Empty Vessels – part ten of eleven

by Eildon Rhymer

He drifted back to awareness slowly. "Rodney?" he heard. "Doctor McKay?"

"Go away," he mumbled, without opening his eyes. "I'm thinking."

He breathed in and out again. On the third breath, he realised the full significance of what had just happened. He knew his name. He knew his name! He opened his eyes, sitting bolt upright in bed. "I'm Rodney McKay. Doctor McKay, with a capital K and two PhDs." It had seemed so natural to know his name that he had not stopped to realise how marvellous it really was. It was the sort of thing you normally took for granted, but once you knew what it was like to forget it, you would never…

A man in black, falling to the ground, asking them to leave him.

"What happened?" he asked. "How did we get back here?" The true question died on his lips. His thoughts skirted around it, lost in worry.

"You were hours overdue," Doctor Keller told him. "Colonel Carter sent a team to search for you, and found you in a jumper right next to the Gate. You were all fast asleep, but I can't see any evidence of drugs or foreign substances. You're the first one to wake up. Were you experiencing any --?"

"Yes, of course we were," he snapped, throwing off the covers. "We all lost our memories, and we almost had our brains eaten by a killer rock."

She blinked a few times. "If we were at home, I'd be suspecting you of delusional --"

"Yes, yes. Pegasus Galaxy. Get used to it." He stood up, and pushed past her, her hands moving ineffectually to stop him. She was so stupid. How could she babble like this, when she still hadn't told him the most important thing? "How's Sheppard?" He saw her face change; saw it go from confused little girl in a galaxy far far away, to the face of a doctor delivering news. "Oh God. Oh no. He's dead." He grabbed at the bed, feeling suddenly weak. It must have been hours, or even longer, and all he'd eaten was one small… He snapped that thought off. "Or he's as good as dead. I knew it. He --"

"No. No. He's still with us." She took his arm, stilling it, and he realised that he had been flailing it around. "He's… not well, but I have every hope that --"

"Every hope. Yes, yes." He had heard it before - the weasel words of a doctor who was stumbling in the dark, guessing at predictions and trying to disguise them as science. It was better not to remember anything. At least when you remembered nothing, you could live in your stupid little world of ignorance, and hope that everything would turn out for the best. When you had memories, you knew that they never did. Only fools and people with amnesia could afford to be optimistic in this world.

He remembered those hours in the dark tunnels, watching the rapid deterioration of the man he had called Jet, naming him with less thought than he would give to the naming of an animal. He had worried about him then, of course, but it had meant nothing - just a chance stranger who might have been an enemy all along. If only he'd known that it was Sheppard. Could he have said something differently? Could he have done something differently?

Could Sheppard have done anything differently? The man was as indestructible as Ronon – he had to be, what with that death wish of his – and, really, Sheppard's fondness for blowing himself up with nuclear bombs was something Rodney could quite happily commit to the domain of unremembered things, alongside his catastrophic attempt to make Sarah Morgan his girlfriend when he was nine, and that time when he had been standing up in front of class, reading a masterfully-written piece of work, and everyone had started laughing because he had forgotten to…

He stopped; cleared his throat; pressed his hands to his face. Sheppard hadn't known that he was Sheppard. Perhaps he had forgotten that he was supposed to survive. Perhaps…

He stopped that thought, too, but no matter how hard he tried, it was impossible to forget things just because he wanted to. "I need to see him," he said.

Ronon came up behind McKay, his steps so quiet as to be almost silent. "I shot him."

"Yes," McKay said harshly, not turning round.

Ronon had shot so many people in his time. He had killed Wraith, and those who served Wraith. He had killed anyone who had played their part in the destruction of his home and his people. He had even killed people who had once been his friends, and although he regretted being forced to do so, he did not regret doing so. For years, he had lived his life down the barrel of a gun.

"I didn't know who he was," he said faintly.

Of course you didn't." McKay said it as if that somehow made it worse.

Sheppard was still unconscious, tubes bringing him oxygen and liquid. The doctors said there was although there was serious damage to his side, no internal organs were damaged. But they also said that he had a high and rising fever, due to dirt in an open wound, and from too much exertion afterwards. Their voices were hopeful, but their eyes told a different story. In this life of too much memory, an unguarded expression, once glimpsed, could not be forgotten.

"It's my fault," he said. He had so seldom thought 'fault' when it came to killing. He took no joy in it, but it was something that had to be done. One by one by one, he would wipe the Wraith from the worlds, and all those who followed or served them, and all those who betrayed their kind to the Wraith. Living the way he had, he had had to learn to respond to the slightest movement. Any hesitation before shooting could leave him dead. He could not have survived all those years without becoming that way. If he had not become that way, he would not be here now.

But perhaps those years on the run had broken something inside him that should not have been broken. Perhaps it had turned him into something that could do nothing but kill.

"Of course it's your fault," McKay said coldly, still not turning round.

"No." He had not heard Teyla approach. She slipped in beside him, close enough to touch, although she did not. "Colonel Sheppard himself said that there were no hard feelings. If he could say that when he thought you were a stranger, perhaps even an enemy, he will say that all the more now he knows that you are a friend."

He remembered a flash of red, and a man falling. No, not just a man falling, but Sheppard. That memory did not have the overwhelming force that it had had in the darkness, but it had a different force, perhaps a more overpowering one. It was less intense, but it was more real. If Sheppard died…

"Colonel Sheppard shot you once," Teyla said, and this time she did touch him, gentle on the arm. "He shot you, too, Rodney. He was not in his right mind. You blamed the Wraith device then, not him."

McKay snorted bitterly. "So that makes it okay, does it? Two wrongs make a right? This Neanderthal shot Sheppard and now he's lying here -- "

"He is called Ronon," Teyla said. "He has a name. We know each other now. We remember. We spent all that time not knowing who we were, and not knowing each other. Now that we know that, we have to --"

"But it didn't stop you from trying to leave us," McKay interrupted. He still hadn't turned around. He was unusually still, too, hands clenched at his side. "You abandoned us. You didn't even care. Now, if you'll excuse me…" He stood up, chair scraping on the floor, and pushed past them.

Ronon barely glanced at him as he left. His eyes were on Sheppard, so still, because of him.

"I did try to leave to you," Teyla confessed at Sheppard's bedside in the middle of the night. "I could feel the darkness in my mind, desperate to get in. I could see in you what would happen to me if I let it. I just wanted to get out."

Sheppard was still sleeping; when she touched his hand, it was shockingly hot.

"I thought you were dead," she confessed, "and I felt nothing." This was worse, she thought, than when the Wraith Queen had been in her mind. She had blamed herself for being weak enough to let the Queen in, but after that, everything her body had done had been the Queen's doing. This time, everything she had done down in the tunnels had been out of choice. She had deliberately made herself heartless to protect herself from the darkness. No external being had been behind that choice, just herself alone.

Oh, she could lie to herself. She could say that the creature in the darkness had stolen away her true personality bit by bit by bit, and in part that was true, but at the heart of it, she had been herself. That was something she had done, so contrary to what she liked to think of as her true nature. She had become the leader of her people not just because of her father, but because she truly cared for them, and had been prepared to put their needs ahead of her own. In the tunnels, under pressure, all of that had slipped away. Rodney had pushed aside his own fears and taken the lead, Ronon had hated the thought of hurting people, and John had been more open, even as he had carried on until he was unable to stand. But as for Teyla…

"I am so sorry, John," she said, although he could not hear her. It had been so easy to tell Ronon that none of this was his fault; it was so hard to believe it of herself. The person who had acted that way in the tunnels was part of her. When everything was stripped away, perhaps a person showed their true nature, and her true nature was something hard and cold and unpleasant.

Sheppard grew worse. When Rodney visited him, he felt as if he was seeing both the stranger he had encountered in the tunnels, and the man who had grown to become his… well, not his friend, not as such… No, what was he talking about? His friend; Jet wouldn't have been scared of saying as much. A friend who could well be dying, whose last conscious memory was of being with people he thought were strangers.

You saw someone differently, he thought, when you interacted with them as a stranger, without all the weight and preconceptions of years of memory. Almost from the start, he had wanted to protect the stranger he had called Jet. That was not an emotion that came easily to his mind when he thought of Sheppard. Sheppard had always been the strong one, the one who would stop all the nasties of the Pegasus Galaxy from eating Rodney up while he did the work that only he could do with his brain.

Who was he really? Who were any of them?

When he was not at Sheppard's side, he drifted, going from infirmary to room to lab, and back again on and endless round. In his lab, he caught people exchanging looks when he shouted at them. Some of them argued with him, questioning his judgement.

"They looked up at me, back in the tunnels," he said, but only when he was alone. "I was the leader." They had all looked to him to make decisions. Sheppard had decided that he lacked tactical skill, and had told Rodney that he was the boss. Ronon had been wallowing in a fit of guilt and pacifism – as well he ought, because he had shot Sheppard, for crying out loud! Teyla had been fierce and restless, but even she had looked up to Rodney.

Not that any of them should have. "I thought I was a hero," he said to his own mirror. "I told them I was, that's why they let me be the leader – because I told them I could do it." He had looked at the military accessories and thought he was some big hero, and he had tried to play the part. He had tried to play the leader, but it had all fallen apart. "I tried to talk to savages who just wanted to tear us apart. I stopped checking the LSD and we got caught. We would have ended up like those savages if Sheppard hadn't managed to drag himself down there - half dead, and he still ends up taking the hero's role; I don't know how he does it - and started to shoot that thing. Take away all the knowledge in my brain - and, really, I do have a lot; quite a staggering amount, actually - and there's nothing left."

It was all Ronon's fault – of course it was Ronon's fault, because he'd shot Sheppard. No, it was Teyla's fault for becoming impatient. It was Sheppard's, for forgetting that he was supposed to take the lead and that he was supposed to be indestructible.

No, it was Rodney's fault. Of course it was Rodney's fault. He had taken the leader's part, but even when he had no memory of all the awful things that could happen in the Pegasus Galaxy, he had dithered with terror. Even as a blank slate, he couldn't be a leader, and his team had nearly had their brains eaten, and Sheppard was going to die.

Ronon stood with his gun in hand, eyeing the target at the shooting range.

He had shot Sheppard. This hand, this gun, had shot the man who had given him a second chance at life and hope and fellowship. The doctors looked grim all the time now. Their voices and their eyes told the same tale, now: Sheppard was in real danger of dying.

It wasn't your fault, Teyla had told him, and he understood that much, really he did. He didn't blame Sheppard for the time Sheppard had shot him, and Sheppard hadn't blamed him in the tunnels. It was more than that, though. He tightened his grip on his gun, but still refrained from raising it.

He had lived for years down the barrel of a gun. For seven years, he had been a Runner, and fighting had been as much part of his life as breathing. Before that, he had been a soldier, fighting for the preservation of everything he held dear.

Before that, though… Before that, he had liked music and painting. He had liked to listen to stories, and his mind had flown on wings of song. Then he had grown tall, taller than all his friends, and his teachers had found that he had quick reflexes and an aptitude for fighting. They had begun to make him what he was, and the Wraith had fashioned the rest.

In the tunnels, he had wanted to talk rather than fight. He had argued for a peaceful response, while McKay had resorted to violence. Without his memory, Ronon had been a shameful shadow of himself, scared to fight.

Without his memory, perhaps Ronon had been the person he could have been, had the Wraith not forced him to become what he was. Perhaps he had been the person he should have been. His first kill had been a Wraith who had been about to feed on one of his own, and the memory of that Wraith and of many others had shaped what he had become. If his first kill had been a friend, perhaps his life would have gone in a direction he was incapable of recognising.

And now his memory had returned, where did that leave him?

Teyla sat by John's bedside and watched the machines keep him alive. She touched his limp hand, and her heart twisted painfully inside her, both at the knowledge of how close he was to dying, and at the knowledge that only days before, she had not cared.

Loyalty to her people had always been central to everything for her. As leader of the Athosians, she had put their well-being before her own, and she had left the warmth of their fellowship to live with the cold strangeness that had been the Atlantis expedition in those early days, before she had known them. Her team-mates, too, had become people she would die for. Her hatred of the Wraith and her determination to learn to fight well had all come from a desire to keep her people safe.

And in the end, when stripped of everything else, she had abandoned them.

Did part of her, deep down, resent the sacrifices she had made for others? Did part of her secretly yearn for a life of selfish heartlessness? Everything that she thought she was cried out that this was not true, but the evidence was there. She had no idea how to go forward in this world that came after the tunnels. She needed to see her people, but was scared to face them. She needed John to wake up.

They visited him alone, the three of them, perhaps deliberately and perhaps subconsciously avoiding each other. As she sat at John's bedside, she was the only one there. There was no-one to talk to about any of this.

She remembered those last minutes in the jumper, when none of them had known who they were, and they had been afraid that they would prove to be enemies. She had felt more close to them then, as strangers, than she felt now, with memory returned.

end of part ten