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vain_glorious Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Word Count: ~32,000 in total. In multiple posts due to length.
Rating: R for disturbing imagery and concepts. Gen. See Warnings.
Spoilers: Explicit for 5x01, more general for 5X08 and 5X09
Summary: A year after the events of 5X01 "Search and Rescue", tragedy strikes Atlantis.
Warnings: Character Death(s). Dark.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Author's notes: Please heed warnings. If you're out of order, here's part 1.
Rodney wasn’t on the second or third floors. The rooms were clearly more labs, piles of Wraith tech, gurneys, and other sinister shit lining every wall. There weren’t any subjects, though. Just more Wraith. Armed, aggressive Wraith that stunned one of the Marines and dropped Sheppard’s team by a man.
“I thought Michael didn’t have a hive,” Lorne muttered, as they beamed the conked out Marine back to the Daedalus. “Where did they all come from?”
Sheppard shook his head, shrugged. “Keep your eyes open,” was all he said.
“Do you smell that?” asked Corporal Mueller, sniffing at the air.
“Smell what?” asked Lorne.
Sheppard lifted his chin and breathed in deeply though his nose. “Burning,” he said. “X-302s, did you hit the building?”
“No, sir,” came the original male voice.
“Not your building,” added the female pilot.
There was silence for a few seconds.
“Sorry.” She was back. “Bit busy here. I’ll fly by your position and check it out.” Sheppard waited. “Hmm. Sir, I see smoke coming out of the top floor. That was not our doing.”
“You need emergency beam out, Sheppard?” Came
“That’s a negative,” Sheppard said. “We’re fine. That has to be my team.”
“Sir,” the female pilot spoke up. “We’re going to need ground troops out here. I can’t keep the Wraith away from Sheppard’s position without bringing the building down on their heads.”
“Do not do that!” said Lorne.
“You got it,”
“On it,” came multiple X-302 pilot voices. Sheppard heard the sound of blasting suddenly change direction. He could also hear the sound of Wraith boots suddenly pounding on the floor below them.
“Company,” sang Lorne, scowling.
Sheppard crouched to the floor, pulled a lifesign detector out of his pack and shoved it at Lorne. “Match this up with Rodney’s subcutaneous signal.”
“Okay,” Lorne said. Then he turned it on and immediately put it to the floor, raising his weapon. “Six Wraith,” he said. “Coming through that door.”
After that, they had to send two more unconscious Marines back to the Daedalus. That left only Sheppard, Lorne, and Corporal Mueller. In the melee, the lifesign detector had also gotten smashed.
They were close to the source of the fire now, entering the fourth floor. The air was getting thick and smoky. It was hard to see and getting hard to breathe.
“We should abort,” Lorne suggested, coughing.
“Negative,” Sheppard said.
But he had to wrap his hand in his shirt before he could pull open the door from the stairwell. The handle was too hot to touch. The air itself was scorching.
Sheppard took two steps forward and tripped over something he couldn’t see on the ground. He fell heavily, rolled, and came up with his gun pointed at nothing.
Lorne crouched down where he’d fallen, gave him a hand up.
“What’d I step on?” Sheppard asked, trying to see through the smoke.
“Dead Wraith,” Mueller said.
“Part of one, anyway,” Lorne said. “It looks dismembered.”
Sheppard’s grin was uncontrollable as he got back to his feet. “Ronon.”
There were more pieces of Wraith along the corridor. Sheppard picked his way around them. It was getting unbearably hot. They all had to wrap fabric across their faces, muffling their voices.
“Ew,” Lorne said. “There’s the head.” He pointed at a round shape on the floor with his boot.
Sheppard peered at it, walked around the other side to see the face.
“Michael.” He said. He paused a second and then kicked it as hard as he could against the wall.
Neither Lorne or Mueller said anything. They continued moving down the hallway, towards the fire.
After a few minutes, Mueller began coughing uncontrollably.
“We can’t go any further,” he said, between gasps. “It’s not safe.”
“My team is here,” Sheppard said.
He was coughing, too. It was getting so hard to breathe, he knew they should drop to the floor and crawl. But that would slow them down. Sheppard shrugged off his pack, dropped it to the ground and kept hold of his weapon. He felt like he was melting inside his tac vest.
Three of the rooms on the level were completely consumed by fire. It was impossible to enter them, impossible to see anything inside except climbing flames and material falling to ashes.
The fourth was almost as bad. The fire was halfway across, reaching for the windows and more oxygen. Sheppard moved towards it, anyway, and Lorne grabbed him.
“You can’t go in there, sir,” Lorne shouted from behind the fabric covering his nose and mouth.
Sheppard twisted free, threw his gun to the side, and dove through the doorway before they could stop him.
“Sheppard!” he heard Lorne yell.
He landed on his hands and knees, immediately crawling towards the figure he’d seen outlined in the smoke.
It was Teyla.
She was lying on the floor, on her side, knees curled up to her chest. She was naked and she wasn’t moving.
Sheppard reached out and touched her shoulder. Her skin was hot. Burning, meltingly hot.
“Daedalus!” he yelled, crawling on top and wrapping himself around her. His throat was full of smoke and it was hard to speak without coughing uncontrollably. Pain shot through his left side as flames reached him. “Emergency beam out!” He gagged on the smoke, nearly screamed from the agony licking his shoulder. “Me and the closest lifesign! Infirmary!”
The smoke-filled room melted away. The sudden drop of temperature feeling like a icy wave washing over him. But he was still burning hot. Sheppard still couldn’t breathe. His eyes were stinging and his left arm was screaming in pain.
He rolled off Teyla, tried to scream for a doctor and ended up gagging incomprehensibly. They were being swarmed by the Daedalus medical staff, anyway. Sheppard rolled back towards Teyla, even as hands seized him.
Sheppard reached for her throat, desperate to find a pulse. His fingers touched her neck, came away red and sticky. He stared in horror at his hand. The Daedalus medical staff dragged him away. His arm stayed out, stretching out to Teyla. He could hear himself screaming.
“Sheppard!” Keller shouting his name finally penetrated his mind. He turned his head towards the sound, looked down to see flames burning down his left arm. “You’re on fire,” he heard Keller say, and then a blinding spray of fire suppressant blocked his vision.
When he could see again, unfamiliar doctors were cutting his clothes off, wiping foam off his face and body. He was on a gurney and Teyla wasn’t in sight.
“Teyla!” He tried to yell, but it came out a hoarse gasp. “She’s bleeding,” he choked. “Neck injury. You gotta tell…”
“Shhh,” said one the doctors.
An IV went into his right wrist, burned his veins, and sent him into oblivion.
~
Sheppard woke up sedated. For a moment he didn’t know where he was, the coloring of the Daedalus infirmary strange and unfamiliar. His mind was sluggish from the drugs, registering little more than the dry, soreness of his mouth and throat and an annoying buzzing in the left side of his torso.
There was movement in the corner of his vision and a black male doctor he didn’t know leaned forward with a small plastic cup of water and a straw.
And then he remembered.
“Teyla?” he tried to say, but it came out more like, “Hrrmph?”
The doctor put the straw between his lips, told him to suck.
“I’m Dr. Baxter,” the guy said. “You have third and second degree burns on your left arm and your torso, but you’re going to be okay.”
Sheppard drank deeply from the cup, the water somehow stinging as it sluiced down his throat.
He coughed. That hurt, too, but it cleared his throat so he could speak.
“Teyla,” he managed, softly.
Dr. Baxter looked sideways, then stepped out of his field of vision and Keller replaced him.
“Teyla?” Sheppard demanded, louder.
Keller reached down and took hold of his right hand. She squeezed it very tightly and leaned close to his face. He could see her eyes swimming with tears.
“No,” he said.
“I’m sorry, John,” Keller said, her own voice thick with held back tears. “I’m sorry. Teyla’s dead.”
~
Sheppard was in and out a lot. Every time he woke up from another drugged sleep, the medical staff would look at each other like they weren’t sure if he remembered or if he needed to be told again.
He remembered. He remembered Keller telling him. He remembered her breaking down and crying immediately after that, leaning into his gurney and clinging to his uninjured side while they both sobbed.
Crying hurt. His sinuses were so irritated that tears made his entire face throb, his eyes and nose burn. He got a sinus headache so bad he hit the morphine pump so many times it locked him out.
So, he wasn’t crying anymore. Over and done.
He knew he should knock off the morphine. His burned arm hurt like hell, but in his experience nobody took a patient who was essentially high seriously.
Sheppard found out from the medical staff it’d been twelve hours since his emergency arrival in their infirmary. He asked if they knew what was going on down on the surface, everyone claimed they didn’t.
It was hard to tell, what with being on drugs and being so angry it felt like he couldn’t think straight, but he was pretty sure the medical staff knew what was going on a lot more than they let on.
Aside from the breakdown at his gurney, Keller had vanished. Sheppard asked after her, got the runaround. He prayed it meant she was somewhere else in the infirmary, looking after Rodney and Ronon.
The medical staff got him sitting up and mostly clear-headed, and that was when
“I’m sorry for your loss,”
“Thanks,” he said, carefully keeping his voice under control. “What’d I miss? Lorne and Mueller make it out okay? What happened?”
“Lorne and Mueller are fine. I lost two X-302s,”
Sheppard’s chest heaved. “I’m sorry,” he said, though he couldn’t imagine it sounded heartfelt.
“My people?” Sheppard said, jumping on
Sheppard shook his head, clutched involuntarily at the sheets covering him.
“I don’t see any reason not to tell you.”
“You make decisions on the Bridge,” he said, “I make them here.”
“What?” asked Sheppard, and he could hear how desperate he sounded.
“My ground troops found Ronon Dex,”
“He’s still critically injured,” Baxter corrected, from a distance.
“He going to –” Sheppard stuttered.
“We don’t know yet.” Baxter moved a little closer to Sheppard’s gurney. “That’s what critical means. He’s badly burned. I was delaying telling you until there was some certainty.”
“He has a right to know,”
Sheppard swallowed. He fought the burn tingling in the back of his eyes.
“His transmitter is still broadcasting,”
“Okay,” Sheppard tried to say, but his voice was thick and ragged. He wasn’t sure the other man could understand him.
Sheppard waited until they were both gone from his sight, and then he buried his face in the gurney and cried ‘til it hurt again.
~
Sheppard wasn’t that injured. The left side of his chest was just kind of pink and sore, his body hair singed. The arm was worse, blistered and sticky and all around gross. And it throbbed like a motherfucker. The Daedalus medical staff mostly kept it bound up so he didn’t have to see it, which was fine.
The stuff from just being in the burning building was more annoying. He constantly smelled burning, didn’t want to mention it to anyone in case it was a sign he’d gone nuts. But one of the nurses referred to it as a symptom of smoke inhalation, so apparently it was real and not because he was crazy. They were worried about his airway, trying to make him wear an oxygen canula and curiously taking cultures from his throat for some reason.
But he could get up and walk around, with his new best friend the IV morphine pump trailing after him. He didn’t mind it. Normally, he hated the cloudy thoughts and tiredness that kicked in with narcotics, but he didn’t particularly want to be clearheaded right now.
It was pretty obvious where Ronon was. A curtained off section of the rear of the infirmary, though it wasn’t just a curtain but some high-tech quarantine type technology. Sheppard didn’t understand why, had a bunch of new terrible thoughts until a passing nurse told him of the susceptibility of burn victims to infection.
“That’s all?” he asked, looking at her hard.
She clearly didn’t get why he was asking, because she launched into a lengthy explanation full of lingo he also didn’t understand but didn’t sound like she was covering for anything Michael might have done to Ronon.
He wasn’t allowed in. Dr. Baxter was firm on that point, even escorting him back to his gurney. Sheppard thought Keller would have let him in, but she wasn’t around or if she was she hadn’t emerged from the curtain thing.
Something happened that first night. Alarmed voices shouting across the infirmary woke Sheppard from a deep, morphine-assisted sleep. He was almost completely out of it; he got a higher dose to sleep because, as with all injuries, the pain seemed to get worse at night and it was hard to get comfortable without putting too much pressure on his burns. But Sheppard was awake enough to see a swarm of surgical-garbed staff rolling a gurney from Ronon’s curtain towards the surgical theater.
Somehow after that, Sheppard ended up stumbling out of bed and trying to follow them. He succeeded in ripping out his IV in the process and was immediately captured by a couple of orderlies. They no difficulty turning him around and hustling him back to the gurney, but he did catch a glimpse of Ronon.
His dreads were gone. Burned off or cut off, Sheppard didn’t know, but both options made him want to puke. Ronon was still and gray, somehow managing to look small under a pile of tubes and medical equipment.
The orderlies returned Sheppard to his gurney and had reinserted his IV before he really even noticed.
“Nighty-night,” one said, and pushed something into his IV-line that immediately burned and turned to blackness, which was for the best because in his last remaining second of consciousness, Sheppard was murderous.
~
In the morning – or whenever it was that Sheppard could coordinate one foot in front of the other without tipping over – he struggled out of bed, dragged his IV-pole along behind him, and took a seat directly outside Ronon’s curtain. A couple staff members glanced uncertainly at him like they weren’t sure he should be there. Sheppard just glared at them and then purposefully avoided eye contact. No one tried to move him.
Eventually, Keller showed up. She was carrying two trays from the Daedalus mess. Setting one on a swing-topped table, she pushed it in front of Sheppard. Then, she sat next to Sheppard on the gurney he’d hijacked and set her own tray on her knees.
“You should eat,” she said, calmly. “I know morphine makes you nauseated.”
Sheppard looked at the tray, mostly because it happened to be in front of his face. He wasn’t hungry and the contents of the plate looked more like a child’s finger-painting easel than breakfast.
He also wasn’t sure that eating wouldn’t result in vomiting, but he decided to try to be good. Without argument, he picked up the plastic fork and stuck it into runny eggs.
“What happened last night?” he asked.
Keller looked at him, surprised.
“I woke up,” he said. “One of the orderlies knocked me out.” He glowered. “I’m going to kick that guy’s ass.” For a second, Keller seemed confused, so Sheppard went on. “I saw them take Ronon into surgery.”
A muscle in Keller’s jaw was twitching nervously. She took a deep breath, her eyes glittering so much that she reached on to her tray and dabbed at her eyes with her paper napkin.
Sheppard’s urge to vomit grew. “What is it?” he asked.
Keller wouldn’t look at him. “We had to amputate his leg,” she said, finally lifting her gaze from her tray. “I’m sorry.”
And Sheppard wasn’t hungry anymore. He dropped the plastic fork in the stupid eggs, kicked at the legs of the swing-top table ‘til it scooted a few feet back.
“Arterial thrombosis,” Keller said. “It happens a lot in burns that bad. We did everything else we could. We would have lost him to an embolism if we’d waited any longer.” She sniffled, crumpled her napkin. “The clots go through the circulatory system and then it’s over. It was the right call.”
Sheppard didn’t say anything. The burn started behind his eyes again.
Keller took a deep breath, shoved some hair behind her ears. Sheppard could see her hands were trembling.
“He’s not out of the woods,” she said. “But…trying to save his leg was why…he’s stable now,” she settled on.
“Stable,” Sheppard echoed.
Keller nodded. “Yeah.”
Abruptly, she moved her untouched breakfast tray off her knees, put it to the side on the gurney top.
“Can I see him?” Sheppard asked.
“He’s not conscious,” Keller said. “Not since he came in.”
“You tell me,” Sheppard said, “the second he is.”
“Yeah,” Keller promised.
~
It was kind of hard keeping it together.
Ronon didn’t wake up. Keller went off duty – well, she fell asleep on an empty gurney and looked so wrecked even sleeping that Sheppard didn’t want to wake her to make her ask the Daedalus medical staff about Ronon. They weren’t very receptive to Sheppard, and he had decided that this Dr. Baxter guy was his new least favorite person in the world, mostly because he’d cut off Ronon’s leg and that was something Sheppard couldn’t even wrap his mind around.
Sheppard did see people moving in and out of Ronon’s curtain, but no one said anything to him and he decided he didn’t have the energy or the self-control to ask nicely or the stealth to sneak in there.
He stayed by the entryway. One of the nurses dragged over an oxygen thing and handed him a canula. At least she didn’t shove it up his nose herself. Nobody yelled at him for not eating breakfast, which was a nice change. He did get a new bag of IV fluids.
Around lunch, someone brought both him and Keller each new trays of equally unappetizing food. He was poking at his and Keller was blinking sleepily at hers when Lorne and Zelenka arrived in the infirmary. The two men made a beeline towards Sheppard.
“Colonel,” Lorne said, his face serious. “I wanted to say how sorry I am…”
Sheppard nodded, interrupted him. “Thanks.” He wondered if hearing that was ever going to stop sucking.
“Me, too,” Zelenka said, earnestly. He was carrying a tablet, twisting it nervously between his fingers. He also looked exhausted, like he hadn’t slept in a while, and his hair was crazier than usual.
“Thanks,” Sheppard repeated. He looked at the tablet Zelenka was fumbling with. “What’s that?”
“Um.” Zelenka slid it down against his chest so Sheppard couldn’t look at it. “Is actually for Dr. Keller.” He glanced at her. “I would like you take a look at…”
Keller moved the lunch tray off her knees. She looked confused. “What is it?”
“Data,” Zelenka said, cryptically.
“From down there?” Keller asked.
“It’s more of Michael’s experiments?” Sheppard asked. He couldn’t tell if Zelenka was trying not to bother him or actually trying to conceal something from him.
“Yes,” Lorne said.
Keller made a face, half-wince and half-sneer. “Why?” she asked, tiredly. “I’d really like it if I never had to look at anything related to Michael ever again.”
Zelenka’s eyes flickered side to side, like he really didn’t want to have to answer that question.
Lorne did it for him. “It’s to help us find Dr. McKay.” His voice was steady but his face was grim. And then he hesitated, too.
“To help us figure out what we should be looking for,” Zelenka said, unhappily.
Involuntarily, Sheppard’s uninjured hand found his face, folded tightly over his mouth. He almost felt like he’d been punched in the gut.
“Oh,” Keller said, like a gasp. She looked horrified.
Zelenka nodded, gestured with his head as his clutched the tablet. “Is complicated. Come with me?”
“Yeah.” Keller scooted off the gurney, cast a sympathetic glance backwards at Sheppard, then followed Zelenka towards some other part of the infirmary.
Gradually, Sheppard’s hand slipped back down to his lap. He felt stupid with it clutching his face, didn’t want to fucking cry any more. Lorne stood there, waited for him to get it together.
“How are you doing, sir?” he asked.
It was a stupid but genuine question. Sheppard shrugged, which was a mistake because it made his burned shoulder scream. He winced, bit back a cry of pain. “I’ll be fine,” he said, aware the way he said it probably didn’t make it sound like he was fine.
“Ronon?” Lorne asked.
“They had to take his leg,” Sheppard said, scowling.
“But he’ll be okay?” Lorne was focusing on the positive.
“I don’t know,” Sheppard said. “Better chances, Keller said.”
“Good,” Lorne said. He paused. “You up to getting a rundown of the situation, sir?”
“I think you’re the only one that wants to tell me anything,” Sheppard told him. “So, yeah.”
“I don’t know what Zelenka’s talking about, exactly,” Lorne said. “It’s science stuff and it’s in Wraith.”
“But it’s not good,” Sheppard interpreted.
Lorne just shook his head, then went ahead. “I’d thought you want to know that the ground troops found Ronon right outside the building we were in,” he said. “Like he jumped out the window.”
“Oh,” Sheppard said.
“We haven’t found any of Michael’s abductees,” Lorne said. “Not one. It’s weird.”
“Maybe he took them someplace else,” said Sheppard.
“That’s the hope,” Lorne said. “I guess a lot of the computer system survived our attack, that’s where Zelenka got the stuff he’s looking at.”
“Okay,” Sheppard said.
“There’s also…” Lorne paused. “Video. I don’t know why. Maybe a visual record.”
“Are our people on it?” Sheppard asked.
“We transmitted it back to Atlantis for the anthropologists to translate,” Lorne said. “It’s organized in Wraith and it looks like there’s months worth.”
Suddenly it occurred to Sheppard that Atlantis probably wanted a report. “Woolsey in the know?” he asked.
Lorne nodded. “He knows you’re out of commission right now.” He changed the subject. “
“After what we did to him,” Sheppard interrupted.
“Yeah.” Lorne went on. “When we’re done here,
“I would really not mind destroying a hive ship right about now,” Sheppard said, honestly.
“Yeah, well,” Lorne said. “I wouldn’t mind either.”
Lorne left after that, said he was heading back to the surface with the search teams. Sheppard found he could only nod in response, that he didn’t have any words. “Good luck” was horribly inappropriate and he couldn’t think of anything else.
Keller and Zelenka stayed squirreled away in some back part of the infirmary for hours. She only came out when one of the Daedalus nurses went to get her, then she went directly into Ronon’s curtain without looking at Sheppard.
She came out a couple minutes later and this time she stopped in front of Sheppard.
“He’s awake,” Keller said, and Sheppard immediately stood up.
“Does he know?” he asked her, as she pushed aside the quarantine curtain so they could enter.
“I think so,” she said softly. He looked at her curiously and she blinked at him. “He didn’t ask,” she said.
Ronon was propped into a half-sitting position on a gurney. He had an oxygen mask over his face and a tangle of IV leads coming out of one wrist. The gurney sheet was sticking straight out from his torso, covering but not touching his lower half like a tent. All the same, Sheppard could see the shadow of a limb on the right and nothing but smooth blue sheet on the left.
A lump formed in his throat and he swallowed hard. As he approached, Sheppard smelled the sharp, unpleasant scent of burned hair. Ronon’s dreads were messily chopped off, some of the remaining hair singed and blackened. His forehead was pink and sore-looking, scrapes and scabs all up his neck and across his shoulders, maybe more under the patient gown covering his chest.
Sheppard dropped heavily into the stool Keller rolled towards him, one hand gripping his own IV pole, the other coming to land on the gurney railing next to the Ronon’s morphine drip.
“Hey,” Sheppard managed, his voice coming out nowhere near normal.
Ronon’s head lolled towards him. He raised a hand bandaged in gauze up to his face, lifted the oxygen mask and shoved it halfway off.
“Had to go with her,” Ronon said, hoarsely. And then he pulled the mask back in place.
“I know,” Sheppard said, thickly. “I know.”
Ronon blinked at him, then closed his eyes and turned his head away.
~
Ronon didn’t want to talk. Sheppard stayed at his bedside, but the other man wouldn’t say another word. Part of it was the drugs – he was on a bunch of stuff plus the morphine and it made him in and out a lot. But when he was awake, Sheppard could tell by the ways his eyes tracked his surroundings and the ease with which the medical staff interacted with him that Ronon was mostly there. He was choosing not speak.
And Sheppard really didn’t blame him, even if he wanted to ask him a thousand questions, so he just sat with him in the silence.
Keller left them, vanishing with Zelenka back to the wherever they were working together.
When it became clear that Ronon was going to stay silent, Sheppard tried to talk. He didn’t know how much he needed to say. Keller was probably right. Ronon did know that Rodney and Teyla were gone. He was probably the last person to see them living, maybe seen them dying. He wouldn’t be silent if he didn’t know, if he had any question that there was something he could do to save them now.
Sheppard waited until Ronon’s eyes drifted open again, after an hour or so of deep, still, narcotic-induced sleep. He waited until Ronon’s gaze traveled around the gauzy confines of his room, landing eventually on Sheppard.
“Teyla’s dead,” Sheppard said, unable to cushion that statement. It didn’t hurt to say, it was the second after it left his lips that the feeling slammed into his chest. “I found her in the fire,” he continued. “And I tried to save her.” His vision was swimming in liquid, no longer able to see Ronon except as a dark, wet blur. “I got her, but she was bleeding from the neck and they took her away.” He blinked, let hot tears roll down his cheeks.
He had to blink a lot ‘til he could see again, ‘til his eyes didn’t immediately refill. When he could see Ronon again, the man was staring purposefully at the ceiling, not looking at Sheppard. Tears were dripping sideways out his eyes, sliding down his temples and wetting the pillow top. But he wouldn’t look at Sheppard and he wouldn’t say a word.
“They haven’t found Rodney’s body yet,” Sheppard said, trying to clear his throat. It didn’t really work. “Lorne made it sound like Michael did something to him.” A full blown fucking sob escaped Sheppard’s lips, cut off only by a sharp intake of breath.
Ronon shut his eyes, eyelashes wet and glittering under the infirmary lights. He kept them closed, even though his face was too taut to be sleeping.
Sheppard gave up. He folded his uninjured arm into a pillow against the rails of Ronon’s gurney, pressed his face into it and waited for the pain to come.
That was how Keller and Zelenka found him later, soggy and drained, his face and sinuses aching again. He might have been embarrassed to have been discovered like that by them, but he was too tired and too pissed and suddenly too fucking angry at everything but especially Ronon, who had decided to float off into morphine-enabled sleep. His breathing was slow and deep, the machine monitoring his heart rate showing the steady, unconscious rhythm he couldn’t fake.
He finally shifted his gaze from Ronon’s gurney to the newcomers. It took a second for him to notice, gunk in his eyes and maybe some self-centered misery, but he realized they looked awful. Both had red puffy eyes and blotchy faces, and Keller was clutching another handful of the paper napkins she was using as tissues. Sheppard froze, utterly unable to imagine something worse than what he already knew.
“What?” he asked, hearing his voice high-pitched and cracking. “Did you find –”
“We found the captives,” Keller said, thickly. “We found the people Michael took.”
“He made them into Wraith,” Zelenka said, right after her. “He transformed them into Wraith. The army down there.”
“Rodn-” Sheppard started.
“Him, too,” Zelenka said, and his face was crumpling.
~
Sheppard thought Dr. Baxter might have slipped him some valium. He wasn’t sure if that came in intravenous form, but he did think the latest needle jabbed into his line was meant to soothe more than physical pain. It was the only explanation he had for why he was able to sit through a meeting with
They’d changed the search parameters based on Zelenka and Keller’s discovery. Lorne looked deeply unhappy about having been part of that job, giving his report stiffly with his voice full of disgust.
Bottom line was the Daedalus now had a refrigerated cargo bay full of Wraith corpses. Wraith corpses that had once been Athosian, Alethian, and all the other peoples Michael had snatched. And Rodney McKay. They’d be taken back to Atlantis so the infirmary could try to identify, at minimum, which planet they’d come from. Keller had a spiel about finding out how Michael had done this, involving DNA replication or something, but it sounded utterly pointless.
“What about the women?”
“We think they are,” Zelenka said, but he looked uncertain. “We will have to look at the bodies,” he said, making a face. “The children…I don’t know.”
“He probably killed them outright,” Keller muttered, scowling.
“Alright,”
“Not that many,” Lorne said. “Not by a long shot, even if half of that number were women and kids.”
“Okay,” said
“I’m going to look at Michael’s data,” Keller said, trying to sound hopeful. “If I can figure out how he did it, maybe I can figure out how to undo it. If we find them.”
“I’m more concerned about them finding us,”
It took a second for Sheppard to realize he was being addressed. “No,” he said.
“No,” Sheppard repeated. He didn’t feel like clarifying. “He did not have anything to contribute.”
“Alright,”
Sheppard, Zelenka, Lorne, and Keller all followed
~
Getting back to Atlantis sucked.
The medical staff on the Daedalus had been good about mostly leaving Sheppard alone, acting sympathetic but not overly invasive about it.
The Atlantis infirmary was not good about it. Keller vanished into one of the pathology labs with whatever it was she was looking at, and without her there to run interference, Sheppard had every single doctor, nurse, orderly, and lab technician deciding to drop their assigned task and come express their condolences to him.
Sheppard handled that for about an hour before he lost it. He tugged out his IV, unhappy to be leaving the morphine drip but unwilling to stay around for it. Keller’s absence meant she wasn’t there to catch him leaving the infirmary. Sheppard could only get half-dressed, unable to figure out how to get a shirt over his bandaged arm. So he just yanked a pair of pants on under the patient gown. He probably totally looked like a fugitive from the infirmary, but he didn’t really care.
Unfortunately, painkillers were locked up with the rest of the controlled narcotics, so Sheppard couldn’t steal any and that meant he would have to come back.
Ronon had been taken to Isolation, probably because of the infection issue the nurse on Daedalus had warned Sheppard about. At least fewer medical staff could get to him there, and maybe his gruff reputation would keep away some of the pests.
One of the nurses saw Sheppard making a beeline for the door, yelled after him something about his airway and to come back if he had trouble breathing. Sheppard fled out the door, ignoring her.
He didn’t really have a plan once he was out of the infirmary. But then he got lots of weird looks in the corridors – and lots more condolences, because evidently everyone in the goddamn city knew already, dammit – and decided that first things first, he needed to stop looking like a grief-mad escaped patient.
Sheppard went back to his quarters. He found a pair of scissors he’d swiped from somewhere else a long time ago, hacked off the left sleeve of one of his few button down shirts. He cut a giant arm hole, one he could fit the whole sling kit and caboodle through. Layered it with his BDU jacket. It looked bulky and weird, and his injury wasn’t entirely thrilled about the heavier fabric but it worked.
When he was done with that, his mind was blank as to what to do next. Keller and Zelenka were working hard on something Sheppard didn’t particularly want to think about. Ronon was doped up in Isolation, and as much as Sheppard wanted to go to him, he was mature enough to recognize the simmering resentment growing in the back of his mind, something that wouldn’t deal well if Ronon continued to want to play possum.
And Rodney and Teyla were dead.
So, Sheppard didn’t really have anyone to go to.
He remembered Woolsey, then. Lorne had most certainly already reported in, explained everything including Sheppard’s injury and the likelihood that he wasn’t going to playing military commander all that well at the moment.
But it was something to do other than sit in his dark quarters and think, so Sheppard went to Woolsey’s office, anyway.
He didn’t know what he expected.
Woolsey was in his office. He looked mostly the same, maybe a little more drawn in the face, maybe a few more wrinkles at the edges of his lips from frowning. Woolsey listened sincerely while Sheppard reported in. He was aware his statement was rambling and incomplete, probably repetitive of what Lorne had said, and probably imparting nothing new or useful.
Woolsey thanked him, anyway. Then, an all too familiar expression crossed Woolsey’s face, the same sad, sympathetic, half-fearful look as everyone who had harassed Sheppard in the infirmary or stopped him in the corridors.
“My deepest condolences to you,” Woolsey said, making eye contact until Sheppard found something more interesting to look at on his desktop. “I may not be the most eloquent at expressing it, but I do want you to know that I am sharing your grief.” Sheppard clenched his back teeth together, kept staring at the back of a photo frame on Woolsey’s desk. “The whole city,” Woolsey continued, earnestly, “the whole mission will mourn the loss of two of its most valuable members.”
“Thank you,” Sheppard managed to say. And that was different, at least, and good to hear as much as it continued to fucking hurt.
It hurt more than Woolsey’s next two sentences, which were the kind but forceful suggestion that Sheppard remove himself from duty during this difficult time. He might have been expecting it had he bothered to think about it. And Sheppard had no reason to get upset, though Woolsey looked slightly worried that he would.
“Okay,” Sheppard agreed.
Woolsey nodded at him, a dismissal of sorts. When he was in the transporter, Sheppard finally remembered that he did have something to do, someone to go to. He redirected the thing to the infirmary, the place he’d just left.
There were a lot of surprised faces when he entered. No one probably expected him to return voluntarily this soon. He ignored them, walking straight back towards the crèche for the Athosian babies. There were two people – a doctor and an orderly – back there playing with and/or feeding the ones that were awake. Sheppard was glad to see that. He found Torrin’s bassinet, leaned in and scooped the sleeping kid up with one arm.
~
