We're drawing to the end here! I just want to, once again, thank my betas Kodiak and Tazmy, as I've been an especially whiny and demanding author this time around, and they've put up with me with grace and patience.
Thank you all for the reviews on the previous chapter. I do hope I wasn't the cause of too many heart attacks.
Chapter Fifteen: Choices
Sheppard's impact against McKay's shoulder knocked him to the floor, as Seng's gun went off with a deafening roar. A hot wet spray soaked his face and neck and side; droplets splattered on the floor around him.
Sheppard hit the floor in front of him like a sack of damp laundry. Like Teyla, the Colonel's eyes were open -- glazed and green, staring sightlessly into McKay's.
McKay's brain tried to cope with this, but it just wasn't happening. Beyond Sheppard's body, Seng was turning towards him, swinging the gun to cover his new position. And there just wasn't anything he could do. Something in his heart had gone still. A minute ago, he'd been terrified at the prospect of death -- and now ... now it didn't seem to matter.
Teyla and Sheppard were already dead. Maybe it made sense that they'd all die here, and join Ford: the once and former Team Sheppard.
And then Seng's body went rigid, and he keeled over, convulsing.
Larissa lowered the stunner she had used to shoot him, and kicked the shotgun away. Her face was flat, unreadable.
McKay blinked. He could feel blood trickling down his face -- Sheppard's blood, its heat slowly fading.
Larissa strode over to him and freed his hands with a few quick jerks on his bonds. Numbly, McKay brought one shaking hand to his head, trying to wipe away the blood. All he managed to do was smear it around.
"Are you all right?" Larissa's voice, like her face, was hard to read.
"N-n--" He had to try a few times to get the word to come out. "No."
Larissa gave him a hand getting to his feet. He leaned on her until he was steady, then waved her off, still trying uselessly to wipe away the blood on his face, neck, arm, leg. So much blood, oh God, so much of it.
"I'm sorry," Larissa said.
McKay laughed. It was high, hysterical, and he didn't seem to have any control over it. "You're sorry?"
She passed a hand over her mouth, so pale that the skin around her lips looked faintly blue. "Dr. McKay, tell me of Colonel Sheppard's Wraith heritage."
McKay stared at her. From the corner of his eye, he could see blood -- from which of his friends, he wasn't sure. "You -- you want to have this conversation now?"
"Please. Tell me. Why did he register with Wraithsign on our scanners? You started to explain earlier, but I was not listening."
Scientific explanation. Okay, he could do this. He could do it without thinking about the blood all over the floor, the walls. All over him.
"There was a world awhile back where we ran into something called an Iratus bug. It injected some of its DNA into him. Very similar to Wraith."
"But it did not affect his behavior? Was he still ... human?"
McKay waved a hand wildly at Sheppard's body on the floor. "He just threw himself in front of a -- a fucking bazooka!" For me. "What would you call it?" His voice shook. He tried to get himself under control.
Sheppard had died for him.
Sheppard was dead.
Teyla was dead.
Oh God ... Teyla, Sheppard. He couldn't stop trembling; if he shook any harder, he was afraid he'd fly apart.
Larissa's lips trembled as she looked around the room, at the blood and devastation. "Mokarra tried to tell me -- I am afraid that we have been wrong. So very wrong."
"Poor you!" He couldn't take self-pity from her, not right now. "Let's all have a pity party for you! The ship's about to blow up, Colonel Klink over there is probably going to regain consciousness any minute -- but let's stop so I can explain to you what we all would have told you if you'd just asked before! If you'd just listened for a minute!"
Larissa looked back at him, and he could see pain and hurt and fear and guilt starting to climb up through the growing cracks in her facade. She was trembling, a faint but visible vibration.
"So can we go up to the bridge of this freaking ship and try to turn off the self-destruct before it incinerates the city?" he demanded. Elizabeth. How am I ever going to tell Elizabeth?
Larissa shook her head. "Not this time," she said, and reached into her pocket.
McKay tensed, especially when she brought out what looked almost exactly like a cartoon version of a bomb. It was a smooth black orb with a little cap like the top on a Christmas ball, of obvious Ancient manufacture.
Larissa offered it to him on her palm.
"What's this?" He didn't touch it.
"Take it," she urged. "Take it quickly. It won't work for me. I've already used it. And time is passing quickly."
He took it in a gingerly grasp between two fingers. "So this isn't some kind of bomb? Or is it?"
"Bomb, what? No." She looked briefly baffled.
"So what's it do?"
Larissa took a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment, and then opened them, looking decisive. "When we attacked your city, the plan was for Mokarra, Peran and myself to take over the computer and render Colonel Sheppard harmless. The first time we tried it, Colonel Sheppard proved too fast for us. He took out both Mokarra and Peran in seconds; I have never seen a man with such quick reflexes. And you took advantage of the distraction to lock us out of the computer, which meant that our ships would have been unable to get through your shield. The first time, our invasion failed before it began."
"The first time," McKay repeated numbly, staring at the black sphere in his hand.
"I used that to jump back and try again. It's something we found in the ruins on Doranda, a long time ago; it has been in my family for generations. But it can only be used once by any carrier of the Ancients' mark, and it will only take you back about a cenda -- what you would call about five minutes or so. So you had better act quickly."
He looked up at her sharply, trying to take all this in. "Time travel! Wait, in the conference room -- that's when you did it, isn't it? I had this weird flash of ... something."
"Yes. Other carriers of what you call the Ancient gene would have felt it. I could tell that you did, though I tried to smooth it over. When you jump back, the others who have the gene will remember both timelines for a moment. The more closely involved they are, the more clearly they will remember it all afterwards." She hesitated, then reversed her gun and handed it to him. "When you go back, everything will reset but you. Wherever you are standing, that is where you'll be. Make it count."
He took the gun, folding his fingers around the trigger, then hesitated. "You won, you know. I mean, you could have. This is your people's victory you're giving me."
She shook her head. "No. We lost." Her eyes were sad, but very intense. "It will only go back about a cenda. Go quickly, or you won't be able to go back far enough and can change nothing."
That galvanized him like nothing else could. He took a few steps to the side, out of Seng's immediate line of sight, and then concentrated on the sphere. Go.
Nothing seemed to change -- for him. But everything around him blinked, the same weird sensation that he'd experienced in the conference room. To everyone else in the room, he must have appeared to teleport from one place to another.
He'd jumped back to just before Seng shot Teyla. He saw Larissa flinch as she felt the change -- and behind her, this time, he saw Sheppard appear in the doorway and then freeze, his eyes going very wide. McKay remembered that bizarre feeling from the conference room, as an impossible set of memories had been briefly overlaid on his own; dimly, he still remembered, now that he knew what he was remembering -- the feeling of being shot in that other timeline.
But there was no time for that; Seng was about to kill Teyla. McKay shot him instead.
Or tried to. Seng saw the movement and ducked, so fast that McKay's reflexes -- not good at the best of times -- were left in the dust. The energy crackled harmlessly against the wall.
Seng fired at him just as a hand seized the back of his jacket and pulled him down. McKay fell flat on the floor, squashed underneath Sheppard's wiry weight, while the alien shotgun or whatever the hell it was blew a hole through one of the bulkheads.
"McKay." Sheppard's face was white, his eyes haunted. "What the hell just --"
"Time travel, sort of, I'll explain later, now get off me, crazy person on the loose!" A crack, a clatter and a yell let him know that something was going on out of his field of vision. He rolled over just in time to see Teyla finishing a roundhouse kick at Seng. She'd disarmed him; the shotgun-thing went spinning off under a piece of furniture. Seng made a dash for the door -- and the bridge.
Sheppard snapped off a couple of shots with his 9-mil. Even lying flat on the floor, half-crushing McKay and obviously very rattled, his aim was true. Seng jerked, spun around, and crumpled in the doorway.
There was a moment of silence and stillness, when no one spoke or moved. The way their bodies were pressed together, McKay could feel Sheppard's heart going like a jackhammer, his muscles tensed up so hard that he was trembling slightly.
Larissa was the first of them to move. She went to Seng in the doorway, knelt and touched his throat, feeling for a pulse.
"Sheppard," McKay choked out, "I can't ... breathe."
"Sorry." Sheppard rolled off him, pushed up onto his hands and knees, and then touched his chest and brought his hand away covered with blood. "McKay --"
"It's not mine," Rodney said hastily, sitting up. He was still covered with gore, slowly getting tacky and stiffening the front of his uniform. Nausea coiled in his stomach at the heavy metallic reek.
Sheppard was still staring at him as if he thought that he could drag the answers straight out of McKay's brain. "It's mine," he whispered, his face a picture of confusion and horror as he tried to sort out the conflicting memories.
No point in hiding it. "Yeah. You died ... messily. Would have died, I mean."
There was a sudden, soft gasp from Larissa in the doorway. "Captain Seng is dead." She looked over her shoulder at Sheppard, frightened accusation in her face.
Sheppard's hand closed around his gun, half-raising it.
"No," Larissa said, and sudden cold terror gripped McKay. "Seng was the only one who could disarm the self-destruct on this ship."
Then she was up and running down the hall towards the bridge.
------
The Dorandan ship wasn't anywhere remotely close to Daedalus size; it wasn't that much bigger than the puddlejumpers. But it was a maze of narrow warrenlike corridors, all jammed together with tiny closetlike rooms. Rodney and Sheppard lost sight of alt-Sheppard almost immediately.
Rodney gave Sheppard's arm a little tug. "Bridge is probably up front. Seems like the best place to go, don't you think?"
"That's not where he's going."
Rodney rolled his eyes. "Which means we should follow him, why? If the ship is going to blow up, the bridge is the most likely place to stop it."
As they turned down the corridor which appeared to lead to the ship's bow (or whatever you called it; he didn't much care) a creepy sense of deja vu swept over him, as if he'd walked down this corridor before. He staggered and caught himself on the wall.
"You feel something just now?" Sheppard asked, frowning.
"Like what?"
"Like --" Sheppard waved a hand around uncomfortably. "Like we've been here before."
"It wasn't just me?"
They looked at each other.
"Bad," Sheppard said.
"When is it ever good, Colonel?"
Sheppard sighed. "You think it's something our counterparts did?"
Rodney shivered. "Or some hitherto unknown entropic effect that we're about to discover the hard way. But none of it matters if we don't turn off that self-destruct."
The bridge was not hard to find; all they had to do was follow the smell of smoke. The door had been blown off. Rodney peeked inside; no sign of anyone there. His eyes were drawn to the red symbols changing rapidly on one of the screens.
"That looks like some kind of countdown," Sheppard said from behind him.
"Gee, Colonel, do you really think so? I can see why I brought you along; I don't know what I'd do without those sparkling insights."
Sheppard leaned against one of the chairs; he looked on the verge of collapse. "Can you read it?"
"Not at all. It isn't Ancient or Wraith or any other script I've ever seen before. Do you have a radio, by any chance?"
"No, they took it when they captured me."
"Great." Rodney scanned the consoles quickly. There had to be some kind of communication system, but he didn't immediately recognize anything that could be used in such a way. Therefore, they wouldn't be able to ask anyone how to shut off the self-destruct. And so it fell upon him to save their skins. Again. Sighing, he pried the cover off the nearest console.
Sheppard cleared his throat. "You're going to try to disarm a bomb that you know nothing about, that's apparently capable of blowing up Atlantis?"
"I don't really see that I have much choice, unless they told you how to shut it off."
There was a rather guilty silence from Sheppard's direction. Lifting off the console cover, Rodney found a tangle of wires and alien circuit boards underneath. Genius or not, he wasn't liking the odds here.
"You might want to leave, Colonel."
"Uh-huh," Sheppard said, and he pointed his confiscated stunner at the door.
"Fine, be that way."
"Look, if this thing does blow up, would I be any safer anywhere else in Atlantis?"
Rodney frowned at the wires, and began tracing them with eyes and fingers. "Well, that's a point."
"Hey, look," Sheppard said suddenly, gesturing towards the main forward viewport with his gun. "I think we're winning. Atlantis, I mean."
Despite the urgency of his task, Rodney risked popping up for a moment to see. The fighting outside the ship had almost completely died down. In his brief glance, Rodney saw small clusters of Dorandan soldiers forced to their knees, surrounded by Lorne's people.
"Whaddya know. We are winning."
"Considering that we have better weapons and I think we outnumber them, we'd better be winning."
"Until the ships blow up and kill us all," Rodney pointed out from under the console.
"Way to look on the bright side, Rodney."
------
McKay had hoped that his memories of the altered timeline would fade, but they were still as bright and sharp as a knife's blade. The brilliance of Teyla's blood, splashed on the wall ... the look in Sheppard's eyes as the life faded from them ... these things would, he thought, be branded into his memory until his dying day.
Which might be today, the way things were going.
He gave Larissa's gun to Teyla, because she was a much better shot and it only made sense. But as Sheppard and Teyla took point on the way to the bridge, following Larissa, McKay realized that he didn't want to be the protective non-combatant, sandwiched in the middle. He wanted to be fighting. Helping.
He flexed his hands, feeling the tacky stickiness of the drying blood. He didn't think he'd ever wanted a shower so much in his life.
He didn't want to watch
someone he cared about
someone else die for him again. Ever.
------
With his senses on high alert, Sheppard was acutely aware of everything and everyone around him: the soft sound of Teyla's breathing as she covered their three o'clock; McKay's heavy footsteps behind him; even the little creaks and pings of the metal in the spaceship.
And every time he blinked his eyes, an image flashed across the darkness behind his lids: a still snapshot of Teyla, her chest blown out, blood spraying across the wall behind her.
It wasn't real. It hadn't happened. He had not watched Teyla die, he had not thrown himself between McKay and an alien shotgun-from-hell -- but a visceral part of him was very deeply convinced that he had. The lingering horror of it made his hands tremble on his gun.
Time travel. I'll explain later.
McKay had done something, Sheppard wasn't sure what, but he was damned determined to get the whole story out of the scientist later. Right now, though, he couldn't afford the distraction; he tried to shove the disturbing mental image to one side, locking it into the same box that held everything else in his life that he didn't want to think about.
Seng's gun, pointing at McKay...
I jumped ...
I died...
He shook his head, forcing himself back to reality, and arrived at the bridge on Larissa's heels -- just in time to hear the other Sheppard's voice snap, "Get back!" and the crackle of a stunner firing against the doorframe beside Larissa's head.
McKay charged past Sheppard and Teyla, pushing them out of the way. "Let her in, you idiot. She's on our side. And it's an emergency."
Larissa needed no more encouragement; she darted onto the bridge. Sheppard followed her, stepping over the fallen metal door to see the alternate Rodney up to his elbows in wiring.
"Move," Larissa ordered.
"Look, I'm trying to --"
"I said move! This ship is going to explode in less than four of your minutes and I do not have the codes to stop it." She began hitting buttons on the console. Sheppard realized, somewhat belatedly, that it was an alien-looking DHD. He wasn't close enough to see which gate symbols she was dialing, though.
As the ship shuddered and began to move, McKay snapped, "What are you doing?"
"I am getting this ship out of your city before it explodes." She reached for a dial on the console, and Sheppard was there with his gun, thrusting it against her chest.
"No tricks, lady."
Her eyes narrowed and she regarded him over the barrel of the P90. "No trick. I need to speak to Treen -- she is the person who was tasked with disarming the self-destruct on the other ship.
Sheppard could feel the motion in the pit of his stomach as the ship rotated slowly, preparing to descend to the gateroom. It must surely have inertial dampeners, but either they were deactivated, or they weren't as effective as the ones in the puddlejumpers. In a minute they'd be through the Stargate, and while he couldn't fault Larissa's actions in getting this particular ship off Atlantis, he hated to abandon his people.
"Do it," he said, pulling the gun back but leaving it pointed at her. "And I'm not kidding. No tricks."
She gave him another cool look and twisted the dial on the console. A sudden hiss of static filled the room. "Treen, it's Larissa. Have you been successful?"
After a moment of silence, the voice that spoke through the bridge speakers was clearly identifiable as Lorne's. "Treen, huh? We caught this lady trying to sabotage one of the ships. Who are you?"
Larissa looked at Sheppard, and made a small gesture at the radio, inviting him to speak. He stared back at her, trying to read her eyes, and finally took a deep breath.
Trust.
"Lorne, this is Colonel Sheppard. Let her continue what she was doing. It's important. She's disarming bombs."
Temporary darkness closed around the ship as they descended into the gateroom, caught up in the automatic launch protocols.
"If you're sure, sir." Lorne sounded very skeptical.
I only wish I was. "Yes, I'm sure, Major. Keep her under guard, but let her do her thing." Looking again at Larissa, he added, "Major, how are we doing here?"
A note of pride entered Lorne's voice. "We're winning, sir. I think we've got most of 'em."
Sheppard managed, barely, to suppress the smile that tried to quirk his lips. Damn, he had good people. This brought a quick flash of Teyla
blood, falling, Teyla ... no --
to his mind, and suddenly the urge to smile was gone.
"Carry on then, Majo--" He didn't have a chance to finish before the gate washed over them in a surge of blue-white light -- and then all that was visible out the forward viewport was a field of stars. The static on the radio suddenly cut off as the gate deactivated and severed their connection to Atlantis.
Larissa leaned forward to touch the controls. The ship came about, and a silver wedge of sunlit planet came into view.
"Wow... Doranda." The soft, contemplative voice was McKay's -- but Sheppard had to look around to figure out which one had spoken. It was the alternate-universe one, gazing out the viewport with a pensive, unreadable look on his normally expressive face. Sheppard noticed the alternate-universe Sheppard staring at alt-Rodney with a frown on his face. Beside the door, the real McKay had folded his arms and was looking over Larissa's head at the planet; Sheppard had to turn away from the brown stains of blood drying on his face and clothes.
"There is an escape capsule on the Caledon," Larissa said, bending forward and touching buttons on the console. "I can engage the star drive to have it take the ship away from the planet after we jettison."
"Star drive ..." McKay swiveled on her, his eyes suddenly sharp as twin knives. "This ship has a hyperdrive?"
"For another couple of minutes, maybe," the alternate Sheppard murmured, and then he staggered and would have fallen if alt-Rodney hadn't lunged and caught him.
"No, no ... " McKay gestured impatiently, oblivious to the byplay. "My God, I know how you two could get home."
This got their attention, all right -- alt-Rodney swung around to look at him, the frozen shock on his face slowly giving way to irritation at being intellectually upstaged by himself.
"Come on! Think!" McKay snapped at his alternate-universe double. "The problem isn't that we can't make a bridge to your universe -- it's that we can't hold it for more than a split second because of the creation of unpredictable particles."
Alt-Rodney rallied, glaring back at him. "It would help in coming up with a solution if you'd ever told me any of this!"
"What, you need me to hold your hand and walk you through everything? You're worse than Zelenka!"
"McKay..." Sheppard addressed both of them with the same annoyed tone. "This ship is about to explode in ..." He glanced at Larissa.
"About two and a half of your minutes," she supplied.
Neither of the dual McKays paid the slightest amount of attention to the small matter of incipient death. They stared at each other, and alt-Rodney's face changed slowly to a look of dawning realization. "Open the rift for an instant and use the hyperdrive to jump in," he breathed.
McKay grinned. "Exactly."
"And that might avoid the problem that we had coming across, too. We just wouldn't be in transit long enough."
Alt-Sheppard, who was still leaning on "his" Rodney's shoulder, gave him a hard nudge. "Rodney, we can't take this ship to Atlantis; it's going to blow up."
It was McKay who answered, waving both hands to punctuate his words. "So? It doesn't have to be this ship! The theory's sound! We just get off this ship and you can try later--"
"With what?" alt-Rodney demanded.
"One of their other ships!"
"No." Larissa shook her head. "This is the only one of my people's ships with a star drive. The technology was taken from a crashed Wraith vessel; we do not know how it works. And there is no reason why we would give you one anyway. I would suggest," she added firmly, "that we make our way to the escape pod now."
Sheppard silently wondered if it would be worth knocking both McKays over the head and dragging them off to continue this argument somewhere that wasn't going to explode. Teyla, presumably having similar thoughts, raised an eyebrow at him. Not yet, he mouthed at her.
"Well, you're sure as hell not getting one of Earth's ships," McKay snapped. "Not to jump through to another universe for all eternity. I can just see what Caldwell would say about that."
Alt-Sheppard glanced back and forth between the Rodneys. "You guys are saying this might be our only chance."
"Not your only chance," McKay scoffed.
"More like our only chance for years," alt-Rodney said grimly.
"If it works," Sheppard put in.
There was the briefest silence, then alt-Sheppard said, "Rodney, do you think it'll work?"
"The theory is sound. At least, as far as I can tell." Alt-Rodney bit his lip. "It should work. I can't see why it wouldn't work. I mean, as far as anything that's happened to us in the last week makes sense."
Alt-Sheppard looked back at the others, his gaze level. "We'll set you down on Doranda. We're going home."
------
The Caledon let the others out on the roof of the main complex on Doranda with about a minute and a half to detonation.
Both McKays were trying to talk over one another. "But remember, when you initialize it, don't give it a chance to get into a runaway loop-" "Excuse me, not a complete idiot here, am I telling you how to use the hyperdrive?" "A minute ago, YES!"
Larissa jumped down off the ramp and looked up at alt-Rodney. "I've set the controls to get the ship far away as soon as you jettison -- just hit the button I showed you. And be ready to move; you don't have much time at all."
"I know! Going, going." But he paused, looking down at them. "Listen, uh ... Sheppard?"
Sheppard paused. His own universe's McKay had already turned to dash down to the control room of the facility. For the moment, it was just the two of them.
"Listen, I --" Alt-Rodney licked his lips nervously. "I haven't been, um, always the greatest person to deal with, although it would have been easier if you guys hadn't been such a bunch of total jerks --"
Sheppard could feel himself fighting off a slightly hysterical urge to grin. "McKay, is there a point?"
"Just this." Alt-Rodney swallowed and gripped the railing. "In my universe, while granted, things are generally a lot less sucky than they are here, Carson's dead and that sucks a lot."
Sheppard felt a quick bolt of something cold flash through his stomach. Memories, half-faded now, but still very real, lurking just below the surface. Teyla. Blood.
Protect your people, John.
"It happens about a year from now, your time," the alternate Rodney was saying. "There's a station-wide rest day and -- and Dr. Houston and and Watson are going to trigger an Ancient device in an abandoned lab in Sector 12 -- are you getting all this?"
"Getting it," Sheppard said softly.
"Tell them. Tell Carson, tell the other me, don't let it happen, okay? Dr. Houston, Dr. Watson -- got it? Station-wide rest day, one year from now--"
"Got it."
"McKay!" alt-Sheppard shouted down the ramp.
Sheppard suppressed a grin. Some things never changed, even between universes. He turned away, following his team into the facility.
------
Rodney was muttering under his breath as he charged back onto the bridge of the ship. "Seriously creepy, it is Doranda, and Project Arcturus, just like ours ..."
"McKay," Sheppard said. "Focus."
Rodney stopped, took a deep breath, then followed Larissa's earlier lead and activated the radio on the ship's instrument console. "You guys ready?"
"Ready," said the other McKay's voice. Damn it, that just didn't ever stop being creepy.
"Wait for my signal," Rodney ordered him.
"Of course I will," alt-McKay said, sounding peeved. "I am not an idiot. And hurry, or you won't have time to eject."
Sighing, Rodney managed to pull himself back from an argument with himself. He looked over at Sheppard, and frowned at the grayish pallor, the dark spikes of sweat-damp hair.
"I know, Rodney -- I look like crap," Sheppard said with weary amusement.
"You don't look like you can move very fast. And when we exit on the other side --" he very carefully did not say if "-- we're going to have to move fast as hell to get to the escape pod before this thing shoots off into orbit over Lantea and blows up."
"Then let's go."
Rodney reached for the ship's radio, then hesitated. "You know, the odds are really slim that this is going to work."
"I know."
"We can go back to the other Atlantis. You could heal. I could refine my theories. We could try again, some other way."
"Years from now," Sheppard said quietly. "While they're fighting the Wraith without us, back at home. And we might never get another shot at going back, not like this one."
"We're probably going to die."
Sheppard closed his hand over Rodney's forearm -- a firm, comforting grip, except for the slight tremors of weakness in his fingers. "Do you think it's worth it? To go home?"
For a moment Rodney said nothing, just looked into the steady green eyes meeting his own. And then he reached for the radio. "On my mark, open the rift. Ready?"
"I said I was ready," alt-McKay snapped impatiently.
"Just think," Sheppard whispered, an impish grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. "Whether or not this works, you never have to hear his voice again."
Sheppard squeezed his arm lightly. Somehow, Rodney managed to find it in himself to grin back.
"Ready, and ... mark."
Blue light flared in front of them as he hit the hyperspace control as Larissa had shown him, and pushed the levers all the way forward. His world contracted to that field of blue fire, rushing to fill the universe -- that, and the solid warmth of Sheppard's hand on his arm, steady, grounding him, as they leaped home.
------
Blue light washed out the viewscreens of the Arcturus control room. McKay and Larissa, working in tandem, quickly brought the power levels down.
"All green?" McKay asked, hating the small catch of nervousness in his voice.
"All green," Larissa confirmed.
"Powering down ... now."
The consoles went dark, but for the minimal level of power to keep the lights on.
"They did it?" Sheppard asked.
For once, McKay didn't have a snarky comeback. Instead he looked up at the ceiling. "Want to go up top and find out?"
Together the four of them mounted the stairs to the nearest balcony. Here, months ago, Seng's patrol had ambushed him, along with Lorne's team -- their first contact with the Dorandans.
Now they lined up along the railing, looking up at the dull leaden sky. Lightning flashed somewhere far off. The ship was gone as if it had never been.
"I suppose that we will never know if they got home safely," Larissa said at last.
"Speaking of getting home," McKay said, "we're all stuck here until someone sends a jumper for us. Unless your people have more ships," he asked Larissa, hopefully.
She shook her head. "The only other ship is my personal one, and it's not here."
Sheppard just stared at them for a minute, then spun around and punched the wall. Hard. "Damn it!"
"Everyone will be all right," Teyla said softly.
"I am confident that our peoples can reach some form of compromise in our absence," Larissa said. But her fingers worked nervously at the hem of her jacket.
Sheppard paced restlessly for a few minutes, punched the wall again, and then -- nursing a set of bruised knuckles -- slid down to sit with his arms over his knees. "Any idea how long it'll be before they send someone for us?"
McKay eyed him. "Are you asking me? How should I know, Colonel? Perhaps I'll use my psychic powers to find out."
Sheppard knocked the back of his head lightly against the wall. "Hell. I'm in hell."
Teyla settled, crosslegged, to the floor. After a moment, McKay and Larissa joined her. They all sat in a rough circle, staring at anything but each other. Larissa's eyes kept going to the P90 resting on Sheppard's knee and aimed, rather pointedly, in her general direction. Finally she said, "You need not point your gun at me. I am not your enemy."
"Yeah, that's a question." Sheppard looked slowly around the little circle, at Teyla's bruised face and the half-dried blood on McKay's jaw, lingering at last on Larissa. "Where do we stand right now? You on our side, or not."
McKay snapped his fingers. "That reminds me. I guess I've still got your -- thing." With obvious reluctance, he held out his hand to Larissa, something small and dark nestled in the palm.
"Hey --" Sheppard began, fingers twitching on the P90.
"Oh, quit it, Colonel. If it hadn't been for her, you'd be pushing up daisies." There was a note of forced humor in McKay's voice, with something darker underneath, as he placed the small object in Larissa's hand. "Teyla too," he added, eyes darting towards her.
Larissa's fingers closed slowly over the object. "I gave this to you?"
McKay nodded, lips pressed together. He scrubbed one hand reflexively at the blood on his neck, then gave up self-consciously.
Sheppard let the P90 relax, marginally, slipping farther down to point at the floor. "I think there's a story here that all of us need to know."
Teyla cleared her throat. "It seems likely that we will be here for several hours at least. Perhaps this would be a good time to ... talk."
Sheppard and McKay gave her identical suspicious looks.
"I think that we are all long, long overdue for a conversation," she said, ignoring them. "A very thorough one."
----
Just an epilogue to go...