Part Eleven: Wash Away Your Sins
McKay came to on the floor of a hallway in the south pier. His laptop lay beside him, damp with seawater but surprisingly resilient. Shifting his eyes to take in as much of his surroundings as possible without actually sitting up, he noted several large cracks in the walls and the restive trickles of water that seeped through them.
Letting out a dismal sob, the physicist knew without looking for further proof that he was underwater, sinking to the bottom in a leaking chunk of infrastructure.
"I can't do this again," he cried, pushing himself off the floor, trying to brush away defeat and wondering whether he had the guts to eat his own 9mm.
Shifting that idea to a middle burner, he fumbled for the LSD, which had somehow come to reinhabit his jacket pocket. His mind was clearing a little bit, enough for him to understand that the power had not yet been extinguished in this sinking part of the city. Glancing at the besotted laptop, McKay was stunned to see a whole slew of life forms in the main control area, milling about as if nothing of particular note had happened to the city. In fact, the city-wide map showed Atlantis to be completely intact.
Throughout this entire experience, McKay had not felt weary despite his physical exertion. Pain, yes. Dismay, indeed. But not hungry in the usual sense, or sleepy or aching from so much running around. Almost as if he had not really experienced anything at all.
"Huh. Weird." McKay had lost his headset in one scuffle or another. Placing his hand to his ear anyway, he recalled watching Teyla do the same thing a month ago while laid out in the infirmary delirious with fever. Her flushed skin had felt blisteringly hot as she burned through her illness, and McKay sat with her, trying to help keep up her spirits. Throughout this difficult time, the beautiful Athosian had repeatedly placed her hand to her ear and called to her teammates.
"Colonel Sheppard, I am lost!" she had cried. And "We are trapped underground. Aiden, please find us!" He had stayed with her, anxiously trying to comfort her until Carson noted his distress and sent him away to collect himself.
As he stood in the south pier hallway, alive again, McKay wondered whether he was now the one who was ill, lying abed in the infirmary, instead of being dead and alive and dead and alive again, and that Teyla sat beside him as a fever blew out his rare and masterful brain.
He was just getting through the layers of these ideas when the alarm sounded again and he heard the dreadful refrain:
"One minute to self-destruct."
…..
Carson drank again and again from the pitcher he found in the room when he awoke. His thirst was still raging, unquenchably intense. Perhaps something in the drug or in the water itself was drying him up from the inside out. The more he drank, the harder it became to slake his thirst, until the world around him was nothing but water and need, more water and more need.
Eoin banged open the flimsy door to the hut where Beckett had been taken after being darted a second time. The smaller man brought up with him a woman about Beckett's age, pulling her by the wrist. She glared at Beckett, harsh lines of a hard life etched in her face. The doctor stood, regarding them with a hangdog expression.
"This is Bettina," Eoin stated flatly. "She is for you." With that he pushed her at Beckett, who reached out to prevent her from colliding with him.
Involved in his own problems, Beckett waved off the pair.
"I must check on Ronon. I'm not interested in your offer." With a glance at each of them, he turned away.
"You give up a fine woman like this for a savage?"
Beckett knew what Eoin was implying. It didn't bother him and, in fact, he found it rather amusing, although not nearly as ironic as referring to Ronon as a savage. Here stood before a man of his own kind, living a short, raw life of violence, in a place where a child wasn't a child any longer once he was old enough to hold a weapon. Arguing with Eoin served no purpose. He was beyond reason, had probably never used it to begin with.
"Please let me go to my friend. Then we will talk."
Eoin glared at Beckett, then turned to Bettina, who had yet to release the hatred from her eyes. With a curt nod, he held open the door, allowing the doctor to pass unimpeded.
…..
This was the shock of which he'd spoken to Kate Heightmeyer. The cause didn't matter; once deep shock developed, death eventually followed. A day, a week. He'd had a patient once who had gone into shock, been revived and finally succumbed almost a year later. Beckett had spent that year fighting the inevitable. Ronon would not take nearly that long.
The packed-earth hut was stuffy, yet too cool for one as ill as Ronon. A light burlap sheath lay near the pallet where the sick man struggled against the poison within him. Beckett tucked the cloth around his patient, hoping to palliate what he could not treat. Ronon was suffering in a way he'd never witnessed before. The raw power of unimpeded death was foreign to him. In time, he took to reciting memorized passages from the Episcopal bible, and also a bit of Norman McCaig, which he remembered from his undergraduate days.
The people of this place would not allow him to touch his friend now that it was plainly clear that he was beyond recall. They were a strange tribe, indeed, willing to send out their children to kill and yet frightened down to the marrow of death itself, so terrified that they paralyzed themselves with panic rather than try to stop it.
Beckett sat beside his friend like this for an hour or so. Ronon clung to life with unsurprising tenacity, for Carson knew no one as skilled as he at the art of survival. Before noon, the doctor, protesting loudly until Eoin had threatened to dart him again, was taken to a different place, a hut on the edge of the village with blocked windows and a locked door. It was very quiet there, so quiet that all the rest of that day and on into the evening Beckett could hear the sounds of Ronon's last breaths.
