A/N: The muses and bunnies are having waaaay to much fun. Your reviews are a good influence on them, although team Sheppard would probably beg to differ.

Ch. 7

Talk About Deja Vu

Major Lorne sucked when it came to computers. If the icon on a word document froze up for no more than two-minutes, he panicked. Computer geeks despised him as he was always calling them at odd hours just to ask if that weird rattling-like noise his laptop was making was normal. But it was sort of like with car mechanics. You knew your own laptop like you knew your own car, so when it started acting funny, you were the only one to realize it since you knew the stupid machine's habits inside and out.

So he followed Dr. Zelenka's instructions to the letter. When Dr. Z said pull this and twist that, Lorne didn't even ask how far or wide, he just did it. Even now his knees were screaming in agony as he knelt before the console with Zelenka hovering above him, alternating between the PC tablet and the console itself.

"Anything yet, doc?" Lorne asked. He'd been twisting wires and moving crystals around until his fingers had gone numb.

Radek sighed and muttered in his mother-tongue. "It is as though the programs are layered. Just as soon as I break through one, I find another. These firewalls, back-ups, it is as though they think for themselves. They have, so far, stayed one step ahead, adjusting to my manipulations. I have never encountered a computer so sophisticated."

Which was saying a lot since he'd mentioned the same thing concerning a few of Atlantis' systems.

Lorne pulled his hands from the console's innards and stalked over to the cowering, mousy Pondo trying to shrink out of existence under the heartless gaze of two armed marines. He gave a quick glance to the four pale occupants breathing and sweating heavily in the chairs, then back at Pondo. "You could make this easy on yourself if you'd just tell us how to shut the damn thing down."

Pondo shook his head. "It-it-it... I don't know. I have never had to shut the game down. The scenarios end when the players wish them to end or the game is completed. I do not know why you do not simply let them finish the game."

"Because they should have been done by now," Lorne snarled. "And I don't remember the rest of my men looking that bad when we woke up. What the hell is it doing to them? What is that thing? Because it sure isn't a souped-up version of Nintendo."

Pondo swallowed convulsively. "It is a game, nothing more. Left by the Ancestors for our entertainment. My family have been caretakers of it for generations..."

Lorne rolled his eyes and moved back to the console. The Pegasus Galaxy was chalked full of surprises but with clichés filling the gaps. Sticking to the cliché, the 'game' had probably been used for training, either to prep the Ancients for war or to speed up Ascension. Ten-thousand years and a few days later, a glitch decided to manifest the moment Sheppard's team sat their rather unlucky hides in the seats.

"Still no change, Major," Zelenka said without looking up.

Lorne leaned his hip against the workstation. "That's not why I came over here. Any luck figuring out what it is, exactly?"

Zelenka shook his frizzy head. "I believe these layers are not only preventing me from gaining access to the program, but hiding the intent of the program as well. Think of it like a maze made up of streets with many signs. Some signs are real but others are false, keeping you in circles."

"So, in other words, your being misled by a computer." Lorne looked over at Pondo quaking like a leaf and one Marine's bark away from wetting his pants. He had enough gate-time logged in to know for a fact there were people out there who could act their ass off and then some. Encounter enough and even the supposedly mentally-handicap five-year-old couldn't be trusted. Pondo could be completely clueless or pulling a brilliant fast one. Either way, they weren't going to get answers out of him. The fakes were always psychotic enough to keep up the act no matter how much they were threatened, then there was that damn Geneva Convention thing always getting in the way.

Usually the trick was to talk to them until they either broke the facade or let spill something that could be used against them. It worked two times out of twenty, but Lorne needed something to do before he ripped Pondo's head off just for the fun of it.

"Keep at it, Doc," he said, and stalked over to Pondo who visibly paled.

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The wraith slammed its fist into Ronon's chest and Ronon sailed back like that weird looking ball Sheppard liked to toss. He crashed into crates and barely had time to shake off the daze when he was lifted by his shirt-front to be tossed the other way. He slammed into the ground, the breath shoved from his lungs. He doubted his spine would be able to take one more blow, but it didn't matter.

The wraith strode forward. Ronon kicked out and laughed when the wraith stumbled back. He would be honest, he was having a blast. The real-life fight should have ended by now, but the cavalry didn't exist in this recreation. But because it was a recreation, lacking reality, Ronon didn't mind so much. He ignored the aches, pains, and grating in his rib cage to leap to his feet, limp up to the wraith, and give him a one-two right and left hook driving the ugly bastard back.

The wraith hissed. Ronon grinned and wiped blood from his face. "I can do this all day." And he would, buying the real cavalry existing beyond this falsehood time to do what they needed to. Ronon charged forward with a bellowing war-cry. He plowed into the wraith in a tackle he was pretty sure Sheppard would be proud of.

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"Help me, please!"

Teyla staggered to a halt and whirled around to the cocoon and its occupant with the familiar voice.

"Father?" she approached the cocoon in an equal mix of horror and hope. Tagan squirmed, struggling against the organic casing.

"We don't have time for this!" Ford snarled.

"At ease, Lieutenant," John snarled back. He was already cutting the bonds of another wraith meal. This one female, a stranger. Something in Teyla screamed that she shouldn't be freed, but the sight of her father trussed up for the eating wouldn't let her pay any attention. Teyla pulled her knife and began cutting.

"I will free you, father," she said, breathless and teary-eyed. She'd been a girl when he was taken, barely in her teens. His absence had kept her awake for days with dreams of his body shriveling to dust under the hand of a wraith, then blowing away in the wind.

But he was here, now. The dreams had been wrong. He had been alive all this time...

She stopped cutting. No, he hadn't. She glanced over her shoulder to see Col. Sheppard shouldering the woman and Ronon freeing two more. Blue flashed and John arched, sinking down with a defiant sneer of pain.

"Almost had you there, didn't I, my dear?"

Teyla looked back at the short, chubby wraith with its hand on her father's chest, sucking him dry, turning him to dust. Teyla screamed a sound strained, feral, and furious. She lifted her P-90 and let a thousand bullets tear into the immortal chest. But this wraith had fed, and laughed instead of shrieked.

"That tickled," he giggled. He dug his fingers into his own chest, plucking the bullets out one by one like a child picking the berries off a Mungon cake. He flicked each bullet at Teyla." You disappoint me, lassie. I think it would be best to step things up a notch." He ripped his hand from Tagan's chest and slammed it into hers.

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Rodney's fingers flew over the tablet just for the sake of typing. The water crept up past his waist as the walls of the jumper buckled in around him. No cliff-edge to save him this time. Either the whale's passing had pushed him beyond the ledge or there wasn't a ledge.

"Isn't real, isn't real, isn't real..."

"That's what you said about me," Fake-Carter said. "Which, as you recall, hadn't gotten rid of me."

"Yeah, well, at the time my mind was only screwing with itself. This is someone else's twisted sense of humor making my already rotten day ten thousand times worse."

"Are you sure you're still even in that 'game'." Sam asked, doing the little quotation-in-the-air with her fingers.

"As sure as I know I'd prefer you in a bikini right now. Why the hell can't my imagination play fair?" But that would probably be asking too much, because life in general wasn't fair or this game would be working and he would be making out with Carter right now. Instead, the hull of the jumper groaned and Rodney's heart-rate shot through the roof. "Not real, not real, not real..."

"Keep it up, McKay. It won't change anything, but maybe you'll believe it enough to suffocate rather than die by a heart attack."

McKay looked up from his tablet to glare at fake Carter. "You know, at least my last Carter-hallucination had the decency of not acting like a complete bitch."

Sam gave him a cherubic smile and shrugged innocently. "That Carter isn't here."

Rodney perked and snapped his fingers. "Ah-ha! That proves it. You aren't a creation of my mind, you're a creation of someone else's because no way would my mind make you this unpleasant."

"You sure?"

"Quite. It would make her partially unpleasant but otherwise helpful and good at distracting me from the impending doom."

"Isn't that what I'm doing?"

"No!" Rodney squeaked. "You're making me think too much about how screwed I am." The jumper groaned louder. Rodney cringed while fake-Carter grimaced helplessly.

Rodney knew what was going to happen next, that it was inevitable, and that he would wake up from it to be thrust into some new nightmarish scenario. But knowing still wasn't enough to keep the instinctual parts of his brain from having a fit. He was about to prove that too much terror really could kill. His mind turned to "what would Sheppard do". He lowered his arms, letting the tablet drop into the chest-high water. Sheppard would probably cuss, say something witty or totally derogatory, and face the on-coming doom with chest out and head held high. Rodney's brain was in a snit, refusing to form coherent words. So he lifted his trembling chin, puffed out his stuttering chest and... squeezed his eyes shut with a whimper.

"Just get it over with," he begged.

"Oh," fake-Carter pouted, "you're no fun."

The jumper groaned and caved like a crushed beer can all around Rodney.

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Sheppard opened his eyes to... himself, which he found immediately odd. He was lying on a metal table, arms, legs and head strapped down, sheet pulled up to his waist, and chest exposed. But that was only the half of it. He was blue and chitinous, mostly around portions of his face, his arms, and a large part of his chest. Ridged and spined scales covered him to his ribcage leaving the soft skin of his solar-plexus and stomach vulnerable. Somewhere close by, a heart monitor beeped steadily.

Then it increased speed when John tried to move his arms, meeting resistance in the form of metal restraints digging into his wrists. So this wasn't an out of body experience. He was looking at a mirror or some kind of really reflective glass.

"We are about to cut into the subject now..."

John's heart sent the machine into a rapidly beeping tizzy. His brain screamed, but his mouth wouldn't comply, and he vaguely recalled speech having been an ordeal even with the inhibitor.

The surgeon in the white smock, mask and cap loomed over him flanked by nurses made faceless by the shadows. A scalpel was slapped into the surgeon's hand, flashing silver on its descent toward John's chest. The blade tapped against the scaled armor over his sternum, then snapped.

"Guess we'll have to go heavy-duty," said the overly cheerful doctor. The nurses nodded in agreement and a surgical saw was slipped into the latex-gloved hand. Dr. Happy touched the serrated edge to the armor and moved his arm back and forth until the teeth bit through the armor finding vulnerable flesh and bone. John's brain screamed, but his mouth remained glued shut as those same metal teeth ripped through his skin and cracked through his sternum. Dr. Happy hummed all the while. Blue-blood mixed with red oozed out of the messy incision.

Sheppard had dreamed this. Between visions of mindless hunting and animal-wrought carnage came images of cages, stainless steel tables, and blades cutting into him as his heart still beat. He'd made Beckett promise that, dead or alive, his body would not be cut up for parts and handed out to the various science divisions. If he had to die like an animal, he at least wanted to be buried like a human – coffin, eulogy, the works.

Carson had promised. But, sometimes, things happened that broke promises.

John's only consolation was that this wasn't real, not even precisely like his dreams.

The saw slipped from the bone into the soft center and cut through it like a hot knife through butter. Dr. Happy tossed the blade over his shoulder to free up his hands in order to dig his fingers into the incision and pull.

"You know," the doctor chatted amiably. "This really isn't all it's cracked," bones snapped and tore, giving, John's chest opening wide, "up to be. Your horror is quite fascinating, but your blasted awareness keeps getting in the way."

John stared in wide-eyed, vomit-inducing terror at the gaping hole in his chest, the split sternum, shattered ribs, pulsating heart and lungs smeared in pools of blue, black, and red blood.

"The problem is," said Dr. Happy – no, Atar - "this didn't happen and a part of you knows it. So what can we do about it?" He reached in and grabbed a fist-full of heart, just as someone else had done only a few minutes (or was it hours?) ago.

Who had done that? More like what, actually. Problem was, Sheppard was a little too busy having a panic attack to recall why.

Dr. Atar leaned in close enough for Sheppard to see the cheery smile through the mask. "What should be done about it, John?"

Dr. Atar squeezed.

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John bolted upright sucking in air as though he'd been submerged for too long.

"Sir, calm down sir! It's all right, relax. We got you; you're back!"

John's eyes rolled wild in their sockets until they landed on Lorne standing over him, holding him down by the shoulders with little effort. Sheppard gasped another lungful and rolled his eyes to the rest of his team snapping awake in gasps or abruptly dying screams, all pale and sweaty and in need of a toilet to vomit in.

"We got you, sir," Lorne assured. "We got you."

John slumped back into the seat and released the gathered breath. "What the hell took you," he coughed, "so long?"

Lorne shrugged abashedly in response.

TBC...