A/N - This fic takes place at the same time as "Brain Storm," when everyone on Atlantis seemed to have a simultaneous two week leave. This fic is sort of a series of unfortunate events featuring mostly John, Ronon, and Zelenka. It couldn't quite decide whether it wanted to be more serious or funny, but I can sure promise that it's whumpy. It should be around thirteen chapters, give or take.

Maybe it was because it had been years since he'd been surfing, but John was pretty sure that the breakers off the coast of Atlantis's mainland were the best he'd ever seen. He and Ronon were a few days into their two week leave, the same two week leave everyone on Atlantis had been given. Most of them had gone back to Earth - John knew Rodney was dragging Keller to some boring science presentation, and he thought Woolsey had muttered something about suit shops. Teyla and Kanaan had gone back to Athos with Torren, and Zelenka had volunteered to stay on Atlantis and keep an eye on it. John had convinced Ronon to come with him to the mainland, since he had no interest in returning to Earth and he knew the Satedan didn't have anything better to do. Ronon had been a little reluctant (make that very reluctant) at first, but after a few beers, some time in the sun, and a chance to whittle some weird spear thing, he was clearly enjoying himself.

John spotted the next wave and pushed himself up, leaning with the board and following the curve of the wave. This was going to be a good one, he could tell-

"SHEPPARDDDDDD!" Ronon yelled from the shore.

John jerked in surprise and alarm, overbalanced, and toppled into the ocean. For a few seconds, he wasn't sure if he was more worried about drowning or about Ronon - there shouldn't be any need to yell on a beach, unless you were asking for another beer. John narrowly avoided smacking his head on his board and surfaced, shaking water out of his ears.

"Ronon?"

"CALL FOR YOU," Ronon bellowed. "IN THE JUMPER. ZELENKA."

John groaned and sank back underwater. Maybe if he stayed there, Zelenka would go away, and he could enjoy his vacation.

Unfortunately, Zelenka was used to dealing with Rodney, so it would probably take him at least two hours to get discouraged enough to hang up, and John couldn't hold his breath that long. Towing his board, he swam to the shore, mentally inventing punishments that he would inflict if Zelenka didn't have something serious.

"You fell," Ronon greeted him, snickering and finishing off yet another beer.

"Shut up," John snapped, storming past him into the Jumper, picking his way past their makeshift campsite. It turned out that neither of them were that attracted to the idea of camping for camping's sake - they hadn't bothered to bring a tent or anything of that sort. John got enough of true camping on missions, and he figured Ronon had had enough for a lifetime when he'd been a Runner. They'd been using the Jumper as their campsite. The back had just enough room to spread out two sleeping bags, not to mention a large beer cooler. The past few days had been just as relaxing and fun as John had hoped, and he'd even managed to get five-beer-Ronon to admit that he'd been wrong, John had been right, and he was having fun. Leave it to Zelenka to ruin everything.

Ronon appeared behind him as John tapped the Ancient controls that would answer Zelenka's comms call.

"-don't know what to do, now it's everywhere, and I swear I only took the shields down for a minute or so, honestly maybe not even, and now this-"

"Zelenka," John interrupted. "I'm here. What happened?"
Radek immediately stopped talking, although John could hear the sound of his panicked breathing on the other end of the line.

"What happened?" John repeated, since no further explanation seemed immediately forthcoming.

"Well…," the scientist squeaked, and then stopped talking again.

"Zelenka?" John said, trying to make his voice sound dangerous. That always worked with Rodney.

"There may have been a small, uh, accident, on Atlantis." Zelenka finally managed.

John felt a pit drop into his stomach. But as panicked as Zelenka had sounded when John had answered the phone, John figured he would have already spat it out if something really bad was going on.

Ronon was standing at the entrance to the Jumper, watching all these proceedings with an air of upset confusion. He made a questioning gesture with his hands, and John shrugged helplessly.

"For years, Rodney has been trying to figure out some way to get a DHD to store more than just the last gate address dialed. It would be helpful for-"

"I know, get to the point," John said. Rodney had mentioned his DHD project before, although John had been firmly under the impression that it had stalled out at some point.

"Well, the reason he could never get it to work was that the power requirements for the test were too high. Before testing it on an actual gate, he needed to make sure his patch wouldn't...explode, or shut down the gate, or anything like that, but in order to make certain of that, he needed a really high energy environment, and there just wasn't a good way to simulate one."

"Okay…," John said, still not sure where this was going. Had Zelenka somehow exploded the Gate?

"I thought that now, when everyone was gone from Atlantis, it would be the perfect time to pick his research back up," Zelenka said, all in a rush. "With no one here, the power requirements on the city would be much lower. It would be safer if something did go wrong - fewer people around to hurt. And Rodney wouldn't be constantly breathing down my neck, telling me I'm setting the test up wrong or that I'm stupid. And he wouldn't be able to do anything to keep me from being the first one to make this technology usable."

"So did it work?" John asked distractedly. Having a list of gate addresses stored right in the DHD would be pretty nice….

"That is what I am getting to. I, ah, in order to get enough power, I had to turn off the shields. Not for very long, just...no more than a minute."

Normally, Atlantis's shields were only turned on if they were expecting an attack. But with only Zelenka on Atlantis, there weren't even enough personnel to monitor for a threat, let alone get the shields up and running if one appeared. The plan was to leave the shields on for the full two weeks, and with everyone gone, the power requirements had dropped low enough that this was feasible.

"What did you do, Zelenka?" John growled, as the physicist sputtered on the other end of the line. "If you...drained the ZPM, or something, I'm gonna-"

"No," Zelenka insisted. "I did not...I did not drain the ZPM. In fact, I did nothing-"

"Then why are you calling me in the middle of my leave?" John asked, with a great deal more patience than he felt Zelenka deserved.

"Well, when I-when the shields went down," Zelenka paused and took a breath, "a teeny, tiny meteor may have...hit the city. It wasn't on any sensors, it was far too small-"

"A METEOR HIT ATLANTIS?" John shouted, feeling the stress headache start to build. "YOU LET A METEOR HIT ATLANTIS?"

"A very, very small meteor. It is perhaps the size of a large, umm, sports ball."

John decided to ignore the term 'sports ball' for the time being and focus on not immediately jumping to the worst case scenario. He took a deep breath, then another, then struggled not to yell as he responded to Zelenka.

"Okay, if it's that small, then get rid of it. And stop calling me if it's not an actual emergency-"

"It, umm, may have caused a small fire to start. And that fire may have caused...even more fires to start. It's really Rodney's fault, he wrote this program that was intended to allow for more efficient fire-fighting protocols, but because the power is out, due to the meteor, instead it allowed the fires to spread rapidly. And he has locked me out of the protocol, so-"

"MY CITY IS ON FIRE?" John was, for the first time in his life, seriously worried that he was going to burst a blood vessel.

"Umm, most of it, yes."

"Why did you take so fucking long to tell me that?" John snarled, killing the connection on the comms and waving frantically to Ronon. The Satedan had heard enough of the one-sided conversation to begin packing up the campsite, and he hurried in with the last of the supplies as John finished up his pre-flight systems check.

"Vacation's over, huh?"

John sighed and lifted off. "Sorry, buddy. Rain check. Let's go save the goddamn city."

Zelenka had managed to extinguish the original fire by the time he heard the sound of the Jumper arriving. He looked out across the sea of fire extinguisher foam and blackened walls and sighed. The meteor had, of course, crashed directly into the Gateroom, interrupting practically every system on the way down, and leaving a very large hole in the roof. The fires hadn't helped either, and now the power was out, the shields were down, and everywhere but the Gateroom seemed to be on fire.

Thankfully, the hole in the roof had allowed some of the smoke to vent. Zelenka was still coughing, and his lungs ached from being so close to the flames. Ash had settled on the surface of his glasses, making it difficult to see. But he thought that, if the meteor hadn't left a hole in the roof, he very well might be dead.

Ronon and John emerged from the Jumper bay, both wearing nothing but swim trunks and a hawaiian shirt. John had managed to close the buttons of his shirt somewhere along the way. Ronon had not.

John started choking as soon as he drew in a breath. He coughed miserably a few times, blinking rapidly, tears already starting to gather in his lashes. Zelenka knew how that felt too - his glasses provided some protection, but he'd been fighting this fire for over an hour now, and his eyes were raw and stinging.

"Oh man," John said. "It's...hard to breathe in here."

"Yes, that would be the smoke," Zelenka said.

John wrinkled his nose. "Why does it smell like that?"

"Well...," Zelenka felt his glasses sliding down his nose, and he pushed them up with a quick, nervous gesture, "I believe that smell is all of the melted Ancient technology."

An expression of shocked horror crossed John's face. He opened his mouth to say something, but Ronon cut him off.

"Where's the fire?" he said. "I don't see any fire."

"I seem to have managed to put this one out," Radek said. "But due to Rodney's new protocol, the fire is staying mostly trapped inside the walls of Atlantis."

"Well, that seems like a good thing," John said.

"It is not a 'good thing,'" Zelenka said forcefully. "Because we have no way to get to the fires inside the walls, and without power, they cannot be put out. They've spread throughout the city via the walls, and it looks like they have escaped the walls in some places. They have started to burn the city."

"Oh," John said. "Well have you tried...water?"

"Of course I have tried water!" Zelenka practically yelled. The whole conversation was starting to put him on edge, and if the circumstances had been any different, he may have regretted inviting John and Ronon back at all. "I put the fire in here out, didn't I? But I have no way to deliver water on such a massive scale, and anyways, the fire is still trapped inside the walls."

"I think I should try the Jumper," John said definitively.

"Oh. Of course," Zelenka responded flatly. "And, how, exactly, do you expect the Jumper to help anything?"

John shot Zelenka a wounded look, as though he was offended that Zelenka didn't consider the addition of a Jumper an instant remedy to any situation. Radek ignored the ridiculous pilot, waiting for an actual answer.

"I'll make somethin' work," John finally said evasively.

"With all due respect, what we need right now is an immediate solution, not a harebrained scheme involving Jumpers," Zelenka told him as nicely as he possibly could, given the circumstances.

"Rodney-"

"Yes, Rodney likes both harebrained schemes and Jumpers. I like putting out the fires all across Atlantis."

John's jaw set in the petulant way that Radek thought might be intended to be his expression of graceful concession, and he nodded reluctantly. "Fine. No Jumper. What do you need?"

"The fires that have made it outside the walls need to be put out," Zelenka said, running a panicked hand through his hair. "I believe that those fires are mainly nearby the gateroom. I will concentrate on shutting down Rodney's so-called 'fire-safety' protocol, so the fire cannot spread any further."

"Okay. Me and Ronon will take care of the fire fighting," John said, and Zelenka could have sworn he saw Ronon perk up at the sound of the word 'fighting.'

"Good luck," Zelenka told him, already turning towards the program on the one working computer in the gateroom, connected to the barely-working center console via a nearly-dead battery source. Just another in a long list of miracles he was expected to pull off, he supposed.

"You too," Ronon grunted, and with that, they were gone.

"Okay, Zelenka said one of the fires was in that storage room," John said, pointing ahead of them to a door at the very end of the hallway. His voice was slightly muffled by the Hawaiian shirt he was in the process of wrapping around his nose and mouth. Ronon had done the same. They were both left bare-chested, but Ronon figured protecting their lungs from the smoke was more important than making sure their skin wasn't exposed. Sheppard had managed to locate a few fire extinguishers on the way here, so the fire probably wouldn't even get near their exposed skin.

Sheppard spotted a third fire extinguisher on the wall nearby and made a beeline for it, the vicious whip scars on his back obvious even in the dim light. Ronon winced, the same way he always did when he saw them. Even after two years, he hadn't stopped feeling guilty over what he considered his part in John's injury, and he figured he probably wasn't going to.

Ronon shook it off and reached for the door to the storage room, not sorry for the distraction.

That was the wrong thing to do. The door was hot, but Ronon hadn't considered that a warning sign - of course the door was hot. Apparently, however, that meant that there was a wall of fire right behind it. The second Ronon opened the door, smoke billowed out, completely engulfing both him and Sheppard. Instantly, Ronon's lungs contracted painfully, his eyes streaming. He could make out the violent, reddish glow of the fire and almost nothing else.

"Ronon!" John said from somewhere behind him. "Fire extinguisher!"

But Ronon couldn't see. He couldn't think. And he was too slow.

Something burned its way across his shoulder and chest - he wasn't sure if it was a burning piece of rubble, or the fire itself. The pain was all-consuming for a bright, hot second, but then the adrenaline swallowed it up. Ronon stumbled backwards a few steps, still hardly able to see.

"Ronon!" John yelled.

Right, the fire extinguisher. Ronon tried to heft it up, but his injured arm gave way beneath him and it clattered to the ground. Not that it would have done much anyways. He still couldn't see.

"We need to leave!" a voice shouted behind him.

"But-"

A hand touched his burned arm, and the pain flared up again. Ronon reeled to the side and nearly fell, and the movement set off another round of spluttering coughs. For a second, he couldn't tell if the smoke was still blurring his vision, or if he was actually starting to pass out.

He heard John coughing beside him. He thought that John was trying to speak, but he couldn't get enough air in. He couldn't seem to get any air in at all.

That, more than anything else, was what really convinced Ronon they needed to leave. He closed his eyes, used the radiating heat to orient himself to the fire, and ran the other way. He had lost his fire extinguisher, but clearly, he and John had both overestimated what a fire extinguisher could do.

He made it to the end of the hallway and managed another turn before his knees gave out and he fell to the floor.

"Ronon!" John exclaimed. "Oh no, buddy…."

Ronon cautiously opened his eyes - the air was hazy, but nowhere near as painful as before. John was crouched beside him, peering at him worriedly.

"Burned?" Ronon croaked, the end of the word trailing off into a series of coughs. He wasn't even entirely sure what he'd been trying to ask in the first place. He definitely wanted to know if Sheppard had been hurt, too, but he was also asking how bad off he was himself. He couldn't see much through his still-streaming eyes, but the searing pain radiating from his chest and shoulder couldn't be a good sign.

"Yeah-" John paused to cough himself, then screwed up his face in an expression of concentration and swallowed. "You got yourself pretty good. You'll be okay, though."

Ronon recognized the tone John was using - it was the carefully light, unworried voice he used when one of his team (excluding McKay) was injured, and he wanted to keep them calm. Ronon relaxed slightly. He didn't detect any of the barely-contained undercurrent of stress Sheppard got when the injury was serious, and the team leader was trying not to let on. However bad it hurt, if Sheppard thought he was going to be fine, then Ronon trusted him.

"You?" Ronon managed.

John coughed again, eyes watering, and shook his head. "Fine," he said, around his somewhat useless attempts to breathe.

Ronon nodded, then hissed as the movement pulled at his injured shoulder. He set his jaw and swallowed it back - setting off another round of coughing.

"Gotta have a look at you," John mumbled, then cast a glance back over his shoulder, towards the smoke slowly billowing towards them. "Not...not here. C'mon."

Ronon braced to push himself up, and managed to get to his knees before the pain really hit. Sheppard's hands were there at his uninjured shoulder, leveraging him upright. After a second of dizzy, breathless pain, Ronon oriented himself and managed to stand. John's arm wrapped itself around his waist before Ronon could protest, but he had to admit (at least to himself) that the extra support helped. Between struggling to breathe and the blinding pain triggered whenever he moved his torso, Ronon wasn't sure that he could have stayed upright long enough to make it to safety.

They started back to the Gateroom - Ronon assumed because it was one of the few places that wasn't on fire. Or rather, John started back to the Gateroom and Ronon stumbled along beside him, closer to deadweight than he wanted to admit. Sheppard was awfully strong, for a guy who looked like a good breeze could blow him away.

Ronon's breathing wasn't any better by the time they reached the Gateroom. In fact, he thought it was worse. Every other step ended with a series of hacking coughs, and he could feel Sheppard trembling beside him with the effort to breathe.

"Good...good thing Mckay's not here," John managed as he practically dropped Ronon on the Gateroom steps, which were, thankfully, mostly undamaged.

"Why?" Ronon grunted. The pain was making him both lightheaded and irritable. "He could turn off whatever dumb thing he did that made the fire go everywhere, and then we'd be able to fix it."

John frowned. "I just meant...well, he'd probably be complaining a lot."

Ronon shrugged - he would rather have Rodney here and complaining than have Atlantis be entirely on fire. He still didn't exactly understand how this situation was Rodney's fault, but he found that he firmly believed that it was.

"Okay," John said. "Think we...think we need to take a little break from firefighting. Gonna take a look at your shoulder."
Ronon nodded, and then cautiously looked down. He wasn't really sure what to expect, but he had the sneaking suspicion that Sheppard calling the burned area his "shoulder" would prove to be a vast understatement.

Ronon was no stranger to injuries. Life as a Runner was dangerous - no matter how careful he was, there was no way he could have escaped from his seven years on the run unscathed. There was no one to take care of him, the many, many times that he did get injured, and so he had had no choice but to perfect a brutal sort of field medicine. It was the only way to stay alive.

He had popped his own shoulder back into place more times than he could count. He had tied his own dreadlocks together to keep a bleeding head wound held shut. He had once removed a rusty nail that had gone all the way through the center of his palm, shattering the fragile bones in his hand. He had once rebroken his own wrist, after he had set it wrong the first time and it had healed nearly unusable.

But burns were relatively untapped territory for him. He'd had small burns numerous times, even some pretty serious ones. But this...this….

Ronon let out a small, shuddering breath, and immediately wished he hadn't - now John was going to know he was in pain. But he hadn't been able to help it. A huge swath of his chest, shoulder, and upper arm was red and swollen. His skin had turned scaly and rough in a few places, in other places, it was tight and shiny. There were a few spots where his skin had cracked open, and was now sluggishly oozing some combination of blood and pus. Worst, there were places where his skin had erupted into huge, yellowish, semi-translucent blisters. He had the sense that if he were to touch one of these, it might hurt so badly he would pass out.

Ronon looked away, once again immediately regretting it. Now, John would probably think he was squeamish, as well as a baby. Still, staring at the burn was making him feel dizzy and nauseous, and passing out or throwing up would be infinitely more embarrassing.

Ronon heard John suck in a breath, pausing to cough before speaking. "Damn. That's gotta hurt like a bitch."

Ronon responded with a one-shouldered shrug, leaving it up to John to decide what that meant.

"There's not a lot we can do here," John said apologetically. "I think one of the hallways between us and the infirmary is on fire."

"Should do somethin' about that," Ronon managed, even tacking on an unconvincing smile.

John sighed, sitting down heavily beside Ronon. He looked a little wobbly too, even though he'd just been exposed to the smoke. It really was urgent that they get the fire situation sorted out, Ronon knew that. But he was now essentially sidelined, so unless Sheppard had a typically crazy plan-

"I have a plan," John announced.

Ronon grunted. He couldn't say he was surprised. "Jumper?"

"Yep. I'm gonna turn it into a huge fire hose. You know all that flexible piping we got, for underwater drilling?"

Ronon did not. Frankly, he didn't care, either. All that he cared about was if John managed to put out the fire.

Apparently, this came through on his face, because John broke off and then shrugged. "I'm gonna use that, anyway."

"Watcha waitin' for?" Ronon asked him. The distraction of conversation was making the pain more bearable, but he could feel it licking at his awareness, waiting just under the surface. But as much as John's conversation was helping, he'd much rather have the fires out.

John made a face, then pointedly looked at Ronon's shoulder. He didn't have to say anything for Ronon to get the gist of it.

"Go. I'll be fine," Ronon told him. "Said it yourself. Not a lot we can do til the fire's out."

John sighed, then coughed again. "I gotta start listening to myself when I talk. You sure? Zelenka should be on his way back, but-"

"Go," Ronon repeated, a little more forcefully this time.

"Okay." John gave him a cautious pat on his uninjured shoulder, and Ronon felt himself relax a little at the touch.

Levering himself upright, John looked a little uncertain about his footing for a split second, then managed a deep breath and steadied. "Hey, the next time McKay starts whining about a sunburn, you can really put him in his place, huh, big guy?"

Ronon's smile was a little more genuine this time - he loved putting Rodney in his place. John gave him a quick nod, and then hurried off towards the Jumper bay. As soon as he was gone, Ronon slumped back against the stairs. The pain was overwhelming. Ronon knew that you were supposed to run cold water over burns, and that was supposed to make them hurt less. Or heal faster. Or something. Sheppard hadn't done that. Of course, if they had access to cold water, they could solve much bigger problems than Ronon's burn.

John hadn't even bandaged the burns. Not that they had anything readily available to use as bandages. Ronon's discarded shirt was disintegrating, and he thought the last thing his shoulder needed was to have ash rubbed in it. Ronon thought it wasn't impossible that he would have to wait until they could access the infirmary to receive any medical care at all, and who knew how long that might be.

Ronon wished he could help. He thought he would be able to, if there were some threat that he could face. He'd squared off with Wraith when he was far worse off than this. Adrenaline took your system over at that point, and everything else was just along for the ride.

But now, there was no threat for him to face. Clearly, there was no help he could offer in the face of the fires. As such, there was no adrenaline spike, either. All he could do was sit here uselessly and wait for John to save him.