![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Title: Been There, Done That
Recipient:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kodiak_bear
Word Count: 8,395
Rating: PG
Warnings: Some blood
Summary: nothing says "about to have a bad day" like waking up strapped down, congested, not a single soul in sight, and not a clue as to what the heck is going on.
Author Notes: Beta'd by the awesome sauce that hislinziday. Written for the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sheppard_hc Secret Santa. Takes place in season four.
Been There, Done That
John had awoken enough times and in enough strange places to become accustomed to, and to quickly over come, the mind-warping sense of panic you get not knowing who, what, where, when and why. He'd suffered enough “odd” from time dilation fields to copy-cat crystal entities to be able to go with the flow and just ride the madness out.
But even waking up to the dimly lit familiarity of the infirmary, complete with its equally familiar potpourri of chemical scents, wasn't enough to help him get swiftly past the heart jolting alarm of not knowing what the hell was going on.
That he was strapped down wrists and ankles monopolized the vast majority of why. The dead silence and complete emptiness of the place didn't help much, either. There should have at least been the blip of a heart monitor, muffled voices having a hushed conversation in the distance, tapping footsteps - something. But John recognized the twilight quality of the lighting and knew this wasn't the infirmary dimmed for patient comfort – it was the struggling power you got when the city was on back-up, lit for convenience but otherwise the main systems on hibernation and the less vital systems dead to the world.
Add it all up, and it equaled crap having hit the fan.
It still had nothing on him being strapped down and alone. John angled his neck for a look at himself, dressed in scrubs but sans a blanket, skin covered in gooseflesh (and making him realize how damn cold it was), an IV needle taped to the back of his hand and an empty IV bag (also making him aware of how bad he had to pee). He was achy; the kind of joint discomfort you got with a bad cold or the flu, joining forces with the ache of having been lying in bed for far too long. His mouth was dry, his throat itched, and when he took a deep breath, his lungs itched provoking a riot of coughs.
Okay, so that explained the infirmary – he was sick, sick while something was going down forcing everyone not to be around.
No. John didn't buy it. No way would the infirmary staff leave a patient behind. Not like this, tied down and unable to fend for himself.
“Hello?” John called. Between the dry throat and congested lungs, it came out as more of a “Lo?” and ended with a cough. Realization number three – he was damn thirsty.
“Hello!” he tried again. Then he stilled, both his body and his breaths (and boy did his lungs hate him for that one) and listened. It wasn't a long listen, his lungs having had enough and punishing him with another round of “let's expel your bronchial tubes.” When John finished, he forced himself to lie still and wait, because who the hell leaves an invalid behind?
John waited, waited, coughed, squirmed to relieve some of the aches, and waited.
No one came.
“Hey! Is anyone out there! Could use a little help, here! I promise I'm...” he grimaced down at the restraints. “Not going to do whatever got me strapped down in the first place. In fact I'm pretty sure I'm sane now.” But won't be for long if you don't get me out of these damn restraints, now!
Silence answered him, so thick, so completely still it was like being wrapped too tightly in a blanket, minus the warmth, until the oxygen ran out. John's nerves cried out in how wrong it was, because if there was one place that shouldn't know quiet this perfect, it was the infirmary.
John's arms started to squirm almost on their own volition, twisting and pulling, warming his wrists against the leather. It was unpadded leather, either because things had been that chaotic, or someone wanted to be cruel.
“Hey, seriously, I need... I need someone over here. The saline bags empty and I've got enough water in me to justify building a damn ark. And who the hell ties someone down without a catheter? I hate catheters as much as the next guy but this... this isn't right!” And how sad was it that he'd frequented the infirmary enough times to know standard procedure.
John didn't care. Something had been wrong the moment he woke up and was getting more wrong the longer he was awake. Right now the only plus was that whoever had strapped him down had either been in a hurry or too messed up to do it right – the buckling was sloppy, leaving lots of wiggle room. John's arms pulled, wrists twisted, the leather chafing like a bitch but his body only working that much harder against it.
“Anybody!” John screamed, half rising off the bed. “Please!”
Silent. So damn silent.
John threw himself back against the head of the bed, letting his arms pull and wriggle their way free. So be it. So damn well be it. What ever was going on, why ever the reason he was strapped down, it could all go screw itself. John tugged with increasingly hard jerks, teeth clenched as he grunted against the escalating pain.
“Come on,” he growled when he thought he felt some give. He pulled harder. “Come on.” Harder. “Come on!”
His wrist popped free, flicking his face with blood. He ignored it in favor of focusing on his second, equally bleeding wrist and freeing it. He then freed his ankles, removed the IV line and scrambled from the bed like scrambling from a dog liable to bite him.
Then he looked at his wrists, wincing at the damage. Although it wasn't exactly the shredded mess of torn flesh he had expected – scratched in places, with small patches of raw areas – it was still one hell of a testament to how bad an idea it was to strap someone down and leave them. John had always considered himself a pretty in-control guy but this... this wasn't in control.
It kind of scared the hell out of him.
But he was free, now. Free and thus far lacking any desire to go on a psychotic killing spree. No hearing voices, no seeing things, no feeling bugs crawling under his skin – if he didn't know any better, he'd say there had been absolutely no reason for anyone to break out the restraints.
Although having been there and done that with erratic behavior, it didn't really mean much. Drug induced, disease induced, Ancient or Wraith tech gone awry induced – the reasons for being crazy then not crazy could fill the city.
And being crazy then not crazy then crazy again was still on the table, and if John weren't the only one crazy, just the only one anyone managed to strap down...
John realized he was still staring at his bloody wrists. Yeah, sporadic insanity most definitely still on the table. He hurried to the back of the infirmary where the supplies were kept, grabbed gauze and an antibiotic spray then went to work on his arms. The spray stung but the pain made him more clear-headed. Wrists secured, he took care of the second most urgent matter that was all that IV juice sloshing around inside of him. It felt almost ridiculous, dealing with such a simple bodily need when the world was going to hell around him. The second bodily need he nearly satiated with a drink straight from the bathroom faucet, then he thought better of it. Atlantis had the best filter system of any galaxy but even advanced filters broke and mind-altering bacterium found their way in. Thankfully, the infirmary had a healthy stock of bottled water on hand, tepid but heaven on John's parched throat.
Up, around, bladder empty, thirst quenched, John was ready to go. He coughed until his chest and throat burned.
Okay, no he wasn't ready. He was unarmed, under dressed and still sick as a dog. He searched the place for weapons, spare uniforms, hell, spare shoes – anything. What he found was a comm sitting by a powered down lap top. John fixed it into his ear and activated it.
“Control, this is Lt. Colonel John Sheppard, recently freed from being strapped to a bed and left alone. Do you copy?”
He was met with a minute of static. Not good. He tried again only to be met with more static.
“Well that sucks,” he sneered, then coughed, then folded his arms against his chest when the room seemed to drop several more degrees. He was freezing, whether because of the power-down or the fever he couldn't tell, and at that moment cared only about getting warm.
Which meant going to his room for clothes.
Which meant traversing halls that may or may not be full of other crazy people.
“Thank goodness for hand-to-hand skills,” John said with little conviction. As handy as hand-to-hand could be when not armed, there was a reason you didn't bring a bunch of mad Kung Fu skills to a gun fight. Well, unless you're Ronon or Teyla.
John once more searched his surroundings, coming up with an electric bone saw (even without power it looked pretty damn effective) and part of an IV stand. Hey, if an IV stand alone could work for a Wraith-controlled Teyla, a stand plus saw would work for him.
It was with covert methodology that John crept from the infirmary to the hall. He pressed his back to the door, opened it, peered out then darted from shadow to shadow, crouching at corners and stilling his breathing to listen.
If it was any more silent, you cold hear a pin drop from four floors up. But now John could add one more oddity to the list – no warning lights flashing. Usually when things were bad and the city was on back up, there were warning lights. Yes, it was possible that they'd been shut off, but if whatever had happened had people seeing fit to leave someone behind, then he doubted they had time or even sense enough to turn off a few lights.
Maybe it was the quiet, or the emptiness, or the lack of opposition thus far, or maybe a growing desperation to find someone that John took the time in his skulking to open a few doors and check a few rooms.
The more emptiness he found, the more his gut clenched and his heart hammered.
There was no one. Not alive, not unconscious, not... anything else. But there were signs of life, a half eaten sandwich here, a cup of coffee there, one of Rodney's beloved Power Bars with two bites taken. John came to someone's quarters and saw a room not the whirlwind chaos of someone having hastily packed. The bed was half made, a book open and lying page down on the mattress.
John straightened from his crouch by the door and went back into the hall.
“Oh no,” he breathed.
Suddenly, he didn't give a damn about being cold and without shoes or a gun. He didn't even give a damn about possible intruders and people sick in the head. He ran, full-pelt, down the hall, to another room – Teyla's room since it was closest. He didn't know why, didn't know what he expected to find... or did know what to expect; signs of a struggle at most, bantos rods and weapons missing because Teyla had gone out to fight at least. What he found was a neatly made bed and everything in its place, bantos and weapons included.
“Damn it!” John hissed, scraping a hand down his face but letting it linger over his mouth.
It could still mean a hasty retreat, one that hadn't allowed any time for basic necessities like weapons (yeah, just keep telling yourself that, John). But then why leave him behind and no one else as well? What could be so bad as to leave one person behind?
Since John wasn't going to find out standing there giving way to panic, he finished the journey to his room and changed into his uniform. With his body layered in his T-shirt and button shirt and his nine mil strapped to his thigh, John felt marginally better, though no where near even skirting relieved. His next destination was the armory for a P-90. His stomach growled in complaint over being ignored, but it was just going to have to wait a little longer...
John paused clipping the P-90 to his vest.
Or maybe not. John had a thought and made his way to the mess hall.
With an IV keeping him hydrated, John could have been in the infirmary for days. On the other hand, he'd woken up in desperate need of the bathroom but not stinking of someone whose bladder had given up on him. Which still didn't mean anything. Dehydration and illness could do weird things to a body.
John jogged into the mess and tables covered in trays of half-eaten food. He pressed his fingers to a piece of not-chicken. It was cool and just a little slimy. John went so far as to sniff it, wrinkling his nose at the slightly sour scent of it.
So gone long enough for food to go bad, John thought. But not so long for it to go completely rotten.
Next stop, the control room. It had been hastily emptied just like everywhere else, laptops open and chairs sitting askew in the middle of the floor. And just like everywhere else, everything was in hibernation mode. But being the community laptops of the control room it only took John's pass code to get the laptops up and running again.
And of course it was just his current luck that they weren't telling him squat. Technically they were a library of readings and numbers but nothing that made sense to John, at least not completely. But it didn't matter, because he knew enough to recognize when the gate had and hadn't been activated, and according to what he was seeing, the last time it had been activated was when he and his team had come through from PR-388... two days ago.
“Still doesn't rule people being beamed out,” John muttered to himself. Were McKay here, he would be snarking about the lack of merit in talking to yourself out loud, but it made John feel... better, somehow, like he wasn't caught in some very tangible nightmare. And as much as it would have been nice for all this to be a dream he could wake up from, he'd been in enough realistic dreamscapes to know that they weren't exactly accommodating when you wanted to get out of them. At least awake you had a lot more control over the situation, at least compared to a dream being manipulated by some outside force.
Something clanked down one of the halls. John lifted his head, turning it hoping to catch the noise again. It was so agonizingly tempting to call out and see if someone was there, proving to his agitated nerves that he wasn't as alone as he thought. But instinct was a tough drill sergeant that shut that urge right up. With P-90 firmly in his grip, John crept toward the right and the hallway there. Another clank had him turning around, down the steps to the gateroom floor and to the left hand corridor entrance. His back to the wall, John peered around the corner.
The hallway was empty.
John eased around into the hall, keeping close to the wall, then darted to the nearest doorway and crouched next to it. He repeated the move in a zig-zag pattern from one door to the next, one hand free and ready to swipe the crystals and dive into a room at a moment's notice.
“Oh, thank goodness, it's about damn time!” someone whined from behind. John whipped around, his heart a jackhammer in his chest and his finger tightening on the trigger.
McKay's pale face and raised hands had him immediately lowering the weapon.
“Damn it McKay, I almost shot you!”
“Yeah,” Rodney said, throating bobbing with multiple nervous swallows. “I – I can see that. And I'm sorry, I do know better than to sneak up on you in Rambo mode but I've been looking all over this damn place for anyone and, well... I guess I got a little over enthusiastic.”
“You think?” John growled. “What the hell is going on, McKay? Where is everyone? Why didn't you answer the comm?”
“My answer to all of the above is ‘Good question,’” Rodney said, glancing around as though waiting for something to jump out and eat them. John could painfully sympathize.
“Believe me, I've been trying to find the answers but can't even get inside any of the rooms,” Rodney continued.
“Really?” John said. Turning to his former hiding place, he swiped his hand over the crystal and the door whispered open.
“Huh,” Rodney said, then sagged as though in defeat. “Oh no. This means there's something wrong with me... I mean my gene... doesn't it? Atlantis isn't going rogue after all it just hates me.”
“Relax, McKay, one weird thing at a time.” John swiped the crystal again and the door closed. “Just tell me what you remember last?”
“Well, I remember doing chair diagnostics and then some sort of emergency. At least I think it was an emergency because Carter was all 'Rodney we need you up here now' and that usually means an emergency and...” he shrugged helplessly. “That's all I can remember.”
“Great,” John grunted, glancing both ways down the hall. “You wouldn't happen to know why I was strapped down in the infirmary.” He coughed, hard and wet, into his fist. Rodney took an uneasy step back.
“Strapped down?” he said, brow furrowed in both confusion and consternation. “I think the coughing should have been your answer as to why you were in the infirmary. I mean, yes, you were a little out of it once the fever hit, but I wouldn't say to the point of justifying straps.”
John opened his mouth, about to demand what the hell Rodney was talking about when he remembered. PR-388, some of the locals having come down with their version of a cold; little more of a sniffle for them but moving fast and hard when it hit John.
John nodded. “It's why we ended the mission early. I had a fever and it was getting worse.”
“You were really strapped down?” Rodney said, horrified. His eyes had strayed to John's bandaged wrists and stayed there. With a weak gesture at them, he asked, “How did... uh... how did you get out?”
John held up his arms. “How do you think? They weren't the padded kind, either.” It was quite an achievement that Rodney didn't swoon, let alone throw up. He was looking uncomfortably green around the gills, though, so John changed the subject. “Okay, look, if you're here that means others have to be around, too, right?”
Rodney nodded rigidly, fingers twitching with the need to hold something, specifically a computer tablet.
“Right. So first things first, we grab a couple of LSDs, head to the nearest lab for a tablet and start looking for people.”
“Sounds good to me,” Rodney said with relief. John led the way up the hall, Rodney trailing – surprisingly silent – to the side. He eventually fell back out of John's line of sight.
“You know what really sucks about this?” John said, but didn't wait for an answer. “That life here's been weird enough that I'm actually not that freaked out about what's going on.”
Rodney said nothing, which was many kinds of wrong. Rodney never missed an opportunity to throw in his two cents whether wanted or not. When John turned his head to ask why so quiet, he stopped and stared.
Rodney was gone.
“Damn it, McKay,” John hissed, jogging back the way they had come. “Rodney, where the hell are you? This isn't the time to get separated. Rodney!”
No answer. John checked each of the rooms they had passed. All empty.
“Okay,” John said, heart rate ratcheting up. “Now I'm freaked.”
He continued retracing his steps, through the gateroom then down the other hall. He stuck with his plan while he searched, grabbing an LSD from the armory. It immediately gave him an idea that he should have thought of the moment he walked into the control room. He went back. Once there, he typed in his code and fired up the city-wide life signs detector.
What it had to tell him made as little sense as McKay up and vanishing. According to the sensors, not only was everyone still on Atlantis, they were gathered in one location. The only life sign not at the party was John's. The rest of Atlantis was empty.
“Curioser and creepier,” John muttered. He sighed. “Human scavenger hunt it is, then.”
John took off at a trot, hopeful but no less freaked out. There were plenty of ways for someone to up and vanish – beaming technology, portals, most likely transporting people to that one spot, and John had a pretty strong feeling that he didn't want to end up in that spot. So he slowed and went back to ducking and creeping.
The clanking returned somewhere further down the hall. John pressed himself against the wall, kneeling on one leg, the other leg poised to push him up into a run when needed. It was a weird noise: mechanical, rhythmic, kind of hissing like hydraulics. But whatever it's destination, it wasn't toward John; the clanking and hissing started fading away.
John burst back into a run before the noise vanished all together.
“Sheppard!”
John skidded to a halt. That had been Ronon. He turned and doubled back. “Ronon! Where are you?”
“Corridor three, I think.”
“That's close. I'm almost there, buddy. Just stay where you are.” John slid when he turned a sharp corner into corridor three then picked back up into a run. “Ronon!”
Ronon didn't answer. John kept running until he reached the T-junction and stopped.
“Ronon!” he tried again. “Son of a bitch!” John scraped his hand over his stubbled face, looking back then forward then back again. “What the hell was going on?”
Another thing that sucked was that having experienced enough weird in your life didn't mean you were equipped to handle it the next time around. Deal with it and keep from collapsing in a heap of blubbering insanity, yes. Having the answers immediately come to you based on past experience, no. Right now all John had going for him were theories, lots and lots of theories. Portals, beaming technology, holograms, hallucinations and all of it nothing he could do anything about until he had a more concrete answer.
And he wouldn't have a concrete answer until he picked a plan of action – find his people or seek out the source of the clanking? It was an easy enough question to answer: find his people, release them from... whatever was holding them, get himself some back up them nip the clanking noise in the bud.
John turned.
Rodney yelped, “Sheppard!”
“Son of a bitch, McKay, where the hell did you go!”
“I have no idea! One minute I was following you, the next I was here.”
John heaved a tired breath, devolving into coughs that made his ribs ache. Between being sick and running around, he was getting exhausted fast. One more not good to add to the growing list of not good. Crap, what he wouldn't give for a nap.
“Okay, I'm really starting to lean toward either beaming, portals and, maybe, some kind of time... jumping... thing.”
“What? What are you talking about? You're delirious, aren't you. Come here, let me feel your forehead.”
“McKay!” John croaked, rearing back from Rodney's reaching hand. His throat was also starting to burn, the soothing effects of his last drink of water wearing off fast. “We don't have time for this, not if you could vanish at any moment. Look, I know where everyone is so we can get them the hell out.”
McKay's head jerked in a nervous nod. “Yes, right. One weird thing at a time, right?” he tossed in an equally edgy smile. “Gotta move fast before I,” he gulped. “Disappeared, you said? For how long?”
“Couple of minutes. Come on.” He didn't move until McKay did, keeping him right by his side and within sight.
“Oh, that is even less good than Atlantis hating me. Why is this even happening?”
“My guess? Someone activated something they shouldn't have.”
McKay tossed up his hands. “Oh, that's right, blame everything on the scientists. It's always the scientists activating things they shouldn't, never your fellow grunts with an unhealthy fetish for all things shiny.”
“I said someone, McKay. Someone.” John studied the LSD carefully, keeping his eyes on the way ahead. “Although that you filled in the blank yourself should probably tell you something.”
“Hey, my people are careful, okay?”
“We've always been careful. Stuff's still been activated.” He frowned at the LSD. Apparently he wasn't studying it close enough because something was wrong.
He quickly figured out what. He stopped.
“McKay, I'm only reading one life sign.”
“So? Someone's up ahead, check it out and either bring them back or, you know, take them down.”
John shook his head numbly, then showed Rodney the LSD. There was only one dot on the screen. One, where there should have been two. All the color drained from Rodney's face.
“Oh crap,” Rodney squeaked.
John tucked his lip uneasily under his teeth. The two of them stared at each other. Then John reached out, slowly, and pressed his finger to Rodney's shoulder.
His finger passed through in a halo of blue-green light.
Rodney's mouth opened, closed, did it two more times, then said, small and terrified. “I'm dead. I'm – I'm dead. I'm dead and I'm a damn ghost and I'm dead and... and...!”
“Rodney!” John barked. Rodney's mouth snapped shut. John continued, calmly but no less stern, “Rodney, you're a scientist, you're all about logical explanations and you live in a city where we've pretty much explained every ass-backwards and hair-brained thing on something we shouldn't have messed with. In fact, look.” He passed his hand through Rodney's chest.
“Will you stop that!”
“Pay attention, McKay. This is exactly what it looks like when we're dealing with a hologram.”
Rodney immediately relaxed. “Oh.” Then tensed right back up. “Why the hell am I a hologram!”
“I don't know. But one thing’s for certain, it means you're not dead.”
“How could you possibly know that!”
John glared at him. “Because there are life signs and because I heard Ronon not that long ago. In other words, you're not the only hologram. Buck up, McKay, we're finding answers and most of them are... good. Maybe.”
“You call being stuck somewhere and a hologram good?”
“Good-ish, then. Look, let's just find the others then figure the rest out.” He started forward, intent on reaching their destination and seeing this... whatever it was: invasion, mistake, whatever – to its end. “You with me, McKay?”
McKay didn't answer. John turned, saw only empty hallway, and groaned. Then he continued on.
John wanted to run, to get to the room or chamber or whatever it was where his people were trapped and get this over with, but both his body and increasingly congested lungs wouldn't let him. Obviously he hadn't been on the mend, more under the illusion of being close to mending, overly rested with enough fluids and maybe the remnants of decongestants to lull him into a false sense of capability. Now it was back with a growing vengeance, gnawing at his joints and stuffing his head and chest. He was coughing more, his skin clammy and overheated, and his mouth tortuously dry. Even a fast walk was horrible but, damn it, he was going to find his people as fast as he could whether his body liked it or not. Then he was going to take care of whatever had done this, make the city safe, and happily pass out.
His skull pounded as though demanding he do the passing out part right damn now. He hated being sick during a crisis.
The clanking returned, and it was heading straight for him. John moved into his favorite position next to a door, one hand on the P-90, the other hovering by the crystal. The clanking drew near – definitely metal and hydraulics, either a machine or robot exoskeleton. Either way it was going to be a bitch to take down. John held his breath even though it made his lungs scream. The clanking thing was just around the turn. John could see it's shadow, now, stretching as it closed in.
“John.”
Telya emerged, the clanking gone.
John pulled his finger from the trigger and stood, the sudden change in altitude making him sway. “Teyla?”
“John, you must come with me, now. You are not well.”
“No, I'm not, but it can wait. We need to find the others first, get them out from where ever they're trapped--”
But Teyla shook her head. “No, John. They can wait. You can not. You are ill, and you need rest. If you continue, others will fall ill as well.”
John narrowed his eyes at her. “Wait, what? If I recall correctly I got this because I accidentally drank out of someone else's cup.” Because, also if he recalled correctly, that world's culture had been a little too slap-happy about sharing – people eating off of each other's plates, sharing each other's spoons and forks, turning them into a germ buffet.
Add it all up and... “This thing isn't that contagious,” John said, suspicion rising fast like a volcano about to blow. “I would've been in iso if it was. I wasn't.”
“John, please,” Teyla said, holding out her hand. “You must listen.”
“John, don't listen!”
John whirled around to see Teyla, wide-eyed and frantic.
“Get away from it! Run!” Her image then fuzzed and winked out.
The clanking returned, right behind John. He whirled back bringing up his P-90 and firing. The big metal behemoth that had been Teyla only moments ago staggered back.
It was a robot, a friggin' giant robot iridescent as the walls of Atlantis, its body plates of armor overlapping each other and its hands big enough for one to crush John's skull like a tomato.
John let off a few more shots, turned and ran with everything he had. The robot clanked behind him, the force of its crashing footfalls making the floor vibrate. But long-legged as it was, its mass wouldn't let it run any faster; John burst out ahead until the machine was well out of sight. He took a hard right down a hall, another right toward a door, swiping it open then darting inside and swiping it close. He ducked behind a table, wheezing and listening.
The machine clanked and thudded past. John waited with held breath until the sound faded away, then collapsed in a heap and coughed fit to dislocate his entire ribcage. But at least one thing was going right for him – the room was a lab with a sink, and he could officially cross out tainted water as the culprit. John climbed to his feet, staggered to it and gorged himself on heavenly lukewarm liquid. He slid to the floor in another exhausted heap, his back against the cupboard and one bandaged arm draped over his knee.
People missing, holograms and a robot – an honest to goodness giant liable-to-break-every-bone-in-the-the-body robot. Which John really wanted to think was the coolest thing ever, except for that pesky liable-to-break-bones part, as well as the able-to-look-like-allies part, and mustn't forget that it had just tried to run him down. Oh, and people were still missing, most likely because of said bone-breaking robot, and John still had to find them.
In a massive city, with a bone-breaking robot.
It was difficult to be happily impressed. Mostly, he was pissed, and nervous. Especially nervous. Not scared per se since the robot apparently hadn't killed anyone as far as he knew. But it was still big and still on some kind of people-collecting/catching/whatever mission. Most important of all, it was still out there, looking for him.
John scrubbed his overheated face, then forced himself up to splash tepid water onto his skin. Feeling marginally better (though not by much) he thought fast.
The robot was looking for him, but unlike something organic it didn't have his scent or it would have been busting through the doors by now. Which would explain the disguise – like a Venus fly trap; look like something harmless, something you can trust, and it reels you in.
Which might also explain how the robot was able to round everyone up. People are vanishing, everyone else is scared, panicking, they see someone they know and, bam! Trap closed.
“Note to self,” John rasped. He made the painful climb back to his feet. “Run away from the clanking, not toward.” That established, he splashed his face with more water, gave himself a moment against his will to hack up half a lung, then pushed himself from the sink into a semblance of a steady walk to the door.
For the first time since coming to Atlantis, John missed hand-operated doors that you could open just a crack. He pressed his back to the wall, swiped the crystal and darted his head out then in. The corridor was empty and the clanking nowhere to be heard. Good enough. He dashed outside.
Running wasn't an option but John made it an option, anyway, his breaths rattling loud from his congested lungs. No more distractions. No more following weird sounds and distant voices. It was straight to where everyone was being kept and nothing else.
“Colonel!”
Damn it
John turned, P-90 raised and aimed at Colonel Carter, her hands up and her face taut with alarm.
“Whoa, stand down, Colonel.”
“Not gonna happened until I know you're you.”
“And how do you propose that?”
John gestured with his weapon. “The crystal, Touch it. Not swipe it, touch it.”
Carter did, hesitantly. When her hand passed clean through, she gaped and John lowered his weapon.
“Good, it's you.” He grimaced. “Sort of. Look, I'll explain on the way but I can't stop or things'll get worse.”
There was a lot John liked about having Carter as a CO, one of them being that she had been there and done that enough times not to be one of those idiots who stood there refusing to budge until they had some answers. She fell into line next to John and he explained.
“Well, that explains a lot. Except for the why,” Carter said.
“What happened before, you know, you started popping in and out?” John asked.
“People going missing, systems going into hibernation on their own. I had lost contact with McKay and was heading out to find him and, then...” She tossed up her hands.
“I've seen McKay twice, heard Ronon, and Teyla popped in just in time to warn me against the robot. If you guys coming and going is random then it's a pretty lucky random where I'm concerned.”
“If it is random,” Carter said, all shock over being a hologram dead and buried. “If these holograms aren't some sort of message for help, maybe being controlled by our minds. The thing is, whenever I pop back in as you put it I'm always somewhere near a lab. Each time, I'm always thinking about how I need to get to a lab.”
John nodded, following the line of thought easily. “Picture yourself somewhere in Atlantis,” he said.
“Exactly.”
“Except why not end up inside a lab? Why always outside?”
Carter snapped and pointed. “Maybe it's because I'm not being specific enough. My desire is to find a lab, not be inside one.”
“So you end up outside with your pick of labs but no way to open the doors.”
“Right.” She sighed. “But even if I was in a lab I wouldn't be able to handle anything.”
“Yeah, but at least we're starting to figure things out.”
As well as proving himself wrong. Having been in weird situations did prepare you for weird situations. Had this been earth, with no Atlantis or SGC experience to go by, it would have been damn easy to cave to theories of superstition, magic and alien abduction. But this was Atlantis, the Pegasus Galaxy, breeding ground for making the impossible possible and nothing as mysterious as it first seemed.
Except for the why. Always the why. But that they would figure out once everyone was released.
“Do you think--” John started, but Carter had vanished. He had been going to ask if experience with holograms would make it easier to pop in and out, explaining why Rodney and Carter had not only found him but lasted longer than Ronon and Teyla. He also wondered who else was popping in and out.
Distant clanking distracted him. John cursed, checking the LSD that was useless in tracking inorganic objects. He took the nearest hall, taking the long way, but the clanking seemed to be everywhere. And he was close, so damn close, to his destination.
Of course things had to go wrong. A crisis wasn't a crisis until the final challenge at the final level. Life was such a friggin' video game, sometimes.
John ducked into a room and not a moment too soon. The clanking rose, thumped and hissed by, then fell, but not fading. John slipped from the room into a run. The noise seemed to follow him, forcing him to hide again and again, the clanking always going by each time. Either that robot was on to him and fast or...
John winced.
Or there was more than one. That, too, made a lot of sense. One robot would have eventually raised suspicion, especially if it encountered too many people to grab. Two or more would definitely even the odds.
John bolted from his current hiding place to the end of the hall.
He'd arrived. On the other side of the door right in front of him, his people.
And possibly a phalanx of robots. Only one way to find out. Bracing himself, John swiped the door open then dove behind a bubbling pillar.
Nothing emerged and the door slid shut. The clanking and hissing remained all around him.
“Looking for little old me?” John said through clenched teeth. “I'm flattered.” He dashed back to the door, swiped it open and dashed inside, weapon at the ready.
It was hard not to lower his weapon and stare, it really was. It was a stasis chamber, one the scientists had discovered some time back, different because every pod was lying horizontal instead of vertical, like a chamber full of streamlined coffins. And nearly every 'coffin' was full.
“This really explains a lot,” John said, horrified and awed. It still didn't explain the why, but that could wait. Going down the row of stasis pods (calling them coffins was too morbid), he found McKay. Next to him was Ronon. Across from him on the other side, Teyla, and next to Teyla, Carter.
John studied Rodney's pod first. Also unlike the stasis pods they knew and – well, not loved but still knew – was a panel with a small screen like a miniature version of the monitors in the infirmary scrolling with vital signs.
Rodney was alive, which meant that everyone else was alive as well. Yes, John had already figured out as much from the LSD, but seeing the proof up close was always so much more a relief than seeing it as a little white dot among countless little white dots. Even better, it looked like the device was simple enough for a child to use. Next to the screen were two buttons, one green, the other red. John pressed the green one first, just to make sure his hunch was right. You never knew when one button had multiple functions, say, like, cleaning the pod by incinerating all the germs. When nothing happened, John took a breath – coughed – and pressed the red button.
The pod unsealed with a hiss of compressed air and slid forward. John leaned in and shook Rodney by the shoulders.
“Rodney. Rodney! Wake up!”
Rodney groaned, rocking his head back and forth. His eyes peeled open to look blearily at John.
John's triumph and relief ended when he was yanked by his vest and tossed away from the pod. Landing on his back shoved what little air he had from his lungs. He coughed, the world spinning wildly around him, a double image of the robot stalking toward him. John scrambled back while picking up his P-90. He fired. The robot staggered. John used the distraction to scramble to his feet, still firing, and backed away. But a blow from behind sent him flying forward.
This time, he was breathless and in pain, his back on fire. He had no time to assess the situation when Robot One was on him, grabbing him by the ankle and dragging him away. Robot Two followed until they reached the door where it stopped to stand sentinel. One of its hands was dripping blood off the sharp points of its fingers.
“That...s'plains lot,” John said blearily.
“You are ill,” said the robot in a distinctly robot voice. “You will contaminate. You must heal. You are ill...” over and over and over again, down hall after hall, through a transporter (and that the thing even fit was amazing) all the way to the infirmary. It lifted John by the arm and dropped him back first onto the bed. Fire ripped through John, making him cry out, but the machine ignored him.
It proceeded to strap him down. But between the pain and dizziness from having been knocked around, John's weak fumble for his P-90 produced no results. The robot gripped his other wrist, shoved it down, and started wrapping the other strap.
“Hey! Wall-E! Over here!”
The robot released the strap and swiveled its body to face the voice, a voice John knew so well. He lifted his head and stared blearily at McKay.
A very much flesh and blood McKay throwing scalpel after kidney dish after bed pan at the robot. “That's right, look at me. Now, John! Shoot it!”
John shook his head clear, pulled his hand from the unstrapped strap and lifted his gun. He fired. All it did was bring the robot's attention back to him. Rodney hit it with a IV pole, it's attention going back to McKay.
“Easier said than done, McKay!” John growled, unbuckling his other hand. Adrenaline surged, enough to push back most of the dizziness and let him roll to his feet without dropping.
“Then figure something out!” McKay yelped.
John raised the P-90, ready to try again, when he saw it, just at the base of the robot's metal skull, the only place not covered by armor. John switched his P-90 for his nine mil, stalked up to the robot and shoved the barrel into the opening.
“Down, McKay!” John bellowed, and fired.
The robot's body jerked with each shot, then it convulsed. There was a whine and hiss of gears and hydraulics winding down. The body slumped, the slump putting all of its weight forward, and it toppled with a crash hard enough to shake the floor.
“Well, that was easy,” Rodney panted shakily.
John looked at him long suffering, then frowned. “Wait, wasn't there--?”
Rodney's eyes bugged out of his skull. “Another one.”
“You didn't take it out!” John said, tossing him the nine mil.
“I wasn't exactly armed! I was lucky to outrun the thing!” he said, catching it.
The clanking was already heading toward them and fast. Rodney suddenly tossed the gun back to John, who snatched it out of the air easily.
“McKay, what--?”
“I have an idea?” he said excitedly, and grabbed the defib box from off its shelf, flipping it on and charging it.
“McKay are you crazy! You don't even know if that'll work!”
“Well I'd imagine it would do something. It's a giant walking computer full of electric parts!”
The doors slid open and the robot stomped into the room, head swiveling between Rodney and John. John fired and the robot's decision was made – it went for John. Howling in high-pitched and terrified defiance, Rodney rushed forward, pressed the panels to the robot’s back, and released the currents. The robot convulsed like its brother. It didn't go down, but it did do a remarkable impression of a drunk.
“Now!” Rodney said as though time was of the essence.
It wasn't. John walked right up to the thing, stuck his gun in the neck joint and fired. The creature whined to a stop and collapsed on top of its brother.
John and Rodney, panting and shaking, looked at each other. Then Rodney's gaze slipped past John and once again bulged. “Uh... are you bleeding?”
John looked back at the gurney, smeared with a generous amount of blood. The room tilted.
“Guess I am,” John said. He started to collapse, but Rodney caught him.
--------------------
“You know, technically it was your fault,” Rodney said, rolling his coffee mug between his palms.
John, reclining on his bed against a stack of pillows in his room, reached for his glass of orange juice on the night stand. Good when you lost blood, OJ. Even better was not having to convalesce in the infirmary. Not that he couldn't have handled it, but even Keller had to agree that after what John had woken up to, maybe a change of scene would be better.
“Wasn't it one of your people who activated that room?” John said, glaring.
“Yes, but the only reason the robots did what they did was because you were sick.”
“With a disease you only get by drinking out of someone else's cup,” John clarified, then took a savoring sip of cold juice. “You can't blame me for the robots overreacting. Robots your people woke up.” He coughed into his hand, not as bad as it was the other day when he'd been running for his life from germaphobe robots, but it still made his chest ache something fierce.
Rodney opened his mouth and raised a finger to retaliate but John cut him off easily.
“How about we leave it at it being no one's fault. Carter said the system was faulty.”
“Well, not so much faulty as not properly programmed. Or maybe overly programmed, I don't know. Technically it was the sick who were supposed to end up in stasis unless the contagion was moving too fast, then it was the healthy put into stasis to ensure that some of the population survived. Oh, but the best part is the holographic interface,” Rodney said giddily. “So even when put into stasis you still had the means to stick around and lend your expertise. But since we didn't know it was an interface--”
“You didn't know what was going on or why you kept going in and out,” John finished. “But it's like I told Carter – think of where you are and there you are.” Looking at Rodney, he batted his eyes. “And you thought of me. McKay, I'm touched.”
“Actually I thought of where the hell I could go to be safe. I ended up in the armory twice before finding you, so don't flatter yourself.”
And Teyla had ended up in her room or the mess hall. Ronon had been all over the place hunting enemies that were always one step ahead. Radek said he'd kept ending up outside, he wouldn't say why. Rodney suspected it had to do with that marine biologist he had a thing for. That woman practically lived on the piers.
John dropped his head back against the pillows. “You ever miss the days when the stuff we went through was the kind of stuff you only encountered when you read a good sci-fi book?”
“Oh hell, yes. But, well...” he shrugged.
“Keeps life interesting.”
“I was going to say it's the price you pay when making discoveries. The world as we know it has always been weird, we just never knew how weird.”
“Yeah, but I still say we have a monopoly on weird.”
Rodney nodded. “Definitely. Very definitely. Well, I don't know, SG-1 might argue otherwise.”
“I'm talking the Stargate program as a whole.”
“Oh, yeah. And once we're able to release our discoveries to the public, we'll even have a copyright on it. With royalties.”
“To owning weird,” John said, holding up his juice.
Rodney tapped his mug against it. “To owning weird.”
Ronon, Teyla and Carter arrived for their usual We-Survived-Another-Ass-Backward-FUBAR-Event movie-athon. John made sure to hold his glass and eat out of his own bowl of popcorn. Wouldn't want to make everyone sick and wake up anymore robots. Human scavenger hunts weren't all they were cracked up to be.
The End
kodiak_bear wanted bleeding, city adventure, fever. I know I didn't have to do all three, but I couldn't resist :D
Recipient:
kodiak_bearWord Count: 8,395
Rating: PG
Warnings: Some blood
Summary: nothing says "about to have a bad day" like waking up strapped down, congested, not a single soul in sight, and not a clue as to what the heck is going on.
Author Notes: Beta'd by the awesome sauce that his
linziday. Written for the sheppard_hc Secret Santa. Takes place in season four.John had awoken enough times and in enough strange places to become accustomed to, and to quickly over come, the mind-warping sense of panic you get not knowing who, what, where, when and why. He'd suffered enough “odd” from time dilation fields to copy-cat crystal entities to be able to go with the flow and just ride the madness out.
But even waking up to the dimly lit familiarity of the infirmary, complete with its equally familiar potpourri of chemical scents, wasn't enough to help him get swiftly past the heart jolting alarm of not knowing what the hell was going on.
That he was strapped down wrists and ankles monopolized the vast majority of why. The dead silence and complete emptiness of the place didn't help much, either. There should have at least been the blip of a heart monitor, muffled voices having a hushed conversation in the distance, tapping footsteps - something. But John recognized the twilight quality of the lighting and knew this wasn't the infirmary dimmed for patient comfort – it was the struggling power you got when the city was on back-up, lit for convenience but otherwise the main systems on hibernation and the less vital systems dead to the world.
Add it all up, and it equaled crap having hit the fan.
It still had nothing on him being strapped down and alone. John angled his neck for a look at himself, dressed in scrubs but sans a blanket, skin covered in gooseflesh (and making him realize how damn cold it was), an IV needle taped to the back of his hand and an empty IV bag (also making him aware of how bad he had to pee). He was achy; the kind of joint discomfort you got with a bad cold or the flu, joining forces with the ache of having been lying in bed for far too long. His mouth was dry, his throat itched, and when he took a deep breath, his lungs itched provoking a riot of coughs.
Okay, so that explained the infirmary – he was sick, sick while something was going down forcing everyone not to be around.
No. John didn't buy it. No way would the infirmary staff leave a patient behind. Not like this, tied down and unable to fend for himself.
“Hello?” John called. Between the dry throat and congested lungs, it came out as more of a “Lo?” and ended with a cough. Realization number three – he was damn thirsty.
“Hello!” he tried again. Then he stilled, both his body and his breaths (and boy did his lungs hate him for that one) and listened. It wasn't a long listen, his lungs having had enough and punishing him with another round of “let's expel your bronchial tubes.” When John finished, he forced himself to lie still and wait, because who the hell leaves an invalid behind?
John waited, waited, coughed, squirmed to relieve some of the aches, and waited.
No one came.
“Hey! Is anyone out there! Could use a little help, here! I promise I'm...” he grimaced down at the restraints. “Not going to do whatever got me strapped down in the first place. In fact I'm pretty sure I'm sane now.” But won't be for long if you don't get me out of these damn restraints, now!
Silence answered him, so thick, so completely still it was like being wrapped too tightly in a blanket, minus the warmth, until the oxygen ran out. John's nerves cried out in how wrong it was, because if there was one place that shouldn't know quiet this perfect, it was the infirmary.
John's arms started to squirm almost on their own volition, twisting and pulling, warming his wrists against the leather. It was unpadded leather, either because things had been that chaotic, or someone wanted to be cruel.
“Hey, seriously, I need... I need someone over here. The saline bags empty and I've got enough water in me to justify building a damn ark. And who the hell ties someone down without a catheter? I hate catheters as much as the next guy but this... this isn't right!” And how sad was it that he'd frequented the infirmary enough times to know standard procedure.
John didn't care. Something had been wrong the moment he woke up and was getting more wrong the longer he was awake. Right now the only plus was that whoever had strapped him down had either been in a hurry or too messed up to do it right – the buckling was sloppy, leaving lots of wiggle room. John's arms pulled, wrists twisted, the leather chafing like a bitch but his body only working that much harder against it.
“Anybody!” John screamed, half rising off the bed. “Please!”
Silent. So damn silent.
John threw himself back against the head of the bed, letting his arms pull and wriggle their way free. So be it. So damn well be it. What ever was going on, why ever the reason he was strapped down, it could all go screw itself. John tugged with increasingly hard jerks, teeth clenched as he grunted against the escalating pain.
“Come on,” he growled when he thought he felt some give. He pulled harder. “Come on.” Harder. “Come on!”
His wrist popped free, flicking his face with blood. He ignored it in favor of focusing on his second, equally bleeding wrist and freeing it. He then freed his ankles, removed the IV line and scrambled from the bed like scrambling from a dog liable to bite him.
Then he looked at his wrists, wincing at the damage. Although it wasn't exactly the shredded mess of torn flesh he had expected – scratched in places, with small patches of raw areas – it was still one hell of a testament to how bad an idea it was to strap someone down and leave them. John had always considered himself a pretty in-control guy but this... this wasn't in control.
It kind of scared the hell out of him.
But he was free, now. Free and thus far lacking any desire to go on a psychotic killing spree. No hearing voices, no seeing things, no feeling bugs crawling under his skin – if he didn't know any better, he'd say there had been absolutely no reason for anyone to break out the restraints.
Although having been there and done that with erratic behavior, it didn't really mean much. Drug induced, disease induced, Ancient or Wraith tech gone awry induced – the reasons for being crazy then not crazy could fill the city.
And being crazy then not crazy then crazy again was still on the table, and if John weren't the only one crazy, just the only one anyone managed to strap down...
John realized he was still staring at his bloody wrists. Yeah, sporadic insanity most definitely still on the table. He hurried to the back of the infirmary where the supplies were kept, grabbed gauze and an antibiotic spray then went to work on his arms. The spray stung but the pain made him more clear-headed. Wrists secured, he took care of the second most urgent matter that was all that IV juice sloshing around inside of him. It felt almost ridiculous, dealing with such a simple bodily need when the world was going to hell around him. The second bodily need he nearly satiated with a drink straight from the bathroom faucet, then he thought better of it. Atlantis had the best filter system of any galaxy but even advanced filters broke and mind-altering bacterium found their way in. Thankfully, the infirmary had a healthy stock of bottled water on hand, tepid but heaven on John's parched throat.
Up, around, bladder empty, thirst quenched, John was ready to go. He coughed until his chest and throat burned.
Okay, no he wasn't ready. He was unarmed, under dressed and still sick as a dog. He searched the place for weapons, spare uniforms, hell, spare shoes – anything. What he found was a comm sitting by a powered down lap top. John fixed it into his ear and activated it.
“Control, this is Lt. Colonel John Sheppard, recently freed from being strapped to a bed and left alone. Do you copy?”
He was met with a minute of static. Not good. He tried again only to be met with more static.
“Well that sucks,” he sneered, then coughed, then folded his arms against his chest when the room seemed to drop several more degrees. He was freezing, whether because of the power-down or the fever he couldn't tell, and at that moment cared only about getting warm.
Which meant going to his room for clothes.
Which meant traversing halls that may or may not be full of other crazy people.
“Thank goodness for hand-to-hand skills,” John said with little conviction. As handy as hand-to-hand could be when not armed, there was a reason you didn't bring a bunch of mad Kung Fu skills to a gun fight. Well, unless you're Ronon or Teyla.
John once more searched his surroundings, coming up with an electric bone saw (even without power it looked pretty damn effective) and part of an IV stand. Hey, if an IV stand alone could work for a Wraith-controlled Teyla, a stand plus saw would work for him.
It was with covert methodology that John crept from the infirmary to the hall. He pressed his back to the door, opened it, peered out then darted from shadow to shadow, crouching at corners and stilling his breathing to listen.
If it was any more silent, you cold hear a pin drop from four floors up. But now John could add one more oddity to the list – no warning lights flashing. Usually when things were bad and the city was on back up, there were warning lights. Yes, it was possible that they'd been shut off, but if whatever had happened had people seeing fit to leave someone behind, then he doubted they had time or even sense enough to turn off a few lights.
Maybe it was the quiet, or the emptiness, or the lack of opposition thus far, or maybe a growing desperation to find someone that John took the time in his skulking to open a few doors and check a few rooms.
The more emptiness he found, the more his gut clenched and his heart hammered.
There was no one. Not alive, not unconscious, not... anything else. But there were signs of life, a half eaten sandwich here, a cup of coffee there, one of Rodney's beloved Power Bars with two bites taken. John came to someone's quarters and saw a room not the whirlwind chaos of someone having hastily packed. The bed was half made, a book open and lying page down on the mattress.
John straightened from his crouch by the door and went back into the hall.
“Oh no,” he breathed.
Suddenly, he didn't give a damn about being cold and without shoes or a gun. He didn't even give a damn about possible intruders and people sick in the head. He ran, full-pelt, down the hall, to another room – Teyla's room since it was closest. He didn't know why, didn't know what he expected to find... or did know what to expect; signs of a struggle at most, bantos rods and weapons missing because Teyla had gone out to fight at least. What he found was a neatly made bed and everything in its place, bantos and weapons included.
“Damn it!” John hissed, scraping a hand down his face but letting it linger over his mouth.
It could still mean a hasty retreat, one that hadn't allowed any time for basic necessities like weapons (yeah, just keep telling yourself that, John). But then why leave him behind and no one else as well? What could be so bad as to leave one person behind?
Since John wasn't going to find out standing there giving way to panic, he finished the journey to his room and changed into his uniform. With his body layered in his T-shirt and button shirt and his nine mil strapped to his thigh, John felt marginally better, though no where near even skirting relieved. His next destination was the armory for a P-90. His stomach growled in complaint over being ignored, but it was just going to have to wait a little longer...
John paused clipping the P-90 to his vest.
Or maybe not. John had a thought and made his way to the mess hall.
With an IV keeping him hydrated, John could have been in the infirmary for days. On the other hand, he'd woken up in desperate need of the bathroom but not stinking of someone whose bladder had given up on him. Which still didn't mean anything. Dehydration and illness could do weird things to a body.
John jogged into the mess and tables covered in trays of half-eaten food. He pressed his fingers to a piece of not-chicken. It was cool and just a little slimy. John went so far as to sniff it, wrinkling his nose at the slightly sour scent of it.
So gone long enough for food to go bad, John thought. But not so long for it to go completely rotten.
Next stop, the control room. It had been hastily emptied just like everywhere else, laptops open and chairs sitting askew in the middle of the floor. And just like everywhere else, everything was in hibernation mode. But being the community laptops of the control room it only took John's pass code to get the laptops up and running again.
And of course it was just his current luck that they weren't telling him squat. Technically they were a library of readings and numbers but nothing that made sense to John, at least not completely. But it didn't matter, because he knew enough to recognize when the gate had and hadn't been activated, and according to what he was seeing, the last time it had been activated was when he and his team had come through from PR-388... two days ago.
“Still doesn't rule people being beamed out,” John muttered to himself. Were McKay here, he would be snarking about the lack of merit in talking to yourself out loud, but it made John feel... better, somehow, like he wasn't caught in some very tangible nightmare. And as much as it would have been nice for all this to be a dream he could wake up from, he'd been in enough realistic dreamscapes to know that they weren't exactly accommodating when you wanted to get out of them. At least awake you had a lot more control over the situation, at least compared to a dream being manipulated by some outside force.
Something clanked down one of the halls. John lifted his head, turning it hoping to catch the noise again. It was so agonizingly tempting to call out and see if someone was there, proving to his agitated nerves that he wasn't as alone as he thought. But instinct was a tough drill sergeant that shut that urge right up. With P-90 firmly in his grip, John crept toward the right and the hallway there. Another clank had him turning around, down the steps to the gateroom floor and to the left hand corridor entrance. His back to the wall, John peered around the corner.
The hallway was empty.
John eased around into the hall, keeping close to the wall, then darted to the nearest doorway and crouched next to it. He repeated the move in a zig-zag pattern from one door to the next, one hand free and ready to swipe the crystals and dive into a room at a moment's notice.
“Oh, thank goodness, it's about damn time!” someone whined from behind. John whipped around, his heart a jackhammer in his chest and his finger tightening on the trigger.
McKay's pale face and raised hands had him immediately lowering the weapon.
“Damn it McKay, I almost shot you!”
“Yeah,” Rodney said, throating bobbing with multiple nervous swallows. “I – I can see that. And I'm sorry, I do know better than to sneak up on you in Rambo mode but I've been looking all over this damn place for anyone and, well... I guess I got a little over enthusiastic.”
“You think?” John growled. “What the hell is going on, McKay? Where is everyone? Why didn't you answer the comm?”
“My answer to all of the above is ‘Good question,’” Rodney said, glancing around as though waiting for something to jump out and eat them. John could painfully sympathize.
“Believe me, I've been trying to find the answers but can't even get inside any of the rooms,” Rodney continued.
“Really?” John said. Turning to his former hiding place, he swiped his hand over the crystal and the door whispered open.
“Huh,” Rodney said, then sagged as though in defeat. “Oh no. This means there's something wrong with me... I mean my gene... doesn't it? Atlantis isn't going rogue after all it just hates me.”
“Relax, McKay, one weird thing at a time.” John swiped the crystal again and the door closed. “Just tell me what you remember last?”
“Well, I remember doing chair diagnostics and then some sort of emergency. At least I think it was an emergency because Carter was all 'Rodney we need you up here now' and that usually means an emergency and...” he shrugged helplessly. “That's all I can remember.”
“Great,” John grunted, glancing both ways down the hall. “You wouldn't happen to know why I was strapped down in the infirmary.” He coughed, hard and wet, into his fist. Rodney took an uneasy step back.
“Strapped down?” he said, brow furrowed in both confusion and consternation. “I think the coughing should have been your answer as to why you were in the infirmary. I mean, yes, you were a little out of it once the fever hit, but I wouldn't say to the point of justifying straps.”
John opened his mouth, about to demand what the hell Rodney was talking about when he remembered. PR-388, some of the locals having come down with their version of a cold; little more of a sniffle for them but moving fast and hard when it hit John.
John nodded. “It's why we ended the mission early. I had a fever and it was getting worse.”
“You were really strapped down?” Rodney said, horrified. His eyes had strayed to John's bandaged wrists and stayed there. With a weak gesture at them, he asked, “How did... uh... how did you get out?”
John held up his arms. “How do you think? They weren't the padded kind, either.” It was quite an achievement that Rodney didn't swoon, let alone throw up. He was looking uncomfortably green around the gills, though, so John changed the subject. “Okay, look, if you're here that means others have to be around, too, right?”
Rodney nodded rigidly, fingers twitching with the need to hold something, specifically a computer tablet.
“Right. So first things first, we grab a couple of LSDs, head to the nearest lab for a tablet and start looking for people.”
“Sounds good to me,” Rodney said with relief. John led the way up the hall, Rodney trailing – surprisingly silent – to the side. He eventually fell back out of John's line of sight.
“You know what really sucks about this?” John said, but didn't wait for an answer. “That life here's been weird enough that I'm actually not that freaked out about what's going on.”
Rodney said nothing, which was many kinds of wrong. Rodney never missed an opportunity to throw in his two cents whether wanted or not. When John turned his head to ask why so quiet, he stopped and stared.
Rodney was gone.
“Damn it, McKay,” John hissed, jogging back the way they had come. “Rodney, where the hell are you? This isn't the time to get separated. Rodney!”
No answer. John checked each of the rooms they had passed. All empty.
“Okay,” John said, heart rate ratcheting up. “Now I'm freaked.”
He continued retracing his steps, through the gateroom then down the other hall. He stuck with his plan while he searched, grabbing an LSD from the armory. It immediately gave him an idea that he should have thought of the moment he walked into the control room. He went back. Once there, he typed in his code and fired up the city-wide life signs detector.
What it had to tell him made as little sense as McKay up and vanishing. According to the sensors, not only was everyone still on Atlantis, they were gathered in one location. The only life sign not at the party was John's. The rest of Atlantis was empty.
“Curioser and creepier,” John muttered. He sighed. “Human scavenger hunt it is, then.”
John took off at a trot, hopeful but no less freaked out. There were plenty of ways for someone to up and vanish – beaming technology, portals, most likely transporting people to that one spot, and John had a pretty strong feeling that he didn't want to end up in that spot. So he slowed and went back to ducking and creeping.
The clanking returned somewhere further down the hall. John pressed himself against the wall, kneeling on one leg, the other leg poised to push him up into a run when needed. It was a weird noise: mechanical, rhythmic, kind of hissing like hydraulics. But whatever it's destination, it wasn't toward John; the clanking and hissing started fading away.
John burst back into a run before the noise vanished all together.
“Sheppard!”
John skidded to a halt. That had been Ronon. He turned and doubled back. “Ronon! Where are you?”
“Corridor three, I think.”
“That's close. I'm almost there, buddy. Just stay where you are.” John slid when he turned a sharp corner into corridor three then picked back up into a run. “Ronon!”
Ronon didn't answer. John kept running until he reached the T-junction and stopped.
“Ronon!” he tried again. “Son of a bitch!” John scraped his hand over his stubbled face, looking back then forward then back again. “What the hell was going on?”
Another thing that sucked was that having experienced enough weird in your life didn't mean you were equipped to handle it the next time around. Deal with it and keep from collapsing in a heap of blubbering insanity, yes. Having the answers immediately come to you based on past experience, no. Right now all John had going for him were theories, lots and lots of theories. Portals, beaming technology, holograms, hallucinations and all of it nothing he could do anything about until he had a more concrete answer.
And he wouldn't have a concrete answer until he picked a plan of action – find his people or seek out the source of the clanking? It was an easy enough question to answer: find his people, release them from... whatever was holding them, get himself some back up them nip the clanking noise in the bud.
John turned.
Rodney yelped, “Sheppard!”
“Son of a bitch, McKay, where the hell did you go!”
“I have no idea! One minute I was following you, the next I was here.”
John heaved a tired breath, devolving into coughs that made his ribs ache. Between being sick and running around, he was getting exhausted fast. One more not good to add to the growing list of not good. Crap, what he wouldn't give for a nap.
“Okay, I'm really starting to lean toward either beaming, portals and, maybe, some kind of time... jumping... thing.”
“What? What are you talking about? You're delirious, aren't you. Come here, let me feel your forehead.”
“McKay!” John croaked, rearing back from Rodney's reaching hand. His throat was also starting to burn, the soothing effects of his last drink of water wearing off fast. “We don't have time for this, not if you could vanish at any moment. Look, I know where everyone is so we can get them the hell out.”
McKay's head jerked in a nervous nod. “Yes, right. One weird thing at a time, right?” he tossed in an equally edgy smile. “Gotta move fast before I,” he gulped. “Disappeared, you said? For how long?”
“Couple of minutes. Come on.” He didn't move until McKay did, keeping him right by his side and within sight.
“Oh, that is even less good than Atlantis hating me. Why is this even happening?”
“My guess? Someone activated something they shouldn't have.”
McKay tossed up his hands. “Oh, that's right, blame everything on the scientists. It's always the scientists activating things they shouldn't, never your fellow grunts with an unhealthy fetish for all things shiny.”
“I said someone, McKay. Someone.” John studied the LSD carefully, keeping his eyes on the way ahead. “Although that you filled in the blank yourself should probably tell you something.”
“Hey, my people are careful, okay?”
“We've always been careful. Stuff's still been activated.” He frowned at the LSD. Apparently he wasn't studying it close enough because something was wrong.
He quickly figured out what. He stopped.
“McKay, I'm only reading one life sign.”
“So? Someone's up ahead, check it out and either bring them back or, you know, take them down.”
John shook his head numbly, then showed Rodney the LSD. There was only one dot on the screen. One, where there should have been two. All the color drained from Rodney's face.
“Oh crap,” Rodney squeaked.
John tucked his lip uneasily under his teeth. The two of them stared at each other. Then John reached out, slowly, and pressed his finger to Rodney's shoulder.
His finger passed through in a halo of blue-green light.
Rodney's mouth opened, closed, did it two more times, then said, small and terrified. “I'm dead. I'm – I'm dead. I'm dead and I'm a damn ghost and I'm dead and... and...!”
“Rodney!” John barked. Rodney's mouth snapped shut. John continued, calmly but no less stern, “Rodney, you're a scientist, you're all about logical explanations and you live in a city where we've pretty much explained every ass-backwards and hair-brained thing on something we shouldn't have messed with. In fact, look.” He passed his hand through Rodney's chest.
“Will you stop that!”
“Pay attention, McKay. This is exactly what it looks like when we're dealing with a hologram.”
Rodney immediately relaxed. “Oh.” Then tensed right back up. “Why the hell am I a hologram!”
“I don't know. But one thing’s for certain, it means you're not dead.”
“How could you possibly know that!”
John glared at him. “Because there are life signs and because I heard Ronon not that long ago. In other words, you're not the only hologram. Buck up, McKay, we're finding answers and most of them are... good. Maybe.”
“You call being stuck somewhere and a hologram good?”
“Good-ish, then. Look, let's just find the others then figure the rest out.” He started forward, intent on reaching their destination and seeing this... whatever it was: invasion, mistake, whatever – to its end. “You with me, McKay?”
McKay didn't answer. John turned, saw only empty hallway, and groaned. Then he continued on.
John wanted to run, to get to the room or chamber or whatever it was where his people were trapped and get this over with, but both his body and increasingly congested lungs wouldn't let him. Obviously he hadn't been on the mend, more under the illusion of being close to mending, overly rested with enough fluids and maybe the remnants of decongestants to lull him into a false sense of capability. Now it was back with a growing vengeance, gnawing at his joints and stuffing his head and chest. He was coughing more, his skin clammy and overheated, and his mouth tortuously dry. Even a fast walk was horrible but, damn it, he was going to find his people as fast as he could whether his body liked it or not. Then he was going to take care of whatever had done this, make the city safe, and happily pass out.
His skull pounded as though demanding he do the passing out part right damn now. He hated being sick during a crisis.
The clanking returned, and it was heading straight for him. John moved into his favorite position next to a door, one hand on the P-90, the other hovering by the crystal. The clanking drew near – definitely metal and hydraulics, either a machine or robot exoskeleton. Either way it was going to be a bitch to take down. John held his breath even though it made his lungs scream. The clanking thing was just around the turn. John could see it's shadow, now, stretching as it closed in.
“John.”
Telya emerged, the clanking gone.
John pulled his finger from the trigger and stood, the sudden change in altitude making him sway. “Teyla?”
“John, you must come with me, now. You are not well.”
“No, I'm not, but it can wait. We need to find the others first, get them out from where ever they're trapped--”
But Teyla shook her head. “No, John. They can wait. You can not. You are ill, and you need rest. If you continue, others will fall ill as well.”
John narrowed his eyes at her. “Wait, what? If I recall correctly I got this because I accidentally drank out of someone else's cup.” Because, also if he recalled correctly, that world's culture had been a little too slap-happy about sharing – people eating off of each other's plates, sharing each other's spoons and forks, turning them into a germ buffet.
Add it all up and... “This thing isn't that contagious,” John said, suspicion rising fast like a volcano about to blow. “I would've been in iso if it was. I wasn't.”
“John, please,” Teyla said, holding out her hand. “You must listen.”
“John, don't listen!”
John whirled around to see Teyla, wide-eyed and frantic.
“Get away from it! Run!” Her image then fuzzed and winked out.
The clanking returned, right behind John. He whirled back bringing up his P-90 and firing. The big metal behemoth that had been Teyla only moments ago staggered back.
It was a robot, a friggin' giant robot iridescent as the walls of Atlantis, its body plates of armor overlapping each other and its hands big enough for one to crush John's skull like a tomato.
John let off a few more shots, turned and ran with everything he had. The robot clanked behind him, the force of its crashing footfalls making the floor vibrate. But long-legged as it was, its mass wouldn't let it run any faster; John burst out ahead until the machine was well out of sight. He took a hard right down a hall, another right toward a door, swiping it open then darting inside and swiping it close. He ducked behind a table, wheezing and listening.
The machine clanked and thudded past. John waited with held breath until the sound faded away, then collapsed in a heap and coughed fit to dislocate his entire ribcage. But at least one thing was going right for him – the room was a lab with a sink, and he could officially cross out tainted water as the culprit. John climbed to his feet, staggered to it and gorged himself on heavenly lukewarm liquid. He slid to the floor in another exhausted heap, his back against the cupboard and one bandaged arm draped over his knee.
People missing, holograms and a robot – an honest to goodness giant liable-to-break-every-bone-in-the-the-body robot. Which John really wanted to think was the coolest thing ever, except for that pesky liable-to-break-bones part, as well as the able-to-look-like-allies part, and mustn't forget that it had just tried to run him down. Oh, and people were still missing, most likely because of said bone-breaking robot, and John still had to find them.
In a massive city, with a bone-breaking robot.
It was difficult to be happily impressed. Mostly, he was pissed, and nervous. Especially nervous. Not scared per se since the robot apparently hadn't killed anyone as far as he knew. But it was still big and still on some kind of people-collecting/catching/whatever mission. Most important of all, it was still out there, looking for him.
John scrubbed his overheated face, then forced himself up to splash tepid water onto his skin. Feeling marginally better (though not by much) he thought fast.
The robot was looking for him, but unlike something organic it didn't have his scent or it would have been busting through the doors by now. Which would explain the disguise – like a Venus fly trap; look like something harmless, something you can trust, and it reels you in.
Which might also explain how the robot was able to round everyone up. People are vanishing, everyone else is scared, panicking, they see someone they know and, bam! Trap closed.
“Note to self,” John rasped. He made the painful climb back to his feet. “Run away from the clanking, not toward.” That established, he splashed his face with more water, gave himself a moment against his will to hack up half a lung, then pushed himself from the sink into a semblance of a steady walk to the door.
For the first time since coming to Atlantis, John missed hand-operated doors that you could open just a crack. He pressed his back to the wall, swiped the crystal and darted his head out then in. The corridor was empty and the clanking nowhere to be heard. Good enough. He dashed outside.
Running wasn't an option but John made it an option, anyway, his breaths rattling loud from his congested lungs. No more distractions. No more following weird sounds and distant voices. It was straight to where everyone was being kept and nothing else.
“Colonel!”
Damn it
John turned, P-90 raised and aimed at Colonel Carter, her hands up and her face taut with alarm.
“Whoa, stand down, Colonel.”
“Not gonna happened until I know you're you.”
“And how do you propose that?”
John gestured with his weapon. “The crystal, Touch it. Not swipe it, touch it.”
Carter did, hesitantly. When her hand passed clean through, she gaped and John lowered his weapon.
“Good, it's you.” He grimaced. “Sort of. Look, I'll explain on the way but I can't stop or things'll get worse.”
There was a lot John liked about having Carter as a CO, one of them being that she had been there and done that enough times not to be one of those idiots who stood there refusing to budge until they had some answers. She fell into line next to John and he explained.
“Well, that explains a lot. Except for the why,” Carter said.
“What happened before, you know, you started popping in and out?” John asked.
“People going missing, systems going into hibernation on their own. I had lost contact with McKay and was heading out to find him and, then...” She tossed up her hands.
“I've seen McKay twice, heard Ronon, and Teyla popped in just in time to warn me against the robot. If you guys coming and going is random then it's a pretty lucky random where I'm concerned.”
“If it is random,” Carter said, all shock over being a hologram dead and buried. “If these holograms aren't some sort of message for help, maybe being controlled by our minds. The thing is, whenever I pop back in as you put it I'm always somewhere near a lab. Each time, I'm always thinking about how I need to get to a lab.”
John nodded, following the line of thought easily. “Picture yourself somewhere in Atlantis,” he said.
“Exactly.”
“Except why not end up inside a lab? Why always outside?”
Carter snapped and pointed. “Maybe it's because I'm not being specific enough. My desire is to find a lab, not be inside one.”
“So you end up outside with your pick of labs but no way to open the doors.”
“Right.” She sighed. “But even if I was in a lab I wouldn't be able to handle anything.”
“Yeah, but at least we're starting to figure things out.”
As well as proving himself wrong. Having been in weird situations did prepare you for weird situations. Had this been earth, with no Atlantis or SGC experience to go by, it would have been damn easy to cave to theories of superstition, magic and alien abduction. But this was Atlantis, the Pegasus Galaxy, breeding ground for making the impossible possible and nothing as mysterious as it first seemed.
Except for the why. Always the why. But that they would figure out once everyone was released.
“Do you think--” John started, but Carter had vanished. He had been going to ask if experience with holograms would make it easier to pop in and out, explaining why Rodney and Carter had not only found him but lasted longer than Ronon and Teyla. He also wondered who else was popping in and out.
Distant clanking distracted him. John cursed, checking the LSD that was useless in tracking inorganic objects. He took the nearest hall, taking the long way, but the clanking seemed to be everywhere. And he was close, so damn close, to his destination.
Of course things had to go wrong. A crisis wasn't a crisis until the final challenge at the final level. Life was such a friggin' video game, sometimes.
John ducked into a room and not a moment too soon. The clanking rose, thumped and hissed by, then fell, but not fading. John slipped from the room into a run. The noise seemed to follow him, forcing him to hide again and again, the clanking always going by each time. Either that robot was on to him and fast or...
John winced.
Or there was more than one. That, too, made a lot of sense. One robot would have eventually raised suspicion, especially if it encountered too many people to grab. Two or more would definitely even the odds.
John bolted from his current hiding place to the end of the hall.
He'd arrived. On the other side of the door right in front of him, his people.
And possibly a phalanx of robots. Only one way to find out. Bracing himself, John swiped the door open then dove behind a bubbling pillar.
Nothing emerged and the door slid shut. The clanking and hissing remained all around him.
“Looking for little old me?” John said through clenched teeth. “I'm flattered.” He dashed back to the door, swiped it open and dashed inside, weapon at the ready.
It was hard not to lower his weapon and stare, it really was. It was a stasis chamber, one the scientists had discovered some time back, different because every pod was lying horizontal instead of vertical, like a chamber full of streamlined coffins. And nearly every 'coffin' was full.
“This really explains a lot,” John said, horrified and awed. It still didn't explain the why, but that could wait. Going down the row of stasis pods (calling them coffins was too morbid), he found McKay. Next to him was Ronon. Across from him on the other side, Teyla, and next to Teyla, Carter.
John studied Rodney's pod first. Also unlike the stasis pods they knew and – well, not loved but still knew – was a panel with a small screen like a miniature version of the monitors in the infirmary scrolling with vital signs.
Rodney was alive, which meant that everyone else was alive as well. Yes, John had already figured out as much from the LSD, but seeing the proof up close was always so much more a relief than seeing it as a little white dot among countless little white dots. Even better, it looked like the device was simple enough for a child to use. Next to the screen were two buttons, one green, the other red. John pressed the green one first, just to make sure his hunch was right. You never knew when one button had multiple functions, say, like, cleaning the pod by incinerating all the germs. When nothing happened, John took a breath – coughed – and pressed the red button.
The pod unsealed with a hiss of compressed air and slid forward. John leaned in and shook Rodney by the shoulders.
“Rodney. Rodney! Wake up!”
Rodney groaned, rocking his head back and forth. His eyes peeled open to look blearily at John.
John's triumph and relief ended when he was yanked by his vest and tossed away from the pod. Landing on his back shoved what little air he had from his lungs. He coughed, the world spinning wildly around him, a double image of the robot stalking toward him. John scrambled back while picking up his P-90. He fired. The robot staggered. John used the distraction to scramble to his feet, still firing, and backed away. But a blow from behind sent him flying forward.
This time, he was breathless and in pain, his back on fire. He had no time to assess the situation when Robot One was on him, grabbing him by the ankle and dragging him away. Robot Two followed until they reached the door where it stopped to stand sentinel. One of its hands was dripping blood off the sharp points of its fingers.
“That...s'plains lot,” John said blearily.
“You are ill,” said the robot in a distinctly robot voice. “You will contaminate. You must heal. You are ill...” over and over and over again, down hall after hall, through a transporter (and that the thing even fit was amazing) all the way to the infirmary. It lifted John by the arm and dropped him back first onto the bed. Fire ripped through John, making him cry out, but the machine ignored him.
It proceeded to strap him down. But between the pain and dizziness from having been knocked around, John's weak fumble for his P-90 produced no results. The robot gripped his other wrist, shoved it down, and started wrapping the other strap.
“Hey! Wall-E! Over here!”
The robot released the strap and swiveled its body to face the voice, a voice John knew so well. He lifted his head and stared blearily at McKay.
A very much flesh and blood McKay throwing scalpel after kidney dish after bed pan at the robot. “That's right, look at me. Now, John! Shoot it!”
John shook his head clear, pulled his hand from the unstrapped strap and lifted his gun. He fired. All it did was bring the robot's attention back to him. Rodney hit it with a IV pole, it's attention going back to McKay.
“Easier said than done, McKay!” John growled, unbuckling his other hand. Adrenaline surged, enough to push back most of the dizziness and let him roll to his feet without dropping.
“Then figure something out!” McKay yelped.
John raised the P-90, ready to try again, when he saw it, just at the base of the robot's metal skull, the only place not covered by armor. John switched his P-90 for his nine mil, stalked up to the robot and shoved the barrel into the opening.
“Down, McKay!” John bellowed, and fired.
The robot's body jerked with each shot, then it convulsed. There was a whine and hiss of gears and hydraulics winding down. The body slumped, the slump putting all of its weight forward, and it toppled with a crash hard enough to shake the floor.
“Well, that was easy,” Rodney panted shakily.
John looked at him long suffering, then frowned. “Wait, wasn't there--?”
Rodney's eyes bugged out of his skull. “Another one.”
“You didn't take it out!” John said, tossing him the nine mil.
“I wasn't exactly armed! I was lucky to outrun the thing!” he said, catching it.
The clanking was already heading toward them and fast. Rodney suddenly tossed the gun back to John, who snatched it out of the air easily.
“McKay, what--?”
“I have an idea?” he said excitedly, and grabbed the defib box from off its shelf, flipping it on and charging it.
“McKay are you crazy! You don't even know if that'll work!”
“Well I'd imagine it would do something. It's a giant walking computer full of electric parts!”
The doors slid open and the robot stomped into the room, head swiveling between Rodney and John. John fired and the robot's decision was made – it went for John. Howling in high-pitched and terrified defiance, Rodney rushed forward, pressed the panels to the robot’s back, and released the currents. The robot convulsed like its brother. It didn't go down, but it did do a remarkable impression of a drunk.
“Now!” Rodney said as though time was of the essence.
It wasn't. John walked right up to the thing, stuck his gun in the neck joint and fired. The creature whined to a stop and collapsed on top of its brother.
John and Rodney, panting and shaking, looked at each other. Then Rodney's gaze slipped past John and once again bulged. “Uh... are you bleeding?”
John looked back at the gurney, smeared with a generous amount of blood. The room tilted.
“Guess I am,” John said. He started to collapse, but Rodney caught him.
--------------------
“You know, technically it was your fault,” Rodney said, rolling his coffee mug between his palms.
John, reclining on his bed against a stack of pillows in his room, reached for his glass of orange juice on the night stand. Good when you lost blood, OJ. Even better was not having to convalesce in the infirmary. Not that he couldn't have handled it, but even Keller had to agree that after what John had woken up to, maybe a change of scene would be better.
“Wasn't it one of your people who activated that room?” John said, glaring.
“Yes, but the only reason the robots did what they did was because you were sick.”
“With a disease you only get by drinking out of someone else's cup,” John clarified, then took a savoring sip of cold juice. “You can't blame me for the robots overreacting. Robots your people woke up.” He coughed into his hand, not as bad as it was the other day when he'd been running for his life from germaphobe robots, but it still made his chest ache something fierce.
Rodney opened his mouth and raised a finger to retaliate but John cut him off easily.
“How about we leave it at it being no one's fault. Carter said the system was faulty.”
“Well, not so much faulty as not properly programmed. Or maybe overly programmed, I don't know. Technically it was the sick who were supposed to end up in stasis unless the contagion was moving too fast, then it was the healthy put into stasis to ensure that some of the population survived. Oh, but the best part is the holographic interface,” Rodney said giddily. “So even when put into stasis you still had the means to stick around and lend your expertise. But since we didn't know it was an interface--”
“You didn't know what was going on or why you kept going in and out,” John finished. “But it's like I told Carter – think of where you are and there you are.” Looking at Rodney, he batted his eyes. “And you thought of me. McKay, I'm touched.”
“Actually I thought of where the hell I could go to be safe. I ended up in the armory twice before finding you, so don't flatter yourself.”
And Teyla had ended up in her room or the mess hall. Ronon had been all over the place hunting enemies that were always one step ahead. Radek said he'd kept ending up outside, he wouldn't say why. Rodney suspected it had to do with that marine biologist he had a thing for. That woman practically lived on the piers.
John dropped his head back against the pillows. “You ever miss the days when the stuff we went through was the kind of stuff you only encountered when you read a good sci-fi book?”
“Oh hell, yes. But, well...” he shrugged.
“Keeps life interesting.”
“I was going to say it's the price you pay when making discoveries. The world as we know it has always been weird, we just never knew how weird.”
“Yeah, but I still say we have a monopoly on weird.”
Rodney nodded. “Definitely. Very definitely. Well, I don't know, SG-1 might argue otherwise.”
“I'm talking the Stargate program as a whole.”
“Oh, yeah. And once we're able to release our discoveries to the public, we'll even have a copyright on it. With royalties.”
“To owning weird,” John said, holding up his juice.
Rodney tapped his mug against it. “To owning weird.”
Ronon, Teyla and Carter arrived for their usual We-Survived-Another-Ass-Backward-FUBAR-Event movie-athon. John made sure to hold his glass and eat out of his own bowl of popcorn. Wouldn't want to make everyone sick and wake up anymore robots. Human scavenger hunts weren't all they were cracked up to be.
kodiak_bear wanted bleeding, city adventure, fever. I know I didn't have to do all three, but I couldn't resist :D
