Chapter Three

"Start at the point when you woke up in the cell, Colonel."

Kate was perched in her chair, pulled away from the desk so that she could sit exactly opposite of me, with no barriers. I wanted barriers. She thought it helped; I thought it was claustrophobic. I'd woken from the sedative, wanting to go to my room and sleep it the rest of the way off, only to find that I was removed from duty. Beckett had apologized, his words hollow, saying he never should've put me back on before. It'd been too soon and he blamed my current condition on his own bad judgment. I'd almost confessed, then, just to rid the man of his self-recriminations.

"It's in the report," I said, dully.

She crossed her legs, and tilted her head, lips pursed in sympathy. "Actually, it's not."

Confusion reigned for a brief moment before I sighed. "I haven't written it yet." Stupid. Every mistake I made kept nailing my coffin tighter. "I forgot."

"That's understandable."

The bitter chuckle was short. "No," I said. "It's not. I meant to do it days ago."

She adjusted my file on her lap, and leaned forward. "Colonel, do you realize that you are the only one expecting yourself to jump back in the saddle, so to speak? You're the one trying to pretend you weren't captured, interrogated, had your friend and co-worker murdered in front of you because you wouldn't talk."

"I couldn't," I replied, voice hoarse.

The smile was understanding, comforting…clinical. "Of course not."

I sat in the chair, not knowing what to say. She didn't understand, couldn't. After a few moments of silence stretching tautly between us, she leaned back. "I think we've done enough for today, Colonel." Her eyebrow arched as she eyed me. "Are you taking your medicine?"

Beckett had discharged me, but only on the condition that I willingly took my happy pills. I agreed, but every day I was flushing them. They made me sick, tense, cotton-headed. "Sure," I said, but inwardly flinched because she'd read my hesitation for the lie that it was.

"John," she sighed. "It's for your own good."

"I'm a big boy, Doc. I can decide what's good for me on my own."

I was afraid she'd call Carson. Tell him I wasn't following orders, and turn me over to him, but she shook her head. "No, you can't. Not right now – but I'll let you keep your little secret, unless you fail to make progress in our sessions, am I understood, Colonel?"

"Like crystal," I replied.

Leaving her office, I headed to a place I shouldn't. People stared. Part of that was my fault. I was dressed in sweats and a t-shirt, figured what the hell, right? If I was off duty, might as well make the most of it. But instead, all I did was keep reminding everyone I ran into that McKay had died, and I was damaged. The only thing they didn't know was just how much.

When I walked into Rodney's lab, it was quiet. I'd been here before, right after Beckett had released me after the rescue. No one had touched his things yet, and I drifted over to his desk. The coffee cup was still there. I smiled ruefully remembering that last cup. We were getting ready for our mission, or rather, I'd been getting ready. McKay had gotten tied up working on a compression program. He was still trying to figure out a way to preserve more of the database in case we had to blow the city and beat a hasty retreat.

I found him typing furiously over his keyboard, the mostly full cup sitting forgotten by his side on the desk. I'd pulled up a chair, drank his coffee and waited. By the time he finished, he reached for the cup, found it empty, looked over at me and scowled. "You drank my coffee."

The smile I had was soft, and slow, and full of feigned innocence. "No, I didn't. You must've drank it while in your work-induced coma."

"I'd remember drinking my coffee."

I snorted, and folded my arms, leaning back in the chair and swiveling. "You can't even remember to be in the gateroom on time."

A look of dawning realization twisted into annoyance. "So you drank my coffee to get back at me?"

Smirking, I stood. "No, I drank your coffee because I was thirsty." I shut the cover on his laptop. "Let's go before Elizabeth sends a search party after us."

Lifting the cup now, looking at the mocha crescent moon in the bottom…I ached. If he'd been on time, or if I'd stayed, and got him another cup of fucking coffee and discussed his algorithm…if if if, it'd always be 'if'. Two letter word that held more power than all the letters in the alphabet combined.

"I couldn't do it, you know," I said to the desk. To the chair where he'd be sitting if… "I'm not sure I can wrap my mind around what that says about me -"

Obviously, he had known I couldn't do it. His eyes had found mine, bluer than I'd ever seen them before, and damn if he hadn't understood. But I didn't…son of a bitch, I didn't! I threw the coffee cup across the room, listening as the ceramic shattered into a hundred pieces, just like me.

I'd done it for Sumner, a guy I could barely stand, but I hadn't been able to do it for Rodney, a guy that I considered to be my best friend. What kind of fucked up statement did that say about me? When it mattered, I couldn't find the courage. That's what I wouldn't tell them. It was the secret I couldn't tell.

I'd told the truth to a point. We'd been captured off-world, that much everyone knew, because Ronon and Teyla had been with us. The Wraith queen had interrogated us together, but something allowed us to resist the mind probes. Rodney thought it was the ATA gene, and when we escaped, he'd wanted to have Carson look into it. When the queen had come back a third time, she'd pulled Rodney into the middle, and latched on. She only tasted at first, and I'd wondered why, when a Wraith warrior walked in and handed me my gun. McKay had been shaking, but he hadn't pleaded for his life. Somehow, staring at me, he'd found the guts he needed. Horrified, but not begging. I only wish I could've said the same.

"Tell me the location of Earth, or your friend dies," she'd sneered.

When I'd asked why they'd given me the pistol, she'd taken a little bit more of McKay and whispered seductively, "Because you fail to have the courage to do what you must – if you shoot me, your friend dies. If you do nothing, your friend dies. If you tell me where Earth is, he'll live. If you shoot him, I will lose my leverage over you, and the location of Earth, but you do not have the strength of mind to do what you should."

She had played me like a guitar, though I still didn't know what she'd hoped to accomplish with her mind games. Three warriors had kept stunners pointed on me; I couldn't take her out, because she was right. She'd drain Rodney and regenerate her damaged parts. If she kept up draining Rodney, I wasn't sure I wouldn't beg for her to stop. To give her something that would make her stop…time; we needed more time for the rescue to come. There was always a rescue. We'd done it before; Rodney had done it for me before. They wouldn't let us down, I knew it, so we only needed to hold on. If I shot McKay, and they beamed us out, then there'd be no rescue…I couldn't do it. Even as she drained him, year by year, I looked at the pistol, and back to him, and I couldn't give up on the slim hope that remained; the hope that the bullet would permanently take away.

And she'd killed him. At first, slow, then faster, as her anger over my refusal to cooperate grew. When it was over, I was stone silent, cold, and unable to even move. His body…his fucking body…was on the floor. She walked by me, and plucked the gun out of my hand before I could even think to shoot myself. "Pity," she whispered. "I rather hoped you would have the courage."

I'd finally stumbled over to his corpse, dropping next to it, and alternately pleading for a small spark of life left, and not for one. I wanted to say I was so damn sorry, but I was afraid of the accusation and pain that I might see. It didn't matter; she hadn't left even a moment of life in him.

The next day, Ronon and Lorne had blown the door, finding me sitting by the desiccated body. I know my voice had shook as I asked, "What took you so long?"

Lorne had sworn, and punched the wall. Ronon didn't say anything. He came over, picked me up, and carried me out of there, and I'd been too everything to protest. I later learned, after dropping me off on the Daedalus, he'd returned, and carried McKay's remains back on his own. They'd delivered the retrovirus to the Hive ship, and then nuked it after we were rescued. One of us, at any rate.

My eyes drifted off the shards of ceramic, and over to his cot. He'd slept in here some nights. Even as my feet moved forward, I knew I should turn around and leave. On the way, I noticed a pack on the floor by the cot. It was Rodney's field pack, and there was his laptop. Someone must have gotten it from the Wraith, also. Lorne or Ronon – didn't matter which. I lifted the laptop out of the Velcro cover, and settled on the cot, lifting the lid and powering it up in one smooth motion.

The last program was still running. The algorithm. I'd have to give this to Zelenka when I was finished. Clicking on c drive, I searched through the folders, not really sure of why I was doing it. "What did you leave for me?" I asked McKay, because just as surely as I knew Rodney liked to leave sarcastic little warning signs all over, I knew he'd left something on his computer in case he died, painfully and horribly, as he always liked to say. I only wish it hadn't proven to be true.

I found it. There under c: program files/Bad shit/Sheppard.wmv – a video file. I double clicked it, already tensing at the impact I knew was to come, and when the program opened to Rodney McKay's face too close to the video camera, I found myself instead smiling. That was him. Too close to everything.

"I think this is recording," he said, irritated. "They always make these things so complicated that a kid can do it, but a thirty something astrophysicist can't. Nothing like reality to put you in your place," he cracked.

Rodney was wearing his blue uniform – the one he'd taken to wearing after the first Siege on Atlantis. He had a bandage above his eye, and I knew right away when he'd filmed this. After he'd been submerged under the ocean. He'd almost died then, alone. But he hadn't. My plan had worked, and we'd saved him in the nick of time, but the pilot he'd been with wasn't so lucky. I'd known he was shaken. Beckett had kept him for a day afterwards, and then he'd disappeared.

When I finally tracked him down, he asked me for a game of gin rummy, and never mentioned what happened down there again. Now I knew what he'd gone and did.

He laughed nervously on the screen. "I can't believe you're watching this, I mean really, how many times do I have to evade death for it to get the point; I don't want to go. I count at least five times in the past year and a half." His face twisted into a sardonic grimace. "Guess death didn't get the point, after all."

I shook my head. Leave it to McKay to think he could dictate terms to the grim reaper. But, then again, I kind of wish it'd worked.

"So, I leave you everything."

I admit, I gaped. Everything?

"You're probably all touched and thinking 'wow' but it's not that much; due payment for putting up with me all these years. My sister gets the life insurance, but everything else, knock yourself out – not literally, but, whatever – you know what I mean."

The stupid thing is, I never even considered Rodney's will. I knew he had one; we all did. But the idea of an inheritance from him…I don't know, maybe it was part of my mental block against the entire process. I pulled my eyes away from the live McKay on the screen to stare at the things in his dead office. Everything was powered down, but his things were still out. The now broken cup, a book, a picture of us shortly after we'd arrived, standing with Carson and Elizabeth on the command deck. He was leaning across, saying something to Grodin. The reaper had been extremely gluttonous when it came to our little expedition. I was getting pretty pissed at him.

"Hey, flyboy, over here – still talking," called McKay.

I turned back to the screen, and his grin was just like I remembered. Smug, arrogant – I'd give anything to see it in person again.

"Psychic super powers," he said, waggling his hands. He paused, vulnerability crept across his face, and his hands fell. "It's actually kind of creepy how well I know you. Let me guess – you were looking at my office; searching for something of me, and full of regrets.

"Oh, don't look so crushed, it's sickening. We knew the day would come, hence, this recording. If you haven't done one for me, I'm suitably insulted from the afterworld, I assure you."

"Great; I've already got a pissed off ghost to haunt me." Because of course, I hadn't. I wasn't the king of 'plan ahead'. "It's partly your fault," I accused the screen McKay. "You always figured a way out – I never believed there'd come a time when you couldn't…or I couldn't." I had to be fair. He'd trusted in me, as much as I'd trusted in him.

"Oh, please, I'm not going to haunt you."

Was this a joke? Had he programmed his computer to respond? I lifted the laptop, looking for something.

"Put me down."

I dropped the laptop. What the fuck? I scanned the room, my level of freaked had just ratcheted to heebie jeebie.

"It's nothing special; a program to respond to actions. Actually, Radek helped me." The Rodney on the screen leaned forward in his chair and pulled a thin electronics device off the counter. "It's something we found in a lab. Interactive AI. Don't worry, I'm really dead. I didn't have time to fiddle with it much, so once this runs out in -" he looked at his watch, "five more minutes, you'll have seen the only remaining part of me." His eyes turned directly on to the monitor – right at me. The teasing arrogance fell away, and he said with too much sadness, "Remember."

The camera picture faded, and I could hear McKay muttering something about a dead battery, and then the program stopped. He was gone, again. There for a moment, I'd had him.

Peering at the small slide bar on the player, I moused over it, and reset it to halfway, thinking maybe I could get him to interact more with me, but it only played out exactly as it had before, even to the end. Must be a one-time deal. And I'd wasted it by staring at the screen in freaked surprise. Great.

I sighed, and shut the laptop, shoving it off to the side. Less than a month ago, he was here. I tugged the blanket up till I had it wrapped around my shoulders, and leaned against the wall. I was relaxing myself in time, and imagining things as they'd been back then. Nothing but the soft emergency lights were on, the ones that were always on, unless you did an override. I'd kept the main lights off. Somehow I had to put this behind me, to move on, but closing my eyes, all I saw again, was McKay aging rapidly, and holding me with his eyes as he did so.