For the first time in almost as far back as he could remember, John Sheppard did not want to be high up. Even before he'd wanted to be a pilot, John had loved heights. He'd climb up furniture, rocks, trees, windows - anything to watch the ground disappear below him. Being up high made him feel safe, but there was still that spark of danger that John had never been able to resist.

Apparently, that was not the case when John was suffering from intense vertigo due to massive blood loss from a fucking monster tarantula bite. The world was swooping horribly around him, threatening to send the coffee he'd drunk earlier right back up. Looking down made it worse, looking up made it worse, closing his eyes made it worse. The only thing he seemed able to do was stare directly at his hands, and the ladder in front of him, and try not to look anywhere else.

He hadn't had much of a headache when he'd woken up in the morning, but now he had a strange one building up. Most of the time his head felt fine, if a little tender, but every few minutes, he would feel a sudden pain behind his eyes. It felt like he was being stabbed in the face, and even though each instance lasted less than a second, it was leaving him worn out and ill.

He also thought the headaches were a bad sign. Everything else - the weakness, the nausea, the vertigo - could theoretically be attributed to the blood loss. A small headache would have made sense, simply because he was sure he was dehydrated, but this constricting, on-and-off headache was not familiar to him. And over the course of his life, he'd lost enough blood to know. The headache wasn't bad enough to be much of a problem, but it meant, most likely, that there was still some poison inside him. Hopefully not enough to kill him. But enough to do this.

"Can we...stop for a second?" John asked. He hadn't realized he was about to ask until the words were already out of his mouth.

"Yes," Zelenka said, sounding a little shaky. He stopped moving up the ladder.

John hadn't really thought this through, and he didn't want Zelenka to have to stop too. Zelenka was scared of heights - that seemed like it would increase the likelihood of him falling on top of John. He just hadn't wanted Zelenka to get to the top, and at that point realize that John was no longer behind him.

"Go on ahead," John said, alarmed by how unsteady his voice sounded. "I'll be there in a minute."
Zelenka didn't need to be told twice, and he left John hanging onto the ladder. John lowered his forehead against his hand, trying to breathe steadily. Now that he had stopped moving, he thought it might be easier if he never started moving again.

But that didn't seem like a very good way to bring power back to the city.

John forced himself to start back up the ladder again, trying not to think about how badly he was shaking and how easy it would be for him to slip. He knew he was going too slow, probably slow enough that even Zelenka was annoyed.

John couldn't help it. He was utterly swamped by a disproportionate wave of fatigue, along with another of the stabbing headaches. This...this wasn't normal. Climbing a ladder shouldn't make him feel like he'd just run a marathon.

John swallowed dizzily, not wanting to admit that something was wrong. John forced back nausea and kept climbing, ignoring the pain from his injured wrist.

He kept climbing until he was sure he was almost to the top of the ladder, and then the dizziness swirled around him, making him lightheaded and uncertain. For a horrible moment, John was sure that he was about to lose his grip on the ladder and fall to the hard tile below. Clutching onto the rungs as hard as he could with his good arm, John closed his eyes and struggled to breathe.

Even with the blood loss, Zelenka had expected John to be dogging his heels all the way up the ladder. Radek would be the one to slow them down, not the pilot. But Zelenka had made it to the top of the ladder almost ten minutes ago, and there hadn't been any sign of John except the occasional shuffle or loud breath.

Slightly worried, Zelenka stuck his head over the edge of the platform and spotted the top of John's head, squeezed up against the ladder. He hadn't hardly moved at all from where Zelenka had continued on without him.

"Come on, Sheppard," Zelenka said, struggling for something both encouraging and motivating. Perhaps some sort of good-natured insult - the military types always seemed to be throwing that sort of thing around. "I, umm, I thought you said you were good at this?"

Sheppard's head tilted up towards Zelenka, and he made a very soft, very wounded sort of sound. His eyes were glassy and dazed-looking, and couldn't quite manage to focus on Zelenka, but he stretched out his bandaged wrist and laboriously began hauling himself to the next rung. Zelenka listened in horror as he choked off a whimper, then continued to climb.

"It was a joke," Zelenka said lamely. "Not...not a very good one, I was attempting to…please, are you alright?"

John didn't answer, at least not until he dragged himself onto the platform. Feeling increasingly guilty, Zelenka offered him a hand. John didn't take it, although he looked like he wanted to.

John stayed sitting, while Zelenka got up and started exploring the platform. The platform itself had lots of panels and screens, which would probably display information about the disc. In a normal situation, where the problem was mechanical instead of physical, they might even allow Zelenka to fix it right here from the platform. But the disc had been knocked loose, and it would be impossible to reattach it from a computer. And anyways, he couldn't even turn any of these things on.

Zelenka gave John what he felt was an appropriate amount of time, until the pilot started to look somewhat revived. "Alright," Zelenka said. "There's a catwalk along the outside of the platform. I believe the disc is about fifteen feet down. You'll need to turn it on, and it should be relatively obvious how to reattach it. Even so, I will of course be talking you through the whole thing…."

John looked rather ill at the thought of walking around the outside of the platform on a catwalk, but he pulled himself unsteadily to his feet. He made his way to the door, and peered out. Then he looked back at Zelenka uneasily.

"There's no railing."

"I, ah...are you sure?"

Sheppard didn't answer, and Zelenka looked out the doorway too. There were the clear remains of a railing, but it was...less than useless. All that was really left were the sharp posts that would have once held the guardrail, and those would probably make a fall worse. Zelenka wasn't sure when the railing had been damaged - it could have been any number of the storms or Wraith attacks or other natural disasters that they'd dealt with since they'd been here, or it could have been damaged before they even arrived.

Either way, it was gone now.

"You will just have to stay very close to the wall," Zelenka suggested.

John did not look like he liked that suggestion, but he lacked the energy to protest. He inched himself out onto the catwalk, hands splayed against the wall. Zelenka watched with his heart in his mouth, wondering if he was sending the Atlantis Military Commander to his death.

"Would you like me to look for a rope?" Zelenka asked.

John answered by stumbling. Hard. He caught himself on the wall - barely - as Zelenka looked on in horror.

"Come back, come back!" Zelenka yelled. John didn't move, staying tight against the wall with his eyes squeezed shut. Zelenka could see his chest rising and falling as he began breathing heavily.

Zelenka was just trying to decide whether or not he should go and fetch the pilot when John's eyes opened and he scrambled back along the wall towards safety. Zelenka reached out automatically to steady him, even though at this point, he was too far away to catch Sheppard if he fell.

Before Zelenka had time to do much more than begin to panic, John was grabbing his outstretched hand and Zelenka found himself guiding John's downward trajectory as the man toppled heavily to the floor in the relative safety of the platform.

"Are you alright, Colonel?" Zelenka asked frantically, as John curled in on himself, panting for air. John's response was to throw up on Zelenka's shoes.

"Můj bože," Zelenka gasped, staggering backward before he realized that neither of those were probably the correct way to react. Gathering his wits, he took a deep breath, steeled himself, and hovered uncertainly over the prone form of the Colonel.

"Umm. Are you feeling better now?"

"Mmhmm," John whispered miserably, but his eyes stayed closed and the fingers on his uninjured hand were gripping the ground tightly, as though it might get away from him. He did not look like a man who "felt better now."

"I will do this part," Zelenka said, in his most magnanimous tone. "You can just...lie there. And I will bring you the device."

"Mmm," John mumbled, but Zelenka couldn't tell if he was attempting to agree with the plan or if he was just whimpering.

"Well. Umm, I will be right back. Unless I die horribly, in which case you and Ronon very likely will as well. Hopefully, I will be right back."

John still didn't answer in words, but he did groan softly and retch again. Zelenka grimaced, unsure at this point whether he was more worried for himself or the Colonel.

Ronon rounded the corner of the hallway, spray can held up in defense in case of spiders. He wasn't sure exactly what weapons one should use against a giant tarantula. He figured his gun would probably work fine, since his gun could kill pretty much anything, but he'd found a can of bug spray in the kitchen and that would probably work even better. He'd just have to use a lot, since the spiders were pretty big bugs.

So far in his search for the origin of the spiders, he'd come across a few key pieces of information. One of them, or at least something he suspected, was that the spiders were actually eating the pigeons.

He supposed that made sense. Since he was pretty confident spiders couldn't swim, they must have already been on Atlantis prior to the meteor. Not that he was going to tell Shep that. But if they'd already been on Atlantis prior to the meteor, and they were clearly okay with munching on people, Ronon knew there must be some reason that they'd chosen to come out now. The pigeons made that clear though. Their food source had migrated.

Even though it had made sense, he still hadn't exactly expected to turn a corner and find a bloody, apparently beheaded pigeon carcass, being torn into shreds by a huge spider that looked exactly like the one John had shot. Ronon had tried to spray it with bug spray, but as soon as it had seen him coming, it had scurried away. Bug spray, Ronon found, did not have a very good range.

Ronon considered laying a trap, so he could really test his bug spray theory, but he decided that he probably didn't want to make one of the bugs come towards him. He hated to admit when he was beat, but he'd survived long enough to know it. Ronon's burns stung and itched, sapped his energy and mobility, and Sheppard was...well, Ronon still wasn't convinced Sheppard wasn't dying. He'd certainly looked like it this morning. In this wild, dangerous version of Atlantis, all three of them were necessary to survive. One more serious injury would cripple Ronon, and then where would they be? As much as Ronon hated it, he had to be more careful now.

He had to be more careful, but he still intended to find a damn spider, and figure out how to kill it dead.

Once Zelenka left, John managed to drag himself into a sitting position. He immediately regretted it as the world spun ruthlessly around him - he had been dizzy before, but he had never known dizziness like what he had experienced when he got out on the catwalk. He felt like the ground was both rocking and spinning beneath him, and possibly that his head was rapidly spinning the opposite direction.

John braced a hand on the ground, leaned forward, and spit out another mouthful of vomit. The nausea was absolutely horrendous, but it had somehow taken a backseat to the dizziness. John knew he'd been sick several times already, but he felt detached from that. The spinning would grow to an unbearable level, John's stomach would contract, he'd vomit exactly where he was, since he lacked the strength to move, and that was that. Nothing felt real.

John managed to find a wall, and he leaned back against it. He tried to decide if he felt better keeping his eyes opened or closed. Neither seemed to help. He anchored one of his hands to the floor, one to the wall behind him, like a drunk person fighting the spins. He wondered if dizziness could kill a person. He wondered vaguely if this is what motion sickness felt like. But he quickly rejected that - if that was true, no one with motion sickness would be able to bring themselves to get on a plane or go in a car.

No, John was starting to become increasingly sure that this horrifying weakness and the debilitating nausea was the result of the spider bite. He must have automatically tensed his injured wrist at the memory of the tarantula thing, because suddenly John's dizziness was overtaken by a wave of pain. He gasped softly, mostly to avoid whimpering again, then very, very carefully brought his bandaged arm in front of his face.

It was a little difficult for him to focus his eyes, due to the dizziness, or the pain, or some combination of the two. Whatever the issue, it took John a good thirty seconds to determine that beneath the bandages, his wrist looked awfully swollen. More than he thought it should.

"Noooo," John whispered to himself. He really, really didn't want it to be poisoned. He'd had far too many encounters with poison from Pegasus insects, and it had never gone well for him. In fact, it had only ever been incredibly traumatic. He wasn't eager to add another experience to his laundry list of Pegasus entomology fiascos.

Besides, they didn't have access to doctors. They didn't even have access to water. If Ronon really hadn't gotten rid of the poison, then John was about as good as dead. And if there was nothing they could do either way, then John would wait as long as he could before admitting it. If he didn't say it aloud, then maybe he could stop it from coming true….

"Colonel Sheppard?"

John hadn't realized his eyes were closed. And now that they were closed, he wasn't entirely sure how to get them open. Was he lying down? Sitting up? Without opening his eyes, he couldn't tell. Of course, with the way his head was spinning, he wasn't sure he could tell even if his eyes were open.

"I have brought the disc," Zelenka's voice continued.

"Oh?" John said softly to the ground, or maybe to Zelenka, or maybe to the wall.

"Can you...touch it? I need you to turn it on." Zelenka sounded impatient. John was fairly sure that he was supposed to be doing something, but he was too busy trying to stay upright to remember what it was.

"No," John mumbled, digging his uninjured hand into the floor and hoping that he'd given Zelenka the right answer.

The next thing he knew was pain, as Zelenka's fingers closed around his injured wrist. John gasped weakly. He could tell that Zelenka was trying to be gentle, but even the slight pressure necessary to lift his wrist off the ground was agonizing.

"I am sorry, Colonel," Zelenka said wretchedly. "I promise, this is necessary if you would like to drink water."

Drinking water did sound like something that John wanted to do. Not now, per se, but certainly at some point in the future. He was pretty sure any water he drank now would come right back up.

"And then you'll be able to fix it?" John asked weakly, feeling the smooth metal under his fingers.

"Then I'll be able to fix it," Zelenka confirmed.

John kept his eyes shut tight, and tried to focus on nothing but that.