Title: Not the Villain You Know
Author: Kodiak bear
Rating: T
Cat: Gen/het/maybe slash, it's a little vague. Really it's OT4 I guess.
Warnings: AU, it's not a story where everyone is back to normal at the end, but it's not exactly depressing. It's not a deathfic, well, not really.
Summary: John creates memories with his team because soon everything will change. The Beginning of the Tok'ra series.

Not the Villain You Know

by kodiak bear


They took him to the beach and they took him to the mountains.

"I'm sorry, John. It's irreversible, at least with any technology we have. We've sent requests to the Tok'ra and the Asgard, but --"

"They aren't exactly sitting on our front porch," John finished wryly.

"No," Carson said, looking away.

They drove from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Then they boarded a plane and took him to Guam, Hawaii and Iceland. Somewhere along the way they acquired a wheelchair, though he didn't need it often yet.

"This isn't…I'm sorry, I can't…" Rodney kept sitting and then standing. He lifted his hands in frustration. "There's got to be something," he tried again. "Anything."

"The Tok'ra contacted the SGC late last night. There's a symbiote. The Asgard haven't called back." John tried to imagine the feeling of having another living organism in his brain.

Rodney gaped. "Would you really do that?"

"I don't know. I haven't got that far yet."

Teyla made love to him, soft and slow, teasing feeling from nerves slowly going to sleep. He hadn't asked and she hadn't offered. She seemed to know he needed to feel it one last time and she did what she'd always done for him: answered unspoken requests. She took him against her and moved her hands across his skin and pretended his trembles were from her and not the disease destroying his body.

Ronon held him through nights when his body shook traitorously. And Rodney tucked blankets around him and held John's head in his lap, stroking brusquely and affectionately – something only Rodney could do -- when the pain grew too great.

"Is it not giving up who you are just to live?" Teyla gripped her sticks and faced John across the exercise mats. "Is living that important to your people, John, that you would sacrifice so much?"

"It's not like that, Teyla," he argued, though a part of him said it was exactly that.

"Colonel Caldwell was used," she replied stiffly. She paced to the side, swinging her right stick. Then, her eyes softened and for a moment, warmth and compassion showed too brightly for either of them to ignore. Her hand dropped to her side and she let the stick fall to the floor before stepping to him and cupping his cheek in her palm. "I would not wish for you to be used. To be changed." Then she touched her forehead against his and felt the unnatural fever already raging.

John loved the coolness of her skin, the silky-soft feel against his. "It's not the same. He was infected by a Goa'uld. They're different."

"They are the same species," she murmured against his throat.

He didn't have an answer to that.

John watched sunsets over fields of gold. He listened to thunder roll across horizons scudded with leaded clouds; and watched as lightning flashed to life, skipping from land to sky, because everyone knew that the electrical discharge went from the ground up. Or everyone should, Rodney had declared.

He felt rain drum against his hot skin and lifted his eyes into the downpour, letting it soak his hair until it stuck limply to his face. Until it soaked his shirt and stuck to his skin and he shivered.

His team sat with him. They got wet and cold and when the storm passed, they carried him back inside and stripped him of his wet clothes, drying him with careful strokes of cotton towels and helped him into dry underwear and nothing else.

"John, we must go back."

He blinked tiredly, staring at her blurry shape as she leaned over him. "I know," he rasped. He was too weak to dress himself and walk without help now.

Rodney brought him a cup of hot tea and Ronon slid behind him, easing him upright. "You've probably caught a cold on top of everything," Rodney scolded. John reached feebly for the cup; the degeneration had progressed into his upper body and their time was up.

His hands trembled around the mug and Rodney laced his fingers over John's and held them tightly, looking steadily at him. With a small nod, John accepted the help and sipped, before pulling away and leaning back against Ronon, signaling he was finished.

"What good are your machines and science if they can't cure this?" Ronon paced around the infirmary, his movements jerky and full of unleashed anger.

"Science can't fix everything, Ronon. If it could, the Wraith wouldn't still exist and people would never grow old." John tried to look supportive. "But I appreciate the thought."

Ronon stopped pacing and turned to John, his hands clenched into fists by his side. "I'm not good at standing around. At not doing anything."

John nodded. He understood that. A crooked grin escaped. "Well, how about we do something then."

They flew him back to the SGC. The Tok'ra were waiting. They had lost a lot in the war against the Goa'uld and were still recovering. Their numbers didn't increase and when a host died, unless a new one was found, the symbiote died also.

They scolded Lam and John, "It might be too late."

"It was gonna die anyway," John whispered.

The Tok'ra sighed. "Fortunately, we understood you would wait till the last possible moment and we brought Aenath with us. Hopefully she will be able to reverse the damage and heal you, but it will be a long, painful process, mostly for her but you will feel some pain initially."

John coughed on a laugh. "It can't hurt anymore than it does." Inside his body lived a bright, raging center of agony that grew greater every day, even as he lost feeling everywhere else.

Rodney paled, Ronon growled, frustrated, and Teyla held his hand tighter. They'd expected Carson to find a last minute miracle and now that John was about to be blended, they realized what he'd already accepted – there wasn't going to be any reprieve this time.

"You've accepted the Tok'ra's offer, Colonel Sheppard?"

John winced. It sounded so innocent. Their offer. Not anything like what it really was. He was going to let another being enter him, invade his mind. His memories and thoughts and everything that made him John Sheppard were going to be at this thing's mercy. He'd seen what the Goa'uld could do. They could subdue the host, take control, and fake it in a way such that no one was any wiser. What if this snake was a double agent? What if it decided the galaxy was wide open and now was the time to take control over other planets, and shoved John to the side, leaving him a spectator in his own body?

"I have," he answered, frankly impressed by the control he kept. "I'll become a host, but I've got one condition."

"We are listening, Colonel."

His team was standing loosely around him. He'd shared his plans. They knew he'd need them. He had done a lot of things alone before, but going to the brink of death… John wanted them there. Needed them there. He didn't have to do this alone and he didn't want to. Not anymore.

"I'm going to do a little sightseeing first --"

The host had already died so there was no transference from one body to the next, just them helping him roll to his side, then someone held his head straight and another person opened his jaw and held it. He'd said he wouldn't move, but now that it came down to it, John wasn't so sure.

He knew his heart had sped up, he could feel it thumping hard against the inside of his chest; he was surprised that it still worked when so much else was shutting down. But Carson had said his internal organs and functions would be the last to go. Smooth muscle tissue, Carson had said, appears to be less susceptible. The disease had attacked his skeletal muscle and the nerves in his extremities first.His motor control had slowly disappeared until now he found his hands and feet refused to respond at all.

When they set the symbiote down next to his mouth, he tried to close his eyes.

When it pierced the back of his throat, he gagged and mentally thrashed from the pain, but wasn't able to twitch a finger against the invasion. In a moment, the agony began to ease and he felt his eyesight grow hazy; his body felt far-away and unreachable.

"What happened?" demanded Rodney, "what's it doing to him?"

The dual voice of the Tok'ra representative said, "Aenath is going to place Colonel Sheppard in a state much like you call a coma – to make the blending easier and to begin healing the damage."

"Will he be in pain for long?" Teyla asked tightly. Somewhere in the distance he was aware of her still holding his hand.

Don't let go, please, don't let go.

"Not much longer."

Strong hands rolled him to his back; his mouth was eased shut and his eyes were closed then taped.

John felt a scream bubbling up – he wasn't in a coma. He was still here.

//Be calm, John Sheppard. It is taking more time than usual. Soon, you will sleep//

Why?

//Because you stubbornly waited so long to be blended//

Be happy I agreed at all.

//These memories, the places you went while already succumbing to the disease, were they so important that you risked death? Much longer and I do not think I could have repaired the damage//

John found it easier to swallow. Whether it was from the symbiote's efforts or just that he was beyond the unknown now, he didn't know. Her question sparked images in his mind. Emotions. He remembered sitting on the beach, white, smooth sand falling through his fingers and surf splashing against his feet, already growing numb.

He remembered long hours spent in the rental car, napping against the window, and hearing nothing but the hum of pavement and the drone of his team talking quietly around him.

The nights spent curled up in the jumble of their bodies.

Yes, it was worth it. It was my last chance to be with them as myself.

//You will still be you, John. I am not a villain, I am not a Goa'uld. We will share many things, but I will not take freely of your body//

But you'll still be here. And if this works, they'll age and they'll die, and I'll still look the same when I go to their funerals. Nothing will be the same again.

// I do understand, John, more than you know//

John's last day with his team flooded back, played across his mind as he sank away into unconsciousness. Ronon had carried him through the prairie grass because his legs were uncoordinated and prone to giving underneath him and a wheelchair wasn't designed for walking through fields; Teyla carried the picnic basket. They'd eaten lunch on the banks of a nameless river and played chess, because as Rodney had said, with forced irritability, once John was snaked, he'd be harder to beat. They'd reminisced over old missions, lost friends and good times.

The heat had worked in tandem with John's fever so that when the storm started just as they neared the rented cabin on the edges of a clover field, he'd asked to stay. To feel the raging storm in his bones, and the cold, cool touch of spring rain against his burning skin.

"Will you return to Atlantis?" Teyla asked.

"If I have anything to say about it," John retorted.

The End (well not really, now there's a whole bunch of AU adventures to write!)

added a POV piece of Aenath, chapter 2 of this story