Chapter Eight: Don't Know What You Got Till It's Gone
A light tap at Elizabeth's door roused her from her laptop ... thankfully. She wasn't sure how many more reports on the state of Atlantis's grain supplies over the last six months that she could handle. Automatically her eyes flicked to the small clock in the corner of the computer screen before she looked up. Past time for Sheppard's team to check in. She'd been expecting someone at her door, one way or another.
"Dr. Weir?" the gate tech said. "You wanted to be informed when Sheppard's team made their check-in. Well, it's past time, and we tried establishing an outgoing wormhole to P2R-517 and couldn't raise them on the radio."
Elizabeth drew a deep breath. "Thank you. I'll be in the gateroom in a min--"
Her radio crackled. "Dr. Weir?" the accented voice said.
"...minute. Hello, Radek," she said into the radio as the gate tech vanished from her doorway.
"Did they check in?"
Weir smiled. "You've been watching the clock too, haven't you?" The smile dropped off her face. "No, they didn't. Now, there are a couple of things to keep in mind here," she added, overriding him as he started to speak. "First off, it's not at all unusual for the off-world teams to miss a check, especially Sheppard's team. If they're, say, at a tricky point in some negotiation, or deep in some investigation of alien technology, they may not break it off to come back and send us a call." Her mouth twisted in a wry smile; this she knew from long experience. "Also, this planet is known to block radio communication; they'd have to be right at the gate to talk to us. Normally, we'd wait through another check-in cycle before we started to worry."
"But this is not a normal situation."
Elizabeth sighed. "I don't want to alarm anyone. And it's still very likely that they're fine."
A hesitation, then Zelenka said, "You don't plan to send anyone...?"
"I never said that. I would appreciate it if you could come up to the gateroom, and on your way, very quietly round up Carson and bring him with you. Let him know what's going on, but keep things low-key."
She could actually hear him leap out of his chair on his way to carry out her instructions -- Low-key, Zelenka, she thought with an inward sigh -- then stop. "Er, you are not sending me on offworld mission, yes? Because I am not trained for field work."
"You helped get Rodney and Cadman out of that crashed Wraith ship."
"Yes, and I was terrible in the field, very terrible. Major Sheppard said so."
"Actually I believe the words he used in his report were 'Slightly jumpy, but performed very well under pressure' or something to that effect."
"Oh," Zelenka said, sounding pleased.
"To answer your question, I haven't decided yet, but if we do need a scientist, I would assume you'd want as few people on Atlantis as possible to know about your hand in Teyla's plan, aren't I right?"
Pause. "You are cruel and manipulative woman, Dr. Weir," Zelenka said.
Her lips twitched. "I'm not manipulating you. I just think it might be best if we didn't have to explain the situation to more than just Carson and maybe one or two others, for Rodney and John's sake as much as anything else. I'm going to have Major Lorne get his team ready for a possible rescue mission. I'd like to know that I can count on you if I need to."
"You can," he sighed. After a moment he added, "Do you think that they are all right?"
"I'm certainly not ready to borrow trouble yet. But knowing John and Rodney, it doesn't hurt to be prepared for it."
------
Sheppard's eyes burned. It was from staring into the light, he thought -- he hadn't been able to tear his eyes away, hadn't shut them quickly enough, and fuzzy afterimages were still seared onto his retinas. Just the light. It still seemed too bright in here, stinging his eyes, making him blink.
Goddamn Afghanistan. Just when it had receded from his nightmares, it had to invade his waking life as well.
When Rodney stepped into that damn chamber, something inside him had frozen, hard and brittle. It was going to break eventually; he knew how this worked, he'd been here before. Hopefully by that time they'd be far away from this place. At this point, he didn't care if they had to kill every last one of these bastards in order to get out, either. This was war, and they'd brought the war to him.
Teyla was talking. Apologizing. He silenced her with a look. They'd talk later, he and she -- a long talk about giving him the full intel that he needed on a mission, about not keeping secrets from her teammates and not trying to "fix" what didn't need fixing.
Later. Much later.
He turned a cold stare on Karmath, and saw the man flinch a little, though he tried to hide it. Good, Sheppard thought. You better be afraid. You better be real afraid if you take these ropes off me.
"Our friend ..." Teyla said. Her voice broke; she steadied it. "Our friend needs medical attention." She gestured with her head to Ronon. "You promised to treat us as guests. If you truly expect us to ... to feed your machine, he may not live that long without treatment for his injuries."
Considering Ronon's stamina, Sheppard imagined that the man could fight off a herd of bears even with two broken arms, but he could see what she was trying to do. And it wasn't a bad idea. He just wished he could think straight. He kept seeing Rodney in the chamber, a white flash of light.
You still don't trust me, huh, Sheppard?
Sheppard pressed his lips together. Okay, the thought he'd just had was a truly crazy one, but it kept coming back. He'd been able to tell that Rodney was trying to convey something to him while standing in the chamber, right before they pushed the button. Apologies, he'd thought, more apologies, and he was so far beyond any desire to hear another apology out of Rodney's mouth -- there was no room for that in the anger that sustained him. But what if Rodney hadn't been trying to say he was sorry? What if he'd been trying to get Sheppard to understand something ... something he didn't want their captors to know?
What if the machine was more than an incinerator?
Crazy thoughts. But he kept having them, as he was hauled to his feet again. He didn't even struggle. He caught a glimpse of Teyla looking at him with open concern, and he knew what she must be thinking -- shell shock, or the Athosian equivalent. But it wasn't that. He was thinking, that was all. For a change.
Because he did trust Rodney. He'd never stopped trusting Rodney. He didn't think McKay really understood -- the scientist seemed to believe that Sheppard's anger had to do with the fact that he'd been wrong, that he'd tried to figure out an Ancient piece of technology and had made a mistake. It was never about that. Hell, Sheppard himself was the grand master of tactical errors, wasn't he? He wasn't about to lay into one of his people for making an honest mistake. Well, all right, he might get a little mad about it, but not that mad.
No. He felt betrayed. Personally betrayed. And it was stupid, and he knew it was stupid -- he'd seen it happen to other people, friendships and relationships broken up by some small thing that drove a little wedge between them, the crack growing wider as neither person could find words to heal it.
He'd always sucked at words.
And granted, almost getting him killed wouldn't exactly be a little thing for most people, but that was just Sheppard's daily life. He didn't care that Rodney'd dragged him to an alien planet and almost killed him. Really, he didn't. How many times had he dragged Rodney to alien planets and almost got him killed?
No, it wasn't that, and it wasn't that he'd lost a little face with Elizabeth, because how many other times had he screwed up in front of her? The woman must keep a "Sheppard's Failed Plans and Bad Ideas" file in her computer by now. It wasn't any of that, and every time that he tried to figure out just what, exactly, it was, he found himself running down a seemingly endless list of things it wasn't.
Rodney had been willing to let Sheppard die in order to prove his theory correct, and maybe that should have hurt, but somehow it didn't -- because he'd also been equally willing to let himself die, or perhaps just blind to the possibility that either of them might not make it off Duranda alive. As Sheppard had said to him then, he'd seen pilots do that before -- get so caught up in the need to fix a problem that they couldn't see the point where the problem became unfixable. It was an ego thing, and ego was something Rodney had in spades, but so did Sheppard and most of the other people that he respected. He understood it.
No ... this was personal, foolish and personal, and it frustrated him to no end that he couldn't really put his finger on one specific thing, out of the whole great mess, that had caused him to slam shut the doors of his soul to Rodney's earnest efforts to win his way back in. What it all came down to was that he'd been hurt and he didn't want to be hurt again. There was no use looking for logic in it, because there wasn't any. He had liked that Rodney had come to him for help. Not to Elizabeth or Teyla or Zelenka or Beckett, but to him. When the chips were really down, out of everyone on Atlantis, Sheppard was the one Rodney turned to. It had been that way for a while, hadn't it? Only he'd never really noticed it before. And this was the first time it had been acknowledged, really ... that deep trust that had grown between them.
Acknowledged, right before it was shattered. Partly by Rodney, and partly, he had to admit, by himself. Because he was as stubborn and egotistical as the next guy ... well, all right, the next guy being Rodney, maybe not quite as much, but enough. The similarities between them were a lot of what made the friendship work ... but now, those same similarities -- pride, stubbornness, temper, ego -- had come right back to bite them both in the ass. He couldn't give in, he wouldn't give in, and neither would Rodney. They'd both just stand in opposite ends of a sinking lifeboat, drilling holes and making it sink faster, neither one willing to take one step towards dry land because that would mean yielding an inch of hard-won territory in a war that made no sense.
Maybe he really did need Teyla and her half-assed plans to knock some sense into him.
And maybe he'd only been so angry the last few days because he knew that if Rodney came to his door again, asking for help with his heart in his eyes ... that he'd do the same damn thing again, even with the memory of the last time still leaving a hole in his chest. There was just no way to take back that trust, not without taking back everything they'd said and done over the last year, all the times they'd saved each other's lives without a second thought. He'd tried, he'd really freaking tried, and probably hurt Rodney enough along the way to more than make up for Doranda, but he just couldn't turn off the part of himself that wanted to trust Rodney McKay the way plants crave light.
He knew he couldn't turn it off because he was doing it again right now. Rodney was alive. He refused to believe otherwise. Maybe it was stupid, maybe it was just his own continued inability to accept that his friend was as fallible and human as the next person -- but, damn it, McKay had been trying to tell him something, and he was going to hang onto that, because to do otherwise meant to admit to himself that the last thing he'd done before Rodney died was to insult him and kick him off the team, and he just wasn't ready to accept that.
He wasn't going to believe Rodney was dead until someone presented him with a body bag of fried super-genius, extra crispy. Not until then.
Sheppard realized that he had completely lost track of where they were being taken this time. He hoped Teyla was paying attention. They were deep in a strange section of the labrynth -- at least, he didn't think he'd been here before; most of the corridors looked more or less alike to him anyway.
"This is our medical facility," Karmath said suddenly, pausing before a door that looked just like all the other doors to Sheppard. When he opened the door, it revealed a room that vaguely resembled a field hospital circa 1860 -- brightly lit and more clean and sterile, but still definitely primitive compared to the Atlantis's infirmary. Rather than beds, there were pallets on the floor, like flat field cots. The Cletans carrying Ronon deposited him on one of the pallets. The runner still appeared unconscious, though it had been long enough since the stun blast that Sheppard was sure he was faking .
A tall woman with her dark hair drawn back in a braid came storming past tables of equipment and accosted Karmath as he stepped back from Ronon. "What is the meaning of this?" she demanded. "Charging in here with your armed commandoes as if this is your own private fiefdom! There are sick people here, Karmath! I've told you how I feel about your high and mighty ways! Do you have a patient for me, or are you simply here to annoy me?"
In spite of himself, Sheppard couldn't help grinning at the startled and disgruntled expression on Karmath's face. Apparently doctors were the same the galaxy over. This was also the first person he'd seen around here who was actually willing to stand up to Karmath.
"As a matter of fact, I do have a patient for you." Karmath stood back so she could get a look at Ronon.
The doctor's eyebrows went up and she knelt in a swift fluid motion, lifting some of Ronon's hair to get a look at his head injury. "I do not know these people. Are these the strangers from outside the city?" She swept her eyes across Teyla and Sheppard, eyes as startling green as Karmath's were blue. Her gaze passed from them to the armed guards surrounding them -- about a dozen of them -- and her green eyes went nearly black. "No weapons in the medical room, Karmath. We've been through this."
"I assure you, you'll regret it if you send them away," Karmath snapped. "These people are dangerous."
"So I can see," she retorted sarcastically, taking in the bound hands, the blood and bruises on Ronon. "It's a good thing we have you and your merry band of thugs here to protect us from tied-up prisoners, or where would we all be?"
Sheppard realized that the green-eyed woman reminded him of somebody even more than Beckett. He nearly staggered when he realized who it was. That abrupt, self-assured manner ... she made him think of McKay. The resemblance, not physical but emotional, hurt as if he'd been punched in the stomach.
"The guards stay, Sasha." Karmath pointed across the infirmary at several people on pallets with nurses, or the local equivalent, hovering around them. "Those people underestimated this man and came out the worse for it. I'm not risking more ... not that it wouldn't do you good to find out you're wrong about something for once, of course."
Sasha snorted. "Me wrong and you right? That'll be the day." She started to move Ronon's arms and discovered the bonds on his hands. "Oh, Karmath, this is really going too far!"
"Take those off and it's your neck, Sasha."
"My neck can fend for itself," the doctor remarked archly, slitting the rope with a small scalpel. Sheppard saw Ronon's body tense very slightly, and bit the inside of his lip, wishing he was near enough to give the runner a good admonishing kick. They didn't need a repeat of their first escape attempt, especially not with a dozen rifles pointed at them.
Sasha gripped Ronon's head and twisted it around to hold his face to the light, not roughly but not particularly gently either. "I can see that you're awake, so don't try to fool me," she said, touching his forehead lightly with her thumbs. "Does this hurt?"
No answer; his eyelids remained closed. Sasha rolled her startling green eyes and bore down hard with both thumbs. The runner's whole body jerked as if with an electrical spasm and his eyes snapped open. Anyone else would probably have cried out with pain, but he just gave her a hate-filled glower.
"Excellent, I'll take that as a yes," she said sweetly. "Anywhere else?"
------
Sasha insisted on moving her patient behind a privacy curtain in order to continue her examination. Sheppard was highly amused at the way that not just Karmath's people, but even Ronon himself, seemed to bend to the will of Hurricane Sasha. Karmath did send a couple of armed guards behind the curtain -- Sasha's yelling could be heard all over the infirmary, but Karmath stood his ground, arms folded, until she quit yelling and endeavored to ignore both him and his guards.
Meanwhile, Teyla and Sheppard were allowed to sit on a pallet and given individual trays of food and water -- this time with utensils. Their hands were tied in front of them rather than behind, so they could eat, and Teyla did so, perhaps more out of a desire to be polite than actual hunger. Sheppard himself was not hungry at all. Staring at the tray, he heard McKay's sarcastic voice in his head: Do you have any idea what these people eat? Oh ... I see that you do.
Everything reminded him of McKay.
He's alive, Sheppard thought. He clung to that.
Teyla finished her bowl of ... glop, and put her spoon down with a grimace. "You're welcome to mine," Sheppard offered, along with a half-smile.
She looked back at him with brown eyes brimming with trepidation. Whatever she saw in his face made the brown eyes warm, the lips curve in a small answering smile. "I thank you, but I could not eat another bite," she said, and then she laughed, a soft warm sound that made him think of sunny days on the Atlantis balcony when they were all together again. And he laughed too, and for just that moment, things were closer to okay than they had been in some time.
"As bad as it looks, is it?" Sheppard asked, shoving at some of the brown stuff with his spoon.
"I have eaten worse," Teyla said, evasively.
"It's every bit as bad as it looks and then some," came Sasha's strident voice, and the doctor crouched down on her heels in front of them. "The 'bounty of the Ancestors'," and her fingers made little quote marks around the words.
Karmath loomed over her. "You shouldn't take the Ancestors' gifts for granted, Doctor."
"Stuff it up your rear, Karmath," the doctor returned with a sugary smile, and turned to Sheppard and Teyla. "Have these ruffians harmed the two of you in any way? You both appear somewhat bruised," she added, looking critically at their faces.
Karmath interjected, "They attempted to esca--"
"Did I ask you, high and mighty lord of sand fleas? No, I did not. I believe I was having a private conversation with my patients."
Sheppard smirked at Karmath's obvious discomfiture at having the verbal rug once again jerked out from under his feet, while Teyla smiled and offered a small half-bow, as best she could while sitting down. "We thank you for your concern, as well as for your food and hospitality, but we are not harmed in any great way. May we see our friend?"
"Certainly." Sasha offered her a hand under her elbow. Sheppard waited to see if he was going to get a hand up, but she ignored him utterly. So much for the famed Sheppard charm.
Ronon had been stripped to the waist, revealing a torso mottled black and blue with dozens of bruises. Sheppard winced just to look at him. His arm was set, though, and the wound on his head had been dressed. He lay stretched out with his eyes closed, chest gently rising and falling. Around him, Karmath's guards watched him from what they probably considered a safe distance. Sheppard thought that if he'd just beaten up Ronon and killed one of his teammates in front of him, he'd want to be a lot farther away. A few miles might be a good start.
"Your friend is still insulting my intelligence by pretending to sleep," Sasha said loudly. Ronon ignored her and remained still. Sheppard leaned a little closer to him just to make sure that he hadn't been drugged. And he saw a slight gleam in one of Ronon's closed fists. A smile flickered on his own face. At some point Ronon had managed to palm a scalpel. Sheppard straightened up.
"Well, not that we don't mind the effort you've put in here and all," he drawled, "but I'd say it's a bit of an insult to us that you folks patch us up just to keep us healthy so you can kill us later."
Sasha stared at him in astonishment. "Kill you! What insane talk is this? My people would not do such a --" She broke off. "Karmath!" she shouted.
"What?" Karmath said, poking his head around the curtain, a bit reluctantly it seemed to Sheppard.
"What have you been telling these people?" Sasha demanded in a voice that promised a slow, painful death involving lots of large needles.
"What?" he repeated.
"You do not know," Teyla said, incredulous understanding dawning on her face. "You do not know the fate he has planned for us."
"What he's already done to one of us," Sheppard interjected coldly. He's alive. Keep believing that.
"There were four of us," Teyla said. "This man put one of our friends in your incinerator machine."
For a moment, Sasha just stared. Then she hauled back and hit Karmath across the face. A couple of his guards made small moves in a protective sort of direction, but backed off when Sasha swept her death-glare across them.
Karmath staggered, nearly fell. He wiped his mouth, looked down to see blood, sighed. "Are you so short of patients that now you have to create your own?" he said.
"I cannot believe that you ... you ..." Her voice trembled. "Next you will tell me they went of their own free will!"
"He did," Karmath returned coldly, meeting her eyes with his blue ones. "Once we had explained the situation, their companion willingly stepped into the incinerator."
"Because if he hadn't, this asshole would have put one of the rest of us in it!" Sheppard flared. Teyla moved a little closer to him, her shoulder bumping lightly against his. I've got your back, that gesture said.
The doctor stared at Karmath with mingled rage and sorrow on her face. "Oh, Karmath," she said softly. "How far you've fallen. How far we've fallen. First your infernal lotteries, then our daughter ... now you have begun murdering strangers. This is a dreadful path with nothing good at the end of it. You speak of duty, but no one is duty-bound to murder someone else; you cannot put this monstrosity aside so easily."
Our daughter. Suddenly a lot of things made sense to Sheppard about the friction between the two of them. More importantly, though, all of the guards were fixated on the argument between the doctor and the military leader. Quietly and unobtrusively, Sheppard went down to his knees. Teyla, looking puzzled, followed suit. They were now kneeling beside Ronon's pallet.
The runner stirred. Sheppard felt an arm fall against his leg, as if Ronon had merely twitched in his sleep. The scalpel was just visible between two of the fingers. Sheppard suppressed a grin and moved his bound hands to bring the rope within reach. One movement of Ronon's nimble fingers, almost too quick for the eye to see, and Sheppard was free. Carefully he gripped the ropes with his fingertips and pinned them against his wrist so that he appeared to still be bound. He shifted to allow Ronon to free Teyla as well.
Sasha and Karmath were going at it tooth-and-nail. "I am responsible for an entire city! Do not talk to me about my duty! It is on my shoulders whether we all live or die! Should we save a few strangers at the expense of our entire people? At the expense of our very souls if we violate the Ancestors' commands? These are the sorts of decisions I have to make every day! You are mad if you think--"
"Hey!" one of the guards yelled suddenly, spinning around. "They're loose!"
Well, damn.
Ronon moved like lightning, rolling off his pallet and dipping his hands under it in one quick motion. The pallet was made up of folded blankets with something like a futon or feather mattress underneath; the runner hurtled the whole wad at the nearest guards, taking them down in a heap. And the three of them were running, pushing aside a startled nurse and fleeing out into the hall. Someone fired wildly, the sound loud as a bomb blast as it reverberated off the walls. Sasha started screaming about firing guns in the infirmary.
Ronon stopped immediately, started to turn. "My gun--"
"No time! Doesn't matter!" Sheppard yanked at his arm, got him going again just as a whole swarm of Karmath's guards came surging out of the infirmary. The three of them rounded a corner, momentarily losing sight of their pursuers.
"I hate running away," Ronon snarled. "I owe them a few broken heads."
"I owe them a hell of a lot too!" Sheppard panted, looking over his shoulder. "I owe them for Rodney, for you, for every damn person that they've fed to that machine! But right now I'd rather get out of here! We can come back here later and strafe the place with a puddlejumper if we have to, but right now let's just go, shall we?" He skidded to a stop where their corridor met another in a T intersection. "Teyla, which way?"
"I -- I --" She decided, maybe blindly. "Left." They went left.
"Can you find your way back to the place we came in?" Sheppard asked her as they ran. A door along the corridor opened; a head poked out and immediately popped back in.
"I ... do not know," Teyla said nervously. "This place is ... confusing."
"Well, try!" Right now he just wanted to get out of the populated section. "We need to get outside, get down to the Stargate, and wait for Rodney."
There was a silence.
"Colonel," Teyla said, sorrow in her voice. "Dr. McKay is not --"
"I know what we saw, Teyla. I was there. But I think there's more to it than just that. I think Rodney knew something when he walked into that machine ... something he couldn't tell the rest of us without tipping off the Cletans."
Teyla didn't answer, apparently deciding to save her breath for running rather than arguing. Another intersection. More bends. The tunnels were interminable.
"I think we may be going in circles," Ronon said when they stopped at yet another intersection, looking both ways.
"Shush!" Sheppard snapped, looking to Teyla. Like Sheppard, Ronon had deferred to her to lead them out -- she was, after all, the only one who had been fully aware and paying attention when they were led to the infirmary.
"I am trying, truly I am," Teyla said, looking desperate. "It is not like navigating in the forest. There are no landmarks here. All these tunnels are very much the same."
A group of Cletans, bristling with rifles, rounded the corner up ahead, saw them and started running.
"Right it is," Sheppard declared. They fled in that direction, only to see more Cletans appear down at the end of the corridor. This would have been funny if it hadn't been so damn serious, Sheppard thought -- like one of those cartoons where characters run in and out of doorways in a hall.
Doorways! There were doors in this corridor. He picked one at random and opened it.
The room inside was large and lit up at their presence. Lots of dark consoles around the walls and long tables covered with dust; Sheppard registered it with a sweeping glance. Some kind of old lab. Door in the far wall too. Hide or run? No -- the Cletans had seen them go into this room. He made for the door on the far side as Ronon was closing the near door, reached out, got it half open and then shouted a curse and tried to slam it shut as someone wedged a rifle inside.
They were trapped.
Sheppard's reaction was desperate, instinctive. He slammed a hand against the wall. "Lock!" he yelled, focusing his concentration on the doors.
And, to his amazement, both doors froze in place -- one shut, one half open. This place responded to the ATA gene!
Unfortunately, they had one half-open door with armed hostiles forcing their way through it. Two guys were in the room already. One fired at Ronon, but the shot went wide and Ronon was on him in an instant. The other guy was taking aim at Teyla, who reached out blindly and wrenched free a handle from one of the pieces of equipment. "Don't move --" the guy with the rifle started to say, when Teyla's hurtled projectile bounced off the hand supporting the rifle. He dropped it, and Sheppard was already in motion, hitting him from behind with clasped-together fists. The man dropped like a rock.
"My thanks," Teyla said and spun around to launch an expert kick at another man, disarming him. Teyla was clearly trying to disable their opponents without killing or even seriously hurting them. Ronon apparently had no such compunctions -- one-handed, he grabbed a woman armed with a decrepit-looking shotgun by her hair and slammed her face into a console.
Sheppard realized that after meeting Sasha in the infirmary, his appetite for wholesale Cletan slaughter had gone the way of his appetite for their food. They were, after all, just people trying to survive. Damn it, he just wanted to get out of here! He disabled another Cletan with a kick to the groin, amazed at how much difference Teyla's martial arts lessons had made to his hand-to-hand skills. Spinning around to check on his team, he saw the Athosian with all her attention on a woman she'd just knocked out, while another Cletan took aim on her back. This guy had one of their stolen P-90s, and from the way he was holding it, he had a pretty good idea of how to use it.
Teyla. It would cut her in half.
He wouldn't watch another friend die. Damn it, he wouldn't. This place wasn't Afghanistan; the hell with that! He wasn't close enough to do anything about Rifle Boy, he didn't have any weapons, but Teyla was only a few yards away...
Sheppard took a running dive at her, hit her in the midsection, and they both fell. The stutter of the P-90 nearly deafened him in the enclosed space, and he felt it hit -- not pain, not yet, but a solid impact, like being punched in the chest. He'd been shot before, but this ... this was bad. Heat radiated out from his chest, spreading down his arms and legs, and everything just stopped working.
------
Teyla heard someone behind her, started to turn when a great impact knocked her off her feet. She heard the assault rifle, felt something wet and hot spray across her chest and shoulders and face, stinging her eyes, her lips. Falling, she tasted salt on her lips. Blood.
And then she was lying on the floor, with Sheppard a dead weight across her legs. She looked up to see Ronon taking out the shooter, and she dared take her eyes off the room around her to lean forward and roll Sheppard onto his back. Even after so many years of fighting the Wraith and the other native predators of Athos, she still could not get used to that first moment when you look into the face of an injured comrade and find out whether or not they've survived. In order to make herself look, she had to fight down a surge of panic that she hoped never showed on the surface.
A glance told her the wound was fatal. In fact, she couldn't believe he was still breathing, yet somehow he was, drawing upon the central core of steel that she had seen in him when they first met on Athos. Blood bubbled on his lips with every breath. The assault rifle had chewed great chunks out of his chest. His entire uniform was soaked with blood, and more of it every minute, spreading under him in a great pool. Even if an Atlantean medical team dropped through the roof right now, Teyla didn't think they could save him.
Her commander, her friend, was bleeding out in front of her, and she didn't know what to do. She tore off her jacket and pressed against the holes in his chest, but the blood soaked through immediately. Looking up, she saw that Ronon had vanished out into the hallway carrying the P-90, and she heard gunfire. Oh Ancestors, he was holding them off by himself.
She had lost her two closest friends today. It hadn't really sunk in yet. She watched Sheppard struggle to breathe, and it still wouldn't sink in.
His eyes fluttered open, saw her watching him. "You okay?" he murmured in a thick, choked voice.
"Yes." There were no words for this. No words.
"Ronon?"
"He's ... in the hall." Another burst of gunfire from the hall punctuated her words.
The hazel eyes, glazed with pain and shock, fixed on her face. "Go help him," Sheppard said quietly. "Get out of here."
"Not without you."
He smiled a faint, lopsided smile, blood on his lips. "There's nothing you can do for me, Teyla. I can feel things breaking when I breathe. Go. Get out. But don't leave this world without Rodney. I don't think you'll have to find him; he'll find you. Just don't leave without him if you can help it."
She searched his face -- the pallor, the determination. "You do truly believe he's alive."
"I do," Sheppard whispered. His body bucked; he tried to cough, brought up more blood.
Teyla desperately wanted to stay until it was over, did not want to think of him dying alone on this alien world. But every moment she waited in here was another moment Ronon was alone in the hall, perhaps needing her help. With one P-90 between them, she didn't know how they were going to fight their way out of here.
Sheppard believed in them. They could do it, somehow. And maybe he was right about Rodney. Maybe Rodney would help them.
She took him by the shoulders, lowered her forehead to his. "Until we meet again in the halls of the Ancestors," she whispered -- an old Athosian farewell.
"Sounds dull," Sheppard said, raising a shaky hand -- at what cost in pain she didn't want to imagine -- to squeeze her shoulder in return. "We'll have a party, liven up the place."
"It is a date," Teyla responded. Sheppard's face wavered in front of her eyes, blurring, returning to focus. No, she could not cry now. Later she would mourn, back on Atlantis, safe with Ronon -- and Rodney, she added stubbornly; if believing in Sheppard's optimism was the last thing she could do for him, then she would do it.
He smiled at her and she smiled at him one final time, then got up and ran out of the room, not looking back.
---
tbc
The next chapter is tentatively titled "The Halls of the Ancestors", by the way. That could be good or bad ...