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“Major Lorne? My apologies, Lieutenant Colonel Lorne.” It was a testament to how worried he was that Richard Woolsey forgot about the recent promotion. Evan looked up from his laptop to see him standing in the doorway.
“How can I help you, sir?” He waved Woolsey in.
Woolsey didn’t take the seat Lorne pointed him towards, instead, he began to silently pace around the office, hands clasped behind his back. Evan decided to give him time; Woolsey had come to him, after all.
“Do you think you could do it?” Woolsey asked at last, stopping in front of Evan’s desk and looking at him hopefully. “Without anyone knowing?”
It had cost the man to ask, to go against the orders of the IOA and the SGC. But this was Rodney McKay they were talking about. Lorne had absolutely no problem disobeying orders on this one. Sheppard had asked. It had been Sheppard’s final request, made directly of Evan, to find Rodney, to bring Rodney home. Evan owed his friend and former CO that much.
“I’ll do it. And no one will know.”
~~~*~~~
“I hate you people,” Rodney called out as the daily tray of unappetizing green mush slid through the door. “Rejects from a Conan movie! MGM called, they want their costume department back.”
The helmeted guard said nothing, but banged the door in reply, as usual. It was a routine, an annoying routine, but something to gauge the day by. Rodney picked up the small rock he kept on the floor near his water cup and scratched another tick mark on the wall. Tomorrow would mark fifteen days. Fifteen days without John. As he stared at the lines of scratches, Rodney stifled a groan. John was gone. He threw himself down onto the hard pallet and stared up at the ceiling, running computations on the last project he had been working on before he left Atlantis. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything else to do with his time except sleep, think, and grieve.
Eventually, Rodney forced himself to get up. He heard John’s voice in his head, urging him to move around, to keep limber, to not let the muscle and strength he had developed over the years waste away from disuse. He imagined himself as Linda Hamilton in the Terminator movie, working out and bulking up while cooped up in this cell. In reality, he did a few sit-ups, a couple of pushups and walked around in endless circles, hardly muscle building.
As usual, his thoughts wandered to John again. He wanted to blame Sheppard for this, for all of this, but they were equally at fault. Yes, it had been Rodney’s insistence that they investigate the peculiar energy trail on Jopsedi. But it had been John that accepted the challenge from the city chancellor, John that had agreed to play in their stupid war game/test of honor in order to secure Rodney’s freedom after he was arrested for desecrating their holy grounds with his infidel presence. Stupid Sheppard. Rodney’s nose was running again, he wiped at it with his sleeve.
“I’m going to die of bacterial poisoning, you lowlife cretins! Did you ever hear of laundry? Even American prisons let their prisoners do laundry!” Rodney found that shouting now and then was therapeutic. It helped him not think of John. It helped him not think about John trapped in a small chamber underground, buried alive as an entire section of this stupid rotting city collapsed.
He was serving time on an alien world for trespassing, of all things. The most important person in his life was gone because Rodney hadn’t been able to read the signs warning people away from the Holy Shrine of Pussygalore or whatever it was. They should have brought Teyla, she’d have been able to read the signs. But Torren was sick, and she had stayed home to care for him, and so no one had been there to tell Rodney he should not walk where he walked. And now John was gone, because of those steps.
The chancellor had sent a messenger to tersely inform Rodney, afterwards, that John was dead. Since he had not completed the challenge, Rodney’s sentence was upheld, he would not be leaving the prison complex. They saw the accident as the will of their dumb goddess. “Oh, your best friend is dead, so sorry, shut up, sit in your hole and eat your gruel.”
John was dead; crushed and broken. There had been no team of engineers from Atlantis to dig him out this time. He’d bled to death, or suffocated. Rodney’s imagination filled in the gaps in his knowledge, and he hated what his vivid imagination came up with. In an attempt to distract himself from the troubling train of thoughts about John's final moments, Rodney wondered instead what had happened to Ronon, surely Dex had gotten away to inform Atlantis what was happening? If he had, why hadn’t Woolsey sent Lorne and a pack of burly marines to break him the hell out of this alien Sing Sing?
Being pissed at Woolsey for a while was better than dwelling on John’s death.
~~~*~~~
With a growl, Ronon hurled the empty tray against the cell wall. For good measure, he pounded on the metal door for a while. It didn’t budge, but it annoyed the guards and that was good. The sound must echo in those giant metal helmets they wore.
“Feel better, big guy?” the question was quiet and weak, and it made Ronon feel worse. He turned and crossed the six paces across the cell to crouch by Sheppard’s side.
“A little. It gives them a headache.”
“They aren’t the only ones,” Sheppard was fighting for breath today, his color, what Ronon could see through the overgrowth of dark beard, was blueish.
He slipped an arm under Sheppard’s back and gently eased him up a little. He felt guilty now for his temper tantrum, it had caused Sheppard more pain, pain that his friend certainly couldn’t handle in his condition. “Sorry. Need to sit up?”
“Yeah, please,” John winced and gasped out the words, which rolled out wetly and thickly, air forced up from his battered lungs.
Ronon positioned himself at Sheppard’s head and slowly, cautiously, maneuvered himself into place so that he could lift his friend and rest him against his chest. Their captors had not provided them with pillows; there was no other way to prop Sheppard up comfortably so that he could breathe. “Better?”
“A little,” John replied after a short pause. “I hate this… better off if they left me there. Long, lingering death sucks.”
“Don’t say that.” Ronon was disturbed, beyond disturbed, by Sheppard’s new fatalistic mentality. The first few days, when he had just been hurting from the broken leg, ribs and deep bruising, Sheppard had been his usual positive self, certain they could find a way out of the situation. But then he had started to get sick, and the more ill he got, the more morose he became. Ronon was afraid for his friend, he was getting worse each day, sinking deeper, fading away.
“Hell is Lorne?” John whispered a little while later, his voice surprising the Satedan; he had thought Sheppard was asleep. Sheppard twisted, trying to look up at him, and where their skin brushed together, Ronon could feel scorching heat coming off his friend. Fever. This was bad, very bad. Each bout of fever left Sheppard weaker, took more of him away with it as it passed.
“He heard you. He’ll be here.” Ronon soothed. But where the hell was Lorne? At Sheppard’s insistence, Ronon had run for the Gate after the labyrinth beneath the old city had collapsed, trapping John and the other ‘combatants’ beneath the ground. Injured, and pinned beneath stone and dirt, Sheppard still had his radio, and he had called to Ronon, told his teammate to make for the Gate, to call to Atlantis. Then he had a coughing fit and had fallen silent as Ronon had run.
When Ronon dialed Atlantis, he tapped his radio and called to Sheppard, telling him he had made the connection, hoping that Sheppard was still alive to hear him. He heard John report in, his faint voice rasping, filled with pain. He had heard John telling them he was buried alive and not likely to survive, since the air was already getting thin and he was badly injured. Woolsey had promised to contact the Jopsedi for permission to launch a resue mission, and ordered Ronon back to Atlantis, so as not to further antagonize the Jopsedi hierarchy, which in turn would bring down the ire of the Coalition members. They could not afford an incident in the sector, not when they had only just returned to Pegasus. Politics. Ronon hated politics. He ignored Woolsey’s order, and Sheppard’s, and went back to dig his friend out. Screw politics.
It took him hours, but he managed to locate Sheppard by following the locals to the scene of the collapse, and then forcing Sheppard to verbally retrace his steps in the catacombs over the radio, in between Sheppard weakly yelling at him for disobeying orders. He bullied some locals into giving him a shovel (stole a shovel) and by the time the constables arrived to arrest him for the theft, he was dragging his bloody and wounded friend out of the rubble. Unsure of what to do with one criminal and one supposedly dead guy, the guards had shrugged and arrested them both for trespassing.
Where the hell was Lorne?
~~~*~~~
Rodney was lost in a dream, remembering the trip they had taken to Yellowstone on John’s last furlough before they left Earth and took Atlantis back to Pegasus. Even Rodney had to admit it had been beautiful, despite the fact that it was camping. But it was Earth camping, and it made John happy, so Rodney had hiked the trails with a minimal of complaining, for him, and in the end had enjoyed the trip immensely.
He had pictures in his mind, of John laughing as they climbed up to the waterfalls. The wind and water spray from the falls had made a mess of John's hair, grown too long while he was off duty to flop into his eyes. That had been the last time he had seen John truly laugh with joy, the trip had ended soon after and it was back to duty.
There was a shuffling outside his cell door. Rodney sat up and waited, it wasn’t gruel time, he already had today’s pile of inedible slop, so what was going on now?
The door creaked open and light flooded in from outside, blinding Rodney. When he could see again, he realized a uniformed and helmeted guard was sliding into the cell. The guard looked outside once before closing the door over, leaving it open a crack. Damn. What now? Visons of prison rape and abuse sprang to his mind. He didn’t have a weapon, the food tray was flimsy, but he picked it up anyway. He prepared himself to spring up and throw the tray and then himself at the guard, if necessary.
“McKay, you all right?”
Rodney blinked as the guard tugged off the heavy helmet, revealing familiar dark hair, blue eyes and a sad little grin. “Lorne?”
“Yeah, c’mon, let’s get you out of here, Doc. Ronon isn’t with you, I guess?” Lorne had crossed the cell and was tugging Rodney up by the elbow.
“No. I haven’t seen Ronon since we got here." In a small, wavering voice he said, "John’s dead.”
Lorne’s eyes were miserable as he nodded. “I know. I heard him over the radio at the end. Ronon told us he was buried when the city collapsed. He lived long enough to call back to Atlantis.”
Rodney’s last dregs of hope dissipated with the official confirmation. “I thought maybe they were lying to me. They don’t like me very much. I desecrated their sacred Pussygalore.”
Distracted as he peeked out the door, Lorne corrected, “Pusamor, Doctor McKay. Let’s go. I’ll get you to the Gate and then come back and see if I can find Ronon.” Lorne dropped the helmet back over his head and took Rodney’s arm, leading him out the door into the stone corridor.
“We can both look. I’ll help,” McKay protested.
“No. I promised Sheppard, it was the last thing he asked me to do, to get you home, and I’m doing it.” Lorne wasn’t going to hear another word on the subject, apparently. It warmed Rodney a little to know that John’s final thoughts had been of him.
The guard disguise was a good one; it got them out of the prison complex and across the city ward, apparently, guards escorting prisoners were a common sight. When they got to the Gate, Lorne dialed it up and nudged Rodney towards the event horizon. “Tell Woolsey I went back for Ronon. Tell him if I don’t report back in twenty four hours, to write me off, I’m not coming back. Good luck, Doctor McKay, and I am so very, very sorry for your loss, he was a good man, and a good friend.” Lorne patted his shoulder and squeezed it once before pushing him gently towards home.
The lights of Atlantis greeted him, the city that John loved so much. Silently, his heart breaking once again, Rodney dropped to his knees on the Gate Room floor, as medical personnel rushed around him. How was he going to carry on here with constant reminders of the years he had lived here with John? Richard Woolsey appeared at his side, and crouched down until he was face to face with him. “I’m sorry, Doctor McKay.” Like Lorne, he reached out and squeezed Rodney’s shoulder. It was acknowledgement of his grief, of the relationship they had not been able to tell anyone about all these years, Woolsey marked the passing of Rodney’s partner in the only way he could.
~~~*~~~
It was a little harder locating Ronon than it had been to find McKay. Lorne had to go much more stealthily now, since McKay’s absence was sure to be noticed soon. He crept through the corridors of the dilapidated underground prison, hiding the life signs detector he carried against his chest anytime he ran into a guard. The helmet was a wonderful thing; it hid so much from the enemy, like his panicked looks and sweat pouring down his face. The life signs detector was acting tetchy, it did not like the composition of these stone walls; earlier, he had not been able to get a reading on McKay until he was practically on top of the cell holding him.
After hours of walking around, sweeping for signs, he finally got a blip; Ronon’s life sign, pre-programmed into the detector. When he glanced down at the tiny screen, he was confused, as there were two indicator lights. Figuring it for a malfunction due to the interference, he carefully slid the detector into the pouch on his belt and went to the cell door. He had stolen a key to let McKay out earlier, which seemed to work on all the cells on this level, since it turned easily in the lock. He pushed open the door and slipped inside, watching the corridor as he backed into the cell.
“About damned time!” the words greeted him as he turned around and found himself nose to chest with Ronon.
He shoved at the helmet, dragged it off roughly and demanded, “How’d you know it was me, I could have been anybody?”
“Been expecting you for days, right height, and US military issue belt and pouch. Help me.” Ronon turned away and moved to the other side of the cell.
Evan huffed out a breath and followed, only to stop dead in his tracks for a moment as he recognized John Sheppard’s still form on the pallet. “Sheppard? But, but, he’s dead.”
“Not yet, but he will be if we don’t go.” Ronon was lifting Sheppard under one arm, Lorne shoved the helmet back on his head and hurried to get under Sheppard’s other arm. Together they carried the unconscious officer out of the cell.
“This way. Longer path, but less guard traffic.” Evan was glad he had taken the extra time to chart his path and learn the layout of the prison complex and the city around it before attempting to go in for McKay. It made this second escape easier, in that regard. The fact that they were hauling a deathly ill man between them made it a much harder rescue.
Evan heard noise and he waved Ronon to a side corridor. “Someone coming. Wait here.” He walked into the path of the advancing guards and asked in his rough Jopsedi, of which he had learned about thirty useful phrases, “What’s happening?”
“Prisoner escape. The noisy defiler got out.” Lorne only understood about half the sentence, but it was enough to let him know that the guards were aware that McKay was gone. They needed to double-time it.
“I’ll go this way, you go that way,” Evan ordered in his best command voice. The guards just nodded and went off in the direction he had pointed. “It worked?” Evan whispered in shocked surprise, and ran back to where Ronon was huddled in a doorway with Sheppard limply in his arms.
“Worse, coughing up blood now.” Sheppard was now cradled in Ronon’s arms like a baby, and when Evan peered over, he could see the spray of clumpy red blood in Sheppard’s beard and on his and Ronon’s shirts.
“Let’s go, quickly.” Lorne led the way to the passage to the city proper and then to the path that led to the Stargate. His estimation of Ronon’s strength doubled that night, as the big man ran full out, carrying Sheppard as if he were the size of little Torren and not a full grown man.
Lorne fell against the DHD, panting and out of breath as he slammed his hand down on the proper sigils. Lorne’s lungs were fit to burst, how had Ronon managed it, burdened as he was? He charged through the gate, screaming before he had gone two steps for a medical team.
~~~*~~~
McKay roused from his troubled sleep as a cacophony of voices burst into the infirmary beyond the curtained walls surrounding his bed. He listened, hearing Jennifer barking orders and nurses and other doctors answering in their voodoo tongue. Someone was hurt, and badly, judging by the tone in Jennifer’s voice and the number of orders she was slinging around.
Did Lorne find Ronon? He hoped it wasn’t Ronon that was so badly hurt that Jennifer was screaming for crash carts and defibrillators. Rodney knew enough medical jargon to know a patient in trouble when he heard it.
They had sedated him, when he couldn’t stop shaking in the Gate Room. Teyla had come to sit with him for a long time while he dozed in and out in the infirmary bed. She had left a little while ago, to feed Torren, but had promised to return when he was down for the night in his little race car bed. The boy loved that bed, a gift from his Uncle John, purchased and smuggled onto Atlantis before they had left Earth.
John. Rodney squeezed his eyes shut tight against tears as his heart clenched. John was gone. The man who had loved the sky more than anything had died buried in the ground, denied the air he so needed.
He heard Woolsey’s voice, approaching the curtains, conversing low with someone, though he couldn’t make out the words. Then he heard Evan Lorne’s voice reply to the administrator’s words with resignation, “I’ll tell him.”
The Lieutenant Colonel was still dressed in his movie extra’s costume, though he had lost the helmet somewhere along the way. If McKay were in a better mood, he might have teased Lorne about the amount of leg he was showing, and his bony knees.
“Hi.”
“Hello, Lorne. Did you find Ronon?” McKay asked, casting a glance towards the commotion unseen on the other side of the curtains.
“Yeah. He’s ok. They’re checking him over.” Lorne tossed his chin in the direction of the exam area of the infirmary.
“That does not sound ok to me.” Rodney waved a hand around at the infirmary walls.
Lorne looked at his feet and shuffled. “Uh, yeah, that’s not Ronon. Listen McKay, the Jopsedi lied to us, about Sheppard. Ronon found him, dug him out. He wasn’t dead, but he’s in a really bad way, Doctor Keller is working on him now.”
He was already on his feet, unsteady; from the sedatives and from the news Lorne had just hit him with. John wasn’t dead? He had to see for himself. Lorne grabbed his arm, and then slipped one around his waist, supporting him and leading him to where he needed to be. Evan was a good friend. He understood.
John looked frail and tiny on the exam table, his arms and legs bare and laced with tubing and wires. He was pale, and thin and his coloring was all wrong. The horrible beard made him look like a POW, which Rodney supposed was appropriate, given the circumstances. He was intubated, a machine was breathing for him. When he realized that, Rodney’s knees went out from under him, only Lorne’s supporting arm keeping him from going to the floor. He was alive; his love was alive, if only just, but he was alive, and so long as he was alive, he was not past hope. Lorne’s arm tightened around him and he whispered encouragingly, “He’s fighting, Doc, he’s fighting his way back.”
~~~*~~~
“You are never, ever playing gladiator again, do you hear me?” Rodney hissed. "That is added to the list; no riding nuclear bombs, no disappearing into the future without me, no getting kidnapped by Genii, or wraith or Travelers, no playing glowing footsie with ascended ancients, no hanging out with Todd, no playing with replicators, no bug bites. Now that I think about it, you already violated the list; you weren't supposed to be under any collapsing buildings anymore, either." There was a tapping of keys accompanying the litany, a familiar sound that John always associated with Rodney. His throat hurt, and his chest hurt, and he could feel the weight of a cast on his leg. Why? Oh yeah, a city fell on him. “Stupid, self-sacrificing noble idiot. This is all your fault. Now wake the hell up so I can tell you off properly.”
“I’m up,” John croaked.
“You’re up.” Rodney’s head jerked up and he stared at John, his mouth working soundlessly.
What John had intended to say was, “You look like a fish.” It came out more like “ooo ooo ike ish.”
Apparently the words themselves didn’t matter. With a choked gasp, Rodney abandoned the laptop on the bed by John’s knee and leaned over him, clasping his cheeks in his hands and staring down into his eyes. “You scared me. I thought I lost you.”
“Nah.” John smiled as Rodney dropped kisses over his nose and eyes. “Still here. I’m hard to kill, remember?” Again, it came out as series of babbling vowels. John scrunched his nose in irritation at his apparent inability to speak properly.
“Stop talking, you sound like a mental defective, your throat is a mess from the breathing tube. Just, just…” Rodney buried his face in John’s neck, his fingers woven through John’s hair, holding him tightly. Awkwardly, dragging tubes and wires along with his arm as he moved it, he patted Rodney’s back, eventually just rubbing circles as Rodney held him.
Sleepily, John closed his eyes and nuzzled Rodney's ear. “Still here,” John whispered.
The End