He remembered the sad face of the blue-eyed man. He saw the man several times while he was training, but the man never spoke to him. It was only when he was wounded and taken to the glass box that the man would approach and speak softly through the confusion and the pain.

One time, the man said very clearly, "Icarus, we need to change our approach. You are fighting me and your brothers. You should be fighting them. We have a common goal. You just need to remember it."

And the man did something to him that made him remember the goal: to take Atlantis. Because Atlantis was the key to defeating the Wraith once and for all.

And nothing could stand in the way of that.

It was late the next morning when Keller saw Sheppard stir. She wiped bleary eyes and discarded the gloves she had been using to stand at his side. Ronon sat up sleepily from his chair, blaster still in hand.

Hazel eyes opened groggily, and Sheppard blinked, obviously confused.

"Colonel Sheppard?" Keller said. "Can you hear me?"

Sheppard tried to life his hand and was brought up short by the cuffs around his wrists.

"Doc?" He looked at the restraints and then at Keller. "Whassgoingon?" he slurred.

"How are you feeling?" she replied, deciding to keep emotions in check. If Sheppard was dangerous enough for Teyla to skewer him with a sword then she definitely needed to be careful.

"Like I got run over by Ronon." He let his head fall back to the pillow, squeezing his eyes shut.

"You did." Ronon tapped the blaster at his side.

Sheppard turned to look at him. "Oh, hey Ronon," he said with a grin.

"What the hell is wrong with you, Sheppard?" the Satedan demanded.

"Nothing's wrong with me," he protested, then grinned. "I … got my priorities straight."

"Which included trying to take over Atlantis?" Keller questioned, suddenly angry at the man.

"What?" Sheppard looked at her sharply, then his eyes seemed to become clearer, the drugged look fading as memory returned. "Oh. Yeah. That."

"Sheppard, who were those guys with you?" Ronon pressed.

Sheppard shifted uncomfortably, his eyes beginning to flutter closed. "Jusss … Just my …"

Keller looked sharply at the machine beeping above Sheppard's head, warnings going off as Sheppard's limbs started twitching against the restraints.

Cursing, she called for the orderlies.

"What's happening?" Ronon demanded.

"I think he's seizing," she responded, taking the medication the orderly offered her.

"What can I—" Ronon began, starting to rise from his chair.

"Get out of here!" Keller shouted. "Let me deal with this!"

Ronon retreated warily, but did not leave the room, standing on one leg in the shadows as he watched the doctor work on the Colonel.

When the seizure subsided, Keller began snapping orders and checking bandages. The ones that bound the sword wound and bullet had already soaked through their bandages. Ronon couldn't tell if it was because of the seizure, or maybe Keller hadn't had a chance to do surgery yet, but it seemed as though now was the time as they wheeled Sheppard off to the operating table, leaving Ronon alone in a room full of wounded soldiers.

He sat down to wait. He needed answers, and he wasn't going to leave until he got them.

When Teyla saw Sheppard in the afternoon, he was raging in delirium. Keller said that medications weren't working on him.

"His body is metabolizing everything too fast. It has to be because of that thing on his back, but I can't get it off."

"Have you tried?" Teyla questioned.

"I haven't been able to yet as he had a seizure. I have some guinea pigs I need to work on, first," Keller motioned to the bodies of the aliens in the back room. "I don't want to hurt him and I need to understand how it works."

Sheppard tossed and turned on the bed, the restraints at his wrists and ankles rattling. Nothing he was screaming was making sense. Someone in passing told her he was speaking Dari, a language from Earth. He had served in the military for a long time in a place called Afghanistan, where he had picked up the language. No one knew what he was saying, though.

Keller finally ordered more restraints as Sheppard was hurting himself, and the sedatives weren't working. Teyla watched as they fastened more straps across his chest and legs, fighting back tears as she knew that she was the one who had injured him.

"You had to do it," Ronon said quietly at her elbow as they watched the orderlies.

It was almost as though he had read her mind.

"I know," she replied. "It does not make it any easier."

"He's tough. He'll make it."

It did not take Keller long to figure out that she was completely out of her element with the alien technology. The first extraction nearly caused her to lose her hands. The device beeped with alarm then exploded in a shower of blood and gore. Most of the alien's head had completely disappeared, and Keller had only pulled her hands back on instinct alone, grateful for the face shield that kept the gore away. The next two extractions were done with the utmost care, but also exploded at some point along the way. She had not had one successful extraction.

When they tried putting the device under a scanner, it glowed dangerously red and McKay was barely able to get a reading before Keller shut the machine down in case they had another explosion on their hands. It appeared to be designed to react negatively with Ancient technology, probably a failsafe in case of capture, according to McKay.

Sheppard's bloodwork also came back with a large amount of something that Keller had never seen in all of her medical work. It wasn't the Wraith enzyme, but she was worried that perhaps so much of the new drug had been pumped into Sheppard's system that it was what was controlling him, or perhaps it was more like a drug that was doing something to affect his behavior.

Keller also suspected the drug was suppressing pain in some way. Based on what Teyla and Ronon had told her, and the fact that it took multiple stun blasts to bring the Colonel down meant that it had broken the communication between Sheppard's nervous system and his brain in some way. She also suspected it was working like a steroid as well, giving Sheppard almost superhuman strength and speed.

McKay and the bio chemical team were analyzing the samples and trying to figure out what exactly it did, as they couldn't come to a firm conclusion on any of Keller's suspicions. McKay wasn't an expert on biological science, but he was doing anything he could to help his friend. The only thing they could confirm was that the device on Sheppard's spine was feeding him the drug, and without being able to take it off they had no idea how long his altered state would last.

Keller was rapidly running out of options, and Sheppard was becoming more difficult to handle. They had started him out in five-point restraints, then had to increase the straps in order to keep him down and from aggravating his wounds which had begun healing inhumanly fast.

He was raving in delirium, and even in his lucid moments wasn't making a whole lot of sense.

"It will all be fine," he called out to her once. Pale fingers were grasping at the sheet beneath him. Blood was beginning to ooze from his ravaged wrists under the restraints. "They know what they're doing. No one will be hurt if you don't resist. I know you shut down the Stargate. Just reactivate it and everything will be fine."

She ignored him, cleaning his wrists under the restraints as best as she could. "You need to stop struggling," she chided. "You're hurting yourself."

Sheppard couldn't raise his head to see what she was talking about, but she knew that he knew. He pulled harder against the restraints, staring at her with a look of pure rage, twisting his wrists and causing the blood to flow more freely.

"I'm not hurting myself," he hissed. "You are."

Keller could barely fight back tears as she looked at this fractured man whom she had once called friend. "You're not yourself," she said tightly. "I'm willing to bet you're in there somewhere, though."

He screamed after her in wordless rage as she left the room, brushing away the tears that finally fell.