CHAPTER 4
--
Three months after Sheppard passed
Ronon was glad that they were finally doing something, even if this was his first off-world mission without Sheppard. They had enough of sitting around, what they needed was something to distract them and getting back out there was the answer. Then they could maybe forget about the huge hole that was left every time they sat down for a meal and any time they walked past Sheppard's room, still left untouched as if it were a shrine.
Except Ronon knew it wouldn't be that easy. He could lose himself with distractions and eventually he would be able to move on but he felt like he shouldn't move on. He knew that McKay was distracting himself to the point of exhaustion but it wasn't working well enough for the scientist. McKay couldn't help but think about possibilities and the probabilities and maybe the thought of stealing a Sheppard from an alternate universe/timeline/past popped up a few times but that was unlikely in any aspect.
Teyla seemed to be doing much better than McKay was but then again Teyla had always seemed emotionally stronger than most of them combined. She was just so sure in her ways and it appeared at times that she knew what was going to happen before anything did.
Ronon stopped his line of thoughts. There was no use thinking about what could have been because nothing would change what had happened. The only thing they could change was the future.
He checked the time and decided to go and pack early. Maybe that way he could have some time to go for a quick run before the mission. Ronon was almost out the door when he remembered that he had left one of his best knifes on his desk. He turned around and quickly slid over to his desk. He opened the top drawer but stopped suddenly as he recognized a yellow football-like shape that he never had in his room before.
He picked it up carefully and studied it, he was fairly sure that it was a lemon because McKay complained about citrus enough and then Sheppard had once shown him a lemon that he had carried around when he wanted to avoid McKay.
Turning the lemon in his hands he felt something scratched into the skin. He went over the markings and then flipped on his desk light. Holding it under the lamp he could see the initials JS.
--
Teyla sat quietly on John's bed. She took a deep breath and gave into the peace that filled the room. Perhaps it was just her imagination but she liked to believe that he was still watching out for them. She wasn't the only one to visit the room, she realized mostly because things moved around once in a while and a photograph which was leaning against the wall then stood in the middle of the desk, the guitar which had been on the bed moved to its stand, and the skateboard which was hidden under the bed had come out mysteriously.
It brought her comfort to know that in this room it was a safe zone. She could sit and think and remember that John was all right because everywhere she turned people were clearly under the impression that the man was gone forever. She wanted to point out the fact that they had no real body to prove that but cold hard facts were hard to disprove and with the evidence given to her, she would have conclude that he was dead but her heart just wouldn't agree with her head. It was distressing because she had always followed her heart and this time should be no different. But she saw John go into that room and she knew he didn't come out. Only there was the nagging feeling that he was still here.
Only a week ago, they were on a planet where the natives didn't take kindly to them and had surrounded them, managing to push them into a cave. Somehow they kept them there long enough to trigger an avalanche which blocked off the main entrance. They were stuck for hours, without contact because the caves just bounced the radio signals around and they got no where with communications. Then she felt it, the warm comfort that slipped slowly into her heart and warmed her soul, it made her follow it through the tunnels which wound and confused even the best trackers. The others followed her in confusion and semi-annoyance but they arrived at a small opening that they were able to crawl out of.
She couldn't believe that it was luck and she couldn't ignore that it had happened, not that she wanted to but Rodney kept telling her that it was and she kept telling him off. She knew he was gone, it was painfully obvious. Except that didn't mean that he'd never be back.
--
Rodney was going crazy. That was the only reasonable explanation for this.
He punched in a few more keys onto his laptop, the only piece of tech that worked, and still nothing changed. The screen flashed the same coordinates that it had been since two that afternoon.
Rodney sighed, he supposed that it wouldn't hurt to check out it out. It wasn't as if he had anything better to do and Ronon had started to get extremely bored and decided that in exactly three minutes he would start tossing his useless equipment out the damn window, which was at least three stories off the ground of the village oval because he could clearly see that it wasn't a circle.
At the thought he could almost feel someone snort at him and the laptop suddenly shut off by itself.
"About time." the voice was distorted and swirled in from every direction but that had to be in his head, he didn't hear anyone say it and no one else seemed to have noticed anything off.
Ten hours later Ronon, Teyla, some guy with red hair that Rodney couldn't exactly remember, and he walked through the gate to Atlantis with not one but two almost 70 percent charged ZPMs.
By the end of the night, when he was exhausted from excitement, he wasn't sure what to think. It had sounded like John, exactly like John; even though the voice was indistinct he knew it was. He kept running it through his mind but lying in bed, staring at the ceiling got him nowhere and he drifted off hearing an oddly comforting voice call him an idiot.