Salt Of The Earth 1

In Dark Places

by Dasha

URL: http://www.area52hkh.net/asd/dasha/saltof01.php
Summary: Rodney has almost everything he wants

"I cannot decide if it is beautiful, or merely...unsettling," Teyla said.

Rodney looked around the cavern--fifty meters long, straight walls nearly thirty meters high, and every square centimeter covered with highly detailed relief art--and winced. There was no question. It was creepy. When the wind blew strongly enough on the plateau to bring the electricity to full power, the light shown all the way to the distant ceiling, which was also covered with lifelike carvings. It must be a very windy night indeed, because the lights were certainly bright. He could see the expressions on the faces of the nearest carvings; the terror vivid and heart wrenching in the eyes of perfectly formed children, the snarl of the Wraith who chased them...it was enough to chill the blood, even though the images were cut in glittering, pink salt.

Ronon shrugged. "The miners are just showing the facts of their lives."

Apparently the facts of life mining salt on Ithna Son included the Wraith coming down in the mines to drag their meals out by hand since they were too far under ground for darts to pick them up by dematerialization ray. There were images of miners mining, of intricate, medieval-looking cities shown from a picturesque distance, of weddings and dances, of exquisitely carved flowers....But most of the pinkish salt carvings were of cullings, in miserable, terrifying detail.

This was the cavern where the miners lived. Rodney sat with Teyls and Ronon at one of the long, wooden tables where the miners ate. By the walls were the soft bed-nests where the miners slept. In the open space before the far wall was a kind of gymnasium—the kind with multiple parallel bars and ropes and climbable arches where the miners played. When they weren't working or taking turns delivering their product to the tiny river port beyond the plateau, this was where they lived their lives. Every night they came here from their long day of work and ate and drank and sang and prayed amid their horrifying art. Even the eternally diplomatic Teyla looked appalled.

"Really, they ought to make it a theme park," Rodney muttered, "Disney had the wrong idea with all those cute, fuzzy animals." Nobody got the humor, of course. Ronon and Teyla didn't usually seem to get Rodney's jokes, even when they didn't rely on cultural references from Earth, and the Colonel was off being Captain Kirk again. "It's almost funny."

Teyla's eyes lingered on the harsh lines of the body of the Wraith that looked down at them from about five meters up. "Almost funny. If you have a very odd sense of humor." She was talking about the art, but her comment worked as well for what Rodney had actually meant. John Sheppard, the most charming man in two galaxies was at it again, and yes, if your sense of humor leaned toward bitter, intergalactic irony, then yes, it was funny.

The woman wasn't even pretty this time. She was a mine engineer, short and sturdy with shoulders as broad as John himself and thick, blunt hands. Her hair was short and a non-descript brown. She didn't smile sweetly or say welcoming things and her voice wasn't melodic. She seemed a couple years older than John and she was smart. Rodney had kind of liked her until Captain Kirk turned on the charm. Now, Ancient technology or not, Rodney sort of wished they could turn around and go home. As it was, they were probably looking at three more days at least.

The hike from the gate to the mine had taken more than half the day. The rest had been spent in negotiation for a chance to look at what the miners had found. They had brought Elizabeth along to handle negotiations, since Barnes and the B-team hadn't managed to bargain for squat. The idea of the three of them off Atlantis at once was an obvious bad one, but Rodney had had to be part of the away team so that when Elizabeth got them access to the Ancient manufacturing facility the go-to guy would be there to make the most of their time. And, as Sheppard had put it, there was no way he was letting both Elizabeth and Rodney off Atlantis without himself along for security.

Not that Sheppard was paying any attention to either of them. Elizabeth was at the head table schmoozing with the mine owner and the two supervisors, offering gifts of sugar and chocolate and antibiotics. Rodney was sitting with the team, admiring the horrifying local art. And Sheppard was off making eyes at the homely mine engineer.

A teenager, one of the mine's apprentices, came to each table and set out a stack of wooden bowels. Rodney thought ugly thoughts about child labor, but didn't criticize. The kid wasn't expected to swing a pick, anyway. An elderly woman came behind him, carrying a kettle of stew. Damn. With all of this communal living, it would be hard to pick at his dinner and then sneak an MRE later. Just to play it safe, Rodney stuck to grain products and meat as much as possible when they were eating with locals, but lately everything seemed to give him gas, even though nothing was likely to kill him. And, of course, if he had to keep to this diet for days at a time there were issues centering on fiber that didn't even bear thinking of. Privacy would have made it easier.

Rodney looked up to see the mine engineer leading John back to the table. She patted him on the shoulder as she motioned to the empty space on the bench and then bounced away cheerfully. A perky, homely, mine engineer.

"Well, Colonel, you seem to be enjoying the local scenery," he said. He meant it to be condescending, but it came out sullen.

John had no trouble managing condescending. "Why, Dr. McKay. I am beginning to think you just don't like people very much."

"I like people fine. I just have very low expectations." And it was sort of the truth. He liked some people very much. And he was trying not to have high expectations. If he liked some people too much and had been trying to lower his expectations since kindergarten, well, intent counted for something, surely.

The mine engineer came back with a glass pitcher full of what might be beer (or might be the piss of some large mammal) and another wooden bowl. She glanced from Teyla to Ronon and back, settling on Ronon. "We serve the youngest first. Here in the mines it is important to remember that while we are not equals, even the least of us are valued." She filled the bowl and passed it to Ronon, who looked only slightly amused at being called the least important person at their end of the table. Rodney tried not to think of the inherent nastiness of sharing a single drinking bowl. He could picture himself drinking after Sheppard or Teyla or even Ronon, now, although it wasn't his first choice. But this little alien, whom he didn't even like....

One more unpleasantness in what promised to be a very unpleasant evening. Sheppard chatted away cheerfully with the engineer. They talked about geometry and art and the properties of different kinds of salt. Sometimes they generously drew Teyla into the conversation. Ronon was as thoroughly left out as Rodney, but Ronon didn't seem to care.

The local beer turned out to be pretty good, though.

Rodney picked at his food and pretended not to think about who else was drinking out of the cup until dinner was over and it wasn't outright rude to get up from the table and take a walk.

He headed back the way they'd come, up the steep ramps toward the surface. The way was clearly marked. Even if it hadn't been, the floor of the passage was not the chipped, angular surface of recent excavation but was warn into a smooth, concave trough by generations of feet. It took only about twenty minutes to reach the wide mouth of the mine.

It was still light, although the sun was near the horizon. Rodney checked his watch and made a mental note of the length of the day. It was mildly disorienting, not knowing the rotation of the planet he was on, or its declension, or orbit, or--he glanced up--how many moons it had.

He shrugged off his pack and pulled out an MRE. A few minutes of privacy and absolutely safe food was, possibly, the high point of the day. And not having to watch John Sheppard chase after a woman who was *neither* as pretty as Chaya nor as smart as Rodney was pure bonus.

The shelf that spread before the mine entrance was cobbled with thick, red stones. To one side was a three meter drop, and a railing had been built of the same stone. It was nice, actually. Solid engineering and even a little picturesque. Rodney stood beside the railing, using it as a sort of impromptu table to hold his dinner, and looked out across the valley. It was a very lovely evening. Almost poetic. Oh, yes, here he was, alone on some picturesque night on some alien planet, eating his rather sad dinner and feeling sorry for his disastrous love life.

The MRE was pork chop, and he ate mechanically. It wasn't wonderful, as dinners went. It was bland and predictable, neither mysterious nor dangerous. And Rodney smiled a little at the thought because for the first three weeks he had known John Sheppard he had looked at him pretty much the same way. Bland and a little predictable. One more Air Force drone was hardly worth noticing--except that this one had the gene and was able to use it. Rodney had envied him that, in the moments he could spare to think about it. There had only been three weeks between the day they met and the day they went through the gate, though, and those weeks had been busy enough that Rodney hadn't given Sheppard much more thought than he would to an MRE.

And things might have stayed that way, with Rodney wanting nothing from Sheppard except that he occasionally touch devices and expecting nothing more than that he do it, except on his first away mission--less than a day after arriving at Atlantis--Colonel Sumner had gotten captured by the enemy. It seemed as though Sheppard had turned into a completely different person. Always before he had taken Rodney's condescension and impatience with amused disinterest. He hadn't been pretending to be actually stupid, but he hadn't shown a lot of thought either.

And then, suddenly, Sumner was gone and overnight--no, not overnight; immediately, right then--Sheppard the Air Force drone was gone, and the Sheppard who replaced him would not be bullied or humiliated by Rodney McKay. He was smarter than Rodney had guessed, he wasn't intimidated by big words, he had his own ideas (which he could not be diverted from) which weren't stupid. It was almost embarrassing, to be taken so completely by surprise, to not have guessed what lay behind the laid-back, easy-going pilot persona. And yes, a Sheppard who argued with him and made him think harder was a lot more irritating than an Air Force drone who had the gene, but Rodney had liked him.

Liked him too much. Expected too much. Wanted too much. It wasn't John's fault that he couldn't live up to Rodney's expectations or that he would never give Rodney what he wanted. No one ever had.

He heard a footstep behind him. Casually, Rodney unshipped his holster; he knew what John and Ronon and Teyla sounded like coming up behind him, and this wasn't one of them. Smiling casually despite the sweat that had broken out on his back, Rodney turned around.

Elizabeth.

Rodney relaxed. Elizabeth shook her head at him. "Do you often wander off like this on away missions? Because suddenly certain patterns are beginning to come clear."

Rodney shrugged. "Not usually. But. You know. It was just getting a little much down there."

Elizabeth looked him over consideringly and then turned to lean against the stone railing. "Are you going to be okay, Rodney? Because I only negotiated us a look at the facility. They haven't agreed to let us carry anything out--and I suspect their prices might be pretty high. If you can't concentrate tomorrow--"

Rodney hadn't been talking about feeling claustrophobic underground. So far the caverns had been large and commodious. And salt mines, at least on earth, were considered pretty stable. Rodney promised, "I'll be fine," and then changed the subject. "Do you think you won't be able to make a deal for some of the better stuff? Depending on what we find? If it really is a manufacturing facility, I may need more than a quick look."

"Well, on the one hand, nobody else in this galaxy can initialize the Ancient equipment, so nobody but us can use it. And almost nobody has the technical know-how to reverse engineer any of it. But there are still people who would pay nicely for it, useless or not. The Genii, for example. I'm just hoping the mine owner really likes chocolate and antibiotics."

Rodney finished the last of the MRE and reached for the zip-top he kept his garbage in. "You might have gotten further if you'd given them samples of pain relievers."

Elizabeth laughed once and rolled here eyes. "Yes, because my goal here is to make the natives junkies. Pushers of the Pegasus Galaxy? Let's not." She took a lingering look at his face and said softly, "Rodney?"

He was of no mind to have a heart-to-heart talk, certainly not about his personal life, which was where she was going. "So, how do you like away missions so far? This is your second, right?"

"Third. Although most of the first one was spent in a Genii interrogation room." She took a deep breath and looked around. "Actually, it's...kind of surreal. Here I am, on another planet."

Rodney laughed at her. "You woke up this morning on another planet."

"Atlantis is different! This is....like something out of science fiction. I can't really believe you do this all the time. Any advice?"

"Yeah. No matter how comfy the bedding looks use your sleeping bag. And sprinkle the moss in it first."

"What? You're talking about the fleas, aren't you?"

"They weren't fleas. Carson was very clear about that. They had four legs, not six, and--" Rodney realized he was being teased. "Yes. Fine. Laugh about our parasites. It won't be so funny if it happens to you. Fortunately for you, I am a better friend than that." He routed around in his pack and came up with a baggy of what looked like dried parsley. "Did you get a bag of this in your pack? Teyla's moss? You sprinkle it in the bedding. Works much better than 'Off.' I have plenty, if you didn't get some."

Elizabeth wrinkled her nose delicately and examined Rodney's baggy of plant bits. "Thank you. That's very generous." She noted his smirk. "What?"

"Nothing. Nothing. Just enjoying not being the newbie here. Gives me a really nice sense of superiority."

"And you so need one. Is this the point where I mention that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar?" she teased.

"I'm not trying to catch flies. Or anything else. That's the point of the insect repellent here." He took his baggy back and waved it in her face.

"Rodney...." She said gently, "I'm not talking about flies."

Blindsided, Rodney froze. Well, hell. He hadn't been prepared for that. But Elizabeth...was like that. Not only the best boss he'd ever had, but also one of the best friends. She was *reasonable.* She was careful. She was intelligent. She was funny. And at the same time, she wasn't the least bit narrow or petty or insecure. As soon as she realized she could trust him, she had backed him to the hilt. Whenever he needed support, Elizabeth Weir had been there with the right kind. If she had been into hard sciences instead of soft, fuzzy linguistics or that fairy-tale that called itself political 'science' Rodney would probably be in love with her. And wouldn't that be great, having a crush on his boss at this stage in has career? But fortunately he had managed to escape that particular disaster. Barely.

But she was still all he could ask for either as boss or as friend, and so probably his other problems *were* her fault. If Elizabeth hadn't caught him by surprised and confused him with her perfection, well, Rodney probably wouldn't have forgotten how people couldn't really be trusted and how wanting things from them always ended badly.

"Rodney?"

"I'm not trying to catch metaphorical flies, either," he said. "A parasitical infection sounds like fun until you actually get one. It never...lives up to its potential. Metaphorically."

Before she could think of a response they were interrupted by the sound of running feet in the echoey mine shaft behind them. As one they turned, but it was only Dex and Sheppard, looking like they might need to stage an impromptu rescue. Rodney steeled himself for an irritated lecture on not staying with the group, but Sheppard simply jogged up and nodded pleasantly. "Enjoying the evening?" he asked, his eyes flicking over Elizabeth.

"Yes. And we're fine."

The look Sheppard shot her carried both amusement and impatience. "And you both make damn sure you stay that way." He folded his eyes and looked up at the sky. "Although I have to admit you had the right idea. This is...nice." The sky was darkening; to the far east it was purple, and the clouds to the west were threaded with read and orange.

"It's a nice galaxy," Rodney said, thinking of the Wraith. Just for a moment, Sheppard met his eyes, thinking the same thing. It was a nice galaxy, other than that.

They went back inside together.

The sleeping arrangements were the stuff of nightmares. Not the really horrible nightmares that involved Wraith and collapsing worm holes or malfunctioning containment fields or lots of blood. Just the moderate nightmares involving going through the gate naked or where Samantha Carter caught him in an addition error or where you tried to go to bed in a huge room full of strangers.

Oh, wait. That last was his current reality. The locals slept in the central cavern. Even the mine owner, when he was on site. Elizabeth was of the opinion it was an idiosyncratic response to the constant anxiety over the Wraith.

The beds were arranged in a single row along the wall that extended more than a third of the way around the huge cavern. The beds themselves weren't as horrible as some that been inflicted on them. On the bottom was a layer of piled grass mats that reached almost ten centimeters thick. On top of that was a thin pad stuffed with something that rustled like straw. And finally there was a nest of blankets, probably made of plant fibers rather than animal wool. Rodney sprinkled a handful of bug repellent weed-flakes on the on the blankets and tried not to think too hard about what he was evicting. The sleeping bag itself was always packed with a sachet of the musky-smelling parsley. Since Teyla had shared the secret with them they hadn't had a problem with insects and Rodney would just have to hold on to the idea that their luck would continue.

Off planet they shed boots and weapons and equipment, but the clothes stayed on for sleep. Also not Rodney's favorite part of camping out, but he was used to it.

What he really wasn't used to was getting ready for bed under the speculative looks of near-naked natives who were also getting ready to bed down on both sides around them. If he snored, a whole room full of people would know about it. And that was assuming they didn't talk in their sleep and keep him awake.

He was used to sleeping with the team. He'd done it in huts and tents and in a crowded and uncomfortable puddlejumper. Elizabeth on his left was new, but Teyla on his right wasn't. Ronon moving his bedding to sleep at Elizabeth's feet had never come up before, but it wasn't a surprise that he'd put himself between the Atlantis leader and room full of strangers. This part, at least, was normal. Rodney was briefly tempted to make an inappropriate comment about sleeping between two beautiful women, but he knew that he and Elizabeth were in the middle not because they were the most valuable but because they were by far the least able to defend themselves.

"So, boss, you want in on the Watch rotation?" Sheppard asked. He was sitting on top of his sleeping bag, his back resting against the wall and his weapon in easy reach.

"Would you let me?" Elizabeth asked. The lights had already dimmed enough that Rodney couldn't make out her expression, so he didn't know if she was kidding or not.

"If you really wanted to, but not by yourself." He frowned. "I'm not sure there's any point in teaching you. We're not making a habit of this."

"But it's fun. I could take stick fighting lessons with Teyla...." She teased.

Sheppard settled for the first watch and the others lay down. Rodney was intent on getting sleep while he could--the watch rotation would cut eight hours down to six or less. In the labs he had no trouble working for days at a time on five or six hours a night, but trying to analyze unfamiliar tech in the field in between long hikes was much harder.

His mind was awhirl. Worse, he was acutely aware that he wasn't in his room or a nice safe jumper. He was in a huge room--well, no. Rooms didn't come this big. The gigantic cavern was of gymnasium proportions. Or theater proportions. Or major supermarket proportions. And it was full of people, strangers, weird locals who shared beer out of the same shallow bowl. He could hear rustling and now and then whispering. There were no small children in the cavern and nobody truly elderly, but other than that it was like trying to sleep with a town.

To the left, around the curve of the wall, someone burped extravagantly. Rodney winced.

Really, he wished he was better at entertaining himself. Keeping himself busy, that was easy. But relaxing? At home on earth, if he were as jittery and awake as this, he would have watched the SciFi channel until he fell asleep in front of the TV. Back in Atlantis he would read one of the books he was borrowing until his mind quieted. Here there was no TV and he hadn't brought any books. Not that it would have been polite to whip out a flashlight and read here anyway. Counting sheep had never worked. The only work he could call to mind was Zelenka's report on the puddlejumper power curves. Which was an interesting problem, really, since according to all the measurements they'd been able to get, the puddlejumpers used more energy than their engines were able to produce. Obviously, it had to be some kind of user error. Or a problem with the measuring equipment. Or Radek's equations. But Rodney had been over the work twice without finding the problem and it was time to consider that the discrepancies might have to do with really basic laws of physics.

Or a secondary power source they hadn't identified. But they had worked out schematics for all of the primary systems. So where was it? Maybe....

And he could go round and round on this all night, but it would not put him to sleep. Except for work, Rodney just didn't have a talent for distracting himself, not in a relaxing, fun way.

Maybe his standards were just too high. Years and years ago he'd known this friend in kindergarten who'd had an amazing talent for letting go and having fun. Theo. Theo didn't know his letters or his numbers and he couldn't tie his shoes so they stayed, but Rodney hadn't cared because Theo was much more fun than everyone else. While the other kids played 'house' and 'cowboys and Indians' and 'red light-green light' and 'tag,' Theo had been teaching Rodney to play 'hunting Bigfoot,' 'attack of the mole-men from under the Earth,' 'spacemen on Mars,' and 'spacemen from Mars versus the mole men.' *That* had been imagination. *That* had been fun. Although Rodney had tried--and Theo had been willing to let him pick the game--he just wasn't very good at pretending by himself.

The class in first grade had been much bigger than kindergarden, and the teacher had been much less attentive. Some of the new kids had been bigger and rougher. They played games like kickball when the teacher was watching and 'keep-away' and 'weggie' when she wasn't. Theo--brilliant, magnificent, Theo--had stopped playing spacemen with Rodney and learned to blend in with the kids who played the kind of tag that ended with one person pinned down by everyone else and tormented.

Rodney had never learned to blend in.

He had also never learned to relax. He would never sleep in here, not with all these strangers making strange noises. Down on the left someone was whispering. Somewhere on the right, someone moaned. It wasn't loud, but it was distinct.

Rodney froze. It was a distinct, quiet, happy moan. That was repeated. And left absolutely no doubt about its meaning. And what was the matter with these people anyway? If they wanted to screw around, fine, great, but they should wander down a tunnel and do it in private and not make a public spectacle for everyone to hear.

Rodney tried very hard to focus on the soft sounds of snoring that rose from random spots in the cave. Listen to the snoring. Nice, innocent, sleeping people.

Instead he heard the almost--but not quite--silent sound of body movement and a soft, hard panting.

Oh, this was just too much. How was anyone supposed to sleep?

And then, beside him, Elizabeth giggled. It was even quieter than the moaning had been and it was quickly stifled, but there was no question.

On the other side of Elizabeth, Sheppard turned over and murmured, "At least we know the natives are friendly."

Both hands clapped over his mouth and sucking air franticly through his nose, Rodney trapped his own hysterical laughter.

Elizabeth's voice was even and pitched not to carry. "I can see I'm writing the recruitment brochure all wrong. It should read, 'travel to the Pegasus Galaxy, meet exotic natives, and--'" laughing, she had to stop and burry her face in the sleeping bag.

Sheppard muttered, "It would be catchier than 'one way trip, certain death likely.'"

Getting himself under control, Rodney hissed, "Very mature, people," which set them off again.

At the their feet, Ronon sat up and leaned toward Teyla. "Are they ill?" he asked.

"No," she whispered darkly. "They are merely rude." Since he was nearest, she hit Rodney on the shoulder. Hard. "I cannot take you people anywhere."

In the shadows, Rodney could see Sheppard and Elizabeth silently shaking with relentless mirth. Rodney managed to stuff his own laughter down, but a couple of tears leaked out of the corners of his eyes. Their conversation hadn't disturbed the couple who had begun the whole thing. They were still going at it like rabbits. Wordless, silent, but nearly frantic.

At some point, Rodney fell asleep.

Breakfast the next morning was informal and hurried. Since no one was paying much attention, Rodney skipped the funky oatcake things their hosts offered and stuffed in a power bar. "They're Americans," he said to Teyla and Ronon. "Biggest prudes in the home galaxy, bar none. They can't help being immature and crude."

"What's your explanation?" Ronon asked.

Rodney grinned at that. "They started it. Anyway, *my* excuse is I haven't had a date since Russia. No time." His smile faded as he remembered what an utter disaster his one attempt at a date had been. "Actually, that's not funny."

John nodded sympathetically. "Really pathetic, actually."

"You be quiet. The last date you had was with a non-corporeal being from another plane of existence. Some of us hold out for people who are, I don't know, human?"

The wind was blowing on the plateau, so they took the electric tram rather than hike through the tunnels on foot. Any way you looked at it, a half hour in a cart followed by a short hike was better than a three-hour hike with a loaded pack. But the ride was still pure hell.

The cart was narrow. The bench was hard. The track rattled. Elizabeth and John had decided to squeeze in on either side of him, penning him in and squishing him a bit. And ten minutes into the trip, the tunnel began to get *narrow*. Narrow enough the walls passed within centimeters on either side. And close enough over head that if you raised your hand to, say, scratch the top of your head, you might lose it.

Rodney closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe slowly. Panicking here would do him no good at all. "Very nice engineering. Really. I'm impressed. How long did they say it takes to put in each tram-section?" He paused to get his breath. "Salt mines are usually very stable. Geologically speaking. Have I mentioned that?"

On his left, Elizabeth took his hand. On his right John said a little impatiently, "If you can't handle this I've got some Dramamine and some valium."

"Oh, yes," Rodney gasped. "That's brilliant. Maybe you've noticed, but if I'm unconscious there's *absolutely no point* in any of us going seventy or eighty kilometers underground."

"We're barely half a kilometer," John said. "I've also got some really high quality placebos."

Rodney blinked at that. "How can you have a high quality placebo?"

"They're really small. And orange. They're the most convincing things I've ever seen."

Rodney laughed. It was a little hysterical, but only a little. The worst knot of his terror was gone. Rodney squeezed Elizabeth's hand on his left and reached for John with his other one. John let him take it.

Sitting between them like this, holding on to them for dear life, it was abundantly clear that he didn't feel the same way about them both. And that was frustrating and painful enough to distract him from the narrow tunnel and the speeding car and the tons of earth above them. He wanted a lot more from John than he wanted from Elizabeth.

As handy as those distracting emotions were at the moment, Rodney knew he couldn't keep them. It wasn't John's fault he charmingly and kindly kept people at a distance. It wasn't his fault he liked girls. It wasn't his fault he wasn't ready to settle down.

It wasn't his fault that what Rodney wanted was way more then John could give him.

John was one of the best friends Rodney had ever had. Every bit as good as Elizabeth. And Rodney knew damn well just how much he owed him. So no, it wasn't John's fault, and no, the situation wasn't fair, and yes, Rodney would just have to learn to live with that.

The trip finally ended. Climbing out of the little car was a blessed relief. The hike that followed wasn't nearly as bad as Rodney had imagined. They didn't have to crawl. They didn't have to climb. The walls were close, but every time Rodney started to feel the world close in on him, John bitched at him to pick up the pace.

In addition to the Atlantis team, the party included the mine owner, one of the managers, and Sheppard's homely mine engineer. Usually there wasn't room to walk more than single file. There wasn't much to look at, unless you liked the look of striated stone and deep, dark holes shooting off here and there. Rodney thought of 'Attack of the Mole Men' and was glad his imagination didn't run more toward the artistic.

The miners had strung electric lighting all through tunnels. In order to minimize the use of limited amounts of power, each section was turned on only when needed and off again when exited. Rather than a switch or button, a small, iron ball was dropped through a hole in the junction box. The ball would touch the connectors and complete the circuit, turning the light on. As the party cleared each section pushing a small lever would expel the ball at the terminal end to be transferred to the next junction box.

Between the time one set of lights was shut down and the next activated was a few seconds of inky darkness. "Boo," Sheppard murmured during the second interval. During the third, he said, "Better hope they don't drop that little ball."

"Very funny," Rodney whispered. He wondered, though, if Sheppard had any idea how reassuring it was to have him standing close and whispering bad jokes.

Sheppard's latest devotee said cheerfully, "Oh, no. We carry a spare, although it's considered poor manners to lose one permanently. And we have lanterns."

They finally reached a junction that look exactly like every other cubic meter of tunnel until the electricity in the next tunnel came on and it the passage beyond suddenly gave way to a bright, open room. The mine owner smiled and flourished at Elizabeth. "There it is."

Elizabeth stepped through, Rodney nearly scampering after her. The room was clearly of Ancient design. The colors were muted, the decoration subtle but pleasant. The walls were slightly textured and set with panels that looked like black glass. There were also several black glass tables.

John stepped in and a second set of lights came on. Rodney used to resent that, the way Ancient technology rolled over and purred whenever John Sheppard appeared. It liked him. Everyone liked him. As Rodney had gotten to like him...the whole thing had started to seem cute.

"Has it been stripped?" Rodney asked, looking around. Except for the tables there was no furniture. Not a single item was on any surface.

"It is how we found it," the mine engineer said. "We have removed nothing. This room, well, it is not the official entry, remember. We came through the wall."

That was true. The wall they had come through was simply the natural stone polished to a gloss.

"Is there a main entry?" Elizabeth asked.

"No," the owner said. "None. There is no access to the outside world at all. I cannot imagine how this place came to be here or how anyone left it."

Rodney frowned to himself, trying to guess how far under ground they were. "Is there a large room with a decorated floor? Patterns of circles? Rings? Something?"

Sure enough, they were led to a ring room. The circles on the floor looked like a glittering mosaic. Nearly dancing with glee, Rodney pressed his hand against the operations panel to initialize the system and brought up the transport consoles. Most of the ring transports he'd examined had been built by Goa'uld. The physics was the same, but the interface was very different. In a moment, he realized that the operation was different also. "We're not all that far under ground, but it won't transport to line of sight. The mechanism needs to lock with another secure ring system before it will transport anything. I think we're looking at mondo security here. Whatever this place is, it was very secure, very isolated." Very isolated. Rodney glanced at Elizabeth and Sheppard.

"Bio-weapons research?" Elizabeth asked nervously. "Toxins?"

Sheppard's hands flew over a general access panel set in the wall. A schematic of the installation came up. "Control room--here," he announced.

Rodney told himself, as they led the bewildered miners through the elegant hallways, that it couldn't be that dangerous. The miners had tunneled through that back wall almost a year ago. They'd all been through here. They'd even taken tourists from three other worlds through. No one had died. No mysterious diseases had appeared. There was no reason to panic.

The control room lit up as Sheppard walked through it. Elizabeth glanced at the menus flashing to life on the screens and paused at one of the consoles. Rodney peered over her shoulder, but couldn't follow what she was doing. Elizabeth didn't need a translator protocol and her Ancient was perfect and fluid. "We run a contaminant scan and a security check every morning. It's fairly simple," she said absently as she flipped through the commands. "This will take a few minutes. Some of these systems have powered down. Hmmm. This is strange. I need a security override. John, come over here and wave your hand at this."

The mine engineer was now gazing at Sheppard with worshipful eyes. She had figured out what was going on. "It recognizes you. You are...well, you cannot *be* an ancestor."

Sheppard laughed, "Believe me, this would all be so much easier if I were."

"Touch here," Elizabeth said, since Sheppard's Ancient was even slower than Rodney's. "And here." She smiled thinly. "While we wait, how about a map?"

The locals were thrilled with the map. They quickly oriented themselves and pointed out the places they had explored. "These are all very simple work areas, like the one we came in through," they said. "This area is sealed. We cannot enter from any direction. Here and here are living quarters, very small and isolated, but luxurious."

Rodney studied the map, trying to puzzle out if it was research labs, a bomb shelter, or, as advertised, some kind of manufacturing facility. It didn't look like any factory he'd ever seen though, and how would you manage the raw materials?

"We're clean," Elizabeth said suddenly. "No biohazard. No contamination. No seals broken. Containment positive on...." Her voice dropped suddenly, "on nanites."

"Oh, crap," Sheppard said.

"Well," Rodney said. "I guess we know what they were doing."

"I do not understand," Teyla said. She had been standing quietly to one side, observing. "You are saying they were experimenting with those....invisible machines that cause diseases?"

"I don't know," Elizabeth said. "There are thousands of different categories of nanite here. The inventory headings don't have research prefixes."

Rodney was already plugging his laptop into the nearest interface. An installation full of nanites. Well. That wasn't automatically a bad thing. Not automatically. Sure, no maintenance had been done on any of the equipment in the last ten thousand years. And, sure, they just barely knew what they were doing. And, well, nanites had incredible potential for screwing things up, like, oh, brains and bodies and regular sized machines. But that didn't mean they were on the verge of disaster.

Of course it wasn't as simple as just asking the systems what they did and how the worked. Of course not. Whatever logic the Ancients based their filing systems on was weird enough that even after all this time Rodney couldn't guess where any set of instructions would be filed or want any given packet of data would contain. "Database" was a euphemism.

Worse, not all of the terms commonly used in the files on nanotech were recognized by the translation protocol. And some of the words that were translated came out the names of flowers or kinds of cloud formations or musical terms. His own Ancient wasn't up to this kind of text, of course. Neither Daniel Jackson nor the linguistics team on Atlantis had even started on anything like this. Irritated, Rodney directed Elizabeth's attention to the textual mess and continued to plow through what his computer gave him. It wasn't all gibberish. The parts that made sense were beyond tantalizing.

At some point, someone handed him a power bar and a bottle of water.

When he finally looked up and stretched, the time bug on his screen told him that more than six hours had passed. He was stiff and his eyes burned from forgetting to blink.

"Well," Elizabeth asked eagerly, looking up from the tiny notebook where she was scribbling tiny translation notes.

"Well," Rodney said, a bit at a loss for words. "Wow."

She shut the notebook and called to Colonel Sheppard and the others on the radio. "They've been exploring," she said. "Carefully, don't worry."

"Yeah. Yeah. Careful is good."

"Rodney? How dangerous is this place?"

"Oh? Not very. I mean, if the system starts to degrade such that it becomes a hazard, the whole thing shuts down and becomes inert. Well, that's assuming that the safety protocols are functioning. But the Ancients were pretty anal about that so...you know. Reasonable risk, not stupid risk."

"Right." She looked up as the rest of the team and the hosts entered the control room. "But what does it all do?"

"Oh, it's a manufacturing facility, all right."

"It can't be," Sheppard said as he came in. "It's almost all empty rooms. There's no equipment anywhere. They couldn't have taken every piece of machinery with them and left everything else. I mean there's no sign."

Rodney sighed, suddenly exhausted beneath the delighted, astonished buzz the day had given him. "Did you ever hear Peter gripe about the drones? About how they just didn't make any sense and he couldn't see how they'd been built or how any of the panels had been sealed? Actually, we should have guessed. We really should have. It's so obvious in retrospect--"

"Rodney, get to the point," the Colonel prodded.

"Right. Well, when we think of manufacturing, we think of fabricating a bunch of interchangeable parts and then assembling all those parts into a final product. Things are made in steps and it's all very efficient."

"An assembly line," Elizabeth said encouragingly.

"Right. But the Ancients built things all at once, without components or interchangeable parts or molds or dies or assembly or...." Rodney had to stop and breathe. This was huge. This was amazing. It was obvious. It was perfect. It started to scare the crap out of him. "ZedPMs. Medical scanners. Jumper hulls." He had to stop to choke back an hysterical laugh. "They built almost everything from the molecular level. From the center out. With nanobots." He looked at Sheppard. "All those empty rooms. Sealed, right? Complicated protocols? Thousands of different kinds of nanobots, remotely programmable. All they'd have to bring in was raw materials."

"So we could build...anything." It was Ronon who spoke. The rest of the Atlantis party was too stunned to say anything and the locals were completely confused.

"If we had the...molecular recipes, yeah. Or knew how to write one. We could build anything."

Anything. Anything. The very idea made him dizzy.

Wouldn't Zelenka have kittens when he found out?

Anything.

The mine owner stepped forward a bit nervously. "I hope you will explain this in much more detail. But perhaps we have seen enough for today? If we leave now, we will just arrive in time for the evening meal."

"Leave?" Rodney repeated, aghast. "Now? We can't leave."

Sheppard laid a hand on Rodney's arm. "They want to go home for dinner, and they won't leave us here in their sacred ground alone. We can come back tomorrow."

"For dinner? The find of ten millennia and they want to go home for dinner? I ask you for perfectly reasonable things all the time and you never humor me, but you'll take these yokels home for dinner?" Rodney hissed.

"If you're going to be really rude, could you be rude very quietly?" Sheppard looked up, "I apologize for Dr. McKay. He's a genius, but genius is often insane. And really irritating."

"They built their best gadgets with nanotechnology and it's right here, and why are you pretending to be so stupid that you think the important thing here is that I'm irritating? I know you know better."

"Patience is not a tragedy, McKay," he whispered in Rodney's ear. "Let's please not piss off the natives. They outnumber us a hundred to one and they have picks. And also, they own this lovely factory."

Rodney had to admit he had a point, but he didn't see that as any reason not to make him suffer. Rodney sulked all the way back to the little electric cart. Despite the sulking, Elizabeth and John settled on either side of him once again. The ride was loud and bumpy and not pleasant in a deep-underground-shooting-through-a-narrow-tunnel sort of way. Strangely, though, uncomfortable, tense and packed in like a sardine, he fell asleep. He didn't wake up until the cart stopped near the main cavern.

Stiff and disoriented, Rodney stumbled as Sheppard tugged him from the cart. He kept one hand on Rodney as he reached for Elizabeth. "Everybody all right?" Sheppard patted their shoulders and fished their packs out of the cart. "Teyla? Ronon? Everybody having a good time?"

Teyla laughed. "It is an informative experience. I did not know such forms of transportation existed." She didn't look like she thought much of the little carts. But being Teyla, she was too classy to say so out loud. Of course, being Teyla, she didn't have to complain loudly to get her way.

It turned out that the protocol, upon returning to the living caverns after a hard day's work in the salt mines, was to head first to a special cavern for a very cool shower. A very cool, public shower. Well. Wasn't that nice?

The bathing room was large. Water spewed from several dozen tiny waterfalls and arced into a floor inset with trenches carry the water away. It was full of miners in various stages of undress and washing. Gosh. This just got better and better, didn't it?

Almost two years in the field had gotten Rodney into the habit of not looking. He didn't look at Teyla or John--because it was way too embarrassing. And he didn't look at Ronon, because hey, who wanted to compare himself to *that*? Not looking at his boss was easy. The last thing he needed in a meeting was the image of her naked and wet. No, even imagining it was weird. So he kept his eyes lightly to the side and got on with the barbaric public wash.

Teyla and Ronon didn't seem to have body taboos. He knew they--well, they didn't *look*, they weren't lascivious about it, there was no reason to complain--he knew they saw. And the aliens apparently didn't mind looking around either.

Rodney tried not to think about how he could be scrolling through files on nanobots right at that moment, but no, they were going to be polite. Partake in the quaint local customs. Join in the lovely communal shower.

Teyla, polite and friendly, offered to wash Rodney's back. He thanked her and said it wasn't dirty. He refused to think about how long it had been since he'd had his back washed. That would only make him surly and unpleasant and frankly, his mood was sour enough over the whole 'break for dinner' thing.

The miners put on loose clothing after the wash. Rodney settled for clean underwear and his used BDUs. Elizabeth was laughing as she combed out her hair. Sheppard and Ronon were doing some kind of macho thing, that game with the twisted towels. Everyone was being very carefully--publicly--comfortable and friendly. Making a display about how relaxed they were.

Diplomacy was bad enough when you weren't wet, naked in front of people whose respect you'd like to have, and sacrificing good research time.

Dinner was pretty much a replica of the night before, except this time the guests from Atlantis were celebrities. They had turned the lights on. They had gotten the equipment to put out unfamiliar text, and then read it. They knew what the Ancient ruin had been for.

A crowd of people plying him with beer and hanging on his every word was not as mollifying as Rodney would have expected. The team had been separated, each member surrounded by a knot of locals eagerly asking questions. Of course, they were naive, ignorant questions. And they didn't understand the answers.

Dinner was some kind of sausage or baloney kind of thing and boiled grain. It was dull enough to count as safe. Since there was no way he was shaking off the fan club long enough to sneak off for a real dinner, Rodney supposed he should be grateful for his luck.

Rodney took the first watch. He was tired, but eager to get some work done. While he sat in the bed-nest, awake just in case something went wrong, he looked over the portion of the database he'd downloaded earlier. He was tired, but this was way more interesting than sleep.

Heh. Radek *was* going to have kittens over missing this. It would just kill him that Rodney had gotten his hands on this stuff first. Which would be fun. More fun--Rodney smiled--would be the moment when Sam Carter got her hands on the Atlantis report of this place. This would absolutely break her heart. She would understand all the implications....

He'd been reading Dr. Carter's work for three years before he met her. Her observations were perceptive, her analyses sleek and elegant. She never hesitated about tossing out 'accepted wisdom' when it was obviously wrong. She didn't confuse minor issues with the important stuff. Her intuitive leaps showed flashes of a brilliance that Rodney had years before given up looking for among his peers. If ever there was anyone in the world who might actually *get* him, it had been her. Hopeful, excited, Rodney had been eager to meet her--absolutely thrilled--even before he saw her and discovered that she was beautiful.

Really, it had been a mistake to get so worked up. Sam Carter had turned out to be a profound disappointment. She'd be green with envy over the manufacturing outpost, though, and that was kind of satisfying.

When the scheduler flashed the end of his watch, Rodney turned off his laptop, roused Teyla, and wiggled down into the sleeping bag.

Rodney was ready for the trip the next morning. He ignored that it was time consuming (the trip on the rickety tram took twice as long; the wind was down on the plateau) and uncomfortable and scary. He knew what he was heading toward, and the anticipation was so bright he could barely sit still. He barely noticed the sharp, uneven walls sliding past just inches away from the side of the car.

On the last leg of the trip, Elizabeth fell in behind him and said softly, "Is there any chance we can actually bring the facility on line and actually...fabricate something? Or is this just about reverse engineering?"

Rodney opened his mouth, shut it, skipped around a fallen rock partially blocking the tunnel and said, "Maybe."

"Rodney! You have to give me a better answer than that. They won't let us have *anything* cheaply. If I am going to offer them the moon and the stars, I have to know what we're getting."

"It's possible. That's all I can give you right now. Ask me again tonight. Atlantis still works. Sort of. There's no reason to assume the factory won't work. Although any one of a hundred thousand things might be broken that we can't fix." Hating himself, hating the Ancients, nearly choking on the disappointment, he added, "No matter how good it winds up looking, Elizabeth...it's going to be a huge risk. The technology is way beyond us."

"Everything is," she whispered.

Rodney thought about how he defined "unreasonable risk" about three years before. He thought about how close some of the calls had been recently. He thought about nanites making...anything...from the inside out. Regretfully, he made himself think about confused escaped nanites remaking *him* from the inside out. He could scarcely see where he was going for all the models of molecules crowding his inner vision. "I'll take a look today."

He couldn't, in a couple of days, learn enough to be sure the facility could be put into operation, even on a reduced level. But if he could locate something irreparably wrong, he might be able to give Elizabeth a definite negative. Besides, if there was any way to collect nanites safely, he'd want a sample.

First he went to life support. The systems' analysis Elizabeth had initiated the day before indicated that the equipment was functional, but that wasn't because nothing was broken; rather that redundant systems had kicked in. He wanted to look at the apparatus himself. Sheppard followed him as Rodney first went to the main airhandler at the base of the complex, and then to two smaller emergency modules. The mine engineer followed Sheppard. Sheppard was useful--he could remove panels, hand Rodney scanners, hold the flashlight--the mine engineer was not.

In the end, he turned the systems on, instructed them to keep the oxygen levels two percent higher then than the mine's ambient and let them go to see if either the main module or the smaller ones would break. Next on the list was safety protocols surrounding actual assembly. He picked one of the medium-sized assembly rooms and ran the computer diagnostic on its functionality. Ten minutes later the system reported non-functional. Rodney considered the remaining day and a half that Elizabeth had gotten for them and moved on to another chamber.

And another, which pissed him off, but, really, he was rationing time and couldn't afford to start looking into why they were broken. All that mattered was that they were.

He moved on to a third, his two shadows picking up on his disappointment and following in subdued silence. Finally, with half the day gone, he found one that said it would work. He moved onto manual tests. He couldn't look at the nanites (even if he could see them) all inert, deep in their packaging somewhere inside the walls, but he could look at the system's output. Their environment was sterile. According to the readout, they were intact. Would they engage if he told the computer to turn them on? Rodney wouldn't even try it until he had Zelenka, Chang, and Frye down here for at least a month.

He ran automated tests and scanners on the chamber itself from the outside, then unsealed the door and stepped in. The room was roughly cube-shaped but rounded. It was about the size of the conference room at home. Sheppard stepped in behind him, looked around, said, "Wow." The little miner muttered something that sounded like praying. Rodney ignored them both and knelt to inspect the seal on the door.

The door itself.

The walls.

The hatch that let the room's associated nanites in.

He shooed his gawkers out and ran a sterilization protocol on the empty room. While that was running, he brought up the quarantine programs and ran a manual test on them. He sealed and unsealed the isolation hatches separating this area from the rest of the facility one at a time. When the sterilization protocol finished, he ran it again and then turned on the emergency containment field.

It had two layers.

According to its specifications, it was completely even and spherical, passing through the solid matter of the walls and floors.

While it was in place, you could run an electrometric sweep of the assembly room and its associated accessways and control room. Rodney ran one. It shivered through his body like a bad jolt to his funnybone and then was gone.

"Hey!" Sheppard snapped. Rodney had forgotten him.

"Sorry," he said blandly. He was looking at the power curve on the forcefields, which were still in place. They hadn't bothered with finesse or efficiency here. The field was even and thin and completely uniform, but it used up power like gangbusters. It was a gas guzzler. An SUV.

"Right. Power systems next. Colonel Sheppard, you stay here. Keep running the room sterilization and keep the inner force field on. See if it breaks. Oh, and in about half an hour, run down stairs and check on lifesupport."

The Miner roused from her admiration of the sleek, black console and said anxiously, "Break it? This place is of the ancestors. We must not--"

Rodney rolled his eyes. Sheppard said reasonably, "It's very, very old, Milla. We're turning it on to see if it is already broken. Don't worry. McKay here can fix anything that does fall apart."

Rodney rolled his eyes, checked the map he'd downloaded onto his tablet, and headed toward the power station. The miner trotted after him. Rodney wondered if he should feel flattered, that she had finally noticed that what he was doing was more interesting than anyone else.

'Power supply' meant checking on the ZedPM. Usually, it was the first thing Rodney looked for in an Ancient installation. It had taken most of yesterday to identify what the outpost had been for, though, and it was so unusual and complicated that Rodney had put off his usual quest for power supplies.

Anyway, there was less reason to get excited than usual. If the zero point module was nearly depleted, it wouldn't do then any good. If it was still good, well, the natives might not let them buy it. And, anyway, if Elizabeth was considering using the factory for the purpose for which it had been designed, they would have to leave its power supply in place. Besides, they had a ZedPM now. It should last for several years.

Maybe, somewhere in that opaque Ancient filing system, was a molecular recipe for building zero point modules. Maybe they could make their own. Maybe they could make as many as they wanted, a new ZedPM for every day of the week.

The door was gene activated and had to be coaxed. It took Rodney three tries to open it. It did open, though, finally, and the lights came on hospitably. "What is in here?" the mine engineer asked. Rodney had forgotten about her.

"Power supply," he said shortly.

"Better than wind power?" she asked, and Rodney laughed.

"Much better," he said. "Now be quiet."

The center of the room held two zedPMs in a tandem housing. Rodney laid his hand on the console and it jumped to life, scrolling Ancient text across the screen. Rodney connected his laptop to the console, and read the English translation.

They both read about seventy percent depleted. Which left thirty percent. Not an insignificant amount of power. You could do a lot with that thirty percent. Either here or on Atlantis, that much raw energy held a lot of promise. Rodney pulled out a celebratory power bar and wolfed it down while deciding what to look at first.

He called up power distribution and identified all of the current power consumption. The biggest spike was that force field around the active assembly room. It was pulling huge amounts of energy, but hey, they had power to burn.

It took him almost an hour to notice the impending disaster. That was embarrassing. Even while he leapt across the room, calculating the odds of being blown to smithereens in the next three or four seconds, he was also wincing with embarrassment because if Zelenka ever found out, Rodney would never live it down.

He didn't bother with his laptop. Directly, from the Ancient console, he cut the power and shut everything down. At once, the panel went out and the room was plunged into darkness. Rodney held his breath, hands poised, waiting for the ancient version of a UPS to come on line.

"*Rodney? What's going on?*" Elizabeth's voice was loud in the darkness and made him jump.

"Busy now," he snapped, pulling his flashlight and running to the place he, building an Ancient power station, would have put the back-up batteries.

"*I can see that,*" she said patiently. "*It's dark*."

"One of the ZedPMs is bad, and I'd kind of like to pull it from the system before it blows up."

He manually turned the UPS on and off a couple of times.

"*Is it likely to do that?*" Elizabeth prodded, since he'd stopped talking.

"It is guaranteed to do that. There's a fault in the field it's generating." Rodney ripped the front panel off the UPS and began pulling the flat crystals one at a time, looking for the broken one. Please, let there be a broken one, something he could bypass...."Sometime between yesterday and about a thousand years from now it's going to dump its whole energy potential at once, which might just destroy this factory but will probably turn the entire mountain into rubble." The next crystal came out cloudy and cracked. Rodney tossed it across the room and replaced it with one of the ones from the top, right-hand corner, which is where Ancients unusually kept a system's internal monitoring subsystem. He would live without monitoring the UPS for five minutes.

The friendly amber glow of the emergency lights came up.

Rodney leapt to his feet and dove for the ZedPM housing. The console was back up, controls and text scrolling under the surface of the black glass. It told him that the main power was off, that the batteries would last less than five days, that both ZedPMs were engaged, but on standby.

He reached for the one on the left--the one that had as good a chance of blowing up in the seconds it would take to reach for it as it would for blowing up sometime next week or on a Thursday at the end of July sometime next year--looking for the icon that would shut it off.

Sheppard's homely groupie cut him off, physically blocking his way. Rodney stumbled against her and irritably tried to shove her aside. She was remarkably sturdy and as solid as pure stone. "I won't let you do it," she said unhappily.

Confused, Rodney shoved again, with the same non-result. "You won't let me do what?" and then "You have to. It could kill all of us."

She shook her head. "We've heard the stories. The people from the City of the Ancestors will trade you fair, and will give you wonders that you've never even dreamed of. They fix things. They heal the sick. But what they want is a ziepiem, and they'll do anything to get one." She swallowed hard and leaned closer to him. "I'll not let you desecrate this place." She pulled a hand tool from her belt. It looked like a small pick, except instead of having two opposing blades, it had one pointy blade and one blunt ball for counterbalance.

Rodney sputtered. "Oh, for the love of--I'm not trying to steal it. I don't *want* it. It's broken, you idiot. It's going to blow up. Frankly, the best thing to do with it is dump it into a sun nobody's using--but no, wait," he shoved her again. She raised the hand tool. "You morons will want to keep it. We'll you're welcome to it. You can take it home and sleep with it under your pillow. But it's coming out of the slot now." Rodney gave up shoving and dove around her. His hand made it to the icon for 'disengage' but before he could touch 'eject' she shoved him back, one hand on his chest the other swinging the miniature pick.

Something gave. Then it felt like being hit, over and over with, say, bat. In the belly. Suddenly breathless, Rodney looked down. The miniature pick was embedded in his stomach. There was already blood spattering the floor, the console, and the vile little woman who had stumbled back, panting.

On the third try, Rodney managed to turn on his radio. "I need some help," he muttered. He didn't notice his knees giving way until he was landing on his arse. The jar of landing turned the whole room white hot with blinding pain. Tears squeezed from his eyes and a squeak squeezed out of his mouth.

The agony came in quick waves, not quite fading between jolts of unbearable fire. It seemed forever before he could even gasp for air, and when he did it hurt so badly--

On his third or eight or hundredth try, Rodney managed to take a couple of shallow breaths. He brought his shaking hands up and cupped the knob of the pick. The rest of the tool was buried in his belly.

Fuck, he thought. It didn't nearly cover it. Rodney looked up. The woman was standing over him, shaking but resolute. Behind her, hopelessly out of reach, was the console he still needed to get to. The odds that the internal field would fail in the next few minutes were so incalculably small that Rodney probably couldn't think of enough zeros to put behind the decimal point. On the other hand, the odds that it would fail sometime during the next few hundred years were so high that might as well be equal to one. And absolutely nothing was stopping it from happening, for example, now.

Possibly, since the containment fields and life support were currently shut down, there might not actually be any explosions. Maybe Rodney wasn't looking at a mushroom cloud here. Maybe the entire facility and the mountain it was in would just melt. Maybe Rodney's future was as part of a spreading pool of molten rock.

"Get out of my way," Cradling the pick so it wouldn't shift too horribly, Rodney surged to his knees and swiped at the panel. His finger left a bloody print over the icon, but as he swayed to the side, gasping, the ZedPM rose majestically out of its niche and came to rest on top of the housing.

"*Rodney! What's going on? Damn it, answer me!*" He wondered how long Elizabeth had been yelling at him.

"John," Rodney whispered. And that was right. Sheppard was great when everything went to hell. Sheppard fixed things, saved things, made miracles. You could count on him for that, Sheppard was *good* for that. Usually he scared the utter crap out of you along the way, but he was the person you wanted, because in the end he would get you through it.

His assailant was looking down at him. Her stare was unreadable. It occurred to him then that she might want to finish the job. It also occurred to him that he was armed, and wow, wasn't *now* a little late to be thinking of that? Rodney thought about what it would take to pull out his weapon and shoot her. He though about the likelihood of hitting her, even at this range, from this angle, and decided his chances weren't good.

The quick, heavy tread he heard at the door were Ronon's, not Sheppard's, but his disappointment was short lived. From Rodney's position on the floor, Ronon looked huge, and in the amber emergency lights he glowed like some kind of god.

An avenging god, apparently, because all at once he was standing over Rodney with his gun drawn. "This doesn't look like an accident," he said.

With Ronon between them, Rodney couldn't see the mine engineer's face, but she said, "You will not steal from us. Even if you kill us all, there are hundreds more in the mine. You will not get away with it."

"Give me the rest of your weapons and go kneel over there or I will shoot you," Ronon said. He stepped back and glanced down. "Dr. McKay...do not move."

And then, finally, the footsteps in the doorway were Sheppard's. It was Sheppard's voice, too, "What the hell?" and a thump as he knelt. "Oh my God. Rodney, what the *hell*--" He turned away, and his absence left a coldness that ached.

"Hey," Rodney gasped, meaning to say 'injured guy, over here,' but he couldn't get the rest of it out.

And then Sheppard was back. With his wicked-looking field knife he slit Rodney's BDUs. His hands were gentle enough not to joggle the pick. "Oh, good," Rodney managed. "I guess it's your turn." Last time had been a draw, hadn't it? They had both rescued themselves. But the time before that Rodney had definitely done the rescuing. He wanted to laugh at that, he really did, but the pain made that kind of movement unthinkable.

And then the pain rose to unbearable again, as Sheppard did *something*, daubing and pushing at the torn flesh, packing something white around and into the wound. He was moving slowly and maybe gently, but every time the curved metal spike shifted Rodney felt as though it were ripping him apart.

The amber lights seemed to fade to nothing as the pain rose up between Rodney and the world. He couldn't see. He couldn't hear. He didn't care.

It hurt.

When the world started to creep back, he heard voices arguing. Many voices, at once.

He was cold.

His breaths came in short, shallow gasps that shook his shoulders and made his belly ache.

Rodney wondered if he was going to die. It took a couple of days to die from a gut wound, didn't it?

The yelling got louder. Rodney tried to focus his eyes. Where was Sheppard?

Somewhere overhead Ronon's weapon discharged.

Utter silence followed.

"Thank you," Elizabeth said sharply, "Now. This is what we are going to do."

Whatever she said next was lost, because Sheppard suddenly appeared. He was very close. One finger tickled gently against Rodney's left cheek. "Can you hear me?"

Rodney blinked, managed a "yeah."

"Can you feel the morphine yet?"

Oh? Morphine? Really? When had that happened? "Maybe," he whispered. He hurt. A lot. But he couldn't think clearly and he wasn't on the edge of screaming anymore. "Yeah. 's going on?"

Instead of answering, Sheppard looked up and said, "We can't move him."

Elizabeth joined them on the floor. Her hands were hot on Rodney's cold, damp face. She looked up. "Bring your healer here."

This pierced through Rodney's fuzzy thinking. "Local quack--" he gasped.

"Hush, Rodney," she said.

"No," he gasped. "Carson--"

"Rodney, we can't move you. We can't transport you. Even if we could, there isn't time. You're bleeding." Reasonable. Gentle. Completely impossible.

"God, no," Rodney's eyes overflowed. "No, Elizabeth, these people are practically animals."

McKay," Sheppard said, and his voice was hard and sharp, "just once can we go to a planet and have you *not* insult the locals? Is that really too much to ask?" His voice was hard, but his eyes were soft and scared, and it sank in just how desperate things must be for John and Elizabeth to even consider letting the local veterinarians or whatever work on him.

Rodney probably wasn't going to make it. "I should have shot her," he ground out through his teeth. Wasn't hindsight wonderful? Too late now, of course. Sheppard was holding Rodney's hand; a very bad sign. A sure sign of ultimate doom. Probably, it was all over except for the dying horribly in agony.

"Rodney?" Sheppard said softly, "I need to know what happened. You said the ZPM was bad?"

"Yeah. That one." Rodney tried to point, but he forgot which direction he was facing, his arm wouldn't respond properly, and when he tried to look around, he couldn't focus on anything further away than Sheppard's face. "Boom," Rodney said sadly. "Or maybe just...puddle. Woosh, everything melts...."

"Rodney. Pay attention. Is it still dangerous? Is there something else we need to do?"

"What? No. S' fine now. Not that that will do me much good."

Sheppard squeezed his shoulder. Hard. "Rodney, I can't hear you. What do we need to do?"

"Nothing," Rodney said, as loudly as he could. "S-safe." There was that. No danger of explosion, now. John was safe. Not a bad bit of work, there, under the circumstances. Rodney collected himself and said, "I'm thirsty."

"I can't give you anything," Sheppard said. "Not with a stomach wound."

The raw stupidity of that made Rodney angry, which sharpened his focus considerably for a moment. "Idiot. It's not going to make any difference."

"Stop it. It's not that bad. It's serious, but we can stabilize you and get you home."

Too tired to argue, Rodney closed his eyes.

"No, Rodney. I need you to stay with me."

Rodney didn't bother to open his eyes. "No," he muttered, "I really don't think so."

Coaxing now, and patronizing: "Come on. Prime not prime?"

"You don't need me to be awake." And really, he was almost annoyed enough to wish he could manage longer, more colorful sentences. "I would really rather be unconscious. So, shut up."

"Thirteen."

Oh, please. Thirteen. "Not prime." Suddenly uncertain, Rodney shifted and breathed. "Prime. Anyway...Anyway, you cheat." He kept his eyes closed, but with his eyes closed, all he could think of was the bone-twisting ache that seemed to take up most of his body and the blood that was probably pouring out by the second. 'Ugly bags of mostly water,' he thought, imagined how much of that water was red.

Flowing out of a leaky bag.

Pooling on the floor.

Rodney opened his eyes. "John," he said, not sure what he was asking.

"Teyla," Sheppard said, "take my jacket and get his feet up."

Rodney squawked.

"If you're going to argue over every little decision," Sheppard said, "we can just pack it up and forget the whole thing."

"Very funny," it came out a breathless yelp because it coincided with Teyla lifting his feet, and like everything else, that hurt a lot.

"So, I'm thinking you aren't going to get your report done on time," Sheppard said. His voice was light and slightly annoyed, but he was holding Rodney's hand, hard. One-handed, he pulled a thin emergency blanket from his backpack and covered Rodney.

"John...."

"I know. I know."

It was a long wait. The floor was cold and hard, but at some point, Sheppard crossed his feet and scooted around so that Rodney's head fitted into the cup made by Sheppard's folded ankles. This was more comfortable and slightly warmer.

"Teyla," Rodney said carefully. "You could send Teyla to the gate. She could get Carson. If he lands a jumper on the plateau...he could get here hours faster."

Sheppard sighed. "I've already sent Ronon." Really? When did that happen? "But even if he runs, it will still take him three or four hours to get to the gate, and that's after he gets out of the mine."

"I can wait."

"We'll see."

It was a long, cold wait. Maybe it was the narcotic that made the moments seem so long as well as fuzzy. Maybe it was the fear, which haunted Rodney through the fuzziness. Maybe it was the thought of 'first aid' from people who shared drinking bowls with extraordinary disregard for sanitation. He thought, 'If I was going to die, I'd really rather I'd blown up.'

"You're not going to die," Sheppard said softly. Either Rodney had spoken aloud or Sheppard was reading minds now.

"Oh, and you would know."

"This isn't my first field dressing, Rodney. And for the record, I'm really glad we didn't blow up."

"You're welcome." Rodney smiled tightly. "You know, if I do live through this...I'm never letting you off the hook."

"Me?" Sheppard asked. "You're the one who got taken out by a five foot two woman carrying...is that some kind of chisel?"

"It's a pick." Rodney paused to swallow. "And she was your psycho floozy."

Sheppard seemed gratifyingly affronted. "She's not my floozy!"

"Oh. Right. Her IQ must be what? A whopping one-twenty? Gosh I'm so impressed."

"Rodney--"

"Your taste is improving. And, hey, this one's human. Good job there."

"Have you got a head injury?" Sheppard hissed, pretending to have no idea what Rodney was talking about. "I'm not--I didn't--"

"Right. Nothing to do with you. Women just follow you around." Rodney panted shallowly, trying to beat back the pain. "Throw themselves at you. Poor John."

Looking up at Sheppard from underneath, Rodney had a very good view of him grinding his teeth. "McKay," he said finally, "could you just try not to be a pain in the ass while you're, you know...."

"Bleeding to death?"

"You're not. You're going to be--"

"Right. Sepsis. Gut wound. Much worse than bleeding to death."

Sheppard sighed. "It's time for another shot. All right? You'll feel better."

The second shot didn't make the pain go all the way away, either, but Rodney cared a hell of a lot less about hurting. He wasn't as worried about dying, either, even though he knew the odds were probably not in favor of survival. He was mellow enough about the whole dying in agony thing that when the local 'doctor' finally showed up, Rodney almost laughed. He was old and bent, with a limp and a squint. Sheppard lifted the thin blanket to show the wound. The doctor muttered and squeaked, looking at Rodney's abdomen. He pointed at the central console. "We'll remove it here. This table is very nice. Let's move him."

Two miners stepped forward with a leather stretcher. Rodney realized they were serious. "Are you people crazy? You can't-you can't-you can't-blood! You'll get blood all over everything..."

Sheppard gently carded his fingers through Rodney's hair. "Easy. Never mind. We'll clean it up, I promise."

He was lifted and shifted by more hands than he could count, and then he was on the stretcher, moving through the air.

"Right. Don't listen to me. We have plenty of extra equipment parts lying around."

"Easy, Rodney. Hush," Sheppard said, sliding onto the smooth black glass of the control panel. He made another nest of his lap and received Rodney's head as the stretcher settled onto the table. "See? No problem. I'm right here."

"Yes, and if you were, say, Carson, that would be comforting."

Off to one side the witch doctor was setting up a small brazier and a charcoal fire. Not altogether a bad idea, since Rodney was a little cold, but it was too small and far away to do any good. Well. Regardless of what Elizabeth said, it wasn't exactly a surprise that these people were ignorant and completely useless.

Finished fiddling with the fire, the doctor began to lay out his equipment. He drew short knives and metal clips and pointy things out of a very tidy leather case. Rodney began to laugh.

Elizabeth held out one of the field medical kits. She showed him the scalpel in its sterile packaging. The sutures. The gauze. The doctor nodded.

"What about anesthesia?" Sheppard asked.

The doctor pulled a small bottle from one of his pockets. "This is very good. We buy it from the Medaens."

Teyla took the bottle from him and gently removed the stopper and sniffed. "I know this. It is very good. Our people used to trade for it when we could afford the cost."

"So it will work?" Sheppard said.

"It is very safe," Teyla said slowly, handing the bottle back. "It dulls the pain and keeps the patient still during the procedure. But it is not as good as the medications that Dr. Beckett uses. The patient does not sleep."

In the silence that followed Rodney tried to understand what that meant.

"We don't have anything...do we?" Elizabeth whispered.

"Maybe...we can wait. Dr. Beckett--"

"We cannot wait," Teyla said. "He has started bleeding again and we can all smell that he has breached bowel.

Rodney slowly turned it over in his mind. The witch doctor--who had never used a real scalpel before and was probably some kind of retired pick-swinger--was about to operate without anesthesia. Rodney really was going to die. Right here and really soon. And while Rodney was still too doped up to panic, he was alert enough to be really...disappointed.

Over Rodney's head, Sheppard pointed at the little bottle of it-barely-qualifies-as-first-aid-ointment. "Is it injected? Get him a syringe."

Ah. Nice, sterile needle. Not that Rodney would live long enough to get an infection from *that*. The shot would dull the pain, though, Rodney thought. It might not be...very awful. Unless the sedation interacted with the narcotic already in Rodney's body and in a freak drug synergy killed him.

"Rodney, look at me," Sheppard said softly.

Lying with his head mostly in Sheppard's lap, there was no place else to look.

"You're going to be okay."

As lies went, it sounded convincing, but Rodney knew better. The shot went into his left arm, a thick sting that was only a pale shadow of the deep ache in his belly. They were ready to start. It might all be over very soon.

"Rodney, you can do this. You are going to be fine." He took a deep breath. "Stop. Don't look at me like that. Don't give up. I know this is really terrible--"

"I can't do this," Rodney whispered.

"Yes, you can. We can. We can do this, Rodney. Together we can do anything."

Rodney tried to shake his head. His whole body felt thick and heavy. The inertia was insurmountable, but Sheppard must have heard something, because he closed his eyes briefly, then leaned down and cupped Rodney's face with one hand. "I know you don't think you're very strong. You fight your body all the time. But Rodney. You've got a brain the size of a planet, and your brain always wins."

Um. What?

"Come on, McKay. Did you forget where you are? Look around you! You're in a nanite manufacturing facility. You're not done here, and I know there is no way in hell you can resist this. So you're going to keep it together through the-the-the operation. And then Carson will come and fix everything. And then we'll take you home so you can recover in a nice soft bed. And then you'll come back. You'll figure out how all this worked, what it all means. You can do this. I know you can."

"John...." Rodney's voice barely made a sound. It was just as well. He wasn't sure what he wanted to say.

"All I can do for you is sit here and believe in you. But I am sure you can do this. And I'm right. I am. You can do this with me. We can do anything."

Pain, then.

Terrible, tearing pain. And darkness. And a bitter cold.

"Rodney, you open your eyes. Look at me. I'm here with you. We can do anything."

Rodney opened his eyes. The tears that freed slid coldly down into his ears. There was pain, again, and a smell. Like something cooking.

Right. Of course. The little fire, it wasn't for warmth. To heat a cautery to stop the bleeding.

"Brain the size of a planet," Sheppard whispered.

"Anything," Rodney shouted, but his tongue was heavy and useless, his lips were clumsy. Somehow, though, Sheppard hear him anyway:

"Anything, Rodney. It's all going to be over soon. Anything."

Pain. Again. And the smell of his own flesh being seared away. Rodney couldn't even manage to be shamed by the tears that were running freely now. Sheppard scrubbed them away, still whispering that he was *sure* Rodney could come through this.

Cleaning the wound did not hurt nearly as much as the first step had. He *felt* the doctor's large hands manipulating his insides and cleaning away the absorbent flakes Sheppard had packed in to quell the flow of blood. Pressure. Pull. Ache. It was uncomfortable and weird, but bearable, if there weren't so much of it. 'I can't take it any more,' spun round and round in his mind, alternating with, 'please, let it be over soon.' If he could have overcome the inertia that held his body as fast as quicksand, Rodney would have crawled away.

Suturing was bad, but bearable, too. Sort of. Sheppard clung to his hand, leaned close, looked into his eyes. Reminded him again and again that it would be *worth* it to survive this. Rodney tried to believe that was true. He tried to think about Asgard shield generators. He tried to remember movie night last week with Carson and Teyla. He tried to list the questions he still had about the Control Chair at home. He failed to do any of that, but still, Sheppard whispered, promising.

It would end.

Rodney would survive.

Rodney had done many harder things than this.

A couple of months from now this would all be a bad memory and Rodney would be in the lab doing miracles again.

They'd go back into the field. It didn't usually work out like this. Usually, they went through the gate and they won. It would be like that again.

And then, suddenly, Sheppard leaned so close their temples brushed together and crowed softly, "That's it. He's done. He's done Rodney. You're free."

He still *hurt*. And he couldn't move. And he was thirsty. And, now that he noticed, sopping wet and freezing. But Sheppard was petting his hair and promising he could rest now.

There were hands. And Blankets, which was good. And Elizabeth's voice: "John? It's all right. I'll take him, if you want to get up for a minute."

Rodney could not move to protest.

"It's all right. We're fine. I don't...need anything," Sheppard said, staying.

Rodney didn't really notice falling asleep. He noticed waking up: the dull ache in his belly, the unnatural calm and thickness of the morphine, the absence of the headache he usually got from proper anesthesia. His hands obeyed him finally, and he pawed at his face. His eyes were crusted with salt and his cheeks itched with dried sweat.

"Hey."

"Colonel," Rodney's tongue moved easily enough now, but his mouth was very dry and his throat felt raw.

"Right here." Rodney wasn't in Sheppard's lap any more, but he seemed to still be on the central console. The pillow he was using currently was not as comfortable as the previous one, but Sheppard was sitting beside him, now, still holding his hand. "We'd like to move you. If you're up to it."

Rodney cringed.

"We can carry you to the little electric train. We can rig a mine cart so it's sort of comfortable. If we start soon, we can meet Carson in the main chamber. It would get you help, sooner. If you could do it."

There was no way to avoid the horrid little tram or the trip through the dim, cramped tunnels. And going *to* Carson would get him real help an hour earlier. Instead of agreeing, though, Rodney managed, "This sucks."

Sheppard nodded. "It does. It does. I'm so sorry I can't do any better for you than this. I know it's asking a lot, but you've got to.... We'll get you home, Rodney. I promise. You will get through this." He smiled suddenly. "You can chew me out if you want. You usually like that. It'll pass the time. I can even act sullen and cowed if you want."

"Thirsty," Rodney answered. 'Give me some water and we'll call it even.'

"Not yet. I'm sorry."

Shockingly, after the first moments of horrible vertigo and terror of being lifted into the air, Rodney fell asleep on the stretcher. The noise of the electric mine train woke him, briefly, but even that wasn't enough to keep him awake.

Strangely, what finally did bring him up was stillness. Silence. Darkness.

What the hell?

Rodney reached out his hand, felt the cold, rough surface of the metal mine cart.

Still not a clue.

A standard Earth flashlight beam stabbed through the darkness. Then two more. They the warm, grey light of a mine lantern.

Well, okay. Not alone in the dark. That was good. Voices erupted around him. Rodney was not-alone with a crowd of upset people. The loudest voice belonged to Colonel Sheppard, but Rodney couldn't tell what he was saying. He couldn't understand any of it. Protest. Frustration. Threat?

Elizabeth's voice cut through the others, calming, restraining, efficiently pointing out that there was no point wasting time in recriminations.

Sheppard was there suddenly, shining a flashlight in Rodney's face, pressing cool fingers to the pulse at Rodney's throat. "You okay?" He laughed bitterly. "Right. Stupid question." He took a deep breath. "There's a little hold up. There must be a storm up on the plateau. It's taken out the electricity. No more cart, no more lights."

A voice--the mine owner?--said, "It happens often this time of year. At least a dozen times more before the season ends. When the storm is over, it will only take a few hours to repair the power cables."

Sheppard squeezed Rodney's shoulder. "We'll have to walk you the rest of the way out."

Rodney swallowed dryly. "How will Carson find us? If we're not there...."

Sheppard closed his eyes. "Carson won't be able to land on the Plateau during a storm. If they can walk from the gate, it'll take....at least another five or six hours. I'm sorry, Rodney."

If it wasn't night already. Ronon, sure, he could race through unfamiliar territory in the dark. But Carson? "Fuck."

"Yeah."

"Thirsty."

"Yeah. Okay. Just a little."

With one hand behind Rodney's head, Sheppard braced him and offered a single swallow of water from the canteen. As the container was pulled away, Rodney made a weak grab for it.

"Later. More later, I promise." He lowered Rodney's head and closed the canteen. "Well, come on. Let's get a move on."

It would have been good to sleep. Rodney couldn't. The footing over the track was uneven. The stretcher tilted and swayed. The result wasn't as bad as motion sickness and it wasn't as scary as freefall. But it was bad enough. The jiggling hurt a little. And the shadows of rocks crawling along as they carried the lights past was...spooky. At least nobody had carved Wraith into the walls here. If he saw a Wraith, it would be real.

Rodney told himself that he wasn't thinking clearly. He was dopy and stupid. And vulnerable. And hurting. That was all.

There weren't monsters creeping around, waiting to jump out on them.

Were there? They were on another planet, after all.

"Rodney? Guys--hold it. Set him down." Through the leather of the stretcher the ground was uneven and hard. Sheppard and the witchdoctor squatted over him. While the local butcher checked the bandage, Sheppard said softly, "Rodney? How are you doing?"

Since that wasn't worthy of comment, Rodney grunted and gave him a dirty look.

"Right."

Sheppard and the witchdoctor had a harassed conference, and Rodney was permitted another swallow of water. It wasn't enough, but Sheppard gently stroked Rodney's hair as he lowered him back down. Rodney caught his hand as he pulled away. "Thank you," he whispered.

In the bad light Rodney couldn't make out his expression, but the tiny flinch backward was clear enough. "For what? For this? This is nothing!"

Rodney wasn't so clouded that he misunderstood. Everything Sheppard had done, it was just what you did for team mates. Rodney had had a right. And Sheppard would have done it for any of them. So would Rodney, had been things been reversed, although Rodney would have done more freaking out.

But *how* Sheppard had done it...With Ronon or Teyla or Elizabeth, it would have been different. He would have been different. "I honestly thought you didn't know." Rodney swallowed dryly. "I thought you didn't know. I thought you were...thick. You never said anything. Turns out that was just because you were kind. And today...." Today had been more than kind. Rodney didn't think he could have borne it alone. No, he couldn't have.

"What are you talking about?" And then: "No. Rodney, don't...."

"I'm okay. It was...kind. I wanted to thank you."

"Rodney...I meant it. I wasn't--"

"I'm sorry. I didn't expect...I mean, I didn't think you had it in you, and I should have, because you really are that--" good. He was that good. Rodney had been right to love him.

"Stop it. Right. Now. McKay, I am *not* kidding." His voice had gotten louder. Rodney's hadn't:

"It's not your fault you can't look at me that way."

Groaning in frustration or pain, Sheppard grabbed Rodney's hand. He jumped and let it go at once. Carefully, he laid the back of his hand along Rodney's cheek. "You're hot," he said heavily.

Rodney smiled a little. "Now you're just teasing," he said.

"You're feverish," Sheppard corrected gently. "I guess-I guess that's normal. Even if the antibiotics are working. I'm sure...you're going to be fine." He took a deep breath. "Rodney, I'm not going to argue with you right now, all right? It's kind of unfair, since you don't know what you're saying. Okay? Just try to rest."

The thing about time was that everything ended. Everything nice. Everything awful. Whether you *wanted* it to end or not, sooner or later it was a memory. That thought had fascinated Rodney when he was about four. It was fascinating now, since he was thinking about as well as a four year old. A moment could be real and in escapable and completely out of your control. And then it was gone.

Although the swaying and jarring and pain and exhaustion was so horrible that it should have lasted forever, suddenly they were passing through habitation passages rather than train tunnel. And then, finally, they were in the huge living cavern and countless hands were shifting Rodney onto his low, soft bed.

Stillness was good. And there was another swallow of water. And piles of blankets to keep out the cold. The familiar Wraith reliefs were almost welcoming, in a ghastly kind of way.

It was the sound of Carson's voice that woke him. Rodney could only stare. As badly as he'd wanted the doctor to come, he'd forced himself not to think about it.

Carson started an IV. And a line for replacement blood. Somewhere in it was something for pain, because somehow Rodney had lost track of how bad it had gotten until some of it eased off.

It eased off very quickly. This was better than the morphine had been, really. Much. He could take a deep breath, turn his head, hold a single thought for seconds at a time.

Carson was talking. He was apologizing for being late, reporting the news that had come in on the latest data squeak from Earth, describing the amazing weather. Apparently 'storms on the plateau' was a euphemism for 'electromagnetic nightmare.' His cool, gloved hands all the while peeled back the gauze and prodded at the seam in Rodney's belly.

Rodney didn't say anything, and before Carson finished he was asleep again.

He woke to dimness, the sound of dozens of breathing bodies, the low rumble of snoring. It was almost familiar by now. No sex this time, though.

Rodney turned his head. The shape sleeping close beside him was too big to be Teyla. Carson? He couldn't see for sure but the antiseptic smell was a dead give away. On the other side--not Elizabeth. Sheppard, sitting with his back pressed against the rear wall. His weapon was in his lap. The posture of his silhouette was comfortingly familiar. Rodney had seen him sitting sentry many times.

Without meaning to, Rodney reached out with his left hand and gently caught Sheppard's leg. At once, Shepard slid down so that their heads were even and whispered, "What's wrong? Rodney? What do you need?"

"Nothing, I'm--" I'm not unconscious, he thought. And really, he ought to be. You were supposed to be blissfully out of it for several days after someone tried to disembowel you, weren't you? Not wide awake and generally achy. And kind of hungry, not with no chance of getting something to eat. "I'm awake." His voice hardly seemed to touch the slumbering quiet of the great room.

"Hurting?"

"A little."

A hand on his forehead. "Your fever's down."

"Oh. Good."

"I'll wake Carson--" The hand hadn't moved.

"No, don't. I don't...need anything."

"You're just awake."

"Yeah."

There was silence between them for a few minutes. Then Sheppard moved slightly closer, his face a dark shadow inches away, and whispered, "You know you're my best friend? Right?"

Rodney didn't know how to answer that. Sheppard sighed, "I didn't mean to...I mean I'd given up...I didn't come here to make friends." He paused and started over. "You're the funniest man I've ever met. And one of the bravest." His voice softened, "and you are so stubborn."

What was this? Oh, it was the let down talk. And it sounded like he'd really worked on it. Rodney almost giggled. He had never gotten a nice one before.

When Rodney made no answer, he continued, "I wish I did....Well, no I don't, I guess."

"What?" Rodney said. Maybe he was way more out of it than he thought, because Sheppard was usually one of the more coherent people he knew.

"I don't wish I could look at you the way I look at them."

The sharp, quick part of Rodney's mind offered: 'Colonel? What I said before about you being kind? I take it back.' But he didn't have it in him to defend himself. What was the point anyway? Colonel Sheppard knew what a fool he was, pining after someone who didn't want him. Worse, pathetic, pining after someone too stupid to see past wide-eyed aliens with pretty little bodies. Narrow and stupid and *still* Rodney hadn't managed to give him up--and Sheppard knew. Had clearly known for a while. Was still willing to be friends, even.

"It's fun," Sheppard said cautiously, sounding like he was feeling his way through a forest of words, "to meet someone I don't have to be responsible for. And I like soft and round and...you know, cute...."

Desirable. Yes, thank you, I get it. Please, go away.

"I like it a lot, and it's everything I'm supposed to want. Being in love and all, it's supposed to be everything...."

Yes. It is. And it's not me. I get it. Really.

Softly, almost ashamed, "I want more. I want...with you....Rodney, we can do anything." Urgent now, a soft breath against Rodney's cheek. "I don't mean that in the idiot, 'we can't lose' way, I mean....Rodney, we have no idea what we'll be doing tomorrow. It could be anything. We came here looking for technology to beat the Goa'uld. Maybe a few more ZPMs. And there were pretty good chances that we'd just, you know, die. Here. For nothing. But, *Rodney*, there is just an outside chance that we can save this whole galaxy from the Wraith. And you--you might be able to *make* ZPMs by this time next year. Every place we go is different. Everybody we meet is an opportunity I can't even begin to guess at. And doing it with you....You ask more of me than anybody I've ever met. And you never make it easy. I don't want things...easy. This isn't making any sense...."

Weirdly, Rodney could feel Sheppard shaking. He didn't know why. He wasn't sure he even understood what he was saying.

"I want more. No, it's not the same, and I'm...so sorry it hurts you that it's not the same. That I can't want you the way you want me. But I don't want *that*. I want *this*. I wouldn't trade what I have with you for something small and empty and easy."

Rodney was very glad for the darkness. He didn't now whether it would be better to present a cold or an amused front, and anyway, he didn't have it in him to carry off either of the options convincingly. "High marks for creativity. And kindness. But you go into negative numbers for plausibility."

Sheppard sighed. "Yeah. I know. It's really weird. And I don't know what kind of man that makes me. I mean, I like helicopters and puddlejumpers and Atlantis and *you* better than girls. Okay, I still like girls, but...It's just not normal."

Stunned, more confused than he'd admit to, even under these circumstances, Rodney said, "So, what--you mean you don't want to be in love?"

"Of course I...maybe not. I want the life I have. Not some cute fantasy. And the point is, I think...the reason it can be so wonderful is a lot to do with you. And you need to know that."

Rodney swallowed hard. "You have a really nice 'just friends' speech," he said.

"We're not *just* friends. I don't know what we are. But we're not just friends." He slid the rest of the way into the gap between the sleeping nests and rested his head beside Rodney's on the pad. He stayed, close and patient, as Rodney lay awake in the dim, quiet cavern. And, damn, how well did he know Rodney? Because he wasn't afraid, or cold or empty, not with John so close.

Carson woke after a while. He changed out the IV. He checked vitals and peeked under the bandage. He tried to talk Rodney into voiding. That was more irritating than anything else. "When I need help with that, I'll let you know," he snarled. "And, yuck."

"Enough," Sheppard said. He was sitting up, now, but still holding Rodney's hand.

Rodney allowed himself to be quieted. Only John could really do that. Sure, Zelenka could change Rodney's mind if he yelled fast enough and Elizabeth could shame him into being polite (or at least not reaming people out in proportion to their idiocy), but nobody reined in growing hysteria like Sheppard. It was like having his very own, frustrating, heavily armed teddy bear. Rodney laughed aloud, which was a mistake because it hurt. He panted shallowly, with his eyes shut, while both John and Carson fussed. Rodney ignored their whispered questions while he waited for the pain to fade.

Comparably, it wasn't very long, or even very bad, but when Rodney's body had finally settled, he found he was too tired to stay awake any longer.

The next morning, when Carson had finished taking vitals and changing IVs, he took a pair of bent scissors and cut what remained of Rodney's ruined BDUs away. Ronon, strong as an ox and eerily patient, helped, which was good, since Rodney couldn't lift his head by himself, let alone his torso or legs.

Rodney, unable to hold out any longer, gave in and voided into the urinal Carson held in place. As embarrassing as it was unpleasant. At least Sheppard was off with Elizabeth making nice with the mine owner so that they would be welcome to come back and try again.

They washed him with warm, sweet-smelling water and slightly rough cloths. It was worth it to get clean, but Carson didn't have a lot of experience with sponge baths and Ronon...was way too quiet, which made Rodney nervous. "What?" he said, finally.

Ronon blinked and shrugged toward Rodney's stomach. "Be a nice scar," he said.

Astonished, Rodney couldn't think of a comeback worthy of that remark. While he was still gaping, Carson, combing out Rodney's hair, leaned down and whispered, "Just take the compliment."

Praise? And anyway, "So--what? Nothing to say about what a wimp I'm being? No lecture on how only the weak accept medical treatment?"

It was Ronon's turn to gape slightly. "Everyone is needed to fight the Wraith," he said. "Illness and injury--we can't afford unnecessary losses because someone gets hurt."

"Oh, come on, I've seen you pull an arrow out of your own leg."

"*That* was just a minor tear." He shrugged. "You're some kind of engineer or something, right? You know the value of maintenance and repair. Men are just another kind of equipment."

Rodney was still caught on 'some kind of engineer or something.' Some kind of engineer? Or something?

Carson leaned over and whispered in Rodney's ear, "Quit while you're ahead, lad. He's not a Klingon."

After the bath, they let him rest. Clean, he felt a little better.

It would be a very long time before he felt good.

Eventually, of course, they loaded him back on the stretcher and began the long trek up out of the mine. Carson had sedated him with something in addition to the pain killers. It only put him far enough out that the swaying and rocking felt like an endless nightmare rather than the end of the world. The drugs blunted the excruciating horror of pain and helplessness, if not the passage of time.

The sunlight was somehow unexpected. Rodney squeezed his eyes shut and told himself that everything passed with time.

The trail they took didn't lead down, but across and then up. There was wind, but no storm. Sometimes Carson called a halt and checked Rodney's vitals. He never asked how Rodney was doing. That was probably best; Rodney couldn't have formulated a useful answer. At some point, against all probability, Rodney fell asleep.

He woke feeling clouded and heavy and stiff. His mouth was cottony and his head hurt. It was a profoundly uncomfortable fuzziness, and Rodney couldn't force himself to rouse until Sheppard's voice said softly, "C'mon, Rodney. You're making Carson nervous. Wake up."

Rodney cursed miserably. A straw nudged into his mouth and Sheppard said more loudly, "Hey, Doc. He's up." And then, "Just a little. Just a little. Easy, Rodney."

The single swallow of water he was permitted was barely enough to wet his throat. Rodney cursed unintelligibly.

And then Carson was there, peeking and pushing and shining lights into Rodney's eyes.

The world was packed in mud. It was vaguely familiar, but....

Anesthesia. Surgery. He'd been operated on again. With real anesthesia this time. "Why?" he croaked.

"Why what?" Carson asked. His hands were cold.

"What happened?"

"There was some internal bleeding," Carson said carefully.

"Witchdoctor."

"Rodney, I didn't have a choice," Carson sounded slightly impatient. "We had to open you up--"

"Not *you*. Him."

"Oh. He did a pretty good job, actually."

"'Cept for the hemorrhage...."

"Leave him alone," Sheppard again, which was odd since Rodney would have thought he'd get bored and leave even if Carson hadn't sent him away, and Carson usually did send visitors away-- "Leave him alone, Rodney. He's had a hard night."

Oh. Right. Carson had a hard night.

"Yes, he did. It wasn't an easy surgery, and Dr. Miller was off-planet." A short, uncertain pause. "We were lucky, Rodney, all right? Just....Don't give Carson a hard time. You scared the shit out of him."

The fuzzy world slid away again before Rodney could worry too much about how close he might have come to dying and whether or not it was still an issue.

Elizabeth was there when he woke up again. She was reading. "For me?" Rodney managed hopefully.

She glanced up, smiled slightly. "Yes. For you. Engineering specifications for water purification." The more complex texts from the Ancient database had to be checked by hand even after computer translation. Elizabeth was the best, but of the translators they'd brought, she had the least time. "This is even more boring than the stuff the bio staff gives me. And I'm not sure what good it is, since I don't understand want I'm saying at this point. But yes, such as it is, it's a present for you."

Rodney started to shift, thought better of it. "We okay?"

"If you're asking if everyone got back all right, then yes. If you're asking, have we still got access to the factory? Then also yes. We sent Zelenka and Rosenthal in with a team this morning."

"Bastards. Mine." Rodney was dimly aware that he should offer a more creative and eloquent complaint.

"Well, Rodney, if you want to keep your assignments, you're just going to have stop getting into knife fights." She was smiling. Gentle. Charming. Kind. Briefly, Rodney hated her.

"Pick," he muttered. He swallowed hard. "How bad?"

"Carson says it looks like you won't be cleared to go off-planet for at least a month."

It was another day before Rodney was allowed all the water he wanted, even though Carson assured him that his stomach hadn't been damaged. By then the infection had set in, and he wasn't in a position to enjoy it anyway. As infections went, it wasn't bad. The witchdoctor had apparently cleaned the tear carefully, and Sheppard had given the first antibiotic shot right after the first morphine shot (not that Rodney remembered either). But bowel had been opened and that was never good. Rodney ran a low fever. He felt slightly nauseated. He ached, everywhere, just a little. Carson told him it was nothing to worry about.

On the third day Sheppard, who'd been making visits all along that Rodney had kept falling asleep for, sat down on the edge of the bed and took Rodney's hands. "I've been thinking," he said.

It was such an obvious straight line that Rodney couldn't help smiling a little. He couldn't think of an original punch line, though, so he didn't answer it.

"Rodney, I think, you know, I think we could try it your way."

"Try what my way?" Rodney looked at their hands. Sheppard had twined the tips of their fingers together. Suddenly, he was much more awake than he'd been in days. "Crap," he choked out. "What the hell?" He tried to pull his hand free, was dismayed at how weak a struggle he put up. "Christ, John, I'm not dying!"

"Of course not. I just--"

"Oh, god, I am? I'm dying." And how had Carson gotten that past him? Carson was such a lousy liar even Rodney could read him like a book. "How long?"

Sheppard gasped. "No. No, don't be an idiot. You're not...." He tried to smile. "You're going to be fine." It wasn't convincing, and Rodney's heart sank.

"I've got some kind of Pegasus Galaxy supergerm, don't I? Carson can't kill it--Why am I not being quarantined? John, get away from me!" He tried to push Sheppard away, but that would have been a no-go even if Rodney hadn't been flat on his back and trembling with weakness. "Oh, god...."

"Will you be quiet!" Sheppard hissed. "If Beckett finds out I've upset you, I'll get blacklisted. This is why people aren't nice to you, by the way. It completely freaks you out. And, no, you don't have a supergerm. Trust me; if you were dying I would have gotten a memo. So, stop it."

Rodney considered that. The fact that he *hadn't* been put in isolation was, in fact, a very good sign. "Then what the hell is this? You're feeling guilty because your latest bimbo stabbed me? You're suddenly bi? You've lost your mind? What?"

Sheppard closed his eyes and took a breath that shook. "I don't know, okay? You look like hell, and you'll hardly talk to anyone, and I...I just can't, Rodney. I can't give you up...."

"So, what? You're giving me a reason to live?" The sluggish circuits flipped over in Rodney's brain. "You are, aren't you? You're giving me a reason to live."

"Is it working?"

"I hate you," Rodney breathed. "I absolutely hate you. Why can't you just be a shit so I don't have to love you any more? Is that so much to ask?"

"Er. What?" Sheppard blinked. "Rodney, I can do this. It wouldn't change anything. Not anything important. There's just be, you know, there'd be--"

"You're insane, *and* I hate you. I mean, if you had just turned out to be a jerk who didn't really understand anything important, ever, if you'd just been like everybody else...." Rodney closed his eyes, losing what little coherence he'd had. "I wouldn't have a problem if I just didn't love you."

"So..." Sheppard spoke carefully, "You want me to be a jerk."

"And boring. That would help. And stupid." Rodney trailed off, his thoughts rambling away from him. Sheppard still had not let go of his hands. Right. Somebody here had to be sane, and sadly, it was going to have to be the person with the fever. "Not dying," Rodney said firmly. "No grand gestures. No good-byes. And what the hell, anyway? You think--what? I'm giving up? Me?"

Sheppard closed his eyes. "No. No, I...."

"Damn right. Go away."

"Rodney--"

"I'm fine. You're...probably a better friend than I deserve. Quit worrying. Go away."

Impossibly, given the fever and the lethargy and how badly Rodney really wanted to throw something, he managed to hold back the tears until after Sheppard was gone. Which was kind of weird, since what he was feeling wasn't sad.

Next: Worse Things Than Love