Okay, you remember how I said at the beginning that there would be Sunday spoilers in this? Just wanted to re-iterate that warning -- it's fairly subtle, blink-and-you-miss-it in this chapter, but in future chapters, BEWARE OF SPOILERS!

And a couple of readers caught the uniform color thing in the previous chapter -- nice! Thank you again for all the wonderful reviews!

Chapter Five: Doppelgangers

It turned out that Lorne's team had found a crashed puddlejumper in the ruins of the city. Or, rather, it had found them -- damn near crashed on top of them, from the sound of things.

When Sheppard and McKay arrived on the scene, leaving Zelenka and Larissa in charge of calling Weir about the unconscious alt-Rodney, they found Lorne's team hovering at a safe distance around a smoking, crumpled jumper sticking half in and half out of one of the buildings.

"I have no idea where it came from, sir," Lorne told Sheppard. "I'd swear on a whole stack of Bibles and my grandmother's grave that it just came out of thin air. One minute we're walking along, the next minute it nearly took off Harrison's hat and crashed into a building not twenty feet away from us."

Sheppard approached the jumper cautiously, leaping back as a piece of debris toppled from higher up on the building and smashed to the ground. Behind him, McKay made a small squeak.

"It's kind of unstable," Lorne added, unnecessarily. "I got close enough to see that you were, well, had been, flying it. I mean, someone who looked like you, that is. Clearly it isn't you, so I figured I'd radio for instructions before, well, doing anything."

Sheppard jumped up on a fallen section of wall so that he could see through the windshield. Presumably this was the vantage Lorne had used. The windshield was a spiderweb of cracks, the jumper's interior dim and filled with smoke, but he could see the twisted, blood-covered body of the pilot. Part of the jumper's roof had buckled on top of him.

McKay made another small sound and Sheppard cast an automatic glance sideways, to see that the scientist had gone white. Seeing his own double hadn't had this much of an effect on him. Sheppard wondered if it was the sight of blood that did it. It sure as hell wasn't the fact that it was him; he knew how McKay felt about him, these days.

"I'd like to get in there, sir," Lorne said.

"So would I, Major. Have you tried opening the hatch?"

Lorne nodded. "It's jammed."

More pieces of the building clattered down around them as they picked their way across the rubble. Sheppard expected McKay to retreat to the street outside, but to his surprise, the scientist stayed behind him. There was a soft whisper of sound as he drew the LSD from his jacket, and then an exclamation of surprise.

"He's alive," McKay said, speaking for the first time since they'd seen the crashed jumper. The whole situation seemed to have actually shut him up. Sheppard wondered if there was any way it could be made into a permanent condition.

"Alive? You're kidding. You saw him; he's a mess." Sheppard tapped at the hull, trying to find a manual release for the ramp. The jumper wasn't responding to him at all; it must have completely lost power in the crash.

When McKay spoke again, he sounded hostile. "The scanner doesn't lie, Colonel." And neither do I, his tone implied.

Sheppard was in no mood to deal with a McKay snit, so he ignored him instead. "Lorne, if we can't get this open, we're going to need a cutting torch. And we'd also better get Beckett down here."

"Colonel." McKay again. "I think we need to consider what we're doing here. This guy could be -- I mean, we don't have any idea what effect these people could have on our reality, if people they actually are. We're just lucky they didn't come from a -- an antimatter universe and annihilate us on contact. They could have bacteria we're not resistant to. They could come from an Atlantis where everyone is evil ..."

Sheppard rested his hand against the hull for a moment, then turned to look at Rodney. "You want us to leave an injured man to die? Is that what you're saying?"

"No -- no, you know that's not what I meant ... I just mean we need to keep in mind that there could be a lot of danger here, that's all --"

A sharp crash made them both jump. Sheppard looked up towards the front of the wrecked jumper as Lorne appeared around the end. "Colonel, the windshield was damaged enough that I've managed to break it. We can get in that way."

As he trotted around to the front of the jumper, Sheppard tapped his radio. "Zelenka? You get through to Elizabeth yet?"

"I did," the Czech reported. "Dr. Beckett should be on his way in a jumper."

"Tell them to fix on our lifesigns and land as close to our position as they can. We've got a very badly injured alternate me out here to match our alternate McKay in there."

After a brief, stunned pause, Zelenka said, "Right."

Sheppard jumped up on the front end of the puddlejumper and knelt to peer down inside. There was broken glass everywhere; getting in without getting cut to ribbons would be a neat trick. "And, Radek? I want that machine shut down immediately."

Rodney squawked, "Hey!"

"Not negotiable, not until we understand more about what's happening. Got it?"

There was a small, unhappy sigh over the radio. "Yes. I will do it. Larissa will not like this."

"I don't care what Larissa likes. I care about making sure the universe doesn't unravel. Sheppard out."

As he broke the connection, McKay said from below him in a disgusted voice, "It's not going to unravel the universe, Sheppard."

"How do you know? Did you know it would do this, McKay?" Using the tail of his jacket to protect his hands, he broke off more of the glasslike material, pushing it out of the way until he cleared an opening that he could climb through.

"I can go in first, sir," Lorne offered.

Sheppard shook his head. "No. You stay out here, keep an eye on things."

He slid through the opening and landed feet-first on the damaged console. Electrical smoke made him cough. His doppelganger was half in and half out of the seat, his torso twisted around at an alarming angle to his legs. Sheppard leaned over him, bracing one hand against the back of the jumper's seat and using the fingers of his free hand to feel for a pulse on the bloody neck. He found it, but it was rapid, erratic and faint. When the alternate Sheppard breathed, blood bubbled on his lips; Sheppard couldn't tell if it was from internal bleeding or because of the blood running into his mouth from one of the ragged, ugly gashes on his head.

"Crap, he's really hurt bad, isn't he?" McKay's voice was soft and scared. Sheppard looked up to see the scientist awkwardly balanced in the opening in the windshield.

Rather than answering him, Sheppard tapped his radio. "Radek, Beckett needs to know that if he isn't here soon, he may as well not bother coming at all."

It wasn't Zelenka's voice that answered, but rather, the gravelly voice of Sgt. Bradbury. "Actually, sir, we're above you now. We just got a fix on your life signs and we're going to try landing in the street."

"Be careful, sergeant; the last thing we need is another crashed jumper."

"Don't put any pressure on him now, Colonel," Beckett snapped over the radio.

Sheppard grinned, and slid down beside the seat, finding purchase for his feet. The jumper was tilted at an angle with its nose pointed up. He braced himself on the seat behind the pilot's, but he wondered why he was bothering to stay -- it wasn't as if his meager first aid skills could do anything at all to help the injured man.

It wasn't just him, though. In a shower of broken glass, McKay landed heavily on the console.

"I thought I told you to stay outside."

McKay raised a finger. "You told Lorne to stay outside. Didn't say a thing to me."

"That's great, but I hope you're up on your tetanus shots, because there are a lot of things to impale yourself on down here."

McKay shivered, his face pale, and with great care he maneuvered himself to rest against the co-pilot's seat. He leaned over and touched the injured Sheppard's face lightly.

"Don't go poking at him, McKay."

Rodney jumped. "I was just checking for a pulse!"

"I already did."

McKay chewed on his lip, then looked around in shock as Sheppard carefully stepped off the seat that was supporting him and, hanging onto a cargo net, slid deeper into the jumper's smashed body. "Where are you going?"

"Checking to make sure there's nobody else in here."

The body of the jumper was a total loss. The ceiling was buckled -- he'd though from the outside that it had crushed the alternate Sheppard's body, but it had actually caved in behind him. The gloom beneath it was lit by the lurid flicker of sparking electrical wires. Sheppard ducked to avoid them, feeling thankful that, unlike a car or a plane, there was nothing in the jumper that was in danger of exploding. At least ... he didn't think so. "Hey, McKay?"

"Yeah?" came Rodney's tense voice from the front of the jumper.

"This thing isn't going to explode, is it?"

"How should I know?"

Not comforting. "All I want to know is how likely it is."

"Not very," McKay said, and just as Sheppard was relaxing a little: "Well, unless the malfunctioning equipment somehow sends the wrong signal to the drones. But that's unlikely. At least, I think it's unlikely ..."

Sheppard sighed and pushed his way past a cargo hatch that had buckled inward on impact, nearly touching the opposite side of the jumper. "Thanks for the comforting thought, Rodney."

"You asked!"

Well, that was true. "Next time I ask you a question like that, just tell me ignorance is bliss, okay?"

There was a short laugh from the front of the jumper. "If ignorance is truly bliss, then you should be a very happy man, Colonel."

Sheppard grinned into the darkness. Maybe it was just that they had hardly seen each other in weeks -- maybe that was why it seemed to be easier to get along for a few hours, this time around. Perhaps the enforced proximity of going out on missions together was what had made it so difficult before.

He liked working with Rodney. He missed working with Rodney.

But it hadn't worked out, he reminded himself. Zelenka was easy to get along with, and a good fit for the team. Teyla and Ronon both seemed to really like him. And, considering how things had crashed and burned -- so to speak -- he wasn't about to ask Rodney to come back.

It wouldn't be good for the team.

Nevermind that he wanted it, and at the same time didn't want it, because it would hurt too damn much when everything went bad again. What he wanted wasn't a consideration. The good of the team was what mattered, and it wasn't fair to kick Zelenka off, wasn't fair to make Ronon work with someone he couldn't stand.

"Colonel?"

He realized that McKay had been repeating his name. "You'd better be on fire up there," he snapped, angry to realize that he'd zoned out in a danger situation.

"Fine, be an ass, I don't care," Rodney retorted, and then, in a different tone, "Hey, Carson! Stopped to play a few rounds of golf along the way?"

"Bloody hell," he heard Carson's brogue, a bit muffled. "It is the Colonel." His voice got clearer as he clambered through the windshield. "And he's a right mess, isn't he? Melanie love, we're going to need a backboard in here."

Sheppard climbed back up to join them as Carson and a muscular, middle-aged nurse worked to free alt-Sheppard from the twisted wreckage of the pilot's seat. Sheppard assisted as best he could, lifting and holding, while the medical talk flowed around him -- pressure and hemorrhage and Carson complaining about not having any cervical collars because he hadn't realized that immobilization and extraction were going to be on his agenda for today and how someone needed to redo the materials lists for the S&R equipment in the jumpers ...

"Colonel, we need to get him back to Atlantis fast," Beckett told him as he jogged alongside their improvised stretcher on the way back to Sgt. Bradbury's jumper. "There's a lot of internal bleeding, we didn't do him any favors pulling him out of there without proper equipment, and I need to get him in surgery now if he's going to even have a chance."

Sheppard just nodded, gripping a cargo net and swinging himself into the jumper's hold. He stopped in surprise at the sight of the other occupants of the ship: alt-Rodney lay on one of the jumper's bench seats, reclining against Larissa, while Zelenka crouched down by his head.

"We shut down the machine, as you said, and then brought him down here," Zelenka explained. "For the doctor to see."

McKay pushed past Sheppard. "I still think taking him back to Atlantis is a very, very bad idea. Why don't you people listen to me?"

Zelenka frowned up at him. "He is you, Rodney."

"He could be an evil me!"

"Looks like everyone's aboard," Bradbury reported back.

Sheppard nodded. "Major Lorne, I want you to take your team back to the facility and keep it secured." With Larissa sitting right there, he didn't want to add "... against the Dorandans," but he thought that Lorne got the idea. The major nodded and trotted off the ramp, which Bradbury closed behind him.

Larissa. Crap! As the jumper lifted off, Sheppard realized that he should have sent her with Lorne's team. Instead, she was still on board, supporting alt-Rodney on the bench seat. Well, damn. Too late now. He actually thought of asking Bradbury to set back down and drop her off, but then he looked down at his alternate self bleeding out on the jumper floor. Allowing his vague suspicions to trump a man's life was a pretty lousy thing to do. Especially when the man was him. Well, sort of him. They had to get back to Atlantis; there wasn't any time to waste. It looked like Larissa was coming along for the ride.

He just hoped McKay was right about her.

------

McKay felt as if things had completely spun out of his control.

It had all been going so well. And then ... this. And now no one would listen to him, and they'd insisted on shutting down the machine despite the fact that he was quite sure that this was a complete aberration and possibly not even related to anything they were doing in this universe -- wasn't it equally likely that the doppelgangers were here because they'd built a similar machine in their universe and screwed it up?

And now Sheppard insisted on taking them home like stray puppies. He couldn't believe it.

With so many people crowded in the back of the jumper, and his alternate self taking up the whole damn bench, there wasn't really anywhere to sit down, adding to his general foul mood. He tried to stay out of the way, and also tried not to look too hard at the activity on the floor of the jumper, where Carson and the nurse had laid out alt-Sheppard and were frantically working over him, as pools of blood spread under him on the metal decking.

Suddenly alt-Rodney sat bolt upright; McKay jumped. "Sheppard!" the doppelganger gasped.

Sheppard leaned forward and placed a hand against his chest, pushing him back down. "Relax."

He did, all the struggle going out of him. "Colonel, thank God, I thought --" Then he tensed up again, looking Sheppard up and down. "You're not--" he began, and then looked past Sheppard and saw McKay. His eyes got very large, and he was silent for a moment. Then he laughed, a very edgy laugh. "Oh, this is ... just great. Deja vu all over again. And here I was hoping it was just a bad dream."

McKay thought it was just his luck that they'd find an insane alternate universe version of him. "Where did you come from?" he demanded, leaning past Sheppard. "How did you get here?"

Alt-Rodney took a deep breath. "Settle down," he said, sounding as if he were speaking to himself as much as to McKay. "Just ... calm down, calm down, calm calm calm. Wide open fields ..." He shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked up at them. "I'm from Atlantis, of course. You're, um -- you too, I hope?"

"We're en route to it now," McKay said shortly.

"Of course we are," alt-Rodney murmured. "And you ... you're -- What do they call you here?"

McKay's eyes narrowed. This was him, after all -- the one person in this galaxy who knew his real first name. "Rodney," he said grimly.

"Well, then, I guess you can call me ... Rod." Alt-Rodney smiled a little, as if at a private joke. The smile dropped away quickly, though. "Did Sheppard come through with me? My universe's Sheppard, I mean. We were both in the ..." He trailed off at the looks on their faces. "What? What?"

Just then Beckett said sharply, "Melanie, I need some help getting this IV set up, I can't hold -- yes, there's a love--" and at the sound of that voice, all the color drained out of Rod's face. His lips moved, unconsciously it seemed, framing the word, Carson? He just sat stiffly for a moment, then leaned forward slowly, his eyes going from them, to the back of Beckett's head.

McKay exchanged a brief, confused look with Zelenka. He didn't have a chance to ask about it, though, because then Rod saw alt-Sheppard's mangled body, bleeding all over the floor of the jumper, and he jerked forward, starting to stand up.

"Sit down," the real Sheppard ordered, pushing him back against the jumper seat.

From the utterly stricken look on Rod's face and the way that he kept craning to get a look at alt-Sheppard, McKay supposed that the relationship between the two of them, in Rod's universe, must be different than it was here. On the other hand ... he got a weird twist in his gut whenever he looked at alt-Sheppard's broken and bleeding form, too.

"I want to see him," Rod said. "Let me see him!"

"You can see him just fine from where you are." There was a hard, brittle edge to Sheppard's voice. McKay didn't speak. For some reason, Rod's obvious concern for his version of Sheppard angered him. It made him feel strangely inadequate. We had that once.

"Would someone calm him down, please?" Carson didn't look up from his patient, but there was a tightness in his voice. "It's a bit difficult to concentrate and this is touch-and-go. Melanie, love, I need pressure there -- thanks."

Rod stopped struggling; his eyes were very large and very blue in his pale face. "What's wrong with him? What happened to him?"

"His jumper crashed into a building." Sheppard let go of Rod's shoulders, but kept a hand hovering near his chest, ready to restrain him if he tried to move again.

"I don't remember that."

"You weren't there," McKay said. Behind him, he was all too aware of Carson talking to the nurse, and he could see from the increasing fear on Rod's face that Rod was, too: ... probably a lacerated spleen ... isn't fractured, but the other one is ... collapsed lung ... need more oxygen here, love ...

Rod shook his head vigorously, partly in response to McKay's words and partly, McKay thought, in denial of what was happening on the floor of the jumper. "No, we were both together, in the puddlejumper, when we -- when the anomaly --" He broke off, the dazed look of fear being chased away, briefly, by sharp fascination; and McKay couldn't help staring at it, astounded to see his own familiar play of emotions reflected on another's face: Is that what I look like when I'm thinking? "Maybe the anomaly treats everything as a unit, the same way the Stargate does, so it took Sheppard and the jumper as -- but no, that doesn't explain why I'm --"

There was a sudden choking sound from the floor of the jumper, and alt-Sheppard's body arched, convulsing. Carson cursed under his breath. "Melanie, get his -- no, don't let him --"

Sheppard's arm slammed across Rod's chest like an iron bar as he tried to struggle off the bench.

"Let me go! I need to --"

"Get in the doctor's way?" Sheppard demanded. "Let him do his job."

Alt-Sheppard's convulsions stopped abruptly; he collapsed back to the floor like a puppet with cut strings. Rod stopped struggling, too, and sank slowly onto the jumper seat. He made a tiny sound in his throat.

Carson was bending over alt-Sheppard. He gave a little jerk backwards, and then said, in a tone of wonder, "Colonel? Are you with us?"

Alt-Sheppard's head turned to the side. His hair was so soaked with blood that it left a streaky trail on the floor of the jumper. His lips moved under the oxygen mask, framing inaudible words.

Carson glanced up at the real Sheppard, and said, "I think he wants to see Rodney." As McKay started to move forward, he added impatiently, "Not you, the other one."

As soon as Sheppard took his arm away, Rod lunged forward off the bench and dropped to his knees, heedless of the blood on the floor or the equipment around alt-Sheppard's body. He reached a hand out, then drew it back; there was nowhere to touch that wasn't covered with blood or attached to some kind of tube. "Sheppard?"

Alt-Sheppard's head turned towards him, and his eyes flickered half-open. His bloody lips quirked in a sideways grin of pure relief, and he whispered, "Rodney."

"Rod," said Rod quickly.

McKay saw alt-Sheppard mouth, "Rod?" in obvious puzzlement. Ha! he thought, they don't call you Rod in your universe either, do they, you big fat LIAR!

"Yes, Mr. Mensa-in-a-parallel-universe: Rod. Because there are two of me and it's too confusing otherwise."

Sheppard's eyes widened just a little, that quick flash where he got it -- and it hurt, dammit, because McKay remembered what that was like, that quick give-and-take between the two of them. He and Sheppard had lost that a long time ago. Now here were these ... these impostors, and watching the back-and-forth between them was like the pain of a phantom limb.

Rod's hand continued to hover over Sheppard's bloody arm, not quite touching it. "So, you're going to be okay, right? Because leaving me alone in a parallel universe with doppelgangers of ourselves would be -- you know, inexcusably rude. And the next time there's some sort of anomaly over the ocean and someone needs to go check it out, we're sending Lorne's team and Zelenka, got it?"

Alt-Sheppard's lips moved, but no sound emerged. His eyes drifted shut again, and the real Sheppard got a hand on Rod's arm, steering him back to the bench. He obeyed in a dazed kind of way. With a sympathetic look, Larissa got up to make room for him, and then she was drawn to the view of space outside the jumper's front viewport. Looking up, McKay saw her heading for the cockpit.

"Hey, you can't go up there!" Sheppard barked after her.

She looked back, startled. "I just want to look. Our ships -- you can't see out like this. It is all instrument flying."

"Well, that area's off limits to civilians."

McKay decided to stay out of this, and sat down next to his doppelganger, keeping a safe distance between them. Alt-Rodney -- Rod -- looked as if he was in shock; his arms were wrapped around himself, and he was shivering. On the one hand, McKay wanted to be sympathetic -- and it was more than a little bit disturbing seeing the obvious distress on a face so much like his own -- but he still wasn't quite done being angry at Sheppard's cutting him out of the decision-making process. Also, he was very, very curious about the many little differences between them. Like the uniforms.

"In your Atlantis, are you on the command crew? Are you in charge of the expedition?"

Rod looked up at him with a shell-shocked, deer-in-the-headlights sort of expression. "What?"

"Your uniform." McKay gestured at the command-blue that Rod wore.

"What are you -- oh." Rod narrowed his eyes at the science yellow of McKay's uniform. "Blue is the scientists' color," he said, a bit challengingly.

McKay shook his head. "No, blue is the command color -- the color Elizabeth wears. Science is yellow."

Rod peered around him, blinking at Carson. "And red is medical," he said, almost to himself.

"Well, obviously."

"It's different where I come from," Rod murmured, "very different," and he sat back against the wall, huddling in on himself. He was silent for the rest of the flight to Atlantis.

----

TBC

The pace of chapter posting will slow down now, as the next ones need quite a bit of revision. But chapters will continue to be fairly long when they are posted.