"Get up."

Rodney cracked an eye open, peeking in the direction of that high-pitched, impatient voice. Somehow he wasn't surprised to see Jeannie crouching beside him. The hood of her little pink snowsuit, with the white fluffy fur trim, was pushed back and snowflakes dusted her blond pigtails, her lips and eyelashes. The snow did not melt, but neither did it fall through her. He wasn't sure which option disturbed him more.

"Mer, come on. Get up."

He shook his head, feeling the ice crystals under his cheek rasping against the skin. "I'm warm and comfortable and I intend to stay here." At least that's what he thought he said. His lips were stiff and words seemed to be difficult to form. The fact that Jeannie could, apparently, understand him just fine, should have worried him more than it did.

"You aren't warm. You're freezing to death. Get up."

"You always were a pest, you know that?" He lurched to his feet, staggered and managed to regain his balance.

Looking around, he saw trees. Damn forests. All of them looked alike. No telling where he was. Somehow, he'd made it out of the river canyon, though he couldn't really remember how. Now he was just walking, not really sure what he was looking for.

"You need to find shelter." Jeannie crossed her arms in a manner that Rodney recognized as his own. Well, it wasn't too surprising; he knew she'd come from his mind, after all.

"I have a very unruly subconscious mind, you know that?" he told her petulantly, leaning against one of the damn, ubiquitous trees. "I bet other people's subconsciouses don't talk to them and dress in pink." Subconsciouses? Is that even a word? he wondered. His thoughts drifted

"It's your own fault for being so repressed," Jeannie retorted.

"Me? Repressed?" His lips were limbering up a little, with the exercise. Unfortunately, he couldn't really say the same for the rest of him. His body felt heavy and cold, like a frozen block of wood. "Excuse me? I'm a realist here; I'm well aware that I talk constantly. Everyone says so."

"You talk a lot, but do you say anything worth hearing? Anything that you really mean? Or do you use words to avoid saying what you mean?" Jeannie pushed off and began walking briskly between the trees. Rodney followed her, because he really wasn't done with this conversation even if he was having it with a figment of his imagination. He hated losing arguments, but losing arguments to himself was just intolerable.

"That makes absolutely no sense. It isn't possible for words to not have a meaning; they're intrinsically loaded with meaning. Otherwise they'd be, well, not words. And why do I always end up having philosophical conversations with my subconscious when I'm about to die?"

Jeannie turned to look up at him. "Maybe because you won't do it at any other time?"

"Saving the city! No time for useless soul-searching! That's Heightmeyer's area."

His coat was sheathed in ice. It crackled when he moved. Next to Jeannie's light grace, he felt like a clumsy, half-frozen lump. Just like being back in the pool on those long-ago summer days. On the other hand, anything that he tried to verbalize along those lines would just prove that she was right and he was psychoanalyzing himself.

Even being angry at his subconscious wasn't enough to keep his legs moving, though. He was just too damn tired. Giving in, he sank down against a pine tree and rested his spinning head against the rough bark.

"Don't stop, Mer."

He opened one eye just enough to see if she was still there. She was. "D-don't be stupid," he slurred wearily. "When you're lost in a blizzard, you should stay in one p-place or you'll just get more lost. Any idiot knows that." He kept having to clench his teeth against uncontrollable waves of shivering, distorting his words into utter incomprehensibility.

Jeannie crouched down with her arms folded over her small knees. "Rodney, you don't know a thing about wilderness survival."

"How do you know?" he challenged.

"Because I'm you."

Couldn't really fault that logic, he supposed. "Okay, so I'll rest for a minute and then get up."

"If you fall asleep, you'll die."

A slow burn of weary anger flared inside him. "I'm going to die anyway, though, aren't I?" He held out one arm, sheathed in ice and smeared with his own blood. "I'm soaked and shot and b-bleeding and stranded in the middle of the wilderness in the winter, with wolves and a crazy guy with a gun and who knows what else. C-Caldwell's probably dead by now. Hardly anybody knows I'm out here, and the few people who do know, don't really care, certainly not enough to come find me. I'm so cold I can't even feel my legs. I'm going to die, Jeannie, and there's not a thing I can do about it. Snuffed out in the prime of my genius. And Elizabeth and Radek are going to die, and eventually, everybody else on the Daedalus. If the winter doesn't get them, the Wraith will, once Armstrong and his crazy friends figure out how to call them down on our necks."

Jeannie laced together her fingers over the top of her knees. She was not wearing gloves; the small, bare fingers were pink and warm-looking. "Deep down, you don't want to die. I can say this with authority, considering that I am you, deep down."

"Yes, I came face to face with that side of myself in the puddlejumper, a side of myself which is very annoying and unhelpful and won't shut up. Only last time you were Sam, and this time you're my sister, and why does this sort of stupid thing always happen to me?"

"Inside you, there's a core of steel," Jeannie told him softly. "You are not a person who gives up easily, and, on some level, you know that. If you didn't know it, I wouldn't know it."

"Go away." He started to close his eyes, then flinched, stiffened and opened them again. "What was that?"

"Gunshots," Jeannie said, cocking her small head to the side.

"I know that. I was being rhetorical."

"I know you know. I'm you, remember?"

"I think I liked you better as Sam," he muttered. "I'm guessing that Caldwell p-probably just met a sticky end at the hands of our friendly neighborhood terrorist."

"So why are you getting up?"

"I don't know!" he snapped, finding that he was leaning weakly, but vertically, against the tree and couldn't even remember how he'd gotten this way. "Maybe I can die quickly rather than slowly! Maybe I can give Armstrong a good shock and he'll collapse from horror at my miraculous return from the dead. This will be followed by my miraculous return to the dead because I'm still freezing to death. Er ... Jeannie?"

He looked around. No little girl in a pink snowsuit. Did this mean that his will to live had given up on him? Was it possible to be so abrasive that you drove off your own subconscious?

Woozily, he pushed himself away from the tree and kept walking, in the general direction of the gunshots. Because it seemed the thing to do. Where there were gunshots, there were people, and even though one of them was trying to kill him, it was always possible that the other side had won. He'd actually be happy to see Caldwell or Cadman right now; at least they could both probably handle themselves in a snowstorm. One thing he did know for sure, through the fog that seemed to have taken over his brain: he wasn't going to survive out here by himself. He'd just have to gamble on finding someone who could help him before he found Armstrong. And, hey ... at least getting shot would mean that he'd die quickly.

------

"Sheppard, this is Atlantis. Do you copy?"

The voice was Teyla's. From the back of the jumper, kneeling next to Radek, Beckett looked up as Lorne reached for the radio.

"This is Major Lorne. We're heading home with full jumpers, Atlantis. We've got a lot of injured, but very few dead."

For a minute, there was no sound from Teyla, but Carson could picture the gateroom -- the moment of paused surprise turning into celebration. Then Teyla's voice spoke again, and he could hear the smile in her words. "We will be happy to see you, Major. We have already sent the next team of rescue jumpers, so you will be passing them in a few hours." She hesitated. Carson imagined her trying to figure out a way to ask about their own people without sounding insensitive to the plight of those from the Daedalus.

Lorne seemed to understand. "We've got a few wounded among ours. One dead -- a Dr. Estvaag, I'm told. Dr. Weir's injured, and so's Doc Zelenka and Lt. Cadman. Dr. McKay ..." He paused, then continued. "McKay's MIA. Sheppard's still on the planet, looking for him."

"I ... see." Her voice had lost its smile.

We were hit hard, Beckett thought, lightly touching Radek's pale face as he checked the scientist's wound. The Atlanteans were close-knit, all of them, but some more than others. The tightly woven fabric of that bond had been stretched and frayed. Now they were scattered, some wounded, some missing and perhaps dead. It startled him to realize that more than anything else, he wanted to be down on that planet, helping Sheppard look for McKay. Not tucked into a warm safe lab, not surrounded by the familiar cradle of the infirmary. No ... God help him, he wanted to be out in the cold and wind and snow, looking for a missing friend.

The Pegasus Galaxy had changed them all. Some of the changes were hard and dark -- Carson still shied away from thinking of some of the things that he'd seen, that he'd done. If the changes in him, personally, balanced out to positive or negative ... he supposed the jury was still out on that.

The only thing he was really sure of, now, was that if they ever went back to Earth, none of them would be the same people who had left. At this point, he did still want to go back to Earth, but he wasn't entirely sure he'd be happy there. In another ten years, he might not even want to go back.

And ... what if Sheppard and McKay didn't come back from the planet? What then? The idea of an Atlantis without those two ... Quiet, peaceful, he thought, but his recalcitrant brain returned with Empty, unfulfilling, lonely.

The Pegasus Galaxy had taught him courage and hope. It had also taught him loss and fear. Which of those lessons would dominate, in the future ... he didn't know.

He listened to Lorne fill Teyla in on the situation, and checked his patients' vital signs in silence, lost in his own thoughts.

------

TBC