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neostriatum · 1 year ago

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To Commit An Act of God

[Dreamwidth] [SquidgeWorld]

Chance was, statistically speaking, a calculable, inevitable event. He supposed he should have seen this one coming.

He's listening with one ear to everyone in the lab, a bustle and background noise that hums along with his thoughts in synchronicity. It's not something he'd ever tell anyone, but the abstract chaos is comforting, and one of the only reasons he'll linger at a table in the communal labs rather than the one designated for his personal use as head of the division. Silence is useful when he needs to bend his nose to the grindstone, but it can make the static of roiling background thoughts too overwhelming with nothing to temper it from outside his head.

Turning the slim, pen-like device over in his hands, he wonders - not for the first time - how the Ancients contrived so many various pieces of technology. With the amount of labs and experiments paused in situ around the city, the power draw must have been enormous. Surely they had some means of regularly maintaining the ZPMs, and he frowned into the middle distance, trying once again to parse the delicate presuppositions of ideas about how this was accomplished.

It was his responsibility to make sure the city stayed afloat, and literally so. He tapped the device against the table, the sound lost among the myriad patter of movement around him. Surely there's some sort of maintenance code? He blinked a few times, letting his vision filter back to the screen in front of him, still paused on a spreadsheet tracking the projects in each department. Columns of numbers greeted him, completely arbitrary in their reflection of progress, the process rubber-stamped by the IOA despite being a galaxy and then some away. Something… something in the numbers. Has to be.

Everyone knew better than to interrupt him when he was off taking a mental walk like this, too used to how his innocuous process of thinking produced results. He brings up another window, remembering at the last minute that the over-engineered soldering pen he had been fiddling with was still Ancient technology and thus not advised for normal interaction, setting it down above the function buttons on his keyboard to prevent it from rolling away. The file directory stared back at him, impassive as he drummed his fingers over the keys in thought.

Re-tracing his whisper of a thought took a bit of effort, but when he did, he mumbled an 'aha!' to himself, locating the root directory mirroring what they had been able to compile from the main Ancient database. It was a beautiful application of colour-coding, if he did say so himself, articulatable to himself unto a fairly steep exercise in exhaustion - his normal state of mind when rescuing everyone from the inanities of a ten thousand year old creaking structure that some days seemed hellbent on killing them all out of sheer decrepitude.

Sorry, he thought anyway, refraining from patting his keyboard, and by extension Atlantis, in apology. Picking up the pen-thing again, he resumed rolling the cool metal around his fingers, mind once again sinking back into the currents of one of the many background problems he toiled with when there was time. If the crystals can be modified for different circuitry layouts, then that presumes the transistors contain different permutations of use…

He walked himself through the argument, muttering pertinent facets under his breath. If you convert the gate of a diode on the third level of circuitry, then the flow is redirected based upon the direction of the other levels, he frowns, tapping the pen against the table, If you have opposing factors in the directions, then the energy flow is based upon the resistance of alloys along the stream.

Not for the first time, he wondered how the Ancients had figured out how to convert a connection to subspace to electricity. It was scarcely the same thing, too many factors at play for physics to catch up. But it did - obviously so, if they were sitting in a ship full of proof. Staring at the pen, he held it between both hands, contemplating it.

An electric flow is dependent upon the magnetization of materials and thus its quantum state, he thinks, Energy is the transfer of matter, and can be modified based on its state.

But how did they connect? He frowned, thinking back to some of the basic schematics he had been able to pull from Earth's ZPM. They were the same technology as Atlantis', of course, so the principles carried over, but the way they interfaced with Earth's stargate and Atlantis itself was a branch or two off of similarity, enough to puzzle over its differences. What he learned there was almost useless here.

He sighed, nearly silent in comparison to the cacophony of his thoughts. State-dependent modifications rely upon sufficient energy to transition to a new form. To alter the path on a crystal, one must modify multiple states at once in order to achieve proper transmission flow. Impediments would be-

"Would be what?" He mutters to himself, staring at the monitor. The root directory told him little, only that power flowed out of the ZPM and to different parts of the city like snowmelt running down the crevices of a mountain - a source from a different system, distributed with the same force but not the same volume.

… A logic gate is transformed upon the basis of individual changes on multiple levels, at different points in the system.

The pen feels all at once too heavy and too light in his hands, drooping in his shock-loosened grip. His mind was flitting ahead, the conclusion almost in his reach. Habit, absently, had him reaching toward it, silence filling his ears.

To adjust for different phase states, one must precipitate a change in the path at multiple points in the system.

It- it explained everything. His mind buzzed at the epiphany, and he couldn't help his fascination leaking forth in one, unprompted, "Oh."

The pen clanks against the edge of the table, falling to the floor with a clatter in the afterimage of gold dust floating away.

When he next blinks, it isn't to a monitor or his thoughts or his realization at all. Instead, it's to midday light, something not visible from the main labs due to the obvious lack of windows. Gold is filtering out of his view, a pretty wave of light that he understands intuitively is the play of photons around him.

He blinks again, scattering the vestiges with bemusement.

"Sir?" A woman's voice sounds from off to his side, sounding as if she's said it more than once, and a bit odd in the manner of hearing two things at once. It occurs to him that he's hearing English, even if that might not be what she's speaking. He blinks again, turning his head toward the voice - a waitress, smiling at him patiently, "Might I take your order?"

"Uh," And damn if that isn't an articulate answer. He flushes, trying not to squirm in place in embarrassment and realizing abruptly that the distinctive twinge in his back was no longer there. Too discombobulated to think about that for too long, he shakes his head, "I'm sorry, who are you?"

The waitress' smile neither dims nor grows, but maintains its placid patience. He can't help but think the overall effect is calming, if nevertheless disorienting - he hasn't met a single waitress that can keep their keel so evenly.

"I'm here to take your order," She says, this time with a hint of humor as she tilts her notepad toward him, "Do you something in mind?"

"Um, uh-" He shakes his head, trying to put two and two together. The memory is a bit blurred, but he retains that distinct feeling of being at work, and then all of a sudden, poof. Nothing after that.

"He'll have something off the breakfast menu," Another voice interjects, familiar enough to draw his attention. His brow furrows at the man smiling across from him in the other booth, too sly to be anything other than real. A hand extends toward him over the table, "You should remember me, Rodney - Daniel?"

"Jackson," He breathes, the dots finally settling into place at seeing the SGC-rumored Mister Ascended himself talking to him. The expected kick of panic at the knowledge of his death never comes, and he exhales in a whoosh, shaking the other man's hand, "What is this place?"

Daniel smirks, albeit in a wholly good-natured manner that he feels should irritate him on principle, the man slouching back into his seat like he was moulded from it, "Oh, take your pick- most people call this the afterlife. You ascended."

"Huh," He looks back up at the waitress, who seemed to be lingering rather than stuck in some freeze-frame out of the Matrix, and then out the window, which held nothing in particular at all unless he concentrated on a specific sight, "Okay, I'll accept that. How did I get here? I mean- ascending, obviously, but-"

Snorting, Daniel shook his head, looking much younger than he remembered him from last meeting, "I'm sure you'll figure it out, if you want to remember it."

"What does that mean?" He asked, frowning, "Am I not supposed to remember, or- Or is there something I am supposed to remember, and-"

"Rodney," Daniel interjected, shaking his head. The smile on the man's face wasn't as reassuring as he probably thought it was, and he said as much, "It's fine. Sometimes you'll want to know, sometimes you won't - it's all up to you."

He watched the flicker of emotions cross Daniel's face, and thought about all the ways that, up until now, he could have died from. A shudder rippled through him, remembering all the mundane and terrifying things he could recall - and recall in perfect, painstaking clarity, "Point taken. But… why now? I could have ascended before, with that- that machine, but this is. This is completely arbitrary, I didn't even plan this."

Daniel raised an eyebrow, an echo of his own death reverberating between them in tangible detail, making him bite back a grimace at the shared memory of radiation eating away at flesh and bone long past what medicine could alleviate. It combined with a faint stretch of precognition, layers of possibilities where that was his own predicated fate among many other routes that led right back to this diner.

They stared at each other for a moment, sharing the mental travelling of what could be, what will be. When he clenched his hands into fists on the table, feeling the emotional burn of nausea if not the physical, Daniel asked, "Would you want to?"

"Plan this?" He asked, then shook his head instinctively, answering his own question, "I mean, I'm sure all of this has its merits - but believe me, those windows are creeping me out, it feels like a bunch of TV screens if I'm not making it stay in place - but… No. Not yet, at least."

With those nightmare-inducing ideas now floating around his head, a thought suddenly occurred to him, "Are you dead, too? Like at the same time?"

"Am I?" Daniel extended his arms, encompassing the table, "Or does a drop of water hold both the salt of a rock and the cold of a cloud?"

"Linguists," He mutters in good-natured disgust, shaking his head.

Daniel laughed, rising from the table, "I recommend the pancakes."

"Of course you do," He replies, but Daniel's already gone, whisked away who knows where. Sighing, he looks at the waitress, still patiently existing for him to revisit her point in time, "Ah, I suppose pancakes will do. Do you have them in chocolate chip?"

The waitress smiles as she copies down the order, whatever she's writing with bafflingly indistinct and definitely not transcribing in English. Huh. "Of course. Did you want anything else?"

He pauses, thinking for a moment before shrugging, "Hell, I'm apparently dead, anyway. I am dead here, right?"

"A pot of water boils when there is a necessity for it," The waitress responds, and he should have figured he was surrounded by Ancients.

Sighing, he consigns himself to an innumerable and apparently eternal amount of superbly bad puns, "A cup of coffee, then, if this is what I'm gonna have to listen to. With cream and sugar," He pauses, hesitant, "And a, uh, a glass of lemonade. Please?"

Smiling serenely, the waitress nods, "Your order will be ready shortly."

Wishing he had nerves to shake out, he only mumbles something on rote, unsurprised when there was yet another Ancient sitting across from him where Daniel had been sitting just a moment prior, "Uh. Hello?"

"Hello," The woman says, and god, what a beautiful woman, too. Her smile only grows wider, in what he assumes is some preternatural ability to read his thoughts, which really falls in line with this whole instinctive multi-lingual thing death had, "No, Doctor McKay, I am merely happy to see you."

He frowns, "Do I know you? I feel like I'd remember someone, uh, someone like you."

The woman shakes her head, laughing. It's all so unoffensive, though, he can't help but feel a laugh bubble up with her, "Doctor McKay. You have seen my Dan'yel, yes?"

The name doesn't ring a bell until a his order is being set down in front of him, somehow a similar order being placed in front of the woman. Grits aren't really his taste, but the way this stranger delicately heaps more food into the bowl and eats a large spoonful makes it look appetizing. He grabs his coffee on instinct, pleased to realize it was precisely the right temperature despite the steam wafting out of the cup.

"Daniel Jackson, you mean?" He asks, smearing the pat of butter plopped on top of the short stack with a distracted swipe of his knife. The smell was superb, making his mouth water, "I, uh, I just saw him. Did you see him leave?"

The woman shakes her head, somehow looking unruffled despite the news, "I will see him again. But, Doctor McKay, I would like you to speak to him."

He blinked around a forkful of pancake, "Uh? I suppose they don't do letters here, do they?"

The pancake was delicious enough that he was almost too distracted to hear the woman's next words, and he chewed quickly, swallowing the bite to make room for another sip of coffee.

"It is alright," The woman soothed, her smile undimmed by his accidentally piecemeal attention, "But you will see him again. I miss my Dan'yel, I wish him to know all is well."

He pauses over his contemplation of the lemonade, familiar trepidation marred by curiosity over the distinct smell that usually makes his stomach roil. Settling for a halfway point of putting the glass down in between him and his pancakes, mildly disturbed at himself with how easy it was to calculate the exact triangulation of objects in doing so, he asked, "What do you mean?"

The woman nods at his juice with a bizarrely patient look of affection, "Drink that, you will like it."

Grumbling, he accepts the non-sequitur, hesitating for a moment at the familiar smell that usually heralded agony for him before taking a small, minuscule, truly tentative sip. There was no burning sensation, no heart palpitations that promised an allergic reaction that would have been doubled by sheer anxiety, no swelling of throat or fading of vision. He tightened his grip on the glass, taking another small taste of the drink.

"Oh," He says, marvelling, "Tangy. This is delicious."

The woman smiles, watching as he takes a more confident drink. He could see why so many people associated lemons with summer, now, it was almost… almost a joyful flavour. Wiggling in his seat at the revelation, it was a short order to drink the rest of it, taking the time to savour the different aspects of acid and sweetness and complete and utter lack of life-threatening reaction.

"Wow," He murmurs, tilting the glass to get a last drop, "I really have been missing out, huh?"

"You are quite brave," The woman says, tilting an eyebrow in a manner that reminds him of Teyla, if Teyla was as naturally demure as this woman. He accepts the hand laid over his own, loosening the grip on his fork, "Doctor McKay, there are many things for you to know."

He shakes his head, pragmatism too engrained for him to abide by that compliment, "I've learned quite enough, haven't I? I'm here, that- that does mean I learned enough."

The woman merely allowed her smile to blend into a different mood, "My name is Sha're. You are much like Dan'yel - always seeking, always helping."

"You are-" His voice strangles on the concept, "You are quite kind. Uh. Thank you? I think."

"You do help," She says, the words strengthened by her obvious conviction, "There are many who are helped. No path is clear, but walk along it knowing the fog of the morning will dissipate."

"And here we are on garden paths," He mutters, but the words click together nevertheless, "You- I recognize you. Your name. Sha're of- of Abydos?"

The woman nods, emphatic, "Yes. A pebble in a stream can branch into a river."

He squeezes her hand back, feeling discombobulated but also at ease. It was funny how epiphanies did that, "I think I'll finish my pancakes first, though, if you don't mind?"

Sha're laughs, her voice tinkling with delight.

Bracing himself to enter his own quarters in a deserted hallway is ridiculous even for him, but the sweet, ready way Atlantis opens his door is reassuring. He's still wrapping that sense of familiarity around him when the volume of people's raised voices registers, halting him with barely two steps through the door that closed with a subtle swoosh.

"What the hell is going on here," Rodney shouts, horrified, derailing three different arguments by force of presence alone. He puts his hands on his hips, muttering to himself, "I'm gone for five minutes-"

"Rodney!"

"Yes, what-"

He's not prepared for the way Sheppard vaults over the bins and boxes and tackles him, his breath thumped out of him with the gesture. The grip on him is tight, and he can swear his newly re-formed bones are creaking with the pressure, so he struggles to get his arms out from under Sheppard's grip to whack at the man's back, "Let me go!"

Sheppard does, but not before he flatly picks him up, like some deranged rendition of a teddy bear, swaying him around a little for emphasis. The smile on the colonel's face is broader than anything he's ever seen - a part of him wants to be spooked by it, the sight so unusual for a typically taciturn person. He's left flailing for the correct response when Sheppard grabs his face with both hands and presses a deep, impulsive kiss onto his lips.

"Hngh?" He can practically feel his brain rewire itself on the surprise dose of endorphins, which he doesn't presently have the wherewithal to deliberate on whether that's a good thing. It's apparently an adequate amount of time for Sheppard to decide to kiss him again, and he can feel himself melt into it, "Mmm. Ah."

He can still feel the imprint of Sheppard's uniform under his hands when the kiss peters off, briefly distracted by the way the other man's lips slide against his own. A part of him wants to lean back in, tilt his head up, but the shocked silence convinces him that he at least needs to table that particular discussion for later.

"Um," He says, blinking a few times and feeling rueful that, once again, his mind is going faster than the rest of him, "Hi."

Sheppard grins down at him, all soft and fond and other gooey emotions he can feel behind his eyes, "Hi."

"So I might have…" He shrugs, swallows loosely and feels himself flush at the way Sheppard's eyes track his throat, "Accidentally ascended?"

"Accidentally?!" Radek shouts in bewildered disbelief, "You- you- 'accidentally', můj prdel-"

"I heard that," He says automatically, still too used to the auto-translate that being ostensibly non-corporeal had granted him. Radek sputters to a stop, gaping at him. He winces, "Uh. Sorry. About that."

"Sorry about what?" Sheppard asks, and he hasn't let go yet, but nobody's making him. The slide of a thumb against the back of his neck makes his eyes flutter, Sheppard's breath stuttering as he does so.

"Mmm," He sighs, letting himself be held. It felt like an eternity since the last time he had experienced such a luxury, "Leaving. Understanding. Whole lot. Take your pick."

Sheppard huffs out a relieved laugh, pulling him closer in a protective grip, one hand still cupping the back of his head, "Apology accepted."

He's still adjusting to the waves of affection coming from Sheppard, threatening to knock his knees out from under him and turn him into a cooked noodle of appreciation, so the non-Sheppard hand tentatively touching his arm is surprising. Sheppard briefly tightens his grip, but now that he can recognize an anxious Teyla - and really, what did happen, she's the least anxious person he knows, a complete opposite of him - he slides out of Sheppard's hold with a faint sense of reluctance.

"Rodney," Teyla is looking at him searchingly, reflexively gripping his forearm, "I- is that truly you?"

Speaking feels utterly trite at the moment, much as he does, sometimes, love to hear himself talk. What he does instead is envelope Teyla in a hug, squishing her against him the same way he remembered doing with Jeannie when she was young, too afraid from a nightmare to seek anyone else out. It's definitely the correct choice, because she hugs him back with a tinge of desperation, tucking her head under his chin with a wobbly breath.

"Shh," He murmurs, making sure he doesn't let go until Teyla wants to, listening to her unsteady breathing. The words that come to mind are old, disused, but he dusts them off because Teyla needs them, "Everything's alright, I'm here. Shh, shh, it's okay."

He'd always known he was one of the oldest by a thin margin, but in the little group of friends and colleagues he's made in Atlantis he'd never felt it - not for real - until just now, feeling the tension in the room go down by proxy as Teyla calmed down with his hushing. It made his heart ache, remembering the way Daniel had smiled when they talked, the shared acknowledgment that knowledge was not always a blessing.

Teyla's hair was soft under his hand, smelling faintly of the bleach and hair dye some of the women had convinced her to use. It was one of her few indulgences with her appearance, and he felt an incongruous twitch of his lips that she still stuck with an element of Earth-based fashion. He found himself reassured by this - Teyla adapted to anything in front of her, so easily he was often awed by her ability to blend in to new crowds. Whatever happened, there Teyla would be.

Swaying together echoed all the times he had done so with Jeannie, before things inevitably deteriorated. He was grateful Sheppard had found a way to patch things between them, and it compelled him to squeeze Teyla tightly, listening to her startle with amusement, "C'mon. Better?"

He felt her nod against his shoulder, the way she bolstered herself before withdrawing. The tilt of her head was expected, and he leaned his forehead against hers, soaking up the feeling of strength she seemed to derive from the gesture. When she looked up, her eyes were red-rimmed, and he brushed away a stray tear track.

"I missed you," He said, because Teyla was rarely anything but honest, and also because it was true. She smiled at him, bright and reassured, "It really was an accident."

Teyla's smile managed to get even brighter, almost on par with Sheppard's, and god, they had missed him back, hadn't they? He had known the truth, in that makeshift highway diner, but being confronted with it was another thing entirely.

"I believe you," She replied, sounding happy, in that way that was stripped of bitter undertones, only joy left over. He couldn't help but grin back, pulling her into a quick hug just to contain the emotion better.

Sheppard was lingering at his back, protective and watchful. It allowed him to look around the room, the way Ronon and Radek were still holding some hastily-constructed cardboard box between them like he'd interrupted their tug-of-war. A scatter of scientists mixed with a handful of soldiers, making his quarters feel like a public common rather than the one place he wasn't required to share.

Letting his hands fall from Teyla's arms, he gestured at the paused cacophony, "Y'know, when I said throw me a party, I didn't mean a riot."

A slew of abashed faces met him. Ronon still took the time to scowl at Radek, yanking the box away. He felt like he was probably going to need to take the box away from Ronon, and what would those two even be arguing over, anyway?

Sheppard had shifted closer, hands ghosting along his sides, telegraphing the intent to resume cosseting him but refraining by a hair. The murmur brushing by his ear made him shiver, Sheppard's lips forming a smirk, "It's more of a custody fight."

"Get a lawyer," He said automatically, then blinked, "Actually. Sam. Is she here?"

He had meant in the general sense of Atlantis, because he didn't actually know how long he'd been gone, but it seemed to have been interpreted in such a way that everyone reflexively looked around them, as if the woman would pop out of the woodwork. Rolling his eyes, he thought, I've got my work cut out for me.

One hand reached to tap his ear, but found that while the Ancients were nice enough to let him de-ascend with memories, clothes, and motor skills intact, an earpiece had been considered optional. He made an annoyed sound, spinning on one heel to look for the closest replacement.

Sheppard blinked at him bemusedly when he leaned forward and plucked the device out of the man's ear, but he had no time for frivolities like that, "McKay to Carter."

If Sam was still the way he remembered, she was probably awake for longer hours than him, and always available in an emergency. Being right was gratifying, and so was listening to her sharp inhale, "Rodney?"

"Hi," He said summarily, "I'm told you know a Sha're? She says hello."

Sam floundering over her words was unusual, but he leaned absently into the hand Sheppard pressed against his back, letting the other take his weight as Sam worked her way through the conundrum, "Rodney, what the fuck."

He grinned, "So that means you do."

"Of course I do," She barked, bewilderment drawing her out of the habitual placidity she wore around him in Atlantis, "What- how- you ascended. She ascended?"

"I also talked to Daniel," He confirmed, humming thoughtfully, "Though I don't think we were there at coinciding times. You get me?"

There was a lot of muttering on the other end of the line, and he split his attention to the way everyone slowly decompressed around him. Huh, he thought, I'm not sure whether to be flattered.

"You're writing a report," Sam eventually demanded, when her self-solved revelations petered off. He smirked, which Sam seemed to have a sixth sense for, "Don't even make that face. Also, Rodney?"

"…Yes?" He hazarded, the hand at his back pressing closer in response.

Sam's smile was obvious in her exhale, "Welcome back."

The whole to-do about coming back over the next couple of weeks was both over- and under-whelming, if anyone asked him. Even if he were still as oblivious as before - and that particular self-reflection had been cringe-worthy to discover, something that had been meticulously gone over in the therapy sessions he was herded into - he would have been able to pick up on the way everyone was tightly wound-up in his absence.

"You know," He said absently over his chocolate pudding, feeling the bizarre need to apologize, "I really, really didn't do it on purpose."

Ronon made a disagreeing sound, which Sheppard copied with a nod, "You do have a habit of doing things accidentally, buddy."

He grimaced, remembering all of those particular flaws. Nothing better to keep himself grounded, he thought, than to remember all of the stupid shit. The pudding tasted a little less nostalgic in that particular wake, and he sighed, pushing it away and blatantly ignoring the concerned looks lasered into him from everyone at the table, "I swear I didn't do it on purpose. I just… had an epiphany."

Sheppard smirked, even if he got the bizarre feeling that the other man had to muster the energy for it, "Hazards of the job?"

"Exactly," He said, relieved, slumping into his seat, "Could happen to the best of us."

Teyla looked down at her food, a neutral expression on her face that he learned boded unknown realms of danger. It seemed to coordinate a silence around the table, unsettling him. He shifted in his seat, glancing at all of them, "What?"

Ronon gave him a frowning, narrow-eyed look, his version of a pout, if Ronon was the type to do it in his direction, "You left."

"Not on purpose," He insisted, sighing in exasperation. There was a chill from everyone, he just knew it, and he cut his losses with an aching heart, "Fine. I'll just- I have some work to do. I'll catch up later."

Nobody called him back to the table, and the taste of the pancakes he had at that ascended diner lingered in his mouth.

Radek was looking at him warily, but he'd had it with apologizing for something everyone presumed he had explicit control over, so he glared and pulled his attention back to his computer. Everything was, disturbingly, exactly where he had left it.

Luckily, the man was smart enough to figure out what his disgruntled mood meant, and they worked in silence for a while. There were others in the room, but they kept to themselves. Eventually the studious ambiance lulled him into something approaching normalcy. His shoulders didn't quite settle from around his ears, but he could focus better on the simulations he had left running in his absence.

Funny, he could swear the numbers made more sense before.

Swearing under his breath, he dumped the results into a spreadsheet and re-ran everything, needing the fresh start of it. Fatigue swept over him, making him wonder if he ought to get up and brave the coffee maker. He scrubbed a hand over one side of his face, sighing.

Radek hadn't committed to the clue of fucking off, but there was a cup of fresh, steaming hot coffee being pressed closer to his hand, so he figured he could forgive the transgression of encroaching on his personal space. He ignored the way Radek was staring at him, forehead obviously wrinkled in concern, focusing on taking a bracing gulp of the drink in his hand despite the way it burned his tongue.

It even had just the right amount of cream and sugar in it. My god, he thought in frank, despondent realization, Things must have really fallen apart.

"How many things am I fixing?" He asked, peering down at his cup in suspicion, "Nobody ever makes me a perfect cup of coffee, what did all of you do?"

"A perfect cup, you say?" Radek smiled.

"Oh, fuck off," He grumped, feeling better when Radek just grinned at him in that typical insouciant, Czech manner.

Radek switched his attention to his monitors, peering at them, "Did you not already get the results on these?"

"Bad data," He muttered, taking an obscuring sip of coffee, "Had to re-run it."

Disconcertingly, Radek merely shrugged, "Perhaps not bad data, but bad interpretation."

He squinted at the other man, wondering which entendre he was going to be wrangling today. Radek merely looked back at him in a crap interpretation of innocence, "Those glasses only make you look bug-eyed, you know."

"And your insistence on regretting de-ascending is demoralizing everyone," Radek shot back immediately.

"Wh- I am not," He protested, putting his cup down. His stomach cramped, and he told himself it was because the coffee had been too hot, not because Radek had hit the mark, "Where are you getting these ridiculous ideas?"

Radek gave him a hard stare, then turned to grab his mouse, shutting down the simulations over his protests. There was a brief - very brief - moment where he debated wrestling the mouse and keyboard away from the bastard, but in the end he just sighed, slumping on his stool. Everyone else was pointedly normal, providing an adequate smokescreen of plausible deniability.

"You," Radek pointed a finger at him, pulling his hand back to shake it in futility, looking away, "You must stop this. You are here, be here."

"I am here," He said quietly, resisting the urge to rub at his sternum, if only to feel his heartbeat for himself, "It doesn't- doesn't feel like it."

Radek put his hand on the edge of the table, tilting his head at him with a potent frown, "How do you mean?"

And this was better than having the therapist sicced on him - none of them could quite do the whole deduction thing like another professional in the hard sciences. And, he thought to himself, an engineer like Radek, who wouldn't let shit go even if you gave him the opportunity.

He shrugged, "I don't know. Just… it felt real there, too."

The way Radek looked at him, all wide-eyed and upset, made him cross his arms. He hadn't expected to be weighed down with this sort of world-weariness, and wondered idly if Daniel had felt the same way. And good god, that man had done this multiple times. No wonder the archaeologist was such an incongruous nut, sometimes.

"Come," Radek announced, "I have a jumper that needs repairing, and you must tell me how I fucked up the crystals again."

"Well," He said, grabbing his coffee as he stood, "If you insist."

Who gave a shit what anyone else thought, doing banal repair work was the best sort of meditation. Radek handed him a toolkit and promptly disappeared to his own corner of the jumper. If he concentrated, he could hear the faint litany of swearing in Czech, therapeutic in its regularity.

He was barely concentrating on his task - some hotwiring at the front to try and coax the jumper's system to let them in to more areas. It was just annoying enough in its aberrations that he couldn't lose himself, and he could let himself wander and process things in the background of the work.

However much amount of time had passed, it was enough to startle him when a foot kicked his own, the thump of some wrapped food landing on his stomach almost making him drop his pliers on his face, "Ow! Oh hey, tuna."

"Tuna lookalike," Radek corrected him with a smile, sitting next to him, shoulders resting against the edge of the copilot seat, "New shipment this morning."

"Ah," He sniffed the sandwich, "That smoked stuff from Ilriga?"

Radek nodded, already tucking into his sandwich. They ate quietly together, and he couldn't help but notice the way Radek was doing that thing people do, where they pretend they're not checking up on you but really are. He was disappointed that he could recognize the look, now, having spent too much time in and out of the infirmary for various reasons.

A stale bag of chips was produced out of thin air, and they passed it between themselves, the hum of the jumper's idling systems a pleasant mental counterpoint.

"I had chocolate chip pancakes," He said, breaking the assiduously-applied silence Radek had gifted him with, "With a cup of coffee. And some lemonade."

"Lemonade?" Radek asked, raising an eyebrow.

He shrugged, "I had never gotten the opportunity to try it out without, you know, asphyxiating. Tasted pretty good."

"It does," Radek agreed, swiping one of the smaller rounds of a chip and offering him the bag with its sundry broken bits. He huffed, taking the bag and letting the chips fall into his mouth with a practiced pour.

"It was…" How could he explain it? The vast, intimate stretch of infinity, its nexus where you could look at galaxies through the diner window if you wanted, or a specific, constrained scene. In a way, it had felt a bit like a truck stop, a place you could always visit, but never the same way twice.

Radek shifted in place, his head now resting against the seat. It made him look attentive, if disheveled, washing away some of the weariness he had spotted upon his return and letting natural curiosity shine through. He felt himself mimicking the posture, twisting himself against the console and feeling the pointed edge of metal dig into his back.

It was reassuring, this discomfort, "There was no pain."

"No?"

He stared past Radek, to the open back door of the jumper but also into his memories, "No. I didn't realize how much of a pain in the ass getting older was until I had a mortal body again," He pursed his lips, "That sounded weird, didn't it?"

Radek shrugged, "One of my great-grandmothers had a stroke once, we think. She laid in bed for days. Woke up, told my grandfather the strangest thing."

"Yeah?" He felt like he would be able to see it, if he pushed himself. It scared him, a little, how relative everything was - the pinch of aligning two different points in space time, just with the thought of it.

He was apparently transparent, as well, because Radek laid a leg over the two of his own. The warmth, human warmth, one that came with its own composite package of memories and thoughts, made him sigh, sinking into the grounding sensation. The look Radek sent him was understanding and chiding all at once.

"She had told him that death was final, but mortality was confining," Radek continued, "None of us could ever understand what she had meant with that."

Humming, he nodded, "She was right."

"Was she?" Radek asked, still sprawled out and looking unlikely to move any time soon.

He quirked a smile, remembering his disorientation in the diner, and how it had felt like a different sort of disorientation putting himself bodily in this plane of existence. It felt bittersweet, now, rather than the pervasive vertigo of waking from a dream.

Picking up the empty bag of chips, he wrapped it in the plastic wrap the sandwich had come in. He could still taste the saltiness of the chips, and the fatty smokiness of the fish that the mayonnaise couldn't disguise. It made him smile, and he felt the way it relaxed Radek, whatever the other man was perceiving.

"Mortality has its perks," He admitted, "Even if you need some Tylenol for it."

Radek laughed, groaning as his leg was shoved back, "Hear, hear."

Things seemed a little more real after that. In comparison, he could see how other people had been concerned - now that he had the benefit of perspective, he hadn't been quite connected, drifting around like some ghost that was confused where it was.

Teyla had been perfectly happy to take him up on a bantos lesson when he had asked, her smile wider than normal even as she gave him a few good whacks that would probably bruise through the padding of his training gear. Still, it was good, spending time with her as he futzed his way through the beginner's forms.

"You seem…" She tilted her head, "More settled. All is well?"

"All's well," He promised, parrying the obvious strike she made. It was drawing their lesson out, but he found himself the calmer for it, letting her dictate their interaction.

"I had worried," She confessed, pushing him through the steps of a kata that still didn't have a concrete name in English. Teyla was nice about it, though, letting him avoid the rolled ankle that most people got caught in part-way through by pushing rather than batting at his elbow when he turned.

"I'm sorry."

Teyla shrugged, a rolling motion of her shoulders he had always admired. Everything was always so well-controlled with her, and it made him sharply miss Elizabeth with how similar the two women were. Are. His stomach swooped, an intuition about Elizabeth he wasn't sure he wanted to acknowledge.

He must have made a face, because Teyla stopped, placing a hand on his arm in concern. She drew him into a head-touch, and he lingered there, using the sensation to ward off the roiling, metaphorical pitch of his stomach. Feeling it with your gut, ha.

Eventually they found themselves in a hug. He didn't think he had hugged so often in his life, and certainly not here on Atlantis, despite how tactile people in the Pegasus galaxy could be to reassure themselves of their humanity. Approximate humanity at least, he thought, mind unerringly flitting back to the Replicators.

"Rodney?" Teyla brushed a thumb over his shoulder, coaxing a sigh out of him.

"I miss Elizabeth," He said, "And I've got just- this is going to sound weird, alright? I have this feeling about her."

Teyla disentangled herself from him enough to look up at him. Her gaze was speculative, and he hated the gleam of hope in them, putting faith where he didn't want it to be warranted, "What sort of feeling?"

"I don't know," He muttered, "And I don't want to look too closely at it."

"That is understandable," Teyla said, even if he didn't quite believe the veracity of her reassurance. It was a tightly-controlled excitement lurking underneath her calm, but it was there, nevertheless, making him feel like an ass.

He bit his lip, trying to figure out the conflicting emotions that just barely reached where he could grab them, knowing instinctively at the same time it was one of those side effects of ascending that he was still trying to avoid. One personal prophecy was enough for him.

Teyla squeezed his arm, speaking quietly, "I am sorry. This must be very disturbing for you."

"Yeah, that's one way of putting it," He replied, rummaging up a smile even as he gave her the quick bow all students gave her after a lesson. She reciprocated, accepting the bantos rods he held out for her, "Teyla, I- thank you, for, well-"

"Being here?" She asked, looking fondly amused. It was an expression he hadn't realized he had missed, and he returned her smile a little more naturally.

"Yeah," He said, relieved that she was still there, and he was still Rodney, "I'm gonna, uh, catch up with you later?"

"I will see you later, Rodney," Teyla replied, warm enough that he could still feel it all the way to the transporter.

Sheppard was still lurking just out of reach, but he figured his ambling around the city would lead him somewhere.

That somewhere ended up being in Ronon's way, a close shave compared to the way others in the city alternately looked spooked at his presence or ready to hound him for their deepest confessions of questions. It was frankly relieving the way that Ronon stared in gruff silence at him, and he clutched literally at that, startling his team mate.

"Oh thank god," He breathed, already tugging Ronon down a corridor, "A normal person. And I don't say that typically, mind you, but I really think it's pertinent in this case."

Ronon's eyebrows scrunched together, still following him despite shaking off his grip, "What?"

He waved a hand, "You- you- you're not staring at me like I'm some, I don't know, revenant? Honestly, if I see one more person cross themselves-"

Ronon made a bemused noise, "I was wondering what that was about."

"Remind me to fetch you one of the great fictions known as a bible one of these days," He muttered, "You'd think they'd realize I'm me and get over themselves, but no- it was more gratifying when they were terrified because I called them morons, not because of some inexplicable mortal phenomenon."

Listening to Ronon grunting in disinterest was reassuring. All was well with the world, because the big man couldn't give a shit at the new weirdness of the day. He flustered out a sigh, herding his friend to a transporter a little quicker than he liked, but almost quick enough to avoid the people turning the corner.

Ronon raised an eyebrow at him, leaning against the wall of the transporter and watching him run a hand through his hair and debate which section of the map to press.

"You're like one big lion, you know," He muttered, eventually picking some place on a pier that he presumed would be a short walk and probably uninhabited at this hour, "All staring and leaning."

"Isn't that Sheppard?" Ronon asked with a smile.

He snorted, not entirely certain where his next words came from, but they felt appropriate to the subject, "Sheppard's like a bunch of cooked spaghetti. … Don't tell anyone I said that."

"Sure," Ronon agreed amiably, following him out of the transporter when the doors opened.

Fresh air, that was what he needed. He couldn't believe he let himself be cooped up indoors for this long, running hither and thither catching up on things that had screwed up while he had a brief bout of death. The smell of the ocean air was just as invigorating as it ever was, and he took in a deep, bracing breath.

Ronon easily kept pace with him, for a while keeping shoulder to shoulder as they strolled the deck. The usual thread of anxiety that would have him checking for emergencies was there, but not so overwhelming that he felt the urge to turn right back around. He stuck his hands in his pockets, letting the late afternoon sunshine warm his face.

As they walked, he found himself appreciating that Ronon had different qualities of silence. It wasn't the same as Sheppard and Teyla, of course, prone to mischief in a way that reminded him of a younger brother. None of that was here, at least for the moment, only the quiet enjoyment of each other's company.

If given the opportunity, Ronon would never speak first, or rarely so. He drifted into Ronon's side, gently shoulder-checking the other man and letting Ronon push him back.

"Radek was pissed at me," He said, watching a bird soar in the distance, not quite close enough for them to hear its call. They gathered to a pause, watching it ride the eddies of the wind, looping around a few times.

The ability to calculate its speed by sight alone, and the angle of its turns, was still there, but he didn't feel the urge to reach out and grasp the knowledge of its data points. Reducing a phenomenon of happenstance to a series of numbers, like he easily could when he was ascended, didn't have the same luster or scope.

He shook off the thought and its accompanying moroseness, shrugging limply when Ronon made a questioning noise, "Nothing. Just… thinking."

"You do that a lot," Ronon replied, turning his head down to watch him instead of the bird that crossed their paths. They weren't arranged in line of the sunlight, but the slow degree of its setting nevertheless added shadows to the man's face.

It made the faint line of accusation deeper. He frowned at it, uncertain how to assuage that.

"I feel like I'm doing things in reverse," He confessed, blinking and looking out across the pier. Ronon grunted, pushing him to continue, "Usually the dying do all the motions of comforting before they die. Here I am, doing the opposite."

Ronon laid a hand on his shoulder, gripping it firmly and turning him around. His friend had a complicated expression on his face, lips twisted in a blend of amusement and unhappiness. It was a similar enough face that people had been making at him the past few days that he reflexively sighed, shoulders slumping despite the way Ronon clasped his other shoulder, holding him upright under the misery.

"You do your best," Ronon said seriously, pressing his thumbs into the hollows of his shoulder, as if to impress the gravity of the words, "When it counts. You always do."

He sighed wearily, "But?"

"But," Ronon rumbled, drawing him in. The hug was encapsulating - they didn't often hug, and usually only after a life-or-death situation, but it was difficult not to appreciate the way Ronon committed to it the same way he committed to everything else in life, "What you think of as giving your best is giving too much of yourself."

"I-"

Ronon squeezed his arms, silencing him without a word, "You're my friend, McKay. My team mate. Don't go marching off too soon."

"Big words," He sniffled, letting himself twist his hands in Ronon's tunic, unable to forget the brief glimpse Daniel had allowed him to witness of his own life. There were many futures, that was true, but once you knew the variables, you could calculate the equation. 'Soon' was merely a matter of perspective, "For someone that thinks with his gun."

"It's a cool gun," Ronon rebutted gently.

"It is," He agreed, letting Ronon change the subject, swallowing some of the last vestiges of his grief, "If you'd only let me attempt to replicate it…"

"Not a chance," Ronon chuckled, running a rough hand down his back before releasing him.

He quirked a smile, scrubbing at his face when Ronon took the opportunity to glance down the pier, "I'll convince you one of these days."

Ronon smirked, "I'm sure you will."

Considering that he was the one who ascended, he did feel a little ridiculous that he was one of the ones experiencing an emotional reaction about it, annoyed about having disproved the peace and presumed quiet of an afterlife. The mess was perturbingly nice to him about the whole affair, and he gave one of the soldiers on KP duty a gimlet eye when a substantial helping of baked chicken and lookalike rice was heaped onto his plate.

The soldier merely gave him the well-trained blank face of innocence, handing his plate back to him.

He huffed, grabbing the plate back and wondering when he could get back to his regularly-scheduled bitching about whether or not he was going to be accidentally poisoned by cross-contamination. Not a single bit of citrus! For days! If Sam somehow managed to have something to do with it, he was going to find himself rather cross with her.

Still, he grabbed one of the multitudes of stacked cups, filling it with some infirmary-approved concoction botany quite literally cooked up. It reminded him a bit of V8, but reliably tasted like a disappointing tomato and was never formulated with any allergen he could think of.

Adding it to his tray, he found a spot open on Sam's table. She was busy with a power lunch, scrolling through a tablet with one hand while she absently speared a bit of chicken with her fork. It was probably something from one of his departments, because Sheppard rarely ever submitted so substantial a report that it needed close attention.

Well, He thought, setting his tray down with a quiet clack and sitting catty-corner to Sam. She gave him a brief glance and a grunt of acknowledgment, finally eating her bite of chicken and summarily ignoring him for her reading material, At least it won't be boring.

The peace and quiet Sam exuded by dint of being a very busy expedition leader that rarely appreciated interruptions extended over to him, and he took advantage of that to eat undisturbed. It gave him time to actually taste his food, and he thought wistfully that chicken probably wasn't going to taste this good for a while.

Eventually, though, all good things came to an end. Sam clicked off the screen of her tablet, tucking into her meal for a moment before leaning back in her chair, "So."

He sighed.

Sam ignored that, giving him an assessing smile, "How are you holding up? Re-acclimating well?"

"You're much more attractive when you aren't being all leader-y," He groused, spearing one of the salad vegetables on his plate and eating it with exaggerated chewing motions.

She had obviously been inured to his indubitable charms, merely raising an amused eyebrow while she waited him out. He parried the look by continuing to eat, knowing she had the same squeamishness of talking with one's mouth full as Sheppard. Both of them would eventually have to get back to work, and he reckoned she would need to cut the conversation to the end before he would.

"'Leader-y'?" She asked coyly, when he had eaten through the last turnip-fennel thing, smiling in that way he knew he shouldn't have complimented her on.

He took a vindictive sip of his juice, internally bemoaning that he was back to a strict no-citrus life even as he could, in fact, admit the tomatoes weren't as bad as they could be, "Oh, shut up. You know what I mean."

Sam must have been affected by some enormous level of grief-driven insanity as many others in the city, because all she did was laugh, "I do, yes."

"Why does everyone keep asking me that?" He complained, waving his fork at her when she raised her eyebrow, "That! That- that thing. I hate it."

She continued to raise her eyebrow, pushing her tablet to one side and re-settling in her chair in the same way their resident psychotherapist had done during his mandated therapy sessions. He frowned at her, hoping to ward off whatever it was she was going to say, but she only glanced casually around the mess before speaking, "We didn't have any idea what happened, Rodney. It's going to take everyone a bit to realize you're here to stay."

"What does that-" He swallowed, throat drying at her implications, "What does that even mean?"

"It means, Rodney," Sam said, leaning toward him, firmly compassionate, "That once we realized you ascended, we believed it had been on purpose. You came back right after the paperwork had been filed to clear your quarters."

"Is that what that was about," He muttered to himself, shaking his head, "Anyway, why would I do that? I have too much- I actually like being here. All the insanity with the Wraith and everything else is, surprisingly, not as much of a deterrent as it could be."

Sam peered at him. It had the effect of pinning him in place, all gentle and caring and those other nice adjectives he tried not to think too hard about in conjunction with Sam, lest he be somehow thwarted by it and end up in some remote outpost doing back-burner work. She raised her eyebrows at him, obviously catching some facial expression he didn't hide fast enough.

"That's good to hear," She said seriously, subtly letting him out of her verbal grip, "And I believe you have someone to talk to about that."

"I've been talking non-stop," He said, setting his fork down with an aggrieved clang.

"Rodney."

He sighed, "Yes, I know."

Sam pursed her lips, "I expect you to get on that."

"O wise leader," He replied, only half in jest. Sam was right, and they both knew it. Gathering up his things, he said, "Fine, alright. But that's the last of it, understand?"

She gave him a winning smile, sweet and what he now realized as, for him, only objectively attractive. It made her look years younger, making him realize that his absence had in fact been noted. He felt himself smile in return, shaking his head as he gathered up his tray.

'Last one' ended up, naturally, being Sheppard. He licked his lips, unaccountably nervous, remembering the tingle of them after Sheppard had kissed him. Clearing up that contemporaneous situation of his living quarters had been the most he'd actually seen the man, their shared meals as a team often cut short by one thing or another.

His time on enforced recuperation despite his obviously good health - recuperating the nerves of the medical staff, more likely - seemed to only prolong how much work he had to put into fixing the odds and ends of his division. If it wasn't paperwork, it was questioning the sanity of everyone's decisions while he had been gone.

It hadn't been a picnic, and he had found himself wishing he could merely tap his comm and chat with Sheppard. There had been something preventing the notion, though, probably his newly-found good sense that he would be intruding. On what, he didn't know for sure.

But with Sam's orders bolstering his nerves, he found himself at Sheppard's door, wondering briefly if the man was even in his room at this time of day. He sucked in a breath, waving his hand over the lock, anyway, letting the doorbell ring.

He waited impatiently, and just as he was about to talk himself out of this and make his excuses to Sam, the door slid open. Sheppard looked just as surprised, hair ruffled and a stylus in one hand.

"Sheppard," He greeted, shoving his hands in his pockets and rolling on his feet nervously. There was a flutter in his stomach that felt like more than just his own emotions, but that couldn't possibly be true, not with the way his friend continued to stare at him blankly, "Can I, uh, come in?"

"Oh," Sheppard said, blinking. It looked like he realized what was going on, shaking his head and stepping off to one side, "Yeah, yeah of course."

They stood awkwardly on the same side of the door, listening to it slide shut with a quiet sshk. Sheppard looked harried, like he hadn't been sleeping well, and his heart skipped a beat at the beginning of bags under the other's eyes.

"Are you-" He said, not entirely certain what question to ask, blurting out the first thing that made it to speech, "Okay? Are you okay?"

"Rodney," Sheppard sighed, and he felt himself blink, expecting McKay, instead.

"No, really, are you?" He asked, gaining momentum as he waved a hand around, "Because I haven't seen you in ages, not really, and I- I just. Wanted to know."

Sheppard looked at him from under his bangs, the sight an odd one given that even with the hang-dog look Sheppard shouldn't be able to pull off as the technically taller person, "You tell me, Rodney."

"Tell you-" His brain hit a snag at that, "Do you not know?"

"I've been here," Sheppard shrugged, looking almost listless, "You're here."

Oh. The realization hit him like a lightning bolt, a sensation he now had an equivalent experience for, his conversation with Sam making much more sense in retrospect. He felt his mouth drop open in surprise, automatically reaching a hand out to Sheppard.

If there was any reason to suspect something was wrong, it was that Sheppard allowed the touch, slouching into it in the barest of fractions. He gripped harder, feeling Sheppard sway into his hand.

"I'm right here," He murmured, the realizations slotting into place like Tetris pieces, the gaping space it created making him lean equally as much into Sheppard's space, "I'm not going anywhere."

He couldn't bring himself to tell Sheppard a timeline of relevancy, even as it burned his tongue to say. It was more feasible to quench his fears by pressing his lips to Sheppard's, listening to the clatter of the stylus falling to the floor as hands pressed into his waist.

For a pair of people that could, if they felt like it, converse without a single word, it felt less ambiguous to communicate this way. It felt like terabytes of information was being conveyed this way, listening to Sheppard's sighs and pushing away the burgeoning ability to listen in on what must have been instinctual thoughts.

"John," He sighed, pressing the man's name into his skin, rubbing a thumb along a stubbled jaw.

"Don' need to talk," John murmured, tilting his head to allow contemplative kisses to be trailed down the length of his neck.

"Mmm."

And that was a wonderful idea, if technically betraying the spirit of Sam's tacit orders. He felt it was the better interpretation of things, at any rate, continuing on his way of pressing reassurances and comforts into John's skin in lieu of speaking them.

Their method of communication required no appendices, John taking and interpreting what he intended flawlessly, melting into him with drifting, clutching hands. It felt a little bit like the closest he would get to that liminal place he had tripped into, only circling back home by an act of faith in his own self.

He leaned into John, skimming a hand up the man's side and feeling the shiver reverberate back onto him. Lifting his head from where he had been preoccupied with tasting the quiet, barely-there moans John had kept trapped in his throat, he gathered John closer with a hand on his back, "Hey."

John's eyes were still closed, and he was absently brushing their cheeks together, the rasp of daytime stubble brushing warmth into him. He hummed, turning his head to catch John's mouth for a kiss that was barely more than an indulgent slide of lips. They stayed like that for a moment, breathing in each other's air.

"I'm here," He said, pressing the words into John's mouth like a vow, feeling like he had to cradle this flickering, uncertain light close, the sight nearly visible behind his half-lidded eyes, "I'm here, I'm not leaving."

"Promise?"

He shuddered himself, feeling all the strings attached that Daniel and Sha're and death had unearthed to him, lines in the sand that he could cross at any moment. If he wanted. And with some of them, he did want - or would, if the right circumstances aligned. It was string theory, in a tangible, personal way, hitting one note and listening to its echo in a silent chamber hall until it faded out of existence.

The pause seemed nearly enough to undo John entirely, a hitch of breath that would precipitate misery, tearful and messy. He could feel those calloused hands grip him close, as if the act alone could keep him tethered in this plane of existence.

"Rodney," John begged, for multiple things, for a singular thing. Stay.

It was the one thing he knew John would nearly never ask for, too well-trained to protest loss hammering him into the thinnest of sheet metal, until it warped and bent him beyond usefulness. He pressed a slow, careful kiss to John's mouth, mapping the grief that had been allowed to settle into the crevices for too long.

His heart thumped to say it, distracting himself with John reviving in achingly cautious measures under his touch, "I promise."

The shudder rippling across John's crumple zones let him know the weight of his own words, sealed by the choked noise John made as he kissed him back, pressing a tongue past his lips with desperation. He let it happen, soaking up the way John needed him, wondering if this was what the Ascended meant, with their ability to touch a soul.

Coaxing John to bed was easier when it clicked that he wasn't being pushed away, endless murmurs pressed into the other man's skin. The grief was slow to slake, only now truly visible to him when that the reflexive veneer of relieved joy had worn off. He took his time with the way his hands travelled over John, pushing and tugging at fabric to signal his intentions to get closer.

John was still endearingly quick-witted, squirming against him once the tacit request had been registered and shucking his shirt, fingers stumbling on the myriad clasps that were fastened to his pants. He hushed him with a smiling kiss, drawing a bite out against John's lower lip as he ran soothing hands over the other's chest.

"Hngh, Rodney-"

"Shh," He promised, finding the belt buckle by touch, "I've got you."

And he did, unequivocally. John's head thumped back onto the bed, missing the pillow by a hair. It was an easily-followed urge to press a kiss above the top of John's pants, the stiff material of the uniform brushing against his throat as he felt the reflexive ripple of John's stomach under his mouth.

The snap of the buckle being undone was loud in the lull between them. He let his hands linger, tracing as he found his way to the holster. It was tempting to follow it with his mouth, if only to feel the strength of John's thigh so intimately, but John was clutching at the sheets and he was disinclined to make him wait any longer.

He set the sidearm, holster and all, on the side table. John was quick to cling to him as he stretched over to reach the table, eagerly rucking up his shirt. Grinning, he pressed into the hands that groped and skimmed over his body, relishing that this bit of mortality he was still able to enjoy.

It was a catching expression, John's smile luminescent as his hands slowed, mapping new territory with a possessive touch. He sighed, letting his weight sink down onto John, both of them sliding into another kiss.

Time rather melted away after that, the afternoon sunshine making its slow mark on the shadows in the room their only subtle indicator that they were crossing time with languid, heated touches. Maybe it was only a few minutes, but he couldn't be bothered to pull away to check, reveling that he was too absorbed in John to keep track of the ticking of seconds.

He sighed, coaxing John to switch their places with a murmur and cupping John's ass with one hand, tasting the moan as he gave it a squeeze. The press of John's chest bearing down against his, sweat-slicked and solid, was as heady as it was reassuring of the man's presence.

"I would never be able to forget you, you know," He said quietly, easing off from their kissing just enough to speak. There was just enough of a tremble to John's lips to indicate words being perched there, and he brushed them off with a quick swipe of his lips, "I couldn't. Not ever."

John seemed to know, though, the foundation upon which they knew each other set deep into their bones. He felt the nod made against him, John hiding his face against his own even as he tentatively rolled his hips, muscles in his ass tightening under his palm.

He encouraged John with a moan, rucking the man up against the thigh he had wedged at some point between John's own with a firm hand. The jump of a cock against his own, muffled only barely by the fabric between them, made him lose his mind a little.

"C'mon," He breathed, pressing a quick, dirty kiss into John's mouth, twisting so he could get his other hand on John's ass.

John moaned into the kiss, hands clutching at him as if he needed the support. He coaxed the man into straddling his hips, taking John's weight as his hands fluttered over the button and zip of the other's pants. It was more difficult by the way John couldn't help but shove into his hands, making needy sounds and overall just inhibiting what they both wanted.

He gripped John's hips, forcing them to still with an amused huff, "Stay still," He said, voice having dropped low and rough. It made John heave, wild-eyed but obedient, and he couldn't help but dig his fingers in a little deeper, "Let me take care of you."

The nod John gave him was instinctive but tremulous, head dropping into a bobble of agreement that made him look, abruptly, an aching sort of vulnerable that had his own heart skipping a beat. He gentled his touch, smoothing his hands up John's side and over his chest, feeling the thunder of the man's heart as he circled the tight nipples under his touch, "Will you let me?"

"Y-" John swallowed, arching into his hands, "Yeah."

"Okay," He murmured, letting his hands drag down with the barest touch of nails, imagining the welts he might leave there at a later date. The shiver and pant was satisfying, however, and he let his fingers dip beneath the waistline of John's pants in a tease, letting a thumb circle over the button the way he wanted to do to John's cock.

It was tempting to draw things out, but he felt like both of them have been craving this for far too long. He popped the button open, hearing John's shivery moan, letting his finger dip underneath the flap to trace the zipper before undoing that, too.

John rolled his hips into his hands, eyes having fallen shut and the man's own hands reaching behind him to grip his legs. It painted an attractive picture, all wanton offering with cock peeking out over the rumple of BDUs, and he took a moment to run his hands over John from hips to knees and up to ribs with a heavy, promising touch.

He felt when John shuddered, body relaxing and legs sliding further open to sit more heavily in his grasp, head lolling in pleasure. It seemed like the words would be on repeat, murmured as he tucked his fingers under the fabric of John's clothes, unwrapping John like an unforeseen present, and framing John's cock in the crook between thumb and forefinger with his palm flat on John's skin, "I've got you, I've got you."

"You do," John gasped, just from that simple touch alone. The helpless way John rolled his hips, shifting the hard line of his cock against his hand, as if that alone would make his palm leave the warm skin of John's groin.

Raking his fingers through the hair scattered on John's skin, he listened to the drawn-out groan as he wrapped his hand around John's cock in a long, leisurely pull. John was already wet for him, leaking in unsteady spurts that dribbled over his hand, and he pumped John's cock, watching how John fell apart for him.

The other man stayed still for him, though, restricting his own movements and going with the flow of this nonverbal conversation. It made him lick his lips, compiling a wish list of things he wanted to do - later, though, too busy easing his hand over John's cock and coaxing the other's pants lower so he could get a better grip of John's ass with his other hand.

"You'll come when I say so, won't you," He murmured, listening to the way John panted as he twitched between the dual pressures on him. His cock was aching in his own pants, and he shifted his legs, pulling on John's cock and pressing with his other hand so John curled over him, rolling his hips just to hear John's whine near his ear, "Look at you. You're beautiful, do you know that?"

John was shaking his head, far too quickly to be anything other than instinctive denial, and he wasn't having any of that. He cupped John's ass, massaging it with a wide-fingered grip and a thumb sweeping over the top of the curve.

"You are," He insisted roughly, pressing a kiss to the side of John's head, the only part he could reach without removing his hands from where they were, "You are, and I'll keep telling you. Every day, if I must."

"Don't," John choked out, shuddering in his grip, "'M not-"

He slowed his hand on John's cock, making his touch delicate as he played with the tip of John's cock, fingers sliding from frenulum to slit and back, a circular loop around the top that had John leaking over his hand with a sob, "I love you," He said firmly, the words a rebuttal to John's insecurities, so visible he almost felt angry at it, using the truth of his own self as a balm to that wound, "You're the most beautiful person I've ever seen. God, do you even know-"

John was trembling in his arms, helplessly grinding into his hand, trying to draw out roughness from him. He refused, not wanting John to use him to smother himself, to hide away the way he had been doing since he had returned from that little diner on the way through to death.

"You don't get to do that," He swore, mouthing kisses along John's jaw, rough bites that would bruise later in contrast to the gentle, gentle way he traced John's leaking cock, "Not with me, understand? None of that."

"Rodney," John clutched at his shoulders with both hands, frantic as the man held on to him, "Rodney, you died, you left, you-"

"I'm here," He said, dipping a finger in the curve of John's ass, circling the tight entrance there with the same understanding of fragility as he was with John's cock, feeling the twitch and warmth of muscle, "I'm here, I'm back. I'm not leaving."

John rocked into his touch, moaning and wet-faced with a grief that was shattering. He murmured nonsensical things, keeping John grounded with his touch, arcing that pleasure between ass and cock with a careful balance. Slowly, the spasms rippling across John began to increase, accepting the uncoordinated kiss John laid upon his mouth as he coaxed that crescendo tighter.

He felt when John began to open at his touch, just enough for him to press the tip of his finger against the rim, a promise imprinted with the way he circled and dipped his finger, an inverse echo to what his hand was doing on John's cock.

Pressing a kiss against John's jaw, he murmured, "I want you to come for me."

And John did, wonderfully so, collapsing against him so he could grind on his stomach, smearing come between them and letting him feel the way John's ass fluttered against his finger. The aftershocks rolled through John, pulsing heat that made him moan against John's cheek, moving his hand to grab John's ass so he could roll his cloth-trapped cock up against him.

John pressed back against him, letting that finger slip momentarily deeper past the threshold. They both groaned at that, and he pushed John higher up so he could unbutton and shuck his own pants down far enough, cock rubbing against the cleft of John's ass.

It was a momentary disappointment to withdraw his hand from that warmth, but John was apparently more than willing to let him get off like that, pressing against sweat-dampened skin. He could taste the way John gasped into his mouth, feeling a little breathless himself at the way John rolled his ass back against him.

Coming was almost an afterthought, absorbed as he was in their synchronous motion. He shuddered, thoughts hazy as he felt hands pressing against his chest and shoulders in warming, repetitive motions.

"Mmm," He shifted, taking more of John's weight even as he huffed at the way the man slumped on top of him, "John."

The only response was garbled sentence squished into the side of his neck. He smiled, dancing the fingers of one hand up John's side, soothing the instinctive twitch with his palm, "Much as I enjoy having you naked, I would like to put my pants back on."

John grumbled, "Only sorta naked."

He skimmed his hands over the crease of John's ass, smirking at the shiver, "It's the thought that counts."

They righted themselves with reluctance, sacrificing John's shirt to clean off the worst of it - laughing when John subtly flexed his muscles as he got out of bed, enjoying the view and kissing the pout off with a firm press of lips.

Swinging his legs over the side of John's bed, he paused, thinking, "Shower?"

John tilted his head from side to side, giving him a once-over, "Could do."

He couldn't help his smile, shaking his head fondly at John's beaming smile. Pressing his side against John's, he leaned up for another kiss, listening to the way John breathed out a contented sigh, "Come on. Lunch break's almost over."

It turned out that they had wildly overshot the lunch hour, but nobody had gone looking for them, anyway. John had been much buoyed by more kisses, soaking up the inherent affection of being held when the anxiety of approaching the door made his shoulders tense up. The sight wasn't the first time a deep pensiveness had reared its head, but it was a nebulous feeling to actually act upon it for once, making him sigh as he pressed his head into John's shoulder.

The inherent protectiveness emanating from the way John ran his hands down his back was easy to settle into, something he had missed deeply and unintentionally. It had that tinge of tacit territoriality, making him clench his arms around John tighter, taking in the smell of freshly-laundered clothing and soap from their joint shower.

"What's up?" John murmured into his hair, matching his reluctance to leave the bubble of the room, voice still retaining a hint of that deep pitch from earlier.

He shivered, rubbing his cheek against the BDU jacket, "Hmm. Nothing much, I suppose."

And it was true, for a given value. It would be far too easy to slip into an awareness of this bubble of time, the consequences of popping it and leaving it in the past - a linearity that was relative, true, but only making him all the more aware of the finite amount of instances. But the knowledge was a background sort, still tasting like a wax seal broken off as its lid was cracked open, flavouring everything else with its presence.

"We don't have to go," John said, sounding as if he was split on the temptations, "Could call in, make some excuses."

He sighed, shaking his head and reaching up for another kiss, lingering over the way John's mouth moulded to his with a simple press, "We'd never leave, probably."

"Hmm," John nosed at his jaw, skimming his lips over the soft edge with a façade of thoughtfulness, "Probably, yeah."

Groaning, he made himself push John away, unable to help the smile tugging at his lips as John made to mosey closer, "Really, though. I need to head back to the labs, repair some of the equipment brought back from the last mission."

John sighed, letting them disengage and opening the door with the faint pressure of thought. It still gave him a little shiver of intellectual curiosity that he could sense the edges of that, and he followed the other man through the mostly-deserted corridor back to the main areas of the city.

"Can't you get someone else to do that?" John asked, tilting a brow at him.

"Not unless you want some mystery soldering and parts from the wrong rummage bin," He replied dryly, "Most everyone is still on inventorying - a few people started up projects without Sam's explicit permission, and I'm still hunting down all the parts that were allocated to more important things."

"Things like…?"

He huffed, swiping the button for the transporter, "Oh, jumper maintenance, that transporter in one of the residential halls that still puts you to a pier one out of five requests, the like."

John nodded slowly, that innocent look pasted onto his face that stopped working on him except for special occasions, "The jumpers are important, yeah."

"And so is everything else," He shook his head, amused, "It's mostly the geological team complaining about it, since I put everyone together by department. You wouldn't happen to know anything about why that happens, would you?"

"Nnnno, absolutely not," John rocked up on his toes, keeping deliberate attention on the doors as they opened.

He snorted, shaking his head, "I don't even want to know."

John grinned, gesturing for him to leave the transporter first, "All's well that ends well."

"Like I haven't heard that before," He rolled his eyes, pausing with a small shuffle of his steps where he knew they would have to split paths. John was likewise lingering, a wistful look to his face that wasn't quite as patted down into inscrutability as the man probably thought, "I'll, uh, see you at dinner? All of you?"

Waiting for John to melt into a slow, reassuring smile did little for his nerves - nor did the cognizant inability to settle himself with one last, lingering kiss like they had done in John's quarters. Nevertheless, it seemed his thoughts were recognized, John leaning marginally forward into his space, "Yeah. Don't get too caught up, okay?"

Feeling breathless from that little bit of proximity, he nodded faintly, "Yeah."

Heedless of the tacitly curious looks thrown their way, John winked and strode off with a swing in his step. My god, he thought faintly, No wonder the women keep fawning over him.

Catching the quizzical look one of the soft scientists - P-something, he believed - threw his way, he touched the side of his cheek, realizing he had a smile firmly affixed onto his face. What a strange sight he must have made, staring after the colonel like that.

Lips unable to fall back into their usual resting state, he thought, Mine, though.

Whatever his mood was, it made his minions all the more biddable when he walked into one of the main labs, and he would take the stretch of luck as far as it would run.

"You," He snapped his fingers at Kusanagi, "Have you found all the scrap alloy O'Brennon and his roving horde of miscreants squirreled away?"

She smiled, cheeks dimpling under her glasses, "Yes, Doctor McKay. I have informed them to return everything to a new bin for your inspection and filled with its own catalogue."

He beamed at her, "Excellent. Make sure you get those meteorological analytics in to the marine biologists, Sam wants them to make sure we have clear weather for a research team on that new island chain we found."

Kusanagi nodded, still having that polite grin on her face as she returned to her computer. He wanted to harrumph, but frankly it was reassuring to have that same dubiously perpetual ray of sunshine around to witness, undaunted by his brief, unintentional respite in the so-called afterlife. Pausing briefly over his keyboard, he wondered whether she ought to be given more responsibilities because of that.

Hmm. Opening up the notepad on his computer, he typed in a quick note to assess her workload and if she would benefit from some training in additional areas. Radek would probably know.

And speak of the devil, Radek rapped his knuckles on the edge of the table, announcing his presence, "Alo. Are you done sight-seeing?"

"Hmph," He responded, turning his stool around so he could grab the stack of LSDs that AR-5 had zapped. It was busy work, because he knew as well as Radek did that there were plenty of people who could solder a few chips together, but he quietly appreciated the banality to give himself an opportunity to rest the still-turbulent nature of his thoughts, "What have you got?"

Radek raised an eyebrow at him, "Rumors that you are in a good mood. I am glad to hear they are false, for otherwise I will need to train in another boss."

"Har-har," He rolled his eyes in response, "I still sign all of the paperwork you foist off on me so you can stare down a microscope, don't forget that."

"Ah, yes, that is true," Radek nodded thoughtfully, sliding onto a stool on the other side of the table, logging into his tablet with a quick set of swipes on the screen, "It is good for me, no? You would not look as handsome in glasses. Best to save that dilemma for me."

He grumbled good-naturedly, opening up his email, "To have the disconcerting appeal of a moth in daylight? You have the market cornered."

Radek waggled his eyebrows, "All the better to track down filaments for our gravity simulators, no?"

Blinking, he tore his attention away from the molecular models of some prototype drug the medical department CCed him on, leaning around his monitor, "Did you really?"

Grinning, Radek tapped his nose, "I may have found an alloy we can synthesize, but it will take much work to test whether it will work in different gravities."

"You are the best," He breathed, scooting off the stool in excitement, roundly ignoring the way Radek perked up with a smug look, "Gimme. Where is it?"

"Ah, ah, what do you say?" Radek asked with a grin.

He arched a brow, "Uh, now? So I can figure out how to fix the simulators below our waterline? Where we've been wanting to renovate for extra storage in the accessed labs we've cleared out?"

Radek rolled his eyes, huffing and waving a hand to the corner of the lab where some of the employee lockers were. They had some unlocked ones to store the smaller odds and ends they found while exploring the city, if it wasn't filled with motherboards and other spare parts. He couldn't find it in himself to be more than superficially annoyed, doing his best to restrain himself from skipping over to the locker with glee.

There was indeed a little plastic bin, neatly labeled with some masking tape and marker in Radek's obscure handwriting. Do not touch! Rodney's work was scribbled onto it, and he popped off the lid with the same enthusiasm as he would a box of the fancy TV dinners.

"Oh my," He murmured to himself, delicately tracing the iridescent metal. There wasn't very much of it, and they had yet to actually work out the production process to duplicate it in the amounts they needed to truly repair all the damaged sectors in the city, but seeing the neatly-coiled amount nestled in some tissue paper from the chemists' lab was enough to catch his breath, "Radek, this-"

"Might actually be enough to test?" Radek completed his thoughts, smiling, "Yes, it is possible. I have submitted a proposal for testing with one of the smaller superconductors, but it will need your signature as well as Colonel Carter's."

He carefully replaced the lid, clutching the tub close, "Absolutely. Is this already emailed?"

Radek waved a hand at his computer, making him hustle himself back to his seat, typing with one hand as he searched through his email. When he spotted the correct subject line, his eyes caught on the timestamp, "Radek-"

"Ano," Radek replied simply, looking at him over the rim of his glasses while he worked on his tablet.

"I-" How could he explain what he thought, the proof that this was idling in his inbox during his absence, when there had been no known possibility that it would only have been temporary? Looking helplessly at the way Radek was calmly writing something on his tablet with a stylus, he clutched the tub closer, feeling overwhelmed.

"Is nothing," Radek said, expression kind, "I knew you were looking for it."

And the thought of this little tie to mundanity, that Radek considered it more important than his own ascension - purposefully or accidental, something none of them here would be able to tell apart - was a startling level of consideration. He wetted his lips, wondering what to say as he blinked a few times, "Thank you. I'll- I'll sign off on that, tell Sam to."

Radek relaxed in his seat, looking relieved, "Yes. Be sure to review proposal, as well? I do not want any surprises during testing."

He found himself smiling, tremulous as it was, "Of course. I'll get on that right away."

Nodding, Radek returned to his work, the air between them and the lab at large losing that unfounded edge of anxiety. He felt that sharpness ease within himself, too, and looked at his screen, deciding on the spot that this was a subject better hashed out in person, "Actually, you know what, I'll just- I'll be right back."

Radek glanced up at him, "Of course."

He nodded a couple of times, "Yes. Yes, of course." Patting the container, he walked toward the door, tapping his comm and feeling everything settle into place, "McKay to Sheppard. Hey- Radek found something, you'll never guess what it is-"

Author's Notes

Ascension is… an odd concept. It seems a little odd that Ancients - or Alterans, for the broader scope across the Stargate canon - would spend so much time developing so much technology across multiple galaxies, just to have one of their most memorable points as a society be a prettily-worded death cult. What would be the point of all that technology? So… mathematics, and its applications in the sciences, as a form of philosophy that reflects back onto ascension. And for someone like Rodney, who not only had one confirmed brush with ascending (Tao of Rodney), but an unconfirmed one (The Shrine - same technological basis as in Tao of Rodney) as well, on top of multiple near-death experiences - something in his hind brain has got to be percolating that during a fair amount of the show.

I realized about partway through that the control crystals for Atlantis tech show nearly identical circuitry patterns, which I understand would have made it easier for audiences to figure out that it was Technology TM and provide a bridging point, but I kind of threw it out and substituted my own headcanon that's visible through Rodney's internal monologue in the beginning scene.

There's a background fix-it in terms of Sha're ascending, mostly because I thought her death was nonsense and also I like the idea of her and Rodney being in the same room. As for that little diner, it fits a lot of themes and motifs in other media (that I don't remember at the moment) of being a transition point between living and death, and indicative of Rodney being indecisive about actually being dead - an opposite end of that subject is discussed via Campfire Stories. This also takes place before This Mortal Coil, where Replicator!Elizabeth visits Atlantis, and after Miller's Crossing, where Rodney and Jeannie were abducted for evil plot reasons. Can't imagine anyone really dealing with Rodney's ascension all that well, in that context.

Over the course of canon, also, I've noticed Rodney has displayed some… let's call it awareness of plot-related events. He's a main character, sure, so his plot armor means death won't stick, and the writers have an interesting way of dancing around their plotholes sometimes, but somehow or another it ends up being conveyed as prescience of critical changes in a situation (Rodney picking what ultimately ended up being the correct door in Trio, for example). I wanted to convey that as a sort of quantum physics problem - Schroedinger's cat, almost, in that what could be will be and always is (a multiplicity of states, aka the quantum superposition principle). Some of this was also discussed via Interface- an effect once observed and all that, and rather fitting given Rodney's specialties.

I wanted to lean into these concepts, and go "What if Rodney ascended?", with an added dose of making it accidental because Rodney is noticeable prone to being able to come up with solutions out of thin air, and what is ascension but another revelation? It seems very in character for him, I think.

Also meet the new OC, scientist O'Brennon - he's a mechanical engineer, probably.

Czech translations:

Ano - yes

můj prdel - my ass

#stargate atlantis #mcshep #rodney mckay #my story

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neostriatum · 1 year ago

Text

Interface

[Dreamwidth]

Sometimes, he thought, it was difficult to tell apart where Doctor McKay ended and the city began - the one who raised the city, the one whom they all went to with their questions about Atlantis, the one who sunk himself into the city so intrinsically they could only hold on and ride out the waves.

The lights swooned, Atlantis feeling acutely like a ship in sea, a frozen microsecond of questioning reality as Chuck's computer dinged with a sensor alert.

He read the message, pursing his lips and body still stiff as if to anticipate another swell of water against their perception of stability. The pulsing glow of the notification had not changed, and he raised a hand to his ear.

"Doctor McKay, please come in," Chuck said into his comm, deciding on the open channel first, finger raised to tap the side button to cycle between channels if necessary.

His hail was met with silence across both the bandwidth and the room, something tentative and rousing itself to alertness - it was unusual to call for the scientist randomly outside of a serious situation, and by then the man was already in the loop, likely going a mile a minute as he kept the city floating and operational. The monitor flickering its warning notification at him was a steady, if nerve-wracking, background light.

One life sign down, and none matching their chief scientist.

He swallowed, keeping the veneer of professionalism by dint of habit, and tapped his comm to a private channel, "Sergeant Campbell to Doctor McKay, please respond."

If he were lucky, the difference in tone to the hail would be enough to distract McKay from whatever he was absorbed with. Probably some lab thing, but it was unusual for him to be truly alone, given his position in charge of all of the labs and accessory scientific endeavours.

A bated breath of fifteen seconds - protocol, drilled into him by McKay and Zelenka after the background system was installed - with no response, he exhaled shakily, manually clicking on the notification of the dropped life sign and navigating its options to raise an alert.

Blue alert, McKay had joked, gesturing to the standard-issue shirt for his department with a wry smirk. An alert for unexpectedly missing personnel, really, but dead useful for situations like this.

He cringed at his own thoughts, forcing his face into something less likely to unsettle everyone else in the command room. The screen prompted him on the series of options available, and he clicked on the city-wide one. Unlike Star Trek, the lights didn't change colour, but he could hear the staggered ripple of beeps on all the comms in the room, knowing the program was running through personnel top to bottom - a high priority, automated alert.

In his own ear, he heard the recorded message, mechanical only through lack of organic fluidity of speech, "All personnel, please report to the nearest supervisor in your chain of command. Repeat, …"

Chuck closed his eyes, almost hearing the scramble as the message was processed by everyone aboard Atlantis. He exhaled, tapping his comm once more, "Sergeant Campbell to Colonel Sheppard, please come in."

"Sheppard," The colonel answered briskly, "What do you have for me, Chuck?"

He stared at the window on his laptop, fingers trembling over the trackpad, "Colonel, Doctor McKay's last known location was the ZPM room."

It was also standard protocol to deploy an emergency medical team to the missing person's location. What they would do with multiple missing people, or if there were a ceiling to the quantity, Chuck wasn't sure. McKay probably had something percolating in his brain about it.

But with the situation established as-is, he could only sit on the public line and do his job - mainly, make sure the gate was secured. What use that would be during an internal crisis, he wasn't sure, but the limits of his shift had just acquired an indefinite timeline, so he and the others on duty waited anxiously for the current crisis to be resolved.

Tapping his computer, he ran the program again, hoping for McKay's signature to flicker back to life. It hadn't, but he drew up the map associated with the program, zooming in to the right section of the city and correct level with the trackpad, once again pleasantly surprised at the UI as he set the visual angle and toggled the overlay for something resembling being in-person. All they were missing was the pushpin person to drag and drop, he thought, chewing on his lip as he watched the nearly-live updates of the ZPM room.

Everyone in the room had their own busywork, ears turned toward each other in case a true emergency developed - as if Doctor McKay being randomly out for the count within the city wasn't emergency enough, and he remembered the last time this happened, a lab accident that slowly killed the man and somehow didn't completely stall the science department. Deciding he was going nowhere making himself antsy like this, he tapped his comm on to actively listen on the public line, rather than have it set to any all-calls.

Colonel Sheppard apparently decided to keep his mic perma-on, and he wanted to flinch back at the man's tone, "- get that defibrillator down here, dammit, I don't know what this damn thing did to him."

He stared blindly at his screen, owl-eyed and numb. It was one thing to run the protocol and kickstart the process to solving an unknown situation, it was quite another to listen to someone's life hanging in the line while being able to only sit on your hands and watch everyone's six from a nearly-pointless avenue.

"C'mon, McKay," Sheppard muttered, the radio quality good enough to hear the breathless tone, in time with what must have been chest compressions, "Can't- can't crap out on me, now, c'mon. Fuck. I know you can do it, McKay, stay with me."

A part of him felt like he was there, watching the scene unfold. The map did its periodic update, McKay's signature flickering for a beat before timing out again at the next data sweep. He felt nauseated at it, seeing the scientist's heartbeat on the screen at the same time he was hearing Colonel Sheppard doggedly forcing the man to revive himself.

There was some feedback on the line, apparent that not everyone in that room was on the same line - or missing their comm, and what the hell had happened, everyone knew to keep those in when working on the city in just such cases of a- an injury. Fatality, he thought reflexively, grimacing and curling his hands tightly over the keyboard.

"No, dammit," Sheppard answered whomever was beside him, and he could faintly hear another person talking to the colonel, the range of the mic too short to get anything other than a human-shaped warble of speech. There was a pause, and he found himself counting the beats necessary to restart a heart, one-two-three-four-five…

It was a fixed point, Sheppard in a holding pattern until medical could arrive, and he breathed in unsteadily, eyes fixed on the screen as it continued its updates. McKay's signature flickered intermittently, the sight making his own chest hurt even as he heard Sheppard swear darkly, "You son of a bitch. Knock this shit off, or I swear to god- c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, Rodney, please."

He was vaguely aware of the rest of the room… existing, he supposed, around him, that there were other breathing bodies in the room waiting on the same tenterhooks. Absently, he wondered how many of them were tuned into the same channel, shock muting them more effectively than a button-click on their comm. Eventually their background noise was decided for them, filled with more earnest desperation than he could remember Sheppard ever voluntarily voicing in public.

"Rodney, Rodney, Rodney-"

Perfectly on point, in sync with the effort it takes to thump a heart back to beating. He found his breathing matching it, silently saying McKay's name right along Sheppard, gazing at the map and waiting for the man's life-signs to reappear and stay online.

An eternity seemed to pass, but he was unaware how many minutes it actually was in reality until they heard on the line Sheppard's breathless protest that made his stomach plummet hearing before the whine of a defibrillator registered in his ear.

"Clear!" He could hear over Sheppard's mic, and the choked sound from the colonel surely overrode the thump McKay's body likely made on the floor as he was resuscitated by medical personnel.

Squeezing his hands tightly together on the laptop, he listened to the sounds, Sheppard abruptly silent on the line. He wasn't the one logged into the security cameras, and was reluctant to leave his seat until the program itself assured him McKay's life was solidly back on the line.

"Alright, let's give him a little room…" Carson's voice, even second-hand, was reassuring, "There we are, Rodney. Take it easy. Alright, nice and smooth, one, two, three!"

Presumably that was the sound of Doctor McKay being lifted to a gurney, but he could only guess at what was going on. A blink to clear his vision and a glance at his screen confirmed that McKay was solidly back, and moving through the corridors to the nearest transporter.

The emergency was over, but the mystery was not. He listened to Sheppard's breathing over the line, how it wobbled for a moment before being forcibly steadied, "Yeah. Yeah," the colonel said, and he heard the huff of breath that indicated him standing, "I'm fine."

Like hell he was. He knew he sure wouldn't be, if it were his best friend's life on the line.

The tension seemed abated - the arrival of a medical team usually predicated a return to normalcy, if the sky wasn't actively falling down around their ears - but he could feel the swarming of the scientists as they analyzed whatever data McKay was aiming for. The man himself was still in the infirmary, being treated, he heard, for electrical burns and an arrhythmic heart that was probably more serious at that age.

Zelenka had popped in occasionally, muttering to himself and shooing them away to plug in a lot of wires into a lot of things. He looked frazzled, but he assumed the mad scientist hair kind of did that, anyway, especially when Sheppard magically appeared and they did a test dial of the gate.

The address looked like one of those uninhabited one, PX5-whatever, and he watched as everyone watched the gate. It didn't look unusual or anything, or even lagged (could gates lag? It made him think of a dial-up tone as the gate whooshed, and he had to press his lips together before Sheppard could turn to frown at him), but that seemed to mean something as Zelenka squinted at one of the portable computers and muttered to himself.

Sheppard made one of those "pay attention to me" postures, hands shoved in his pockets and eyebrows raised at Zelenka. The other man waved a hand, scrolling through the output of whatever it was, "Point one-five seconds."

"And…?" Sheppard drawled.

"It's drawing energy more efficiently," Zelenka replied, frowning.

"Isn't that a good thing?"

Zelenka shook his head, "Ordinarily, yes, but," The man turn to another computer, and he shifted out of the way while still hoping to be able to peer at everything. The view was mostly blocked, but he saw on one computer a live-feed graph, two lines squiggling around in a vaguely steady manner, "It's almost like the ZPM is unified. The feed is altogether much more smooth."

Sheppard frowned, "Unified?"

"Yes," Zelenka said, head bobbing as his attention was riveted to the data, "Energy transmission is the same, but the depletion rate has changed. I do not know what to tell you."

Now Sheppard's posture shifted again, crisp lines of command at odds with the soft tension of worry in his face, "Find out."

Zelenka was already gathering up all of the extra computers, mind obviously a million lightyears away as he chewed on the problem, "I will," The man promised, "Will need to run another test."

He shared a glance with Sheppard, both of them watching the scientist leave at a brisk clip. An uneasy feeling squirmed in his gut, matching the way Sheppard sighed and followed. And they say shit doesn't roll downhill.

McKay was too good to let a bout in the infirmary derail his department, and from one of the scientists gossiping on the table next to him, he was absorbed enough to have established protocols in place for exact such situations. He stared at his meatloaf and Athosian potatoes, wondering if it wasn't just good sense to expect a disaster.

Though it was a background memory for most people, and a vaguely confirmed rumor in the way it was for the new people, he was brought to mind the last time McKay had been long-term in the infirmary. Sheppard's voice was still ringing in his ears - and, god, it was multiple times McKay was kept in the infirmary for observation and care. He couldn't help but be stuck on the last accident in the city that warranted such attention.

It wasn't going to be ascension again, he didn't think. He hoped not.

But he saw a couple of nurses grabbing trays piled high with food, and cut his glance away from them, cutting a potato with his fork. McKay ate a lot, right? That didn't mean anything, necessarily. He was probably in good spirits, if they were bringing that much food up - it wasn't like there were a lot of patients at the moment staying long enough to need a meal.

The meatloaf tasted a little bland, now, and he sighed. Sometimes he really hated the "wait and see" stage of things.

Probably he needn't have worried, because between some teams coming back from the usual diplomatic missions and training that Sheppard and Lorne insisted upon, he was too preoccupied in relaxing into his shifts at the gate room to pay attention to the fact that McKay had been released from the infirmary with nothing more than some tentative caution and a watchful eye from his department. They seemed to be the only ones who remembered all the times McKay put life and limb out, even accidentally, which he appreciated the resiliency of.

Zelenka was back, muttering over his computer, but this time McKay was following him. The man's pace was a little slower, probably in deference to having the shit shocked out of him recently, and the paleness in his face showed only the usual strain of managing what seemed to be fifty different projects at a time.

He obligingly moved out of his chair, hoping he made it seem like both of the scientists were too busy with their work and he was being shooed aside, rather than freeing up a chair for McKay to sit in. It seemed the gesture was appreciated, anyway, McKay settling down with a poorly-disguised sigh of relief, some colour flushing back into his face after no longer standing.

Clocking a look at some of the others in the room, he took note that McKay was being observed on the sly. A lot of them were the same shift members from over a week ago, and he knew the way they were keeping quietly busy matched his own face and polite hovering to be used for Zelenka and McKay's beck and call.

"You see, here," Zelenka said, leaning toward one of the monitors, "Efficiency has increased five fold, core components of the ZPM working in synchronicity in the conduit chamber."

McKay nodded wearily, eyes on the screen but glazed nevertheless. The man looked a couple ticks from nodding off right in the chair, something that made him want to panic in the back of his mind - how would they even handle that? - but roused himself at the last moment. Eyes at half mast, the man said, "Were the simulations re-ran in the ZPM room?"

"Er. No," Zelenka admitted, crossing his arms, "We wanted to make sure you could review the data personally before we checked our design on how to proceed. This was… not in our parameters."

"I bet," McKay said dryly.

He heard McKay sigh, sounding an awful lot like his uncle Jacob right before the game came on TV, and he frowned over his head at Zelenka, wondering if there was something they ought to do. Zelenka shook his head in consternation, gamely trying to continue the conversation, "We will need to revise the sche-"

"Elizabeth," McKay said, sounding far more alert than his posture indicated and scaring everyone with the interruption, fond-voiced and instructional as it was, "Forty-five degrees clockwise. … Yes, exactly like that. Now do the rest of them, in the same order."

Zelenka was bald-faced with shock, arms falling to his side and looking as bewildered as he felt. They exchanged a glance, and he realized one hand was already on the back of the chair, frozen in indecision of turning it, lest he somehow hurt McKay. They waited a beat, heart somewhere in his throat, waiting to see if McKay would tell them whatever the hell it was that prompted him to speak to thin air and address someone that had died years ago now.

But it was only captivated by McKay's blank, drowsing stare, as if the man were sleepwalking. He bit his lip and counted to ten, then another ten when he chickened out.

In the background, he could hear the quiet murmur of someone talking on their mic, and he exhaled roughly, "Doctor McKay?" He asked quietly, hoping not to spook the man, "Are you alright?"

McKay blinked, eyelashes fluttering as if coming back to himself, "Hm? What were you saying?"

He swallowed, keeping his tone polite and careful, the hand he had on the chair gripping tightly, "Seems like you zoned out there; are you alright?"

Zelenka watched with him as McKay shifted in his seat, sitting more upright with a grunt, "Yes, perfectly fine. Radek, you were talking about reviewing the designs?"

The other scientist blustered, waving his hands, "Nothing that cannot wait. Please, Rodney, I think we have been more than exciting enough for today. Perhaps you should see Beckett, no?" When McKay looked like he was about to protest, Zelenka held up his hands, "Is only that, well, you look a little pale."

McKay seemed to weigh the request, giving his co-worker a gimlet stare. Someone murmured in the background, again, too quiet to be easily overheard. Probably to belay the request for a medic, he thought, only mildly hysterical with disbelief, He's not that delusional to make up Doctor Weir, right?

"Fine," McKay said, not sounding nearly so grumpy as exhausted, "Since you seem to think I'm in such dire need of being treated like a pin cushion again."

Zelenka smoothly redirected the habitual ire, playing along, "Perhaps if you ask nicely, they will let you have a laptop this time."

McKay snorted, already rising from the chair with a slowness that set his nerves on edge. Even with all of the complaining the man regularly did about his back, and this and that, he still managed to haul ass, as if conscious of the fact that slowing down meant a permanent decline into being decrepit.

It hammered home the point that the man had effectively died and had to be resuscitated barely over a week ago, even as McKay grumbled, "You'll be bringing it," He addressed Zelenka, straightening up and looking none the worse for wear, even if still drained from the effort of moving, "And the mess has brownies today."

"I will bring two," Zelenka bargained graciously, gathering up the gear they had arrived with and passing a significant look with him. He nodded, watching the two follow each other out of the room and down the stairs.

He realized his hand was still clutching the seat, and felt a bit like collapsing into it, himself. Looking bug-eyed at everyone else, he could feel the emotion ricocheting between all of them. Karolina rose from her chair, hand dropping from her comm.

"I will… get Mr. Woolsey?" She asked, her Swedish accent tinged with hesitancy.

Realizing nobody else would answer her, he nodded belatedly, "Yeah. Yeah, that would be. Good."

He tapped his own comm as she stepped away from her post to hurry over to the next office over, Woolsey visible from here, "Sergeant Campbell to Colonel Sheppard. Would you… please come to the Ops room?"

Sheppard's eyebrows were up to his hairline, and he resisted the urge to squirm, dutifully repeating the sequence of events upon the man's request.

"So you're telling me," And he cringed at the colonel's tone, but only internally, "That McKay just… what? Sat here and talked to Elizabeth Weir?"

"Well," He prevaricated, "No. I think he thought he was… talking at her?"

Sheppard stared at him. He shrugged, knowing that they had already dealt with this whole "will we, won't we" debacle of Doctor Weir's death and transformation into a replicator already. If it weren't so bizarre of a place to live, the events in Atlantis would be more difficult to remember.

"I'm not sure he remembers he did that," He confessed, "It happened while Zelenka was talking about schematics and designs to testing the ZPM after the, uh. The first test."

He watched as his superior's brow furrowed, feeling guilty for bringing it up even if that really was the context to the situation, "He kind of went right back to asking Doctor Zelenka about the data. Y'know, like he hadn't heard it the first time?"

"And how long did all of this take?"

He pursed his lips, thinking, "Like the whole thing? Maybe a minute, tops," He replied, wishing he were able to give more precise information to work with, "The zoning out thing, though, it was like he was responding to a call. Only a few seconds before he came back to himself."

"Hmm," Sheppard frowned, and he was reasonably certain this time it wasn't at him, but the information.

"I, uh," He said, wanting to fidget when Sheppard's gaze snapped back to him, "It did kind of, uh. Look like he was having a stroke. Sir? Even Zelenka was concerned."

"A stroke," Sheppard repeated woodenly, and god, he felt bad about saying it, knowing the guy probably wanted to turn heel and run all the way over to the infirmary.

"Yessir," He replied, nervous, "Except he was talking?"

"To Elizabeth."

"… Yes, sir."

This was certainly not one of the most uncomfortable conversations in his life with a commanding officer, but it sure ranked up there. He firmed his posture, grateful when Sheppard's attention focused on the opinion rather than him. It was awkward waiting in silence while Sheppard came to a conclusion, but he knew it was a worthwhile wait.

Sheppard ran a hand over his jaw, sighing, "At ease, Chuck."

"Yes, sir," He said, relieved.

"Let me know if this happens again," Sheppard said, already turning to leave, undoubtedly to the infirmary.

"Yessir."

It was a conundrum worthy of an investigation, apparently. McKay was ensconced back in the infirmary, probably undergoing a whole slew of neurological tests. He bartered for a packet of chocolate chip cookies, anyway, making sure it was slipped to McKay's bedside in apology.

Zelenka refused to let anyone go back to the ZPM room, especially after that last scare, which meant he was hovering around the controls with a gaggle of scientists instead of holing up in one of the labs like usual. It made for a crowded room, but the bustle was almost a little reassuring, watching all of them map and discuss problems in real time instead of waiting for the results to disseminate along the rumor mill.

Apparently McKay's… whatever it was shouldn't have occurred in the first place. There was discussion of it being related to the ATA gene, and some subconscious commands being entered, which meant that everyone with the gene was banned from the ZPM room until further notice. As a precaution, Sheppard was likewise banned from the Chair room, at least until they had a better handle on what the hell was going on.

He didn't think the colonel was particularly interested, at any rate, too preoccupied with keeping McKay company during the battery of tests after he let the - quite reasonable, he believed - suspicion slip that it might have been some weird Pegasus form of a stroke. Who knew, in this galaxy, especially since a regular cold could become a trip down memory lane and their biggest existential threats were literal vampires.

"Uh, Radek," One of the scientists said, peering at one of the laptops. The man navigated his way over between the small crowd of scientists, "This looks a lot like a wormhole."

"What?" Zelenka muttered, adjusting his glasses to look at some spreadsheet of incomprehensible numbers. The scientists quieted their bustle, as if waiting for some verdict, "No budu proklet. That is remarkable similarity to the gate."

He perked up, curious to see what the information was about. As predicted, Zelenka popped his head up, snapping fingers at him, "You. Sergeant? Were there any dials during the testing?"

"Uh," He stuttered, turning to his station. It was difficult to forget the exact time and date, but he logged everything both one hour before and after, just in case. The laptop spit out both a graph of energy consumption and all dials both in and out, the latter of which was predictably nothing, "No, sir, but we did have a power… surge?"

Zelenka frowned at him, "What do you mean?"

He waved a hand around, imitating the bobbing motion he had felt, internally feeling a little stupid for how he was describing the sensation, "It was maybe a second, but- the lights kind of… dimmed? And the city kind of. Swooned?"

The scientist repeated the word under his breath, turning back to the computer he appropriated. A finger was pointed in his direction, anyway, "Send me that data."

"Yessir."

It felt like progress, or at least some dots on a board they could try connecting. What the stargate had to do with the ZPM, he had no idea, but he was sure Zelenka would figure it out. Hopefully it would be faster with a team at hand, because he knew McKay would have been the best bet if he weren't laid out at the moment - this situation was unusual enough to make him uneasy, because there seemed to be a critical mass point where 'weird' became 'dangerous', and somehow or another AR-1 managed to get roped into it.

He felt vaguely haunted by Colonel Sheppard's tone over the mic from back then, and he hoped there wouldn't be a repeat situation, for all of their sakes. Maybe some miraculous explanation could be pulled out of thin air again, some explanation why McKay was talking to a dead person after nearly dying.

The scientists shuffled around for another few minutes, hunting down data and dispersing in ones and twos as Zelenka directed them back to various labs for analysis. When the man himself was left, he warily watched him flit between the two leftover computers and the ones permanently hooked up in the Ops room. It was apparent he was sending data back and forth, bringing up the email client periodically and presumably coordinating with the team.

It was pretty cool, even if he was on tenterhooks for an explanation. Finally, Zelenka muttered, minimising windows and closing the lid to one of the laptops, turning to him with a piercing look, "You will notify me of any changes, yes?"

He bobbed his head, wondering if all of the scientists were that forthright or if it was just a product of wrangling science into shape, "Yessir."

Zelenka frowned at him for a moment more, as if impressing the importance to him. He blinked, wondering if he had to be dismissed, "Good. I will be back."

One of the other techs mouthed a Terminator line to him behind Zelenka's retreating form, and he shot them a dirty look, not wanting to get in trouble for laughing. He was pretty sure Zelenka would be able to hear, anyway, the way the man looked eerily reminiscent to one of his trainers in basic.

He was admittedly, a little curious about the gate data. It gave him something to do, at least, and took his mind off the way McKay had seemed to age ten years in front of them.

Regular data that he was trained to interpret was a lot simpler than digging through non-dial data and trying to spot an anomaly. He remembered how the city had - not flickered, precisely, because that would have snowballed into the city sinking again, at least a little bit - felt like it rocked on its axis. A part of him was considering the ramifications of that, how something gone sideways with the ZPM would affect the entirety of the city, and he swallowed dryly when he realized that McKay, objectively, should not have survived whatever had happened down there.

It was certainly a learning curve to zoom in on the data, the DHD and other Ancient monitoring equipment logging information in a set of binary that might have been intuitive to them but had the science department swearing at it for a month straight as they built a compiler from scratch. He wasn't going to underestimate the allure of spreadsheets ever again, he thought with a brief smile, going through the pages of data and extracting some of it to a new database.

Setting everything up took the majority of his shift, and he had to switch between it and juggling the usual retinue of offworld teams that were slated to go out that day. AR-1 was grounded, but he saw the rosters adjusted for Ronon, and occasionally Teyla. Watching as they lingered in the periphery of the teams they were supplementing, he wondered if this was their way of handling the nerves that came with a team mate with an unknown illness.

He realized that it was not the first time they had to deal with such a situation, and not only with McKay, terrifying as the man's illnesses sometimes were. It was a sobering thought, and he silently wished them a sense of stability as he watched them step through the wormhole.

Turning back to his computer, he realized his shift was ending in a few minutes, the other technician on duty already waiting nearby to relieve him. He checked to make sure his nascent project was emailed to himself, and shut the window down, working himself up to a summary of his shift in change-over.

There must have been something tracking anyone who accessed the gate data, because McKay pulled some spooky sysadmin privileges and replied to his self-sent email with the database he was building to try and parse the data with an instruction to meet him in his office. It was a reappropriated lab, really, but it was the one McKay had most of his work in, and generally only shared with Zelenka, so it functioned well enough.

"Sir," He reported in, lingering close enough to the doorway that he could make a reasonably quick escape if needed. It wasn't that he minded being here, it was just… okay, it was strange as hell to be here without the other gate technicians or under threat of an imminent emergency. Outside of how McKay was moving carefully, snacking on some tossed salad that looked like kitchen leftovers, he wasn't sure what the most appropriate reaction was.

"I won't bite," McKay said, amused. He waved his fork at one of the nearby stools, resuming his meal with a perfunctory bite of some cheese, "Sit."

He sat.

The silence was awkward, but less so when he realized McKay's obvious enjoyment of his meal made him hungry. He grimaced at the rumble of his stomach - McKay tossed him a powerbar after rooting through one of the desk drawers, and it helped to pass the time between the two of them more companionably.

"So," McKay said, pointing at his monitor, where the recognizable crests and troughs of a typical gate cycle were displayed in one of the windows, "You had an idea."

"Uh. Yes, sir," He replied, crinkling the wrapper in his hand nervously, continuing at McKay's expectantly raised brow, "Doctor Zelenka was looking for any anomalies when the both of you ran your experiment in the, ah, ZPM room."

A little bit of tact was probably expected, for all of McKay's reputation to breeze through social niceties like so much tissue paper on his way to a conclusion. It earned him a sardonic smile, "The one where Beckett had to zap me back to life? I had the pleasure of lots of blood draws for that, but yes, what anomalies were you looking for?"

The blunt expression was oddly settling, and he relaxed on the stool, "Well, sir, I was curious if there was anything happening with the gate during the experiment," He responded, waving a hand around, "I know we didn't have any dials in or out, but there was some sort of power surge, so that might have affected gate stability."

McKay's eyebrows flew up, and he gestured for him to continue, spearing a piece of quartered fruit that looked covered in a vinaigrette.

He wet his lips nervously, pointing to the computer monitor that had his extracted data up, "I know I'm no good at the finer points of analyzing the gate activity, but Zelenka had mentioned that the ZPM demonstrated wormhole-like activity. What if that's something the gate could have logged, between itself and the ZPM?"

"Hm," And that wasn't the 'oh that's funny, we're about to die' kind of Hm, so he relaxed marginally as McKay turned on his own stool to scrutinize the data. The bowl of salad was placed off to the side, the scientist drawing the keyboard closer to tab through some of the data. It flickered across the screen, and he watched how the data was manipulated with ease, "I suppose theoretically such activity could occur between the two…"

McKay shook his head distractedly, and he watched in fascination as the man pulled up the main gate computer remotely, tagging a few things and drawing it into the database he had built during his last shift. All of a sudden everything looked more comprehensive, and with some more muttering and fussing with the program, a handful of line graphs showed up across the set of monitors. They circulated in real time, a mesmerizing cycle of different comparisons of data.

"Right. So," McKay clapped his hands, "What you see here is the ZPM power fluctuations during Zelenka and I's experiment, cross-referenced with wormhole characteristics, stargate power flows, and pings between the two technologies over a fixed period of time."

He nodded blankly, leaning forward to get a better look at it. There were certain crests and troughs that matched, but the power flows and pings were inverted to each other. Pointing to one of the graphs, he asked, "What's happening here, with the pings? It shouldn't drop the power flow, should it?"

Looking pleased, McKay reached for his salad again, taking a hearty bite, "Mm-mm. No. But if Radek is correct - and I stress if - then it means that any wormhole development was the ping."

What the fuck. He didn't even bother to pretend he understood it, because the primer on wormhole theory he was required to take to be part of SGC seriously didn't cover this situation, "How can wormholes ping?"

"I have no idea," McKay shrugged, ostensibly unbothered by whether that could potentially be a problem, "That's the problem with wormholes, is that we never actually pinned down the subspace it's connecting to when we make connections between gates. There's only some vague idea about why we have a difficult time accessing the Milky Way gates - different galaxies shouldn't develop a large power draw if you're folding spacetime like that, ultimately - and it's not like we have a rolodex of confirmed subspace dimensions to cross-reference."

He frowned, a thought occurring to him, "What if it connected to itself?"

"What do you mean, to itself?" McKay asked, frowning himself. The man turned to the computer again, salad held absently in one hand as he tapped his fork against the rim as he thought, "Like the ZPM connecting to itself? That would- hm, that would imply a lot of things."

"I don't know what the implications are," He hurried to say, covering his ass, "Just. What if it needed the gate as an orientation point in, I don't know, subspace or spacetime, and it connected to itself in. A different dimension?"

McKay sat back. He ate distractedly, mind obviously a million miles away. It was apparently a thought-provoking question, but he couldn't tell yet whether it was in a good or a bad way.

Abruptly, McKay leaned forward, drawing back up the gate data and pulling another stack of information from it. The variables were tightened, and he watched as McKay irritatedly shoved his fork between his teeth to use both hands on the keyboard. There was a muffled noise of success, and his shoulders dropped at the sound in relief.

"There!" McKay pointed at the screen, fork back in hand, where he had refreshed the graphs and paused them. The wormhole data had been cross-referenced to dial in and out pings. Where he had originally thought was an oddly quiet spot in the data must have been the exact time the ZPM experiment went live, "That's why you and Zelenka couldn't find anything - we had an in-ping and an out-ping simultaneously."

He blinked, bewildered, "And this is possible?"

McKay scoffed, "Obviously. The data wouldn't lie, and the Ancients were too good to design equipment failure in their gates or their ZPMs."

"That we know of," He felt the need to point out. McKay waved a prevaricating hand at him.

The man tapped his comm, "McKay to Zelenka," A beat, "Hey. So you were totally wrong, by the way, the gate totally did dial- what, yes it did, I'm looking at the data right here-"

It was apparently completely possible to hear only one side of a conversation and actually know more about what was going on than if he could hear both people. Glancing at the screen, where McKay was emphatically waving his fork at as he argued, he supposed it helped to have the data on hand that they were referencing.

"-No, I'm not saying… you're just looking at the wrong data!" McKay exclaimed, throwing his hands up, "Ye-here, I'll send it to you."

He wondered if he was dismissed, but as he didn't really have anywhere to be and McKay had bothered to feed him, there wasn't anywhere more interesting to go. The data and graphs were quickly minimised and appended to an email to Zelenka, zooming off-screen with a cheerful visualisation. It didn't look like the one on his laptop, and it made him wonder if that was a science special or a McKay special.

McKay was back to his salad, scraping the last bits of it from the bottom of the bowl as he waited for Zelenka to read through everything. The sound of metal on metal was jarring, and he grimaced to himself at the sound, only stopping when McKay was distracted by whatever it is that Zelenka was saying on the line, "Uh-huh, yeah- yeah, it does look like a ghost dial, but Chuck found out that the energy spiked during the dials. Yeah, he's right here next to me-"

Briefly, he felt panic grip him, knowing he wouldn't be able to answer whatever question it was the two of them had decided upon, but McKay only grinned at him, "Radek says thank you, by the way," He rolled his eyes, pointing to his mic, "What, yes, that's absolutely a thank you! Hah. No, it's not my fault you couldn't see anything right in front of your nose-"

And so it went. He wasn't sure what to do with the thanks, but one of them had apparently decided he had contributed enough. Slowly, he slid from his stool, gesturing if he could leave. McKay glanced at him, waving a hand.

He waved back in goodbye, and was halfway to the door when he heard McKay say, "The city would have sunk, Radek, I-"

Whatever it was, a gasping, choked noise that reminded him of his grade four classmate drowning in the community pool wasn't it. He turned abruptly, nearly knocking into one of the auxiliary tables, and saw just in time McKay beginning to slide off his stool.

It felt very much like a dive, and he was sure he had bruised his shins terribly getting to McKay in time to keep the man from cracking his skull on the floor - or worse, he didn't even want to contemplate it. McKay was struggling to breathe, going blue at the lips, eyes wild.

He checked frantically for a pulse, find it erratic. McKay looked as terrified as he felt, and he quickly patched to the medical line, "Medical emergency to the control tower, level seven. I repeat, medical emergency to the control tower, level seven. Doctor McKay isn't breathing."

Had he the time to contemplate it, the irony of being the one to work on resuscitating McKay instead of being one of the people to hear about it would have been staggering. He focused on keeping McKay breathing, wondering why the hell CPR wasn't working.

Being ushered along behind the entourage of doctors having only marginally better luck than him at keeping McKay alive put him in a daze. His shins hurt, and his knees from when he had fallen to the floor in his haste, but only if he thought about it.

It was unsurprising to be intercepted by Sheppard, who was quickly followed by a harried-looking Teyla and Ronon, the latter of whom still had their gear on from a mission. Right, he thought in vague shock at the time, We had some trade items this week.

"What happened?" Sheppard demanded, grabbing his arm. They were all keeping pace with the gurney, and all of them ignored the dirty look from the one person walking and talking to Beckett while hanging up an IV.

"I- I don't know," He said helplessly, eyes glued to McKay and the ambu bag being used on him. Tearing his mind away from what the medics had to do in order to resuscitate McKay, he looked at Sheppard, "We were just talking about some data with Doctor Zelenka, and I was leaving the room when I heard."

Teyla frowned, confused, "Doctor Zelenka was not in the room?"

And right, someone probably knew that. Had been around Zelenka at the time. He would have been more surprised at how quickly everyone talked to each other if he weren't still trembling from nerves, "No," He confirmed, "Over the comms. McKay said I was free to go, and- and-"

Sheppard changed his grip, shifting from angry to an attempt at soothing, "Hey. What happened?"

The infirmary wasn't far away, and he could already hear the bustle that indicated an incoming patient. He blinked, swaying into Sheppard's hold on his arm, "I almost didn't hear it."

"You were almost out the door," Ronon concluded, looking grim.

He nodded, surprised to feel a gurney at his back. Sheppard hefted him onto it, brows crinkled in concern and looking pale, "But you did. Okay? You caught him."

"I almost didn't," He repeated, staring at the medics surrounding McKay.

McKay's diagnosis - this time - was bizarre. Somehow he was still around, buffeted by all of AR-1 that wasn't already in an intensive care room. A doctor had come by and checked on him, a blur of white he hadn't paid attention to while his blood pressure was checked and eyes looked over with a penlight.

It was shock, probably. He ate the pudding that someone handed to him mechanically, barely feeling the warmth of Sheppard and Ronon buttressed against him. Teyla was probably somewhere, he hadn't noticed if she had left. The infirmary felt gauzed in weariness, and he wondered which would reach them first - McKay's mysterious series of blinks at death or the solution to the ZPM experiment's failure.

A part of him hoped it would be the ZPM. At least then McKay would be able to do something about it.

Doctor Beckett eventually exited the room McKay had disappeared into, closely followed by someone he recognized as an anesthesiologist veering off into another direction. Both had a portable computer in their hands, and Beckett looked downtrodden in the way of bad news. He felt himself stiffen right along Sheppard and Ronon.

"So," Beckett said slowly, "That was a mite bit of hypoxia there, we were lucky to stabilize it. Sergeant Campbell here did an admirable job working on Rodney until we could get to him."

"But?" Ronon said, his arms crossed.

"But we have no idea why that happened," Beckett replied. He ran a hand over his face, sighing, "We had to take multiple brain scans, but it was like his body forgot he could breathe air. We had a hell of a time convincing him there was plenty of it around him."

The silence after that remark was deafening. He crunched the pudding cup in his hand, feeling sick, "He. Doctor McKay looked-"

Beckett stepped forward, looking at him carefully, "What is it, son?"

Gulping in a breath under the scrutiny of the others, and well aware of its irony, he managed to say, "He sounded like he was drowning."

Sheppard jerked, standing up from the slouch he had against the gurney roughly to pace with a hand over his mouth. They watched him, and after a couple of paces to the computer console nearby and back, the colonel took the hand off his face and pointed at him, shaking his hand in emphasis, "Drowning? Are you sure?"

He glanced at Beckett, who was looking between the two of them in confused apprehension, "Yessir."

They watched as Sheppard decided to pace some more, the man only stopping when Teyla called out to him from where she was nervously folding and re-folding a blanket on another bed, "John. Please. Tell us what you're thinking."

Ronon shifted beside him, feeling coiled as if there was an attack nearby, "Elizabeth."

Sheppard nodded, "Right."

He bit his lip, wondering if he should ask. Doctor Beckett did it for him with a concerned frown, "Care to elucidate, colonel?"

Sheppard had one hand propped on a hip as he thought, waving the other, "You remember Elizabeth, right? The other one?"

"Wh-" Beckett frowned, "The older one?"

And he had officially lost the train of conversation. Hoping he wouldn't be dismissed, because he really wanted to make sure McKay was okay in person this time, he poked his head forward in attention.

"Yeah," Sheppard confirmed, nodding and looking at the floor as he paced, "She had to rotate the ZPMs in order to keep them working, so Atlantis wouldn't sink this time around."

A little hysterically, he wondered how many rumors he would hear confirmed just by sitting here watching everyone ping pong ideas. He watched Beckett nod slowly, "That was when you had Rodney in here again to test for a stroke."

"And then this time," Sheppard said, looking up at his team and swallowing roughly, "Sounded like drowning. Couldn't take in oxygen. Beckett, what did you have to do?"

"I…" Beckett looked at his computer, drawing a finger across it, "I had to treat it like acute generalized hypoxia with hypothermia. His body temperature was unusually low, considering where we found him."

Beckett looked thoughtful, turning to him, "And you said he had just finished eating, sergeant?"

He bobbed his head, "Yessir. He had a big bowl of salad from the mess. It had a lot, uh, cheese, and stuff in there?" A thought occurred to him, "There was vinaigrette in there, I think. It didn't have anything in it, did it?"

The doctor gave him a reassuring smile, clapping a hand on his shoulder, "No, lad, but that's good of you to consider. Doctor McKay is well-trained in what to do in case of anaphylactic shock, and he nearly always carries epinephrine with him just in case."

It was an unaccountable sense of relief, making him drop his shoulders. He had known, vaguely, that McKay was allergic to something, but it had been so long since they were last on Earth that he had forgotten what it was, other than being something disconcertingly common.

The reminder was less well-received by the man's team, as if the thought hadn't occurred to them alongside all the new problems. Teyla was finally in eyesight, having gravitated toward them during conversation, and she looked disconcerted at the idea.

"How did this happen?" She asked, shaking her head, "That was another timeline, Rodney could not have the memories of it."

The question nearly made him drop his empty cup in realization, "The experiment," He breathed, looking to Sheppard, "There was some data points we were discussing. A wormhole might have opened up between our ZPM and, uh, another one. The gate showed an in-dial and out-dial at the same time."

All of them looked baffled, and he straightened up, "I was curious about something Doctor Zelenka said when he and some other scientists were analyzing some data in the Ops room, so I pulled some data to try and look at it. Doctor McKay saw the email I had sent to myself and called me to his office."

Ronon snorted, and he grinned a little sheepishly, "Yeah. I thought I was gonna get yelled at, but he was wanting to see what I was getting at. He did… something with the data, and found out that whatever happened during the experiment on the ZPM, it might have created a wormhole between our dimension and another, and used the gate to reference its position."

The only one who looked like they could follow along was Sheppard, who sighed and tapped his comm, "Sheppard to Zelenka. You were talking to Rodney about some data? … Yeah, you wanna do a little show and tell?"

They all shuffled into the meeting room, minus Beckett, who had to stay in the infirmary and keep an eye on everything. Mr. Woolsey was sat in one chair, staring wearily at the whiteboard Zelenka had dragged into the room for the sake of expediency.

The board itself was covered in formulas and drawings, different marker colours used to highlight different areas. Sheppard was nodding along like he could follow most of it, and that made sense, given that McKay was his teammate and also, apparently, a whiz at math himself. It made a little spark of awe flare up, and he had to wrest his attention back to Zelenka's explanation.

"We are still incorporating data from Sergeant Campbell's dataset," Zelenka said, nodding to him, "I believe this would explain the anomalies in power stratification with ZPM and also Atlantis."

"Is this still ongoing?" Woolsey asked. He was looking at his coffee cup like it would resolve the meeting sooner.

"That…" Zelenka tilted his hand back and forth, giving up and shrugging, "We do not know. They might be fluctuating on a very small scale, and we had not thought to look. If not for Campbell's data, we would not have known how small of fluctuations."

"Atlantis is still floating," Ronon interjected, "Can't be that bad."

Zelenka held up his marker, "Only because we do not know what kind of bad it is."

Ronon looked thoughtful, the nodded once as if that answered his statement. Maybe it did, but then Ronon always appeared to look at a situation literally. It was helpful in an emergency situation, and he didn't know if this quite qualified as one.

That idea made him frown to himself. He raised his hand briefly to catch everyone's attention, and then pointed to the whiteboard, "Have we figured out how Doctor McKay's… illnesses are factoring into this?"

Zelenka shook his head, "Unfortunately not. But if your idea is correct, then it could be that Rodney was the one who initialized this process."

"Is Rodney experiencing what the ZPM is experiencing?" Teyla asked, gesturing to the board, "This seems to be a remarkably similar situation, if it is true that the ZPM is accessing an alternate reality."

"It may be more than one alternate reality," He said, looking at the portable computer propped up on the desk for them to look at, noticing it was one of the graphs McKay had set up, "Doctor Zelenka, what were the parameters of your experiment?"

He watched as the question truly registered, the older man paling, "Dobrý Bůh. We had been attempting to unify various sections of the ZPM to communicate with each other more properly and establish more cohesive power flow. Our upper boundary was only theoretical."

"What does this mean, Zelenka?" Sheppard asked, looking forbidding.

Zelenka looked to be calculating in his head, rotating the whiteboard marker in his hand, "It means that… that we had been attempting to figure out a means to configure a spare ZPM into a rechargeable state, rather than a power outflow state. It was only at twenty percent capacity, but…"

"Twenty percent?" Woolsey prompted, sitting straighter in concern.

Shaking his head, Zelenka turned to look at the board, muttering to himself, "If this is true, then as a matter of it being a zero point- yes. We only managed to install a one percent total additional charge to the ZPM."

He turned back to them, looking nervous and grave, "Rodney might be experiencing one percent of total possible alternate realities connecting to the ZPM."

Looking back, one percent didn't sound like a lot. But then it apparently wasn't a one percent in the sense of going from twenty percent to twenty one percent, so the actual number of change was even smaller. If this was enough to nearly kill McKay multiple times in the span of two weeks, then he dreaded to think what would have happened with a fully-charged ZPM.

Probably they would have been blown out of the water.

This was a failed experiment? It made him wonder what the scientists actually got up to in their labs, and all of a sudden Doranda made a lot more sense, if 0.202 zetta electronvolts increase in ZPM capacity was enough to wreak this much havoc.

With the new data in their arsenal, at least, things were looking a lot busier. Sheppard was helping to diagnose which parts of the city might be prone to electrical surges, blocking off things mentally - that never got any less cooler - so the shield doors in various hallways came down and locked in place.

The gate room and ops was du jour, but also under heavy scrutiny. If the ZPM could treat the stargate like a proxy, there was no actual telling what it could do, and they risked a short databurst back to Earth informing them of the situation before restricting all activity. He had to lock out Earth's address and the bridge program manually, and they shuffled around redirects to the alpha site in case one of the gates somehow blew.

He didn't think they would, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

The jumpers were also rearranged, and they managed to buff out the dents in a couple of other jumpers that were hanging in the bottom-level docks around the different piers. They hadn’t been fully repaired, but apparently were sea-worthy enough to act as substitutes if needed.

McKay was still in the infirmary, but once again in long-term care. It spoke a lot about how much this last scare had spooked him, given that he didn't hear any rumors of attempted jailbreaks. He didn't blame him; a part of him was still recovering from that, himself.

Given that it was his data, at least in part, that had spurred the newest discovery being studied, he had been co-opted by the science department. His shift was covered, and Sheppard seemed to split his time between the Ops room and the infirmary as the highest priorities.

It had probably been done for personal reasons, but maintaining the security of Atlantis was still the colonel's job. He certainly wasn't going to be the one to broach the subject, though, even if it was handy that Atlantis' priorities were also Sheppard's priorities. As it were, they all slowly acclimated to seeing the man let himself be taught a gate technician's job, at least for the few hours when an overlap wasn't available.

He was here himself, though, doing whatever Zelenka thought he should be doing. Currently it was helping with simulations, feeding data into computations and seeing what it visualised. There was a method to the madness, Zelenka had promised, but he wasn't at the stage to understand it.

And that was fine by him, the learning curve for applying formulas to raw data enough to baffle him. There was a time crunch, given the context, but he let himself be wrapped up in the excitement of learning something new that had immediate applicability. ZPMs were still the peak of understanding Atlantis - he combed the data with that in mind, doing his best to flag anything that looked similar to a wormhole developing with its energy patterns.

So far it seemed that mitigating the power allocations had a beneficial effects on the stability of the ZPM. It reminded him of the early days, when the only one had been half a clue about what a ZPM even was was McKay. Now there were half a dozen people on that research, all trained by McKay and the various troubleshooting methods used for applying and fixing it. Even though this seemed to outstrip everyone's knowledge capacity, everyone's mind was turned toward the next bend in the road, attempting to predict the unpredictable.

Tapping his laptop idly, he scrolled through the data again. There were a few discrepancies that haven't been spotted by the others on the team, so he set flags on them with the standardized commentary Zelenka had coached him in about pertinent parameters.

He didn't think there was anything he could add at the moment, though. For that, they were still waiting on McKay himself to finalize conclusions between him and Zelenka on everyone's findings. Swallowing the thread of dread he's been unable to get rid of, he hoped the man was doing alright.

Asking Teyla for a sparring session seemed like the right idea, especially after he had it cleared between Zelenka and Sheppard that it was alright to take a bit of a break. Go, before steam blows out of your ears, Zelenka had advised with no little amusement, We shall hold the fort down.

So an impromptu bantos lesson it was. Teyla was nice enough to realize he was having trouble following more than the very basics, so they spent more time with her directing the flow of their mock fight, only expecting him to intercept her blows instead of reacting to them.

It was calming in the way that a productive distraction was, and he let himself lean into the sound of their sticks clacking against each other at a pace just quick enough to keep him on his toes. They weren't speaking, but then there was no need to - he could see why so many of her students in the city came out looking calmer after a session, the rhythm of the bantos rods enough communication.

His thoughts inevitably slid to their current crisis - waiting for the peak of the problem to crest so they could solve it was nerve-wracking, despite actively working toward the resolution. Nobody knew, for sure, whether McKay would survive this, or even why he was affected in the first place. All they had was speculation that was capable of spiraling out of all recognizability without any concrete data to rely on.

Carson was doing his best, but despite having McKay in the infirmary, this seemed more like a medical corollary to a mechanical issue. He could only tell McKay was alive and otherwise healthy from the way Sheppard was interacting with everyone; there was none of the manic, suppressed grief surrounding him if that had been the case.

Hopefully that wouldn't be the case. Zelenka was stressed enough doing the job of two people with a city that might only maybe be on the verge of a meltdown - not something he realized a guy from his part of the world would like to experience again - without having to deal with his boss dying on him, too.

The sharp rap of Teyla's bantos rod across his knuckles forced him back into the present, and he dropped into a forfeit stance with an embarrassed flush heating his face, "Sorry," He apologized, "Mind got away from me."

Teyla only tilted her head in acknowledgment, smiling graciously, "It is understandable. We are all under much stress right now."

"Yeah," He sighed, curling the rapped hand into a fist and rotating it with a grimace, following her to the rack where the rods were stored, "It sucks, having to sit around and wait for something to happen, in order to do anything about it."

"This is true," Teyla responded, accepting the rods he offered her, setting them carefully back in their place. She gestured to see his hand, holding it in hers while she inspected it. The knuckles were showing signs of bruising, and she tsked as she prodded the inflamed parts, "We shall see Doctor Beckett, I am not sure if these are fractured."

He nodded, letting her lead him out of the sparring room. It was a short enough walk to the transporter, but Teyla's presence made it feel communal rather than awkward as she escorted him to the infirmary. It was a busy area on a typical day, and Teyla flagged down the doctor as he was exiting the room currently housing McKay.

"Hello there, love," Beckett greeted her. The wide smile on his face didn't seem fake, so he hoped with a quiet exhale that it boded well, "What brings you into my little corner today?"

Teyla smiled, gesturing to him, "Sergeant Campbell and I were sparring, and I'm afraid I don't know whether I fractured his hand. Would you be able to take a look at it?"

He got the same tsking noise Teyla had given him, Beckett reaching out to take a look at his hand in the same way. The prodding was, well, more clinical, and he hissed when a sore spot was prodded, "Aye, that looks like a simple enough break. I'll get you some painkillers and a brace, if you'll wait over there?"

'There' was a free bed, which Teyla steered him toward and effortlessly parted the loose crowd around them. It was near McKay's room, close enough that he could see the door was still open. Probably Beckett was in the middle of something when he and Teyla had interrupted, and he had to refrain from clenching his hand in a fit of guilt lest he make the injury worse.

Teyla had also spotted their relative position, and he saw her looking at the open door with a complicated expression. If he concentrated, he could hear a voice from inside the room, but it didn't sound like McKay's. He nudged her shoulder with his own, "You don't have to stay with me, y'know. But thanks for walking me here."

Her smile was thin, "It was no problem, Sergeant. It was the least I could do, as I was the one who injured you."

At the very last moment he remembered not to swear, "Sh- uh, stuff happens, ma'am, don't worry about it. But if you wanted to pop in and say hi to McKay, I'm not gonna tell anyone."

Teyla shook her head, but seemed a little bit cheered up, regardless, "Colonel Sheppard is in there, now. I do not believe Doctor McKay requires further attention at the moment - I shall visit later, when it is quieter."

If anyone was a master of subtlety, it was Teyla, and he nodded in agreement. The colonel had been taking it hard that McKay was still hurt from the ZPM accident, and not having any clear-cut answers to it was probably adding to the man's stress. He remembered the way Sheppard sounded on the city-wide comm, and shivered right as Beckett was stabilizing his hand for a wrap.

"Och," The doctor said, looking concerned, "You aren't sufferin' from a bit of shock, now, are ya?"

"Ah- no," He shook his head, embarrassed at the frowns both Beckett and Teyla were wearing, "No. I am feeling a chill, though, maybe because we didn't do our cool down exercises?"

Teyla looked thoughtfully at the careful way Beckett was binding his hand, "That is a possibility, Carson. You said you would be prescribing him something for the pain?"

Nodding in a consoling manner, Beckett gave his hand a gentle pat when he was done securing the wrap over the splint, "Aye, just a few milligrams of paracetamol ought to do it."

Flexing his fingers experimentally, he could tell that the pain was already subsiding, and he grinned, "Thanks, doc."

"Not a problem," Beckett smiled, "I'll have those pills for you in a moment."

Teyla looked ready to bid him goodbye, likely needing to get back to her other duties, but they both paused when they saw Zelenka stride into their section of the infirmary. He could tell the moment they were spotted by the way the scientist redirected his path, "Ah! Just who I am looking for. Here, look at this."

He barely had time to grab the computer Zelenka shoved at him, wincing as it pulled the newly-made brace, "Doc, what's this?"

"It is the projection of energy consumption by the ZPM," Zelenka said, looking faintly apologetic at the way Teyla helped stabilize the computer so it wouldn't drop, "Rodney, do you know if he is awake? I must tell him what these results mean."

Scanning the data in all its line graph glory, he frowned, "Isn't that our upper boundary it's hitting?"

Zelenka sighed, twisting his hands together before unclasping them to gesture, "Nearly so, yes. That was our projection from our original data. Somehow, whatever Rodney is experiencing is changing the parameters."

Teyla frowned, "What does this mean?"

"I have some ideas," Zelenka replied, sighing, "But I am not sure. I will need to speak to him."

"He's awake, Doc," He said, "Colonel Sheppard's in there, though."

Zelenka and Teyla looked at each other, doing that complex not-talking all the senior staff seemed to do at some point. Eventually they both looked unhappy, and Zelenka sighed again, taking the computer back from his hands, "Vím, ano, but I must speak with him. The colonel will understand."

He exchanged a look with Teyla, both of them apparently coming to the same conclusion to eavesdrop as Zelenka went inside McKay's infirmary room. Hiding on either side of the doorway was easier said than done, but the weary look Beckett gave both of them upon his return subsided when he realized why they were trying to surreptitiously peek into the room. There wasn't quite enough stuff to hide the way their heads poked around, but from what he could tell with only one eye looking, both McKay and Sheppard seemed riveted by Zelenka's presentation of the computer.

"There does seem to be an upper boundary of the amount of energy accrued by the experiment," Zelenka was explaining, pointing to something on the screen, McKay frowning at the data and nodding, "We have been able to approximate when it will achieve this mark - it is much more energy than we were anticipating, I think because the stargate had modulated the process of drawing power."

"…consolidating it," McKay murmured, the tail end of his sentence just barely audible. Zelenka nodded, and he could see Sheppard leaning forward, bracing himself on the gurney as he peered at the computer, "This doesn't make sense, though - there must be some variable we missed to get this order of magnitude."

Sheppard made a low sound, "You, Rodney. You're the variable."

He heard McKay make a derisive sound, "All I did was press a button."

"All you did was die, McKay," Sheppard grabbed the other man's arm, squeezing it tight enough that the alarm for McKay's pulse beeped at them, "We had a hell of a time getting you back."

He looked away from the sight of McKay looking at Sheppard in shock, seeing Teyla's face being tightly-drawn, and behind her, Doctor Beckett looking grim. Nobody that had their comm on at the time would forget that incident any time soon, he thought. When he heard Zelenka interrupt McKay floundering for something to say, he forced his attention back to the scene in the room.

"Sheppard is correct, Rodney," Zelenka said, tapping a button on the keyboard and then pointing to the screen again, "If you see here, the fluctuations in the power draw are matching your, ah, incidents."

"Near-death experiences, you mean," McKay said sourly.

"… Yes," Zelenka admitted, pushing his glasses up, "There is another thing."

McKay sighed, making a 'hurry up' gesture with his free hand, Sheppard still gripping McKay's forearm. Both seemed to either be unaware of their position or ignoring it, something that Zelenka likewise seemed to be playing along with.

"The next fluctuation will be in a few minutes," Zelenka said flatly, "The increases in power are mostly logarithmic in scale."

Everyone within earshot froze. The only sound for a moment was the flutter of McKay's heartbeat, audible only through the monitor hooked up to him. It smoothed back to a normal pulse quicker than he expected, though, McKay responding, "How many?"

"I-" Zelenka inhaled roughly, "At this scale? Not many more. Rodney-"

McKay's lips pursed, "I see," He watched the scientist hand the computer back to Zelenka, who seemed to stumble under its weight, light as the device was, "… Thank you. For your time."

It was an uncharacteristically courteous thing for McKay to say, but it seemed to resonate with the other two men in the room - likewise, he could sense Teyla and Beckett stiffening out of the corner of his eye. McKay glanced at Zelenka before turning his attention away in clear dismissal, his only other movement turning the arm Sheppard was still holding palm-up. He watched Sheppard strangle whatever he was going to say, only moving to slide his hand into McKay's as Zelenka nodded and left without a word.

When Zelenka passed through the doorway, he didn't betray their presence there, obviously eavesdropping, only holding his head up as he presumably exited the infirmary entirely. Teyla had a hand over her mouth, reaching behind her to grab at Beckett. He felt the need to be as silent as them, waiting for whatever happened next. If the last time was Beckett struggling to revive McKay, what would the next time bring?

He wasn't sure he wanted to find out, but he found his feet glued in place, unable to bring himself to move.

Inside the room, McKay sighed, "John-"

"No."

A wordless grumble, almost too quiet to hear, "John, I'm serious."

"The answer's still no."

"You don't even know what I'm going to ask of you," McKay said exasperatedly.

Sheppard's dogged reticence was obvious in his tone, "I do."

"… You do."

There was a beat of quiet, and he imagined there was something he was too reluctant to peek inside to see. Teyla seemed to be in the same position, and for lack of anywhere better to look as they listened, they looked at each other. He didn't know what expression was on his face, but he imagined it was something similar to the grief carving rivers into hers.

"We're good, right?"

Sheppard made a small, choked sound, "Yeah, buddy. We're good."

His fractured hand was aching again, enough to draw his attention away from the steady, reassuring sound of McKay's heart monitor, and he realized that he was balling it into the fabric of his uniform. It felt exactly like the tenterhooks of the first time he overheard everything, back when Atlantis had informed him a life sign had dropped off the monitor. He found his breath caught, waiting once more.

Whatever Zelenka's predictions, they were on the mark, some electric zing raising the hair on his neck as another monitor made a noise in a way that had Beckett startling, only held back by Teyla's grip on his shirt. McKay was speaking again, his diction softer, fonder.

"Don't forget, John, this is important," McKay said, "You don't have much time to get through the gate. Go on- I'll be right there."

Sheppard was responding, even though it was apparent this wasn't McKay, not really, "I will, Rodney. You- you be safe, okay?"

He clenched the fistful of uniform tighter at the way McKay hummed, gentle and amused, "Young man, what are you doing here? I don't think I could store that much data."

"You're here," Sheppard gasped, "Here. You did it, Rodney, I made it back. There's- there was an accident, Rodney was attempting to recharge the ZPM."

"Oh," Rodney chuckled, "Isn't that ambitious. But yes, you seem to be correct. What am I doing here, then? I may be a hologram but I'm no subspace."

Hologram? He mouthed the word to Teyla, who looked unsettled. It was strange enough to make him peek inside, Teyla apparently doing the same by the glint of how her hair fell across her shoulder. Sheppard was leaning into McKay's space, conveniently keeping them from being seen, even if they wouldn't be able to see whatever expression was on McKay's face.

If this was what he thought it was, though, he was glad the sigh was obscured. Watching McKay struggle to stay alive was difficult enough the first time - he wasn't keen on seeing it again.

"Chuck- do you remember him? Chuck Campbell?" Sheppard said, speaking quickly, as if he was trying to beat the clock, "He found some connecting piece of data. You and Zelenka were attempting to recharge the ZPM, and you- you initialized it. Your heart stopped."

That was as painful to hear as it was, apparently, for Sheppard to say. But he saw how McKay reached his free hand up, placing it on Sheppard's bowed head. The gesture was unbelievable gentle, despite how it drew a broken sound from Sheppard, "It's alright," McKay soothed, "How many times has this happened so far, hm? Tell me."

Sheppard inhaled raggedly, lifting his head, but not enough to dislodge McKay's hand upon it, "Three times. You're the fourth."

"I can feel the power draw," McKay murmured, "Not a bad way to go, all things considered. Beats waiting for the sun."

"It's- it's shorter, yeah," Sheppard replied.

"What do you need, John?" McKay asked, "I didn't spend all that time for something to go wrong now."

"I need you," Sheppard said immediately, then cringed, the shape of his shoulders bowing, "I mean- I need my Rodney. This is killing him."

McKay was silent for a moment, seemingly fascinated to draw his hand through Sheppard's hair. He didn't know if they were already like that, but Sheppard offered no complaint, and he wasn't about to ask any questions. The other monitor, which was apparently monitoring a brain wave or maybe an EKG, he didn't know, was picking up in pace in small, noticeable increments.

"Alright," McKay agreed simply, "Let me see what I can do."

"Thank you," Sheppard gasped, leaning forward to brace his forehead against McKay's in the same way he'd seen the Athosians do.

"John," McKay said, hand going to the colonel's shoulder and gently pushing the man away, "It is good to see you. Regardless of the circumstances."

Sheppard covered McKay's hand with his own, grasping tight enough that McKay would have usually yelped in pain. The scientist instead looked only fascinated, staring at the white-knuckled grip upon him, "Oh- oh my. Can I really-"

Nodding quickly, he could hear Sheppard swallow, "Yeah. Really."

He had to blink a few times at the unmistakable sight of both of them leaning together to kiss. It wasn't anything particularly scandalous, other than the fact that he wasn't expecting to see it, and he was really only able to see the way Sheppard was apparently willing to accommodate McKay by contorting himself over the infirmary bed.

It was over as quickly as it began, Sheppard clasping the side of McKay's head and letting himself be entangled with the other man. He could hear speech, but it was too quiet and too low for him to even guess what was being said.

"Time to go," McKay eventually said, settling a hand on Sheppard's face, thumb brushing at the corner of Sheppard's eye, "Take care, John."

"You, too," Sheppard said roughly, breathing in shakily and leaning away, composing himself with a quick swipe at his eyes.

He was still processing what was in front of him when the machines hooked up to McKay blurted out in alarm. Beckett practically dove into the room, Sheppard easily stepping into a corner as other medical staff filed in. They all looked grim, ignoring him and Teyla as they carried in equipment.

The ensuing chaos was enough to convince him to back away, pulling Teyla with him. She looked shell-shocked, hand still faintly cupped over her mouth, cheeks streaked in unexpected tears, "C'mon, ma'am," He said quietly, his own heart still shaking from the scene, "Let's let them work."

Teyla nodded, and he cast a glance back into the room. Sheppard's eyes were glued to McKay being resuscitated, arms crossed over himself and looking small where he had pressed himself into the corner.

Whatever it was that this- this holographic, apparently, version of McKay did, it had Zelenka running into Woolsey's office uncaring of how many people he ran into. It had already been daylight, so he hadn't noticed the purported power spike that had made all the lights on Atlantis glow, but from the colonel's pale countenance as he was called into the office, McKay's efforts had been significant.

Teyla had been the one to inform him of its magnitude. Both of them were sitting at a table in the mess, long enough past dinner hours that even she looked fatigued. They picked at the fried fish that the kitchen staff had decided to serve that night, some creamy sauce overlaying it and an unappetizing mix of vegetables that didn't quite hide the sharp bite of spices the botany department confirmed was high in vitamin C.

"Doctor Beckett assured us that Rodney is stable," She confided in him quietly, spearing a morsel of wannabe-carrots on her fork unenthusiastically, "They're using a regenerative scanner to heal the damage of the electrical shock he endured when his alternate self transferred energy to the ZPM."

"How-" He coughed on a piece of pepper flake, reaching for his glass of juice, "How much energy was it?"

Teyla raised an expansive eyebrow, shaking her head at her plate as she frowned, "I am not sure the precise number, but Doctor Zelenka assured me it was a significant amount. Rodney is lucky to have survived it."

"Is this a good thing?" He asked. The sharp whine of the defibrillator had only been in the periphery of his hearing as he escorted himself and Teyla out of the infirmary, but the pitch of it had stayed as an incessant buzz in his ears even hours afterward. There had been a lot of scientists running around in the interim time, making all the soldiers anxious about having nothing productive to do.

He watched her shrug limply, shoveling a bite of food into her mouth in a blatantly automatic action. It was obvious her thoughts were far away, and he guessed from the scuttlebutt that she had been helping Woolsey to coordinate information and keep Sheppard calm enough to be useful. Come think of it, he hadn't seen anything of the colonel since earlier that day - Beckett was likely to kick people out when he was busy with a patient, but it was Lorne who had been sending soldiers on preemptive patrols in case they needed to be anywhere quickly.

The golden hues of the setting sun morphing into dark blues made Teyla's sigh more effusive than it really was, "Doctor Zelenka has predicted that Rodney's actions have ensured the plateau will be achieved sooner. Presumably this means that there will be fewer incidents incapacitating Rodney."

Chewing on his fish thoughtfully, he tilted his head to one side, doing his best to recall the data that Zelenka had showed him in the infirmary. They had all more or less established that - whether anyone liked it or not - McKay being the initializer to the recharging program meant that when- if, he reminded himself sternly - the man could no longer act as a conduit, then the program would have run its route. None of them had admitted out loud what the end of that road meant; Zelenka had been the closest, earlier, having calculated a more or less exact time.

He gripped his fork tighter, setting it down before the tremble in his hands could cause him to drop the utensil. It clanked loudly in the relative silence of the mess, too few people taking up room to lose the noise in background chatter. Teyla's head rose sharply at the unexpected noise, eyes focusing before realizing there was no immediate danger to be had.

Her compassionate look made him want to sink into his seat - McKay was one of her team mates, he ought to be the one comforting her, not the other way around. It looked like taking on the mantle of responsibility was a hard habit to break, though, and he had the feeling it was more helpful to her. He sighed, accepting the curl of her hand over his forearm with as much grace as he could muster.

"I really don't like the Ancients," He muttered, shooting Teyla a wry look, "No offense."

She smiled easily, "No offense taken. I, too, have learned to question their ways. It has been a difficult lesson, but a useful one."

They ate their meal a little more easily after that, the food tasting more palatable now that he was a little more grounded in the present. It was a companionable silence, one that was refreshing after the events of the day.

When Teyla raised a hand to her ear, head tilted, he felt himself tensing, but a quick shake of her head dissipated the reflexive fear. She listened intently to whatever was on the other side of the line, smiling after a moment, "That is excellent news, thank you," She said, smiling warmly, "Yes, you have a good night as well, John. Let us know if you require anything."

He raised a curious eyebrow as they stood from the table and bussed their trays, "Good news?"

"Yes," She confirmed, grinning, "Rodney woke up briefly and has regained lucidity. They will be watching him carefully, but for now we have ample opportunity to rest."

He grinned back, "That's great news."

Teyla briefly clasped him on the shoulder before they parted ways, "Indeed. Thank you for sharing dinner with me, Sergeant, and have a good rest of your evening."

"Same to you," He replied, feeling himself finally settle, for real. They might not be out of the woods, but the confirmation that they were most of the way there was encouraging.

It was relatively deserted in the hallways back to his room, everyone either cooped up in the labs or long since winding down to bed. He found himself enjoying the solitude. McKay had come through yet again - their little cornerstone would last just a bit longer.

For a while it seemed like the coast was clear. He was able to take a couple more shifts at the Ops room again, and whenever the colonel swung by, the man seemed to be in a much better mood. McKay was still tentatively in the infirmary, watched closely as he recuperated.

But just like a ship exiting the threshold of a storm, he kept a nervous eye on the horizon, checking the data Zelenka let him have access to several times a day. It had become rote habit - once an hour, or more, if his fingers felt the wrong sort of twitchy.

Zero-point-two-oh-two. It was the magical number, approximately.

They hadn't even reached it yet.

So he pasted on a smile, did as he was ordered, and waited for the next wave.

When it came, he was merely in the infirmary for a routine check-up, one of the doctors on shift scanning his hand with a little oval-shaped device that would record the pace of his healing and administer some sort of electrical field to hurry things along. It made his hand a little numb, and he was still flexing it absently as the doctor left for the storage cabinet in search of a softer brace that would function more as a reminder than anything else when an alarm trilled from McKay's room on the other side of the infirmary.

It was alarmingly similar to the last time, and he felt drawn to move toward McKay's infirmary room, as if it were a gravity well drawing in everyone in the vicinity. Something seemed to be out of order, though, the doctors clearing out unusually quickly but with strange expressions on their faces.

He lingered by the door, again, uncertain whether he intended to keep watch or to eavesdrop. The decision was taken from him, though, when Sheppard tentatively said, "McKay?"

"Ah."

The voice was McKay's, but the tone was not - or, rather, not one he could imagine. It reminded him vaguely of Woolsey, whenever he had caught the man's arguments with the IOA through gate transmissions. Firm, vaguely condescending, and brooking no argument.

Few arguments of that type had ever crossed their proverbial desks, mostly because setting up communication buoys between the two galaxies was expensive, exhausting work according to McKay, and hardly worth the work when an email would suffice. It wasn't like the IOA had much pull here, according to the invectives McKay had thrown when Woolsey had made one half-hearted attempt to hand down circumspect orders.

He barely tuned his attention back to the conversation at hand, still caught up in memories of how all of them had been grilled when they had hauled ass to save Earth. McKay was speaking, in that unnervingly controlled pace that the man usually lacked.

"-must be in another dimension, correct?" McKay said, laying out facts as if they were options on a table. It was entirely like McKay, that even alternate universe versions of him were able to deduce a situation after being thrown head-first into it.

"… Correct," Sheppard said, drawling out his answer.

"Don't sound so uncertain," McKay said chidingly, "It doesn't become you."

"And how would you know what 'becomes' me?" Sheppard replied, sounding some mix of unconcerned and angry. Given how Sheppard had reacted to the last McKay that hopped into, well, McKay's brain, he was a little surprised at the reaction, and wondered what exactly it was that he had missed.

"Because I have never known a John Sheppard that did not fling himself into death without the slightest provocation," McKay snapped, and whoa, how many Sheppards did this McKay meet? He frowned at the headache-inducing thought, leaning his head against the doorframe and wondering what McKay would say next, "And either I am dead or dying, because I am seeing you in the infirmary, so tell me what is going on."

The pause that followed that was long and tense. He felt himself straightening up in reflex at the rustle of cloth that was undeniably the colonel stalking toward McKay in a pissed-off mood.

"You are not dead or dying," Sheppard hissed, "Or if you are, I'm not currently giving a shit. What's going on is that my McKay is maybe dying, because all of you alternate universe McKays are butting in to his head and trying to kill him. So you tell me what's going on."

He could hear the beeping of the machinery, feeling like he was perhaps listening in on something more private than originally believed. Still, his feet were too leaden to move, and he was able to hear the way McKay exhaled.

"Maybe I am," McKay said thoughtfully, "And I'm just too far gone to realize it. Alternate universe, you say? How is that happening? I don't see a quantum mirror anywhere, and at any rate, they don't work like this."

"There's no quantum mirror involved," Sheppard ground out, "Also, what? What would you be dying from?"

"Hm," McKay sounded amused, "Take your pick. We're - or perhaps I - have been having a war of attrition with the Wraith. I take it by your presence on Atlantis that this is a universe in which you came along with the expedition? How many people are left of the original expedition?"

There was a metallic rattle, as if Sheppard had grabbed the bed railing and shaken it, "Seventy-seven percent."

"Not bad," McKay sounded impressed, "I had always known your presence kept more people alive, but it's always nice to have a figure on hand."

"Are you-" Sheppard's voice caught, and he pressed himself further into the little alcove by the door, heart thumping. Seventy-seven percent? He remembered how many had died the first year, from sheer bad luck or from being on a gate team, but it hadn't occurred to him that Sheppard had kept meticulous track of the number of- of survivors. Dozens of people lost from the original two hundred, and that before the miraculous arrival of the Daedalus.

Sheppard seemed to have found whatever energy was required to keep speaking, "Are you from one of the realities where I didn't go?"

He listened to McKay chuff a laugh, too full of honest grief that he had the feeling no version of McKay would ever indulge in public. Sheppard didn't count, and he doubted Sheppard ever counted as a true stranger, "John Sheppard. You were dishonourably discharged long before this expedition ever formed."

The weak feeling in his knees caught him off-guard. Not staying in the military? Sheppard? It seemed too ridiculous to be true. The man wore his uniform like it was the only thing he would ever volunteer for, and had figured out how to lead the military contingent as Weir's right hand through literal thick and thin when everyone seemed to believe Sheppard wasn't cut out for it.

Colonel Sheppard was their commander, and he couldn't fathom anyone else in the role. Who was it this McKay had? Sumner? Someone else? He had been pleased at hearing about a seventy-seven percent survival rate, when they had all grieved over it. What hellhole did this McKay come from?

"What happened?" Sheppard asked, rough and almost too quiet to be heard.

There was a pause, quick enough to be glossed over, before McKay spoke, "We had Wraith on Earth, some freak accident of an invasion we were barely able to keep wraps on. You were the only detective in Las Vegas capable of tracking down the victims. Eventually," McKay sighed, "Eventually you ran into your perp."

"A Wraith killed me," Sheppard said flatly.

"No," McKay chuckled, an unexpected sound, "Or at least not then. I was in charge of your interrogation. You didn't want to join the program - too much debt, I believe. Then you were off, probably heading down to Mexico in your little sports car, when you called me."

"Thought we didn't know each other."

He felt the urge to peek into the room at Sheppard's tone, but held back, vaguely wondering why nobody was around to pluck him away from the doorway and scold him for the intrusion. But the area seemed curiously clear, as if in deference to Sheppard and McKay conversing with each other.

"We didn't," McKay confirmed, sighing as if releasing a great burden, "But I had still given you my number. You had called me, made a U-turn in the middle of the nowhere. Apparently, you had figured out where the Wraith would be, sending out the signal of Earth's location."

"Wanted to keep in touch, eh?" Sheppard said weakly. It was the first time he had heard Sheppard attempting to deflect. Maybe the colonel had picked up on what he had - that this McKay wasn't a nice one, or maybe hadn't had the luxury of it.

"Something like that," McKay replied wryly. In the background, the pace of the monitors shifted, so slight it would have gone unnoticed if he hadn't been working with Zelenka almost non-stop for the past couple of weeks attempting to parse the problems with the ZPM and McKay alike, "I had called in the airstrike on the coordinates you gave me. I… didn't know if you had managed to escape the strike zone in time. Not then."

"I'm sorry," Sheppard said, and he wondered if this would be like last time, if he looked inside the room.

"Don't be," The bitterness was apparent in McKay's voice, "I was at least able to meet you. It doesn't seem to be guaranteed in these multi-verses of ours."

"How long? It doesn't sound like a long time."

"… Three days. Give or take," McKay admitted, over Sheppard's sharp inhale, "All sounds very biblical, if you ask me. Only you didn't rise again. We- we didn't have time for a proper funeral. Atlantis had to move back to the Pegasus galaxy in order to contain the rest of the Wraith invasion. It was only because of you that the coordinates burst wasn't sent out to more galaxies through the rip in spacetime. I can only imagine if it made it to your sensors or not."

"We'll handle it," Sheppard promised, seeming to gloss over the news of his own alternate universe's death, Atlantis being able to make such a miraculous journey, and a projected doom that might be sent their way entirely, "Was there anything you wanted to know?"

"Do you really like spearmint gum?" McKay asked, sounding faintly uncertain.

Sheppard, unexpectedly, laughed. It sounded surprised, and honest, "Only you, McKay," Sheppard said, when he managed to let his belly laughs peter off into chuckles, "Only if I'm smoking. Why do you ask?"

There was a sigh, a fwump as if McKay had slumped into his pillow, "I was wondering why that Sheppard insisted on it. Seems he had picked something up about how I was asking. You were always too smart for your own good."

"Yeah," Sheppard said wryly, "I get that a lot."

"From me, I suppose?" McKay asked. It sounded, if he didn't know any better, vaguely coy. He felt his cheeks warm by proxy, wondering if it would be too late to slip away and find that doctor looking for his replacement brace.

"Funnily enough, you always seemed impressed," Sheppard replied, "Always surprised when I said something smart."

"Well, you are a flyboy," McKay said ruefully.

Their laughter sounded almost normal, as if this were yet another post-mission infirmary stay rather than everyone waiting on tenterhooks whether McKay would survive a leap of faith experiment. His heart clenched painfully at the demonstrated fact of McKay and Sheppard getting along in any reality, and across realities, Zelenka's words from the last incident rearing up in unpleasant reminder.

"So," McKay said, his curiosity warm and unlike the crispness of earlier, "What's it like? Here?"

"… Ah. Pretty good," Sheppard hedged, "It's a lot more fun when it's both of us."

"That sounds nice," McKay sounded wistful, "I would have liked that. Just once."

"Well, I'm here now," Sheppard insisted, "As long as you have me."

And now, now, he felt like he was undeniably intruding. He inched away, hoping nobody would catch him doing it, the indulgent, overlapping chatter from the colonel and McKay echoing in the background as he sought out a doctor. Whatever would happen, he thinks, it should be alright.

Neither of them would let it fall apart.

Whatever had happened with that particular McKay, he didn't know - only that Zelenka had pinged him over the comms, ordering him to the Ops room to track fluctuations with the gate. He ran, sliding into his seat right as the gate powered on, and his fingers flew over the keyboard to look at the data.

"No incoming IDC," He confirmed aloud, hearing the familiar steps of Woolsey skidding to a stop behind him. Wherever Zelenka was, he could only assume it was back in the lab, or else the ZPM room. Inhaling mostly to steady himself, he ran the program Zelenka and McKay had mocked up, something that would check if the dial-in was from Atlantis or not-Atlantis, "No… incoming address, either."

"Do we have any other information?" Woolsey asked him.

He shook his head, tapping his comm, "Campbell to Zelenka."

"I am very busy!" Zelenka shouted into the line, sounding out of breath. Right on cue, there was some muttering in Czech, the city giving an imperceptible sway, as if it were a ship about to breach the boundaries of a storm. Swearing to himself, he clutched at the console reflexively, feeling Woolsey grab the back of the chair, "You, run the code again. Do you see anything?"

Biting his lip, he did as instructed, pressing run on the program and waiting anxiously. It seemed like the rest of the room was waiting with bated breath - he didn't even want to consider the potential chaos in the infirmary, briefly screwing his eyes shut to ward off any bad luck. Behind him, Woolsey's hand clenched tighter on the chair, the plastic creaking under his grip.

When the computer pinged, he exhaled roughly, quickly reading over the results, "Incoming address is Atlantis, sir."

There was more muttering, a mix of Czech and English, too rapid for him to make out any particulars. Watching the active portal on the gate, he wondered once again at what the gate was connecting to, at how the wormhole looked from the inside. The iris would prevent anything from coming through, anyway, but for a moment the possibility of something intangible traversing that barrier made his heart skip a beat.

"ZPM has regained stability," Zelenka announced, making him startle. Behind him, Woolsey made a wordless murmur of concern, abruptly making him remember that he was the only one on the line with the scientist, "Zero point… zero point three zero zero zetta electrovolts increase in ZPM charge."

He echoed Zelenka's disbelief with a faint gasp of his own, turning around to grip tightly at Woosley's arm, "Doctor McKay-"

Woolsey nodded sharply, tapping his comm, "Woolsey to infirmary. I need a status report on Doctor McKay."

The silence in both the room and at the other end of his call with Zelenka was deafening. He found himself watching Woosley's expression with desperation, needing some finality to the situation.

After a beat, and then two, Woolsey relaxed, a faint smile on his face, "Thank you, doctor. Please convey our regards."

It took effort to bite back the instinctive Well? that he wanted to ask, but it must have been written all over his face, anyway, because Woolsey patted his arm reassuringly and then peeled his hand off with a hesitant kindness. "Everything is well, Sergeant," The man announced, smiling at him indulgently, "Is Doctor Zelenka still on the line with you?"

"Ah-" He flushed, "Yessir. Doctor Zelenka, did you hear-"

"Yes, you are quite loud, both of you," Zelenka griped, sounding nevertheless relieved, "Thank you."

"You're welcome," He replied automatically, "Campbell out."

Tapping the call off, he slumped in his chair, staring out at the gate as it closed with a sedate whoosh. He listened with half an ear to the tentative chatter burbling up around him, feeling a little shell-shocked at the problem being resolved at all. Absently, he shook out his hands, the tingle of adrenaline still sparking at the ends of his fingers.

Woolsey pressed a hand at his shoulder, "That was very good work, Sergeant. Why don't you take the rest of your shift off, relax a little?"

He nodded blankly, the words making sense to him after the fact, "Oh. Um. Thank you, sir."

Stumbling out of his chair on wobbly legs, he realized he knew exactly where he needed to go, pushing past the people milling about the room and directly to the transporter.

Whatever was going on in the infirmary, it seemed all was clear. There had been enough time between the Ops room and the infirmary for him to calm down, the erratic, nervous patter of his heart finally settling. He straightened when he saw Doctor Beckett coming toward him, only relaxing when the man gave him a reassuring smile.

"Are you here for Rodney, then?" The doctor asked, corralling him in with an arm when he nodded and leading them to McKay's infirmary room, "He should be resting right about now, that business with the ZPM scaring the hair off of us, but all's well that end's well, I suppose."

He nodded along to Beckett's chatter, both of them navigating the other personnel and lingering at the room's door. It was quiet there, a calmness emanating from its stillness that had been absent during the entirety of McKay's stay in the infirmary. He frowned, not wanting to intrude if McKay was finally able to get a restful sleep.

"Ach, don't worry about it," Beckett said, albeit in a hushed tone. The man pushed him forward by his shoulder, steering him into the room, "You'll hardly be able to wake either o' them at the moment."

The question rising to his lips of Both? Fell away when he saw what the doctor meant. Colonel Sheppard had scooted up the guest chair to the very edge of the infirmary bed, one arm entangled with McKay's. Both were snoring lightly, and someone had propped the colonel's head up with a pillow tucked over the edge of the chair.

He noticed that both of them looked peacefully asleep, a notion that was supported by the even beeping of the monitor recording of McKay's vitals. It undid that persistent tangle of fear he had been harbouring since McKay had first collapsed on him in the labs, letting the remembered echo of Sheppard's voice over the comms that had been repeating McKay's name fade away.

Perhaps those memories would still crop up on the bad days - probably the next time they needed McKay and Sheppard to save the day and fix whatever had gone wrong, but for now he just sighed, hearing the way Beckett did the same.

"Better now, lad?" The doctor asked, patting his shoulder.

Nodding, he smiled, "Yeah. Thank you."

Beckett returned his smile, watching the two for a moment more and seeming to relax the longer both colonel and scientist were undisturbed, "Aye, well," The doctor blinked back to himself, "Let's let them rest."

As he walked away, he could swear he felt the city settle, its normal rhythm restored. He breathed out a sigh of relief, letting the sunshine filtering in through the corridor windows warm him. Everything would be alright, now.

Author's Notes

Glossary

No budu proklet - Czech, "Well I'll be damned"

Dobrý Bůh - Czech, "Good God"

Vím, ano - Czech, "I know, yes"