Archive of Our Own

The Daedalus lands on the north pier just after 0900 Atlantis time, an overcast but promising summer's morning. The unloading is quick and efficient, and John's not really needed for that, so he grabs his stuff and heads for the nearest transporter, makes it to Elizabeth's office by 0925. She's called away by Caldwell before they have a chance to talk it out, before she has a chance to catch him up on everything that's been going on in his absence. It leaves him feeling at something of a loose end, so he shoulders his duffel again, and heads back towards his quarters. It's always fairly quiet at this hour of the morning, people still settling into their morning's work in the labs or the gateroom or the infirmary, the whole city overlaid with that uncomfortable stillness that John associates with the interval between one Wraith attack and the next Genii assault.

Plenty of familiar faces greet him the corridors, though. Biro, terse, on her way back from her morning run; Sgt. Jimenez, with a shy smile and a soft 'Sir'; Beatrice Williamson, bustling past him on her way to the botany labs, with an effusive and heartfelt 'Welcome back, Colonel!' It's all so familiar that John begins to feel uncomfortably like he's never been away.

He hadn't really banked on that.

Rodney finds him within maybe fifteen minutes of his leaving Elizabeth's office. Elizabeth had promised him confidentiality for the time being, and fifteen minutes isn't long enough even for Rodney to browbeat information from her; so when he sees the other man marching purposefully towards him down the corridor, he has the sinking feeling that Rodney has been hacking into the security feeds again, despite the little talk they had.

'Hey, Rodney,' he calls out while the other man is still a couple of yards away. He keys open his door; inside, his quarters are much as he left them more than three months ago; a little dustier, maybe, but the city's climate controls have done a good job at making sure that the air is still fairly fresh. After so long cooped up in his tiny quarters on the Daedalus, it feels incredibly airy to John, room enough for dozens. He dumps his duffle on the bed, steps quickly across the room to throw open the wide windows that look out on the ocean below him, and draws in the deepest of breaths, letting the scent of salt tickle the back of his throat.

The door slides closed behind him, but only for the length of a heartbeat, two; then it opens as suddenly as doors on Atlantis can, and Rodney's inside, and 'What the fuck do you think you're doing? No, no, scratch that, I know what you're doing. Why the fuck are you doing it?'

John lets his face fall into that well-practised smile, the smile that simultaneously manages to charm and placate and show the teeth of a predator. 'Hello, Rodney,' he says, overly polite, emphasising the drawl, widening the smile. 'How've you been? So nice to see you again after so long. Why yes, I had a nice trip, thank you very much for asking. Lots of leg-room, good in-flight entertainment.'

'Colonel, please,' Rodney says, 'You think you're going to distract me with social niceties?'

'Well, you are Canadian,' John says, all wide-eyed innocence.

'Well, you are a jackass,' Rodney sing-songs back at him, pointing an accusing finger. 'I haven't seen you in, in what, nearly three months? You swan off back to Earth without so much as a by-your-leave. You tell Elizabeth you're going back to take care of Air Force business, you tell Radek you're going back to take care of some personal business, and me you tell absolutely nothing. You leave us and we have to— Jesus, John. I reiterate, in words that don't tend towards the polysyllabic so you can understand me with greater ease: why the hell did you just tell Elizabeth you were resigning your commission?'

'Because I was always raised to tell the truth, Rodney,' John says, ignoring the little contemptuous huff that earns. 'And it is true. I've done my twenty years, and for reasons personal and professional, I have resigned my commission, and I'm moving back to Earth.'

Rodney's gaze flickers over John's face, anger mixed with something else that John can't quite read, but which might almost be anxiety. 'You're not joking, are you?' he says eventually. 'This isn't some vast, early April Fool's Day extravaganza designed to make me look ridiculous? Why aren't you joking about this?'

John sighs and rubs at the back of his neck. 'It's not a joke. I wouldn't— Look, Rodney. I've spent twenty years doing this already, and I don't think I can stand to do twenty more. I'm growing older, I'm getting tired. I'm tired of losing people, I'm tired of losing friends, and I'm tired of counting a mission a win if someone isn't killed or seriously wounded. We've got more and more people arriving in Atlantis every year, from Earth and from Pegasus. I was never supposed to be in charge of so many people, I was never supposed to help protect so many people. Hell, every instructor I ever had told me I would be lucky if I ever made it to Captain, and they were right. I just— '

He lets his words trail off, lets his hand fall away from his neck. He's not sure exactly why he just told Rodney so much, when he spoke barely more than the minimum required to Generals Landry and O'Neill back at the SGC.

'Okay, fine,' Rodney says after a silence that lasts a few moments, 'I know that drawing the Wraith away from Earth aside, our latest missions haven't exactly been what one would ordinarily call successful— '

'Rodney,' John interrupts. 'You and Teyla spent two weeks sitting at the bottom of a mineshaft on MX-315 getting food and air through a tube while we tried to dig you out!'

'Yes, well, much as I've always had a tendency to regard cave-ins as being somewhat detrimental to my health,' Rodney says. 'Things haven't been so bad lately that— Why would you leave? Let's not be stupid here. You give up this silly idea of leaving, stay here, we'll keep on not getting along in a friendly, jocular sort of way, and and I promise to continue to provide you any number of more than satisfactory blowjobs— '

'What? Rodney— '

'— and I even promise not to harbour any bad feelings over this, this brain aberration or whatever you want to call it. I'm sure Carson has a technical term. Maybe not enough not to, you know, withhold the really good sex for a couple of weeks, but I won't be rigging one of the puddle-jumpers to skywrite my indignation, okay?'

'Rodney,' John says evenly, 'as wonderful as you are in an irritating sort of way, it doesn't matter. I've already resigned. O'Neill's got my letter of resignation, and he's approved it. I stay here for three weeks, make sure everything is handed over neatly to Lorne and Caldwell, and then I head back to Earth on the Daedalus' return trip.

John would love for nothing more than for Rodney to just leave it at that. But there is the peculiar set and lift of Rodney's jaw which means that Rodney's not done yet, and John sighs even as Rodney says, 'Have you even thought this through? Have you? You're going to leave the expedition, leave this galaxy, leave the past four years of your life and go back to what? What are you going to do with yourself, John?'

John shrugs. 'I've got my pension and a couple years of combat pay that's been sitting in a bank account with nothing to do but earn interest. And an uncle of mine left me some money a couple years ago. Enough to get myself the basics— a house, a plane, a surfboard. Maybe I could move to Hawaii or something.'

'Hawaii or something,' Rodney sneers, and John hears something more than just his usual level of snide disbelief in there; there's something edged with bitterness, too. 'That's just wonderful, Colonel, that really is.'

'Rodney, look, you can't tell me what to do. We're not— you're not— a couple of hand jobs and one attempt at sixty-nining doesn't mean— '

'What do you mean by that, exactly?' Rodney snaps.

'Just what I said. I'm not staying, Rodney, and you can't talk me out of it.'

Rodney glares at him, and John is already mentally preparing himself for Round Three, when Rodney's eyes go a little distant, and he taps his ear piece. 'What is it, Carson?' A brief pause and then, 'I'll be there right away. Try calibrating the machine to deliver an increased dosage to compensate in the meantime.' He's already moving towards the door while he talks, attention moving rapidly away from John towards whatever's going on in the infirmary.

'Something up?' John calls after him. 'What's wrong?'

'If you'd bothered to stick around,' Rodney says as he palms open the door, not looking at him, 'you wouldn't have to ask.'

'I'm asking now,' John says, tightly.

'Too late,' Rodney says, and the door closes behind him

With Rodney gone, the room is too quiet. John fidgets around, moving from the bed to a chair to the bed again, trying to doze before finally giving it up as a lost cause. He puts on some music that Zelenka had given him a while back, something very fast and European with a beat that John likes. He unpacks some of his stuff while he hums along with it, starts to plan how he's going to pack up some of his larger things, makes a list of who is going to get his surfboard (Cadman) and his second-best guitar (Rodney, even if he might just beat him over the head with it first).

Somewhere around 1400, he decides to head to lunch before his scheduled afternoon debriefing with Elizabeth. In the mess, he loads his tray with turkey sandwiches and plenty of the Athosian coffee substitute; funny that he'd spent all his time on Atlantis before now wishing for real coffee, and all his time in the SGC wishing for the Pegasus equivalent.

The mess hall is unusually empty for this time of day, but Rodney is over at the far side, eating lunch with Ronon and Zelenka. Ronon grunts a greeting to John around a mouthful of mashed potatoes that nevertheless manages to seem friendly. Zelenka greets him absent-mindedly, too caught up in whatever conversation he's having with Rodney to really notice his presence.'...but the machine was not designed— hello, Colonel, hello— it was not designed for such a use. We cannot believe that the Ancients would have used it for such a purpose, or to filter such a quantity of blood, and the machine is breaking down as much as it is working. I do not think that the lieutenant can take much more of this, Rodney. Dr Beckett knows it, too.''What are we talking about here?' John says, as he starts in on his first sandwich.

Rodney ignores him, moodily stabbing his fork at the one or two fries remaining on his plate. Zelenka blinks at John for a moment or two, clearly before remembering that he hasn't been around for a while, and doesn't have a clue what they're talking about.

'Ah, yes. Dr Weir will not yet have had a chance to tell you, and our transmission to the SGC about Lieutenant Williams only went through a couple of days ago.'

John racks his memory for what he can recall of the lieutenant. Earl Williams. Nice kid, inoffensive and eager to please, from some tiny town in Idaho where the potatoes outnumbered the people by a factor of millions. His personal item had been an iPod loaded with thrash metal that he listened to at volumes loud enough to damage the eardrums of anyone in his near vicinity, and he was well known for the tentative crush he was nursing for Dr Biro. 'Something happen on a mission?' he says, already mentally running through what he can recall of the mission rosters for SGA-2 and SGA-3 which were scheduled to take place while he was away.

'Yes, something happened on a mission,' Rodney says quietly. His tone and the volume of his voice alone are enough to tell John that something is badly wrong. 'We received some information about a potential Ancient outpost on a moon in a system we'd already cleared as safe. Teyla, Ronon, Lorne and I and a group of Marines, including Williams, went to investigate it. It was an Ancient outpost all right, but it had already been picked clean by the Wraith, and some of them were still there. It was an ambush, a trap.'

John pulls himself up slowly in his seat, feeling his spine lengthen and straighten as the food turns to ash in his mouth. 'What happened?' he says again, gaze flicking from Rodney to Radek to Ronon and back again.

'It seems that the Wraith have been learning from us, Colonel. An unfortunate side-effect of unleashing a, a genetic blitzkrieg against them is that they're going to learn from it. They're going to take what we did, take it apart and twist it, and then they're going to turn it back on us and— '

'Rodney,' John says.

Rodney takes a breath, shuddery and unsteady, and doesn't look at John. 'A retrovirus, Colonel. They made a retrovirus, made it better and nastier than anything Carson ever managed, and they infected Williams with it.'

'What,' John says, voice uncertain in a way it hasn't been since he was a teenager, feeling his skin crawl in a way it hasn't since it changed colour and tried to change him, 'What are we talking about here, Rodney?'

'We are talking,' Rodney says carefully, clutching his cutlery so tightly that his knuckles turn white, 'we are talking about a retrovirus which has been engineered to slowly, steadily and permanently mutate human DNA into Wraith DNA. We are talking about a twenty-two year old kid from Idaho being strapped to a table in the infirmary while Carson tries and fails to stop him from turning into a creature out of my worst nightmares. That is what we are talking about, Colonel.'

'Why the hell wasn't I told about this sooner?' John snaps, cutting off Rodney before he can rail at him any further. 'That's one of my men you're— '

'Well, that's part of the problem of running off to another galaxy now, isn't it?' Rodney bites back, looking at John for the first time, the high points of his cheekbones slowly staining red. 'Besides, it's not like he's going to be one of your men for much longer, is he, if you insist on being such a jackass; why would you care one way or another?'

'Fuck you, McKay,' John hisses, the legs of his chair scraping noisily against the floor as he stands up. 'I'm going to talk to Elizabeth.'

As he leaves the room he wishes, not for the first time, for a door he could actually slam behind him, some impact he can make, some way to make things shake and echo around him. Instead, Atlantis' doors slide, smoothly, frustratingly, closed behind him.

Rodney studiously avoids watching him leave the room, though both Radek and Ronon do. Ronon's face shows a stirring of interest. Radek looks openly surprised; behind his glasses, his eyes are bright and inquisitive.

'This, I think, will be an interesting interview,' Radek says, as he adds yet another sugar to his coffee. 'Perhaps a betting pool as to how long it will take the Colonel to ask permission to send a team back to the moon?'

'Think Weir will listen to him?' Ronon says.

'Colonel Sheppard has a lot of charm,' Radek says, non-committally.

'Yes,' said Rodney, skewering the last fry with his fork, 'well, he comes by it naturally. His grandfather was a snake. Or a sociopath, whichever.'

Radek raises an eyebrow; Rodney doesn't flush. 'Besides,' he continues, 'I don't think even Sheppard would be idiotic enough to ask Elizabeth for that now.'

'No, John. You are not taking a team back to that outpost.''But if I could just— 'Elizabeth holds up a hand, forestalling any further objections. She's not in the mood for hearing any; not now, and not from John. 'I can appreciate that you are angered by this, John. We all are. No-one is happy that we have to sit around and do nothing while we wait for Carson and his team to come up with a cure. But that's all we can do for now.'

'If I can bring a team back to that moon, I can take out that Wraith ship. I know I can. Give me a couple of Marines, some ordnance and a puddle-jumper, that's all I'm asking,' John says, all blood-lust and earnestness, both palms flat on her desk as he leans in towards her. 'We can blow those sons-of-bitches to hell in an hour or two and be home in time for dinner.'

'And risk having the Wraith retaliate with an even greater direct assault on Atlantis? Or have them make revenge attacks on the Athosian settlement? Our defences still aren't strong enough to chance that, John. Not to mention the risk of having one of them attack you or any one of your team with the retrovirus and leaving us even worse off than we are now.' Elizabeth leans back in her chair, folding her arms and glaring back at John. She isn't going to let him wheedle and cajole this out of her, stare her down and manipulate her and then leave.

'You're making a mistake,' John says from between gritted teeth.

'I'm afraid I already have,' Elizabeth says, closing her eyes, choking on the screams, on the shouts, that always threaten to rip their way free from her throat at times like this, the ones she can't let herself indulge in. 'I already have.'

There is no-one left in her office to answer her.

Rodney's never thought of medicine as being any better than voodoo or witchcraft, superstitious mutterings and mumblings designed to comfort children who are afraid of the dark. He's fully aware of all his medical conditions of course, from hypertension to hypoglaecemia, and he was probably the only sixteen-year-old in Canada who volunteered to go get his flu shot each winter; it always pays to be sensible, after all.But ever since the age of three, when he first found out what it was to have to fight and choke for every breath, when his mother first ran screaming with him into an emergency room, he's found it hard to trust doctors. 'Yes, there's a problem with your son, Mrs McKay,' they'd say. 'We know what it is, we can even tell you what's causing it; we just can't fix him.'

Rodney has always found that incredibly sloppy on their part.He's starting to understand how they must have felt.It's been three hours since lunch, and two and a half hours since he first found himself up to his elbows in Ancient tech. Radek's somewhere on the other side of the infirmary, wrapped up in what seem like endless miles of wiring and page upon page of schematics. Between the two of them, they're making steady progress, and Rodney knows that given enough time, they can more than likely adapt the machine to do what they need, to give Williams enough to keep him alive, strip the poison from his blood, maybe even find a cure.

But each time Carson emerges from the make-shift ICU-cum-cell that they've set up just off the infirmary, he looks graver. Rodney can read Williams' lack of progress in the downward groove of Carson's mouth, just how little time they have left in the misery in Carson's eyes.

There's a rational, logical, hateful little voice inside his head telling him that 'little time' means 'not enough time', and that no matter how many more all-nighters he and Radek pull, that no matter how inventive he gets at re-wiring and recycling and refashioning Ancient machinery, it's not going to be enough. It's not going to be enough, and Rodney will be forced to watch helplessly as they lose one more person, to remember once more what it felt like to watch John forget family and friends, to forget what it means to be human.

Somewhere around 1900, he and Radek take a break, slumping against the wall and sharing some MREs in the kind of companionable silence which settles over Rodney only when he is truly exhausted. Rodney is about halfway through his second packet of chemically heated lasagne when John enters the infirmary. He makes a bee-line for Carson and drags him into a corner; Rodney can't hear what he's saying, but from the set of his shoulders and the pleading line of his mouth, he'd bet good money that he's starting in on the patented John Sheppard 'Gee whiz, doc, all I want to do is help!' routine.

'The Colonel is leaving in two weeks?' Radek says carefully, in the kind of mild-mannered voice that Rodney knows the little weasel only adopts when he is very determined to dig for information.

'Three,' Rodney says, 'And he's not leaving.'

'Really?' Radek says, blinking behind his glasses. 'But I heard he had resigned his commission from Miko, and Miko is never wrong about these things. And if he resigns his commission, he must leave, is part of the SGC charter; unless, of course, Dr Weir is to offer him a civilian consultancy here, but I do not— '

'He thinks he has resigned his commission,' Rodney interrupts, tucking into a power bar for good measure; he's pretty sure that if he can just figure out the correct coupling interface for the machine, find out a way to improve the filtration process, it'll be another all-nighter. 'But he's not leaving. He just doesn't know it yet.'

'Whatever you are planning, Rodney, I feel I should advise you that it is not going to work.'

'Oh, ye of little faith,' Rodney snaps. 'I will have you know, Radek my friend, that I have a plan.'

Radek sighs. 'You are either very clever or a complete imbecile.'

'Well, then it's lucky we both know I'm a certified genius, now isn't it?'

'Listen, doc,' John says, 'All I want to do is see him. How much harm can that cause, huh? In and out, quick and simple, no harm caused.' He leans against one of the infirmary workstations, hip-shot, arms spread wide.

Carson barely even glances up at him, focusing instead on one of the clipboards a harried-looking nurse had thrust into his hands, jotting notes and observations onto it his scattered scrawl. 'I said no, Colonel, I don't see how I can say it any plainer than that. And no,' he says when he sees John begin to protest, 'No, I am not going to reconsider, no matter how much you whine. It won't do the patient any good at all, not in the state he's currently in.'

'I am not whining,' John says, 'I am asking to see one of the men under my command who has been injured in the line of duty, and I think I'm asking politely.'

Carson looks up at that, pen stilling for a moment as he studies John's face. 'Colonel,' he says slowly. 'John. You know that Lt Williams is even worse off than you were, don't you?''Elizabeth explained— '

'You don't get it,' Carson says, and he is as close to outright angry as John has ever seen him. 'I am not exaggerating. Your body was devolving into something close to the Iratus bug. It was a very painful and distressing experience for you, of course­— '

John rolls his eyes; Carson ignores him.

'— of course; but it was an unplanned reaction, and as time progressed you lost lucidity. You weren't you any more; the part of you that is John Sheppard essentially went away. But the Wraith planned this, they targeted us. Whatever else you want to say about them, they're clever buggers. They designed it so that the conversion progress is incredibly painful, quick, and irreversible, but also so that the person infected remains perfectly aware the entire time.'

John stills at that. 'It's been four days, and he's still aware?'

'He knows exactly what's going on, Colonel,' Carson says. 'The pain disorients him a little, at times, but he's still very much aware. But that's not all.'

He indicates to John to follow him, brings him over to his office, and sits him down. Carson hands him a slim file, and John flips it open to see a series of photos. The time stamps show that they were taken over a series of days, from four days ago until this morning. They show a series of hands, of palms, skin slowly shading from a healthy tan to a bluish pallor, nails lengthening and curling.

'Just what am I supposed to be looking at here?' John says.

'That would be the lieutenant's hands,' Carson says. 'At first, we were wondering why the Wraith would create a retrovirus like this. Why make more like themselves, when there are already more of them than their food supply can support? It doesn't make sense. But eventually Dr Biro and I figured out what was happening. Look at his palms again.'

John does, flicking through the pictures once more from beginning to end. The colour alters, the nails grow, but the palms themselves don't change. 'The feeding apparatus— '

'Is atrophied,' Carson finishes for him. 'Deliberately. They engineered the virus so that it would convert human DNA to Wraith DNA in every respect but the creation of the feeding apparatus.'

'Christ,' John says as it finally dawns on him, and he flings the file back onto the desk with a shaking hand, photos spilling everywhere, falling to lie scattered on the ground.

Carson rubs tiredly at his forehead. 'I suppose in a way, it's a kind of poetic revenge on us. They're turning us into them in every way except the one which they know we abhor, the feeding; and then letting us starve to death because of it. The transformation isn't going to kill Earl Williams; it's just going to weaken him enough that he succumbs to starvation even more quickly.'

'Christ,' John says again, words thick in his mouth as he chokes back the bile which threatens to rise up his throat. He gets up and leaves the little office, and Carson makes no move to stop him.

John has to pass Rodney on his way out of the infirmary. Rodney knows that he could take the high road and ignore the other man, not say anything, be the better person when it's obvious to anyone who knows John that the man is distressed, upset.Rodney's never been good at that sort of thing.

'Have a nice visit with Carson, then?' Rodney says calmly from his position on the floor, back to the wall, knees folded. He's looking at the piece of machinery in his lap rather than at John. Very calm; but it's still enough to make Radek murmur an excuse and slips out of the infirmary, leaving that section of it deserted apart from John and Rodney.

'Don't even, McKay,' John says, 'You have no right, none— '

'I have just as much right as you,' Rodney spits. 'I've got more right. I've been here with Radek almost for the past seventy-two straight hours. I've barely slept, I'm exhausted, the only reason I'm not on uppers is because Carson still won't give them to me after what happened last year, that tight Scottish bastard. I've had to sit here and work on this, this piece of Ancient shit' — he sends the bit of machinery he's holding skidding across the floor— 'in the hope that it will buy us some extra time, all while listening to that poor bastard scream and sob and starve to death, while you're off deciding that you're tired of this.'

'I'm not doing this, McKay,' John says, face carefully composed. 'Whatever you think, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm going back to packing.'

He pivots back around when he hears Rodney snort, his eyes narrowed. 'What?' he says. 'What have you done?'

'I've done nothing at all,' Rodney says, lips twitching in a way which means he's definitely, definitely done something. 'I just don't think you really need to rush the packing process.'

'Rodney,' John says.

'Well,' Rodney says, stretching his legs out in front of him and folding his arms. 'There's no point packing if you're going to be here for weeks yet. Hermiod's decided to dry dock the Daedalus for an additional couple of weeks to perform some perfectly necessary maintenance on the hyperdrive. You won't get very far towards Earth without that.'

It takes a supreme effort of will on John's part to stop him from flipping Rodney off. 'Hermiod's decided,' he says instead, disbelief in every line of his face.

'That's what I said,' Rodney says, something like smugness sneaking back into his expression. 'Very sound engineering decision on Hermiod's part, I think.'

John makes an exasperated noise and strides out of the infirmary. He's halfway down the corridor when he's fairly certain he hears Rodney say, 'And Hermiod thinks you're a jackass, too.'

Even with the amount of caffeine Rodney has in his system, a crash is inevitable. It hits him somewhere around 0200, halfway through the short Atlantean midsummer night but before he feels like he's made any significant progress with the machinery. He wakes up to the familiar tense feeling of a muscle cramp beginning in his lower back just as the first grey half-light of dawn starts to filter through the windows.

Surprise surprise, he thinks, he hasn't made it out of the infirmary to the rumpled, dubious comforts of his own bed yet again. He stifles a groan as he stretches, feeling his right knee protest a little— never the same since that mission to M4X-351, not likely to be now that he was staring at forty— and braces himself to stand up.Then he hears voices coming from Williams' room; a low murmur, but voices nonetheless. The infirmary is deserted at this hour, and from his position on the floor, Rodney can see Carson slumped, asleep, at the desk in his office. Rodney doesn't really need observation or the process of elimination to tell him who's in there with the lieutenant, though.

'John, you stupid, masochistic bastard,' he mutters to himself.

Rodney forces himself to his feet, moves as quietly as he can over to where the door to Williams' room is standing ajar. Inside, he can see John, sitting on one of those uncomfortable chairs— really, Rodney thinks, had the Ancients never even heard of ergonomics?— elbows braced on his knees, forehead resting on his interlaced fingers. He's talking softly to Williams.

Rodney knows that John would hate to know just how young he looks at that moment.

He can see what's happening in the room, can catch the heavy odour, like dying lilies, that seems to accompany this change of form and flesh, but he can't hear what John's saying. Williams clearly can. He is lying on his back on the infirmary bed they've modified for him. There are straps and buckles and padded cuffs, and it makes Rodney uncomfortable just to look at it. He's awake and staring at the ceiling; or at least, what Williams can see of the ceiling through the bars of the makeshift cell they've hurriedly constructed around him. Nothing as elaborate as where they kept Steve or the rest of his friends, but still necessary. Williams is still lucid and aware, yes, and he can't feed on anyone; but the pain and the fear make him angry, and he's stronger even than Ronon now.

Williams turns his head to John and says something, voice distorted and made strange by the weight of unfamiliar teeth in his mouth. Whatever it is, it makes John smile at him, weak but genuine; Rodney sees him get up to go and stand by the cell, wrap his hands around the naquadah-reinforced bars.

Dawn is rapidly approaching outside, the light coming stronger and stronger through the windows. Rodney knows that the morning shift will be coming on duty soon, one of the nurses shaking Carson awake and pressing a large mug of coffee into his hands, and that one of them is sure to chase him away to either get some sleep or get some food, or both. He's had enough run-ins with Nurse Molloy over the past couple of days for that to make him wary, to make him shift towards the door; besides, he doesn't want to be around when John leaves that room.

He's not entirely stupid, after all.

John spends that morning in the gym with Teyla. His lack of sleep shows in the bruises under his eyes, his slow responses to her attacks, the way he does not even attempt his usual feints, ineffectual though they have always been. He seems to have lost all that he has learned from her in the past months, centring himself too high, carrying himself too stiffly.

After an hour, she has barely exerted herself enough to break into more than a mild sweat, but Teyla has still managed to throw him to the mat half a dozen times. Standing there looking down at him, at how his arms tremble as he forces himself back up to face her again, she shakes her head. Too stubborn, as always: for his own good, or anyone else's.

He adjusts his grip on his fighting sticks, stands ready. Teyla sighs and goes to sit on one of the window seats, pulling a bottle of water from her bag.'Teyla?' John says. 'Are we ready to go here or what?''I do not think that would be productive today, Colonel,' she answers carefully.

That gets her an eye-roll. 'Oh, not you, too. Elizabeth was bad enough this morning at breakfast, and I don't want— '

'If you will forgive me for interrupting,' Teyla says, in a voice which shows that she does not care whether forgiveness is forthcoming or not, 'it is not a matter of what you want, Colonel. This is a matter of what you need, of what we need, and of what is appropriate. We are all struggling with this, and I know that this must be especially hard on you. But with what we have had to face in your absence, and with the knowledge that you will soon be gone from us— '

She breaks off when John tosses his sticks onto the ground and stalks from the room. She would follow him, but knows that it would be even less useful; Teyla has long since learned to pick her battles.

She gathers the sticks up, since they were a gift from Halling and Jinto to John, and she knows that he cherishes them; he will be displeased later if something were to happen to them. She wraps them in a scrap of old cloth and gives the bundle to Ronon when they share lunch together, asking him to return them to John during their afternoon run.

Ronon raises an eyebrow at her. 'Sheppard's taking it badly,' he says. It's not a question; Ronon knows his team leader.

'I have known him to handle things better,' Teyla admits.

'Two weeks til he leaves?' Ronon says, and this is a question.

'Apparently so,' Teyla says, mouth quirking up into a half-smile. 'Though Dr Zelenka was sad to inform me a few minutes ago that Major Lorne and Lieutenants Miller and Dubois have all suddenly been taken ill with Athosian flu; Colonel Sheppard will have to delay the handover of his duties to them for some time until they recover.'

'That'll take a while, huh,' Ronon says.

'For as long as Dr McKay and Dr Zelenka tell them they are feeling ill, yes,' Teyla replies.

Ronon grins.

Sleep for two hours, work for three or four, and then Rodney finally lets himself head to the mess; Williams is sleeping for now, and there's not much more he can do at the moment. He grabs some soup and sandwiches, a large mug of coffee, but finds even the quiet murmur of the early lunch crowd too much for him, finds the knot of tension at the nape of his neck, across his shoulders, too much to bear.

He takes his tray and heads for one of the transporters, lets it take him over to the far side of the city. There's a balcony where he likes to sit, sometimes, on the rare occasions when he allows himself a break. Broad enough to let him sit comfortably, it's all clear glass and cool, arching metal. When Rodney sits there, it makes him feel like he's suspended out over the ocean; when he closes his eyes and leans his head back, he lets the sun-warmed metal bake away his headache.

He knows he can't have been there for long when his headset chirrups in his ear. Rodney sighs; he knows who it has to be. Tapping at it, eyes still closed, he says 'Yes, Colonel?'

'Is that you, Rodney?' John says, tone deliberately light and sweet. Rodney suppresses a snort; he must really have pissed John off if he honestly thinks that Rodney is actually going to buy that act.

'Rodney Ingram McKay, PhD, at your service,' Rodney says, his voice as close to perky as he can possibly make it. 'How can I help you this fine afternoon?' He allows himself a smirk when he can clearly hear John grind his teeth over the headset.

'Well,' John says, 'it seems like there have been a couple of unusual incidents in my city over the past few days. The Daedalus has developed a pressing need for repair, even though Colonel Carter and a handful of Asgard went over it with a fine-tooth comb before we left Earth. My 2IC has developed a sudden and debilitating bout of flu, as have most of my officers. And now, when I finish having Teyla and Elizabeth kick my ass one after the other, and head back to my quarters to get a start on my packing, I find that my suitcases have disappeared, and someone seems to have made a mistake on the shipping manifesto so that my weight allowance for the return flight has been reduced to five ounces. More than a little unusual, don't you think?'

'Mmm, very,' Rodney agrees. 'Unusual to have so many coincidences. At least a chance of, oh, one in five million, four hundred thirty seven thousand, two hundred and ninety-one, by my reckoning. With a slight margin of error, of course,' he adds modestly.

'Oh, of course,' John says. 'Just one of those statistically unlikely things that happen all the time in the Pegasus Galaxy, right?'

'Uh huh, yeah,' Rodney says, shifting slightly so that he can get into an even more comfortable position. Seriously, the Ancients and ergonomic design? Not even acquainted.

'Right,' John drawls. 'Oh, and Rodney?'

'Yes?'

'If you, or Zelenka, or Lorne, or whoever else you have roped into this little half-witted attempt at manipulating me, tries it again, I swear to god I will take one of the jumpers and use it to blow the coffee crop on the mainland to kingdom come. And that's before I even get started on the great process of getting back at you. You don't own me, Rodney, you don't control me. This is my life, my decision, and I want you to stay the fuck out of it.'

After that, there is only the static of a broken connection in his ear. Rodney settles back to let himself enjoy a ten-minute power-nap before he heads back to the infirmary and starts in on another twelve hour shift.

'My city', not 'this city.' 'My 2IC', 'my officers'. 'Earth', not 'home.'

John isn't going to leave, even if he doesn't know it yet.

Rodney smiles. He really is a genius.

On the third day after John's return, he lingers in the debriefing room with Carson after the others have left. He's doodling something on the pad in front of him, while Carson fidgets with the files and folders he brought with him to the staff meeting as a distraction, information and statistics and reports amassed to bury the one important fact.

'He's not going to get any better, is he?' John says.

'Given another few weeks, I should have an experimental treatment worked up to block the retrovirus,' Carson says. 'That, combined with the Ancient technology Rodney and Radek have redesigned to deal with this should stop this from ever occurring again.'

'But it's not going to stop it this time,' John says flatly.Carson hesitates a moment, then, 'No. No, it's not. I'm sorry.'

John nods, sharp and quick. 'Thank you,' he says, before he gets up and leaves.

Carson stays for a moment or two, feeling guilty for enjoying the first moment of solitude, the first moment of peace, he's had in so many, many days.

When he gets up to leave, he pauses by John's seat, looks down at what the other man had been writing. Dear Mr and Mrs Williams, it begins in John's neat print, it is my sad duty as his commanding officer to inform you of the death of your son, Earl, in the line of duty.

Carson doesn't read any further.

That night, Williams escapes from the infirmary. Carson lets Kavanagh in to hook up the latest modifications to the Ancient tech that is all that's alleviating Williams' pain, all that's keeping him alive; but, stupidly, he's not accompanied into the cell by anybody more than two young Marines. Inexperienced and distracted by the sight of someone who'd been running drills with them a week ago, someone who was now looking back at them through slitted pupils, from behind a fall of long, white hair, they're not able to react quickly enough. The restraints aren't quite tight enough, and Kavanagh is foolish enough to lean in to adjust one of the lines that trails from Williams' body.

'The Marines are unconscious,' Rodney tells John over the comm, 'but they should be coming to any minute now. Williams took both their P-90s, shot Kavanagh in the stomach when the stupid bastard tried to stop him. Carson's operating on him now, and is horribly afraid that he's going to recover.

'Fuck that,' John snarls as he clambers out of bed, pulls back on his BDUs and straps on his thigh holster. 'You mind telling me how in the hell this happened, and how we're going to get him back?'

'I'm working on it, Colonel,' Rodney snaps. In the background, John can hear frantic consultations and conversations that aren't quite yelled, and over it, the loud, frenetic pace of Rodney's typing.

'Tracking him is going to be a problem,' he says after twenty, thirty seconds, says while John is already heading out of the residential section and towards the command centre. 'His transformation is confusing the Ancient life signs detector. At the moment, he's not human anymore, but he's not quite a Wraith. The gene therapy didn't hold with him, so he we can't track him using the ATA gene.' Rodney makes a frustrated noise in the back of his throat, one which John knows means that he can't quite see the answer yet.

'Well, we'll just have to rely on the good old-fashioned way then, won't we?' John says. 'Where's Ronon?'

He's made it to the gate room by then, and Rodney leans over the railing to shout down the answer to him. Elizabeth is next to him. 'He's taken a team of Marines out to run the perimeter, make sure he's not going to, to do something stupid. Or to take one of the Ancient cruisers to the mainland.'

John shakes his head impatiently as he jogs up the steps to the main control centre. 'No. Salt-water. He's not going to go there; and he's not, he doesn't want to get away, he wants— Teyla?' he says. 'Lorne?'

'Both took detachments of Marines with them,' Elizabeth answers. 'Major Lorne's standing guard in the jumper bay, even though we don't think he'll head there; he hasn't got the gene and he knows he won't be able to activate the jumpers without it. Teyla's bringing her group on a sweep through the main areas of the city— mess, the rec rooms, the armoury, back to the infirmary— and we've got snipers set up around the gate-room. We're not going to let him get out of the city, John.'

John nods, distractedly, not really listening to what she's telling him. 'He's not going to leave,' he says, cutting across whatever Rodney's saying about troop deployment, whatever Elizabeth's saying about the direction Nurse Molloy saw Williams run in. 'I talked to him, I know what he's thinking, and he's not trying to leave the city. That's not what this is about.'

Then he snaps his fingers, points at Rodney and says, 'I know. I know where he's gone.' He turns and takes off in a dead run in the direction he came in, hearing Rodney's steps, surprisingly swift, behind him.

The residential quarters are quiet and dark and mostly deserted; the civilian members of the expedition know enough by now to make it for one of the designated safe areas as soon as the alarm is raised.

Mostly deserted. The door to one of the quarters has been forced open, and there is a dim light coming from inside. John steps in, cautiously, Beretta drawn and held out at his side.

Williams is sitting on the bed, legs tucked under him, looking at a photo album he held in his lap. In this light, in these shadows, he looks almost normal, a young man in ill-fitting hospital scrubs with limbs he hasn't grown into yet and hair that he's grown too much of. The two P-90s lie next to him on the bed. There's nothing normal about him.

'I was due to go home on leave in ten months,' Williams says without looking up. He's turning the pages of the album, looking at photos of people and places and events that happened years ago, thousands of light years away. At this angle, in the dim light, John can't see much more than indistinct blurs, family groups posed in front of green trees, proud parents and sons posing in front of the stars and stripes. 'I was really looking forward to it, you know? See my folks, see a concert or two, have a few beers with my brothers, maybe even— There was this girl, Molly, and I thought—'

Williams trails off, and John's grip tightens on his sidearm.

'But that's not going to happen, is it, sir?' Williams says, so quietly John can barely hear him.

'Listen, Lieutenant,' John says, low and earnest. 'If you come back with me, Dr Beckett can help you. McKay and Zelenka, they're doing their best, the whole science team is. If anyone can find a cure, they can.'

Williams shakes his head. 'I'm not going back to the infirmary with you. Sir, please. I don't want to go back there.' He looks up at John. 'Maybe you're my friend, and maybe you're not. Maybe you're still my commanding officer, and maybe all you see when you look at me is another bug to be killed. I don't know any more. I don't care. All I know is that I don't want to kill anyone; I just want to be left alone. I want to go in peace.'

John takes a deep breath, and then nods. Carefully, he places his sidearm on the foot of the bed. Williams ignores him, running one hand over a picture of a girl with a mass of red hair and a bright, bright smile.

John says, 'It's been an honour, lieutenant,' and wills the door to close behind him when he leaves the room. He doesn't say anything when Rodney asks him what's going on, he doesn't let Rodney into the room, and he doesn't flinch when a single shot rings out.

Later, much later, after the autopsy and the inquest and the funeral, after a tense and strained meeting with Elizabeth and a shouting match with Caldwell, after carefully composed official reports and a death certificate have been sent back to the SGC in a databurst, Rodney comes and sits next to John.They're in one of the dozens of rooms in the city which have no obvious function, and which have not yet been taken over by the ever expanding expedition. It's empty and bare, a room made for light. All floor to ceiling windows, high summer sunlight flooding in through gorgeous-coloured glass, and it seems as if from here, John can see to the edge of forever.They're quiet for a long moment, longer than John can ever remember Rodney going without speaking without the extenuating circumstances of sleep or unconsciousness or paralysis by a Wraith stunner. He doesn't even fidget, just sits there calmly next to John, staring straight out at the ocean, and waits for John to speak.

"I take it that this is kind of a hint for me to say whether or not I'm staying or going?" John says eventually.

"Kind of," Rodney says without looking at him. "Though I don't want to rush you. You can have a few seconds."

'Generous,' John says. Then, awkwardly, 'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have, I— '

'Oh, shut up,' Rodney says quickly, but there's no heat behind it. Maybe even a little affection. 'Jackass.'

'Jerk,' John says, and lets himself lean a little into Rodney's warmth. He closes his eyes for the first time in days. Thinking of how Rodney's eyes widened when he heard the shot, thinking of the look on his men's faces when he'd talked to them later. Thinking of Elizabeth's smile when he told her he'd changed his mind, thinking of the envelope she'd handed him with his letters of resignation inside, unprocessed, and a note from General O'Neill in his large, generous scrawl that said Knew you were smarter than that.

'I'm staying in Atlantis,' he says, smiling at the hitch and release in Rodney's breathing.

'Good, good,' Rodney says, 'Glad to hear it.' He's aiming for cool, laid-back, nonchalant, John can tell; instead, he ends up sounding like, well, like Rodney. He puts out one hand a little stiffly, blindly, and wraps it around John's. The pressure of Rodney's fingers is cool and welcome. John squeezes back, thankful.

Things aren't all right yet, but they're okay, it's okay, he'll be okay. He's home.