He knew he shouldn't have let her go. Well, it was not like he could have done anything to prevent her from going. After all she was the leader of this expedition and therefore in charge. But he could have insisted on going with her. He should have.
He sighed.Maybe there was nothing wrong. Maybe the gate would activate any minute and she'd step through.
But with every minute that passed, this option became less likely. He found himself restlessly pacing the control room. People were starting to look at him. He didn't care. Something was wrong. He could feel it.
Why had he not objected more strongly when she told him he still had to recover from the latest fight he had gotten into off world and that she would take Lorne and his team with her? Carson had released him from the infirmary two days ago and he felt perfectly OK. There was still sometimes a slight pain in his shoulder where the arrow had struck him, but he could handle that.
It was not that he didn't trust Lorne. He was a good man. But still, if something had gone wrong - he should have been there himself.
But he was here, in Atlantis, and she and the team that was supposed to protect her were more than two hours overdue. What could possibly have gone wrong? She wanted to negotiate for food, that didn't sound very dangerous, did it?
She had wanted to do this. And he had understood her. Things in the city were running smoothly at the moment and she had said she was looking forward to getting out of the city for a few hours. And there had been no reason to think they would run into any kind of trouble on that planet.
It just wasn't like her to not let them know when something unexpected came up. And it wasn't like Lorne, either. Besides, they had tried to establish radio contact a couple of times, but hadn't been successful so far.
He went over to the guy at the controls.
"Try to radio Dr. Weir's team again."
"But, Sir, we tried five minutes ago..."
"Do it!" John ordered, a lot harsher than he had intended to.
The man shrugged and started pushing a few buttons.
Teyla entered the room. "Any news?" she inquired, a worried expression on her face.
John shook his head. "Nothing so far."
"Sir" the man at the controls looked up "They're still not answering, Sir!"
John turned around to address Teyla.
"That's it! We'll start searching. Get the rest of the team and tell them to be ready in twenty minutes."
Teyla gave him a concerned look. "Are you sure? They are only two hours overdue and the people on that planet are the most peaceful..."
"I don't care!" John cut cut her off "They wouldn't just stay away that long without telling us. We can't even establish radio contact. Something's wrong and we're not just gonna sit here and wait. The sooner we start searching the better!"
Teyla nodded, squeezed his shoulder and left.
He turned around to the gate and glared at it angrily, as though it was the gate's fault that the team hadn't returned when they were supposed to. Then he headed back to his quarters to get ready.
They searched everywhere in the village. They flew a jumper over the area to search for signs. They retraced the steps of each member of the team. And while it was quite easy to determie the places their friends had been, there was no hint of where they'd gone. They seemed to have vanished into thin air. And all the people they questioned either claimed to have never seen them at all or swore they had seen them head back to the gate and go home. Which, apparently, they hadn't done.
They could only have gated to another planet.
In which case, John thought, it would be next to impossible to find them. He knew there was no way to find out which planet they had gated to. And why would they have done so in the first place? The truth was, they wouldn't just have gone somewhere else, without telling anyone. Not willingly. Not without being forced to do so.
This was driving him crazy.There seemed to be nothing he could do, yet he needed to do something! He needed to think. But thinking, worried as he was, seemed to be the last thing he was capable of doing right now.
All he could think about was that he should have been here. In his head he could only see her face, hear her voice. He thought of the many times he had promised himself that he would always protect her. Always be there for her. Never let anything happen to her. And now she was gone. Missing. And although he knew it wasn't really his fault, he started calling himself all kinds of names for ever letting her go without him.
"Hey"
Ronon's voice made him start. He turned his head. "What is it?"
"They're not here."
"Yeah. I've noticed that." he answered.
"Shouldn't we return to Atlantis, in case they come back or try to contact us?" Teyla asked.
John rubbed his face with both hands. He needed to think!
"I don't know!" he heard himself say. He looked at Ronon and Teyla, who exchanged a brief look of concern, and then focused on Rodney, who by now also started to look rather worried.
"Are you sure we've looked everywhere? What if we missed something?" He tried to keep the despair out of his voice, but realized himself that he wasn't too successful with hiding it.
"We have searched everywhere." Teyla assured him. "No one knows anything or has seen them since the time they were supposed to return. There is nothing more we can do here."
"I guess you're right." John admitted.He hated the idea of just sitting around in Atlantis, waiting for something to happen.
"Rodney, you're sure you can't find out where they went, IF they used the gate?"
Rodney shook his head. "As I have already told you, there's absolutely no way to tell which address was dialed in last. Believe me, if there was a way to find out, I'd already have done it, don't you think?"
John sighed and looked away.
He knew that everyone was worried and concerned, and that he was practically in charge now. He had to decide what to do next. But suddenly he felt like he couldn't handle this. Not with everything that was on his mind.
Well, there was basically only one thing on his mind. One person. He asked himself whether this was the same kind of thing she was going through everytime someone went missing. He asked himself whether she had ever felt this way about him, when he was in danger. He pushed that thought away and turned back to his team. He had to concentrate on what needed to be done next.
"We're heading back to the village." he informed them "We need the stargate address of every planet these folks have ever been in contact with. The other teams can return to Atlantis."
Eight days. They were gone now for more than one week. And still they had found no sign of them. John and his team had returned to the planet a few times, hoping against hope to find something they had overlooked on their previous visits, or to find someone who could tell them something new. But, of course, they hadn't found anything.
He was sitting in her office, staring at her empty chair, and he felt the despair he had tried to control for so many days finally taking hold of him.
She was gone. He had lost her. Before he had even had the chance to tell her - to tell her what? That was the part he had never really allowed himself to think about. From the day they met he'd known that there was something special about her. He had felt comfortable in her presence. And this feeling had frightened him so much, he had run from it. Into dangerous situations. Into the arms of other women. Just away from her.
Yet he had never been able to escape. He had always returned and sought her company again.
He got up and started pacing her office. He had been so damn stupid. If she would only come back now. He smashed his fist against the doorframe, barely noticing the pain that shot up his wrist.
His mind was just refusing to accept the fact that he could do nothing. He simply had to find a way to find her. To save her. Hell, he didn't even know if she was in any kind of immediate danger. Or, for all he knew, she could as well be dead already. He winced at the thought.
'She is not dead! She is not dead!' he kept repeating that sentence in his mind over and over again.
Oh god, he needed her to be alive, to be OK.
He made his way to the control room. He just stood there, staring at the gate, willing it to activate and bring her back to him, almost disappointed when nothing happened.
There was so much work waiting for him. While she was gone, he was in charge. At least the work might help him take his mind off her. Which was, of course, stupid, since first of all it was her work he was doing, and in addition he constantly kept asking himself how she would have handled things. So that if... when she came back, she'd find everything pretty much unchanged.
Anyway, the work still needed to be done and if there was nothing he could do to rescue her, he could at least run her city the way she would have wanted it.