500 reviews! (dies of shock) Thank you, all of you! You are wonderful, wonderful people, and here is another chapter for you! Unfortunately I'll be out of town this weekend, so it will be a few days before the next chapter is posted. But we're getting into the home stretch now ...

They held Rodney's memorial service in the jumper bay.

Sheppard wasn't really sure why; he hadn't been consulted. But it seemed appropriate, this vast, echoing utilitarian space. Rodney would have approved.

It had been awhile since he'd worn a suit. The last time, in fact, was when he'd gone to talk to Ford's family back on Earth. Suits were for weddings and funerals, in Sheppard's world.

And that called up an unwanted memory, a snide voice remarking, Of course, because everything's a shortcut in Sheppard's world. Rodney. Everything seemed to just come right back to Rodney.

Elizabeth was speaking now, but Sheppard wasn't listening to what she was saying, until he heard his name and looked up to see her sympathetic eyes on him.

"Do you want to say a few words, John?"

No, he didn't; there was nothing that he wanted less, in fact. Standing up in front of all those people and baring his soul sounded like hell to him. But it didn't seem right not to say something. He owed Rodney that.

Even though he hadn't been able to save him.

Maybe this was his punishment for not being there when he should have been.

He could feel all eyes in the room on him as he rose and approached the podium that had been set up at one end of the room. Elizabeth stepped aside and he was alone, with a microphone in front of him and the combined population of Atlantis and the Daedalus sitting silent and still, watching him. He saw Teyla gripping Ronon's arm with fingers clenched white, and Cadman resting her head on Beckett's shoulder, while the doctor looked red-eyed and stunned. Zelenka sat stiffly, looking as if a wind could blow him over. Even Hermiod was there, in the back.

Sheppard wondered if Rodney would have been surprised, to know how much he was missed. Reaching for the mic, he saw that his hand was trembling, and realized that he didn't have the slightest idea what to say.

Finding words had never been a problem when talking to Rodney. There were too many words, in fact. But never words for what mattered, never words to express what was between them. And that had been all right. Neither one of them went for that kind of thing.

Now it was too late, and yet here he was, making the effort. Maybe it was just Rodney's last attempt to embarrass him from beyond the grave.

"I'm not good at this," he said, and had to pause, hearing the sound of his own words booming out into the room from the microphone. Having to hear himself, having everyone else hear him ... this was hard, so hard. And maybe it should be, maybe it meant less if it was easy, maybe that was part of what he should say because it certainly seemed to sum up his friendship with Rodney. "I don't know what to say. If Rodney was standing here, if he was listening -- and who knows, maybe he is -- anything I could say at this point would just embarrass us both."

He darted his eyes towards Elizabeth, saw her give him a small, encouraging smile, and found the strength to continue. "Rodney McKay was a good man. I know that sounds empty and hollow, like every eulogy you've ever heard, but I mean it. He wasn't necessarily a nice person, although he could be -- but he was a truly good person, and there aren't too many of those.

"Like all of us, he came to this galaxy without leaving too much behind. We're flotsam, all of us. They picked us for this because there wasn't really anybody to miss us back on Earth. Some of us have parents --" his eyes picked out Beckett's pale face "-- and some had lovers --" and here he glanced at Elizabeth, and then had to look away from the desolation in her eyes "-- but all of us had, and have, one thing in common: there was nothing, no one, on Earth to tie us there. We all felt that we might find something better here."

Despite the hollow ache in his chest, Sheppard found himself smiling. "And we did, didn't we? Something we never expected. I don't really even know what to call it -- friendship isn't really deep enough, family is too specific. I don't think it needs a word. Talking about it just cheapens it."

His voice faltered, but went on. "The good things in life aren't the things that are easy. They're the things you have to work for. And being Rodney's friend takes -- took a lot of work." Hell, he couldn't let go of the present tense, even now. Couldn't accept that Rodney wasn't going to come walking back into his life. "But it was worth it. Always worth it."

He was still waiting for somebody to fidget, or cough, or get up and leave the room. But they were all listening as if transfixed. Teyla had begun to weep softly, and Beckett looked on the verge of it, but no one seemed bored. They were all focused on him, awaiting his next words.

And suddenly, he didn't know what words to give them, because there were no words to make this better, no words to ease them from the part of their lives that contained Rodney to the part that didn't. No words to replace the arrogant, abrasive, larger-than-life figure that would never again terrorize the labs, save the day, or drive John Sheppard crazy like no one else ever could.

He'd never been good with words, and now he found that the words were deserting him again, leaving without a trace. He should have been good at this by now; he didn't know how many times he'd had to find the words to deliver this message to a soldier's family, by letter or videotape or email or in person. Each time, it never got easier, and this time, he felt as if each word was being ripped out of his raw bleeding heart.

"I wish he'd come back," he said softly. His fingers clutched at the edge of the podium, digging into the wood. The words, the comforting words to keep everyone at a distance were gone. There were only feelings now, and he couldn't deal with them. "I want him back. I'd give my life to have him back."

And then he found that he couldn't talk anymore, because, to his horrendous embarrassment, he was actually crying. The sensation was almost totally unfamiliar -- it actually took him a minute to figure out what was happening. And now he was breaking down in front of everyone he knew. He tried to stop, but couldn't, and turned his face away, trying to shut them out, close himself down, simply not be until he could deal with it.

No one spoke or coughed or even moved, and he was cold, the world was cold. Somebody turn up the heat, he wanted to say, and with a choked laugh he realized that he was dreaming, and blinked snowflakes away from his eyes.

He raised his head, or tried to. There was a great weight on top of him, and as he began to understand where he was and what it was, he fumbled with desperate fingers to feel along its massive rib cage for any sign of breath. But the wolf was dead, well and truly dead -- half its head was blown away. Its slowly cooling bulk must be helping to insulate him from the cold.

Taking stock of his body once again, he moved his legs and froze as a hot, searing pain spiked from shin to hip. Okay. Moving the legs was bad. He tried his arms, found them unhurt, then flexed his fingers -- stiff, but not numb. Stripping off a glove, he raised his hand to his face, and stopped at the hot moisture that he felt there. At first he thought it was blood, and some of it surely was that, or worse -- cooling clots from the wolf's shattered skull. But there was also a salt-water taste on his lips that he couldn't mistake.

Tears. Damn. He hadn't cried since ... since when, anyway? Since his father's funeral, maybe, the year he turned eighteen. He was John Sheppard, tough-guy pilot, and he hadn't cried when his girlfriend of six years, the woman he'd thought would bear his children someday, had dumped him after one deployment too many. Hadn't cried when Mitch and Dex took an RPG on a medivac outside Kabul. Hadn't cried when he'd left Earth, knowing he might never return, knowing also that there was precious little to return to. As he'd tried to tell himself in his dream, it just wasn't something that he did.

And here he was, lying in the snow with tears running down his face for a smug, arrogant, hypochondriac physicist who didn't know one end of a P90 from the other ... crying for an egotistical SOB with the social skills of a five-year-old child, who terrorized his employees, annoyed his co-workers, and generally made an ass of himself every time they took him offworld.

Crying for the best goddamn friend he'd ever had, who'd died on an alien planet because Sheppard hadn't been able to protect him.

"Sonovabitch, McKay," Sheppard muttered, scrubbing his hand across his burning eyes, wiping away the tears and blood and maybe even a little of the pain. "You're even annoying me after you're dead."

He wriggled around under the wolf carcass, teeth gritted against the pain in his leg. He didn't know how long he'd been out, but Armstrong would surely have heard his gunshots, and assuming that Armstrong didn't have problems of his own, would be on his way. Raising the knee of his good leg like a lever, he managed to roll the animal's bulk off into the snow, and he sat up. The BDUs on his right leg were shredded into bloody rags by the beast's claws. He didn't know how bad he was hurt, didn't have time to figure it out -- the only question that mattered right now was whether or not he could move. Flexing his leg, he discovered that, as long as he was willing to accept a certain level of pain and not bend it too much, he could get by.

The P90 lay next to him in the snow. Sheppard picked it up, checked it over quickly. The clip was nearly spent, with only a couple more shots left. He reached into one of the parka's deep pockets for another.

"Still alive, I see," a quiet voice said, out of the storm.

Sheppard froze, one hand in his pocket and the other on the gun.

Armstrong stepped forward, out of the blizzard, his weapon trained on Sheppard's face. "Is that all its blood, or some of yours? Seems you've had a rough time."

Sheppard noticed that the man's hair was askew and the shoulder of his parka had been torn up. "Looks like I'm not the only one."

Armstrong snorted. "Touche." He gestured with the muzzle of the gun. "Hands where I can see 'em, and toss that over there."

"You're going to kill me anyway, so give me one good reason why I should cooperate with you?"

Armstrong's lips twisted in a flat smile, a mockery of the warm one he'd worn earlier. "You strike me as a man who doesn't throw away hope, however thin the shreds might be. If you don't cooperate, I shoot you dead where you sit. If you do, then you get to live a little bit longer."

"And what's in it for you?" Sheppard asked, carefully removing his hand from his pocket. "Somehow I doubt if you're keeping me alive out of the goodness of your heart. I would've expected you to shoot me by now."

"You have a point. But I have some questions for you, starting with how you got here and how many people came with --"

At that point, Sheppard flung the P90 at him and rolled to the side, tumbling behind some rocks. Bullet scattered off the stone as Armstrong recovered from the split-second's distraction and squeezed the trigger; a flying chip of rock glanced off Sheppard's face. He fumbled under his coat for the sidearm strapped to his leg.

"Or maybe I'll just kill you," Armstrong said from the other side of the rocks.

"Lots of luck. I imagine you're running pretty low on bullets by now. How many did you use up on the wolves?" Sheppard looked around and stifled a curse. Additional cover -- trees, rocks -- lay several yards away. He'd have to run in the open to reach it, and somehow he didn't think Armstrong intended to give him that chance. The .9mm felt very small and useless in his hand.

"I still have enough to kill you." The voice sounded closer.

Yeah, that's it, sucker, Sheppard thought. Just keep coming.

He worked his way quietly to the other end of the pile of rocks, leaving great swatches of blood in the snow from his injured leg, and risked a quick peek. Just as he'd thought -- Armstrong was doing likewise. He obviously intended to ambush Sheppard from this end.

Sheppard was a great believer in the tactical advantage of doing something stupid. It threw your enemy off guard. Nobody in their right mind would try a full-frontal assault on a much more heavily armed opponent, so Armstrong wouldn't be expecting it.

He came out shooting, emptying the clip into Armstrong's face. The man was already moving, ducking, firing as he went, but Sheppard was in motion too, going low and smacking headfirst into Armstrong's knees. The two of them fell over together, dropping their now-empty guns and grabbing at each other. Sheppard felt his fist connect with some part of Armstrong's head and let out a yell as fingers sank into his hair and yanked on it, jerking his head backwards so hard it nearly gave him whiplash.

"Pulling hair, asshole?" he panted. Armstrong almost got him in the crotch with a knee, but he managed to block it -- with his bad leg, unfortunately, sending all the breath out of him in a rush. "Thought you were ... man ... not grade-school girl."

Armstrong's elbow clipped him in the temple and he saw stars, but he managed to drive his own weight into the other man's stomach and heard a loud grunt of pain. Then Armstrong got a better grip on his hair and whacked his head against something, catching him right where he'd hit his head in the puddlejumper crash. His vision went white and his hearing blurred out in a rush of static. As he desperately clawed his way back to consciousness, he found himself lying flat on his back. Armstrong was holding him down with one hand while pointing a pistol at his face.

Sheppard thought at first that it was his gun, in which case it would be out of bullets, but then realized that Armstrong would have probably had one, too.

"So long, Colonel," Armstrong said.

The next sound, though, wasn't the sharp report of a bullet -- it was a soft snick, the sound of a gun being cocked. Armstrong froze.

Caldwell, Sheppard thought in relief, and he looked up past Armstrong's face, past the .9mm which was now resting against the back of the Lieutenant's head ... up a parka-clad arm with blood liberally splattered all over it, into the wide, slightly dazed-looking blue eyes of Rodney McKay.

------

Sheppard's world froze in perfect white stillness for just a moment -- the swirling snow, the white sky, white ground, and in the middle of it all, Rodney's eyes, bluer than blue.

Time started again when Rodney said to Armstrong, in a voice so slurred that it was barely comprehensible, "Let him go."

The gun in Rodney's hand -- that was Sheppard's gun. The empty one. He recognized the little scratch on the barrel. In which case they'd be doing fine right up until Armstrong called Rodney's bluff, at which point they'd both die.

But Sheppard was already moving, lashing out and up into Armstrong's face. One hand smacked into Armstrong's .9mm and sent it flying; the other hand went straight for the throat in a hard jab at the lieutenant's windpipe. As Armstrong reeled back, choking, Sheppard reared up out of the snow -- just hitting him, as hard as he could, as many times as he could, until Armstrong slumped facedown in the snow and did not get up.

Gasping, Sheppard crouched for a moment with his hands sore and hot and sticking to his gloves at the knuckles. Then he turned and looked at Rodney. Just stared at him for a moment. One side of his face was covered with blood, matting his hair and coating his neck and the collar of his parka. The parka hood was down, and his hair, clothes, even his eyelashes were covered with ice and snow -- it looked as if he'd been rolled in ice crystals. He was shivering so hard that his movements were jerky and uncoordinated. He'd dropped the gun.

"Rodney," was all Sheppard could manage to say.

"I would ask what you're d-doing here, Colonel, but it's gotten to the point where following the sound of gunshots and finding you doesn't even surprise me anymore. All I want to know is, since you're the military one, why do I always end up saving your ass?" He managed to sound petulant even through chattering teeth. And then he folded up without another sound and crumpled into a boneless heap, joining Armstrong in the snow.

"Rodney!"

Sheppard crouched down next to him -- or started to; he'd forgotten about his leg, which buckled under him and spilled him on his face in the snow next to Rodney.

"We're a real healthy bunch," he muttered, picking himself up. Stripping off a glove, he laid the back of his hand against Rodney's face. Cold as ice. In fact, ice was exactly what he seemed to be covered with. Touching one sleeve of Rodney's parka, Sheppard found it heavy and stiff. Probably about as insulating as being wrapped in a wet towel. Before he had time to think about what he was doing, he slipped out of his own coat and tucked it around Rodney. The wind seared through his jacket as if it wasn't even there. He clenched his teeth and tried to ignore it.

Rodney McKay was alive. He didn't know how, didn't know why -- all he knew was that when they got back to the jumper, he planned to have a nice, long, loud chat with Caldwell about checking for a pulse before declaring someone dead, possibly with a little added lecture about not leaving people behind.

And then there was Armstrong. Taking his own advice, Sheppard limped over to Armstrong's still form and felt for a pulse. Strong, hard and fast. Damn. He loathed the thought of shooting an unconscious man, loathed the thought of turning his back on him even more. But he did have zip ties in one of his vest pockets, and securely bound Armstrong hand and foot. If he ended up with frostbite, well too damn bad. It was the least he deserved for killing Rodney. Or ... whatever. If he hadn't succeeded, he'd certainly tried. He'd killed others, and considering that he was one of the saboteurs, there wasn't a soul on the Daedalus whose life had not been threatened by his actions. Sheppard tucked Armstrong's gun into a pocket of his coat and reloaded his own before holstering it.

Rodney made a faint, garbled sound behind him. Sheppard spun around so quickly that he took his weight on his bad leg and nearly toppled over in the snow. Clenching his teeth against the pain, he limped over to Rodney.

"McKay?"

Rodney blinked, and turned his head to one side to squint up blearily at Sheppard. "I thought I dreamed you," he said in a sleepy voice. "Maybe I'm still dreaming. You were Jeannie last time, weren't you?"

"Er ... no." Sheppard leaned down to wrap an arm around the physicist's shoulders and struggled to lift him to his feet. "Rodney ... c'mon, give me some help here." This got no response, so he tried snapping at him, "McKay, on your feet!"

"You were a lot nicer when you were Jeannie," Rodney mumbled, his legs wobbling as he made what appeared to be an earnest effort to stand independently. Most of his weight ended up bearing down on Sheppard, who let out a sharp breath as he tried to stabilize them both and wrenched his leg. He could feel blood trickling down his thigh, hot against the cold skin.

"You haven't seen the not-nice version of me yet, Rodney, and you don't want to. I'm gonna need you to walk out of here on your own, because I sure as hell can't carry you." He didn't like the weakness in his own knees, didn't like the way that he'd already almost stopped noticing the razor-sharp edge of the wind cutting through his jacket. "Now move it, McKay, I'm not kidding around here!"

He could only hope, as they began their slow forward progress through the snow, that no more wolves showed up before they could make it to the jumper. He was already shivering so hard that he wasn't sure if he could aim.

"You're shivering, Jeannie," Rodney mumbled, leaning into him. He pawed at the front of Sheppard's coat, lacking the manual dexterity to do anything more. "Here, take my coat ..."

"For God's sake, McKay, stop calling me Jeannie. You're really creeping me out. And quit that." Sheppard smacked his hands away from the front of the coat.

As they left the semi-protected area against the hill, the wind roared down on them in earnest. Sheppard stumbled and managed to right himself only because he had to -- because he knew that to fall down now would be to die. The valley channeled the storm like a wind tunnel. Sheppard could barely see more than ten feet in front of them. He realized how incredibly easy it would be to walk past the jumper in the white-out. It could be no more than a few paces to their left or right, and they wouldn't even know it was there. To make matters even worse, darkness had begun to threaten. Soon it would be pitch-black. They were both covered with blood, and Sheppard seriously doubted if he and Armstrong had managed to kill all the wolves.

I'm sure I've been in worse situations, he thought, struggling grimly through the drifts while half-dragging Rodney. I just can't think of any right now ...

"Jeannie?"

"What?" he responded automatically, before the actual name sunk in, and then he cuffed Rodney lightly on the shoulder. "Damn it, McKay, stop calling me that!"

"My imagination's better than I thought it was," Rodney slurred, his head lolling against Sheppard's shoulder. His hood had slipped off again at some point, and Sheppard could feel the prickle of Rodney's blood-stiff hair against his cheek. "You really sound like Sheppard. You've even got that weird flippy thing his hair does ..."

"That's because I am Sheppard, and what weird flippy thing?" There was something deeply surreal about the fact that he was arguing with a delirious Rodney in a blizzard. And yet, there was a certain comfort to it, too -- the familiar give-and-take, push-and-pull. As long as we can still argue, we can get out of this.

"Sheppard -- Sheppard's back in Atlantis. Safe. Warm."

"No, I'm out here in a blizzard, saving your accident-prone ass." At least he sincerely hoped he was doing that, and not just prolonging their deaths. Either the snow was getting heavier and harder to wade through, or his legs were getting a lot weaker, and neither option boded well.

One of Rodney's arms was loosely slung around his shoulders, and Sheppard felt the hand tighten suddenly, spastically, on his arm. Rodney stopped walking. Sheppard literally dragged him for a step or two before he stopped walking, too, and used the side of his head to push Rodney's head off his shoulder so that he could look him in the eyes. "Okay, now what?"

Rodney was staring at him as if he'd never seen him before. At the moment, that could well be true. "You're here," he said. His voice was still soft and slurred, but there was a sharper note in it, as if he'd rallied enough to try to fight through the fog in his brain.

"Yes, now move."

But Rodney just stood still, continuing to stare at him. It was getting slightly creepy. "How did you get here?"

"By puddlejumper, how else? Rodney, we're freezing to death as we stand here. Move!"

He responded to that, weakly, slogging another few steps through the snow before stopping again. "Teyla? Ronon?"

"Teyla's back in Atlantis; Ronon's on the Daedalus." Sheppard had had to think hard to remember where Ronon was. He couldn't really feel the cold at all anymore. Walking might be warming him up ... he hoped so, but somehow he doubted it. "Rodney, seriously, we need to keep moving."

Rodney's hesitation continued for another few seconds and then he got himself moving again with little, hitching steps. His head sank down again, resting on Sheppard. "You know what's crazy?" he murmured.

"No. Tell me." Because he needed to keep talking. Stay awake. Keep moving.

"I thought you'd come. I mean, it's crazy and stupid and there's no rational reason for it." Rodney's words started and stopped, with ever-longer pauses between them. Sheppard, through long experience at deciphering just about every dialect of McKay-ese, strung them together into a coherent whole without even having to think about it. "My subconscious kept telling me you wouldn't, that I had to make it out on my own. And it's crazy, because back in that puddlejumper, underwater, I had the opposite problem. I didn't think you'd come. I really didn't. Sam said you would, but I didn't believe her. And then you did ... you did." His voice trailed away and then picked back up again, so slurred that Sheppard could barely make it out. "I think that was the last time I ever thought you wouldn't."

Sheppard felt strangely warm, from head to foot. Maybe it was just the hypothermia. "Well, don't thank me yet, Rodney, because we're a long way from the puddlejumper." And he couldn't feel his feet, which was making it even harder to find and keep his footing in the snow. On the other hand, it was dulling the pain in his leg, and that was helping with the whole keeping-vertical thing.

That was the last coherent thing that he got out of Rodney, who degenerated into a mumbled, monotone tirade about something-or-other having to do with ZPMs. And then at some point he stopped talking, but Sheppard wasn't even sure when it happened, because by that time it was taking all his concentration just to keep walking, especially with Rodney getting heavier and heavier against his side.

When his injured leg crumpled and slid out to the side, he didn't even realize what had happened until he was facefirst in the snow, half buried under Rodney. Oh, well, this isn't good, he thought, trying to turn himself and just managing to thrash around in the snow a little bit. "Rodney," he said through a mouthful of snow. Or thought he'd said it. Maybe he didn't. Rodney, in any case, remained a limp and unmoving object across his chest.

Sheppard tilted his head back and let the snowflakes brush his face. It was nice here, down in the snow, out of the wind. He didn't hurt, he wasn't cold. And he'd found Rodney. All he wanted to do was sleep. Some deeply buried part of his mind was railing at him, telling him to wake up, get up, keep walking. But he couldn't remember why. And he didn't want to. It had been a hell of a long day. Sheppard figured he'd earned a rest.

He closed his eyes, and let himself drift away. It felt as nice as he'd thought it would, and finally the part of his brain that wanted him to get up got with the program and shut up, letting him sleep in peace.

------

TBC

I owe much thanks to betas Erika and Tazmy for helping me keep Grieving!Sheppard in character. Any lingering OOC-ness is my fault and mine alone.