In a different world, Rodney has lost Sheppard to the Wraith, the Daedalus seconds too late. They've all lost Major John Sheppard, but he feels it to the depth of him, like a black hole in the pit of his stomach. He feels the stress as every part of him stretches, pulsing, snapping apart like taut elastic, gobbled up by the vast nothing inside him.
He aches in every part that isn't numb, his fingers trembling visibly. He knows, logically, that they all feel this to some degree. Elizabeth's face is all lines and stone, and Teyla's dark eyes are stubbornly lowered. Ford has vanished during the fight.
In a different world, Rodney stares at the chair that could've saved them, if he'd only gotten it to work. And he fixes it, mechanically, emptily, so his hands will be busy. Radek comes, and tries to fight, tries to wake his stubborn will. Rodney works in silence.
He sits in the chair and shuts his eyes and thinks of flying. In a different room, a shuttle trembles and rising an inch- a foot- before giving a great shiver and dropping back to the ground. Rodney can only see that shuttle's predecessor crashing into a hive.
Atlantis darkens around him, and its family looks about in fear- no one thinks to check the control chair while they are scrambling for flashlights- when they do, looking for Doctor McKay, their savior, the doors stubbornly refuse to open.
For a long moment Rodney listens to the sound outside the door. Then he can see them, the people just beyond the great metal wall, and he can see everything. The ancestral home he is in shows him everything, and he feels nothing. Information flows through his open mind. He sees every corridor, hears every voice in this great, grieving family. He feels every fluctuation in the ground-shield that is keeping them afloat, feels the wash of waves against the gigantic armed structures. He knows the ring-shaped weapons platform, sunken just far enough below the surface that no one has seen it. He feels a great pressure against his mind, the heavy song of an ancient creature.
Atlantis has been sleeping for so many years, coming alight under the footsteps and the shining thoughts of one Major Sheppard. She has lost him, just as Rodney has lost him- the only thing bringing her to life.
The people outside are shouting his name, and as he returns to himself out of instinct the city leaves him. The great hole inside him opens again and he lurches forward, gagging on air.
He cannot live like this.
In a different world, Doctor Rodney McKay leans back, screws his eyes shut and begs Atlantis to let him sink into her, see everything, know all, fix her from the inside, with her help, with her knowledge, with her great song, and never feel again.
In a different world the door to the control room opens quite suddenly; Elizabeth Weir stumbles in, Radek Zelenka and Carson Beckett on either side of her, and they find Rodney McKay prone in a chair- sleeping. They do not have time for tests, but only know they cannot wake him.
Hours later, when the new wave of Wraiths come, a gigantic ring forms a halo above Atlantis and tears the sky apart. And then again, and again, but they keep coming and coming, and soon there is little power left, even within the ZPM hidden deep inside Atlantis where the scientists had never searched.
The city gives a great heaving sigh and sends everyone home before sinking deep into the waters, letting the pressure of the deep sea crush it until there is nothing left to fight for.
In a different world, Carson declares the body they brought back on a stretcher to be in a vegetative coma- mindless, a shell and nothing else. Doctor Rodney McKay is somewhere stretched among a thousand redundancies, sleeping away the millennia. Maybe in ten thousand years, he will devote all his life to cradling a young, young creature from the third evolution, cocky and maybe-unsure, with the voice of a stranger and the code of a god inside him. Or maybe the last ruins of a great city will never be found, a cracked kingdom hidden in dark waters.
In a different world, Atlantis waits again, but not alone.