kriadydragon | SGA Fic

Title: Dark Places
Author: Kriadydragon
Rating: PG-13 for blood/gen
Characters: John and Ronon - friendship
Warnings: Blood, bugs.
Summary: "Maybe it was the darkness, maybe the silence and the lack of wraith pursuing them for some inexplicable reason, but his heart was fluttering fast like an animal trapped in a cage of bone, and desperate to get out." Written for

kristen999. Hugs to

flingslassfor the beta.

Dark Places

John swung his arm around releasing another blind volley into the forest. P-90 thundered ripping branches and leaves like they were paper, stinging his neck with splinters. Blue-white electricity skimming dangerously close to his shoulder cut off his firing when he was forced to twist and avoid it. His feet pounded forest debris into the dirt and branches slapped and clawed at his face. He was running close to blind except for the flash of a tan leather coat four feet ahead giving him a semblance of direction.

“McKay!” John screamed into his comm. “Tell me you have the damn 'gate dialed!” He sent another volley tearing up the forest but not wraith flesh.

The comm crackled. “We're not even at the 'gate, yet! Just hold them off a little longer.”

“Not much of a choice, McKay! Get to the 'gate and get those reinforcements!”

“I'm trying! And for the record, shouting isn't helping!”

John was denied a retort when he was forced to drop and roll beneath two stun blasts. He stumbled getting back to his feet, briefly losing sight of Ronon until the tan coat flashed through the trees. Heart pounding, breaths heaving, John slapped branches and leaves aside, jumped over a log and landed in a crouch just as a blast sizzled overhead. It took some scrabbling to get back upright. He caught up to Ronon who had stopped to deliver a few shots of return fire. The Satedan slapped Sheppard's shoulder when he arrived.

“I saw a cave not far ahead, this way.” He sent another blast then twisted around and charged through the undergrowth like a human monster truck. Shrubs, ferns and lower branches didn't stand a chance.

John saw the cave entrance through the trees: low, long and dark like a gash in the rock-face. They had to duck low to get through, almost in a crouch with knees and spine bent, and rock still scraped across their back. Ronon scooted to the side enough to let Sheppard and his P-90 light through.

“This should slow them,” he said.

Sheppard twisted his mouth wryly. “It's certainly doing a fine job slowing us.”

The low hanging ceiling continued for another fifteen feet before finally opening up enough to let them stand straight.

“You know they're probably going to have us cornered in here,” Sheppard said. He wasn't trying to be deliberately negative, he was just stating a fact. But it would certainly complete what had rapidly declined into an utterly crappy day. A survey mission for a third alpha site, that was all this was supposed to be. An hour to get the lay of the newest strategic location on foot after having scoped it out the other day in a puddle jumper; in and out, there and back, all in time for an early lunch and possible downtime. Sheppard had been looking forward to that downtime to take a nap and regain an accumulation of seventy-two hours of lost sleep. Even at the height of an adrenaline rush, he could feel the need for rest like several layers of iron weighing down his bones.

One thing after another pretty much summed up his entire week, and today was turning into the pinnacle of it all.

“Unless there's another way out,” Ronon said.

“Is there?”

“Don't know.”

Sheppard glanced back with a scowl that was completely pointless in the darkness behind him. “That's not encouraging.”

“Would it help to say I've never entered a cave that I couldn't get out of?”

“A little,” John said. “But there's always a first for everything.”

“If there wasn't an exit, I'd know. The air would be stale.”

John sniffed, smelling only rock and mineralized water. The most cave experience he had were his two visits to Carlsbad Caverns and one visit to Tiponogis in Utah, and that was it. Give him a rock wall to climb any day into the wild blue yonder. He wouldn't call himself a claustrophobic – most of his military career was spent in the cramped space of a cockpit – but he preferred being where he could see open sky and make a clean break. Being in caves, some days, felt too close to being buried alive.

And his association with caves over the past few years had done a number on his tolerance for dark, enclosed spaces. His previously pounding heart was starting to skitter light and fast with reluctant unease.

“I don't think they're pursuing,” Ronon said. “I don't hear them.”

Maybe they can't see us, Sheppard wanted to say, more like reassure, but Wraith favored darkness or they would have better lighting on their ships.

John walked heel to toe, minimizing the crunch of his boots against the gritty floor. Ronon was apparently doing the same and it increased the silence until John could hear the whisper of his controlled breathing and the rush of blood through his ears.

But no distant thump of Wraith boots closing in for the stun.

“Should we be worried about that?” John asked redundantly. He was certain he was as worried as he was going to get, as anyone could get.

“Probably,” Ronon replied.

Sheppard was wrong. He could get more worried.

“Ronon,” he said. “Do me a favor.”

“Yeah?”

“Don't be so damn honest.”

John heard a snort, followed by, “Wraith don't like caves, think they're scary so won't be following us any time soon.”

“That wasn't so hard, now, was it?” John said with a tight smirk. Ronon replied with another snort, and it was easy to imagine his good-natured head-shaking wagging the ends of his dreadlocks.

John swallowed. Maybe it was the darkness, maybe the silence and the lack of wraith pursuing them for some inexplicable reason, but his heart was fluttering fast like an animal trapped in a cage of bone, and desperate to get out. Sweat tickled down his back in the indent of skin over his spine, creating an itch he couldn't scratch. It made his skin twitch, shudder and want to crawl off his skeleton.

This cave was creeping him out a hell of a lot more than it should be. He wasn't claustrophobic. He may have preferred the sky but accepted the fact that enclosed spaces were a fact of life. The walls had never closed in on him, the air never thickened until it was too heavy to breathe, and his mind never screamed at him to get out while he still could.

Until now, and he had no idea why.

“Ronon,” he said, a little too high-pitched. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Ronon you, uh... you don't... sense anything, do you? I mean, you know, like, feel something's near by? Maybe following us? Watching? That kind of thing?”

He heard the whispered movement of Ronon's coat. “Why, do you?”

John reached around slipping his hand through his vest, scratching that itch down his spine as far as his arm would let him reach. He mumbled a vacant and unhelpful “I don't know.” He was a firm believer and practitioner of gut instincts being more than just lucky guesses, except he didn't recall them ever feeling like this. If situations and surroundings shifted off-kilter, then John's heart beat a little faster; his senses sharpened a little keener. If situations and surroundings came with an unseen enemy keeping watch, the muscles of John's back and neck would tighten. He never did like being stared at.

What he was feeling now had him poised on the brink of flight. He wanted to leave, run, anywhere, everywhere; just keep moving too fast and to haphazard for whatever was chasing him to ever catch him, and he didn't like that feeling. In the history of his combative life, he'd never felt anything like it, even when the chips were down and flight was the only means left to stay alive...

Sheppard paused. No, he was wrong. He had felt it before, he just couldn't remember where or when, and hated that even more.

Call him a control freak, but he liked to know what he was up against before running away from it.

A heavy hand landing on his shoulder made him jump.

“Sheppard?”

John swallowed. “Sorry. Thinking too much.”

“Not a good place for that,” Ronon said. He gave Sheppard a gentle nudge in the shoulder. “Come on. Let's get out of here.”

They continued on, the tunnel widening ahead into a cavern bristling with cream-pale cone stalagmites and pillared stalactites that John thought with slightly hysterical humor looked like mounds of frozen cottage cheese. The air was moist and cold, clinging to his skin, and when he breathed in he could almost taste the minerals. The cavern stretched a ways, beyond the reach of Sheppard's light before tapering back into a tunnel.

The light slid over rough walls and floor that John would bet a weeks pay were roughly the same height and length, with not even a single stalagmite after having just emerged from a forest of them.

“Is it just me,” John said, “or is this place looking a little too man-made to you?”

Heavy boots crunched passed John. Ronon stepped within the light up to the right side wall. “Shine your light here.”

John did so. Ronon's face looked hollow in the pale illumination. Not sunken, but sharper, harsher, his eyes dark beneath the shadows of his furrowed brow. He was passing his hand over the wall, feeling out each angle and bump with palms and sometimes fingertips.

“Recent, too,” he said. “These rocks are sharp or I would have guessed this some old culling bunker.”

Planets were full of such caves, which was probably why Ronon's luck with finding exits hadn't run out. When a society couldn't rely on moving from spot to spot like Teyla's people, they hollowed out mountains between cullings, going deeper and deeper. The Genii weren't the only ones to have hidden their civilization beneath the earth. On some planets, there were races that had never even seen the sun.

John sidled closer to the wall and touched the familiar uneven geometric juts that could only be made by explosives. There was just one unnerving little problem that made the whole thing rather surreal and their current situation even more uncomfortable.

“This planet isn't occupied,” he stated. They both knew for a fact, having led the 'jumper survey that had found only ruins of civilizations so old that had it not been for the configuration of the remains, the piles of dead buildings would have been passed off as rock piles. No one had occupied this world for millennium.

“Might be settlers looking for a new planet,” Ronon said, “A lot of 'em'll carve out the bunkers before they start planting crops.”

“Then why haven't we seen them?”

Ronon shrugged. “Maybe they were culled before they could finish. Come on.”

They kept going. When John tried to his comm to check on Rodney and Teyla, all he got was static. It wasn't a surprise – half their communication problems on other worlds were caused by either Ancient tech on the fritz or naturally occurring minerals or energy that cut through radio signals like it was butter. And by the way Sheppard's arms were goose-fleshing, they must be pretty deep into the cave.

The tunnel turned in a gradual bend that sloped gently down for twenty feet before leveling out again. John kept his light moving in a slow, steady back and forth over walls and floor, looking for branch-offs or openings.

He found one right where the tunnel curved toward the left, a smaller tunnel entrance just wide enough for two men to walk side by side. He lifted his light to cut straight through to the other end and did a double take.

It wasn't a long tunnel, maybe ten feet, maybe more, ending at a rust-stained door bent and barely hanging onto its hinges. Ronon didn't hesitate heading toward it and yanking it open with three hard tugs. Metal shrieked as it scraped over rock and against its own rusty joints. Ronon managed to get it open enough for them to squeeze through if they wanted, after Sheppard revealed the interior with his light.

Sheppard's eyes grew large and he breathed, “Son of a bitch,” Then squeezed through. Inside was a good-sized room eerily familiar with its organic-like terminals, tables with restraints, and empty steel cages starting to rust.

A lab, and not just any lab.

“Wraith,” Ronon said from behind John, making him jump.

“Yeah,” John growled without hiding his annoyance. At the rate he was going, he'd end up dropping dead of a heart attack before he ever saw daylight again. “But I don't think just any Wraith.”

“Micheal,” Ronon said with more menace.

Sheppard moved closer to the racks of empty cages, passing his light over the mutilated mesh doors, some of them still hanging on, others having eventually dropped to the floor. Only in Micheal's lab did they find cages this size.

John's light skimmed over a tube of foggy, green-tinted liquid not unlike formaldehyde preserving the for-legged insectoid that made Sheppard's heart rate triple-time it. He didn't realize he was taking a step back until his right foot was on the ground and his left was moving to join it.

“Looks like he hasn't been here for a while,” he heard Ronon say, as though far away, across a chamber rather than a room. “That's why the Wraith must be here. They're looking for him. He knew they were coming, so packed up and ran like the coward he is. Sheppard? Hey, Sheppard, you listening?”

The hand landing on John's shoulder made him jump, and yelp, and jerk away slamming his back so hard into the rack of cages they rattled. His heart beat hard trying to hammer a hole through his chest. He pressed his hand over it as though it would actually have an affect.

Ronon backed quickly off with both hands raised and both eyebrows curved high on his forehead. “Whoa, hey, it's all right. It's all right. You all right?” He regarded John in a way that John wasn't particularly liking: one part concern and two parts silently asking “what the hell is wrong with you?” Only good-naturedly. It was obvious Ronon thought John was over-reacting – they were in no danger here, after all, with the Wraith not following and Micheal long gone from this place – and the Satedan was finding it amusing.

It pissed John off.

“I'm fine,” John snapped, pushing away from the rack. “Just a bad case of deja vu.”

Even in the bad lighting, Sheppard didn't miss the twitch of Ronon's lips fighting back a smile. “Yeah, well, like I said, I don't think Micheal's been here for a while. So I doubt we'll have to put up with repeating history.”

John's hands tightened around his weapon. Ronon was making fun of him. They were lost in a friggin' cave with Wraith on one side and no potential way out on the other, and Ronon was making fun of him.

“After everything Micheal's put us through, I think I'm entitled to a little paranoia,” John said through gritted teeth. His eyes strayed against his will to and from the dead Iratus; a momentary flicker of his eyes, there and gone, just not quick enough for the ever vigilant Satedan to miss.

“You really hate those bugs,” he said. Sometimes the big man was too damn observant for his own good, and his joy for stating the obvious didn't help.

John did another flickering glance at the creature that should have only existed in Sci-fi horror movies. “They put me through worse,” he said, not wanting to say more. He could never bring himself to talk about it, not even to explain it to Ronon. It made the memory too fresh, and the more he said, the fresher it became until he could almost feel a tingle in his fingers and toes, the slick, cold surface of defibrillator paddles against his ribs... a sharp pinch of pain over his carotid. As though for emphasis, cold crawled up his back and he shivered. “Let's get out of here.”

Ronon nodded in agreement and turned to the door. Sheppard followed, skirting around the table, when he heard something clack behind him. He spun around, P-90 raised and light circling the general area where he'd heard the sound.

There was nothing there.

A slight weight pulled the front of his vest a centimeter higher than the back, and he rolled his eyes.

“Chill, Ronon, I'm coming. I just thought I heard...” Something sharp pricked his shoulder, then the skin below his neck. Something else brushed across the strip of flank exposed by the vest gaps and wet, chittering clicks agonizingly familiar from years of nightmares that never let him forget tickled his ear.

John's heart slammed into his ribs, and he freaked. “Son of a bitch!”

There was no thinking, only reacting, tossing his gun and gripping the hard shell with both hands. He pulled and squeezed feeling the solid chitinous pressed into the soft underbelly that should have popped like a water balloon but wouldn't. Needle sharp legs pierced both cloth and flesh into the muscle that it clung to with impossible strength. If it was going, it was taking a piece of John with it. He felt the tail lash slapping his back, head, arms and wrists, vicious as a serrated whip that he didn't have to feel to know it was tearing his skin.

And he felt nothing except for those claws, heard nothing except for the shrieking chitter. It was getting closer to his neck, he knew it, could feel the mandibles brushing against the skin over his carotid. He screamed, shouted, pulled with everything he had and didn't give a damn how much damage it did. It was going to latch on, send a knife through his eye and limbs and nerves until he was paralyzed and helpless. Then it would feed, and the only way to save him would be to kill him.

Not again. Like hell it was happening again.

He added twisting to squeezing, digging his nails into the softer tissue that was tough as old leather and refusing to give. Then larger hands joined his and together they haul the thing further and further from his neck. John howled in defiance and pain when the claws tore through his skin.

Pain ripped through his leg. John screamed and dropped, and screamed louder when the Iratus was ripped away from his shoulder. Red flashed out of the corner of his eye, barely perceptible with his attention narrowed to the second Iratus latched to his leg. Again he pulled, howling, ripping the mandibles and four pronged claws from his calf that tore through the BDUs like they were tissue paper.

Not again, not again, not again...

He squeezed and pulled and squeezed, not caring how much it hurt because he was not going through this again. Fate begged to differ when a second Iratus leaped onto his forearm and sunk its fangs in just below the elbow.

John's vision whited out, pain and terror and the need to be rid of that pain and terror the only thing that he knew. Screaming, he twisted his body slamming the creature attached to his arm into the rock floor. He kicked slamming the second creature into the leg of the metal table. He slammed, kicked, thrashed, snarled: mindless and wild with desperation. He thought he heard someone call his name, but it was distant and garbled and meant nothing.

But the press of something solid into his thigh was important. He grabbed at it thinking it another Iratus, felt cool metal, remembered his gun and tore it from his holster, firing a shot into the bug on his arm.

Pain tore through him like acid and he arched back, screaming and dropping the gun for fingers to curl convulsively. His arm seized and slammed into the metal rack then pulled back. Flesh tore, lesser pain lost in the greater pain still raging through him. It was too much, overloading his brain that filled his vision with white, then black, then blessed nothing.

----------------------------------

Chittering, skitter, skitter, chittering. They were everywhere in the dark, circling him, closing in, chittering and skittering.

“When is he going to wake up? It's been three days... no, strike that, four.”

“He's catatonic, Dr. McKay. He'll wake up when he's good and ready.”

Chittering, skittering. Airy brushes against his skin, light as feathers, Pressure on his arm, leg, shoulder, chest, neck. They were toying with him, cat and mouse only the mouse was paralyzed and couldn't run. Why couldn't he run?

“What the hell did these things do to him? And don't tell me 'it was bad' again or so help me, McKay...”

“What do you think 'it was bad', means? It means we don't like talking about it. None of us, Sheppard especially.”

“McKay...”

“We had to stop his heart to get it off, all right? We had to kill him to save him.”

Silence. Chittering, chittering...

“It almost killed him.”

“It did kill him. We killed him. He asked us to. He just wanted it off. I don't think you can get more desperate than that...”

Skittering, chittering. They were so close, a hair's breadth away brushing him with their too warm underbellies. He needed to move, run, but he couldn't. He was numb... crap, they already had him. They were already on him! He could feel them tugging at his chest, pinching his hand; just enough feeling left to know they were there, not enough feeling to get away from them. His heart beat frantic against his sternum and they shrilled a frenetic, enraptured keen like the whine of a machine.

They had him. Hundreds, thousands, millions of them burying him alive under claws and fangs.

John screamed. Then he was upright clawing at his body, ripping bugs and wiry tails from his chest and hand. They were every where but moving too fast to catch: over his shoulders, across his neck and down his back. Shouting a hoarse cry, John thrashed and slammed his body trying to head them off. Two of them wrapped their legs around his biceps and pinned him to a soft surface.

“Sheppard. Sheppard!”

“Ronon, hold him!”

“I'm trying! He's fighting too hard... Sheppard! Stop!”

The legs pinched tighter. More pressed into him, his shoulders, his chest. He felt them on his legs, his neck. Too many. He gasped and choked on air, coughed and coughed until coughing was gagging and he was hauled upright in time to keep the vomit pouring from his mouth to go burning down his windpipe. Cold rushed through his veins and he had only enough energy to scream before darkness took him and the creatures won.

--------------------------------

Chittering, skittering... this time John wasn't paralyzed. He could feel his arms, legs and the pull of something on his chest. When he moved his hand to test it, fangs pricked his skin in a pinch and he gasped, bolting upright. He ripped at the sticky filaments holding the webbing to his chest, his hand. The Iratus were frigging cocooning him, like damn wraith! To preserve him and suck him dry to their hearts content. Feed him to the young he'd taken to save himself...

When his arms were suddenly pinned to his side by a vice grip around his chest, he cried out and kicked. How big did these damn things get!

“Sheppard,” a voice whispered in his ear. A human voice, deep and soft and rumbling against his back. “Sheppard, it's me, Ronon. You need to calm down and listen to me. You're in the infirmary. You're home. You're all right. There are no Iratus bugs. No. Iratus. Bugs. You hear me? No. Iratus. Bugs.”

John slowed his struggle, cautiously, testingly. No Iratus bugs.

“No Iratus bugs. You're safe, Sheppard. Safe. Home.”

Safe. Home. No Iratus bugs. No Iratus...

It was then John realized the whimpering sound between his rapid, hiccuping breaths were coming from him. The softness below him - not a cocoon, a bed. The filaments, webbing – wires. Beeping, shrilling – machines, heart monitor. The vice...

Arms, Ronon.

Safe, Home. No Iratus bugs. Then why couldn't he stop shaking, panting, make his heart beat normal? Something patted his chest and he flinched with a rough gasp.

“Easy, Sheppard. Easy. You're all right.”

Energy flowed from John like water through a busted dam and he sagged, letting Ronon take all his weight. He was so cold, so exposed and felt his body betray him by curling into the bigger man's embrace; the bigger man who would protect from the nasty bug monsters, who could kill the nasty bug monsters.

Humiliation crept hot up John's neck and he hoped to Heaven for a black hole to open up and swallow him whole. He felt so small, pathetic, so damn useless! A quivering ball of skin and bones; a five year old in a grown man's body who'd been pretending all this time; a child playing soldier but still just a child.

Yet when he tried to push himself away and maintain what dignity he had left – if there was any dignity left – Ronon's hold tightened.

“Don't worry about it, Sheppard,” he said.

John swallowed. He couldn't stop shaking no matter how hard he tried. His voice was like sandpaper when he spoke. “I've never been the touchy, feely type.” Or such a spineless coward.

“We're all afraid of something,” Ronon said, his voice a gentle rumble in his chest, like the distant thunder of a passing storm. He helped John get settled back into bed.

“We all freak out, sometimes,” Ronon said.

It took knowing Ronon to see past his veneer of frustration to the fear and concern he was so good at never showing. When you knew him, when you knew what to look for, you wondered how you ever missed it before.

The expression he wore even a total stranger would know it for what it was. And John had thought he was feeling vulnerable and child-like. If Ronon looked any younger, any more helpless, he would make John feel old enough to be... not his father, no way. Maybe uncle.

It made John wonder if the “manly embrace” had been just as much for Ronon's sake as his own.

“You guys never told me what happened the first time you'd faced one of those things,” the Satedan said. “All anyone ever said was that it was bad, and that we aren't supposed to talk about it.”

John smiled weakly. “Bet you thought we were over reacting.”

Pressing his lips, Ronon dropped his gaze to the bed rail. After a moment, he lifted it again, eyes large and dark and uneasy in his suddenly too young face.

“I get it now.”

Pursing his lips, John moved his arm with the intent to clasp Ronon's shoulder and offer pathetic reassurances, though nothing evenly remotely reassuring came to mind, pathetic or otherwise. But the motion made his arm sting and he hissed. Cue Dr. Keller, who must have been waiting in the wings for this precise moment. She tutted over the blood-stained bandages, lightly admonishing him for tearing his stitches... again... then pointing to the bag of blood next to the saline and saying like a reminder that they only had so many of these and didn't want the one who'd donated it wrung dry. She cleaned him up, both his arm and his shoulder that had also suffered; restitched, reattached, re-everything that needed to be redone and finally left them with instructions for John to rest.

John sank deeper into his pillow, feeling heavy as an anchor and liable to sink through the bed. He could feel himself start to drift off now that the terror-born adrenaline was out of his system.

But he didn't want to sleep. To sleep was to dream. To dream was to hear them, feel them, chittering and skittering closer until he awoke screaming, thrashing and quivering like a child. Above all, it would be to hear them and feel them.

A hand on his good shoulder made him jump. Instead of pulling away, the hand squeezed.

“Get some sleep,” Ronon said. “I'll be here.”

John licked his lips, wanting to say, for dignity's sake, though he didn't really want to say it, that Ronon could go.

“Not going anywhere, Sheppard,” Ronon said with a stubborn crossing of his arms over his chest for emphasis. Again Sheppard wondered if this were just as much for Dex as himself.

John smiled tremulously – he could live with that – and let himself drift away.

The End