dark, no,” replied John.

“And I do not want Wraith in my home,” added Mawa. “So work must be done.”

Rodney nearly choked on a bite of the cherry-sweet apple. John wasn’t much better, he just wasn’t eating. Sera leveled a flat look at the man.

“You were in my home for two days before the Wraith appeared. Mawa’s home is older and doesn’t have the cells. You can’t stay here,” she said. She walked back over to them and started tugging at the pack. “So. I will give you food. And point you toward the Well. Then you are on your own.”

“Thank you,” said John quickly, but Mawa made a chutting noise at Sera.

“I have seen you show more compassion for your dog, child,” the woman said.

“Sometimes there is little room for more than that, Mawa,” Sera replied, not at all bothered. She didn’t seem bothered by much, really. Rodney was really beginning to like the woman, which left him casting a suspicious glance at John again. He got days of starvation in a hallucinogenic pod being crawled on by tentacles, and John got days dealing with Sera and Cyrwin; how was that fair? Rodney hugged his busted arm a little closer, trying to shift it higher in the sling, and not-so-accidentally shoved at John’s shoulder.

“There is plenty of room in my home to help the man, and you’ve the tools and the knowledge,” Mawa replied, pointing to a pillow-strewn couch along the wall in the half of the room that wasn’t a cozy kitchen and was more like a cozy craft-room. Another doorway led off to other parts but Rodney wasn’t one to snoop. John was starting to look a little suspicious himself so Rodney decided he needed to start paying attention to things aside from his personal quest for pain killers.

“Wait, you know about the trackers?” John asked the women, pulling Rodney’s attention very quickly back.

“We’ve seen to their runners before,” said Mawa, even as Sera hissed at her for sharing. “And Sera is a surgeon.”

An exasperated Sera thumped the backpack down on the table to start loading it with the basket she had brought over from the cupboards. “For animals!”

John looked from the two women and their glaring match to Rodney. It wasn’t exactly like a veterinary doctor would be Rodney’s first choice in surgical care, but when the alternative was the Wraith… it became a very close tie.

“Hold on! You can get those things out of people?” he asked, looking to Sera. He pointed at John. “Out of him? The thing hasn’t healed yet, you can’t miss it. As long as you’re not, you know, me.” Rodney held up his broken and trapped wrist just enough to make his point.

“They gave us thirty hours and we’ve been here-” John paused to check his watch. “Eight. It buys us time to get to the Well, and then we’re out of here for good.”

“You’re assuming the Wraith are honest,” said Mawa, which Rodney had to concede was a valid point. Sera cast her a narrow eyed stare.

“You’re assuming that they won’t come for the village when they don’t find these two, whenever they show up,” she said. That was also a valid point, though one Rodney was far less comfortable with.

“They dropped us by the lake, that’s where we’re supposed to be when they come back. They won’t come looking for us here,” John pointed out. “Too far away.”

Sera considered it. The woman still wasn’t happy about it, and Rodney couldn’t exactly blame her, but he and John didn’t have a lot of options at this point, short of John digging the thing out himself. Ronon said he had tried it, had all the scars to prove it, but John hadn’t slowed down enough to consider that option and Rodney hadn’t wanted to volunteer it. Cutting into his friend’s spine wasn’t a responsibility he was quite ready for; John was the furthest thing from a computer console in the city and it could go too badly. But if they had someone who actually knew what they were doing…

“Look, I don’t care if all you’ve got is a dull knife and some whiskey, if you can get this thing out, I’m willing to take the chance,” John said. Sera still didn’t look comfortable with it but she looked to Mawa and the old woman was nodding her head. Mawa made her way briskly to the kitchen area to start buzzing around behind Sera at the table.

“She’ll do this thing, and we’ll see you to the Well in the morning,” the old woman said. It wasn’t a tone Rodney felt inclined to argue with. John looked to him, something like relief on the man’s face despite the very real sense of doom that came along with the project. They were in a house in the middle of an orchard, surrounded by hanging plants and dust and apothecary bottles and the furthest from an operating room that Rodney had ever seen.

“Oh, crap,” muttered Rodney. John nodded apparent agreement, eyebrows arched up, but he took a deep breath and looked around. The table had a set of high-backed chairs and John pulled one out, moving it closest to one of the windows. Then, on second thought, he took it all the way outside. Plenty of light, no mess on their nice wood flooring. It didn’t make Rodney feel any better at all about the hygienics of the situation, but they were admittedly low on options, and maybe only a few hours walk from proper health care, if they could just make it that far.

“How can I help get this done?” John asked as he came back inside. “Out there, you can see, I can move the table-”

“Settle yourself, Colonel. She has her tools. In five minutes we’ll be done,” said Mawa. The woman was fussing over the stove with a pot of water, like she planned to make tea. Sera frowned between them before moving to the other, unseen rooms of the house and returning with a pack of her own. She also carried towels and cloth that looked like it might be rolled bandages.

“You are lucky you found us here,” she said, her tone still flat and unamused. “I would not be at all inclined to this in my own home. You would be lucky if even Fristy would have taken you in. Only Mawa. If you bring trouble-”

“We’re trying not to, ma’am,” John reported, sounding like a Boy Scout if Rodney had ever heard one. He added in the puppy eyes and Rodney caught his arm and made him get away from the women’s kitchen spaces to let them work. He parked them on the low couch along the wall and wedged in, shoulder to shoulder, and marinated in a weird mix of worry and excited relief.

A minute later, Mawa was shoving something in John’s hand and telling him to drink. He curled his nose at it and Sera crossed her arms at him. “You ate poisoned berries. You can drink Mawa’s tea.”

Her tone made Rodney swallow the demand to know what it was, and all he heard from John was a “Yes ma’am.” Then John downed the whole mug like it was a bottle of Coors. Rodney watched from beside him, across the room, as the two women boiled a handful of knives and metal skewers in the pot of tea on the old wood burning stove that John had chased down from the hills, across the fields, for an hour. Maybe the idiot’s gut instinct actually worked.

Rodney reconsidered that assessment when John slumped suddenly into his shoulder, like he had fallen asleep, and startled himself awake again from the drop. He blinked at Rodney from right up close and his eyes were wide black dots that focused unevenly.

"Uh…" John struggled with words and made a few more sounds that seemed to be at least aiming at speech. Rodney looked up at the pair who had so reluctantly insisted on helping.

"What was that tea?" he asked, however belatedly.

"You don't cut a man open while he's awake, Rodney," Mawa said, her voice hushed but no less chiding. Sera and Mawa approached then to pull John up to his feet, each of the women grabbing an arm to tug over their shoulders to get him mostly standing and haul him away from Rodney and the couch. He stumbled up and followed them out to the chair John had set on the path outside, Mawa snapping fingers at Rodney until he helped brace the back so they could prop John up against it. He was only still barely conscious, gangly and awkward and confused. Rodney hung on to the back of the chair to help squat down to be eye level with John, shushing him without paying attention to what he even said. Whatever was in that tea, it seemed to be effective, and there was the Colonel, fighting it instead of letting it knock him out.

"Colonel- look at me," Rodney tried, catching his friend's shoulder. It almost worked. "John! Just stop! If we're going to do this, you have to stop. And we're already in this far, so..."

The hazel eyes stared blurrily at him before John stilled and nodded, setting his chin down on the rounded back of the chair. Rodney stood up and moved his hand down to rest between John's head and the wood.

Mawa came out carrying a basket with towels and the knives in it, Sera following her a few steps behind. The older of the pair handed Rodney a strap of leather that had been folded and sewn around something that felt like it was possibly a soft wood, instructed him to put it in John's mouth and make sure he bit down on it and not his own tongue or lips. That was no easy task one-handed, but he managed it, only to then have to help Sera pry John's shirt up and as close to off as they could manage. John was in and out of consciousness still, and sometimes he helped and sometimes he was dead weight. When they got the shirt up around his neck and somewhat padding the chair at his chin, John caught Rodney at the belt and tugged him in, wrapping arms around him and pinning them both to the chair.

"Oh no…" Rodney grunted, just managing to dodge to keep his injured arm from getting trapped against it, too. He ended up with the busted arm leaned on the back of John's head as the man held on. He looked to Sera. "Is this- can he do that?"

"He can try," said Sera, offering a shrug. Mawa grinned at him.

"Just don't let him bite you," she said, far too cheerful as she snapped her teeth on the words. She held the basket up to Sera and Rodney saw the big mug tucked inside it with towels all around and the small knives sticking handle-out in the steaming tea. Rodney suddenly realized he was going to have a full view of the surgery this way and that was not at all his favorite idea. He shuffled uncomfortably, debated trying to coax John into letting him go, but that ultimately failed. It wasn't like Sheppard was having an enjoyable afternoon, either. It might as well suck for both of them.

Rodney tucked his other arm behind John's neck, just at the top of his shoulders and well out of the way, and tried to curl up around his friend's hold on him. He just barely managed a kiss to his forehead, but he could hang on and maybe help him stay still. And as a bonus, he didn't have to watch the women take knives to John's back. They were better than the Wraith, maybe, but every instinct in him yelled panic at the risks involved.

He was very careful not to watch what the two women did, instead tried to focus on what John was doing, whether he was awake or out of it. He stayed tense and quiet for what felt like minutes, arms wrapped around Rodney and not letting up at all the only way Rodney knew he was still awake. Then he was shouting and the tension doubled and Rodney had to pull him in with his uninjured arm to keep him still. He stayed curled around John as much as he could, trying to help, trying to offer comfort, but for fucks sake he was the worst one on their team for that. He was bad at all of anything having to do with injuries, particularly when he was the injured one, and there he was trying to ramble John through having his back sliced open and poked around in. There was a lot of swearing on both their parts, John's muffled by the leather-wrapped stick in his mouth, and Rodney's by John shoving into his chin.

They survived it, though. John passed out officially just before Sera pulled the first piece out and handed it to Mawa. Smaller pieces followed, but by then, John had gone slack and he was still wrapped around Rodney only because he had pried his fingers through belt loops in among his efforts at climbing into Rodney's chest through the back of the chair. Then all that was left to do was to apply some stitches and cover the wound, and Rodney could strangely handle that part. Not that he knew what he was looking at, but he could supervise to make sure it all stopped bleeding. Sort of. Someday he was going to have to let Carson teach him basic first aid. It didn't do John any good now, but it was obviously something that would make sense to know, rather than always rely on Teyla and Ronon for the field-medic work when home was out of reach.

Once he was cleaned up and the mess was all put away, Sera and Mawa came back to carry John inside. He was definitely thoroughly out cold this time, though, so they more or less dragged him between them with his weight across their shoulders. Rodney couldn't even offer to help. He followed them inside and supervised again as they got John sprawled out on the couch.

"He should be awake in a few hours," Sera told him. Mawa went to the table and fished into the now-bloody tea water in amongst the used towels in the basket. She came back holding the chip that had been attached, according to Sera, to the back of John's shoulder blade.

"There's your trouble," Mawa said, handing Rodney the tracker. Rodney took it, looked it over. It was just like the rest of the Wraith technology, some parts organic and some parts mechanical. Rodney had been stuck in a pod with tentacles climbing around him, choking him and pinning him, but John had the damn things burrowing holes in his shoulder from the inside out.

There were no lights anywhere on the tracker, and it made sense that the thing would die when removed from the host body. But just to be on the safe side, Rodney took it outside. He set it on one of the wide flagstone steps and started pounding away at it with one of the loose river rocks scattered throughout Mawa's garden, until the mechanical pieces were in shreds and the organics were an ugly stain on the stones. The Wraith would have to work a little harder than a stupid tracker if they wanted to find him and Sheppard again. But Rodney still wasn't planning on waiting around long to let themselves be found, either.

Chapter Text

The Colonel and Rodney had been gone for thirteen days. It was still a gamble that they were alive at all. But when John had called in, over his absolutely terrible radio connection, the clearest signal Chuck's equipment could receive had actually been from the subcutaneous transmitter. Whatever was wrong with the radio, it had to be internal, because the frequency from the tracker showed up perfectly. And through an ingenious bit of math and some computer magic, Zelenka had figured out how to patch together an estimation of how far the signal had traveled based on the degradation through the wormhole. That in and of itself wasn't actionable information, but the computers then spent three days looking for stargates that were approximately the same distance away.

They were chasing down a far-fetched lead and had wasted a ridiculous amount of time, and the city's energy, opening and closing the gate, sending out a radio call across some distant planet, just hoping for a response. But it was the only lead they had. And if their stargate was busy then there was less opportunity for attack, so it was as much of a defensive chore as it was taking the initiative on offense.

In that time, they had dialed twenty-nine gates. Elizabeth watched the thirtieth wormhole connection engage from the catwalk in front of her office. She stifled a yawn and waited for the sign from Chuck.

"Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard, please respond," Elizabeth said into her headset. Everyone on that channel in the city was tired of the script being repeated for a half an hour, once an hour, over ten hours a day, but there wasn't much to be done about it. It wasn't like Elizabeth could read them a novel for the sake of variety when the point in the call was to catch John's attention again. "This is Dr. Weir. Colonel, please come in."

The even, loud tone repeated three times before there was static on the line. Elizabeth looked over at Chuck for confirmation that she had heard anything at all. The intent, surprised look on his face and Zelenka's said that Elizabeth wasn't imagining things. She stood up from the railing and moved to stand behind his console instead. Elizabeth tried again.

"Elizabeth!" The signal was clear and easily understood this time, and that was definitely Rodney's voice. Elizabeth smiled as Zelenka let out a "You are kidding with this," and Chuck gave a silent fist-pump in cheer.

"Rodney! It's good to hear your voice," Elizabeth said. "Where are you?"

"Some planet. We got the Wraith tracker out of John, but we can't get him up. I swear to God he's allergic to everything edible on this planet," said Rodney, speaking quickly. "We were supposed to go to the 'gate this morning. We don't have our IDCs, Elizabeth. We have nothing. I bricked my laptops but we lost them on the ship-"

"What do you mean, about John? Do I need to send Carson?" Elizabeth asked.

"Yes, but I don't know where to send him. We aren't at the gate yet. John's still… snoring."

"If we have the right planet, we can find you. John's transmitter is what we used to narrow down the planet belt. Once we get close enough, in a Jumper, they'll be able to find you."

"This place- it's a cottage. There was an orchard and now it's a village- There’s these damn rose bushes where there should be a street-"

"I can't see, Rodney," said Elizabeth, trying to calm Rodney before he got too frustrated. "Just wait a few minutes… We're going to send a Jumper to scan-"

"There's no place for a Jumper here, is what I'm saying, Elizabeth. They'll have to hike in either way. We can try to meet you, but I can't carry Sheppard, and he won't wake up," Rodney cut in. "I've been trying all night. This stuff isn't supposed to do this to people, but apparently not all humans are the same."

There was an edge to Rodney's voice that said something was wrong, more than just with John. Elizabeth paused long enough to pass along the news to Lorne as the Major jogged into the room. He was a little slow to arrive, but put-together as always, and Elizabeth didn't begrudge him the delay after twenty-nine false alarms.

"Get a team, get Dr. Beckett, and a stretcher," Elizabeth said quickly. "You'll have to scan for them when you get there, Rodney doesn't know where he is."

"Who's with them?" Lorne asked.

"I'm still getting to that," Elizabeth replied. Lorne nodded.

"What channel?"

"Elizabeth? Are you there?" Rodney asked in her ear. Elizabeth nodded automatically and then shook her head at herself for it; she was catching Rodney's frustration again. She held up three fingers to answer Lorne's question and turned her attention back to the stargate iris to stay focused on just her missing team. Lorne knew what to do and was already leaving.

"I'm here, Rodney. We're sending a team. Major Lorne is getting Carson now," said Elizabeth. "Help is on the way, alright? Are you okay?"

"No! I broke my arm, and I think there was something on the ship, I'm getting really… it's not clear. I don't know. We moved to the village because they had a cart to move the Colonel but we can't just shove him through the gate, can we-"

They certainly could have and Elizabeth frowned at him for it. "You could have-"

"I can't! Arm! Broken!" Rodney stopped himself, very upset about something. "I'm tired."

“Rodney, who’s there with you? Are you safe?” Elizabeth asked, trying to project calm in her voice despite growing worry.

“Yes, of course, John knows these people,” said Rodney. “Well, they helped him before, and they all know his name, anyway. I don’t know. They have kids, Elizabeth. And a dog. Damn it. Why doesn’t anybody have cats? If I see a cat, I’m bringing it home.”

Elizabeth blinked at the information rush ending on a threat to kidnap a cat. Down on the lower level, Carson and one of his nurses were following Lorne to meet up with Lorne’s team in the Jumper bay, medical gear bags over their shoulders.

“They may be drugged, Carson,” Elizabeth called down to him. The doctor nodded, reached up to tap his ear.

“Aye, Elizabeth. I’ve been listening,” he replied. That was good news at least and Elizabeth let herself relax against the railing again.

“Rodney, the Jumper will be leaving very soon. They’ll be searching for you from the planet within minutes. You’ll be okay.”

“Tell him to bring something to keep me awake. And really good pain killers. I had to walk all the way here this morning. And they said it’s still another few hours to the gate and I don’t want to walk that far. John got to sleep through everything-”

“Why?”

The simple question seemed to throw Rodney off track and the complaining shifted. “Because you should probably be asleep when somebody goes digging around in your shoulder to pull out a piece of Wraith tech an inch wide with tentacles, Elizabeth. Why else- do you think we’d let them take it out without-”

“What happened to your arm? Did they take care of that?” she asked, trying to find him something to focus on that wasn’t raising the man’s blood pressure.

“I fell off a wall, which shouldn’t have been a wall, there’s no sense building walls around their food like that, we weren’t stealing anything. It was grass, not even food, there was nothing to take anyway-”

“Did they give you something for the pain, Rodney?”

“Tea? And breakfast. Well, and dinner last night. No, there’s something… I’m fidgety. Itchy. Couldn’t sleep. I think there was something in the pods. Delayed reaction. Things are... weird.”

“Yes. I can tell that from here,” replied Elizabeth.

“How? You’re there, not here. You can’t see me here,” said Rodney.

“You don’t sound like yourself, Rodney,” said Elizabeth. She sighed, frustrated, and tightened her hands over the edge of the railing. The Jumper made its entrance then, dropping quietly down to center in front of the stargate before easing out and away. A moment later, Lorne’s voice was over the radio.

“Hey, McKay? Why don’t you head outside, just so we can make sure there’s no interference on the transmitter when we get out there to you,” the Major said, his usual cheerful self but with a definite note of placating their not-quite-there, missing genius. The request, however, was met with silence. Elizabeth clicked her radio on and then off again, just to be sure it wasn’t a technical error on her side. She looked back at the two men still monitoring the line from Ops and saw the same confusion on their faces as she felt on her own.

“Rodney?” she asked into the quiet. There was again no response for a long minute. Then Lorne spoke up.

“Uh, I’m not getting any signal pings off their transmitters, Doc.”

Chapter Text

Consciousness wasn't happening. His head was stuffed with oil-soaked cotton and thinking hurt. Dreaming didn't, though. John kept dropping back into sleep, in between fuzzy, blurry-eyed efforts at waking up, and ending up back in the same dream. Some camping trip, that sometimes had a cabin and sometimes had a tent, and the ocean was right there with a perfect cove and private beach, and breakers within sight, and Rodney in the background, bitching about the outdoors the whole time. Some part of John knew it was a dream, but it felt real enough to stay under, especially when waking up hurt all the way to his eyelids.

It was hard to sleep through Rodney talking, though. The more his voice broke through, the more John heard the panic in it. He kept mentioning Elizabeth, like he was talking to her, and John wanted to go home. He had to wake up for that. So John gradually climbed out of his head enough to open his eyes and try to make sense of reality, despite the hang-on memories of the dream.

The room he found himself in was dark and open, not at all the cramped and bright cottage he remembered being in last. There was a lamp lit on the wall, casting wavering light and dim shadows. It was familiar, somehow, and as the fog lifted, Sheppard remembered the hiding-cellar under Cyrwin and Sera's home. He remembered the couch and managed to not fall off of it this time as he became aware. Sitting up hurt like hell until he remembered not to reach for the assistance of grabbing the back of the bench to pull himself up. His shoulder had been dug into with knives or something, of course it was going to hurt. There were bandages tugging under his dirty shirt and he hoped they were cleaner.

Once John had found some vague memory of the last thing he could remember, he could worry about remembering the rest. Like how the hell he had wound up at Cyrwin's place, over an hour's walk away from where he started out, with no memory of anything in between. And why had Rodney gone quiet?

"McKay?" John asked, staring at the floor as he cautiously tried to get to his feet. There was no response. Sheppard looked around the room, at the small sitting area with the rugs and the curtained-off beds along the walls, the open door to the bathroom-area. No Rodney. With that area cleared, he turned toward the stairs out.

And there was Rodney, in a heap on the floor in front of them.

"What the hell-" John rushed to check on his friend, quickly finding a pulse and remembering to breathe. He saw that Rodney's arm had been rewrapped, better cared for than scraps of a sacrificed jacket tying it close, with a proper sling this time. But whatever work had been done there had likely been ruined by the fall to the floor. There was a cut and forming bruise over the man's brow that he had gotten from either a tumble down the stairs or someone taking some kind of blunt object to his head. John kept a hand at his friend's uninjured wrist, a simple reassurance that aside from a concussion, Rodney was okay. Then he looked up at the stairs. The hatch was closed, unlike the last time John had seen the room.

“Hey!” Sheppard called up at the doors. If there was some sort of attack going on, where stealth was needed, Cyrwin’s family would be in their little hidey-hole. But they might not like their guests making a racket in it in the meantime, either. The noise might bring Rodney around, too. John shouted up at Cyrwin and Sera a few more times before he figured he had to make a choice. He knelt to press a kiss to Rodney’s forehead, feeling the slight fever from the newest injury, and made himself stand up again. His back hurt but he could move, and he climbed the stairs easier than he had when he was high and sick. Sheppard set his shoulder to the hatch over the stairs and shoved at it, not actually surprised when it didn’t give. There was a slight movement, hardly an inch, before it thunked back at him and he heard a clatter of metal. Like a lock, not like the furniture that had been attached to the panel on the topside.

Anger heating up his thoughts, John went quiet. He kept his attention on the hatch as he went back down the stairs, step at a time, not turning his back to the room’s one escape route. It was a damn Wraith-cellar, there would be no back door access. And even if there was one, it wouldn’t do him any good until he had Rodney back up on his feet. That meant getting Rodney to as much of a defensible position as he could manage and getting him awake.

Sheppard could kick himself because he should have seen this all coming, shouldn’t have let himself be put down like he had, but there was nothing he could do about it now. At least the tracker had to be out. His shoulder hurt too badly for nothing to have happened there. All the same, he caught Rodney by the jacket lapel and hefted, dragging as best as he could to get the man away from the stairs. He couldn’t get far, but he got them to an empty corner, got Rodney propped up against the brick-covered wall and sitting up as best as he could.

Then John set to moving furniture around in the room, looking to own whatever of the space he could. Careful not to use his right arm too much, he shoved the couch-like bench with the pillows up against the stairs and started building a wall to direct that eventual traffic away from the corner Sheppard was declaring as his. The pillows and blanket were tossed off toward Rodney and the three smaller chairs and various tables in the room were added to the stack on top of the bare bench frame. He moved the room’s one small lantern to another corner, putting the entry area in darkness again. When he was done, his shoulder hurt, as did the slice at his ribs that wasn’t hardly healed, and he thought maybe he was bleeding again, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He couldn’t see the bandages on his back, let alone reach them to try to fix whatever had happened.

He found their food pack and kept it with them in the fortified corner he had made. At best it bought him time, he could only knock over his furniture wall once, but it might make someone think twice about wandering down without something to trade. It was their house, after all, and they did use the room, so it was likely Sera didn't want her furniture destroyed before the next time they went hiding from the Wraith.

Shoving the traitors out of his mind, John dug into the pack to see what they had left of the food. Sera had at least repacked it the day before so John had a variety of fruits and nonperishables to choose from; that was nice of her. None of them woke him up when waved under Rodney's nose, though.

"Rodney, I need you to snap outta this, buddy," John said. He crouched next to Rodney and tried again to rouse him, prying at an eyelid and being as obnoxious as he could be without potentially jarring the man's head and neck more than he already had in moving him. It slowly worked and Rodney woke up groggily swearing at him and swatting his hands away.

"What the hell happened, McKay?" John asked quickly. Rodney stared at him in the dark, blinking and probably half blind.

"What- why- hey, you woke up-" The man's voice said he hadn't fully yet. John nodded.

"And you were on the ground and the front door's locked, so what happened?"

Rodney's mouth dropped open a little and he stared as the big brain fought through the likely concussion to process what John told him. He suddenly clapped a hand at his ear, a familiar motion John did often enough to trigger a radio.

"They took my radio."

"Radio?"

Rodney nodded. "I went upstairs with it. Lorne's looking for us. But the guy took it and… I don't remember."

"Well, there's enough evidence to take a guess that somebody hit you over the head, so the not remembering part makes sense," John replied. "If your head hurts, that's probably why."

"Yeah. But I was sick before then. Something's wrong, I don't know what, so sure, let's add concussion to it, too." Rodney was very sarcastically dismissive of something he was usually not so cool about. John squinted at him in the dark.

"What? Did you eat anything that looked like berries?"

"No. Vegetables and this… chicken thing," replied Rodney. He shook his head. "But it started before then. I couldn't sleep. Not once. All night. And I was getting that itchy, weird feeling, like from the pods. And I just… I'm tired now, but before? I needed something and I couldn't find it and you know how I get when I don't eat? But they gave me food."

Just what they needed. Another batch of problems. If there was anything McKay was good at, it was definitely finding problems.

"No sleeping. Stay awake," John ordered. It was the only answer he had. "Unless you know what's going on better than I do, we need to be ready to run the first chance we get. And we can't do that if you're out flat from a concussion."

He was pretty sure Rodney was glaring at him in the dark. "Oh, sure, you sleep it off for the last, what, twenty four hours, but if I need a nap-"

"You just had one, McKay. That's all you're gonna get," John said. Despite the very understood threat of concussion, McKay was ramping up an argument to that, on principle, but the sound of the hatch above the stairs moving seemed to change his mind. John motioned him to quiet before standing up to look out over his furniture-wall at the crack of sunlight slowly opening.

"Colonel?"

It was Cyrwin, and there was no obvious weapon in the man's hand, so John eased around the wall and moved to meet him at the stairs, to keep the stranger out of his own cellar. He squinted up at daylight and crossed his arms, with Cyrwin only a few steps down the stairwell.

"Cyrwin… just what is going on here?" John said, only barely not growling about it. The blond man on the stairs stopped where he was, more shadowed outline than anything, with the cellar dark and the sunlight behind him. Sera stood holding the hatch, and John saw another pair of boots up there, but it wasn't Mawa.

"The Chancellor was tasked with a project," Cyrwin said. To his credit, he didn't sound happy about it. "Until he has what he needs, you're to stay here."

"Tasked by who?" John replied. He felt Rodney bump up against his shoulder as his friend leaned on the brick wall to the stairwell.

"And what's the project have to do with us?" Rodney asked. "Our friends are here, looking for us…"

"We could be out of here in five minutes if you just give us that headset back," John added in. "We'd be out of the way of whatever the project is."

Cyrwin looked up at the hatch briefly before shaking his head, half turning back to them. "No, he must speak with you. Now that you're awake-"

"Well, we want to go home. We're not exactly feeling chatty, locked up down here," John replied.

"Colonel, Mawa has been added to the offering for providing you aid, and should there be more difficulty, my family will be next. So whether you feel chatty or not, you're staying here," said Cyrwin. That news gave John a moment's pause to consider it. The man's family had two kids in it, neither one of them a day over nine years old. He didn't know what the offering was, but it didn't sound like a good place for kids.

"I would like to get Mawa un-added to the offering," he said, cautious. "It's not her fault. I stole the food from her."

There was a long quiet from Cyrwin. He finally nodded. "I'll pass that along to the Chancellor."

"And let Rodney go find our friends. Whatever the Chancellor needs to know, I can answer it. McKay's just a geek, he won't know anything," John added, just in case the lies were going to sell with these people. It was worth a shot. Rodney shoved at his shoulder and kicked at the back of his boot but very noticeably did not argue. Even if the genius was feeling fuzzy, he could apparently still keep up with a scheme.

"He's a... geek?" Cyrwin asked, confusion and concern plain in his voice. Rodney rolled his eyes and started to correct the record, but John caught his wrist to distract him.

"He means I'm-"

"The village idiot, and now he's getting sick, so when you add in the fact that somebody slammed him over the head and pushed him down the stairs, he's not the guy with any answers," John interrupted, weathering the glare from Rodney over it. And it was possibly more proof that something really was wrong with Rodney because the man didn't argue. Again. That was twice in two minutes. Something was definitely up.

"I'll… mention it to the Chancellor," said Cyrwin, awkward and uncomfortable.

"At least get him up to a doctor to check his head." John pressed because Cyrwin was the middleman and not very high up on the food chain. Maybe, like old Blue the Wraith, the guy in the middle holding the jail keys would screw up if they hassled him enough. "Just to make sure he's okay. Or get us some medicine if we're gonna be stuck here. Pain killers, anti-inflammatories, antibiotics..."

As he spoke, John tugged on Rodney's uninjured arm and urged him up the first steps. It had the expected effect and Cyrwin waved a hand to hold them back, retreated up a step himself.

"Wait! I have to ask the Chancellor. If we can- he will have to approve it," the man said. He was out of his element. That strangely put Rodney and John at the advantage.

"Fine, tell him that whatever he wants to know, Rodney gets cared for by a doctor first," Sheppard added, just to up the ante. Cyrwin nodded briefly but he was already heading back up the stairs. Sera dropped the door closed the second the man was out on the upper floor.

Rodney wasted absolutely no time smacking John in the arm. "Village idiot?!" he hissed at him.

John waved up at the hatch as it was audibly locked twenty feet above them. He kept his voice quiet.

"You heard him. Whatever's going on, it's gonna hit his family. We asked for food, not human sacrifices in our names," he replied. "They're little kids, Rodney."

The glare softened a little but it didn't settle anything. John carefully caught his arm and pulled him away from the echo-chamber of the stairs. It was darkest there and he didn't want to be potentially overheard from above or misunderstood because they couldn't see each other. This was important, damn it.

"Look, I'm thinking this room is shielded, because the Darts couldn't find me down here last time. So I was trying to get him to take you up to a doctor or something. If Elizabeth really did send someone for us, they could maybe find us. If we're not down here."

Rodney sat with that for a moment, scowling at him for it. "I'm not the village idiot."

"Neither is he, but I'm hoping he bought it anyway if it'll get you up where our guys can find you," John replied. Rodney considered it again, blinking at him, strangely slow.

"Us," he said. He thwapped his free hand at John's chest again. "They'll find us."

"Not down here," John replied. But he nodded anyway because Rodney at least had the main idea down. Rodney still had his jaw set, but the glare had backed off. He was almost pouting as he squinted at him in the dark.

"My head hurts," he reported. He shifted to lean closer, dropping his forehead down to John's shoulder, probably putting a crick in his neck to do it. John carefully tucked an arm around him in a hug.

"I'm sorry I called you the village idiot," he said, quiet. "I'm just… making shit up as I go."

"So you're the idiot, then," Rodney replied, nodding.

John rolled his eyes. "Sure. Just not enough of one that I have the excuse to get my head examined upstairs where Lorne can find us. That's where you come in."

Rodney lifted his head to glare at him from up close and John snuck in a kiss in a blatant effort to distract him from a lecture.

Chapter Text

As much as it pissed him off, John's blatant travesty of a lie painting Rodney as the village idiot who was getting sick actually managed to work. He was called up and out of the shielded, buried room. That part, Rodney understood, was good. They could be found that way.

The less-good part was that John wasn't invited with him, and Rodney was not left in the same building. It was dark when Cyrwin escorted him outside, and the little cottages and buildings along the rose-bush lined streets had their lanterns out, and they all looked the same to him. And his mind was still going too fast, which amounted to a certain kind of panic when he couldn't process the differences between the buildings to know he could find his way back to John.

Being marched to another building and deposited in front of a man claiming to be their version of a doctor wasn't any more reassuring. The man thought Rodney was an idiot, talked to him like he had to use small and slow words, and didn't believe him at all when he tried to explain the strange disconnected feeling that came with the added confusion of the headache.

"I know what a concussion is, damn it!" Rodney yelled at the man. "I'm not a medical doctor, but I've had them, and they're not this. They're not the… the… this paranoia. This is disorganized, this is loud, like everything is going fast, and I can't keep up-"

"Did you eat the berries, like your friend?" their healer asked, somehow making his voice go impossibly slower as he frowned. The sound warbled like a slowed-down record player. Rodney blinked at him. He looked down at his shirt and jacket, cursing at the yellow light of the room's old fashioned lanterns, just barely worth presuming were electric.

"Am I purple? Is there any of the pod dust-"

"Pod dust?"

Rodney struggled with his jacket, cursing the sling as it bit into his broken wrist for the effort. "Wraith-pods. It was drugged-"

"There's nothing," Fristy said, and he slapped at the jacket and looked at his hand, showing Rodney there was no powder or dust or purple anything. Rodney stared, confused and hating it. Nothing felt real. It had to be the pods. The doctor asked again what Rodney had eaten and he closed his eyes and tried to focus, tried to remember, stumbled around in his empty-feeling head until he landed on something more useful than reciting the Pythagorean theorem to make noise.

"Chicken thing. Salad. Water. Tea-"

"What tea?"

"I- how the hell should I know what kind of tea you have here? Mawa told me to drink it, I drank it-" Rodney bit off on the swearing because he remembered something about having gotten the old woman in trouble already.

If he had just further damned her, Fristy didn't seem to care. The white haired old coot rushed out of the room, leaving Rodney plenty of time to berate himself for having accepted food that hadn't come out of the backpack. He was wrong, anyway, because it hadn't been because of the food. Rodney was sure his muddled senses and cloudy brain were the Wraith's fault. Something in the pods. Something that attacked him days after the fact. But he didn't know, and he was in too much pain otherwise to define everything that was just wrong.

Staying where he was in an empty room, unsupervised, was also wrong, however. Rodney's thoughts seemed to be skipping, forward and back and sideways, distracted by everything he saw, everything he heard, but he landed on the idea to check the door while the so-called doctor was gone. Of course, it was locked, which didn't do him any good at all…

The yellow-tinted light in the room suddenly disappeared in a wall of white and a roar of sound. Rodney slammed into the door trying to get away from the noise that hit from across the room, his arm up to protect his eyes, his injured arm screaming at him for the abuse like it was his fault. He didn't like things that exploded in his immediate proximity, especially when those things left him unable to see beyond flashing bright light in his eyes, and unable to think under the tinny ringing between his ears. And he smelled smoke- oh god, no.

"Hey, Doc… let's go," came a tense invitation as someone grabbed his elbow. Rodney blinked until he could make sense of the shadows in the room and the random places where the room was lit up from fire. Fire that the person who had hold of Rodney's arm was dragging him toward.

"What-" he began, suddenly overcome by the urge to cough and an intense itching all over that he didn't have an arm available to let him scratch, adding to the urgency and the panic.

"Strategic application of C4, courtesy Cadman," came the answer from the man helping Rodney across the room. Toward a rather large hole in the brick. He pointed toward the window a few feet away that no longer had glass. "We just had to snoop for a chance when you weren't near all this stuff."

But even the rescue was wrong. Rodney watched it around him, didn't really participate as he was herded into the idling Jumper that apparently didn't care a bit about the town's rose-planter boxes because it had flattened two of them to park.

"But John-"

"Can't find him. We found you. Now we know we got the right place, we'll camp out," said Lorne. Rodney finally recognized the man's face, just because it showed up next to Carson's as the both of them helped Rodney sit on the bench. He had a familiar context for the soldier because he remembered Carson. This was a new level of not-right.

"But John should be here-" he began again. He pointed toward the now closed back door of the Puddlejumper. "He's in the… the cellar-"

"Of this place you were at?" Cadman asked. Rodney frowned at her. He didn't like her. But it bothered him that, in that moment, he couldn't remember why.

"No… down the road… I crossed the street… at least once," he said.

"We'll keep looking, Rodney," Cadman promised. But she backed off as Carson started investigating Rodney's arm.

"What've ye eaten recently, Rodney?" the doctor asked. And he was a real one, but Rodney was frustrated again because even Carson was asking the wrong questions.

"It's the ship. They gassed me on the ship. I was hallucinating. I kissed the Colonel- damn it, Carson, it's the goddamn ship! I'm still here-"

"No, Rodney, you're here," Carson said. He caught Rodney by the shoulder to make him look at him instead of swear at the wall. He looked toward the front of the ship and then pointed at the view out the big window. "Home, Rodney. See? I promise ye, this is real, you're home."

Rodney looked and saw the stairs leading up to ops as they disappeared, saw the familiar glass wall that went up and up, and the balconies and the stairs on the way to the Jumper bay-

"No! Get out! Stay out! Get out of my head, you can't have it!" He suddenly ducked his head and tried to hide his eyes behind his arm and shoulder. The Wraith wanted the information on Atlantis. They wanted the location, they wanted the easy attack, and they were just showing him what he would have to see to let them have it. Just like when he punched John.

Just like when he left the cell to go back to the pod. With John.

He was stuck in the pod. That was what was wrong with him: nothing was actually real.

Carson let him hide under his arm and stayed kneeling in front of him, watching him without shoving care at him.

"Rodney, my friend, I promise you, I am real, you are here in front of me," Carson said, voice pitched quiet, his words too slow, too intentional. His friend's voice warbled and dragged on a weird reverb and Rodney shook his head against his arm.

"I don't know that. You could just be saying that. You’re talking wrong. It's another trick. It's all another trick. John's still down on the planet, I'm stuck here," he said.

"Aye, Rodney, John is on the planet, until we can find him," said Carson. "But you're home now. You're not stuck. Evan will go back for John-"

"You won't find him. The cellars are shielded. You can't find him," Rodney said, and he felt smug about that, almost laughed. If he was still in the pods, then John was on the planet, and he could hide there. It had taken the Wraith days to find him before, so it would take them days to do it again.

Rodney just had to keep them out of his head that long. Or at the very least not give them what they wanted while they were in there. He missed Carson, he missed Atlantis, but they weren't real. They were just memories dragged up from the concussion and the no-food. Rodney missed food suddenly.

"I'm hungry," he announced. He could eat food with his memories and not give anything real away to the ones who poked around in his head. It became a mantra, any time Carson asked about his arm, or asked to draw blood, or about whatever else he asked about.

Rodney refused to walk anywhere and refused to open his eyes, he refused to draw the Wraith a map of Atlantis, and there was no point when he couldn’t trust any of it. Sounds would randomly warp, everyone’s voices slowed down, his skin itched like fire and he couldn’t reach to stop it, things jumped around on him and nothing was real. He was still locked up in a pod, breathing poisoned air, so what difference did it make if he thought he was sitting in the Jumper or lying in a bed in the infirmary. None. None at all.

He didn’t know what to do. He was stuck in his own head and he couldn’t trust anything. Not his senses, not his thoughts, because the Wraith could get into all of it. Somehow they could steer it all. Maybe none of what he remembered over the past few days had been real. Rodney couldn’t prove it. He felt the pain in his arm and his head and his neck, that all felt real, but so did the sounds of the infirmary around him, so did the feel of his own hand over his eyes to keep him from seeing anything that would help whatever had hacked into his brain. All he could do was to ride it out.

A hand grasped his shoulder and shook, gentle and careful but insistent.

“Rodney, I need you to look at me, jes a moment,” said Carson. The man’s accent sounded more ridiculous, slowed down by the hallucination. Rodney was somewhere between panicked and angry, frustrated and helpless stuck in the not-real. He wanted to see his friend and have it be a comfort instead of torture, but he knew it wasn’t real, so there would be no reassurance that the doctor would actually help. But it couldn’t hurt anything to look at Carson for a minute, either, and maybe even the lie of it would help Rodney calm down. So he tried, squinted past his fingers at his friend, and only at his friend.

“There’s something showing up on the scans. Somethin’ we… well, we’ve no idea what it is. In your lungs. So we need to check, Rodney. We’ll need your help for this…”

And it wasn’t like it mattered at all so Rodney cooperated as the illusions around him collected a culture from his lungs. Things got slightly less painful for a few minutes as the numbing pain medications kicked in. He tried to think of the view out on the empty ocean, from the balcony, because that hallucination had been far less painful overall.

As Rodney suspected would happen, they still refused to give him food, because it would “interfere with tests,” and then when the tests were taken, it was too dangerous because they had numbed his throat and he could choke… right. It was all a likely story. Eventually Carson did show up, talking to him in the weird, slow voice, hand on Rodney’s uninjured wrist to show him he was there and he was real even though he wasn’t. John had been real for a while, too, and John had held him and kissed him, and it was all just the Wraith.

The illusion of Carson hooked up an IV with antibiotics and put a mask over Rodney’s mouth and nose to breathe supposedly clean air, but Rodney knew better. It was just the damn pods, and they knew he was winning. He wasn’t giving them Atlantis. He wasn’t showing them the city or drawing them any maps. He was sitting in the pod and hating them. He was winning.

Rodney blacked out with a smile on his face because he had figured out how to beat the Wraith. He just had to keep his eyes closed.

Chapter Text

John stayed behind his little barricade and ignored the painful cold that seemed to spread out from the stitched up hole in his shoulder. It was tiring but he had slept for hours so he wasn't tired. He wouldn't be tired again until they brought Rodney back, because they would be bringing him back. They would. Or John would burn their little hatch cover and let himself out, whether he had to burn down their house to do it wasn't much of a deterrent at that point.

He hadn't meant to get anyone in trouble by asking for help, but he hadn't taken anything that hadn't been offered. Any consequences for that were between the people who helped and their community. And if they had a shitty community, that was on them. John's view of his situation got more mercenary the longer he sat down in the cellar on his own.

He found and raided a stash of candles and set up multiple little fire-hordes around the room. He refused to waste the candles, but he made sure he had ready access to the only weapon he had handy. He had the knife still, but that was only for close-contact, and his shoulder was not in fighting shape.

John missed his jacket because of the cold and because he really needed something to help make a sling. He tore up one of the pillows instead, but it was a looser weave material and didn't support his arm as much as he wanted it to. He was stuck with the pain of it, one way or another.

Meanwhile, hours passed. John paced and watched the stairway. There was still food in the pack so he didn't starve. But he was left alone. And Rodney wasn't brought back. No news was tossed down, just like no meal offering. He was left to fend for himself and prowled the cellar apartment accordingly, figuring out better what he had to work with. There wasn't much, other than his choice of flammable furniture.

All the time to himself since last seeing Atlantis left John a little wobbly on time. He had no idea how long it had been since they had left home, no idea how long he and Rodney had been gone, or if anyone even considered them still alive to look for. How long had it been since he had gotten Elizabeth on the radio? Had Rodney really talked to her, or was the guy just… losing it? He hadn't been doing so great when Cyrwin had collected him to take him up to the local doc. But John hurt like hell all over after days - weeks? - of sleeping on cold floors and rocks and all of the fights and the goddamned Wraith… so maybe he wasn't the best one to read anybody's sanity anymore.

The longer Rodney was gone, the more John felt like going a little crazy on purpose. He was trapped and angry and clueless, which added up to some less-than-reliable plans. The version of Ronon that lived in his head encouraged the ideas. The version of Rodney and Elizabeth were maybe a little terrified. And he could so easily see Teyla shaking her head at him, but he knew she'd be in his corner on it, too.

All the same, he could hear Rodney berating him for his schemes the closer he got to trying them.

"You realize fire burns things, correct?"

Yes, Rodney.

"Burns, as in creates fire and smoke and ash and eats up oxygen."

Yep.

"Oxygen… of which you have a limited supply when trapped in a tomb underground, under a house, with a wood floor as a partial ceiling. Wood, which burns, and consumes oxygen, as it collapses down on top of you."

Not very cheerful there, McKay.

And the Rodney-voice in his head didn't get any happier with him. But John tried to be smart about it first. He tried going up to the hatch, listened to hear if anyone was around up on the floor over his head. Everything went quiet when he thumped on the hatch and tried to push it open. He made noise, tried to catch attention in the usual ways, but everyone above was happy to ignore the prisoner below.

There was a lock on the inside of the hatch and John had found the key hanging on the wall in the cellar. It was a strong metal construction and would have given the Wraith it was designed to keep out at least a few minutes of frustration. The underside of the hatch was gridded out metal mesh framework to help reinforce it. John could have locked them out and negotiated for food and freedom in exchange for their cellar back, but it didn't take a genius to see the flaw in that option. They could starve him out.

The advantage of the construction, however, was that the reinforcement was on John's side of the hatch. The outside was a plain wood floor. They may have some way of locking it down, but it was more likely some heavy piece of furniture that John just couldn't move from under it, in the stairs. So if he burned the hatch, the stuff on top would burn, too. And it would clear the path out.

John just had to be very careful about the whole part where he would have to climb out through fire. He had blankets and access to running water from the cellar's little water closet. He could figure it out.

For all that the Rodney in his head didn't like it, it wasn't John's stupidest plan ever.

His efforts at getting attention the polite way went nowhere. Cyrwin and whoever was pulling his strings now had removed the peaceful options themselves, it wasn't John's fault. It was probably better for the kids' life expectancy if he escaped the hard way.

By his watch, Rodney had been gone almost a full twenty hours. Wherever he was, John hoped the quiet meant he was being cared for, but he had no way to know he hadn't gotten the man killed when he asked for help. And he was tired of waiting around for answers.

Sheppard padded scraps of blankets through the metal frame under the hatch and lit the material on fire with one of his candles. It acted as a nice fuse, and he smeared some of the weird waxy stuff from the candle onto the hatch as he watched to be sure the blankets actually caught the wood of the hatch. It definitely got smoky and John retreated to the bottom of the stairs to get the blanket scraps he had soaked in water. He grabbed his pack and suffered through getting it on his back, then draped himself in the soaking blanket and tied a small kerchief-sized scrap over his mouth and nose as a mask.

The smoke started to sting his eyes as he watched from the bottom of the stairs, surrounded by his small wall of flammable furniture off to one side. One way or another, John was leaving.

Up on the floor above, there was noise as people noticed the fire creep through. The smoke trapped in the stairwell climbed up rather than down, calling attention to the fire. John heard the furniture trapping the hatch get moved. Other sounds followed, maybe they did have a lock on the outside after all, but Sheppard didn't care. He heard them shouting at each other easily enough.

"Fire! Get it open! Get him out!"

There was a moment of debate as to whether their prisoner could possibly even still be alive if the fire had reached that high, and they only had one way to find out. John crept up the stairs as they argued. When they did figure out how to pull open the flaming chunk of floor from their side, Sheppard charged, mostly blind, arms up, body protected from the heat by the soaked blanket as much as possible.

Breathing was another matter entirely, but he struggled through it in the stairwell and was rewarded with fresher air once he crashed into the unlucky human who had stood near the hatch as his buddy opened it. The blanket served its purpose and John let go of it, adding it to the other man's problems as he got to his feet to put distance between himself and the guards and the fire.

With the hatch open, it started to spread, and the two guards had the damnable position of either losing their prisoner or letting the house catch fire. The problem John hadn't accounted for was that it wasn't their house. They didn't care if it burned.

As he kicked his way away from the man he had tangled up in the blanket, the man minding the burning hatch door extracted himself, and the crowbar he had used to pull the flooring up with, to instead go after John. The hot, hooked end of the metal bar that had been used to pry at the hatch came down hard on John's forearm, barely missing his head. It burned and Sheppard rolled, trying to get away from them, and the backpack got in the way. He scrambled back enough to get the knife out of his pocket and soon had a fight on his hands with one shoulder all but worthless and the other arm blistered and in a new round of pain. He was the only one with a mask against the smoke, though, and that was his only advantage.

It was enough to get to his feet and John could more easily dodge the wild swings with the metal bar. He kept moving, on the defense and in full retreat, looking to get out more than fight back. The heavy table in the corner of the room that served as the kitchen made a good block to enforce some lead space and John and the stranger danced around it a few times as the man's partner thwacked at the fire across the room with the blanket.

"Got it!" the man yelled suddenly, pulling the attention of the guard dogging Sheppard. It was a good enough distraction and John dumped the table back and over on the man. He ran for the door as his opponent stumbled, even made it out to the sunset-lit front porch and actual fresh air.

He didn't make it far off of the front porch, however, before he was tackled into the rocky ground by two new players. John just barely managed not to land on his own damn knife. The noise had raised curiosity and people were crowding toward the house and the rolling scuffle between the rose bushes just brought more attention. The man who hadn’t wrestled around John’s middle instead stepped on his wrist and started to pry the knife out of his hand.

At that point, the options seemed to disappear. John shoved back against the men holding him down, hauled his elbow back to try to get one of them in the shin. Someone else kicked him in the jaw and his vision swam.

Before he really understood what happened after that, Sheppard was hauled up off the ground. The backpack was roughly taken off his shoulders. Somebody had a fit because he was bleeding, and it turned out it was John's blood, so that caused some concern, but Sheppard was a little dizzy and couldn't quite remember why he needed to care about that. Also, his head hurt, so he was distracted. He was half-carried, half-pushed to another building, out along the road that led off towards the stargate, and deposited in a cell, where they said he couldn't light anything on fire.

His arm was bleeding, his back was bleeding, and his face hurt, so, for the first time in hours, lighting things on fire was admittedly a low priority.

When they sent in their version of a doctor, John squinted at him. He was weirdly familiar, probably from when John had been high on the berries, and looked like a mop haired hippie like Mawa. Rodney probably didn't like him much.

"Where's McKay?" he asked automatically. The doctor hadn't been expecting it and blinked at him from the other side of the bars.

"Someone took him," the man said. He was quick and quiet, the nervous sort. "So I don't know."

John was suddenly more alert, though struggling to think through the blurry pain-fog. "Wraith?"

The old man shook his head. "No. Now, will you cooperate for tending to, or no?"

Scuffed up and lopsided from the boot print on his face, John just smiled at him. Rodney had gotten home.

Chapter Text

The report from Carson was that Rodney had gotten into something that had taken over his lungs, some kind of virus that coated the airways, that had gotten into his bloodstream and was working on his mind. He had apparently been speaking nonsense since Carson had first seen him. Now, back safe in Atlantis, he wasn't exactly in a medical coma but he was as sedated as the doctor was comfortable with keeping him to let the man's system work with the full medicinal cocktail he had developed to kick the virus out.

Elizabeth looked down on the quarantine room where Rodney was being kept isolated. No one knew what the virus growth was from or what to do with it. Because it coated his throat and lungs, it was possible it was airborne. No one was allowed near him without the normal precautionary hazmat gear. Her friend seemed unnaturally and disturbingly still, hooked up to IVs and monitors and weighted down with blankets. He wasn't restrained, but Carson had told her it was a possible option, given the man's behavior since they had gotten him through the stargate.

The door opened and Major Lorne stepped through, apologetic but still his usual, unperturbed self. While he wasn't smiling, he wasn't a dark cloud, which Elizabeth supposed was a better description for herself or the rest of Rodney's team. Even Carson had been less than his usual sociable self since Rodney had been brought home.

"Morning, Doc," the Major greeted. "I was told to remind you that you have to get sleep sooner rather than later."

Elizabeth could have bet the request came from either Teyla or Carson either one, but with the oddity of the last few hours, it was just as likely to have come from Ronon. The remaining members of AR-1 had been prowling like cats for weeks and Rodney's reappearance had only brought out the claws and bared teeth. Elizabeth waved down to the man on the bed below the viewing window.

"Hopefully he's getting enough sleep for the both of us. There's still work to do, Major," she replied. The man nodded soberly.

"That's certainly true, ma'am. But it doesn't help him or the rest of us if you get knocked down from exhaustion. You or anyone else. I'm fairly confident I know the Colonel's opinion of that option, especially on his behalf," Lorne replied

Elizabeth had to agree there. "No, I'm sure Colonel Sheppard would be the one standing where you are, with the same things to say. But I won't be resting easy until they're both out of the woods. Rodney was very clear that John was with him on the planet-"

"Doc, that's true, he was quite loud about it," said the Major, again nodding but far less comfortable suddenly. "The problem is, we still can't find him. My crew had to come back and swap out. Markham's got a Jumper on idle to shift us and we've got the ships cycling for the signal on a regular interval. But nothing showed up while I was over there. And Dr. McKay was pretty scrambled when we picked him up, ma'am. He wasn't making sense. He got to the point where he wouldn't even look at Dr. Beckett when we got back to the city. Wouldn't even open his eyes. He's a bit of an odd duck, maybe, but he's never been that checked-out before."

The man's words and his tone painted a picture that Elizabeth didn't want to hear. She crossed her arms and shifted to look at the Major rather than down at Rodney. "What are you saying, Major?"

Major Lorne hesitated, looking pained. He started to say something, twice, before finally landing on whatever approach he wanted to make.

"I'm saying it's looking likely that the Colonel isn't on the planet," the Major reported. The next part was somehow harder to get out. "And I think, given that Dr. McKay and the Colonel are close… It's possible that some of the reaction we saw on the Jumper home was grief. I've seen it before. It's possible the Colonel's… not making it home. And Dr. McKay just can't tell us that."

"Well, until he can, we operate under the assumption that he won't have to," replied Elizabeth. What the Major was suggesting was a non-option and she shook her head. "You know as well as I do that John would be running himself and his team ragged if your positions were reversed. The Colonel has yet to leave anyone behind and we owe him the same loyalty. We are too close."

"Yes, ma'am," said Lorne. "I've got volunteers to run double shifts if we need to. Our schedule is set until something changes. I just thought maybe you should be aware that it hasn't."

"Yet," Elizabeth corrected him.

"Yet," Evan allowed, nodding. "I just… I guess, things aren't coming out hopeful out there and I don't want to see anyone back here get blindsided, hurt worse."

"Then don't look, Evan," replied Elizabeth, her tone quiet but sharper than she intended. "These are our friends. They've saved the lives of everyone here a dozen times since we got to Pegasus. And we lost them for weeks. We failed them on this one. Maybe not Rodney yet, but John's somewhere we don't know. If we get him back looking anything at all like Rodney does now, it will hurt. Because this hurts."

She waved just enough toward the window to show what she meant. Carson had done everything that he could think to help Rodney, and the team was still digging into the organic bug that had gotten into his system. Yes, Rodney was home, but he was stuck fighting on his own until the doctors had more of an idea how to help.

"We went from knowing nothing solid about Rodney's whereabouts to having him in hand and knowing nothing solid about how to save him from something that seems to be slowly starving his brain of oxygen. And I'm not sure which is the worse fate of the two. At least with John we can assume he is still alive until we have proof to the contrary. He asked for that, and I'll give it to him."

Evan nodded and offered up a shade of the smile the Major was capable of. "I'll take that as orders, Doc."

"Thank you, Major. I'd appreciate that," Elizabeth replied. She looked down at Rodney, her brain still busy and working over everything from the past two weeks, trying not to forecast into the future where she couldn't see. It dragged a frustrated sigh out of her. She shook her head and turned away, caught the Major at the forearm to give a brief, grateful squeeze as she walked by.

"You are right though," she admitted. "I'll be worthless to everyone if I don't get some sleep."

Evan seemed to agree and the smugness made it into his tone. "Good call, Doc."

Chapter Text

The cell was pretty average. Bars set in stone or brick of some kind. It even had a window-thing with diagonal plates that let in fresh air but would not allow much more than a human hand to fit through. Whoever Cyrwin's people were, they had a decent setup and understanding of security. Unarmed and injured, John was secure in the knowledge that he was not getting himself out of the room through any means other than the presently barred gate of a door.

It didn't say anything necessarily good about Sheppard's life choices that he had unconsciously established a ranked set of standards for the confinement practices of different cultures across two galaxies. But there he was, bandaged and groggy and sore, sitting on a comfortable enough cot, in a cell, comparing notes and trying not to think about the lack of other amenities in the room. No food or water or bathroom. He had to ask for those things, and he could only do that when someone showed up to be asked. So John wasn't in a hurry to move anywhere.

For the first time in days - no, it was longer, wasn't it? - he didn't have to be in a hurry. Rodney was gone, and it wasn't the Wraith who had taken him, which meant he was safe. John knew he personally wasn't safe yet, he couldn't just kick back and relax, but he felt like he could breathe for the first time in a while. He didn't have to worry about someone else getting stuck in the consequences of his own fuck up, just himself, and that was a relief.

He hurt all over, though. It made him lazy. If somebody showed up to drag him out to face a firing squad, Sheppard wasn't sure he would argue against it. His arm hurt, all one massive bruise from elbow to shoulder, and stripes of burns on his wrist up to his shoulder on the same side. The other side had a gash on his ribs that looked really unhealthy and he didn't remember where it came from. Somebody had kicked him in the head with a wood-soled shoe, so he had a bruised jaw and it hurt to talk; it hurt to think, really. And his back hurt like a sonuvabitch but he couldn't get it straight in his head if it hurt because of the Wraith or if it hurt because of the batty witch-lady he had stolen the cheese from on his first visit to the planet.

Things were getting a little scrambled and John could only blame it on the fact that he hurt. He tried to sleep it off, but he only dozed, and even those shallow naps were dogged by nightmares of the Wraith ship. They started off nice enough, blurred lines between dreams and memory, with John being curled up in Rodney's coat because he was cold, had lost his jacket somewhere, and McKay was always warm. But they didn't stay that cozy, the Wraith showed up and fights ensued and the ship ate Rodney… sleep wasn't actually any better than just tolerating the pain and hoping it passed sooner rather than later.

Eventually, though, the Chancellor showed up. He didn't seem like a happy guy, and he didn't seem to like his prisoner much, so John didn't have high expectations for the meeting. He sat up on the edge of the cot but he wasn't about to waste more energy than that.

"Who are you that the Wraith would send patrols looking for you?" the Chancellor wanted to know. Just like that. No finesse. No chatter. No Get-to-know-you time. Made it pretty simple for John.

"Lt. Colonel John Sheppard, Air Force, of the Milky Way galaxy," he replied. He was probably too smug to be polite, but the view from behind the bars provided a cozy illusion of safety from his own sass. "I'm not from here. They don't like that."

"We do not like that. We do not like the random patrols," replied the Chancellor. John squinted at him across the room.

"Seems to me patrols are preferable to cullings," he pointed out.

"We mitigate the cullings with regular Offerings. Cullings are less of a concern. They are predictable," said the Chancellor. That explained a few things, though it didn't make John like these people any better.

"I guess. Just don't give them the dogs," he replied. He liked the dog he had met so far.

"If we include you with the next Offering, will it stop the patrols?"

John shrugged. "Damned if I know. All they told me was that I had thirty hours. And I can guarantee you we're past that deadline. I don't know what they'll do," he replied.

The Chancellor didn't seem to like the news. "And what of your friend? Will they continue to look for him?"

"Probably. They probably wanted him more than me," John said. And he didn't know. All of it was foggy guessing, at best. It made for the easiest interrogation he had ever had to sit through. But he guessed, too, that it wouldn't win him a meal ticket any time soon.

"Where did your friend go? We need him back," was the conclusion the man came to, and John laughed at it, curling forward over aching ribs.

"How the hell should I know? I was in a basement."

"You would know who was looking for him," replied the Chancellor.

"The Wraith."

"The ship they traveled in was not Wraith."

"Then he's gone and through the stargate or the Well or whatever you call it and you won't get him back," John replied. He smiled then, liking the additional confirmation to the news his gut had been leaning on for hours. "And the Wraith can track me, so you should probably let me walk through it somewhere, too. Then the patrols will just follow me."

"They cannot track you. Sera et Pre already confessed to removing the tracker from you to prevent their finding you near the village," replied the Chancellor. He sounded very confident about something regarding John's physical person that he himself was unclear on.

"When did that happen?" John stared at the man on the other side of the gate. He searched his memory, trying to remember when the tracker had been removed. That seemed like something he would have noticed. But it would definitely explain the pain in his shoulder and back.

But he didn't remember anything about it. That was a whole other problem.

"Cyrwin said you lied already about Mawa," said the Chancellor, clearly annoyed. "Do not bother when the confessions have already been made."

"No, I honestly don't remember," replied Sheppard. He forced himself to stand then. "Look. Can I talk to them about that? Seems I should remember that kind of surgery-"

The Chancellor shook his head. "No. What they did was for the benefit of the village, not for you. There's nothing for you to discuss."

"There is if you want information that I can't remember," John said. "If I talk to someone who was there, maybe I can put things together-"

"It doesn't sound like you have any information to offer," said the Chancellor. He was getting snippy and turned halfway toward the door. "Your value to the Offering is still in dispute. Someone will inform you when a decision is otherwise made."

Standing at the gate, John watched the man leave, feeling a new level of confusion sink in over everything else. He was missing pieces, but he didn’t know which ones or how many. And sitting on his own in a jail cell wasn’t going to help solve the puzzle any faster. It only made it worse as he started to worry about it, added to the pain in his head the more he tried to poke out shadows of things he couldn’t recall.

John dropped down onto the cot and stared up at the ceiling. “Shit.”

Chapter Text

Even after combing back through his memory for where his time had gone since leaving the Wraith ship, John found holes. Things didn't make sense. He remembered Rodney, remembered leaving the ship, and the lake, but he didn't remember where his jacket went, didn't remember running into Sera, though he remembered meeting Mawa at the house he had stolen from. Everything scrambled once the cottage door was opened. He assumed she chased them off, but that didn't make sense, because Rodney had said something about John being passed out and taken back to the village in a carriage. He thought that was what Rodney had said, anyway.

And the more he tried to create a timeline for himself, the worse it got, until eventually the time on the Wraith ship started to blur. Had he been sent down to the planet four times before Rodney was sent down with him, too? But why would the Wraith send Rodney down? Why didn't they just kill them if they had given up on getting the information about Atlantis?

Why hadn't they just killed them from the start? Where were Teyla and Ronon? John had so many questions and all of them just because his brain wouldn't work. He thought he knew things and then, suddenly, found he couldn't remember. It was another stress, another injury, and he had physical injuries he didn't know where they had come from, just like he didn't know what happened to his mind.

He was eventually fed, water brought, and allowed out of the cell to step into the water closet located in the room beyond the bars. If his brain could be trusted with current events, that happened a few times over many hours. And the hours turned into another two days.

The lights in the cell would be doused randomly, not as any apparent punishment but rather as a reaction to something outside. John climbed up onto the cot and tried to see out the slatted window in the dark. He saw a bright white-blue beam pop in and out between buildings. He heard the high-pitched whine of low-idle engines that were far too familiar. The Wraith were doing their patrols. They were looking for him. John thought it happened three times in those two days before his jailers made up their minds.

It was night outside the window and the lights were still off inside when the Chancellor and a few locals who acted as guards showed up. The gate was opened with a loud rattle and the grunts approached with a necessary caution but no less clear intent. John was hardly off the cot before the men were pinning his arms and tying them together, thankfully in front of him where it didn't pull as much on the burns on his arms.

"What's going on-" he began, but he stayed quiet. He could guess easily enough; the Chancellor and his people were tired of the patrols.

"You will not be kept in town. We created an alternative," the stranger replied, and it didn't sound pleasant. John was led outside to a wagon with painted writing all over it, every spare inch from corner to corner crammed with some kind of scribble, none of it a language he could read. A full escort team waited alongside, all on the back of big, fragile looking things that mostly looked like horses. Locked up inside the wagon, John saw there were benches all around the walls, but no one else was shoved in with him. At least, not that he could see in the dark, stuffy box.

It was a few hours ride in the back of the wagon box. By the time the door opened, the sky glowed with the first hints of daylight. John couldn't help the yawn as he jumped down out of the door of the box. Looking around, he recognized the open area near the stargate, and he turned in a complete circle looking for the big hunk of weird stone and metal. The guard tugged him away from the wagon and over to an open framework structure that hadn't been there the last time John had been through.

It was an open-air jail cell, five of them stacked neatly side by side in plain sight of the stargate, all made of crisscross tree trunks for bars with sturdy ropes and heavy looking spikes for fasteners. The posts were dug into the ground and everything. Thankfully they were back far enough from the stargate's splash-zone that he wouldn't be disintegrated when they locked him up in the center cage. He was aware enough to recognize that he was still going to bake in the exposed sun and starve if they left him there on his own.

The Chancellor stood in front of the cage gate to scowl at him as he locked a chain around the door and the wall post. "When they come to look for you next, they will find you first. Our regular arrangements will resume when you are gone."

"You don't know that," John pointed out. But there didn't seem to be much sense trying to talk reason to a man who gave friends and neighbors up to the Wraith and called it a "regular arrangement" like it solved the culling problem. The Chancellor didn't bother to argue about it, just climbed up onto the front of the wagon with the driver as his men climbed their own horses.

So John was left in a box in the middle of the road that led to the stargate, absolutely impossible to miss when the Wraith showed up again.

Suddenly there was an inhuman screeching sound that startled one of the horses and the rider fell off. The horse ran away while the others stood confused and concerned. And from the trees emerged a rowdy group of… swamp-things, whooping and hollering and throwing things at the horses. John backed up, well away from the walls of the cage and mostly protected by the limbs and trunks that made them up. Anything that made it through changed trajectory when it hit the bars, the objects thudding down to the ground rather promptly either inside or outside after that.

Wide eyed, John stared, too surprised for anything useful, as he saw the men from town be either taken down or chased off by the men from the woods. Maybe he was a little compromised by his general pain level, but he started to laugh as he watched it all unfold; he obviously wasn't the only one who wasn't a fan of Cyrwin's village leadership.

It wasn't funny when the fallen rider got clubbed in the head and either knocked out or killed, though. John stopped smiling then, not drugged and brain-fogged enough to ignore actual danger. Most of the men from the village escaped but a few didn't, and those were dragged into the cells built alongside the one John was in. Some of them were bleeding and passed out. But they stayed in their corners and John stayed in his, wary and confused about the change in situation for him and four other men.

That meant there were four horses the men in the swamp-rags had stolen, though. And the Chancellor was locked up in one of his own boxes, one cell away from John's, so that was nice. John stayed in the center of his wood-frame cell, watching the free men outside calm their new horses.

"You might wanna take the masks off. You're probably going to spook them," Sheppard offered. It was random, but he was betting the equine beasts of Pegasus weren't all that different in temperament than those of Earth, even though they looked bigger and their heads were shaped a little weird. It caught the attention of one of the marauders and he sidled toward the cages again. Oops.

"Why do you want to see our faces?" the man asked.

"Oh, I don't. No. That's fine. I meant the animal. The horse- the animals are spooked. They smell people, but they aren't going to recognize your masks as being human. Your masks are scaring them," John said to clarify.

The man in the ghillie suit considered it. "What do you know about it?"

John shrugged. "I used to know horses. It's just a guess."

He ducked behind his bound wrists then as the marauder outside the cell started swinging an ax in his general direction. Pieces of the door chipped away, the lock chain hanging loose as the door section it hung from cracked and splintered. The cell door was open, aside from the large-ish human blocking it.

"Come on, out," the man ordered. John stared at him, not quite processing the order.

"Uhh… What was that?" he asked. He was half genuinely confused and half stalling; he wanted no part of the marauders’ operation.

"You, get out of the box. We're leaving," the stranger replied.

"Oh, no, I'm good here. Now that you've got the door, I'll just head home when you clear out…" John went quiet when the man with the ax raised something that looked suspiciously like a gun in his direction. He motioned toward it. "Now, what's that for?"

He wasn't expecting the aim to shift and the thing that was very definitely a gun went off, loudly, scaring the horses again. Worse, there was a shout of pain as one of John's new neighbors went down.

"It's for that. Now, get out," the marauder said. Sheppard stared between the injured man and the man with the gun. That had been a step too far; there was no reason to injure anyone just to get him to leave a cell he didn't want to be in to begin with. But John didn't have any natural defenses against being shot, either. He couldn't exactly defend himself, let alone avenge a fallen stranger, one who wanted him dead anyway. The catch to the Get Out of Jail Free card was mostly that he didn't know why.

And the stargate was right there. He could dial home and be done. He was so close… but there was a stranger covered in swamp-guts literally standing in the way. On top of everything that already hurt, figuring it out was just exhausting. He lifted his hands to show the binds, prove that he wasn't a threat to a bunch of camouflaged horse thieves, and stepped toward the door.

"I thought you guys only come out when the sun goes down," he complained quietly, edging out of the reach of the man the moment he was out of the cell.

"We take exception to the rules when the Wraith are about," came the reply. "Break up the Offering ceremonies that way."

"That sounds nice of you," John said, awkwardly stalling as he tried to figure out just how long it would take him to get to the stargate and dial. He wasn't paying attention to his immediate surroundings and was nearly slammed into by a jumpy horse that stopped on a very large dime to fight the bit, only inches from John's face. Sheppard stumbled back. "Ohcrap."

He got his footing back and looked up to see a second marauder in a ghillie suit up on the horse. This guy had followed John's advice and removed the mask and hood to coax the unsettled animal. Apparently it worked. And the rider wasn't a guy, looked more feminine under the smeared mud painting their face. The stranger with the gun caught John's shoulder to steer him toward the horse and John instead nearly went down to his knees, surprised by a new shock of pain. Only then did the guy notice the bandage he had clapped his hand over, and he started shouting about blood or something or other.

Things went a bit woozy on John and he did good to not fall down. By the time everything that hurt let him think clearly again, he was sitting on a horse that felt broader and taller than a Clydesdale, slouched over some kind of saddle pommel, with another rider behind trying to keep him from falling off.

Apparently the stargate was going to have to wait.

Chapter Text

When the world showed up in clear color detail instead of blurred haze, suspiciously purple-shaded, Rodney started to trust that he was conscious. He had so many dreams within dreams that he felt like he had fallen into the matrix and, inside multiple dream-states, he had started writing old code to a video game he never got completed as a kid. It didn't do him any good to write archaic code in his mind, however, and McKay woke up very frustrated that he still, twenty years later, hadn't finished the stupid video game after all.

He also woke up surprised. There were clear plastic walls everywhere around him, layers of them, and an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. The more alarming part was that he had a soft restraint on one of his wrists, though it wasn't attached to the bed; the threat still existed, and he couldn't remember if there was a good reason for it. His other arm hurt, and it was wrapped in a cast as a perfectly logical explanation for the pain. But it still hurt. There had to be something else Carson could give him to take that edge off. It was bad enough that he was starving, his mouth was drier than any of the deserts Rodney had ever had the misfortune to work from, and the pain in his arm was frankly just overkill… but then again, so was the isolation in the contamination cell. What the hell was going on?

Rodney left the oxygen mask on his face and stared up at the ceiling, trying to remember how he had gotten to the infirmary. He was comfortable aside from the pain in his arm, he knew he was home… and then suddenly he remembered the Wraith, the days - weeks? - of not being home. And John. Rodney remembered the lake. John had been with him. But he wasn't now.

That kicked up worry that moved quickly to panic. There were only three possible reasons John wasn't somewhere nearby. Either he was still with the Wraith, he was somehow injured himself and couldn't be kept in a potentially dangerous hospital area, or there was the third option, which Rodney was not actually willing to put words to. But he needed the answer found, and quickly.

Very carefully, he tried taking stock of how his lungs felt, a few deep breaths, just testing to make sure his necessary organs still functioned as they should, before he removed the oxygen mask from his face. Then he tried a very raspy, croaky-sounding bellow for Carson.

"Aye, Rodney, careful," the man greeted, edging through the plastic sheeting and covered in a hazmat suit with full head gear. Rodney stared, wide eyed.

"What-"

"Keep that mask handy. You may yet still need it," said Carson. He still stood at the bedside with a capped vial with some kind of liquid in it and a long testing swab. "I'll explain what I can in a moment, but let's check to be sure this mix is doing the job."

Rodney didn't argue as the swab scraped around his mouth and then disappeared into the vial in Carson's hand. He watched as the clear liquid turned slowly blue and then yellow.

"What's that mean?" he demanded quickly. Carson frowned at the vial but then he nodded and looked over at Rodney again.

"It means you're better, lad. But not well," said Carson. He held up the test-kit. "You were exposed to some sort of organic… thing. Like a virus but more... alive. Something perhaps akin to a microscopic fungus. And it was happily making its home in your lungs, throat, the mouth, spreading all into everything, as far as we can tell. It shows up on a scan just as bright as barium, an' had worked its way well into your mind, Rodney. We have to take precautions, for your sake and ours."

Thankfully, shrooms in his mind or not, Rodney was able to process what his friend told him. "It's airborne?"

Carson nodded quickly. "Aye, very much so. You breathe it out. We've been doing regular checks of everyone in contact with you since we figured it out, had to call back two teams for a full scrubdown on the Jumpers, traded out Marines to keep watch for the Colonel-"

"Where is John? I don't… I don't remember how I got here, Carson. This isn't right-" Rodney felt himself getting panicky again but it was at the cumulative of bad-news and he wasn't sure how to solve his own problems yet. Carson set a gloved hand on his arm because the man was always touching people. It was a familiar gesture, and surprisingly comforting because Rodney remembered that, more so than because he wanted anyone touching him.

"Ye said he's on the planet, so Elizabeth has had teams scanning. When it's safe," replied Carson.

"What do you mean when it's safe? It's a planet. I was on it-"

Unhappy having to make the report, Carson sighed, stalling. "Well. The Wraith have been doing fairly regular sweeps, for one. And for the other, we had to recall two teams when we discovered they had been exposed to whatever knocked you down. We've no notion if this is from the planet or something ye picked up somewhere else-"

"We were on the Wraith ship, Carson. That has to be what this is from," interrupted Rodney, shaking his head. He tried to sit up to argue properly but Carson gently pressed him back down with a hand to his shoulder. "Look, there were these pods. They were different than I've seen before. They… they messed with my head. I was breathing in this purple-stuff… Carson!" Rodney grabbed at Carson's arm. It suddenly dawned on him that he hadn't passed along very important information. "They tried to feed on John and it made them sick! The antivirus is still in his system. It… turned them weird colors."

Carson went a little pale himself. "How on Earth could ye tell that?"

"Well, we weren't on Earth, for starters," returned Rodney absently, information still rushing around in his head that he had to get out of it because this was all important for the man to know. "They went kind of… blue. Really. And they refused to try again. On either of us, thankfully. So they shoved me in the purple pods and stuck a tracker in John and sent him to go find food because they wanted to know about Atlantis so they wouldn't just kill us-"

"Settle down, Rodney. You're home. Ye have time to recover-"

"John doesn't, does he?" said Rodney. He tried to sit up again. "They're still looking for him. You said so. They're doing sweeps. They don't have him. He's still there, somewhere."

"And we're looking."

"I can help!"

"Not until you aren't breathing out toxins with every breath, lad!" Carson held up the vial. "This is saline, Rodney. Simple saline. It should nae turn colors. Whatever that gunk is, it's still in your system. The bright side is it's going away, this round seems ta be doing the trick. There's far less of it than there has been. But until there's no more trace, ye must stay in here, or else everyone else is liable to catch it. And we don't know what it does yet, other than apparently make ye crazy."

That was mildly offensive as well as alarming. "I'm not crazy, I'm perfectly competent-"

"Aye, now. But not when we got ye. You thought I was a Wraith-"

"Look, after the week I've had, it's perfectly reasonable-"

"Ye said ye kissed the Colonel, Rodney, right there in the Jumper," cut in Carson. Because he was a nosy snoop and of course he would throw something like that in Rodney's face. Rodney's scowl faded somewhat, confused.

"I never kissed the Colonel in the Jumpers," he said, though now the thought was in his head and it certainly wasn't a bad one. Carson frowned at him again.

"M'point being that it's not the sort of thing ye usually go about declaring, Rodney. You fought us every step once we got ye through the 'gate and ye weren't yourself before that. Even Elizabeth could tell on the radio."

The mention of the radio kicked up the niggling of a memory and Rodney stopped arguing as he instead tried to chase it down.

"We can't have this spreading. That's all," said Carson, and Rodney again didn't argue. He couldn't remember things, but he could almost reach what was missing, so it distracted him. Carson asked what happened to his arm and it just started the fight in his head all over again for a different memory. It was right there, he just had to get through the fog to find it, figure out what he had hallucinated and what was real and what actually existed at all. It became a guessing game between doctor and patient, Carson prompting with potential reasons for a broken arm and Rodney dismissing the ones that didn't seem familiar.

"Well, ye were absolute filth when we got you," Carson pointed out. "Perhaps a fall?"

And that triggered it. The lake and the climb down into the valley and the big field of inedible plants and the dirt walls that protected the crops from all of the creatures that weren't interested in eating it anyway. "Sheppard killed his jacket. He said my arm was broken and used it to make the sling."

"Well, the arm was broken. But the sling ye had on was not his jacket. Something more proper," said Carson. And Rodney dogged that memory again until he remembered Mawa and Sera fixing it up with a better temporary cast and a much simpler sling to keep it immobilized. He looked up at Carson and actually smiled.

"I remember that," he said. And he outlined what he remembered to his friend, minus certain things relating to John, just so that he could get it all sorted out in his head. Carson didn't exactly take notes, but he listened, responded as Carson normally would to Rodney’s stories. It helped Rodney feel more like himself, even if he was stuck in a plastic-layered room and his friend was wearing a hazmat suit just to be able to talk to him. It helped it all settle in for Rodney that he really was home, that reality as he knew it had once again righted.

It was another twelve hours before the swab test would come back clear. Over that time, through the multiple tests and Rodney’s persistent questioning, he learned that, whatever the virus was, it was very reactive to water. Carson suggested the lake they had found had been the culprit, but Rodney rejected that adamantly. The pods had made him hallucinate, had left him feeling a step off of normal ever since. They had to be the source. It started long before he had ever even seen the lake. But the lake likely made it worse.

Still, Rodney was kept fully isolated for an additional twelve hours after the clear test. By the time he was able to leave the infirmary, entire days had passed. And John still hadn't been found. The Jumpers had searched the villages many times, and there were many villages on the continent that they now had mapped entirely. The report was that they kept looking on the roads and in the cities around the stargate. Rodney told them about the shielded basement that hid the locals from the Wraith raids, but he had no way to recall which one he had been held in.

“We’re still searching, Doc,” said Lorne. “So far, the Wraith don’t seem to notice us as long as we’ve got the cloak wrapped up on the ship. I’ve followed them a couple of times now, haven’t seen them scoop anybody up. They’re still looking, so we’re still looking.”

“Well, I should go with you-” Rodney tried. Elizabeth stepped into the matter then, shaking her head.

“No, Rodney. You’ve been sick. You’ve already got a broken arm. You should stay here,” she said firmly.

“But I remember things when someone mentions them. It stands to reason that I would remember where we were when I saw it again,” he argued. Elizabeth wouldn’t budge on it. He was grounded. Rodney wasn’t even allowed to try getting back to work in the labs on anything substantial. Ronon and Teyla wouldn’t let him out of their sight. He was only barely allowed to sleep in his own bed. The bulk of his time was consumed by appointments for all manner of experimental tests in the infirmary, to be absolutely certain the virus was gone. Perhaps worse was that his friends the Chief Medical Officer and the Director both used their authority to insist that he have daily appointments with Heightmeyer because apparently being gone for almost three weeks would subject him to certain traumas that he would need help sorting through.

Rodney didn’t need help sorting out his head anymore. He was past that. He needed to help bring John back. Ronon and Teyla were neither one of them much better on that front, but they had weeks of practice at being shot-down when asking to be involved; it was in the hands of the military defense jarheads because the Wraith had been involved from the start. They needed their Wraith experts at home and at hand rather than in the field and at risk. It made a certain sense but it was also the wrong tact. Elizabeth was just afraid of losing the rest of John's team looking for him, and she did a poor job of hiding it if even Rodney could tell. He might have cheated on that assessment, because Teyla had told him her own observations of Elizabeth's decisions since they had been gone, but it made sense to him. They were important, they were valued, but that didn't mean they couldn't do their damn jobs.

And with Rodney’s arm in a sling making life difficult for its own host of reasons, Rodney couldn’t even shove his weight around to get past the usual hangups of the chain of command. He looked broken, because he was in the physical sense, so he was treated like he was fragile. Even Ronon had pulled more punches than he had landed, despite the fact that the man had become Rodney's shadow. Rodney scrunched his nose at him about it over lunch the day after he had been released from the infirmary.

"You don't even like me. Why do you bother?" he asked, blunt as usual. He was fine, damn it. He didn’t need babysitters. Ronon smiled broadly back at him.

"I like you well enough. You're a pain in the ass, maybe. Not like your yelling and bullshit is going to do anything to me," he replied. Rodney blinked at him. The man had his own talents for being blunt. "You're my team. Same as Sheppard and Teyla. That's family. I'm not going to kiss your ass when I could kick it easier."

"Be nice, Ronon," intoned Teyla, but she was amused by it. It wasn't a threat. Rodney understood being honest. And it was rather striking that the man had said so at all. It hadn't been said before because Rodney had never asked before. It was definitely more direct than anything he ever got out of John, but Rodney had absolutely no inclination to kiss the Satedan. People just did things differently.

"Huh," Rodney said, still processing. He reached for his jello cup on the edge of the tray then, only to be surprised by Ronon snatching it before he could touch it. To his surprise, the man opened the foil lid and placed it back where Rodney could barely reach.

"That’s not gonna work with one hand," Ronon pointed out, crumpling up the foil and tossing it onto Rodney's plate.

"When have you ever seen me incapable of doing things by myself," Rodney returned, scoffing at the implication that he couldn't open a sticky bit of tin foil off a plastic cup. "Especially in regards to food."

"Ah yes, Rodney," chimed in Teyla quietly. "But the fact remains that you do not always have to."

Maybe that was also true. But it didn’t make it any less annoying when he wanted John home and couldn’t get anyone to let him go looking.

Chapter Text

Mostly, John existed in weird dreams. Vivid dreams with a haze of unnatural color over everything, faded and rough at the edges, but hard to know what parts were real and what his brain made up. The Wraith were real enough, voices in his head demanding free access to Atlantis. To his friends, his family, to his home, to the protections and shields and defensive stats. He had spent days - weeks? - fighting them off his dreams on the ship already, so it was becoming a default, he was used to it. He was tired, but he was used to it.

Sheppard steered the dreams around, restless and annoyed, remembering the maps of Disneyland and Disneyworld his mom had once decorated her home office with. There was a castle in the middle of those old maps that always kind of stuck in his head when he looked up at the Atlantis control tower, and he wanted to get up there somehow, some day, and plant a few flags and banners at the top to complete the look. It was easy enough to overlay all the places in his head, stack them up in dreams to make Atlantis unrecognizable to the Wraith hacking his brain. He added the flags as a flourishing touch. Not like the Wraith spying on his brain would know any different.

There were a few more foggy wake-ups before John could get a real handle on the whole consciousness thing. He remembered waking up to have some kind of drink poured down his throat, and waking up to lose it, in a repetitive course that went on for a few rounds. Things seemed weirdly purple in between. The sky was the wrong color, people's blurry faces were very oddly tinted, but he couldn't be sure that the cloth ceiling he saw a few times hadn't actually been purple. Maybe a little blue-ish. It was hard to track with much certainty and he didn't try.

Sheppard was admittedly more concerned with figuring out where the hell he was and how he got there than he was about what color any of it wanted to be.

When he got around to being able to understand the world again, he tried to sit up and just breathe. He was in some kind of little hut with no windows, just drapes everywhere. They weren't purple, but it was too dark to really see color, just shadows in layers. John could tell he was on some kind of padding, like a bed, but he wasn't far off the ground, and there wasn't much in the way of furniture in the room.

It dawned on him shortly thereafter that he was missing his shirt. Or whatever had been left of it, anyway. He did have blankets around him, however, and they confused the whole issue, so John dug around under the pile of quilts to try to figure out if he still at least had his pants. He wasn't exactly surprised to realize he was in his birthday suit, but he wasn't completely comfortable with it, either. Sheppard didn't know where he was, he was fuzzy on how he got there, he was naked, and his shoulder hurt, and he was a little pissed off about the whole thing.

Using the layer of blankets closest to him, John sorted out some kind of folded-around toga-thing and pushed up onto unsteady feet. He felt a little better when he tripped over what felt like his boots a step later; they were definitely his boots he learned when he tried to put them on. And so he stomped to what seemed like a door, with its bit of light under the bottom edge and over the top edge, and let himself out of the room. All blanket toga and untied boots.

It was another hut-like space with no windows, more drapes on the rock walls, but this one had lanterns burning. Some were mounted in the cave-like walls and others sat around on tables and bookshelves. The furniture seemed oddly familiar but was nothing at all like home. Everything was rough and handmade from wood and bore visible tool marks, all the opposite of anything ever constructed on Atlantis.

And he found people.

"Ah, awake now, then?" asked a small, fragile looking woman with wild gray hair. She smiled over at John from a table, not at all bothered by his appearance or his toga. The younger women at the table with her gave him a more speculative once-over, but still no one said anything about the fact that he was draped in blankets to contrast their layers of more functional clothes.

"I guess," John croaked out, testing his voice. "Look, what's… where? I need clothes…"

He felt a little scrambled and wasn't sure exactly which direction he needed to start off in for his information quest. He needed to know many things but his capacity for prioritization wasn't fully online yet. He wasn't in any immediate danger, given that the women in the room didn't hardly bother to look at him from whatever they were hunched over the table doing, and that lack of outside-incentive meant the fog in his head didn't have much to chase it out. Instead, the gray haired woman laughed at him and stood, leaving the table to grab a lantern and waving John back toward the door he had snuck out of.

"Your clothes were poisoned and had to be burned, Colonel. We set aside these for you," the woman said as she pointed to a set of pants and a shirt draped across the end of the pallet bed John had climbed out of. He had knocked the pants half on the floor when he had gone digging out the blankets to turn into a toga.

"Oh."

The woman laughed again and patted his arm, handed him the lantern. "I trust you can see to yourself?"

John nodded quickly and the woman let herself back out, closing the door. It left him with space and light to figure out what was going on with his immediate person. He found a notch to hang the lantern from so that he could get started taking better inventory of all the things that hurt.

Back. Shoulder. Arm. Head. Ribs.

That was a good enough list to start with. He remembered the Wraith and the tracker in his shoulder, he remembered that Rodney had made it home, but he didn't remember a fire or why his shoulder hurt like a sonuvabitch. He could see the bruises and the cut on his ribs and the burn on his arm. His back and face and head, though, were too complicated to figure out on his own. He sure as hell didn't know where he was or what part of his injury list was the result of poisoned clothes.

John got dressed in the gifted clothes and headed back out in search of better answers. He wasn't exactly surprised to find that the three women at the table in the other room had called in reinforcements while he was gone.

"Uh. Hi…" Sheppard began.

"Here, drink this before you go breathing on anyone," said the gray haired woman. She seemed to know him well enough because she was the only one in the room who didn't look at him like they expected him to pull a weapon. She stood just to his side and shoved a mug of something smelly and hot toward his face. The drink reeked toxic, like vinegar and bleach, and John turned his face away, backed up a step to remove it more fully from his senses.

"Nope-"

"Colonel, you were near dead from the Wraith sickness when we found you. You'll drink this when you're told and save yourself, or we'll send you back up to your masters if that's your wish," said the woman, her humor gone flat. Her mood was backed up by the five other humans in the room, but they each had a hand on what was, clearly enough, one form of weapon or another. Sticks and staffs and something that might have been a gun… John would take his chances on the putrid tea until he could get some idea what the hell the woman was talking about.

He choked down the burning, stinging drink and coughed until he could breathe again without tasting it. He was handed another mug and glared but the woman winked and promised it was only water. He tried it, discovered she told the truth, and recovered a little more. The people who had appointed themselves her bodyguard relaxed and the women sat back down at their table.

"Now someone can tell me what the hell I missed," said John. "And what exactly is Wraith sickness and what did I just drink…"

"I think that's reasonable. Have a seat, Colonel," said their spry older ringleader as she waved him toward a chair that notably was not at the table with the others. "Over there is fine."

John kept his distance but he didn't feel like sitting. His arm was dragging heavy on his shoulder and he was getting more irritable by the second. Pacing seemed like a good idea, given that he didn't know which of the many doors around the long room would lead to an exit or to more small rooms. He had a confused, scrambled memory and no idea how to get home without help from people who seemed intent on helping… not that he hadn't learned the dangers of that lesson already, but he had few options otherwise.

"I'm afraid you have been with the Wraith too long. Your friend had, too, but he disappeared before I could help him. While you were down, he wouldn't listen to us, and obviously things fell apart when we reached the village. I had no opportunity to help either of you, then," the woman said. She seemed unhappy about it, but all the same, she relaxed in her chair at the table and sipped at her own mug of some drink that probably wasn't toxic.

"I don't know what you're talking about," John said, a simple statement of fact more than any kind of argument. "Any of it. I remember the Wraith sent us down for food, otherwise McKay was going to starve to death, and we got split up so now he's gone… and you're not Wraith."

"My daughter removed the tracking device from your shoulder. And because she and I helped a Wraith Runner, I was to be added to the offering. Instead, I am here. Your friend disappeared from the doctor's care in the village, which just left you as the new offering when the village sought to appease the Wraith into leaving. And instead you are here, once again in my care, though this time you are your own responsibility."

"Okay, but care for what?"

"As I said, Wraith sickness. It is in your blood, distorted your mind, and if you had been subject to it long enough, you would have disappeared from yourself. Another Worshiper." The woman waved her hand, dismissive and almost resigned. She didn't approve of Worshipers any more than John did, from the sounds of it.

"They use you as bait then, rather than sport, when your mind is theirs. You are far more dangerous that way," she said.

That was something of an understatement. John found the chair he had been instructed to sit in and finally followed orders. Thinking and moving at the same time was more work than he was willing to invest just then. "And you just… knew what was wrong? We didn't know anything was wrong. At least- hell, I don't remember, maybe Rodney knew."

The woman nodded. "Your Rodney was the larger threat, Colonel. He was almost well enough to go unnoticed. But I think maybe you're right. I think, maybe, he knew something was wrong. His behavior alerted us."

"Most people think there's something wrong with McKay. It's lucky you noticed," John said. He was trying for humor but no one seemed to catch that. He blamed his headache for the dry reception and hugged at his sore shoulder to try to rein it in. The woman frowned at him, not understanding the joke at all.

"We don't see it often, but we've seen it enough," she said. "That's why Runners aren't to be helped. There's no way to know which you'll end up with until too late. But you and your friend… reacted poorly to the toxin. It was a safer assumption, this once."

"Well, uh, thanks for what you've done so far-"

“For what I have lost as a result, I wish I had never given you a chance." She shook her head at him and Sheppard felt like a piece of slime, crusted and unwanted along the walls. When she shrugged it off, she offered a smile, but it didn't make John feel any better.

"But you are here. And we will make what we can from it. You will get well. And you will go. I will see my grandchildren again, in time."

"For what it's worth, we didn't know," said John. It was met with a nod and the woman somehow had the patient air of an old hippie who had grown up to be a kindergarten teacher.

"I didn't say you did. I said there were consequences. And given the lesson to learn over again, I would have chosen differently," she replied. And John was not at all offended, nor inclined to argue with her logic. He had been away from everything he considered home for too long to say anything about his life choices recently were worthwhile.

"That's fair," he said instead. He tried to redirect. "Look, once I'm at the stargate, I can promise you, you won't see me again. Or Rodney. Or any of our friends."

"All fine. But until you are well, you remain here. You drink your tea, stir no trouble, and when it is safe, you may leave."

That was not the answer John had expected. "What? I could leave now-"

"It is too far, too much ground to cover, and I will not ask Ralond to send someone along with you to make sure you arrive at your destination this time," the woman replied. "I have seen enough to know you would only end up right back in his way. No, you heal. Then you'll go."

Sheppard hesitated, wanting to argue but also certain that the woman was right. He didn't have the first clue where he was, let alone where the stargate would be found. The inclination to go it alone was only worth listening to if he had the information that would guarantee survival… and so far, John had swiss cheese for brains and a lot of pain. The more talkative of his hosts smiled at him again.

"Don't worry, Colonel," she said kindly. "Your Dr. McKay will wait for you, wherever he ran off to."

John tripped over a reply to the call-out and decided somewhere he had already said more than enough.

Chapter Text

The report from Lorne hadn't changed in days. The most recent was that the village they had pulled Rodney from had been razed between the Marines' monitoring shifts. All the same, Sheppard's transmitter was still nowhere to be found. The Darts had disappeared. The Jumper teams were back to planet-wide grids. It was slow and tedious work, but Elizabeth had already made it clear that they would keep looking off the leads they had. It wasn't the first time their Lieutenant Colonel had disappeared, and he would be returned, despite the odds.

The difference in the report, however, was that when her acting military commander left her office afterward, Elizabeth was left to face her Chief Science Officer. Even wounded as he was, Rodney's frown could still find a certain level of intimidation. Weir sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose to chase off a headache rather than look at her friend just then.

“You have to let me go, Elizabeth."

It was the arrogant, angry tone Rodney would drag out when he had a sure-fire argument ready and expected it to get him his way. The bad news for him was that Elizabeth wasn't interested in risking any more of her friends and top staff than she had to. Especially the injured ones. She closed her eyes so Rodney wouldn't see her own flare of annoyance.

"Oh, do I?" she asked instead. There was a rustle of movement and Elizabeth looked up to see Rodney step up to her desk from where he had been lurking by the window. He pointed vaguely back toward the door Lorne had left through.

"Yes," the scientist replied without the slightest hint that he had caught her sarcasm. "Because if you make me sit here through one more report without offering the slightest help toward finding the Colonel then I will resort to drastic measures and, insomnia notwithstanding, you nor anyone else in this city will have a successful night's sleep for weeks if I go on strike."

Elizabeth blinked over at him, crossed her arms on the desk in front of her tablet dock. "Rodney. Did you… I'm sorry, was that actually a threat?"

"No. Merely an observation," said Rodney. But he straightened his shoulders, guilty, and stuck out his chin. "If I can't work on the projects I want to work on, then I don't want to work. And while Zelenka is a clever enough example of his country's pitiful education system, you still need me working to keep the lights on."

The man was quite serious and Elizabeth Weir knew a threat when she heard one, even when they came from friendly corners. "I will grant you, that is true. That is exactly why I don't want to send you into a Wraith targeted planet to look for needles in haystacks when we already have a team doing exactly that."

Rodney stared back at her for a long time. Finally he nodded, clasped his hands behind his back like he was all-business. "Then we're at a stalemate. If anyone needs me, I'll be on the mainland, with Teyla and Ronon."

It seemed like Elizabeth's headache tripled in size, in a band squeezing her forehead all the way around her skull. "Oh, you're dragging them into this scheme."

Rodney nodded, absolutely determined on his claims. "That's my team, Elizabeth. We're John's team. And you won't let us help him. So… that's on you. We're done doing nothing. At least helping the Athosians is… doing something."

After weeks of poor sleep and high anxiety, Elizabeth felt her temper kick up a notch. "Rodney, you can't go hide on the mainland-"

"Neither one of us are military, Elizabeth. You can't tell me what to do," replied Rodney. "And you can't exactly fire me. Not unless you want this entire city to go up in flames without me. I'd give it, what, maybe, six months, on the outside."

"This act isn't funny, Doctor." Elizabeth stabbed a finger at her desk rather than point at the act she was referring to. Rodney kept his chin up, but his expression was completely serious.

"I'm not laughing, either. I'm saying, stop making me sit here when I could be helping. A broken arm means I can't fly, it doesn't mean that I can't navigate. If I can remember something when I'm over there, then we narrow down the number of haystacks."

Curbing a frustrated sigh, Elizabeth tried to pin her friend into a staring contest, because it always seemed to work when Teyla tried it on him. She didn't seem to have the same luck, though.

"I'm sorry, are you honestly hostaging all of Atlantis against being allowed through the stargate to look for him?"

"If I have to," said Rodney, nodding slightly. "I want him back. I think I can help find him. If that's how I have to do it, fine."

There was something in his words, though, that stuck with her. The standoff lasted long enough for Elizabeth to kick the man out of her office, long enough for her to think it over in peace and quiet on her own.

It wasn't exactly Rodney's style to threaten anyone with actual intent. Sure, he would bluster and yell, but his threats were mostly as empty as his coffee cup after half an hour. And this time he had gone after everyone in the city all at once. Because he wanted John Sheppard back in it. Lorne made it sound impossible and Elizabeth just refused to accept the conclusion. But if there was any one of them who were capable and proficient at producing the impossible, it was Rodney.

So Elizabeth ordered the stargate closed and the Jumpers grounded and tracked down Major Lorne again. His orders were changed and he didn't seem to agree with it but he didn't argue. The man was certainly not John Sheppard, because John would have argued for five minutes and pouted for ten before going along with what Elizabeth wanted.

A half hour after Elizabeth had sent Rodney and his bad attitude out of her office, she was walking up the Jumper ramp only steps behind him, with Teyla and Ronon already aboard. Rodney didn't ask Lorne's opinion and helped himself to the navigator's chair at the front. He sat rigid and impatient until they were through the stargate and then he started messing with the console and some interface between the ship and one of the ever-present tablets.

"What're you doing, Doc?" Lorne asked, curious but wary.

"Trying to use the ship to boost the reception and doing a deeper scan. I remember we were underground, so… In other words, I'm doing my job. You should do yours. Fly the ship." The shut up and leave me alone wasn't directly stated, but Elizabeth heard it clear enough from where she sat behind Rodney.

She could have spoken up, bossed her friend for being out of line again, but the Major knew Rodney well enough and, while annoyed, didn't seem bothered by it. Rodney was not particular about his rough treatment, so everyone was used to it. The main reason she had come along at all was to let McKay do what he needed to do, make the calls an order when he was a little too focused, or call off something dangerous before Rodney or the rest of John's team had a chance to steamroll Major Lorne about it. But if Rodney had to blow off some steam along the way, it seemed like everyone was fine to allow it.

The planet was very green, with yellow fields, and brown orchards, and overall looked like a nice place to have made allies. But from what Rodney had said when he first got back from his short stay on the planet, they weren’t friendly enough to risk it. And the color variety in the landscape made the black smoke stand out that much darker on the horizon.

Lorne’s report hadn’t been exaggerated. The village that Rodney had told them about was still mostly on fire when the Jumper cruised slowly up on it, but there were flowery bushes between buildings that weren’t on fire or blackened to crispy charcoal. Weird animals had been gathered up outside of the village and seemed to be under someone’s care, while a menagerie of others ran in fear all over the area.

“What the hell- look, over there,” Rodney said. He pointed toward a building that was mostly completely engulfed, with a fair number of people working to throw water on the doorway and windows. It was a pitiful effort and it was probably the best they could do.

Other houses had similar scenes, but Rodney was worried about just the one. The Jumper was still hidden from view of the people around the house while he and Lorne coordinated moving the ship into a position to somehow try to help. It didn’t so much as cause turbulence, but the color of the smoke outside the Jumper’s view window changed, and Rodney started demanding the ship land somewhere.

“What’s going on?” Elizabeth asked, calm enough because she knew the basics of what the two had just done - apparently put out a fire using the ship’s exhaust force - and not entirely approving of the idea of landing the craft in the middle of a recovery zone they had no business interfering in. Rodney showed her the screen of the tablet in his hands.

“The Colonel’s down there. Underground. They had these basement hiding places. And his transmitter’s pinging there.” He shoved the tablet at Elizabeth as he stood up and moved toward the back of the Jumper. He still had a broken arm, thankfully in a brace rather than a cast that would limit movement, and all the same would be no good digging through the remains of a burnt house.

“Rodney! Wait!” Elizabeth dropped the tablet and chased after him, even as the Marines in the back had already gotten the hatch lowered to let everyone out.

“Director, we don’t know-” But Elizabeth ignored Lorne’s call for caution. She followed after Rodney, who was already chasing after Ronon. The American military crew shadowed them, with Lorne parsing out orders on the way, everyone watching the buildings and the scattered locals as they rushed by to get back to the burning house around the corner.

There was smoke and ember drifting on the wind between buildings and there was a noticeable heat difference between where they had stepped out of the Puddlejumper and where they ran to. Not every building in the village was on fire, but there were enough bonfires still burning to feel it. Elizabeth coughed and tried to zip her jacket collar up as a mask.

The team stopped in the street just in front of the smoldering structure, Ronon shoving into someone - or something - that advanced on them to block them from the building. That's when Elizabeth looked around and saw that half of the people around her were dressed in what she would consider normal clothes for any civilized society, while the other half… didn't seem human.

They were lumpy and misshapen, with fur everywhere as often as what looked like branches or moss… in the bright daylight around them, it looked like slime gleamed off the coats. It wasn't natural, and Ronon stood ready to shoot any one of them that got too close.

"Ghillie suits!" Lorne shouted, quieting the yelling from his men. "Hold fire!"

"What-" Teyla seemed as confused as the others, though Rodney had at least relaxed.

"Camouflage," Elizabeth explained. "Disguises."

"Whatever they are, they reek," complained Ronon.

"That's probably the smoke," said Teyla. Rodney shoved something at Ronon then, drawing Elizabeth's attention back. It was the fire extinguisher from the Jumper.

"Put the gun away. You've got two hands, use this," McKay ordered. It was an afterthought to ask to be sure Ronon had ever even been trained to use the extinguisher, but then the man was just short of pushing his teammate toward the porch of the building. It was still burning inside, even though the chemical exhaust from the Jumper had taken care of the exterior danger.

"It's not safe," Elizabeth began, but whether she was heard over the general chaos outside was debatable. There was noise from inside the building then, that could have been the movement of collapsing support beams or could have been boots across the floor. It was enough to keep Ronon and Rodney from doing anything dumb, and everyone stood back as they sorted out the source.

More people streamed out from the broken doorway, two of them in the ghillie suits, one not. One of the monster-suits carried a bundled up blanket and had what looked like a child clinging to its back, under something that looked heavy and wet, adding to the slimed look of the camouflage suit. The other carried someone in a fireman's carry over his shoulder, and a woman carried a little girl, draped in a wet jacket.

Teyla rushed forward to help the woman with the child, the both of them coughing and choking. Elizabeth helped the woman as she was limping once she was no longer carrying a child, the adrenaline boost no longer enough to make it through the pain of her burned leg. Shoving the fire extinguisher back at Rodney, Ronon moved to pull the body off the rescuer's shoulder and helped get them further away from the toxic air.

"But John's in there-" Rodney pointed out loudly. He was, however, smart enough not to chase in himself, one-armed with a heavy fire extinguisher that required two functional hands.

"Gimme a minute, McKay, I'm a little busy," came a frustrated reply. Even among the noise of the fires throughout the village and the shouts between people trying to save others from building to building, Elizabeth recognized the voice.

"Colonel?" she asked at the same time as Teyla did. They both looked up, attention effectively split in a dangerous situation, and Elizabeth had to remind herself to focus on the woman she had committed to help. She crouched with her charge, beside Teyla and the little girl, a safe distance from the burning building and tried to sort out injuries while villagers crowded in to take their place. Then Teyla was pulling her away and toward Rodney.

Rodney stood near the man in the ghillie suit as he knelt on the ground and let the child off his back, and unfolded the blanket he carried to drop a dog down carefully to four paws. The little boy, perhaps eight or nine from his size, shrugged out from under his wet blanket-covering and immediately pounced on the dog's neck. A tail swapped quickly along the dirt. They were fine and healthy, and the boy ran off with the dog a moment later to see to the two people who were likely his mother and sister.

"John?" Rodney was insistent and impatient, and at the slightest nod from the man in the camouflage reached forward to tug the gross-looking hood away. By then, the man stood and was very clearly the Colonel's height. And somewhere under a face marred by mud and soot or some kind of paint, Elizabeth could almost recognize John Sheppard.

"What the hell, John!" Rodney still tugged at the suit, looking shocked, and John took it as help to pull an arm out of the bulky, wet sleeve.

"There was a raid, the marauders let me help," said John. By then he was looking at least half more like himself, in the same dark linen shirt style as the townspeople wore, and the ghillie jacket in a mess on the rock covered ground.

It was on the tip of Elizabeth's tongue to ask for clarification. Helping "marauders" carry out "raids" seemed like something that could get her whole team lynched by the locals. But she stayed quiet when Rodney stepped into the Lieutenant Colonel's space and hugged him.

Rodney McKay didn't hug people. Elizabeth had known him for years and could count on one hand the number of times she had seen her friend hug someone, and in at least half of those instances, he had hugged her. John Sheppard was the same, accepting hugs from Teyla and Elizabeth and few others.

And the two men now wrapped completely into each other's arms in the middle of an alien street. It pieced in suddenly with what Lorne had said when he warned her that Rodney was likely grieving and unreliable in the search for John. It cast a very different light on Rodney's open frustration with her over the past two weeks, over his threat to mutiny.

And then Ronon joined in on the hug, and then Teyla, and their additions highlighted just how very different it was as the whole of AR-1 dog-piled on each other in celebration. It was celebration, too; Ronon was loud and smiling again, pointing out that John reeked of Torta shit and swamp stew, and Teyla laughed as Rodney bitched at him for the colorful descriptions of things they could all smell and none of them escape because Dex wouldn't let them.

“Sir, we need to go,” came Lorne’s voice. Elizabeth startled as she looked at the man standing beside her. She hadn’t noticed his approach and he was a few inches from her shoulder. The Major didn’t look happy. Sheppard looked over at him as Dex backed off and let Teyla loose so that the fenced in Lt. Colonel could actually be seen.

“Why? They need help-”

“With no offense, sir, so do you. We’re not equipped for fire fighting just now,” replied Lorne.

“I’m fine. Mawa cleared me to go back, that’s how we knew about the attack,” John said. “So we’ll stay, and we’ll help, and then we’ll go back, Major.”

Lorne looked uncertainly over at Elizabeth for confirmation on the orders. Maybe it was a little much after the last few weeks, but Elizabeth was willing to bet that Sheppard’s had been harder than either of theirs looking for him. She nodded to allow it.

“The Jumper handled one of them, Major. Maybe you can put out a few more fires that way?” she suggested. Lorne didn’t look entirely sold over but he nodded and turned back to grab a copilot and headed for the Jumper again.

John spared a glance at Elizabeth before extracting himself the rest of the way from his team and picking up the jacket. The jacket was just a stall tactic, though, as he leaned in to take the fire extinguisher from Rodney and seemed to trade it off for what looked suspiciously like a kiss. Then John pointed Ronon toward another burning area and dragged him in to start helping with some extraction effort going on at another building. Teyla returned to checking on the injured as if nothing had happened.

However, Rodney stood where he was, looking like he had just hugged a mud-monster, and not quite recovered. Elizabeth retrieved the wet blanket that had covered the boy and found a non-soot covered corner to wipe at Rodney’s face with.

“You’ve got mud or something now, just here...” she said helpfully. It startled Rodney out of it and he took over getting rid of the face paint that had smeared off on his.

“That man is an idiot,” he grumbled. Elizabeth smirked at him for the comment.

“I know a couple of those,” she replied.