Zelenka had managed to locate both a comprehensive first aid kit and a large bottle of Pedialyte, and was now running back to the Gateroom. He didn't really know what Ronon planned to do with the first aid kit - he'd already practically butchered John, so Zelenka wasn't feeling overly confident in the Satedan's caretaking abilities.

Still, when he entered the Gateroom, he found John curled up, his head and torso in Ronon's lap as Ronon kept pressure on his wrist. The scene would have been almost sweet, if not for the fact that John's lower body was lying in a pool of his own blood. Still, Ronon had managed not to kill John while Zelenka was in the infirmary, and that had to count for something.

"You got the stuff?" Ronon asked, looking up from John's pale form expectantly.

"Yes, but I do not know very much about stitches," Zelenka explained.

"Me either," Ronon said with a shrug. "You're gonna have to sew him shut."

"Oh no, I couldn't possibly-"

"You wanna pin him down so he can't move while we're working on him?"

Zelenka did not. Nor did he want to put stitches in the Colonel's arm. Still, he had to be a better option than Ronon. If his wound care was anything like his first aid, John would probably end up with more holes in him, rather than less.

"Alright," Zelenka said nervously. "Colonel, are you awake?"

John's eyelids fluttered, and he managed to nod. "Don' pin me down," he said quietly. "I'll stay still."

"Sorry, buddy," Ronon said. "I'm worried you'll forget."

"Wait," Zelenka said. "Can you drink something? I believe he should try to get his fluids up before we begin the stitches."

This was true. Radek really thought John needed fluids, and he was likely to go into actual, medical shock if he didn't get them. However, much more pressing was the fact that Zelenka did not want to give stitches, and he was willing to do absolutely anything to further delay that.

"Nah," John said softly.

But Ronon seemed to have taken Zelenka's words to heart. "You gotta," he said. "The doc's right. It'll make you feel better. You need to get your fluids up, or somethin' bad will happen."

John frowned, but seemed unwilling to protest anymore. Zelenka handed Ronon the bottle of Pedialyte he had found, and Ronon uncapped it. He managed to get John propped up into a position that somewhat resembled a sitting position, and helped John drink a few sips.

"Th's is gross," John whispered unhappily.

Zelenka had to agree - Pedialyte was disgusting. But John's protestations also worried him for a whole other reason. Zelenka had expected Ronon to be forcing Pedialyte down the throat of a mostly-unconscious John, because he had expected to be administering stitches to a mostly-unconscious John. But this John, while weak, was simply not unconscious. And giving amateur stitches to a person who was actually awake to feel them felt unimaginably worse.

Ronon forced a few more sips on John. John's eyes were drooping closed by the end, which Zelenka supposed was a very good thing. Ronon set John on the ground, and John immediately tried to curl in on himself. Ronon prevented that from happening, lightly pinning both of his arms, careful not to further damage the wounded one.

"You ready?" Ronon asked.

Zelenka nodded, feeling sick. He pulled the needle and thread out of the first-aid kit, along with the rubbing alcohol. He poured a healthy measure of rubbing alcohol over the needle, as well as his hands. He debated pouring it into John's wound as well, but decided that would probably cause more pain than it was worth.

"I apologize if I hurt you," Zelenka said stiffly. "I am not entirely sure what I am doing."

The corner of John's mouth crooked into a half-smile, even as his eyes stayed closed. "Awesome," he mumbled softly.

This upset Zelenka even more. Not only was Sheppard conscious, he was sarcastic. He wondered if it was too late to switch, and make Ronon do the stitching.

"I'm sorry," Zelenka told John again, and turned his injured wrist faceup, squinting in the dim light of the camping lanterns they were using in lieu of electricity. John's breath escaped through his teeth in a gentle hiss, and Zelenka thought grimly that if it was already hurting him, Sheppard wasn't going to last very long when the stitches actually started.

The wound was bad, at least in Zelenka's unprofessional estimation. Bad and...gross. Zelenka was a physicist - this wasn't really something he was used to. By virtue of living on Atlantis, he had received the odd injury, but he'd never really had to look at it. Beckett or Keller had just given him some pain pills, Zelenka had gone to sleep, and when he'd woken up everything was nicely bandaged and out of sight.

This was not the case at all with Sheppard's wrist. Ronon had made a fairly clean cut, so at least the wound looked easy to close, but that was only one aspect of the damage. Ronon's deep knife wound stretched nearly all the way across John's wrist, splitting right through the torn flesh from the spider. Zelenka shuddered at the sight of the original bite. John had killed the monstrous arachnid-like thing before Zelenka had really gotten a chance to see it, and now he was almost relieved he hadn't. Earth spiders never left jagged bite marks behind them - the worst Zelenka had ever seen were welts. Apparently, Pegasus spiders had teeth as well as venom. He didn't have the slightest idea how he was supposed to close up the bite marks, but they looked deep enough to warrant some effort.

Zelenka took a deep, shaky breath, and told himself that throwing up on the Colonel's open wound would be very, very bad. Nodding to Ronon, he gripped the needle a bit tighter and pushed the thought of what he was doing out of his mind. With his free hand, he reached out and took hold of John's wrist, trying to bring the edges of the wound closer together. He had no idea how to stitch up a human being, but he was hoping that the principles were similar to those in sewing.

Unfortunately, unlike cloth, humans felt pain, and at Zelenka's less-than-gentle touch, he felt John tense and try to pull away.

"Shep-"

"Sorry, sorry," John said breathlessly, his voice trembling slightly. "Keep...keep goin'. 'M okay."

"Very well," Zelenka said, knowing that Sheppard wasn't, but not really having another option. Gritting his teeth, he pushed the needle into John's arm at the far edge of the slash mark.

John squirmed slightly, whimpering in pain, but Ronon managed to keep him pretty much still. Zelenka thought that if he let himself stop to think, he would probably give up on this entire thing, so he just plunged the needle into John's arm again, ignoring the way John's breathing immediately sped up.

"It's just like cloth," Zelenka whispered to himself. He could feel sweat starting to drip into his eyes. When had he started sweating so much? It was still freezing in the Gateroom. "It's just like cloth."

"What was that?" Ronon asked.

Zelenka swallowed hard. "Are you sure...are you sure that the venom has been removed?" He had a sudden, horrible image of sewing up John with the poison still inside him. What if Ronon hadn't gotten enough blood out yet? What if the stitches made John's wound worse? What if…?

Ronon just shrugged. "Gotta stop the bleeding. Don't overthink it."

Right. Zelenka couldn't let himself overthink this, or he was never going to get through it. John whimpered as Zelenka stuck the needle through his skin again, but Zelenka managed to mostly ignore this. The rest of the process passed by in a blur, although by the time Zekenka was done his breathing had sped up almost as much as John's. John seemed to have mostly passed out, and he hardly twitched as Zelenka finished up his line of stitches and tied off the knot.

"Good job," Ronon said, sitting back on his heels.

Looking down at John's limp, pale form, Zelenka didn't feel like he'd done a very good job at all. "Is he…?"

"Sheppard?" Ronon said loudly, nudging John's shoulder gently with his hand. John stirred and moaned, involuntarily curling away from the touch. His eyes didn't open.

"He's fine," Ronon said definitively. "Just a little passed out."

"What do we…?"

"What he really needs is rest," Ronon said. "We need to get him in his sleeping bag, he'll catch a cold out here. In a few hours, we can try to get him to drink a little more of that stuff." He gestured at the bottle of Pedialyte, which was abandoned on the ground.

Zelenka thought a sleeping bag and some Pedialyte wasn't quite enough for this situation. But, he supposed, Ronon knew more about both injuries and John. Maybe all the Colonel did need was a night of uninterrupted rest, and he would be all better tomorrow.

Zelenka and Ronon manhandled John back into the sleeping bag. He woke up a few times, which was a relief. Every time John's eyes slid open, Zelenka became more and more sure that he hadn't inadvertently killed him.

Once the rest of the Colonel's awkwardly long limbs were safely encased back in the sleeping bag, Ronon took hold of his injured wrist and hastily wrapped a bandage around it a few times. John hissed at the movement, but his eyes didn't open. He was really asleep now, Zelenka thought.

Ronon finished off the bandage and tucked John's arm back inside the sleeping bag, then fumbled around for the zipper and pulled it all the way up to John's chin.

"For warmth?" Zelenka asked.

Ronon nodded, looking slightly sheepish. "And this way, if there's any more spiders around, they can't bite him."

Much to Zelenka's surprise, John's eyes drifted open. He looked terrible, pale and gaunt and in pain, but he nodded softly, looking a little more relaxed.

"Plus, if they come out, I'm gonna shoot 'em," Ronon said grimly, putting his hand on John's sleeping-bag-covered shoulder, then patting it. John nodded again, this time almost smiling. Then, he closed his eyes. Zelenka thought it was possible that he'd passed out more than fallen asleep, but at least he was resting.

"You should sleep too," Ronon told him, somewhat unexpectedly. "You gotta fix stuff tomorrow."

Zelenka cast an uncomfortable look at the darkness all around him, not wanting to admit what was on his mind. But they still didn't know where the spider had come from, and it was possible if not probable that there were more out there somewhere. He did not want to wake up to find Ronon slitting his wrist as well.

"I'm on watch," Ronon told him, casting a stormy look at Sheppard's sleeping form. "I'll look out for any more of those things, coming for either you or for Sheppard."

Even so, it took a long time for Radek to find sleep that night.

John woke up from dreams full of fangs. Any other time, he thought he would have snapped awake and upright, but right now he was far too weak. Instead, he just lay inside his sleeping bag cocoon, feeling his breathing slowly come back into his control as his heartbeat jumped in the aching wound on his wrist.

Daylight was spilling into the Gateroom, illuminating Ronon and what had to be thousands of pigeons. At least there weren't any spiders. The sound of the pigeons talking to each other was horribly annoying, but after nearly dying the night before, it sounded like music to John's ears.

"Hey," Ronon said. "You awake?"

John wasn't sure he wanted to be awake, but it didn't seem that he had an option. "Yeah," he managed. His throat was horrifyingly dry, but swallowing didn't seem to help much. In fact, it made everything a little worse - his mouth tasted like a disgusting combination of Pedialyte and vomit.

"Good," Ronon said. "How do you feel?"

"Need some water."

John pushed himself into a half-sitting position, then instantly regretted it as the world swooped around him. His memories of the night before were hazy, punctuated by alarming blank spots. But he thought there was a good chance he had at one point lost quite a bit of blood, and that might be why his head now felt like it was stuffed full of cotton.

"Whoa," Ronon said mildly as John tilted. However, he apparently felt that John was okay to sit up on his own, because he didn't reach out to help. John planted a hand behind him and bowed his head, breathing hard against the dizziness and nausea. A few seconds later, a bottle of water was pushed into his hand.

John drank a few sips, and nodded his thanks. A small part of his brain that he couldn't turn off reminded him that their water supply was limited, and he should probably try his best to conserve what he had.

"Okay," John said slowly. "What happened? Did I...did I get bit by a tarantula?"

That was one of the few things from the night before he was really fairly sure on - he had a very vivid memory of waking up to the massive spider crawling along his arm. But it just sounded so much like a nightmare that he wanted to be sure.

Ronon briefly explained what had happened - the huge spider, Ronon's attempt to save John from the venom, Zelenka's stitches. John looked down at his arm - it was neatly swathed in bandages, although beneath all that it was throbbing mercilessly. John grimaced. He really didn't want to see what it looked like underneath.

"Are there any more of them around?" John asked nervously.

"Not quite sure," Ronon replied, glancing behind him. "I didn't see any, but they gotta be coming from somewhere, you know?"

John nodded shakily, not trusting his voice to remain steady if he spoke. He swallowed hard, trying not to imagine spiders lurking in the corners of the Gateroom, lying in wait like the Iratus bugs in their webs.

"I'm gonna find out where they're comin' from today," Ronon told him, and John nodded again, closing his eyes as a wave of dizziness threatened to overwhelm him.

"Hey, you really don't look good," Ronon said, his voice cutting through the haze. That made sense - John didn't feel good either. "Need some coffee?"

At this point, John had absolutely no idea what he needed. A tarantula-free Atlantis, for one thing. He could also probably use some fluids, and about twenty hours' more sleep in a warm bed.

Unfortunately, Beckett and Keller were gone and John wouldn't be getting any of those things. He couldn't even go back to sleep, not with the ever-present threat of the tarantulas lurking in his mind. In that case, coffee probably was the best option.

"Yeah," John managed. At the very least, the coffee would take the puke-and-Pedialyte taste out of his mouth.

"Zelenka said he was bringing extra. He should be comin' soon," Ronon announced. "You gonna be up for helping him with the power?"

"Course," John said, trying to sound less weak and injured than he currently felt. "I c'n help."

At least, he hoped he could. The longer he was awake and upright, the more dizzy and drained he was beginning to feel. Even the thought of extricating himself from his sleeping bag seemed far too daunting.

Still, he also knew that he didn't have a choice. He was still the only one with the ATA gene, and Zelenka was bound to need that plenty of times. He would just have to manage it, no matter how shaky he was already beginning to feel. John told himself sternly that this is what the coffee was for.

Zelenka chose this moment to arrive back in the Gateroom, accompanied by the smell of freshly brewed coffee. John's stomach twisted, apparently caught in between his caffeine addiction and his leftover nausea.

Radek seemed surprised to see him awake. "Good morning, John," he said nervously, handing John a cup of coffee. John reached to take it with both hands, and then realized that he wasn't going to be able to. The hand with the spider bite was swollen and throbbing, and he seemed to have lost the fine motor control in his fingers. He took it one-handed, alarmed when his arm immediately dipped. But he managed to hold the coffee steady, and took a tentative sip. It settled his stomach, sort of, or at least didn't make the situation worse.

Ronon and Zelenka started talking about their plans for the day, spider-hunting and power-fixing, and John tuned them out. He didn't have the energy to focus on that right now. All he could do was concentrate on not spilling his coffee, and try to bring his brain back online.

John realized that at this point, two-thirds of the people on Atlantis were pretty badly injured. If there ended up being a true threat, it would pretty much be up to Zelenka to solve it. John didn't care for that at all, but there wasn't really much that could be done about it. Besides, John figured their luck had to start holding at some point, right? A meteor had already hit Atlantis. It had started massive fires, which had taken out the power. They had no water or heat, there were massive amounts of pigeons everywhere, and apparently now huge spiders too. Nothing else could possibly happen. John was pretty sure that wasn't allowed.

John only drank about half of his coffee - he spilled the rest. Drinking one-handed, especially when he was this shaky and weak, had turned out to be a bad idea. He had also forgotten about the burn in the center of his palm from his cooking fiasco, but hot coffee reminded him with a vengeance. Granted, it was pretty hard to focus on a tiny burn when his other hand felt like it was possibly about to fall off.

The coffee had made him feel marginally better. He was pretty sure he would be able to walk now, at least. However, he firmly declined when Zelenka offered him breakfast.

Zelenka sat down next to John. "I believe that I can bring the power back on today," he said. "Although I will require your ATA gene. Then I will be able to get to work repairing the water filtration system."

John nodded - he had figured as much. In fact, this was in some ways better than the news he had expected. He hadn't realized Zelenka was so close to repairing the power.

"What do I have to do?" John sighed.

"There is...ah, it resembles a satellite dish, but it is a conduit for power. It is on the outside of Atlantis, and when the meteor hit, the whole structure…," Zelenka indicated wild shaking with his hands, "and it was knocked loose. If we can reattach it, and turn it back on, I believe the power will be restored immediately."

John perked up - this sounded much easier than he had anticipated. He liked the sound of "immediately."

"That's not too bad," he said hopefully. "We just gotta reattach it?"

Zelenka made a face, and John felt his heart sink. "It is very high up," Zelenka said reluctantly.

"That's it?"

"Very high up," Zelenka insisted. "On a tower on the South Pier. There are ladders involved, and apparently the Ancients do not see the need for handrails, or basic safety protocols…. I do not like heights very much."

John fought back a smile, overwhelmingly relieved that something was going right for a change. "I'm a pilot. Liking heights is kinda in the job description. I told you about ferris wheels, right?"

Zelenka shot him a glare that could have peeled paint and shook his head. "I will have to climb it too, in order to make some of the modifications."

"It'll be a piece of cake, Radek," John promised, feeling infinitely better now that he felt more in control of the situation.

Zelenka muttered angrily under his breath, shaking his head, and Ronon stood up, buckling on his gun.

"I'm gonna go track these spider things, find out where they're coming from." He nodded to Zelenka and John and left the Gateroom, leaving John to conceal his bug-related shudders as best he could. Hopefully, the spiders weren't coming from anywhere near the section of Atlantis where John and Zelenka were headed.

"Ready?" Zelenka asked. John nodded, carefully not looking at the body of the tarantula that he'd shot the night before. He swallowed hard as a sudden wave of nausea swept through him, then heaved himself to his feet.

"Ready."

Before they'd gone more than a quarter of the way to the South Pier (without transporters, of course), Zelenka was legitimately worried that the Colonel was going to collapse in the middle of the hallway. Even before trying to walk, Sheppard had looked pale and ill, his sunken eyes ringed by dark circles, his manner listless. Radek, familiar with many instances of Sheppard damaging himself somehow, knew that this meant that John was fairly badly injured.

But now, it was far worse. What little color John had regained in his face was completely gone, leaving his face bloodless and hollow. He looked unsteady on his feet, and he was trembling slightly. It didn't look like the coffee had done much to help, if anything.

"Are you feeling alright?" Zelenka asked John.

"Yeah."

Zelenka thought it would be polite to wait at least ten minutes before asking John again, so he passed the time by trying to think through each step he would do to fix the power conduit.

"Are you feeling alright?" Zelenka asked, once he thought an appropriate amount of time had gone by.

"Yeah," John said. He sounded angrier but also somehow unconvinced. Zelenka looked at him more closely - his head was drooping against his chest, eyes half-lidded, one hand wrapped loosely around his middle. He was barely able to pick up his feet for each step, and watching him move, Radek was half-worried he would trip.

"Do you need-?"

"I said I'm fine," John growled. With visible effort, he straightened up, looking pale but determined. "Let's get the power back on. I want some damn heat."

They made it the rest of the way to the South Pier without incident, although by the end of their journey, Zelenka found himself subtly slowing their pace, trying to give John some small chance to rest.

Once again, Zelenka was struck by how strange the power setup was on Atlantis. They had known for years about the three strange discs positioned on spindly towers around Atlantis, but Zelenka hadn't had any idea how important they were until the meteor knocking one loose had taken out the rest of the power with it. Essentially, the disc took the power from the ZPM and naquadah, and distributed it around Atlantis, while also functioning as a breaker, and keeping any one area from getting overloaded. As near as Zelenka and Rodney had been able to figure, they were housed outside because they received some supplemental power from the sun, in case the ZPM was ever depleted but there was still some power held in reserves. However, they'd never been able to absolutely prove this - the design was completely unlike earth solar cells, which made it impossible to be sure.

Zelenka had been unable to verify the state of the other two discs, but he figured they had been damaged as well. With only one down, Zelenka assumed the other two would have been able to make up the difference, but apparently Atlantis did in fact need at least one to function.

This was news to Zelenka. He had thought that the other power sources would automatically take over if the discs were down, and as soon as he had time, he was determined to do a thorough study of the discs - they probably held technology they could use. Maybe he could study them behind Mckay's back, and when they finally revealed something important, he could….

Zelenka shook himself slightly. Now was not the time to be thinking about one-upping Rodney. He could do that later, once he'd restored Atlantis to its former, undamaged-by-meteors state, and covered up all evidence of any subsequent issues. Otherwise, Rodney would never, ever let him forget it.

"It's up there," Zelenka said, pointing to the very faraway looking top of the soaring tower. "I will climb up behind you, so when -if- I fall, I will not send you toppling to your death as well."

John blinked at him for a moment, then gave him a slightly vacant smile. "Funny. I said you were gonna be fine. See, you're makin' jokes and everything."

Zelenka, who had not been making a joke, sighed heavily. The Colonel, much like Rodney, had an amazing knack for purposefully misunderstanding other people's humor to suit his own needs.

Of course, taking a second look at Sheppard, Zelenka thought it was possible that he was being unfair. Even though they had stopped walking a few minutes ago, John was still breathing with difficulty, and his face was an unnerving shade of greyish blue.

"Are you-"

"What?" John snapped, around an uneven, shallow breath.

Zelenka bit off the 'alright' before it could leave his mouth and shrugged. "I was going to say 'ready.'"

He watched as the Colonel deflated, and as the embarrassed aggression drained away it left him looking even sicker.

"Oh. Yeah." John nodded a few times, then took hold of the ladder with his uninjured hand. He looked at his bandaged left wrist blankly, as if surprised that it belonged to him. Then, screwing up his face in an expression he no doubt hoped Zelenka wouldn't notice, he gingerly placed his left hand awkwardly on the ladder as well. Zelenka followed him, beginning to think that his station behind John on the ladder might prove to be less to protect John from Zelenka and more to protect John from himself.