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sga_flashficTitle: when I came I was a stranger (1/2)
Author: Sarah T.
Website: www.aliencorn.net
Rating: NC-17
Characters: John, Teyla, Rodney
Notes: A "Vegas" AU. Thanks to the Spike for a Turkish-massage beta. (~12K words.)
Summary: John is recruited.
It takes a lot longer to recover from gunshot wounds than you might think.
John Sheppard knew this, had learned it in other hospitals in other war zones, but somehow, like always, his brain had conveniently fogged over this fact until it was too late. Now he was lying there living with it in a bed that he was pretty sure was deep in McKay’s ridiculous complex in the desert, feeling like an idiot.
Another decent death, gotten away from him.
Keeeeeep dreaming. There must be some other reason for your existence.
McKay spent an awful lot of time sitting by his bed, talking over the other voice while John dozed. Lots of names John didn’t recognize, and a few he did. “I was thinking about Elizabeth today. She would have loved you. One of her strays. But Colonel Carter is a little more...goal-oriented. Makes things complicated. Not that Elizabeth was straightforward, sometimes she was incomprehensible, but she never could resist the one with the black mark. If it wasn’t for her, we never could have gotten Teyla on the team after...”
The fourth or fifth time McKay dropped by, John began to think that McKay didn’t have all that many people to talk to. Either that, or he just enjoyed talking so much that he didn’t really care if anyone listened to him, which made a guy nodded out on the good stuff like John his best buddy ever.
“Just so you know, we notified your brother. Told him you were in an accident. He wanted to make sure your costs were covered, but I don’t think he’s coming out. Convenient for us. Transferring you to another facility for a staged visit would have been one of the stupider things I’ve had to do all year, and believe me, my life is a carnival of stupid things only occasionally interrupted by meaningful work.”
John kept his eyes closed, his face turned away.
Time stretched out like taffy, but he thought it was on the third day that McKay paused unexpectedly mid-tirade to grab his injured arm and squeeze hard. “Come on. The nurse says you’re conscious. I had her cut back the morphine an hour ago.”
Like there’s anything you can do to hurt me, McKay, he thought, but he let his head drift slowly over towards him.
“I knew it. Do you know where you are?”
John had to clear his throat. “The Thunderdome?”
“Oh, please, the Thunderdome wasn’t anything like—never mind.” He shook his head. “Yes, you’re in a secure wing of Area 51. The only patient, actually. Do you remember what happened to you?”
“I remember getting shot by that alien. And then bombed by friendlies. And then lying there bleeding out in the desert because none of you apparently believe in doing post-attack recon.”
His shoulder throbbed with the memory. That had hurt more than he had thought it would. It had almost been funny, how indignant he had been, not even at the pain, just: c’mon, you guys, don’t you know how to do anything?
“Oh, yes, that.” McKay waved his hand irritably. “We did come get you eventually, so why are you complaining? The big question is what comes next.”
That was a question John had almost zero interest in.
McKay waited impatiently for him to respond, and when John didn’t, he leaned in and brought it out like he thought he was some mastermind in the Bourne films. “I want you to join the SGC. My team, in particular.”
John squinted at him, wishing he had his glasses. “Join your team?”
That clearly wasn't the response McKay had expected. He blinked, then rolled his eyes. “Yes, join my team. Look, what you did was really brave. Really stupid, but really brave. Perfect for the muscle on one of my missions.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“There’s no question you have the combat experience, and Atlantis could definitely use a pilot. And we’re short one member since Cadman got her promotion, so you don’t even need to wait for a slot to open up.”
Pilot, he thought, and the word resonated so loudly in his head that he had to fumble for something to say. “You hunt Wraith.”
“And go out, see new worlds, new civilizations, new Ancient technologies that dimwitted peasants are using for Christmas lights. It’s good work. We do save lives, if that’s what you’re fixated on. Sometimes in bulk.” He smirked knowingly. “The local women are often very grateful.”
“How long do I have to decide?”
He knew he was kidding himself even as he asked. This kind of decision was made for him, before he’d even heard the details. For just a few hours, he had felt purpose, pulling him together, making everything around him real. He’d do anything to get that back.
“Well, it’s more like we decide. You’ve obviously got a few issues, there will be some paperwork, but I should be able to get the appointment through.”
Uh-oh. He’d heard that one before. “Uh-huh.”
The skepticism must have shown on his face, because McKay clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll get it through. Just...no rush getting well, all right? I know you’ll feel the need to leap heroically from your bed at least two days before you should. Suppress it.”
“I’ll try not to be bravely stupid,” John said, and turned his head back to the wall.
“Right, then,” McKay said. “That’s settled.”
His footsteps were quick to the door.
The next day, the nurse came in to his room to find him doing careful laps around the perimeter, clutching his IV stand in one hand. His legs were wobbling like a newborn colt’s and sweat stung his eyes, but he gave her his best smile.
“Look who’s up,” she said. “I thought Dr. McKay told you not to do anything brave.”
“I think I can handle the menace of walking. Shuffling, really. See?” He demonstrated.
She raised an eyebrow. “You couldn’t yesterday. Sit down, please.”
But he could tell she was pleased as she ran through her little battery of tests. When she was done, she said, “Dr. Keller will be in to see you later.”
“The coroner? It’s that bad?”
The nurse gave him another look. “Dr. Keller is the chief medical officer of Atlantis. Technically, she’s been your doctor since you were brought in.”
“Oh,” he said. Well, that made sense. He’d never yet gotten to go to an obscure posting without some doctor fussing at him first. Hopefully there wouldn’t be too many vaccinations. As he leaned back in bed, he began to get ambitious about taking a shower later.
It was impossible to tell time in the windowless room, but Keller didn’t show until long after his second round of green jello on a tray. She’d shed the weird blue eyeshadow and pulled her hair back. It made her look a lot younger.
“Busy night?” he said, trying for collegial but overshooting and ending up a little too close to sarcastic.
“You’re actually my only patient on Earth,” she said, flipping through his chart without making eye contact.
“Do a lot of gunshot wounds?” he said. He was already feeling like he was on a first date with a girl who was only there to please her mother.
She put down the chart and snapped into a pair of gloves. “Occasionally, but my practice is actually more lasers, stunners, exotic poisons, bioweapons, radiation exposure...”
“Oh,” he said. Right. Brave new world. All sorts of new ways to get hurt.
“Let’s take a look at you.”
As she probed a little too directly into his wounds, he tensed and did his best not to show the pain. When she hit a particularly tender spot, he asked casually, “So, when do you think I might be getting out of here?”
It wasn’t even that he was attached to that damn apartment—just one more place to lay his head that didn’t feel remotely like home. He hadn’t bothered to drop by before starting to get the hell out of Dodge. He just didn’t like the feeling this place gave him. There were too many machines in his room that he didn't recognize from any hospital he'd ever been in, whirring and chiming in barely-audible tones that weren't quite right. There was no noise whatsoever from the outside, no activity in the hallway. Not even a TV to watch. Whenever they walked out of his room, he might as well be the last human left after an apocalypse.
Or a guy in solitary.
She waved another mysterious device and studied the readout. “We’ll disconnect you from the IV soon. That will make you more mobile.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said, “but that’s not exactly what I asked.”
“Now that you’ve decided to recover, you could be discharged in a few days. When you get out of here...” She hesitated. “You’ll have to speak to McKay about that.”
John frowned. “He’s not a doctor, though.”
She snorted. “Try telling him that.”
“I mean, a real doctor. Someone who heals people.”
“No.”
“Then why--”
“I have to go,” she said. “Keep up the walking. Don’t flirt with the nurse, she’s not interested in men.”
Somehow she managed to shed her gloves and vanish, leaving John with his gown hanging open, before he could get the next question out of his mouth.
He’d had less ominous medical clearance exams before.
His muscles were telling him the shower was a little too ambitious, so there wasn’t much for him to do that evening but wait for McKay to show up again. That was already kind of odd. John was convinced he’d been a several-times-a-day visitor when John had been more out of it, and now it had been a full day since he’d seen him. The painkillers made waiting less painful than it might otherwise have been, but also weirder. He felt like he didn’t have a tight grip on where his thoughts went, especially after the facility hit some hour it obviously defined as “night” and the lights dimmed. He kept skimming in and out of dreams, surfacing with strange images. His mother, standing by the window that wasn’t there in a long white coat with an elaborate collar. The wind drawing patterns in the sand like letters from another alphabet as he lay still in one of so many deserts, waiting to die. A long hallway, and the lights going out abruptly, and then a single blue spotlight snapping on, picking out his dead Wraith on the floor.
Did he sing for you before he died, John Sheppard?
McKay’s heavy tread in the hall made him start up, blinking furiously.
“Ah, you’re awake,” McKay said at the door. He was wearing the exact same black suit-and-shirt combo as he’d been every single time John had seen him, like it was his uniform. “I thought you might have drifted off. I heard you had a busy day.”
“Not that busy. Come in.”
McKay did, but stayed on his feet. “You’re looking better.”
“So they tell me. They also tell me that for some reason you’re the man in charge of deciding when I get out of here.”
Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, he let hang in the air without saying it.
“Well...” McKay hesitated. “It’s really more of a committee decision whether you can join the team. Colonel Carter, Lorne, Teyla…It’s going to take a while.”
“What does that have to do with whether I can sleep in my own bed and eat something besides hard-boiled eggs and jello?”
McKay frowned. “I believe I mentioned this is a secured facility.”
This was starting to sound much too familiar. “Yes, and...?”
“Until we decide whether or not to accept you, we need to keep you here. You’ve seen way too much at this point.”
“Hey!” John sat up straight. “You let me go before!”
“Which was exceeding my authority,” McKay said, with a mixture of irritation and faint embarrassment, “as I’ve since been reminded.”
This was what he’d been afraid of, what he’d been fucking afraid of since they’d first brought him into that little interview room. He’d seen way too much of this out of the corner of his eye during his time in the Air Force, and he’d never liked it. “So I’m a prisoner?”
“No, no. I’m sure you’re going to get in. It’s just a matter of time.”
“And what do you expect me to do til you decide I’m good enough for you? Jerk off and cry?”
McKay didn’t look fazed by the crude remark, which surprised John. “First, get better. You’re not exactly fit for duty right now anyway. Second...” He sighed. “Look, I’ll get you a pass. You can wander around the place, see if you can wrap your mind around things. You’re a quick study, always have been. Just don’t touch anything, okay?”
John would have said something about McKay’s creepy habit of acting like he already knew him if a much more troublesome thought hadn’t taken priority. “But if I already know too much...”
McKay’s smile got dim and cold. “Might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb, Sheppard.”
Message received.
The pass arrived the next day: a clear lucite card with no markings of any kind. He held it up to the light, which seemed to fracture in it, and got out of bed. He managed the shower and—after the resulting nap—took a triumphant totter through the hallway, dragging his stand. The place was just as eerie and deserted as he’d guessed it would be, cold white lighting on greenish-grey walls, with only a single silent nurse, different from yesterday, at the station at the far end of the ward from him. The station was equipped with closed-circuit TV showing all the rooms, including his, in grainy black-and-white. Some of the rooms, he noticed on the way back, had restraints on the beds and heavy bolts on the doors.
The day after that, they took out the IV. John celebrated by trying to do a wall pushup and nearly fainting from the pain in his shoulder.
Two days later, after who-knew-how-many laps of the hallway, he decided he was strong enough to start exploring the complex without serious risk of a humiliating return trip in a wheelchair. He’d paid enough for his ticket. He wanted to see the show.
He got lost a lot. There were no maps, and the few people he met hurried past him as if he weren’t even there. He didn’t want to ask any of the guards for directions; he guessed that McKay had probably “exceeded his authority” again in giving him the pass, and so he shouldn’t draw any more attention to the fact that he was wandering around than he had to.
The rest of the complex wasn’t significantly less creepy than the hospital wing. Most of the rooms he passed were labs, empty or not, filled with unrecognizable machinery in various states of disassembly. Even here, he couldn’t make himself take an interest in that kind of thing. Server farms, too, clicking and humming ominously. A couple of ranges devoted to weaponry, and while the guns shaped like little pythons certainly caught his eye, he knew they were more trouble than they were worth right now. Still, he carefully noted down the location in the little mental map he was creating.
The hangar was the first really interesting thing he stumbled across. Opening a door at random, he found himself on the first level, staring up at the “Dart.” McKay had only shown it to him from the perch of the catwalk. Now he could inspect it up close. It was long and slender but hardly aerodynamic-looking at all; it bristled with tubes and mysterious bulges. And something about the texture was all wrong. He was sure that if he touched it, it would be spongy rather than cold and smooth. Where it had taken weapons fire, the edges of the holes seemed to bubble and throb. The design put a chill down his spine—he could believe it was an alien race that had designed it. John had heard people call some helicopters insectile, but they were nothing compared to this.
McKay had said that Atlantis needed pilots. Did they expect him to fly one of these?
He backed out of the hangar carefully.
At least now he was back on familiar ground. He could probably even find the interrogation rooms if he wanted to be sentimental about what life had been like before he had found out how a man could jump eight stories to the ground and get up with just a nosebleed. Instead, he turned in a different direction.
The room with the chair was right where he remembered it. His breath hitched as he stepped through that door, just as it had when McKay had taken him in before. The lights were out, but he didn’t bother trying to find the switch. The chair glowed with its own cold blue light. Covered over with that weird circuitry, it should have seemed as alien to him as the Dart, but instead he found himself moving closer and closer to it. It seemed to glitter just for him, and he knew enough to know that nothing could be that beautiful that wasn’t also dangerous, but the longing he felt was almost obscene, like he was in some kind of sci-fi porn film. If he sat down in that chair, the whole galaxy might lock into place around him, a huge clock mechanism of which he’d be the linchpin—
He drew back his hand. It would probably set off all kinds of alarms, bring guards running. John didn’t want to fuck this up. More importantly, an urgent voice in his head told him that if he touched the chair, the SGC wouldn’t have to lock him up if it turned him down. He’d walk out into the desert and lie down in the dust again.
And that thought scared the hell out of him, and this time he did turn his back before half-sprinting out of the chamber.
He didn’t stop til he was safe back in his room.
Day five, and still no sign of McKay. He’d expected his little excursion to set off some smug visit where he’d tell John that he’d done exactly what he’d expected him to or given him a lecture on where he wasn’t supposed to go, but instead there was only silence, and lots of it. He let the nurse poke and prod him (Keller was a no-show too), worked on his upper body strength, and tried not to go nuts in between.
He was as good at hurry-up-and-wait as the next guy. He’d sat around playing cards and making stupid bets in lousy conditions all over the world. But this was pushing it. He’d picked Las Vegas for a reason, after all. Screw New York, Vegas was the real city that never slept. Lights, noise, action 24-7. Replica landmarks at weird scales that made you think you were dreaming or high (John had gotten to be a fan of the surreal in the last few years), fake volcanoes, come-ons every five feet. You were never in danger of being left alone with your thoughts. But here there was not only no casino, there was no TV, no phone, not even a random dogeared Russian paperback for him to read. No getting away from his own head. When day six rolled around with no visitors, it became way too easy to fill up the silence with a review of all the reasons that he’d never be cleared to join a top-secret military operation. From the cash they must’ve found in his car to his gambling debts to the Air Force record, it all added up to John Sheppard being the most useless, hopeless pilot who’d ever killed a dozen people trying to save one. He wouldn’t hire him, either. Especially not if they were comparing him to whatever heroic John Sheppard had supposedly been running around with McKay in other realities.
What had he been thinking, letting himself hope that this was some kind of way out? And what the hell was McKay thinking, making all sorts of grand promises and then just disappearing? Was this some kind of bizarre test? If so, McKay could stuff it.
That night he lay awake thinking about Amy—and thank you, McKay, for bringing that all up, like they were already friends, like he had any right to talk about it. When he finally drifted off, he dreamed of his dad’s funeral, and Dave clocking him for even showing up. You put him here, John. Why didn’t you at least have the decency to eat your gun before he could find out? Isn’t that what you military types do?
He woke at that, but the line between waking and sleeping seemed hard to cross, not so much firm as sticky, clinging at him and snapping him back. Maybe, he thought, rubbing his eyes, trying to clear the heaviness, maybe he had died out in the desert, and this was some weird version of hell, or an afterlife halfway house. It made a lot more sense than that he had fallen in with a bunch of people secretly fighting off an alien invasion who had then left him to rot in an abandoned hospital ward.
The idea had a freakish appeal. He could surrender to it, and then he could get back to really not giving much of a damn about anything. They’d let him go eventually, and when he walked out, it might really be into nothingness.
But…wait. He’d met an alien. Not just the one he’d killed. One that they were keeping on ice upstairs. One who had stared at him with eyes from another galaxy and told him he knew the future.
John was walking down that endless hallway before he knew it.
The Wraith’s cell was on a level even deeper than his. He should have been surprised that his pass worked, but he wasn't. He should have been more surprised that the guard who had been there during his day visit was gone that night, but the heaviness in his head made him accept everything quietly.
The steel door slid open and the single bright light flicked on. For a minute, it dazzled John’s eyes. When he could peer into the cell, the Wraith was standing much closer to the glass than he’d expected, studying him with a gleam in his eye. John recoiled a step involuntarily.
“John Sheppard,” he said. “You have returned. I knew you would. I dreamed it.”
He was reminded of the other one, sitting across from him in the suite. John had never seen anyone so unreadable at the table, so remote, even though he had been dressed like some idiot out of a goth music video.
“Oh, yeah?” He started a slow pace back and forth in front of the cell. “And what did you dream I’d say?”
The Wraith spread his hands out. “Do you like my cage, John Sheppard?”
“I like that you’re inside it.”
He made a slow arc with his fingers, following the glint on the glass. John’s eyes followed them unwillingly. “See how it shines. Phosphorence and starlight, the glory of the queen, all blown out in the darkness, but still they leave me this.” He sighed, then suddenly put his palm flat against the glass, startling John. “It is very literal, John Sheppard. Very definite. Not like yours at all.”
“Mine? I’m not the one locked up.”
The Wraith laughed, deep and rusty. “Forgive me. Perhaps you are dimmer than I thought. Just another soldier, not fit for a face…” He turned away, mumbling to himself.
Of course, despite his immediate, instinctive protest, the guy was right. He was as much a prisoner of the SGC as the Wraith was. But how had he known?
It’s like you can read minds, the wiseguy had complained.
They can get into your head, McKay had said.
He shook off the mounting feeling that maybe he would be better off somewhere, anywhere but here. “Hey. You got a name?”
The Wraith looked up sharply. The jagged tattoo around his eye was really starting to bother John—a symbol he couldn’t decode and couldn’t look away from, like the glyphs in the deserts of his dreams. “Not for you.” He paused. “Not yet.”
“What are they going to do to you?”
“I am the last. A pathogen in a test tube. Soon, if I do not feed, I will sleep. Sleep and wait. The Wraith are relentless as rivers. One day I will be free again.” He dropped his voice, almost crooning. “But you, John Sheppard, you will never be free.”
“Look,” he said weakly, “they’re not going to keep me locked up here forever.”
“That is not what I meant. Haven’t they already begun? With their dreams and fairy tales?”
McKay. McKay and his pictures, his spearmint gum, his talk of other worlds where he’d been someone worth knowing. Pretending to let him go. Knowing he couldn’t walk away from a promise like that.
Headgames. This was all a headgame. He should’ve known from the beginning, but… “Why?”
“You have the key, the spark of life to give to the constructions of the Ancients. They will use you until you are as dried a husk as any human ever fed upon by Wraith, and then they will abandon you. Just like they always have.”
The words woke some reverberation in him he could not explain, like fragments of some beautiful story he knew only in his sleep and ached for in daylight. Like the ache he’d felt looking at the chair. John found himself leaning against the glass. “The key? The Ancients?”
The Wraith’s mouth was so close to the glass it misted over with each breath. His cat’s-eyes burned into John’s. “Oh, there is so much you do not know, John Sheppard. So many great and beautiful and terrible things you have seen only through their ignorant eyes. But I can show you,” he coaxed. “Come inside.”
John’s hand hadn’t actually moved towards the lock, he told himself later. He had only shifted his weight, which cast the light on the glass at a different angle. An angle which showed him, instead of the Wraith’s eager expression, a sliver of a reflection, dark eyes above bronze cheekbones. Behind him.
“You should not be here,” a low woman’s voice said.
John jumped backwards, away from those eyes but practically into the woman herself. He nearly lost his balance as he turned around to stare at her. She was tiny, hardly coming up to his chin. She wore jeans and a loose-fitting sweater that only partially hid how thin she was. Her tawny hair was close-cropped, emphasizing those high cheekbones and cool eyes. She held herself poised and light on her bare feet, like she expected to have to throw a punch or block one. There was a bandage on her left hand.
“Who are you?” he finally got out.
“You should not be here,” she repeated.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said, still a little dazed. “I have a pass.”
“You are John Sheppard?”
“That’s me,” he said, trying for a winning smile. This woman didn’t seem up for being won, but he was already feeling like it was something he wanted to do.
“It is not safe to be alone with a Wraith, especially this one. McKay should have told you this.”
“Must’ve forgot to mention it. But you still have the advantage of me, Miss…?”
“Teyla. Teyla Emmagen,” the Wraith said from behind him, making him jump again. “Fish out of water. How can you breathe? This desert will be the end of you.”
John’s eyes narrowed. “He knows you?”
Teyla’s eyes flicked past him, to the Wraith, and then back. “Come. It is better not to be down here at all.”
John looked back. The Wraith smiled knowingly and turned away, muttering. “A queen in rags and tatters is a queen still…”
Suddenly, he simply looked strange again, tall and thin and long-haired, like some lost crazy hippie. Who ate people. John shook his head and hastened to follow Teyla.
As he fell in beside her, he asked the question again. “How does he know you?”
“He does not.”
Her tone was icy. Looking at the way she held her chin high, he realized she was furious, but he didn’t think it was at him. Well. Mostly not at him.
Maybe she hated having other people know her secrets as much as he did with his.
“What does that mean?”
She didn’t answer. At the end of the hallway was a guard station. There was a guard there now, stunned and rubbing his eyes, looking more like a kid than a marine. “Are you going to report this, Miss Emmagen?” he asked plaintively. “I really don’t know how I could have fallen—“
She glanced briefly at John. “No. But do not let it happen again.”
John waited until they were in the elevator before he said, hopefully, “Thanks for not reporting me, either.”
She looked at the numbers going by on the panel. “I do not care for the SGC’s approach to potential contamination,” she said.
“Well, thanks anyway.”
Again, she didn’t answer. There was something as remote about her as there had been about the Wraiths, only she was so fiercely beautiful that no one needed to make him want to get closer. John was starting to feel shellshocked. How many landslides were going to sweep him away while he was here?
“So, what were you doing down there?” he blurted.
She pushed a hand through her hair. “I felt that something was wrong.”
“You felt it?”
“Yes,” she said shortly, and he remembered that she was one of the people McKay had said would have to sign off on him. Better not to push it.
Speaking of McKay…he took the chance. “You wouldn’t happen to have seen Dr. McKay around recently, would you?”
“I have been away,” she said. The elevator stopped. “I must go. If you start to dream again…” She stepped in unexpectedly close and tilted his chin down to look into his eyes. He caught a whiff of some gingery perfume. “Have them call me.”
“Okay. I guess this is my stop,” he said faintly.
She searched his face for a minute longer and then released him without a word. He didn’t think he’d be wanting to tell her about any dreams he might have that night. The thought distracted him enough that it wasn’t until the elevator doors had shut that he realized that he’d never told her he’d been having strange dreams in the first place.
The next day, a guard told him he was wanted upstairs. John was calmer as he followed him up than he’d thought he’d be. He wasn’t sure whether it was anger at being left so long, or the things the Wraith had told him, settling in deep, or just the sense, which had almost always been right, that at this point he’d better play it cool.
The guard took him to an area that was new to him, with a good-sized conference room whose walls were covered in LCDs. McKay, still in one of those suits, was standing in front of one of them, scowling at it. There were two other people standing at one end of the table, which was littered haphazardly with office supplies, looking at a file. One was a short blond man who had a gentle face and harried lines around his eyes but whose bearing gave him away instantly as a Marine, and the other was Teyla. She didn’t look up as he came in.
“Ah,” McKay said officiously, “glad you could join us, Sheppard. I wanted to introduce you to the rest of my team, now that they’re back.” He waved a hand. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Lorne, in charge of the military stuff.”
A lieutenant colonel? In charge of the military stuff? He was probably one of the highest-ranking officers on Atlantis. John came forward to shake his hand. Lorne’s grip was firm, and he didn’t try to disguise his appraising look. “Good to meet you, Colonel.”
“And this is Teyla Emmagan. She’s our first-contact specialist. Helps us deal with all the different cultures we meet in Pegasus.”
“We have already met,” she said, but she gave him her hand. Her gaze at him was steady, but detached. “I understand you have spared me some work, Sheppard.”
“You met him?” McKay looked oddly disconcerted. “When?”
“Last night, upon my return.”
“What? You didn’t come see me last night.”
“No, I did not. It was late.”
“I’m just saying, you might have. You know you wouldn’t have woken me—“
“Rodney,” Lorne said, softly but firmly. “Leave it.”
“Fine.” After a minute, McKay recovered. “Anyway, Sheppard, meet Atlantis’s first team, and maybe your own. We’ve been split up, chasing Wraith all over the planet, but we think we’ve got them all now. We’ll be going back to Atlantis soon.”
John’s attention had been arrested by the first sentence. “Maybe?”
“There have been a few difficulties with your appointment,” McKay said, obviously trying to sound breezy. “You know how the military bureaucracy is.”
“I remember,” John said.
“But you’re keeping busy, right?”
John hesitated, wondering if the question was some kind of reference to the night before, when Teyla’s voice broke in. “Have you downloaded the data from the desert site yet, Rodney?”
McKay blinked. “Oh, yes, yes.” He produced a DVD from his jacket pocket. “Here it is.”
“Good. I will go work on the translations.”
“Wait,” he said. “How was Baltimore?”
“The Wraith is dead,” she said. “There is little else to tell.”
“Still, why don’t you tell me about it over lunch?”
Teyla stiffened almost imperceptibly. “It will take me some time to work through the data.”
“The mission report will be ready tonight,” Lorne put in.
McKay frowned. Teyla nodded to them and left. Unbidden, John’s glance followed her out. After a minute, he realized that McKay was staring after her, too. Strange how McKay’s coldly competent air had vanished as soon as he’d spoken to her. An unrequited crush? John felt a faint and troubling stir of jealousy at the thought, but rejected it. It seemed more complicated than that.
“She was so different before, you know,” McKay said plaintively. “So nice…”
“Rodney,” Lorne said, with that tone again, this time glancing at John warningly.
“Yes. Right.” McKay drew himself up, and John finally realized what he had been reminding him of all this time, despite the know-it-all air and the Matrix suits. The young lieutenants he had seen with their first command, the ones desperately trying to be something they weren’t. The ones who didn’t grow into it. “Try not to take it personally, Sheppard,” he said loftily.
It was only decent to change the subject. “I saved her some work?”
“Hunting the Wraith here,” Lorne explained. “That’s one of her specialties.”
“Wait, there are ways to kill them besides bombing the hell out of them?”
“If you try hard enough.”
John was a little sick of the cryptic references.
“So,” Lorne said after a minute, “you actually are interested in the job. This isn’t just McKay railroading you.”
“Well, to the extent that I know what the job is.” John smiled slightly. “It’s all pretty new to me. Aliens and spaceships and other galaxies…”
“Why would a cop want to leave it all behind and go to a city in another galaxy?”
“I’m not a cop,” John said without even thinking about it. “I’m a pilot.”
Shit. Where had that come from, after all this time? And did it sound pathetic enough, coming from a broken-down bulk-grade detective who hadn’t touched aircraft controls in five years?
Lorne was looking at him hard. There was a glint of something in his eyes, but John couldn’t tell what it was.
“Told you,” McKay said. “Just like—“
“Okay. It was a pleasure meeting you, Sheppard,” Lorne said. “We’ll keep you posted.”
“You will?” John said. “Because there’s been nothing but radio silence for the past week. There’s only so long a man can entertain himself looking for the vending machines.”
Lorne shot McKay a look. “Rodney…”
“What?”
“You gave him a pass?”
“Yes. Why not? He’s already seen Wraith, Darts…what harm could it do?”
“You weren’t by any chance hoping he’d do anything that would force the issue, were you?”
“Of course not!” McKay protested, not entirely convincingly.
“Force the issue?” Thinking back to what the Wraith had said, he thought he might have caught this particular cryptic reference, but he wanted to make them say it.
Lorne smiled tightly, the smile of a guy who had gotten used to keeping secrets. John couldn’t tell whether he was sorry for Lorne or resented the hell out of him. “We’ll be in touch, Sheppard.”
Author: Sarah T.
Website: www.aliencorn.net
Rating: NC-17
Characters: John, Teyla, Rodney
Notes: A "Vegas" AU. Thanks to the Spike for a Turkish-massage beta. (~12K words.)
Summary: John is recruited.
It takes a lot longer to recover from gunshot wounds than you might think.
John Sheppard knew this, had learned it in other hospitals in other war zones, but somehow, like always, his brain had conveniently fogged over this fact until it was too late. Now he was lying there living with it in a bed that he was pretty sure was deep in McKay’s ridiculous complex in the desert, feeling like an idiot.
Another decent death, gotten away from him.
Keeeeeep dreaming. There must be some other reason for your existence.
McKay spent an awful lot of time sitting by his bed, talking over the other voice while John dozed. Lots of names John didn’t recognize, and a few he did. “I was thinking about Elizabeth today. She would have loved you. One of her strays. But Colonel Carter is a little more...goal-oriented. Makes things complicated. Not that Elizabeth was straightforward, sometimes she was incomprehensible, but she never could resist the one with the black mark. If it wasn’t for her, we never could have gotten Teyla on the team after...”
The fourth or fifth time McKay dropped by, John began to think that McKay didn’t have all that many people to talk to. Either that, or he just enjoyed talking so much that he didn’t really care if anyone listened to him, which made a guy nodded out on the good stuff like John his best buddy ever.
“Just so you know, we notified your brother. Told him you were in an accident. He wanted to make sure your costs were covered, but I don’t think he’s coming out. Convenient for us. Transferring you to another facility for a staged visit would have been one of the stupider things I’ve had to do all year, and believe me, my life is a carnival of stupid things only occasionally interrupted by meaningful work.”
John kept his eyes closed, his face turned away.
Time stretched out like taffy, but he thought it was on the third day that McKay paused unexpectedly mid-tirade to grab his injured arm and squeeze hard. “Come on. The nurse says you’re conscious. I had her cut back the morphine an hour ago.”
Like there’s anything you can do to hurt me, McKay, he thought, but he let his head drift slowly over towards him.
“I knew it. Do you know where you are?”
John had to clear his throat. “The Thunderdome?”
“Oh, please, the Thunderdome wasn’t anything like—never mind.” He shook his head. “Yes, you’re in a secure wing of Area 51. The only patient, actually. Do you remember what happened to you?”
“I remember getting shot by that alien. And then bombed by friendlies. And then lying there bleeding out in the desert because none of you apparently believe in doing post-attack recon.”
His shoulder throbbed with the memory. That had hurt more than he had thought it would. It had almost been funny, how indignant he had been, not even at the pain, just: c’mon, you guys, don’t you know how to do anything?
“Oh, yes, that.” McKay waved his hand irritably. “We did come get you eventually, so why are you complaining? The big question is what comes next.”
That was a question John had almost zero interest in.
McKay waited impatiently for him to respond, and when John didn’t, he leaned in and brought it out like he thought he was some mastermind in the Bourne films. “I want you to join the SGC. My team, in particular.”
John squinted at him, wishing he had his glasses. “Join your team?”
That clearly wasn't the response McKay had expected. He blinked, then rolled his eyes. “Yes, join my team. Look, what you did was really brave. Really stupid, but really brave. Perfect for the muscle on one of my missions.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“There’s no question you have the combat experience, and Atlantis could definitely use a pilot. And we’re short one member since Cadman got her promotion, so you don’t even need to wait for a slot to open up.”
Pilot, he thought, and the word resonated so loudly in his head that he had to fumble for something to say. “You hunt Wraith.”
“And go out, see new worlds, new civilizations, new Ancient technologies that dimwitted peasants are using for Christmas lights. It’s good work. We do save lives, if that’s what you’re fixated on. Sometimes in bulk.” He smirked knowingly. “The local women are often very grateful.”
“How long do I have to decide?”
He knew he was kidding himself even as he asked. This kind of decision was made for him, before he’d even heard the details. For just a few hours, he had felt purpose, pulling him together, making everything around him real. He’d do anything to get that back.
“Well, it’s more like we decide. You’ve obviously got a few issues, there will be some paperwork, but I should be able to get the appointment through.”
Uh-oh. He’d heard that one before. “Uh-huh.”
The skepticism must have shown on his face, because McKay clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll get it through. Just...no rush getting well, all right? I know you’ll feel the need to leap heroically from your bed at least two days before you should. Suppress it.”
“I’ll try not to be bravely stupid,” John said, and turned his head back to the wall.
“Right, then,” McKay said. “That’s settled.”
His footsteps were quick to the door.
The next day, the nurse came in to his room to find him doing careful laps around the perimeter, clutching his IV stand in one hand. His legs were wobbling like a newborn colt’s and sweat stung his eyes, but he gave her his best smile.
“Look who’s up,” she said. “I thought Dr. McKay told you not to do anything brave.”
“I think I can handle the menace of walking. Shuffling, really. See?” He demonstrated.
She raised an eyebrow. “You couldn’t yesterday. Sit down, please.”
But he could tell she was pleased as she ran through her little battery of tests. When she was done, she said, “Dr. Keller will be in to see you later.”
“The coroner? It’s that bad?”
The nurse gave him another look. “Dr. Keller is the chief medical officer of Atlantis. Technically, she’s been your doctor since you were brought in.”
“Oh,” he said. Well, that made sense. He’d never yet gotten to go to an obscure posting without some doctor fussing at him first. Hopefully there wouldn’t be too many vaccinations. As he leaned back in bed, he began to get ambitious about taking a shower later.
It was impossible to tell time in the windowless room, but Keller didn’t show until long after his second round of green jello on a tray. She’d shed the weird blue eyeshadow and pulled her hair back. It made her look a lot younger.
“Busy night?” he said, trying for collegial but overshooting and ending up a little too close to sarcastic.
“You’re actually my only patient on Earth,” she said, flipping through his chart without making eye contact.
“Do a lot of gunshot wounds?” he said. He was already feeling like he was on a first date with a girl who was only there to please her mother.
She put down the chart and snapped into a pair of gloves. “Occasionally, but my practice is actually more lasers, stunners, exotic poisons, bioweapons, radiation exposure...”
“Oh,” he said. Right. Brave new world. All sorts of new ways to get hurt.
“Let’s take a look at you.”
As she probed a little too directly into his wounds, he tensed and did his best not to show the pain. When she hit a particularly tender spot, he asked casually, “So, when do you think I might be getting out of here?”
It wasn’t even that he was attached to that damn apartment—just one more place to lay his head that didn’t feel remotely like home. He hadn’t bothered to drop by before starting to get the hell out of Dodge. He just didn’t like the feeling this place gave him. There were too many machines in his room that he didn't recognize from any hospital he'd ever been in, whirring and chiming in barely-audible tones that weren't quite right. There was no noise whatsoever from the outside, no activity in the hallway. Not even a TV to watch. Whenever they walked out of his room, he might as well be the last human left after an apocalypse.
Or a guy in solitary.
She waved another mysterious device and studied the readout. “We’ll disconnect you from the IV soon. That will make you more mobile.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said, “but that’s not exactly what I asked.”
“Now that you’ve decided to recover, you could be discharged in a few days. When you get out of here...” She hesitated. “You’ll have to speak to McKay about that.”
John frowned. “He’s not a doctor, though.”
She snorted. “Try telling him that.”
“I mean, a real doctor. Someone who heals people.”
“No.”
“Then why--”
“I have to go,” she said. “Keep up the walking. Don’t flirt with the nurse, she’s not interested in men.”
Somehow she managed to shed her gloves and vanish, leaving John with his gown hanging open, before he could get the next question out of his mouth.
He’d had less ominous medical clearance exams before.
His muscles were telling him the shower was a little too ambitious, so there wasn’t much for him to do that evening but wait for McKay to show up again. That was already kind of odd. John was convinced he’d been a several-times-a-day visitor when John had been more out of it, and now it had been a full day since he’d seen him. The painkillers made waiting less painful than it might otherwise have been, but also weirder. He felt like he didn’t have a tight grip on where his thoughts went, especially after the facility hit some hour it obviously defined as “night” and the lights dimmed. He kept skimming in and out of dreams, surfacing with strange images. His mother, standing by the window that wasn’t there in a long white coat with an elaborate collar. The wind drawing patterns in the sand like letters from another alphabet as he lay still in one of so many deserts, waiting to die. A long hallway, and the lights going out abruptly, and then a single blue spotlight snapping on, picking out his dead Wraith on the floor.
Did he sing for you before he died, John Sheppard?
McKay’s heavy tread in the hall made him start up, blinking furiously.
“Ah, you’re awake,” McKay said at the door. He was wearing the exact same black suit-and-shirt combo as he’d been every single time John had seen him, like it was his uniform. “I thought you might have drifted off. I heard you had a busy day.”
“Not that busy. Come in.”
McKay did, but stayed on his feet. “You’re looking better.”
“So they tell me. They also tell me that for some reason you’re the man in charge of deciding when I get out of here.”
Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, he let hang in the air without saying it.
“Well...” McKay hesitated. “It’s really more of a committee decision whether you can join the team. Colonel Carter, Lorne, Teyla…It’s going to take a while.”
“What does that have to do with whether I can sleep in my own bed and eat something besides hard-boiled eggs and jello?”
McKay frowned. “I believe I mentioned this is a secured facility.”
This was starting to sound much too familiar. “Yes, and...?”
“Until we decide whether or not to accept you, we need to keep you here. You’ve seen way too much at this point.”
“Hey!” John sat up straight. “You let me go before!”
“Which was exceeding my authority,” McKay said, with a mixture of irritation and faint embarrassment, “as I’ve since been reminded.”
This was what he’d been afraid of, what he’d been fucking afraid of since they’d first brought him into that little interview room. He’d seen way too much of this out of the corner of his eye during his time in the Air Force, and he’d never liked it. “So I’m a prisoner?”
“No, no. I’m sure you’re going to get in. It’s just a matter of time.”
“And what do you expect me to do til you decide I’m good enough for you? Jerk off and cry?”
McKay didn’t look fazed by the crude remark, which surprised John. “First, get better. You’re not exactly fit for duty right now anyway. Second...” He sighed. “Look, I’ll get you a pass. You can wander around the place, see if you can wrap your mind around things. You’re a quick study, always have been. Just don’t touch anything, okay?”
John would have said something about McKay’s creepy habit of acting like he already knew him if a much more troublesome thought hadn’t taken priority. “But if I already know too much...”
McKay’s smile got dim and cold. “Might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb, Sheppard.”
Message received.
The pass arrived the next day: a clear lucite card with no markings of any kind. He held it up to the light, which seemed to fracture in it, and got out of bed. He managed the shower and—after the resulting nap—took a triumphant totter through the hallway, dragging his stand. The place was just as eerie and deserted as he’d guessed it would be, cold white lighting on greenish-grey walls, with only a single silent nurse, different from yesterday, at the station at the far end of the ward from him. The station was equipped with closed-circuit TV showing all the rooms, including his, in grainy black-and-white. Some of the rooms, he noticed on the way back, had restraints on the beds and heavy bolts on the doors.
The day after that, they took out the IV. John celebrated by trying to do a wall pushup and nearly fainting from the pain in his shoulder.
Two days later, after who-knew-how-many laps of the hallway, he decided he was strong enough to start exploring the complex without serious risk of a humiliating return trip in a wheelchair. He’d paid enough for his ticket. He wanted to see the show.
He got lost a lot. There were no maps, and the few people he met hurried past him as if he weren’t even there. He didn’t want to ask any of the guards for directions; he guessed that McKay had probably “exceeded his authority” again in giving him the pass, and so he shouldn’t draw any more attention to the fact that he was wandering around than he had to.
The rest of the complex wasn’t significantly less creepy than the hospital wing. Most of the rooms he passed were labs, empty or not, filled with unrecognizable machinery in various states of disassembly. Even here, he couldn’t make himself take an interest in that kind of thing. Server farms, too, clicking and humming ominously. A couple of ranges devoted to weaponry, and while the guns shaped like little pythons certainly caught his eye, he knew they were more trouble than they were worth right now. Still, he carefully noted down the location in the little mental map he was creating.
The hangar was the first really interesting thing he stumbled across. Opening a door at random, he found himself on the first level, staring up at the “Dart.” McKay had only shown it to him from the perch of the catwalk. Now he could inspect it up close. It was long and slender but hardly aerodynamic-looking at all; it bristled with tubes and mysterious bulges. And something about the texture was all wrong. He was sure that if he touched it, it would be spongy rather than cold and smooth. Where it had taken weapons fire, the edges of the holes seemed to bubble and throb. The design put a chill down his spine—he could believe it was an alien race that had designed it. John had heard people call some helicopters insectile, but they were nothing compared to this.
McKay had said that Atlantis needed pilots. Did they expect him to fly one of these?
He backed out of the hangar carefully.
At least now he was back on familiar ground. He could probably even find the interrogation rooms if he wanted to be sentimental about what life had been like before he had found out how a man could jump eight stories to the ground and get up with just a nosebleed. Instead, he turned in a different direction.
The room with the chair was right where he remembered it. His breath hitched as he stepped through that door, just as it had when McKay had taken him in before. The lights were out, but he didn’t bother trying to find the switch. The chair glowed with its own cold blue light. Covered over with that weird circuitry, it should have seemed as alien to him as the Dart, but instead he found himself moving closer and closer to it. It seemed to glitter just for him, and he knew enough to know that nothing could be that beautiful that wasn’t also dangerous, but the longing he felt was almost obscene, like he was in some kind of sci-fi porn film. If he sat down in that chair, the whole galaxy might lock into place around him, a huge clock mechanism of which he’d be the linchpin—
He drew back his hand. It would probably set off all kinds of alarms, bring guards running. John didn’t want to fuck this up. More importantly, an urgent voice in his head told him that if he touched the chair, the SGC wouldn’t have to lock him up if it turned him down. He’d walk out into the desert and lie down in the dust again.
And that thought scared the hell out of him, and this time he did turn his back before half-sprinting out of the chamber.
He didn’t stop til he was safe back in his room.
Day five, and still no sign of McKay. He’d expected his little excursion to set off some smug visit where he’d tell John that he’d done exactly what he’d expected him to or given him a lecture on where he wasn’t supposed to go, but instead there was only silence, and lots of it. He let the nurse poke and prod him (Keller was a no-show too), worked on his upper body strength, and tried not to go nuts in between.
He was as good at hurry-up-and-wait as the next guy. He’d sat around playing cards and making stupid bets in lousy conditions all over the world. But this was pushing it. He’d picked Las Vegas for a reason, after all. Screw New York, Vegas was the real city that never slept. Lights, noise, action 24-7. Replica landmarks at weird scales that made you think you were dreaming or high (John had gotten to be a fan of the surreal in the last few years), fake volcanoes, come-ons every five feet. You were never in danger of being left alone with your thoughts. But here there was not only no casino, there was no TV, no phone, not even a random dogeared Russian paperback for him to read. No getting away from his own head. When day six rolled around with no visitors, it became way too easy to fill up the silence with a review of all the reasons that he’d never be cleared to join a top-secret military operation. From the cash they must’ve found in his car to his gambling debts to the Air Force record, it all added up to John Sheppard being the most useless, hopeless pilot who’d ever killed a dozen people trying to save one. He wouldn’t hire him, either. Especially not if they were comparing him to whatever heroic John Sheppard had supposedly been running around with McKay in other realities.
What had he been thinking, letting himself hope that this was some kind of way out? And what the hell was McKay thinking, making all sorts of grand promises and then just disappearing? Was this some kind of bizarre test? If so, McKay could stuff it.
That night he lay awake thinking about Amy—and thank you, McKay, for bringing that all up, like they were already friends, like he had any right to talk about it. When he finally drifted off, he dreamed of his dad’s funeral, and Dave clocking him for even showing up. You put him here, John. Why didn’t you at least have the decency to eat your gun before he could find out? Isn’t that what you military types do?
He woke at that, but the line between waking and sleeping seemed hard to cross, not so much firm as sticky, clinging at him and snapping him back. Maybe, he thought, rubbing his eyes, trying to clear the heaviness, maybe he had died out in the desert, and this was some weird version of hell, or an afterlife halfway house. It made a lot more sense than that he had fallen in with a bunch of people secretly fighting off an alien invasion who had then left him to rot in an abandoned hospital ward.
The idea had a freakish appeal. He could surrender to it, and then he could get back to really not giving much of a damn about anything. They’d let him go eventually, and when he walked out, it might really be into nothingness.
But…wait. He’d met an alien. Not just the one he’d killed. One that they were keeping on ice upstairs. One who had stared at him with eyes from another galaxy and told him he knew the future.
John was walking down that endless hallway before he knew it.
The Wraith’s cell was on a level even deeper than his. He should have been surprised that his pass worked, but he wasn't. He should have been more surprised that the guard who had been there during his day visit was gone that night, but the heaviness in his head made him accept everything quietly.
The steel door slid open and the single bright light flicked on. For a minute, it dazzled John’s eyes. When he could peer into the cell, the Wraith was standing much closer to the glass than he’d expected, studying him with a gleam in his eye. John recoiled a step involuntarily.
“John Sheppard,” he said. “You have returned. I knew you would. I dreamed it.”
He was reminded of the other one, sitting across from him in the suite. John had never seen anyone so unreadable at the table, so remote, even though he had been dressed like some idiot out of a goth music video.
“Oh, yeah?” He started a slow pace back and forth in front of the cell. “And what did you dream I’d say?”
The Wraith spread his hands out. “Do you like my cage, John Sheppard?”
“I like that you’re inside it.”
He made a slow arc with his fingers, following the glint on the glass. John’s eyes followed them unwillingly. “See how it shines. Phosphorence and starlight, the glory of the queen, all blown out in the darkness, but still they leave me this.” He sighed, then suddenly put his palm flat against the glass, startling John. “It is very literal, John Sheppard. Very definite. Not like yours at all.”
“Mine? I’m not the one locked up.”
The Wraith laughed, deep and rusty. “Forgive me. Perhaps you are dimmer than I thought. Just another soldier, not fit for a face…” He turned away, mumbling to himself.
Of course, despite his immediate, instinctive protest, the guy was right. He was as much a prisoner of the SGC as the Wraith was. But how had he known?
It’s like you can read minds, the wiseguy had complained.
They can get into your head, McKay had said.
He shook off the mounting feeling that maybe he would be better off somewhere, anywhere but here. “Hey. You got a name?”
The Wraith looked up sharply. The jagged tattoo around his eye was really starting to bother John—a symbol he couldn’t decode and couldn’t look away from, like the glyphs in the deserts of his dreams. “Not for you.” He paused. “Not yet.”
“What are they going to do to you?”
“I am the last. A pathogen in a test tube. Soon, if I do not feed, I will sleep. Sleep and wait. The Wraith are relentless as rivers. One day I will be free again.” He dropped his voice, almost crooning. “But you, John Sheppard, you will never be free.”
“Look,” he said weakly, “they’re not going to keep me locked up here forever.”
“That is not what I meant. Haven’t they already begun? With their dreams and fairy tales?”
McKay. McKay and his pictures, his spearmint gum, his talk of other worlds where he’d been someone worth knowing. Pretending to let him go. Knowing he couldn’t walk away from a promise like that.
Headgames. This was all a headgame. He should’ve known from the beginning, but… “Why?”
“You have the key, the spark of life to give to the constructions of the Ancients. They will use you until you are as dried a husk as any human ever fed upon by Wraith, and then they will abandon you. Just like they always have.”
The words woke some reverberation in him he could not explain, like fragments of some beautiful story he knew only in his sleep and ached for in daylight. Like the ache he’d felt looking at the chair. John found himself leaning against the glass. “The key? The Ancients?”
The Wraith’s mouth was so close to the glass it misted over with each breath. His cat’s-eyes burned into John’s. “Oh, there is so much you do not know, John Sheppard. So many great and beautiful and terrible things you have seen only through their ignorant eyes. But I can show you,” he coaxed. “Come inside.”
John’s hand hadn’t actually moved towards the lock, he told himself later. He had only shifted his weight, which cast the light on the glass at a different angle. An angle which showed him, instead of the Wraith’s eager expression, a sliver of a reflection, dark eyes above bronze cheekbones. Behind him.
“You should not be here,” a low woman’s voice said.
John jumped backwards, away from those eyes but practically into the woman herself. He nearly lost his balance as he turned around to stare at her. She was tiny, hardly coming up to his chin. She wore jeans and a loose-fitting sweater that only partially hid how thin she was. Her tawny hair was close-cropped, emphasizing those high cheekbones and cool eyes. She held herself poised and light on her bare feet, like she expected to have to throw a punch or block one. There was a bandage on her left hand.
“Who are you?” he finally got out.
“You should not be here,” she repeated.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said, still a little dazed. “I have a pass.”
“You are John Sheppard?”
“That’s me,” he said, trying for a winning smile. This woman didn’t seem up for being won, but he was already feeling like it was something he wanted to do.
“It is not safe to be alone with a Wraith, especially this one. McKay should have told you this.”
“Must’ve forgot to mention it. But you still have the advantage of me, Miss…?”
“Teyla. Teyla Emmagen,” the Wraith said from behind him, making him jump again. “Fish out of water. How can you breathe? This desert will be the end of you.”
John’s eyes narrowed. “He knows you?”
Teyla’s eyes flicked past him, to the Wraith, and then back. “Come. It is better not to be down here at all.”
John looked back. The Wraith smiled knowingly and turned away, muttering. “A queen in rags and tatters is a queen still…”
Suddenly, he simply looked strange again, tall and thin and long-haired, like some lost crazy hippie. Who ate people. John shook his head and hastened to follow Teyla.
As he fell in beside her, he asked the question again. “How does he know you?”
“He does not.”
Her tone was icy. Looking at the way she held her chin high, he realized she was furious, but he didn’t think it was at him. Well. Mostly not at him.
Maybe she hated having other people know her secrets as much as he did with his.
“What does that mean?”
She didn’t answer. At the end of the hallway was a guard station. There was a guard there now, stunned and rubbing his eyes, looking more like a kid than a marine. “Are you going to report this, Miss Emmagen?” he asked plaintively. “I really don’t know how I could have fallen—“
She glanced briefly at John. “No. But do not let it happen again.”
John waited until they were in the elevator before he said, hopefully, “Thanks for not reporting me, either.”
She looked at the numbers going by on the panel. “I do not care for the SGC’s approach to potential contamination,” she said.
“Well, thanks anyway.”
Again, she didn’t answer. There was something as remote about her as there had been about the Wraiths, only she was so fiercely beautiful that no one needed to make him want to get closer. John was starting to feel shellshocked. How many landslides were going to sweep him away while he was here?
“So, what were you doing down there?” he blurted.
She pushed a hand through her hair. “I felt that something was wrong.”
“You felt it?”
“Yes,” she said shortly, and he remembered that she was one of the people McKay had said would have to sign off on him. Better not to push it.
Speaking of McKay…he took the chance. “You wouldn’t happen to have seen Dr. McKay around recently, would you?”
“I have been away,” she said. The elevator stopped. “I must go. If you start to dream again…” She stepped in unexpectedly close and tilted his chin down to look into his eyes. He caught a whiff of some gingery perfume. “Have them call me.”
“Okay. I guess this is my stop,” he said faintly.
She searched his face for a minute longer and then released him without a word. He didn’t think he’d be wanting to tell her about any dreams he might have that night. The thought distracted him enough that it wasn’t until the elevator doors had shut that he realized that he’d never told her he’d been having strange dreams in the first place.
The next day, a guard told him he was wanted upstairs. John was calmer as he followed him up than he’d thought he’d be. He wasn’t sure whether it was anger at being left so long, or the things the Wraith had told him, settling in deep, or just the sense, which had almost always been right, that at this point he’d better play it cool.
The guard took him to an area that was new to him, with a good-sized conference room whose walls were covered in LCDs. McKay, still in one of those suits, was standing in front of one of them, scowling at it. There were two other people standing at one end of the table, which was littered haphazardly with office supplies, looking at a file. One was a short blond man who had a gentle face and harried lines around his eyes but whose bearing gave him away instantly as a Marine, and the other was Teyla. She didn’t look up as he came in.
“Ah,” McKay said officiously, “glad you could join us, Sheppard. I wanted to introduce you to the rest of my team, now that they’re back.” He waved a hand. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Lorne, in charge of the military stuff.”
A lieutenant colonel? In charge of the military stuff? He was probably one of the highest-ranking officers on Atlantis. John came forward to shake his hand. Lorne’s grip was firm, and he didn’t try to disguise his appraising look. “Good to meet you, Colonel.”
“And this is Teyla Emmagan. She’s our first-contact specialist. Helps us deal with all the different cultures we meet in Pegasus.”
“We have already met,” she said, but she gave him her hand. Her gaze at him was steady, but detached. “I understand you have spared me some work, Sheppard.”
“You met him?” McKay looked oddly disconcerted. “When?”
“Last night, upon my return.”
“What? You didn’t come see me last night.”
“No, I did not. It was late.”
“I’m just saying, you might have. You know you wouldn’t have woken me—“
“Rodney,” Lorne said, softly but firmly. “Leave it.”
“Fine.” After a minute, McKay recovered. “Anyway, Sheppard, meet Atlantis’s first team, and maybe your own. We’ve been split up, chasing Wraith all over the planet, but we think we’ve got them all now. We’ll be going back to Atlantis soon.”
John’s attention had been arrested by the first sentence. “Maybe?”
“There have been a few difficulties with your appointment,” McKay said, obviously trying to sound breezy. “You know how the military bureaucracy is.”
“I remember,” John said.
“But you’re keeping busy, right?”
John hesitated, wondering if the question was some kind of reference to the night before, when Teyla’s voice broke in. “Have you downloaded the data from the desert site yet, Rodney?”
McKay blinked. “Oh, yes, yes.” He produced a DVD from his jacket pocket. “Here it is.”
“Good. I will go work on the translations.”
“Wait,” he said. “How was Baltimore?”
“The Wraith is dead,” she said. “There is little else to tell.”
“Still, why don’t you tell me about it over lunch?”
Teyla stiffened almost imperceptibly. “It will take me some time to work through the data.”
“The mission report will be ready tonight,” Lorne put in.
McKay frowned. Teyla nodded to them and left. Unbidden, John’s glance followed her out. After a minute, he realized that McKay was staring after her, too. Strange how McKay’s coldly competent air had vanished as soon as he’d spoken to her. An unrequited crush? John felt a faint and troubling stir of jealousy at the thought, but rejected it. It seemed more complicated than that.
“She was so different before, you know,” McKay said plaintively. “So nice…”
“Rodney,” Lorne said, with that tone again, this time glancing at John warningly.
“Yes. Right.” McKay drew himself up, and John finally realized what he had been reminding him of all this time, despite the know-it-all air and the Matrix suits. The young lieutenants he had seen with their first command, the ones desperately trying to be something they weren’t. The ones who didn’t grow into it. “Try not to take it personally, Sheppard,” he said loftily.
It was only decent to change the subject. “I saved her some work?”
“Hunting the Wraith here,” Lorne explained. “That’s one of her specialties.”
“Wait, there are ways to kill them besides bombing the hell out of them?”
“If you try hard enough.”
John was a little sick of the cryptic references.
“So,” Lorne said after a minute, “you actually are interested in the job. This isn’t just McKay railroading you.”
“Well, to the extent that I know what the job is.” John smiled slightly. “It’s all pretty new to me. Aliens and spaceships and other galaxies…”
“Why would a cop want to leave it all behind and go to a city in another galaxy?”
“I’m not a cop,” John said without even thinking about it. “I’m a pilot.”
Shit. Where had that come from, after all this time? And did it sound pathetic enough, coming from a broken-down bulk-grade detective who hadn’t touched aircraft controls in five years?
Lorne was looking at him hard. There was a glint of something in his eyes, but John couldn’t tell what it was.
“Told you,” McKay said. “Just like—“
“Okay. It was a pleasure meeting you, Sheppard,” Lorne said. “We’ll keep you posted.”
“You will?” John said. “Because there’s been nothing but radio silence for the past week. There’s only so long a man can entertain himself looking for the vending machines.”
Lorne shot McKay a look. “Rodney…”
“What?”
“You gave him a pass?”
“Yes. Why not? He’s already seen Wraith, Darts…what harm could it do?”
“You weren’t by any chance hoping he’d do anything that would force the issue, were you?”
“Of course not!” McKay protested, not entirely convincingly.
“Force the issue?” Thinking back to what the Wraith had said, he thought he might have caught this particular cryptic reference, but he wanted to make them say it.
Lorne smiled tightly, the smile of a guy who had gotten used to keeping secrets. John couldn’t tell whether he was sorry for Lorne or resented the hell out of him. “We’ll be in touch, Sheppard.”