Chapter Five

Teyla had hit him when he'd reached out to her in the horrid cell, had looked at him as if he were something filthy. Teyla, his friend of so many years…

Someone lifted McKay's head and placed a flask to his lips, letting a thick, sour liquid dribble over his tongue. It was a woman, but her voice and her hands were cold and abrasive. A rough sheet under his head smelled like sick, felt stiff with it. His body burned and tingled and felt so, so heavy, as if he were tied with lead weights.

He tried to speak to ask where he was, what planet he might be on, now, but managed on a vague mumble.

"Professor…not speak…"

Professor. Oh, God. He was dead on Sey.

Then all was quiet again until someone laid a lantern nearby and placed a cold compress against his brow. Water passed his lips, then more of the thick, sour stuff. He was sick again, and didn't realize that he was crying and asking for his friends.

"Sleep," said someone. "The poison…" but he was asleep, as he'd been told.

OoOoO

The team's escape from Dorav began when the guards watching Teyla shout as she was tortured, the ones who prevented McKay from breaking through the window of his closet, turned out to have no stomach for seeing a woman in so much pain.

"Come with us," the guard said, in a whisper this time, as he passed a water flask among Sheppard and his team. The cell door was opened wide for them.

"You're helping us escape?" Sheppard asked, incredulously.

"The High Mater loses respect when he wishes to harm a woman, especially when he commands us to do it for him."

Sheppard looked over at Teyla. She was still troubled from the prolonged session to which she'd been subjected. Mercer took her arm, and she pretended to stumble. They were going to play it like she was a soft thing, unbearably delicate.

The five were taken from their prison, a couple of their packs returned to them, and brought to the stargate. Then weapons fire erupted and the Mater's disloyal guards fell dead with burning holes blasted through and through their bodies. Dozens of loyalists appeared with the High Mater in command, intending to recapture the Lanteans. That was when the team had scattered. That was how McKay and Teyla became separated from the rest deep in the Doravan wilderness.

OoOoO

After her evening meal, King Teyla of Sey felt the pull of sleep, once again. Centris told her that this had always been her habit. The bed was so welcoming and a grey breeze moved the curtains that surrounded it.

Teyla told one of her handmaids, "I dreamed about the pale man taken from the prison beneath this castle. He seemed familiar to me."

The handmaid fluffed Teyla's pillows and pushed them to the perfect angle beneath her king's head. "You were ill for a time, mixed up. Your meal will settle your cares and bring you to health once again."

When the servants left, Teyla fought off her grogginess and sat up in the bed. Her body had been shapelier some days ago. Now it felt as if it were melting into fat, as if she were supposed to be moving faster and bringing her limbs around and holding the iron pipes used to beat prisoners.

She recalled a room with golden light shining in patterns on the floor. She held two iron pipes, one in each hand. These pipes were coming down on the large-maned man and on the dark-haired man she had sent to the fields. She held the iron pipes to the neck of the pale man that she had sentenced to death. And the pale man had made her a promise and he had held her hand once when her eyes were so heavy that she could not keep them open.

"Please," she heard him say, and it broke her heart and hardened it at the same time.

OoOoO

McKay slept as the executioner's poison tried to leech the life out of him. He felt heavy, as if he'd run for miles, as he had on Dorav, when the High Mater's men were after them.

Leafy branches whipped against his face, smacking him and smacking him again as if he were the one shooting at innocent people for no good reason. Homeboys loyal to the Doravan High Mater pursued McKay and Teyla into the waterlogged forest. Without weapons there was little they could do except try the age-old survival technique known as Running Like Bats Out of Hell.

They scaled a low fence—right into a holding pen containing an enormous and enormously annoyed pig-like thing. Teyla managed to sprint to the other side with only a minor stumble. McKay caught his leg in something and tore a hole in his calf. Then he fell chin-down into the shriekingly disgusting pig shit, where he struggled in the slimy crap to get his feet under himself.

They were coming, the Mater's men, stupid, ignorant people, serving under a sadist, a madman. They were armed and dangerous and determined to shoot him and Teyla dead. This was no time to pause.

Scuttling in the sty, with the pig snorting and squealing in outrage, McKay wanted to live or else to give in, or bravely face these pursuers or cower with his head hidden until all of the scary stuff went away.

Then Teyla was there, pulling at his arm, digging her feet into the mess that flew up all over her in the backwash from McKay's faltering feet and the now-hysterical pig's scrambling hoofs. Teyla pulled him and pulled, telling him, "Get up, Rodney! They are close behind us!" as if it had never occurred to her to let him go.

McKay found a foothold and slogged onwards, Teyla leading him over the other side of the low fence. Adrenaline anesthetized him so that he wasn't even limping, although his flesh was badly torn and he was bleeding heavily.

They came to a part of the forest clogged with low shrubs and eye-level saplings, and Teyla ran ahead, trusting that McKay was right behind her, occasionally jerking her head to the side to see him peripherally.

Green firebolts flew past McKay, sizzling and bright and sour-smelling. The powerful shots were poorly aimed, and they slammed into tree trunks or the ground, or else arced over his head into the distance on either side. He saw the flash of Teyla's copper hair as another blast crackled by his ear…and then she was gone—disappeared!—making him race on alone. He looked from side to side, searching for her, his lifeline, scarcely allowing himself to think that she would leave him at a time like this.

The strafing discharges became more frequent and blew by closer, singeing his shoulder and his arm, before he took a glancing hit to the back, which sent him sprawling, effectively tasered and left dimwitted by the shock of it. The Mater's loyal followers slowed their approach and a long pause happened as his senses dulled.

"Don't kill me," he slurred, watching the colors of earth and sky and people and plants form kaleidoscope patterns before his eyes.

Someone kicked him in the chest and so he curled up to keep his innards safe, painfully aware that his burned back presented a worthy target, as well.

"Oh, God, go away!"

But they didn't and the loyal guards aimed their potent weapons at him. His breaths came faster and faster and all of the little sensible thoughts in his mind got bungled up in one another.

"Don'tdon'tdon'tdon'tdon'tdon't…" he said, like a mantra, as if it would protect him. "Don'tdon'tdon'tdon'tdon't…"

Then there was a rifle shot, which splintered a nearby tree. Then—thankyou thankyou thankyou—a flash of copper hair and someone was standing before him, facing the great crowd that was calling for blood, a small, lone person coming between Rodney McKay and his doom.

"Stand back!" she said.

It was Teyla, her P90 raised. A surviving mutinous guard, hungry for rebellion, had beckoned her in the forest and handed her the only weapon he'd saved from their cache. McKay didn't know this then. He knew only that Teyla had come back for him when he really hadn't thought that she would.

"I will kill any of you who come closer!"

And with that, she locked her knees and drew the weapon up in front of her face, her arms steadied, her back straight as steel. Teyla, a woman raised in a tent. Someone McKay had mocked and referred to as Xena. Someone who once had said to him, "You do not respect me. Do you think that I am stupid?" and he had scoffed and walked away from her.

Then, even though it was very loud, the P90 sounded like survival to him, as did the bodies thumping as they hit the ground.

OoOoO

He lay curled in a perspiring ball, groaning at the lightning bolts searing through his head and at the grinding ache in his belly and the stinging pain in his blistered hands. McKay, poisoned by the yellow liquid, came back to the present feeling as if his skin were aflame and a heavy quilt lying on top of him, weighing him down like a suffocating veil. Someone came and put their hand on his forehead and removed the blanket. A light breeze moved over him and the sweat cooled. He sighed with relief and opened his eyes.

The driver and a small boy were looking at him. Behind them stood a woman, thin, small and haggard. Behind her were several other men peering at him curiously, all of them dressed as the driver was, in ragged trousers and stained overshirts. Their dirty boots testified to long days of hard work.

"He is awake," said the woman, unnecessarily. "Make him go, now, before he is found."

"I do not think that he is well enough to leave this bed, let alone to stumble around outside, Leenee," the driver said. "Can you hear me, man?"

McKay twitched his fingers in response, not able to move, yet, or speak.

"Good. You dug your burial pit two nights ago, but instead we have given you your life back. Now you will heal and take us with you to your world."

The addled physicist waited a while to respond. The driver's wife, Leenee, tsk-tsked in annoyance, gave him a dribble of water and put a cold compress to his head. He would have given just about anything for a couple of milligrams of morphine sulfate right about then. Here he had come to this God-awful backwater in search of a medicinal plant. He hoped that they had better cures than just compresses and water.

"Family…not…whole town."

The driver smiled and gestured to the room around him. "These are my family," he said. With an arm around his son, he held the child close. "My son. My wife. My brothers and cousins and the cousins of my cousins. We waited for the executioner to depart to inform the king that his task was completed. The delay almost proved fatal to you and for that we are sorry. The grave that you dug was filled with stones and covered over. We brought you here and gave you medicine to counteract the poison."

Crouching next to McKay, the driver, little more than a shadow, now, as McKay began to fade again, said, "When you are well enough we will go to your world and never again have to throw bodies into graves that the condemned have had to dig for themselves."

The room spun, and McKay rapidly tumbled down into darkness. His last thought this time was for his friends, his own cousins in this galaxy, and how much he wanted to bring them home with him through the stargate.

TBC...