I wanted to write something quick for Search and Rescue, and this is not at all what I had in mind.
There is the fire, the dry taste of dust in his mouth, the sharp and searing hole in his side and the pain, ebbing and pulsing and reaching every inch of his body. There is the heat, sweltering, first of the flames and then of the dry Afghani sun and of the last real talk he had with his father in the summer before college. Something moves beside him (behind, to the right, has to remember these things), rubble shifting in its wake, and he can only wonder how long it will be until he is crushed before the nuance slips away again.
He is thousands of years in the future, staring out the windows at the vast red desert before him and wondering where it has all gone. A voice crackles in his ear, but it is not McKay, persisting in his repartee after all these years; it is vague, indistinguishable, though its message is clear, and he does not know what to make of it until he is sitting on the pier with Rodney and drinking the last of his case. You should have told us, he says, sincere and a little bit hurt. John has nothing to say, so he says nothing at all, picking at the label of his beer bottle and asking Rodney if he knows the history of Guinness Stout.
I don't know, Ronon replies, dark eyes flitting over the deep stain in John's side as his hands work at the rubble. Look, if I could just get this beam up–
It's their only chance. Either he tries to take the helm and crashes them horribly into the atmosphere, they drift endlessly through the empty vacuum of space, or they get very lucky and the Daedalus picks up their signatures and beams them up. The latter seems the least likely, but both other paths end in death (slow death or quick death, McKay likes to add) and even with a gun wound in his shoulder, he is still ever the optimist. They just need to wait for rescue, and hopefully he hasn't bled out by then.
Stalling's gonna be pissed, Holloway tells him, shoving a canteen in his face with a smile he knows well. Our best pilot went and crashed his goddamn plane in the sand, and John just smiles right back, because what else can he do? He's got broken bones and open wounds and he's bleeding out into the sand (dirt, really, it had stopped being desert two miles ago) and his head hurts a lot, and he's back beneath the rubble with sharp pressure in his side, Ronon's hands heavy and rough as he pulls a pressure bandage tight around his midriff.
He tries to tell Ronon to leave, to claw his way out and save himself because unless they get some sort of miracle (all his team members were in the blast or are currently kidnapped, so he doubts it, but he has trouble thinking about things in abstract terms like that right now) they are both going to die, but he wouldn't, John knows, wrong way, chief, because he would sooner die down here than live in regret on the surface, because John knows exactly how that feels and would do the same if it were reversed, and he does, he just needs to throw it in reverse, get the darn thing to slow down before it collides with the earth and he's coming in too fast, too steep.
There are candles again, only this time there is a gun in his hand and they are not candles at all. There is a deep roaring, like a river after heavy rainfall only it is heavier, thicker and closer and it is inside his head, consuming. He is vaguely aware of Rodney, hands calloused in strange places and pressed firmly on his shoulders, in the small of his back, cool against his forehead, whispers of you were there for too long and a hushed thank God, thank God. The city has taken almost as much as it has given, and he had nearly been swept up in it, pulled under the surface by the very device that acts as its core.
He is there again, back before he started, soaring over the wide blue ocean (too blue, a distinctly different colour to Earth's) in a chair the same but different, and then he is not soaring but falling, hurtling into turbulent waters and shaking the world apart. When he comes to he sees the ship beside him, sees the trees that are not of his planet at all, and he wonders if his dream of wide open blue is what caused them to crash in the first place, just as his knowledge of the future is what caused the building to come crashing down around them.
It is still unsettled, groaning and scrabbling above him, but as Ronon gives him a nudge he realises that it is not the ruins, but those above them, clawing their way down to him. He raises his gun to the sky (he does not remember picking it up, but thinks of firm hands around his and the cool grip of the weapon between them), waiting for dusty light to filter through, and then there is only clean air and the cold metal floor of the infirmary.