"Ok," Evan tried to say. It was a simple enough word, yet it caught in the back of his throat and stuck there. He tripped and tumbled over it ungracefully until, clearing his throat, he tried again. "Ok, I've heard enough. You can shut it down now."

There was an energy that filled the room every time the Stargate was engaged. It was a rumbling, pulsating thing you never realized was there until it wasn't. As Radek Zelenka cut the power to the activated gate Evan Lorne felt its absence keenly. It left behind an empty space inside of him and he apparently wasn't the only one who felt it. There were a dozen or so other people up on the platform with him and every single one of them had gone quiet. In the stillness that followed, even Atlantis seemed to be pausing to take in what had just been said.

Evan Lorne wasn't used to this much failure, or on such an epic scale. He'd had his moments over the years for sure, but he'd dedicated his life to trying to be the best soldier possible, and hits like these... Well, they were devastating. They went against every internal oath he'd ever made to himself, especially the ones he'd just made to John, and it sickened him. He'd failed the man before, and now he'd gone and done it all over again. For a moment, Evan Lorne regretted his decision to ever come back to the SGC.

The feeling was fleeting, but it was there. Without Sheppard, it would just be more of the same, a desperate scramble to find someone else who could fly the city, and years and years of waiting in limbo when they couldn't. That was the life he'd just given to the scientists and techs in the room with him and the weight of that realization was piling up on top of his already laden shoulders.

The terminal he was standing by had gone dark, but like the rest of the people up on the platform with him, shock still rooted him in place. He'd been expecting the transmission, had been waiting around all day for it in fact, but nothing could have prepared him for what he'd just heard.

A galaxy full of allies, and no one was coming to help.

The bits and pieces of him that made up the soldier half of his brain understood the reasoning behind it. Whether or not Earth was able to send a science expedition back to Pegasus was hardly a life or death situation in the eyes of their Milky Way allies and John Sheppard was just one man in a galaxy of trillions. New threats emerged then receded every day. Earth and her allies were always stretched thin, but that human part of Evan Lorne - that part that raged for what was happening to his friend - just couldn't comprehend why they all wouldn't all just drop what they were doing and come and help.

It's what he would have done. Protecting Sheppard, it was just something you did. It was this deep-seated loyalty born from the mistakes of the past. But it went even further than that. John Sheppard was the kind of man, the kind of friend, that you held on to. He was the soldier who would cross enemy lines to bring you back home to safety. The brother who threw himself over your back to protect you from the worst of the blast. He was the kind of CO you'd follow anywhere... and now he was going to die.

Lorne felt his hands yearning to contract into angry fists but a touch on his forearm stopped the tension before it could go any further. Dr. Zelenka, eyes soft and just beginning to yellow with age, gripped his arm with surprising strength. Lorne found himself looking back and forth between the hand on his arm and those eyes.

Radek was telling him it wasn't his fault. For a moment, he wanted to believe it. He wanted to convince himself that losing track of Sheppard that day right after the crash was not the cause of all this. He wanted to believe that those few seconds of delay before this team arrived at the cottage had not just cost that man his life. Lorne wanted to believe all of it, but in the end, he just couldn't do it.

His anger dissipated just as suddenly as it had surged, but the sadness did not go with it. He forced himself to smile weakly at Zelenka and the aging scientist patted his arm before turning to address the platform.

"That's it for tonight, I think. Why don't you all go back to your quarters."

If people spoke as they packed up and moved off, Lorne didn't hear them. He stood facing the powered down monitor just lost in his thoughts. Part of him wanted to turn around and ask the departing scientists to please keep the news of what they'd just heard to themselves, but he knew it would be useless. The news would spread regardless. Come sunrise, the entire city would know that their last-ditch effort at finding someone to save Sheppard's life had failed. It would happen even if he threatened every man and woman in the Gateroom with him with a court-martial. So he ignored them all and let them go until it was just him and Radek left.

"I know what it is you are thinking," the scientist said.

Lorne nearly langued. "I doubt it."

He wasn't normally short with Zelenka. The man had long ago earned his respect and friendship, but the shock of the Tok'ra's refusal to help and knowing it had been his last line of defense, had Evan feeling raw and exposed. It was a feeling he'd never done well with, those around him bearing the brunt of that inability to cope. It had destroyed countless relationships, but it was a part of him and one he felt like embracing at the moment.

"You heard the message," Radek continued, unfazed by the curtness of his reply. "No one is close enough to get here in time. You can hardly take the blame for that, Colonel."

But he could, and he would. Lorne was the one Landry had tasked with finding an off-world ally who could possibly help Sheppard. It was his own empty promises that had kept Rodney away and in the infirmary close to John. Lorne had been given this one mission to complete, and he'd failed at it so spectacularly again that it would cost one man his life. And that realization was threatening to tear him apart.

He'd even gone so far as to try and tap Dr. Jackson, but even he had disappeared on some off-world, clandestine mission for the SGC with his partner, Vala, and couldn't be reached. It was as if fate was thwarting his every attempt at saving his friend, and it didn't stop with the Tok'ra's latest transmission. Things had been going wrong from the start. Sabotage, murder, cyanide poisoning. Hell, even the Daedalus being sent out to scout Pegasus ahead of the expedition had backfired.

Oh what Lorne would have given to have that ship around when Sean Fitzpatrick had taken everyone hostage. If it all had happened just a week sooner, then that psychopath would be in custody, Richard Woolsey's brains wouldn't be splattered all over a dilapidated cabin at the edge of the base and John Sheppard wouldn't be fighting for his life down in the Atlantis infirmary.

"Colonel," Zelenka said softly, the hand returning to his arm. "Evan, this is not your fault."

He could argue. Part of him wanted to, but he gave the scientist what he wanted and forced out a terse nod and another strained smile. Zelenka looked anything but convinced, yet let go of his arm to reach for his cane propped up against one edge of the console. He stood up easily and Evan wondered for a moment why he bothered with the cane at all. Zelenka had recovered so well from the loss of the limb that sometimes Lorne forgot that the leg beneath the scientist's trousers was a prosthetic at all. But it was the short, truncated steps he took next that reminded Lorne of what that man had lost. Atlantis was a beautiful city, but she demanded payment from time to time. They'd all give it to her in kind, but some had been forced to give more than others.

Sheppard would pay the ultimate price, but sometimes it was the survivors who suffered the most.

"We all knew what we were signing up for here, Lorne," Zelenka spoke again in his slightly accented English. Evan realized he'd just been caught staring at the doctor's leg.

Zelenka raised his cane and tapped it lightly against the artificial appendage. The sound it made was hollow.

"I was angry about this for a long time," he continued, glancing down forlornly at his leg. "I wallowed and wondered 'why me?', but then I had an epiphany of sorts one day, and I never worried about it again.

"What kind of epiphany?" he asked.

"It occurred to me that there was not a single day on Atlantis I would trade for even the slightest chance at getting this back." He tapped the leg again then looked over at Lorne. "This city is a choice, Colonel Lorne, and one we all make. We knew it would be dangerous, but we did it anyway, because the rewards were always going to outnumber the risks. General Sheppard understood that too, and, somewhere in that messed up head of yours right now, I know you know it as well. The key, my old friend, is to get yourself out from under the things you can't control, and embrace the things you can."

"And what's that?" he asked, unsure of what to make of the impromptu lecture he'd just been given. "What do I possibly have control over now?"

Zelenka smiled. "You are a good man, Colonel Lorne. You have compassion and strength, and there is an infirmary full of people right now barely holding on. Perhaps your efforts would be better spent on them, then wallowing up here alone."

Without further comment, Lorne watched Zelenka disappear down a ramp that had been installed in the Gateroom to help some of Atlantis' less mobile staff members and tried to decide how to feel about it all.

Atlantis was a choice, and one he'd made knowing it would never be a cakewalk. Even in the beginning there had been a very real chance that they would never see Earth again, and he'd gone anyway. But that was also back before he had an entire expedition to worry about. It was back before betrayal and before over a quarter of Earth's population had been decimated. They had been both more complicated times and less complicated times and Lorne couldn't help feeling like he'd just managed to exchange one set of problems for another.

Maybe he just needed a rest. For years it had been "just until after the next Armageddon" and now here he was, pushing 50, and still leading men into battle, feeling no more equipped for the job than he had 20 years ago.

Sighing, Lorne looked down at his hands and tried to decide what to do next. Zelenka had given him one option. He needed to go to the infirmary anyway and give Rodney and Carson news that their last attempt at getting someone in to help John had failed. But when it came right down to it, he just couldn't make his boots go in that direction. What he really wanted to do was lose himself in mindless paperwork for a few hours just to see if it would be enough to make him forget what was really going on, if only for a moment. He even glanced over to Weir's old office where he'd taken up temporary residency, but found he couldn't go that way either.

When he'd taken over that empty space a few months ago, it had been just that, empty space. Now being in there felt like a betrayal of some kind and he couldn't bring himself to go back in there now. So he stood in the silence of the Gateroom for a while, just lost in a teeter-tottering world of limbo.

He could see that night had descended over the bay. Even though every light in Atlantis burned with the awesome power of three fully charged ZPMs, San Francisco slept on, ignorant of the massive ship that was resting in the waters a few miles offshore.

The funny thing was, Atlantis would go on running, too - even if John Sheppard passed - and that thought hit Evan Lorne hard.

Dying was a part of life. As a soldier, he'd seen his fair share of death, but there was something different when it came to someone you cared about. He'd attended funerals before, handed flags to grieving widows, and he'd always felt like he understood the pain they were going through. But he knew now that he never had a clue. His first taste of that true grief had been the day he'd lost his parents and now that same feeling was gaining momentum inside of him again. It was colossal and hard and he remembered now why he'd found it so fitting that some cultures stopped all the clocks in a home shortly after somebody died. The idea that time could go on after such a devastating loss was unfathomable. Everything should come crashing to a complete standstill. The universe should stop and acknowledge that it had lost a very important and vital thing... but it never happened that way, did it? They could try and preserve the illusion, and sometimes it worked - but in the end, that's all it really was. Just an illusion.

Atlantis would go on running. The SGC would continue its search for a new ATA gene candidate. And Evan Lorne would keep on working until the day it killed him, too.

Knowing what he needed to do next, Lorne made his weary way down the main staircase and paused just as he reached the bottom. Something - a twinge near the center of his gut maybe - made him look up. For just a moment he thought he could make out the blurred silhouette of John Sheppard, standing there before an activated Stargate, bathed in the blue hue of an event horizon.

The apparition was dressed from head to toe in battle gear, P90 grasped firmly in its hands and tucked securely against one side. Without sound the vision turned, smiling at Lorne with one of those cocky half-grins and a slight inclination of the head as if offering Lorne the chance to come with him. It was a moment they'd lived through countless times before and one that should have been lived through countless times after, but one he knew they would never live through again.

Lorne wanted to reach out and stop his friend, yell at John not to go, but the vision disintegrated right before his eyes, and Lorne was left standing alone at the base of the Gateroom stairs, wondering if he'd seen it at all. Atlantis had shown him some incredible things over the years. It was possible what he'd just witnessed had been some projection conjured up by the grieving city. Lorne tried to decide what it meant. The things he came up with though... they were too hard to examine, so he pushed them back down and headed out the door, not even allowing himself a glance backward to see if the apparition had reappeared.

Lorne made his way back to the Atlantis infirmary slowly and tried to ignore the grief that clutched at him with no mercy. How was he supposed to tell them he failed? In what world was it ok that John Sheppard was about to die?

The answer was none. But what could anyone do about it now?

TJ McKay - or McLaren, depending on who you asked - had always had this list inside his head of the things he wanted to do before he died. It was a good list, too. One filled with all the normal things a kid his age should want. Skydiving, traveling the world, meeting a girl... The list went on to stranger things, but as he sat in the nearly empty Atlantis infirmary with a forgotten book propped up against his knees, he found he really didn't want to examine the rest of that list. Whenever he did, the resentment he was harboring inside would flare to life, and he was getting pretty tired of trying to beat back the flames.

It was quiet in the Atlantis infirmary right now. Things had only finally just begun to settle down after Colonel Lorne's latest visit... though Atlantis still quivered around him like she was as angry as any of them over what was happening.

Everyone in the room had dealt with Colonel Lorne's news in a different way. Pops, per usual, had gotten pissed and belligerent. Doc Beckett had gone internal and Carrie Sinclair had followed Colonel Lorne's lead and fled just as soon as the message had been delivered. TJ had decided to stay behind. For the past hour or so he'd been attempting to lose himself in the familiar book that now sat heavy and unread in his lap. But it had been in vain, and not even Tolstoy's heavy prose had been enough to spirit him away. He still sat there wallowing away in the pile of ash that was all that was left of that last strange half of his bucket list.

There were no windows in this part of the infirmary but TJ could still sense it was late. The evidence was there in the heaviness that had settled down around him. Judging by the blank numbness of it all, it had to be three, maybe four o'clock in the morning on this, his third day in the city of the Ancients. TJ would never understand why things like this always happened in the early hours of the morning. Why they decided to plow through him with no mercy at the exact moment he'd lost all energy to fight back. It never happened gradually either, or after a good night's sleep. Tragedy was more often cruel than she was kind, blindsiding them out of nowhere as if the universe were correcting itself swiftly and angrily for some transgression they didn't even know they'd made.

And all this that was happening? It was tragic , because for as long as TJ could remember he'd been dreaming of returning to Atlantis and traveling with the expedition back to the place where he was from. Now all of it, every single bit of it, was slipping through his fingers. John Sheppard was going to die, and he was going to take everything TJ had been working towards for the last 18 years of his life with him.

Shifting restlessly in his chair, TJ let the boots he had propped up on the edge of Sheppard's bed fall away. They hit the pale linoleum with a dull thud and his book followed suit a moment later. TJ cast careful eyes over to the sleeping men at his right, but the noise hadn't been enough to wake either of them. It was Pops in particular he was worried about, but his adoptive father slumbered on, lost in some dream TJ had half a mind to wake him from. It was something he had certainly done before. Pops always struggled with the things he'd seen and done over the years with the SGC. TJ had woken him from his fair share of nightmares, but he just couldn't bring himself to wake Pops now, even though it was obvious he was dreaming. He needed the rest. They'd all been awake for the past 72 hours at least and his father would need all the energy he could get. Especially if...

TJ picked his book back up off the floor and set it in his lap, fingering one frayed edge of the ancient cover. He'd lost his spot in the story, but he really didn't care. He'd been trying to disappear in its pages for hours now. Mostly he just ended up reading the same passages over and over again until they blurred and his mind wandered. He flipped the heavy cover open, wincing a little as the binding cracked loudly, then let a fingertip linger over a name inked into one corner of the inside page.

The book was old. A forgotten relic from a bygone age. Publishers didn't even make books like this anymore. People still wrote stories, they were all just distributed digitally now, the dusty old book shops and their crotchety, bespectacled old caretakers a thing of the past. Pops was always going on about how he thought that was a travesty. TJ just figured it was one of those unforeseen casualties of progress, but even he had to admit there was something to be said for the feel of an old book in his hands. Something substantial and real about the smell of old leather and the musty delicateness of a publisher's original typeset.

The ink used on the name in the upper hand corner of this particular book had all but faded. Even so, TJ's fingertips could still make out the indentation left behind by the heavy hand. The name had been scribbled quickly, like the man who had written it had been in a hurry, and memories wicked up into his finger to form pictures in TJ's mind: a messy-haired Airman fresh out of training, penning his name into the front corner of his book so that it would always find its way back to him. The tome sitting on a shelf or the corner of a table always forever waiting for its owner. The day that owner had disappeared and the book was saved by a scientist determined to give it back to him someday. All of it played out in his mind and he ran the pad of his finger over the name and contemplated its meaning.

John Sheppard. The legend himself. The superhero that had been as big a part of his childhood as Superman and Batman and the other heroes of the comic books he so coveted. TJ had spent countless nights as a child falling asleep to the stories Pops would tell him about the adventures of McKay and Sheppard.

The latter half of that superhero duo was now lying in a hospital bed just a few feet away from him. TJ looked up from his book to study him.

John Sheppard looked broken. His face was a highway of cuts and puffy flesh left over from the beating he'd gotten at the hands of that guy in the cottage. Yet despite all the trauma and the fact that he was lying in an infirmary bed, close to death and with little chance of survival, TJ could still see the man he once had been... the man he still could be.

Uncle John, as Pops called him, had always been this Indiana Jones-type figure in TJ's mind - complete with iconic fedora - swooping in on jungle vine to save the day. He could see that possibility in the thin, muscular frame Sheppard still maintained from his youth. He could sense it in the constant stream of visitors to the infirmary door, none of whom came to gawk, but to pay their respects to a man who had touched their lives in some way or another.

It was so unfair. TJ and the other members of the expedition were about to be denied all of this because of some psychopath with a gun. Sean Fitzpatrick had managed to single-handedly wipe out an entire lifetime of dreams and plans with three well-placed slugs to the center of his uncle's chest and now TJ's world was in the process of imploding in around him. The cornerstone had been yanked from his foundation and now he was teetering on the brink of total collapse... one breath of wind in any direction the only thing standing between his destiny and total annihilation.

Everything in TJ's life had been building up to this one epic moment... this one chance to go back home, and he was losing it. He was watching it disintegrate right there before his eyes. And the worst part about it? There was absolutely nothing he could do to stop it. Not even after spending the better part of a year training to be a soldier. But it hadn't been enough, and now the first battle he was going to be faced with was one he couldn't even fight in. It was an internal, solo mission he couldn't have joined, even if he wanted to because there was nothing countless months of intense training could do to help a body heal. There were no orders to be given to organs that simply couldn't function on their own anymore. TJ didn't even have the luxury of going after those responsible. Sean Fitzpatrick was already dead, taken out by Colonel Lorne and his team long before TJ had arrived.

He was being denied everything, and it was enough to set his blood to boiling. TJ had been trying to keep his cool on account of Pops, and so far he'd managed to keep himself under control, but the closer things got to the end, the harder and harder it became to keep the lid on securely.

TJ imagined the real catalyst for all this was the fact he'd made the mistake of visiting his mother's old quarters this morning. He'd gone alone, something he probably shouldn't have done considering Pops told him specifically that he wanted to come along with him, but TJ had made that trek up to the space he'd shared with his mother for a short time alone.

He discovered pretty quickly that there was nothing left of her there. Atlantis had long ago been scrubbed of any hint of her former occupants, but TJ still felt her presence there. Echoes could be like that sometimes, the energy of the past so strong that some of it stayed behind no matter how hard someone tried to scrub it away. He could feel her in the room with him, only it was like she was watching him from the other side of some veil he couldn't quite see through. Some barrier separating him from the one thing he wanted most in the world. All his life he'd been trying to break through barriers like that and in that moment, he'd made a pact with himself to do whatever was necessary to make sure he made it back to Pegasus.

Only he wasn't going to make it back to Pegasus now. He was going to lose his last chance at finding his parent's people again unless he found some way to get back there on the Deadalus. But the real kicker? The one that made him want to punch something? Was that TJ was about to lose his last untapped source of information about his birth parents.

TJ knew a lot about his mother. Pops had always been up front with him about who she was and where she'd come from. But when it came to his father, Kanaan? That was when the normally loquacious Dr. Rodney McKay shut down like a steel trap. TJ didn't think his adoptive father meant to do it. Maybe Pops took the careful questions TJ asked as a betrayal of some kind, he wasn't sure, but he knew next to nothing about the man who had given him life.

And John Sheppard was supposed to have been the answer to all that.

Rodney and Diane McKay had been fantastic parents and he loved them so much, but there were things he knew his adoptive parents were keeping from him. He figured he could understand Pops wanting him to protect him, but TJ had been banking on the chance to pick John Sheppard's brain about the past. Everything he'd learned about the man as a kid had led TJ to believe that this long-lost uncle of his would finally give him the answers he craved. Only now that opportunity was slowly fading away. It was circling the drain along with the man in the bed beside him and TJ balled his hands into fists, that anger inside of him forming his fingers into ineffectual balls that could do little more than crumple the delicate pages beneath his hands.

It really wasn't fair. When Pops had called him with the news that John Sheppard had been found, it was like Christmas had come early. Suddenly it wasn't a question of if he would ever make it back to the galaxy where he had been born, but when . For two straight weeks after, he'd cataloged all the things he'd say and ask his uncle when they finally got the chance to meet. It had all been so perfect. Too perfect, really, and he had been a fool to think that he would actually get what he wanted.

Death had been following Torren John Emmagan around for his entire life. She stalked him from the shadows like easy prey, toying with him at times as if he were some plaything and not her next meal. But death always managed to get her claws into him eventually, and this time would be no different. General Hank Landry had shown up on his base and the dreams he'd so carefully constructed broke apart around him like tempered glass.

At first TJ had thought the general was coming to tell him that something bad had happened to Pops, but even through that haze of relief, TJ had still been cut deep by the story the General told him. For most of their 4-hour flight across the western United States, the seasoned military officer had laid everything out for him. Atlantis, his own connections to the SGC, and though he wasn't quite sure what it was, something changed inside of TJ during that flight from his former base to Cheyenne. For the first time in his life, he found something that felt a little like belonging. The world he was being offered, it was strange and convoluted and dangerous, but it was his world - his mother's world - and he was finally going to be a part of it.

Trouble was, there wasn't much good going on in that world at the moment. He was headed straight into the storm and he'd been brought on board not so much because he deserved it, but because Pops had asked a favor. He needed an anchor. TJ was okay with that, he understood it even. He'd changed into the son Pops would need and the soldier John Sheppard probably wouldn't right then and there. That feeling of belonging stuck around, but it was pliable now and it was no match for the other things that forced their way inside his brain, like sadness and that all-encompassing anger still simmering away inside of him.

Realizing he was still crumpling the pages of his book, TJ released the tension in his hands with a sigh and smoothed back the pages with the palm of his hand.

Anger was useless. It wouldn't change what happened and it sure as hell wouldn't save his uncle's life. Death was going to take his last hope at finding out the things Pops wouldn't tell him. TJ knew enough about loss to understand there was nothing he could do about that. But he was worried about the aftermath. For Carrie especially. Hers would be a grief that none of them would understand because none of them had known John Sheppard for the past 10 years... not like she did.

When the doctors had come in and told them it wouldn't be long now, she'd run, and TJ didn't think he couldn't blame her for it. News like that had to be processed and some people handled it very differently. Pops... he normally talked incessantly, and TJ had been relieved when his old man finally dropped off into something resembling sleep a little while ago.

Closing the book in his lap again, TJ set it on the end of his uncle's bed and got up to stretch. A blanket one of the nurses had brought Pops was starting to snake its way off his lap so TJ walked over and readjusted it, careful not to disturb his slumbering father.

It felt good to stand up for a moment. The chair he'd been occupying for the past several days was of the most uncomfortable things he'd ever sat in. That was probably on purpose. Uncomfortable chairs discouraged unwanted guests from staying too long past visiting hours. The thought of plopping himself back down into it nearly made him shudder. His muscles were too angry at him now for the treatment they'd received over the past several days to be still again and he yearned suddenly for a nice, long run.

For 14 months he'd done nothing but train. His body wasn't used to going days without so much as a pushup. He hadn't seen much of the city just yet, but something told TJ that the places to jog in Atlantis would be epic. He needed the feel of her unyielding metal beneath his feet, and he contemplated leaving for a while to go find it.

But something was holding him back. There was a hint of finality in the air... a feeling that things were beginning to come to a close. Like that moment in a movie just before the credits roll. It was that feeling that kept him confined to the space of their little curtained-off world. Eagerness to leave suddenly forgotten, TJ shuffled over to the seat they normally kept open for Carrie and collapsed down into it.

Maybe it was the late hour and the constant fatigue of the past several days. Maybe it was just the calm before the real storm hit, but TJ lost whatever forward momentum he'd had going and scrubbed his palms down over his eyes.

"I had plans, Uncle John," he said with a sigh. "I was going to take this damn place by storm and now it's all going to shit." He laughed into his palms then raked them the rest of the way down his face.

"I don't even know if you can hear me or what all Pops' told you about who I am, but I could really use a miracle here, man. You know, pull one of those good ol' Atlantis Hail Mary's out of left field three points down in the 9th."

He snorted at the absurdity of what he'd just said, then shook his head.

"But seriously, you and me, we were gonna go places. I was going to get the inside scoop from you about my birth parents and you were going to impart all that patented Sheppard wisdom on me. So why'd you have to go and get shot? Why couldn't they keep you safe?"

TJ thought about the remaining ATA gene carriers then. Even though the threat against them had been eliminated, they were still shepherded around Atlantis like messiahs. Heavily guarded and protected around the clock. He got angry sometimes when he watched them pass, a dwindling group surrounded by armed guards, shuffling down the hall at a quick pace as if the devil himself were at their heels. Where was his uncle's protection when everything was going down with Sean Fitzpatrick? Why hadn't someone seen through that asshole's charade and put a stop to it before they all ended up here? Nobody had, and now his uncle was going to die.

Even as a kid TJ had always known that he would join the USSF and follow in his uncle's footsteps. Pops had spent those formative years of his life trying to push science on him, but TJ had remained steadfast to his military dreams until one day Pops had finally just thrown up his arms and given up.

"Just tell me why," his dad had asked angrily one morning as he cleared away the college applications he'd laid out in front of TJ at the breakfast table. "Why would you choose a path like that when you know where it could lead?"

"You know why," TJ responded, trying to keep his cool. They'd been having this particular fight for a while now. "I want to be a part of the Atlantis expedition, Pops." There was more to it than that - TJ knew it and his dad knew it - but he couldn't bring himself to say it.

"So go to school!" Pops exclaimed, tiptoeing around TJ's response and waving the collected applications under his nose. "You have an amazing intellect. Go to college, get a degree and join the SGC that way. Leave the machine guns to someone else."

There was a look Pops got in his eyes sometimes and it was shining full blast at TJ now. It both spoke of the past and worried for the future. Part of TJ wanted to just cave and promise his dad that he would go to college like the good little boy Pops apparently still saw him as. But there was something burning in TJ's veins. It hid right beneath the surface of his skin. The something was just hot enough that it never let him be and he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he would never be happy in the life that Dr. Rodney McKay had envisioned for him. It was nothing against his adoptive father - TJ loved the man more than anything - it was just that he'd been suppressing who he really was for so long that he just couldn't do it anymore.

His mother had been a warrior. TJ felt that same fire racing through his own veins, and he knew there was only one place for him.

TJ sighed heavily and for a moment, his father's face changed. It held a hopefulness that he'd finally convinced his young, adoptive son to choose the path of least resistance. Too bad he was about to be disappointed yet again.

"I can't do it, Pops," TJ said, watching his dad's face carefully. "If the SGC never gets the Atlantis Project back up and running again, I can't spend the rest of my life chained to a microscope. That's your world, not mine."

Resentment filled Pops' downcast eyes but TJ ignored it and kept going.

"Doing this, joining the SGC, you know it's something I gotta do."

The old man's gaze snapped back up at that. "You'd serve in their military?" he questioned darkly. "Even after everything they did? What they would have done to you had they known who's son you are?"

"Come on, Pops!" TJ exploded in spite of himself as they finally came to the heart of every argument they'd ever had on this particular subject. "You gotta stop seeing the enemy around every corner! You stopped them, remember? Anyone at the SGC who would have had a problem with you keeping me here on Earth is gone now. So please, stop trying to protect me all the time!"

"Are you kidding?" Pops laughed mirthlessly. "You don't know what it's like out there in that galaxy, son. I do. You've never had to watch a Wraith suck the very life out of your own best friend or race against time to stop some alien technology from destroying the galaxy. I was just a scientist and that place still managed to nearly kill me. And you want to go out there and lead your own off-world team? Well, you can forget it, TJ! I won't have it!"

"God, would you listen to yourself? I'm not eight years old anymore, Pops!"

'Pops' was something TJ had only recently begun calling his adoptive father and, judging by the look he got next, his dad was still trying to decide if he liked it or not.

"I know you're not," Rodney grumbled, looking away.

"Well, then would you stop treating me like I am? I'm not going to sit around here and let my life pass me by just because you can't handle the idea of me getting hurt! People die, dad. And I'm sorry you lost my mom and your buddy Ronon. And I'm so sorry that Uncle John is gone, but I won't let you smother my life just because you think the same thing's going to happen to me!"

It was a soft spot he'd just poked and that fact was clearly evident by the storm that broke out across his father's face. TJ braced, ready for that maelstrom to be unleashed on him directly, but his dad remained uncharacteristically quiet.

Their sightlines had converged in the center of the room: one pleading, the other, unreadable. It had been a standoff, and one that would never fully resolve, and the memory of it still plagued him to this day.

John Sheppard was a loss his father had never fully recovered from and now he was being faced with living through that same loss all over again. Then to top it all off, TJ was here now and about to head down that same path his uncle had chosen so many years ago. He could see why his adoptive father had always had trouble grappling with the decisions TJ made about his future, but it was just no use. For all of his father's efforts, TJ had always known it would never be enough to change who he was inside. Change who he was at his core. He was always going to be the son of Teyla Emmagan, no matter how much he tried to fight it.

TJ forced his eyes back over to his dying uncle, hating himself a little for what he was about to do. The demands he was going to make, they weren't fair. Maybe he was a terrible person for wanting them in the first place, but he was tired of playing the patsy. If death was going to follow him around for the rest of his life then he needed to get in a good 'screw you!' every so often to maintain the balance.

"You can't die," he said a little too forcefully, lowering his voice as Pops stirred slightly. "Because if you do, then it's over for me. I'm never going to get another chance like this and you're fucking it up."

If Pops had been awake he would have smacked TJ right upside the head for what he was saying, but he just didn't care anymore. They might have turned him into a soldier, but part of him would always be that little boy, alone and different in a world that wasn't his, just trying to find a way back home.

"So I need you to get a handle on this and come back. I don't care how you do it or where you have to go to to find the strength, just get your ass out of that bed, stop scaring the shit out of people, and wake the fuck up already."

Loss was making him cruel. He didn't mean half of what he said, but anything seemed better than the alternative.

"Did Pops tell you I did all this for you?" he tried again, swallowing back down some of the heat. "Did he tell you about all the knockdown, drag-out fights we got into over me joining the military just so that I could get the chance to serve under you? I worked my ass off to get here and now some punk with a gun is going to end it all? I don't think so. I mean, come on, you're the legendary John Sheppard for christ's sake! Since when do you get taken out by some psychopath with a couple of bullets?"

Without even realizing it, TJ had taken hold of one of the bedside rails so tightly that his knuckles had gone white. Angry tears had begun to gather at the corners of his eyes and he chastised himself for the weakness. He inhaled to go on, but then stopped. Realization flooding his system and making him let go of the bar.

He was an idiot. He'd let himself climb too high, too far above the cloud cover, and now he was stuck on the precipice of a mountain with nowhere to go but down. And every escape route available to him was obscured by gathering clouds. He had no idea how far the drop would be or if he would even survive it… And he was terrified.

His dreams, they were all he had, and he didn't know how to exist in a world where they were no longer a possibility. No one had been back to Pegasus since right after the war and he doubted he could talk Landry into organizing a mission back there on the Daedalus just for him when the ship got back. Earth was still trying to recover from the decimation left behind by the war and what few ships had been developed in the 18 plus years since then were already in play. Atlantis was it for him and John Sheppard was taking it with him to the grave.

He had a right to be angry, but as he turned hostile eyes back towards his uncle's still form, he paused, shamed by his own abject selfishness.

A man was dying, and here he was, sitting beside his bed and whining about how his death would ruin TJ's life. His uncle deserved better than that. The McKay's had raised him better than that. But the deep dark truth of it was, TJ was in mourning, and it wasn't just for the loss of this unknown uncle. He was mourning for everything.

Growing up had been a lonely business. Pops' family had been taken that day by the Wraith and Diane was an only child. Ever since TJ had spent the night at a friend's house once and had seen firsthand what it meant to have a large family, he'd craved one of his own. General Sheppard was not his blood, but TJ had always known that, if they ever found one another again, he would get that family he'd always craved in his company. And that didn't just go for Sheppard. Doc Beckett was a big part of that too. So was Colonel Lorne, though he seemed to be a little tougher nut to crack. These people were what he'd been searching for his entire life and TJ would have gladly given up all hope of returning to Pegasus if it meant that he could have that family again.

So there it was.

"I'm s-sorry," TJ stammered, clenching his teeth to keep from coming apart. "I'm sorry, Uncle John."

TJ reached a hand out to thread it through the bars, but stopped suddenly when a noise to his left caught his attention. It was faint at first and for a moment, TJ wondered if his uncle had somehow heard what had just been said and was responding. But then the noise began to grow and before TJ's brain even had time to register what was happening, the sound had morphed into a wail and rough hands were pulling him up and away from his uncle's bedside.

"Oh shit." He wasn't sure if that curse had come from his own mouth or someone else's, but there was no time to find out. Chaos erupted in the small space they had been occupying for days now and TJ realized with a sinking feeling that his uncle was not trying to wake up. John Sheppard was trying to die.

TJ had pushed too hard…

Panic sped everything up. People called out to one another across the room and TJ thought he might have heard his own name called from within the din, but he kept his eyes trained forward. The chaos was converging into one, sense dampening blur around the still figure at its epicenter and it wasn't until two strong hands whipped him around that he was able to wrench his eyes away from his dying uncle at all.

Pops was squeezing his arms - so hard he would leave bruises - and TJ tried to pull away to look back over his shoulder at what was happening behind him. But Pops' hold on his arms remained steadfast and he finally forced his eyes up to meet his father's.

"TJ, I need you to go find Carrie. Do you think you could do that for me?" he asked seriously, searching TJ's face with concern.

"Y-yeah, Pops," he stammered, trying to get his stupid brain to focus. "Anything you need."

"This is important, TJ. Okay? I think this is it."

It? Did he mean the end? That moment when the clouds parted and he realized there really was no path down the mountain and he was stranded on it forever?

That moment?

"TJ?" Pops repeated his name warily, shaking him slightly. "Please son, I need you to go do this for me."

Maybe it was the way Pops said it, or something inside of TJ himself finally snapping back into place, but reality came crashing back down around him in an instant and he stiffened under his father's grip.

He was a soldier. He'd trained for intense situations like this, yet here he was, losing it like a child and letting the panic drag him down with it.

"I'm on it, Pops," he said determinedly, shrugging off his father's hands but squeezing a shoulder before rushing past him.

TJ took off for the exit of the infirmary without looking back, calling out to anyone on the comms who might be listening.

"Anyone got a 20 on Carrie Sinclair?" he asked.

"She was up at the top of tower 9 last we saw her. Should still be there," someone answered back, and with the klaxon wail of death following him down the corridor, TJ McKay threw himself into the first transport he came to, and prayed he would reach Carrie Sinclair in time.