A/N: Hey y'all! Just a little something I whipped up today. Just kidding. I've been writing this chapter since July and it went through 4 edits before posting. Hope you enjoy!

Credit to parmakai for inspiring the little conversation between Eva and Ronon about their oath.

Sheppard and Lorne stood huddled together near the rear hatch of the jumper, going over the mission plan and various contingency plans, should the mission go south. Toward the middle of the ship, McKay was explaining to Lieutenants Coughlin and Reed how to operate the personal cloak, while Teyla, still seated in the cockpit with Eva and Ronon, quietly inspected one of the Goa'uld zat'nik'tels they had brought along.

Anticipation prickled like an electric current through Eva's skin. The calm before the battle was often worse than the actual fighting and she was itching to get inside the Hive, but the eastern ship was still sending a steady flow of reinforcements down the ramp and toward the other. Only once it slowed down would they be able to enter.

The incessant scrape of Ronon's sword against the whetstone in his hand made the tension that much more unbearable, so she turned in her seat and propped herself on her knees to face him.

"You've been here before, right?" she asked.

His eyes flickered up to hers, but immediately returned to the long sword braced against his knee. "Once. A long time ago. My grandfather suffered from the Second Childhood."

"The one you went to live with after your mother…was taken?"

Teyla looked curiously in their direction, abandoning her inspection of the zat.

Ronon looked up, this time longer than before, and gave her that same look of astonishment as when he noticed her jacket. He nodded.

"How did you get past the Wraith then?" she asked.

"The Wraith hadn't settled here yet. Like I said, it was a long time ago."

He continued sharpening the sword and the swollen red gash along his wrist caught her eye.

She pressed on. "You know that oath you made me take?"

"I didn't make you do anything."

"Is it always the same?"

The scratch of the blade came to a halt and he shifted his attention on her, confused. "What do you mean?"

"Like, do you always say the same words? Did you make…Melena say that she would always obey you and do everything you said?" Did you make my mom say that?

Tactful as ever, Teyla got up from her seat and joined the others in the rear compartment, but Ronon didn't seem to notice. His eyes were locked onto Eva's, like a missile to its target.

"Again, I didn't make her do anything." His gaze fell to his sword where it lay limp in his lap. "I couldn't have, even if I tried."

Eva expected him to drop the subject there, but to her surprise, he continued talking.

"No…" his voice lowered a fraction, "we made our own vows." From underneath the shadow of his heavy brow, he glanced back at her and a lopsided smile appeared on his face. "The whole obeying and listening to me thing, that was special for you."

Eva chewed the inside of her cheek and sank back into her chair. It was more than she thought he would say, but she could tell he had had enough. After a few seconds of silence, Ronon resumed his sharpening.

He was going to take their oath seriously, and though she had presumed nothing less, it still took her aback. So important was it to him, he had insisted the two reconnaissance teams switch up their members to ensure that he could be with her at all times. Sheppard's team would now only consist of the colonel, Teyla and McKay, while Lorne's team would include Coughlin, Ronon, and herself. Lieutenant Reed would stay behind and guard the cloaked jumper.

Eva's team would take up the vanguard, fully benefitting from Janus' personal cloak, to find and incapacitate any Wraith that crossed their path. Sheppard's team would follow close behind with McKay monitoring their presence on a life signs detector. They would then be in charge of extracting enzyme, planting C4, and disintegrating the Wraith corpses with the zats while Lorne's team stood guard. Two personal cloaks would have been ideal but they had to work with what they had. Maybe once they woke Janus up, he could whip up a spare.

Sheppard came back to the cockpit and put a hand on Eva's chair. "How's it lookin'?"

She glanced through the HUD. A lone Wraith commander descended the ramp. "They're slowing down," she said.

"All right." He checked his sidearm. "Let's head out."

Ronon's solid presence next to her as they left the relative safety of the Puddle Jumper was a welcome reassurance. In the short time she had been hunted by the Wraith, she had never had someone looking out for her. Now she did.

She looked to the left, at the burning blaze that was the other hive, gleaming bright orange against the navy-black sky. A plume of gray smoke floated high into the air from the only fire the Wraith had managed to extinguish. The haze burned at the back of her throat, but she suppressed the urge to cough. Darts continued to whir overhead in the smoky, starless sky, still searching for their attackers.

As soundlessly as possible, Lorne's team made their way up the loading ramp and when they reached the top, a shockwave surged through Eva's body. Two guards were standing sentry at the entrance. It shouldn't have alarmed her as much as it did; they had been watching the Wraith all afternoon, and the whole point of the mission was to make contact with them. But to see them up close…it still sent her adrenal system into overdrive.

Completely invisible, Lorne, Lt. Couglin, Ronon and Eva took point to clear and incapacitate the Wraith. Lorne carefully pulled the pin from a smoke grenade and tossed it inside the entrance of the Hive where it landed with a heavy clank. Both guards reacted simultaneously to the sound and aimed their weapons toward the source. White smoke, the same color of the misty Hive floor, rose up in billows, obscuring their surroundings. In a tightly rehearsed maneuver, Ronon and Coughlin left the safety of the cloak just long enough to approach the unsuspecting Wraith from behind and snap their necks.

No blood, no sound, no mess.

She had always known her father was a violent man. Never to her. Never to her mother. But she knew. A few months ago, something as gruesome as what she had just witnessed might have shocked her, but she was different now. Her hands, she realized, had clenched into fists while memories of that same violence coursed through her veins.

They entered the darkness of the Hive. The air was heavy and humid, even thicker than the smoke outside, and Eva found herself trying not to breathe. It chilled her to the bone, leaving her skin damp and clammy. She looked up at Ronon, who didn't look back. His normally bronze skin had taken on a sickly, greenish-white hue. And yet, his expression was calm and determined.

This kind of covert operation wasn't new to him. She had heard the stories about the assault he had led on Sarif Sur when he was only a few years older than her. Older and wiser now, he was back in his element, doing exactly what he had been trained to do, and that helped to settle some of the nerves ricocheting against the walls of her stomach.

After checking around the corners and surrounding area for other Wraith, Lorne gave a quiet go-ahead to Sheppard's team over the radio. To speed things up, Ronon and Eva knelt to the ground and got a jumpstart on the other team's task, slicing open the forearms of the two dead Wraith. Lorne and Coughlin stood guard while they waited for McKay, armed with the life signs detector, to guide the rest of his team to their position. It took the other team only seconds to catch up, for Teyla and Sheppard to continue the skin-crawling process of extracting the enzyme pouch.

"This is so nasty," Sheppard said, breathing only through his mouth.

Teyla dropped the pouch she had excised into a small biohazard canister and placed it in her pack, while Sheppard did the same.

"Finished?" McKay whispered.

Sheppard nodded. "Go ahead, Rodney."

He pointed the zat gun, shot three times, and the bodies disappeared.

Confident they had left no trace of their crime, they proceeded deeper into the Hive.

Both a blessing and a curse, they walked for quite some distance without encountering any more Wraith. Sheppard's team would hide in the shadows, behind walls, and in the nooks and crannies of the ship like cockroaches scattering under a bright light, while Lorne's team pressed ahead.

After nearly a quarter of an hour, they came across a lone Wraith on patrol in an otherwise empty corridor. Figuring the space was uninhabited enough, Ronon risked the noise of a single blast from his magnum and the Wraith dropped, a large, smoking hole in the middle of its chest. The stench of burnt flesh singed the inside of Eva's nostrils and she swallowed hard, forcing an involuntary gag back down her throat. Sheppard's team appeared almost instantly to finish the job.

The same phenomenon repeated itself an almost predictable fashion – every fifteen minutes or so, they would sneak up on a lone Wraith patrol and eliminate it – enough that it should have felt routine; but every time Eva caught sight of one of the beasts, her heart would skitter against her ribs. Nonetheless, they continued to move like a well-oiled machine, falling into a comfortable rhythm together until they became too comfortable.

They had come to a point in the ship where the path diverged. Teyla and Sheppard were on the floor, harvesting the enzyme of a Wraith guard they had just brought down. Lorne and Coughlin had their eyes on one fork in the road, Ronon and Eva were guarding the other flank, all while McKay clicked through files of Hive schematics on his tiny tablet, trying to figure out which corridor would lead them to the engine room.

The Hive was quiet, but it wasn't silent. Eva had quickly accustomed herself to the routine background sounds of the ship: the low hum of the ship's generator, the spontaneous, wet squelches of the organic walls and floor, the stealthy footsteps of her team. When she detected a new, different sound, an icy chill ran up her backbone. Soft and intermittent, she heard the faint swish of fabric dragging against the ground and looked over her shoulder. A dark shadow, growing in size, loomed behind McKay. Before she could shout a warning, a pale face with sunken yellow-green eyes and a fanged mouth, wide open in a silent snarl, emerged from the mist. With a sweep of its long cloak, the specter seized McKay from behind and brought a dagger to his throat.

In sync but unplanned, Ronon and Eva sent a pair of knives flying across the corridor. Both hit their targets – each sticking squarely in one of the Wraith's eyes – before it could utter a single threat. Crying out in pain and alarm, it fell to its knees, releasing McKay, and Teyla delivered the final, fatal blow.

From a crumpled fetal position on the ground, McKay popped his head above the mist and peeked one eye open. Convinced all threats had been eliminated, he got to his feet and started whisper yelling in Eva and Ronon's general direction.

"Are you crazy?! Those could have hit me! I could very well be blind right now! Or – or worse!"

"Mute?" Eva suggested in a low voice.

"You're welcome," Ronon growled.

"You're fine, Rodney," Sheppard said as he dropped the enzyme pouch of their assailant into his bag and Teyla disintegrated the corpse.

"How much do we have?" Lorne asked Sheppard.

"About half of what we need," he replied.

"And the amount of C4 we've placed so far isn't enough to cripple the ship. Not by a long shot," McKay informed them.

"Then we gotta keep moving. Did you figure out which way it is to the engine room?"

"Left," said McKay, holding the life signs detector so hard that his knuckles turned white.

And so, they kept going, more careful and on edge than before, tacitly wondering if the Wraith that had attacked them had managed to somehow alert the rest of the Hive of intruders.

It was this newfound caution which tipped them off to the presence of a mobile Wraith squadron before they were seen. What began as a simple "did you hear that?" soon grew louder and into the thundering footfall of dozen soldiers coming down the corridor.

"Quick! Get under!" Lorne called to Sheppard's team, scrambling to take cover.

Teyla and McKay, who were closest, managed to squeeze under the cloak's protection, all pressing themselves against the wall. McKay snatched the cloaking device from Coughlin's hands and worked frantically to widen the field. Sheppard, however, was left on the other side of the corridor, completely exposed as the platoon marched closer.

He had only a fraction of a second to make his decision. He looked around his surroundings for cover, but ultimately found none. Just as the squadron, all armed with stunners, rounded the corner, he dropped to the ground on his stomach and under the blanket of hovering mist, hiding him from sight.

The squadron passed, but before they could all take a collective sigh of relief, the commanding officer stopped. He had been bringing up the rear of the group and would have been the last to pass, had he not noticed a small disturbance in the mist. Suspicious, he slowly approached Sheppard's location. He searched the air around him, drew his weapon, and hissed.

Beneath the cloak, Eva bumped Ronon and glanced pointedly toward his blaster. Any other weapon would be too loud. He followed her gaze, but shook his head in denial.

Fine. If he wasn't going to do anything, then she would. She drew a large knife from her sleeve, poised to throw, but Ronon stopped her.

"Wait," he mouthed.

There was a spot she could hit – right between the base of the head and the top of the spine – so she pulled her arm back as if to throw, but Ronon gripped her left wrist in his hand and squeezed. Pain from her oath-taking wound shot through her arm, shocking her back to reality. It was the only reminder she needed, and she put the knife down.

The silence that ensued, disrupted only by the hissing of the Wraith standing over Sheppard, was intolerable. As Eva began to wonder if the Wraith could hear the colonel's heartbeat, which must have been hammering, it began to sniff. What was it searching for? The scent of human…or the reek of fear?

A distant sound of query broke the silence and the commander's concentration. It cast one last look around and left to rejoin its group.

Eyes locked on McKay's life signs detector, it was a while before anyone moved. Sheppard was the first to rise and Lorne led the rest of them to him, "That was some quick thinking, Colonel."

"Yeah. Thanks," he said, breathless. "Anyone got a fresh pair of boxers?"

They should have called it then, but the mission wasn't complete. As they moved farther and farther into the belly of the Hive, Eva felt the walls close in on her. With each step they were farther away from being able to find a way out. The dark became oppressive, the mist in her lungs poison. How much longer, she wondered, as her bones tried to worm their way out of her skin.

Did they all feel like this? Or just her?

She took a deep breath, more of the noxious atmosphere filling her chest, and focused.

Movement from the corner of her eye caught her attention and before she had time to think, fired a round from her P90.

The first actual shot of the mission fired. They all froze.

The thing about silencers is that they don't actually silence a gunshot. They just make it less explosive. And so, the shot still rang out, loud and clear, before it was absorbed by the organic material of the ship's walls.

No one said a thing, but Sheppard's team wasted no time in harvesting the fallen Wraith's enzyme and getting rid of the body. As Sheppard was helping Teyla zip up her pack, an alarm sounded and Eva's stomach dropped out from beneath her.

"Shit," she heard someone near her say.

The jig was up. The sound from the gun had revealed their presence and it was only a matter of time before a search party found them. The guilt crept up her spine and settled in her chest, and she found it hard to keep back her tears of disappointment.

The alarm continued to wail when a voice came over the intercom. It repeated its message a few times, enough that McKay was able to make out some of it.

"I don't think it's us," he whispered. "They're calling for support to the dart bay."

The weight lifted slightly from Eva's chest.

"Why?" Sheppard asked.

"Hell if I know! My Wraith knowledge skews more toward the academic than the conversational."

"Whatever it is, it can't be good," Ronon said in a low, gruff voice, just loud enough to carry out from under the cloak.

The weight that had lifted returned, this time plummeting into her stomach. He was right.

All of a sudden, Teyla brought a hand to her head and stumbled, reaching out the other to catch herself against the wall.

Sheppard moved in an instant to steady her in his arms. "Teyla! You okay?"

Still holding her head, she glanced up at him. "The queen has awakened."

Sheppard's eyes widened in surprise, but the concern in his expression never wavered.

"What? Are you sure?" McKay asked.

"Yes," she said with a nod. "I can sense her."

Everyone under the cloak looked at one another.

"She is…" she shook her head, "pleased."

"How can you tell?" McKay asked.

"I just can. I cannot explain it."

"Well, that can't be good," he said.

"No."

Without even offering, Sheppard took Teyla's pack from her and flung it over his own shoulder. "How close are we to the dart bay?"

McKay pulled out his tablet and consulted it quickly. "It should be to the right and a few corridors down. Not too far."

Sheppard nodded, taking a moment to formulate a plan. "We need to split up. Lorne – you and your team go see what's going on in the dart bay. McKay will take Teyla and me to the engine room so that we can plant our final charges there. Continue with our objective, but only if you can remain completely undetected. We don't need the queen to know we're here."

"Yes, sir," said Lorne.

"Wait a minute. So they get to take the cloak and we're completely out in the open?" McKay asked.

"Yes, Rodney," Sheppard replied, fed up. "They get the cloak because they're going somewhere there will be a high concentration of Wraith. We will likely be heading toward a mostly abandoned engine room. The majority of the Hive's engineers are tending to the other ship. And as long as you keep your mouth shut, we'll probably remain undetected!"

McKay opened his mouth and closed it a few times like a fish out of water.

"Teyla, give 'em your zat."

Lt. Coughlin stepped out from under the cloak to meet her and took the weapon before disappearing again.

"Stay on your radios, but keep contact to a minimum. Let us know what's going on when you get to the bay."

"Yes, sir," Lorne replied.

"Good luck," Sheppard said.

"You too, sir."

Sheppard glanced at the detector in McKay's hands, then back toward Eva's team. "And don't get lost."

"We won't," Ronon said.

Eva could have sworn she saw a small smile form on Sheppard's face before they split paths, each team heading down their own long, dark passageway.

As they forged ahead, to the right and a few corridors down, just like McKay had said, they began to encounter the Wraith in much higher concentrations than before. Enough Wraith passed by to meet their enzyme quota three times over, but the odds weren't in their favor. Instead, the four of them huddled closer to each other, Ronon taking Eva under his arm and giving her elbow a reassuring pat. The mass in her stomach eased up a bit.

Treading lightly, they came across a few lone Wraith that earlier would have been prime targets. Lacking the time to harvest the enzyme without another Wraith discovering them, they let them be and passed on by. Each one felt like such a waste.

Faster than anticipated, they arrived at the entrance to the dart bay where both Lorne and Coughlin stopped in their tracks.

"Oh, shit," Lorne said.

Eva peered around his side and her heart sank when she saw what had made them freeze: a Puddle Jumper parked in the middle of the dart bay.

"Colonel Sheppard," Lorne whispered into his radio, "they've got Miller and Simpson."

A/N: A cliffhanger! Oh no! What did you think?