A/N: I own nothing but my own creations.
As I'm typing, 'Whispers' (5X07) is playing in a separate window - and previously 'The Shrine' (5X06). This chapter was originally meant to be five scenes long but, by some miracle, I cut it down to three. There's still a load of things in the first scene that I don't really want to keep but I'm not sure I should get rid of. I'm also not sure if this chapter will be written in a day or two days, and I'm not sure about the other two either. But we'll see what happens.
Enjoy!
They'd taken up residence across the hall from her, sat on the floor, with their knees half drawn up to their chests and their lights shining in Natalia's direction. John's hand rested close to her leg and her head was more or less laid on his shoulder. Her soft breathing tickled him, ruffling his sleeve.
"Are you sure there's nothing we can do?" John asked, angling his head so he could see her looking up at him.
Her knee brushed against his as she shook head. "No. Apart from talking to her and I'm not sure what to say."
He opened his mouth but whatever sentence he'd had in mind died on his tongue when their charge mumbled, "I know something you don't know... If you're nice, I'll tell you." Silence. "Well, what are you waiting for? Aren't you always sending people in to get something out of me?"
John shifted to stand up, until he found himself held back by Elizabeth's hand. "You wait here, I'll go talk to her. I think it'd be for the best."
His hand rose to cover hers and, despite clinging to her fingers up until the last moment, he nodded.
She crossed the hall and used the wall to lower herself into a sitting position again. Beside her, Natalia had finished tending to her 'patient' and there was just enough distance between her and the wall for a body to have fitted in the space. Except there was none. Even when she glanced down, with all the body language of someone checking on an injured colleague, there was nothing there.
"Come closer. We're going to have to whisper, don't want to disturb him. He needs to rest."
Elizabeth shuffled a little closer - how far could she go before she interfered with the other woman's hallucination? "Is this close enough?"
"Yes, I suppose so... Now I'll tell you. There's a man here," Natalia whispered, as though she was telling a dirty secret.
The diplomat nodded and her gaze fell on John for a few seconds. "I know. There are lots of men here on Atlantis... What're you trying to tell me?"
But she only shook her head, so much that she was still doing it when she turned to check on the 'person' next to her, then leaned in closer. "No, no, you don't understand. Do you? He's more important than the others. Do you know why? Because he likes me. But he shouldn't be here. He's an idiot."
"Maybe you could tell us what he looks like, then we could get him to leave?"
The head shaking stepped up a notch, from vacant to frantic. "No, no, he can't leave. It's not safe, he might get in trouble because he did things we didn't agree on."
"That's the problem with a lot of relationships, I'm sorry." Elizabeth tried for sympathetic eyes.
"You don't understand!" Natalia launched onto her knees, face inches from Elizabeth's and fists half-clenched. A click came from the other side of the corridor as John aimed his gun at the hysterical creature in front of him. "He did bad things. Terrible things. Things I didn't tell him to do. He wasn't supposed to go that far. But he always did like keeping all those secrets under his hood, didn't he? God knows how he convinced a little boy to do something for him."
"I-" Elizabeth began, only to be cut off as Natalia swung away from her and curled up in a slightly more vertical rendition of the foetal positional. Weak sobs rattled through her.
By then, the brunette had returned to John's side and her hand was on his cheek. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm good. Just moved too fast is all..."
Her hand didn't move from his cheek. They stood still, concern and some other emotion were taking turns on their features.
And that was when they heard it. Rodney, yelling, "Look, just try and get out of there! We tried pulling it apart and it just gets worse!"
"I can't... It hurts..." A sharp intake of breath. "I think I-" The scream peeled from Carson's throat, overriding any other noise.
"Carson!" That was Jennifer. "Don't just stand there, we need to stop it or it'll..."
They could just hear Rodney's scowl. "I know!"
It didn't take much more than a glance for the pair of them to get to their feet and John to grab Natalia by the arm and pull her along behind them, even as she sobbed and shook her head. When they turned the corner, their audio-only knowledge of the situation hadn't done a very good job of preparing them for it.
Carson was wedged in the doorway of one of the doors as it squeezed him tighter and tighter and tighter by the second. It wasn't comedy. Not by an stretch of the imagination. Not by the ragged breaths or the line of raw skin beginning to form on his throat.
"Look, it's only going to get tighter so maybe-" His sentence ended abruptly when the doors receded and found himself face-up on the ground, with his legs stretched over the doorway from the knee downwards. "Oh."
Then there was a creak.
A click.
And the doors rushed in to meet each other.
Jennifer screamed. Rodney's eyes grew wide. It took them all a few seconds to look down and see that Carson wasn't covered in blood and missing a good portion of his legs.
The only casualty was the panel beside the door; Ronon had shot at it in the last few seconds. Smoke drifted off of it and into the nearest light.
Which just so happened to be everywhere. Light returned to Atlantis and to them, switching back on in the blink of an eye so that it had them blinking spots from their eyes.
"Oh no..." Rodney was staring down at his tablet when the rest of them recovered enough to hear it.
"What is it?" Teyla spared a glance his way, before turning back to Carson to help him up.
"The translation program. They're sending us a message." He turned the tablet around for them all to see. "Give it back. Give. It. Back."
Their next staff meeting - if you could call it that, with Rodney and Carson asleep (not together) and half of them being some other form of busy - took place around one half-eaten plate of breakfast food in the mess hall.
John slid his watch into the middle of the table. "0820. That's when it happened. I borrowed McKay's marker pen, if you're wondering why there's a huge blue line on the glass."
"Wouldn't black make more sense?" Ronon's brow creased, as he stared at the difference between the hand and the streak of marker pen.
"Not to McKay. He has a thing for blue eyes. I think it goes with the blonde hair thing, but..." He tapered off, wincing, when Elizabeth slapped his arm. "What? I'm only saying what everyone else is thinking."
She rolled her eyes. "Exactly, thinking. As in not saying it. Just because Sam isn't here doesn't mean we should be talking about Rodney's god-knows-how-many-years-long crush on her. He's with Jennifer now. Besides, we have bigger problems."
"She's right," Teyla agreed. "We can't have another night like that. We might be able to survive one or two but, aside from this not being good for morale, the infirmary is already struggling."
"What're we going to do about it, then? I mean, we've tried blocking them out and handing Elizabeth over isn't an option." John looked at each of them in turn, trying to put his wrist watch on blind.
Elizabeth sighed. "I doubt they'd stop even then, John. They don't just want me back. They want to study all of us and I get the feeling that I'm one of very few abandoned projects, if not the only one. And, even now, they're back. They might've left that lab but they haven't forgotten about me."
"What about hitting them back? I mean, attack is the best form of defense right?" Ronon rested his chin on one fist.
"That's actually part of my idea. The thing is, we don't have any targets. But, before all this happened, we managed to get a half-decent list of planets with similar power sources to ZPMs. One of them, a sort of hotspot for a certain type of...core, was visited briefly a couple of years ago. But nobody could get inside the building and they couldn't read the writing on the walls, so it was considered a waste of time." Then she placed a tablet on the table, with an image of said writing. "It's the same as what I've been translating. It's one of their outposts, I'm sure of it."
The smallest of grins found its way onto Ronon's face. Then it faltered "Yeah, but what's that going to do?"
Teyla sat further forward in her seat, speaking to the two men at the table. "We believe these outposts may be used to...extend their power. They transmit from one to another to another until their signals reach us. The mission report spoke of readings from the tower in the middle of the structure. If we remove the power source and land somewhere in that system, we should have peace for some time."
"Isn't this...dangerous?" John probed, arms crossed.
"It is, which is why no one's going to be ordered to go." Elizabeth paused to look at him, then continued, "The only way we can make up for that is to design some handheld translators from the program we have at the minute and get Rodney or Zelenka to design something that'll detect whether or not we're being 'influenced'. And we'd have to take the Wraith stunners instead of P-90s, just in case we have to shoot each other."
Her second-in-command was shaking his head by that point. "I don't like it."
Elizabeth rested a kinder hand on his arm. "Neither do I, but it's our best bet."
The Night didn't like it either, when John ended up tripping over a corpse that night and fell straight in front of their next message. This one was written in English and, more importantly, in that dark liquid that just kept appearing.
The message?
'The mind of a thief is the most curious to study'.
"Alright, I'm done. Rodney, how's it going over there?" Elizabeth slid off her stool, carrying the last of the translators. There were nine in total - one for every member of the team going except from her. With that in hand, she wandered over to him and peeked at the device on his desk. It was small and they'd determined that it would attach to somewhere on their necks.
"Fine. I'm just making Ronon's extra durable. You know what he's like, big guy and everything." Rodney's hands shook a little but Elizabeth didn't mention it. They all seemed a little too used to shaky hands.
Her words were soft as she told him, "Good. Just make sure you don't take too long, it's past midnight and the lights are probably going to go out soon."
"I've got my flashlight right here, I'll be fine." He stopped and held the device between his thumb and forefinger. "I'm saying fine a lot, aren't I?"
"Rodney, I don't really think it makes a difference." No sooner had the words left her mouth that the light began to disappear. She dug around in her pocket, fishing out her light and clicking the on button. Rodney was still trying to find his, the one he'd had 'right here', so she shone it in that direction and he picked it up and turned it on.
A few seconds passed: Elizabeth shone her light about the room (empty apart from themselves), and Rodney pushed Ronon's detector away from him with one last adjustment to make sure the little red light that showed the detector was picking something up stayed in place. From the collection of them in the middle of the table, there was a glow of ten tiny red dots.
Then, wordlessly, she pulled her stool over to where Rodney was and dragged his tablet towards them.
"What're you doing?" He raised an eyebrow.
"Solitaire. This is going to be a long night and I want a reason to ignore that noise out in the corridor."
He couldn't argue with that.
A/N: And that's all for now. As with the last chapter, this one turned out to be a chapter-written-in-a-day deal. And I'm pretty happy with that. I might try to write another whole chapter tomorrow. And then the last one might depend on how I feel. But I assure you it'll be at least a scene a day (weekdays, I don't write on weekends). Anyway... Thanks for reading, see you soon!