wip amnesty: running on empty, sga, John/Rodney

WIP Amnesty. This is the SGA Vampire AU. Yes, this hurts me, too.

Title: Running on Empty
Author: seperis
Codes: McKay, Sheppard/McKay
Rating: NC-17



I tried. And tried. I just could not get it to finish. Dammit. I had ideas for this one. 21,016 words.





He wakes up with a spread of bright heat across his face. He sits up abruptly, scrabbling desperately back against the wall, hand covering burning flesh, expecting the feel of blisters raising up against his palm, but there's nothing but the prickle of soft hair.



Opening his eyes, he blinks at the small barred window, unshuttered for the first time in memory, at honey-gold light spilling onto the bare wood floor.

It's been--he doesn't know. Too long. Since he saw the sun.

Clutching the wall, he turns disbelieving eyes on the open door of his cell, the pile of clothes neatly folded by the door. It's a trick, he knows it, but when he glances out, he sees into a deserted room and beyond, a front door open to the world, so bright his eyes ache.

Licking cracked lips, he tastes dried blood and crusted salt, a familiar/unfamiliar tang beneath coating his tongue that he thinks he should recognize. He doesn't know how long he crouches there, staring at the door, the clothes, the slow wave of a distant tree in a warm summer breeze. It's not real, or it's too real, or something half between them when he realizes he's forgotten how to talk.

Clothes feel awkward, the cotton harsh and unforgiving against his bruised shoulders and back, falling over his body too loosely, like they were for someone bigger. He struggles with the button of the pants for too long, hearing someone making harsh, animal sounds of frustration before he finds himself in the corner again, clutching his socks to his chest, panting, but pants buttoned and zipped. He doesn't know how that happened.

It's an hour before he can make himself move again.

Later, for the first time in--days? weeks? months? he doesn't know, does he?--he steps into pure daylight and stares in disbelief at the quiet fields waving golden brown in the distance; at grass so green it feels obscene, unnatural; at a tree stretching leafy arms toward the sky. Everything is chaotic colors and too much activity, too much, Jesus, he can't think with this much happening around him.

He can't think at all; blankness washes over him and he welcomes it with relief.

When he opens his eyes again, he's crouched in the corner of his quiet grey cell, arms locked around his knees, something humming rhythmically in the background that he realizes is his own voice. He watches the square of sunlight crawl slowly toward the open door, telling himself it's all a dream.

He doesn't know what scares him more: that this isn't real, or that it is.

*****

There are other things, count them one by one:

Shoes. He didn't see those before. Boots, almost new, dull leather and broken in. They feel rough and heavy and wrong. Did he wear shoes once? He doesn't remember.

A packed bag by the door: more clothes; a wallet; cheese and crackers, canned meat: portable food; a compass, a flashlight, utensils that feel unfamiliar and wrong for the shape of his hands; matches.

A gun, unloaded. Reloads, six, stacked beside it. One silver loaded, one wood.

A cross, dull silver with a cold iron chain that spills through finger that shake too much to hold it.

Water. Enough to get him--somewhere. He doesn't know where yet.

And a flask beside it, and he sits down when he picks it up, floor rising up to meet him like a punch in the gut. He unstoppers it, looking at the water inside that's anything but plain.

He takes everything back to his cell--doesn't ask himself why--sitting with his back to the corner, and loses time watching another hour pass in slow-moving light while he clutches the water to his chest, the chain of the cross twisted between his fingers while he tries to remember what he supposed to do next. Strange, sharp words hover on the tip of his tongue. He thinks if he said them, he might kill himself when he hears them.

Do something easy, his mind offers with a gentle nudge. Look at what you have.

He takes everything out and arranges it methodically, touching each item to learn the shape, guess the function, fumbling tiny items with fingers that feel like lead.

He repacks everything. It's not as compact, because he knows shit about packing. Puts on the boots, standing unsteadily, awkward when his feet can't feel wood or concrete. His skin itches from the soft cotton of the shirt, the loose cargo pants that scrape unfamiliarly against his skin, remembering vaguely there used to be underwear--he thinks--but he can't remember if he saw them or what they look like.

It takes him two tries to pick the bag up, forget getting it over his shoulder. Sparks dance in front of his eyes, and he has to stop, leaning against the wall until the world settles again into coherence. Slowly, he picks it up, carrying it to the door, coming back to pick up the holster and fastening it awkwardly around one thigh, pushing the gun in. He can't get used to the weight, dragging on the material, scratching already sensitized skin.

He stumbles to the floor halfway to the front door, going down on his knees with a muted hiss and biting his tongue. The taste of blood is familiar enough to ground him; shaking his head, he pushes himself up, waiting for the dizziness to pass. He remembers this feeling, remembers that it's because of--

--something. Because he's. He's.

Oh, he realizes, eyes fastening on the bag in realization. *Hungry*. He should eat, then.

*****

He eats just inside the door, careful to keep out of view of anyone who might pass, hands shaking as he tries to cut the cheese and slices open his palm on the first try. He stares at his hands for a second--this isn't that hard, is it?--wadding a paper towel over the open wound and dropping the knife. Getting the cheese in one hand, he bites off chunks he barely chews before he swallows, nauseated by the strange, bitter taste, unable to make himself stop. The crackers are like cardboard, drying out his mouth; he drinks a bottle of water to wash away the taste and feels his stomach lurch abruptly, nausea rising sour in the back of his throat, burning his tongue before he stumbles to his feet, going--somewhere.

His cell, he realizes as he rolls away from the smell of vomit and undigested food pooling inches away. He stares up at the grey ceiling, fighting down another wave of sickness, trying to connect food with this. It--

He ate too fast. Too much at once. He's still--something. Weak? From. From.

From *something*.

He crawls back to his corner and curls up, head pressed to his knees, watching sunlight crawl up the wall, the fading light outside. Something in him relaxes; dusk's coming, pink-gold and grey, and it was a trick.

Of course. Of course it was a trick. He watches the square and clears his mind, letting everything settle into silence and order, room graying around him.

At some point, he falls asleep.

*****

He wakes the second time to the same flash of heat; he open his eyes, rolling away and almost rolling into his own vomit.

Pushing away, he struggles onto his knees, looking between the window and the open door.

It's morning again, dawn rising pale pink and lavender, and he's still alone. The room is warm around him, summer breeze soft against his skin, but he can't stop shivering.

*****

The second time he goes outside, he stumbles at the uneven texture of the ground, entirely unlike a floor of flat straight lines and obvious beginnings and endings, starts and stops. It seems inconceivable that there are no walls, no doors, no limits to stop him short, hold him still, trap him in small spaces, hands to hold him down and pull him up. A voice in his ear, in his mind, inserted like his own thoughts to tell him what to do.

He thinks that maybe, he's forgotten how to think without that voice.

Looking down, he realizes he changed clothes; the t-shirt yesterday was blue. These pants are looser. His feet are bare, socks and boots long gone, and his stomach seems to have settled. The dry taste of crackers and sharper, sour cheese linger on the back of his tongue. He ate, then. Changed clothes. Showered, because he can smell soap on his skin. This morning; his hair's damp when he touches it. Lowering his arm, his wrist flashes by, the perpetually scabbed red rings that once circled them fading into his skin.

He touches them, surprised the skin doesn't crack beneath the touch, bubble up blood for--someone--to enjoy. Soft flesh, pale like it's never seen the sun. He finds himself staring at the scars that carve curving, jagged lines into his skin like a roadmap of arteries and major veins, circling and twisting to follow the paths of blood to the crook of his arm, up his bicep and vanishing into the short sleeve of his shirt. He traces them mindlessly before the soft ripple of a bird singing snaps him back into the warmth of the world.

His fingernails are gouging at the fading marks, and he goes back inside, ripping the bag apart until he finds a long sleeve t-shirt, jerking it over his head. It hangs loosely, cuffs covering his knuckles, but now at least, he can't see his skin.

He pulls the t-shirt over it, packing everything away with more certainty, folding the clothes like he faintly remembers makes for efficient packing, sorting the supplies again before he makes himself put those away, too. The knife goes in a holster that goes--somewhere. The belt? He runs his fingers over the stiff, rough leather, awkwardly putting it on, tightening it to keep the jeans from crawling back down his hips. The knife presses against the small of his back, hard, forcing his spine straighter than he's used to.

When he comes back to the main room, he stops short; he hadn't realized there was more.

Another bag: it wasn't there yesterday, was it? More water stacked against the wall. A cardboard box of food. Another pair of boots that shape themselves to his hands; these are his, he thinks in surprise, feeling the age soft leather mold to his hands, something in him clicking into place. A map. He flattens it on the floor, studying each letter until recognition dawns. C with O, and L, another O--

Colorado.

Sitting back on his heels, he pulls it up with him, blinking at the slight resistance. He sets the map aside and reaches down, sliding his fingers over the wood, startled by the tacky-dry feeling, mind freezing in recognition. For a second, he can't breathe, every muscle tensing before going loose and pliant, lowering his head while his hands flutter to flatten on his thighs, knees parting from habit.

Waiting, mind blank with relief, for--

What is he waiting for? A hand on the back of his neck; teeth pressed to his throat. A fist against his temple; fingernails gouging his skin. A voice, a mind insinuating sickly into his. For someone to *tell him who he is*.

He lurches to his feet, stumbling backward until he hits the wall, looking at the room--looking and seeing this time. Too much light fucking up his limited night vision, but he needs to--

He goes window to window, stopping at every shattered shutter as he pulls away torn, stained curtains, pulls up broken blinds. Shattered glass coats the windowsills, streaked in brown-black stains, wide spots on the floor where the glass fell. When the final window spills daylight into the room, he turns around, chest tightening at the broken furniture piled neatly in the corner. The floor is more black than hardwood, and the walls--

He fights the urge to kneel, to run to his cell, to start screaming and let the blankness wash over him for good; he suspects this may be his last chance. For what, he doesn't know, but maybe, maybe he should find out.

It was bad; he goes to look at the neat piles of limbs, of torsos, of heads staring at him with wide, shocked eyes from the far corner. Blood pooled here, drying thick and still sticky, pulling at the soles of his boots. Pale wood like the shaft of an arrow shoved through a lone arm, a hand, a hip.

That--that wouldn't kill them, he's almost sure. But it would hurt, hurt when those unsharpened sticks shoved through them, gouging flesh and shattering bone. No hearts were breached. They were hours (days. It takes days to die like this) days dying.

He recognizes faces whose names were always Master, Mistress, Sir. Fingernails. Fingers that twisted in his hair, in his guts, in his ass. They died badly, slowly, left here in pseudocasual brutality as--what? A warning? For him? (Why?) He finds himself clutching his neck, the big artery throbbing dully against his finger, rubbing the scar tissue that crawls up to his ear, the too-smooth skin and tiny indentations only days (a day? Two?) old, fading like the scars on his arms, on his--

Other parts of his body. He steers away from that, searching the bodies methodically before he frowns at his count comes up short by one. One's missing.

One, but the only one that counts; He goes to the window, looks outside, like whoever had done this might be hanging around. They aren't; at least, they wouldn't during full daylight with the noon sun glaring down at the earth and baking everything it falls on. His eyes flicker to the tree, vividly green and almost too real, then slowly down, strangely unsurprised to find what he's looking for hanging from a branch, a shadow almost invisible, almost hidden by the thick trunk.

It's so much easier to move when he has a goal, something to do.

The branches here were cut ruthlessly back, branch stripped to bare wood facing east. He stares up at the blackened, wizened thing that was once something else and feels himself start to shake. Clawed hands pulled close to an unrecognizable face, thin wood piercing in a dozen places, white ash that might have, could have been dipped in holy water, held down while he--

While they held him down, like *he* held him down, with his sharp knives and genial smiles and flat, rough tongue that licked away each trickle of his blood.

He opens his mouth, air clawing at the back of his throat, a word that's choked away speech for longer than--for a long time. Months, his mind offers vaguely. It's been *months*.

"Kolya," he whispers, watching the wind push the body into a slow sway. Reaching up, he touches leathery char that used to be skin, clawed hands that pried him apart, and says it again. "*Kolya*."

It's loud after that, noise to match the riot of colors around him as he presses his head against the sunwarmed bark of the tree. He wonders who's screaming. His throat hurts just listening to it.

*****

Someone left gasoline, hidden in the only room still shuttered. He takes it, following the memory of walking these rooms with cuffed feet, shuffling over smooth wood and concrete, trailing gas behind him like breadcrumbs. The second bag has C4 and dynamite, nitroglycerin and platinum triggers, ropes of wire and cording, containers of various sizes. Tools: jeweler's screwdrivers and small hammers, pliers and tiny screws and nails; wirecutters. Batteries he can cut apart if he needs to. He doesn't, not yet.

For a second, it's all strange and awkward in his hands, but the pads of his fingers slide over every piece, color flaring in the grey background of his memory. *Physics. Caltech.*

Hee sits in the middle of the grassy yard in sight of Kolya's swinging body, spreading the supplies out around him, settling his entire focus on the wires, cutting with neat precision (Engineering. Northwestern.), assembling the pieces into something whole. He won't waste the C4 on this; he wants his fingerprints pressed into every inch, smearing his blood on every wire from the vein he opens in his wrist with a scrape of his teeth over a half-healed scar. He takes the jumble of plastic and wires inside the house, then goes back and builds a second one; smaller, more precise. He rings the tree with gasoline, then finds a chair and looks into the shriveled face of the hanging thing that once held him down and told him he'd forget his own name before he was done with him.

"Rodney," Rodney whispers, and pours gasoline like liquid light over it. Getting down, he strips off his clothes, throwing them at the base of the tree, redressing in long sleeves and age-soft denim, packing everything by rote. Some part of him knows all this; knows how to walk without falling, talk without screaming, eat without vomiting. That part knows how to load a gun, check it before sliding it into the holster, pack what he needs into a single bag with room to spare.

He lets it guide him, packing extra water, the lightest of the food, the tools and C4. Then he slides the bag over his shoulders, memory crawling out to remind him that he needs to eat, soon. Meals. He needs to remember how that works.

He will. Later.

A few miles away, he finds an abandoned car (it doesn’t have wheels, he thinks dreamily, then dismisses it; of course it does) in a field of sunwarmed grass. He checks the keys, finding them in place, then the engine, that purrs to life at a touch. Putting everything in the back seat, he crawls into the front and turns on the PDA, watching the LED flaring up when he draws his fingers across it.

His fingers know what to do, and he doesn't close his eyes at the explosion, watching it flare up like a nova, brilliant even in afternoon sun, searing itself yellow-white into his corneas that he thinks he'll see until the day he dies.

He's not sure about driving; he doesn't want to, not yet. He just wants to sleep. He stares out the windshield and wonders vaguely why he can't see a road.

Everything is grey for a long time after that.

*****

He stops at night, every night, though his body doesn't recognize exhaustion until he finds himself at the approach of dawn with his eyes wide open, grey time loss filling his head.

He doesn't know how he knows, but the sun has barely touched the horizon before he finds himself scanning for shelter, rating it on a mental chart some part of his mind draws helpfully--too many exits, not enough, too far from the road if he needs to run (where would he run? He doesn’t ask). Every room he circles with salt, mumbling nonsense words that mean safety. He sleeps with a cross against his scarred throat, a gun loaded with wood tipped silver beneath his pillow, and a knife clutched in one hand.

Sometimes, he knows he's being watched, but he doesn't care. The knife's not for an enemy; he figures he's learned enough about his own body to die too fast for anyone to stop him. No matter when he falls asleep, dawn finds him walking, crossing the space between the bed and whatever door he entered, fighting away his own shaking terror that screams for him to crawl somewhere small and safe (his cell, small and safe, small and dark), stay there until someone comes for him, tells him what to do.

*Rodney*. It's stuck to the top of his head, his one sure thing. *You're Rodney.*

He wakes up the fourth dawn with his mouth shaping a new word. "McKay."

That evening, he stops at a diner when his supplies run low; they look at him suspiciously even if he walks in sunlight, like he radiates damage and death. Maybe he does. He takes a corner booth, asks for coffee and breakfast with someone else's voice, head turned so the frail waitress can't see the scars. His fingers skitter restlessly over the scarred linoleum surface of the table and he can't make himself stop looking around him, even with his back to the wall and the entire diner stretched out before him.

He looks at the wallet he found in the bag, his ID, reading his name and looking into a face that he doesn't quite recognize. He should probably look in a mirror one day, but his eyes dart away from instinct. A glimpse of brown hair, sun-starved skin, an unshaven jaw, the flaring red of the scars on his throat. Small pieces he can deal with.

He rubs absently at the beginnings of a beard, then takes the cup and the carafe the waitress offers him, her hands shaking so hard she almost spills the coffee. She comes back with a plate, shoving it across the table like she can't stand to come too close. He doesn't thank her, measuring each mouthful of food against a stomach too used to erratic feedings by hand; he fights down the habit of going on his knees when she approaches, rote words as powerful as ritual magic when he'd beg for food.

There's a paper, smudged and badly printed; he glances at the date while he picks through his food, ignoring the fork and knife. Six months, four days.

Rodney feels her long before he should have; abruptly, his gun is in his hand beneath the surface of the table, staring at the woman who coils across the booth from him. Blue eyes meet his in surprise and grudging admiration before she lays both hands flat on the table. Not dangerous, she says without words. It's a lie; her body is a weapon better than any gun. Almost any gun. Almost.

Rodney stares at her, memory automatically scrolling through faces before she clicks into place. "Cadman." She's faint and hazy, ringed around with the grey space of six lost months. But he knows her.

"Got it in one." She studies him with sharp eyes, then uncoils, relaxing back against the seat. "You look like shit."

He shrugs, picking up a piece of bacon and watching the shifts of her body. Fast pulse, eyes dilated, nervous stillness that surrounds her like a coat. She watches as much as he does, her back in the corner of the booth so she can keep him and the room in sight. "What happened?"

She licks her lips nervously, vividly pink against pale skin; she's close to crossing over. He can see the sunglasses shoved in her jacket pocket, the way she shivers in the warmth of the diner. "I don't know."

She's telling the truth, but not all of it. "How long?"

"Since the day you disappeared." She looks at his food thoughtfully, then waves for the waitress pretending to ignore them. "Bring me that," she says, then adds, "And coffee." Settling, she smiles briefly. "You don't sleep much."

"Summer nights are short." Formless, forgotten nightmares make them shorter; he's walked away the hours until dawn with terror shaking him apart, grey waves of not-memory that blunt the edges of raw horror. He wonders that if he knew what had happened, he'd still be sane.

Colorado. Elizabeth. "I was working on a project," he says finally. There's too much locked in his head; he takes it out in small pieces, studying each before he lets them settle into place. Rodney McKay, physicist and engineer. Employed by the federal government. By Elizabeth. By-- "There was an accident."

"Manufactured," she says flatly. He watches her face chill into cool blankness, something peering briefly from her eyes that's isn't entirely human. She won't be much longer, he thinks, waiting for the shot of discomfort that never comes. "It was to get you."

Rodney nods; that he must have guessed, must have known somehow, because it's not a surprise. He thinks she's waiting for him to ask who and why, but the first he knows and the second--he's not quite ready to care. Not yet. "What are you doing here?"

Cadman shrugs, eyes flickering to the waitress, before resting on him. "Making sure you get back safe and sound."

She's been watching him; her or someone else. "I don't need a babysitter." He doesn't want anyone in the room; he won't sleep at all. He can't; he'll be waiting for an order, and he might just obey if one's given.

*Rodney. Rodney McKay. Rodney McKay. Rodney. Rodney. Rodney.*

Cadman snorts, glancing up in time to take the coffee cup before the waitress spills it. The something-else flairs up behind her eyes as their fingers brush, and the waitress goes still, brown eyes glassy. Cadman tilts her head, watchful as a cat, then gently takes the cup, breaking contact. The waitress takes longer, coming out of it dazed and wandering back to the counter with a sway like she's not entirely back from wherever Cadman held her.

Cadman catches his eyes, the left side of her mouth quirking. "She was wondering who you were," Cadman says casually. Rodney hears a crash of glass and silverwear, the waitress's cry of distress, cut off quickly. Rodney watches as the waitstaff clean up, returning with Cadman's food and blank blue eyes that fix on Cadman like Rodney's not there.

Rodney clicks the safety into place and shoves the gun back in his holster, picking up a biscuit, eating mechanically. "Is someone looking for me?" he says dully. He's--he *was* valuable for the mind that's been shredded into colorless pieces, filling his head like used confetti.

Cadman doesn't answer for a long moment. Rodney listens to the scrape of metal against her plate, then a clatter as she lets it fall on the cheap porcelain. "Eat," she says finally, almost harshly. "It's almost dusk."

*****

"No."

She smiles and pats the space beside her, sitting crossed legged and looking entirely too pleased with the fact there's only one bed. "Now's not the time to be shy," she says almost gloatingly, and Rodney has flashbacks to her stuck in his head, almost something he can feel, like something that happened to him.

Almost. He takes a breath, thinking he should try to fight, but then she tilts her head, blue eyes flaring briefly, and says "Come here," and he obeys before he recognizes the words.

He could kill her for that. Just for that. Just for the way he goes pliant when he lies down, thighs spreading like an unseen hand is pushing between them, and she makes a horrified sound and grabs for his knees, stopping him. "Jesus," she breathes, face bleached white. "They died too fast."

They died in days, and they killed Rodney over months. Yes, they died too quickly.

She lets go when he shifts, settling back out of reach. She drags an uncertain hand through her hair, looking at anything but him. "The--I can stop the dreams," she tells the far wall. "So you can--so you can sleep."

"You could just order it," he answers bitterly, then stops, circling the statement thoughtfully. She *could*, actually. Sleep. There had to be a time he liked it, when his body wasn't always exhausted, where adrenaline was the only thing that kept him upright. People didn't, couldn't live like this. They couldn't. "Order it."

Cadman's eyes widen. "You have got to be kidding."

The pillow is rough and lopsided under his head, the mattress lumpy. No luxurious softness to draw him in, capture him in silk and feathers and memoryfoam that learns his shape before it locks him in place. No too-soft blankets to wrap him in strangling softness that ended in pain, in touches he wished he could strip off his skin to avoid, in--in everything. He could sleep here, he knows it; or maybe, at least, he could pretend. "You said--"

"Not like this." She shifts another inch away. He turns his head tiredly, looking at her with indifferent interest. Beautiful, even before she started to change. Blonde. Kind enough. He could--he could be content with this.

"Please," he whispers. tilting his head back, exposing his throat. He can feel her attention shift like a spotlight. He knows all the tricks; his body knows because it was trained to it. Something terrible like relief spreads through him as empty space slides over his mind. There's no memory here, where he obeys without question, no decisions. There's nothing, and he longs for it so much he can taste it. "I know what they want. What you want," he murmurs, letting himself go pliant, open. "I'll do it for you. All of it."

Her hair brushes her cheek, warm breath against his ear. He doesn't even brace himself; he knows it always hurts. He learned to like it. "What's your name?" she breathes.

There's a mental stutter, just for a second. Looking for it, that word, but it's exhausting, and he--well, he doesn't want it. "I don't have one."

She--she's gone.

He blinks, sitting up, but there's no one nearby--she's faster now, he'd forgotten that. "Cadman?"

The room's empty, bathroom door gaping open to reveal no one inside. He forces himself to stand, pushing curtains uncertainly from dark windows, peering into the shower. He can't even smell her.

Going back to the bed, he lies down, mattress pushing lumps into his back, pillow bunching beneath his cheek as he rolls to his side. Closing his eyes, he stops the instinctive drift of his thoughts, centering himself in the bed, the room. He's alone. He has to be ready. Just in case.

*****

When he opens his eyes, its bright. Too bright.

Someone pulled the curtains back, spilling pale morning light onto the floor. Someone also left coffee on the bedside table, and boots on his floor.

A body in the bed. Somehow, he slept through it all, and for a moment, he can't move, frozen in indecision. Sit up, like down, don't move, don't draw attention, don't *move*. Wait. Wait for dawn or wait for dusk, wait for an order, wait for a meal, a slap, a fuck.

He rolls slowly onto his back, staring up at the ceiling, letting the smell of coffee waft over him, of a shower newly run, of a clean woman beside him in a lumpy bed with hazy sunlight spilling over cheap, brightly colored blankets.

He stands up, reaching for the coffee, ignoring the burn into the palm of his hand and taking a sip, startled by the intense flavor coating his tongue. His body carries him to the bathroom, looking at the water-frosted glass before he gets the towel discarded on the toilet, wiping it away.

The face that looks back is gaunt, black smudges cutting beneath his eyes and cheekbones like caverns, skin sickly pale from lightless rooms. Unshaven, grey-brown stubble almost grown to a beard covers the sharp line of his jaw. He touches his face with wondering fingers, almost surprised to see the mirror image do the same, tracing down his throat, so pale that the scars are a barely visible silvery tracery over his skin. Collarbone, visible in bony, stark relief. He reaches out to tap the mirror with one finger, watching the man do the same. Right. Of course.

"What's your name?" Cadman whispers. He looks at the blur of her face over the reflection of his shoulder, then looks at himself.

"Rodney."

She nods slowly. "Are you ready?" she asks, spacing each word with a careful interrogative. He fights the urge to ask her to decide, staring into his own eyes.

"I want a shower," he says finally, feeling a rush of terror when the words spill out, the certainty in them that isn't--that *is* him, that's Rodney, who always knew what he wanted, who was never afraid to speak.

"I'll wait," she answers. He feels her leave, pulling the door closed behind her, and Rodney reaches for the coffee with a steady hand and takes another drink. It's just as good.

*****

He doesn't remember clothes until Cadman clears her throat; blinking, he looks at the bag she throws on the bed, at her discreetly turned back, and almost smiles. "You're kidding me."

She shrugs one shouldered, but he can see the flush staining the back of her neck.

Opening it, he looks inside, really looks. Long sleeve and short, in sizes still too large but he suspects he used to wear with ease. Jeans and cargo pants. The boxers he hadn't noticed before, like he hadn't noticed the scar that bisects his stomach until he looked down in the shower.

Perception filter, he thinks, noticing for the first time the bag with a razor tucked in the pocket. Like the second bag. The water. Kolya's body.

"Are you doing this?" he asks, taking out a pair of striped boxers and tugging them on; it's familiar, finally, to feel elastic settle around his hips, cotton warming to his skin. "Fucking with my head?" He doesn't know if he's supposed to be pissed. There's a lot he suspects he wasn't--isn't--ready to see yet.

At least she doesn’t pretend not to understand. "I'm not that strong," she answers neutrally. It's left open, for him to pursue or not; he doesn't. "It's dissipating; you won't need it soon."

He nods, taking out the razor and shaving cream, balancing them in one hand. There's no way his hands are steady enough to do it, but now that he's seen it, he wants that beard gone. "Can you--" he stops himself, choking on a request when he's not on his knees. "It's not getting easier."

"It is," she answers, beside him so abruptly he's almost surprised. The blue eyes look into his, warm and filled with affection and old irritation, reflecting the man she knows back at him like she can't see any difference at all. "Ask."

Gripping the bottle, he takes a breath. "Would you help me shave?"

She nods, tongue peeking out from between pink lips when she smiles. "To get my hands on you? Sure thing. I'll get a towel."

*****

She won't drive, and the automatics are gone; he sits in the driver's seat and stares at the key, the keyhole. "Harder," he tells her, because it's not hard, not complicated--put the key in and turn. Car starts. Put into drive. Go. "It wasn't this hard yesterday."

"You weren't Rodney yesterday," she answers breezily, leaning back in her seat. "Where are we going?"

He was going to say Colorado Springs, but he stops, thinking about it. About *people* and crowds and places; Elizabeth and her demands his mind will interpret as orders. He's not Rodney yet, not quite; not when his body aches and he still doesn't know how not to beg. "No people," he says carefully, watching her. She doesn't give him an inch.

"Roadtrip?" she asks, framing the question as carefully as he built those bombs. He nods once, jerkily, but she doesn’t look away, not until he forms the word, pushing it out through clenched teeth. "Yes."

"I like it," she answers, fastening her seat belt and bracing a foot on the dashboard. "It's a gorgeous summer."

*****

He stops them for lunch, eating carefully, learning all over again how to use a fork, a knife, while Cadman chatters inanely about everything but the one thing he can't quite stand to hear. She doesn't eat much--well, with her altering diet, she probably doesn't need to--but she's clever at making it look like more, like her body doesn't betray what she's becoming.

It's beautiful, and it's peaceful and bright, and he thinks he remembers feeling like this, in a room filled with chattering people and someone saying that he--had forgotten, and he'd been--told, asked, cajoled--to come eat, come on Rodney, get out of the *lab* already--

"John," he says, so abruptly he forgets to be afraid. It's more familiar than his own name; Kolya took everything, but he hadn't taken that, couldn't take what even Rodney couldn't find, couldn't rip it away and twist it into something Rodney couldn't bear to say. Cadman stops talking, looking at him with sharp eyes, and he says it again, just because he can. "John."

His mind skitters, though, warnings painted on billboards twenty feet high, flashing lights.

"He knows you're safe," she says, licking her lips nervously. He watches her hands flutter to her lap, her knee, settling clenched at her sides. "Are you--" Ready she doesn’t say. She doesn't need to ask.

Rodney draws in a slow breath, feeling another piece slide into place. "No." But he doesn't think it matters.

*****

"I don't believe this," Rodney tells Zorgas (Zedburg? Zenkski?), who is currently being utterly useless three laptops away. A few seconds of exercising his security clearance is all it takes for Rodney to be utterly amazed yet again at the military. "They sealed his records. No *wonder* he wasn't called in."

Zelkoni blinks at him from behind smeared glasses. "Is that not normal for his kind?"

"Not from us." It's all wrapped up in military jargon and random names with dramatic titles, and even knowing what he's seeing doesn't tell him much other than someone, somewhere, wanted to keep John Sheppard's identity very well covered. "At least, not usually." Rodney thinks dark thoughts at Jack O'Neill, who had been uncharacteristically thoughtful when they found Sheppard perched on the chair with a startled look on his face. But not surprised; of course he wouldn't be. Like knows like. They always know.

They have enough data from the five minutes Sheppard was in that chair to effectively double their working knowledge of the control chair; Rodney scans it with half an eye, the other typing out his request to Elizabeth to please, please update him on whether they can have Sheppard. "Months of recruiting and testing; the military's the only place that *registers* them, do you believe it? And nothing. Now--" Rodney just can't articulate his utter horror. "They *hid* him from me."

"I am sure it was not deliberate," Zoidisy answers, not sounding sure at all. Rodney glares at him, then checks his watch and his inbox. Surely by now Elizabeth will have gotten him transferred. It's some pieces of paper, not rocket science. "Where is--"

There's a brief knock on the door; Rodney opens his mouth to throw them out, then looks up to see Sheppard, still looking shell-shocked and a little wary. "Dr. McKay?" he says, eyes darting between Zoidberg and Rodney.

It's unfair, Rodney thinks resentfully, trying not to look at Sheppard's face, at the long line of his body. They're always hot. Linked to the gene, probably, and it's unfair on so many levels that Rodney just can't stand it. The Ancients had a sick, sick sense of humor. He's also not familiar, which Rodney's instincts have picked up almost immediately, reminding him there's a living, sort-of-breathing predator in an enclosed space with him and not a piece of wood in sight.

Rodney points at Zekkerd. "You leave. Sheppard, sit."

Zoinsky rolls his eyes (Rodney sees it), but gathers up laptop and notes, nodding politely to Sheppard before he goes out, muttering in Czech. Rodney resolves to pick up a Czech dictionary sometime soon and turns his attention back to Sheppard, stripping his own unease away as irrelevant. He's not like Carson, maybe, but while Jack's insane, Sam's not, and Sheppard wouldn't be here if he was dangerous. Rodney points at a stool. "Sit."

Sheppard's faintly wary look vanishes. "What?"

"I've worked with your kind before," Rodney says flatly. "Unless you are evaluating me as a dinner entrée, I don't have a lot to worry about. Go. Sit. And when I ask, tell me if you recognize anything I show you."

Sheppard pauses, and Rodney has a second to wonder if this is one of the crazy ones. Well, look at O'Neill. Can't get much crazier than that, really. "You know we don't actually have a *useful* racial memory?" Sheppard drawls, but he parks himself on the stool and that's really all Rodney asks.

"Still better than human," Rodney tells him. "Like knows like." Shuffling through the artifacts, Rodney pulls up a fragile globe, swimming in milky color. It flares in a rainbow the second it seems to sense Sheppard. Rodney grins. "Touch this and tell me what it does. Hurry. We don't have much time."

John took it, long fingers curving around the smooth glass, light ribboning to his fingers and swirling into pictures of places and people so ancient Rodney can only imagine the date. A thousand, five thousand, maybe ten thousand years. A dimension or ten to the right.

When he tears his gaze away, he realizes Sheppard's looking at him again, and forces himself to reach for something else and not look back.

*****

He wakes up to Cadman's hand on his forehead, stroking slick, sweaty skin, brushing back the damp ends of his hair. It's gone before he can hold on, but the feeling remains, wrapped up in that name, that word, a single syllable that he told himself each night, reminder, promise, warning, sanity. He clings to it, drawing the warmth closer, shivering as Cadman pulls back the blankets, curling up against him, warm and soft. He buries his face in her shoulder and breathes her in.

"That was John," he mumbles, though he can't see the face, the body, vanishing into his past like mist at dawn. "Wasn't it?"

He feels her hands shake as they slide down his back. "Go to sleep," she whispers against his hair. "I'll keep watch."

*****

"I--" Rodney draws a breath, forcing words from between clenched teeth. "I don't want to."

"I know." They stopped two nights ago and haven't left. A forgettable, boring motel in pastels and beige. He found a laptop on the desk, and he's still staring at the glossy silver button. He can't face even the blank screen; how the fuck is he supposed to turn it on? "Do it anyway."

He tilts his head. "Is that an order?"

"Good try." Sitting on the bed, she reaches for a book, falling back bonelessly against the pillows. "Use it as a paperweight, call it names, whine, or turn it on. I can wait."

"I want to leave." He actually doesn't, but he's curious what she'll do if he pushes. His body flinches at the edge that creeps into his voice, but it's easier to say, even if it's not any easier to believe. "Now."

"It's night," she answers, not even looking up. Turning a page, she stretches out, toes pointing toward the bathroom door. "I'm tired. *You're* tired." He is. "Look. Turn it on. Marvel at the technology of the future."

He feels his eyes narrow. "I have a doctorate in engineering. I *build* computers for fun. And work," he says a memory slipping free, bright and vivid, something from Before. A small, scrunched face and brown hair, silver glasses. "With Zelenka," he adds, and it's almost like he knows who that is. He slots the face into place with a blank space beside it for definitions later.

"So you do," she says, but she's smiling when she says it. "So do something with it."

He looks back at the laptop, taking a breath, forcing his shaking finger to push the button, colors flashing across the screen. It asks for a password that he enters without thought, wondering what it means even as it logs him in.

Rodney McKay, he thinks as he looks at the bewildering line of folders, meaningless names that he has to learn. He touches the keyboard with the tips of his fingers and feels another memory slide into place. "I can still hack your bank account," he tells her.

"My bounced checks will thank you," she answers airily. "Have fun destroying the internet."

*****

"Don't you go home?" Rodney asks, exasperated and charmed by turns when Sheppard materializes at his door. He's in uniform, which Rodney hadn't expected; it's uncomfortably sexy, body long and lean in unrelieved black. Rodney looks him up and down with obvious deliberation to hide the fact he likes looking. "Poetic of you."

Sheppard rolls his eyes. "You should eat," he says, bonelessly dropping into a stool. He gave up moving like a human when Rodney's nerves snapped at the pseudo-clumsiness. Sheppard's body just didn't do angles and corners like it should, and moving like a human being was far more disturbing than his habit of appearing in thin air.

And Sheppard--isn't this relaxed, even with the others. Maybe it's too many of them all in one place, but Rodney always has a faint feeling of stumbling into some kind of wildlife documentary when five or more appear in the same space. John tends to avoid too many people on a general principle of anti-sociability, which would explain hovering in Rodney's lab. It's weird, though, now that he thinks about it; the others don't avoid him so much as--something else. He wants to say wary, but it feels different from that.

Watching him sprawl lazily against the lab bench, Rodney hides a smile, then frowns at the rumble of his stomach.

Sheppard grins.

"Shut up," Rodney mutters. Stupid sensitive hearing. Though he'd think the base would drive Sheppard nuts, with all the noise; maybe they have natural filters or something. Or maybe Sheppard just likes fucking with him. Then he gives up; he is hungry. "What did you have in mind?"

"Out of the mountain, out of the building--out of the state if we had time." Sheppard's eyes go distant. "I want to go surfing."

Rodney slow blinks his unsurprised. "Night surfing. Of course."

Sheppard grins back. "The day thing doesn't work for me too well." That's not entirely true; Rodney's seen him wander around in daylight, but he never seems comfortable and is faintly crabby afterward. "Mostly, just out of here."

Rodney's unclear on the job description; regular military isn't exactly the best place for one group to mix socially with their food source. He's not even entirely sure how it works, but then again, up until eight years ago, he hadn't even known Stargates existed, so who the hell knew? Black ops has taken on an entirely new meaning. He's seen Sheppard order people around, and it's not just his species that brings the instant obedience.

"How did you fly planes?" he asks finally, closing down his laptop in what isn't surrender at all. "I mean--"

"Believe it or not, in my line of work, night work is kind of a requirement. We're pretty good at it." Sheppard smirks at him. "Which you know since you pulled my file."

And wasn't that a waste of time. "You don't even list your birthdate!" he says, frowning when Sheppard's smile widens. "How does that even work? With--" he gestures vaguely. "With ID and birth certificates."

Sheppard rolls his eyes. "Okay, now you're getting cranky. Food." Sliding off the stool, he circles around, pushes the laptop away from Rodney's hands. "It's pizza in the mess," he says cajolingly.

"You can't possibly appreciate how badly they interpret the concept of pizza."

Sheppard's mouth quirks. "You'd be surprised."

*****

He remembers his sister all at once with a single email, reliving the fight that stole five years of their lives, his first meeting with his niece in their bright, airy kitchen as he asked her for help.

Leaving the laptop, he sits on the bed, pushing Cadman's legs aside, closing his eyes to let the new pieces find some kind of order in his head, arranging themselves in careful niches like the most complex jigsaw puzzle in the universe.

When he opens his eyes, Cadman's watching him with unconcealed worry. "Rodney?" she says finally, voice lifting on the question. She wont' push for an answer he doesn’t want to give.

"Why you?" he asks finally. He thinks he should know this, but he wants to hear it from her, have one thing that's not a battle to find out.

She thinks about it, blue eyes glazing slightly into something else before she shrugs, setting her book aside and drawing her legs to her chest. "The same reason you can stand to have me touch you," she says finally, reaching out to touch his arm. "Family. Pack. *Ours*."

He shivers, staring into her eyes. "I'm not--one of you."

"Like knows like," she says, squeezing his shoulder gently before leaning back, watching him from not-human eyes. "We always know. Always."

He lets himself fall back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. "I don't remember," he says finally, thinking of the gaps as wide as chasms between each memory, all that he can't quite understand no matter how he tries. "Rodney," he says, tasting the name, settling it around him like a wall.

"Rodney," she agrees, picking up her book. "Get some sleep and I'll drive us tomorrow."

He turns his head, studying her face. "You have something in mind."

"Maybe." Turning a page, she looks up, eyebrow raised. "You'll just have to wait until we get there."

*****

It's not that he forgets, exactly; it's just that it's Sheppard, and the not-human is like any collection of weird quirks and bizarre behaviors. In all honesty, Rodney's thesis advisor wasn't as good at playing human as Sheppard is. So he doesn't eat, sleeps during the day, cranky if he has to wake up early (before dusk), inhumanly pretty and ridiculously geeky--it's like having a grad student slash supermodel as a best friend. A slacker one with a mental database of utterly, intriguingly, *frustratingly* useless knowledge.

Sheppard also remembers *every episode of Dr. Who*. He saw the premiere. *At first airing*.

"I was doing some work for the RAF," Sheppard says, sounding defensive. "I was bored. It was--" he stops, wrinkling his nose in thought before he grins. "Okay, it was pretty damn cool."

"Please shut up," Rodney tells him, dropping on the warm, lumpy couch in the common room. "There are *lost episodes*--"

"I remember them," Sheppard says earnestly, then stops at the look on Rodney's face. "Probably shouldn't have said that."

Rodney stares at him before he turns back to the TV, wondering when the last time he left the base. With Sheppard, actually, to get a Playstation 3 and more games than a normal person could play in a year.

Thank God, they aren't normal. Rodney stares at the controller, but his hands feel like they're made of lead. Sheppard, on the other hand, looks like he could go six more rounds with a song in his heart.

Jesus, Rodney hates him sometimes.

"I'll be out next week," Sheppard says casually, leaning into the sofa with a small sigh of satisfaction. Rodney tears his eyes away from Sheppard's slightly spread thighs. There's just no reason to torture himself like this. "Have a thing."

"Thing?"

Sheppard shrugs, too casual and too calm. "Kin," he offers finally, looking at the far wall. It's taken Rodney a while to figure out the connotations of that--something like blood but not always, and something to do with a line of descent, and some kind of ritual of acknowledgment. The genetic marker for his kind shows up in a small percentage of the population, but that alone is apparently not enough, not with the mix of human genetics--and how that works, Rodney still hasn't gotten the nerve to ask--but it's how they, for lack of a better word, propagate.

Rodney scans his memory and twitches. "Cadman." She was identified early in the program with the latent gene. She's baseline human now with that single gene, but that's all she needs. Sheppard had frozen the first time he'd seen her, watching her with thoughtful, measuring eyes, and Rodney remembers a second of searing jealousy, so bitter he could barely breathe with it.

Like knows like, Sheppard had told him later, looking lazily content with a universe that had Bladerunner in a special two disc anniversary edition. "It's knowing all your life something is different, but never sure what. Some people don't accept it. Some do." Sheppard had shrugged, and that had been that.

"Cadman," Sheppard acknowledges. Rodney feels it before he sees it; it says something about how much time he's spent around Sheppard that he recognizes the change, even if it's something no more definable than a change in the air. Rodney looks up and sees Carson at the doorway.

Fruitfly, Rodney thinks blankly. Not so much. "May I speak to you, Major?" Carson says, voice deceptively quiet. Sheppard tilts his head, and Rodney's abruptly aware he's alone in a room with two beings that he still can't pin down a definitive age on. And who bite. For fun.

"There's nothing to talk about."

Carson takes a step inside, staring at Sheppard. "You don't have the right."

"She chose to give it to me." The sudden stillness makes the room feel like a tomb; Rodney can't move either, or maybe he doesn't want to. He's not sure which one. Fingers flexing in his lap, he tries to tear his eyes away from a scene of absolutely nothing at all.

Nothing, until Carson breaks away, head lowering briefly, turning and vanishing like Sheppard does. Rodney feels the air return with a shock, realizing he'd stopped breathing.

Sheppard's still watching the door, blank and eerily calm, and somehow, that's the worst part. Rodney clears his throat and regrets it; Sheppard's eyes flicker to him, catching him up in incandescent green, and Rodney shivers at what looks out at him. It's like weight, like a hovering anvil, like breaking airlocks and the rush of air and gravity as they leave you alone, floating, suffocating in airless space. He's bending for it before he knows what he's doing, spine melting like wax.

Then Sheppard blinks, something like horror, and Rodney can breathe again. "I have to go," Sheppard says abruptly, and he's disappearing out the door, as silently as a wraith.

Rodney stares at the Playstation controller and tries to remember how to breathe.

*****

"Breathe," Cadman says, holding his head as he vomits lunch into a discreet bush, out of sight of the road. "You ate too fast."

Rodney grabs her wrist. "I didn't." He knows he didn't. Something sick twists in his stomach. "Six months," he whispers, feeling sick. He might not remember, but he can guess. And he can taste. "Jesus--"

"You're not changing," she says calmly, kneeling so he can brace himself upright with her body. "I'd know, trust me. For that matter, *you'd* know."

Rodney blinks at her. "I would?"

"Yeah." She pulls a water bottle from somewhere and unscrews the cap. "Let's say we wouldn't be such close friends right now if you were." He takes the bottle, spilling half of it getting to his mouth, spitting out the remains of half a sandwich. Her head tilts, fingers closing over his jaw before he has time to take another drink. Curious, he follows the pressure of her hand, meeting her eyes. She's not quite like them yet, but that feeling of pressure is there; lighter, gentler, without the weight of age and certainty. She's like a scarf, slipping over his mind like breath, vanishing almost instantly as she shakes her head.

"What were you remembering?" she asks slowly, thumb stroking away a drop of water with easy familiarity; when did this become normal? She acts with him like she does with her people, with her--with her family. "When it hit you?"

Rodney grasps the tail end of a memory. There's no context anymore; it's like a barely watched movie. "John. And--Carson?" He pauses; even then he hadn't understood. "The night before you--"

"Joined up. Right." She swipes the corner of his mouth, nodding like it all makes sense. It doesn't. At all. "Let's get back to the car."

"And drive in circles?" he asks. It's already fading; that was important, he thinks, but he lets it go, settling in pale color. The trick is not to grab on; they vanish that way and he'll lose them again. "What's going on?"

Cadman stands up, hauling him to his feet with one hand. Her mouth curves up in a smile, blue eyes shining, and Rodney finds himself staring at her skin, almost translucent in the summer sun, and flushed from more than exertion. "You're going to need to stay out of the sun," he says abruptly. "And--eat something."

She blinks in surprise, letting him go. "I--" She stops, staring into the distance. "Soon, yeah."

Rodney glances at the angle of the sun and sighs. Reaching into her pocket--when did it become this easy to be with another person?--he pulls out her sunglasses. "Get used to them," he tells her, shoving them onto her face. "John never went anywhere without his."

It takes him a second to realize what he just said; it's a lot longer before he realizes she never answered his question.

*****

They're not driving in circles, precisely, but they're staying fairly close to Colorado. He's not sure why, but he thinks it has something to do with his (job?) life, his work, maybe. Names and faces flash through his mind, too quick to see: Elizabeth, Zelenka, Simpson, Ford, Sumner, Lorne; there's respect with some, glowing in blue, slashed with affection and rivalry and familiar, friendly irritation; with others, nothing but blank, unhappy space.

They stop near dusk, in an apartment complex he's pretty sure he should recognize, though he can't associate it with anything in memory so far. But his body seems to know, at least a little; he knows to skip a stair that hitches slightly from a loose nail, and pauses in front of semi-familiar numbers. "Is this my apartment?"

"You're not here much," she answers, handing him a set of keys. For some reason, these he knows; this is his locker (locker?), his lab (lab!), his car, his--apartment. "You keep it mostly for storage."

When he opens it, he doesn't recognize a thing. "Someone cleaned it." Or maybe he does. Taking a step inside, he stops, then shakes his head. Forcing doesn't work. Going to the couch, he stares down at the cushions. "I may not remember this or me," he says, "but I know I don't dust."

"You really, really don't." She closes the door behind him, cutting out the evening's dim light and flips the lightswitch. It's even cleaner when bright, if that's possible.

The blinds and curtains are drawn shut, he notices with a corner of his mind, and even from here, he can see the hinges painted to match the walls. For shutters.

Turning around, he sits heavily on the arm of the--his--couch. "There's got to be an easier way." He looks at her, busily taking their bag of food into the kitchen, looking curiously into his refrigerator before she shoves in milk and tuna and other things she bought while he sat in the car and chanted protection charms under his breath and feeling like such an idiot.

"I'm a scientist," he tells her half-heartedly, falling back on the cushions to stare at the ceiling. No cobwebs. Jesus. "I was reciting nursery rhymes to ward off the evil eye."

"Well, you're the one who translated them," she says reasonably. "And keep in mind I can't read your mind." She pauses, grinning. "Not yet, anyway. So non-sequitirs are something to avoid, mmkay?" Sitting in a chair desperately in need of upholstery not from the eighties, she sighs, taking off the sunglasses and rubbing her forehead. "It's easy to forget I'm changing."

"Order me to remember," he says, folding his hands over his stomach. "I promise to hate you and call you a bitch after."

She pauses, going still for a second. She has months left, maybe. The process usually lasts a decade as the body slows, adjusting incrementally, but she's always been impatient. "Why?"

Rodney pushes himself up on both elbows. "Because this is--" Too hard, he wants to tell her, but that's not the entire answer. "Because it's my life. And I want it back."

"I know." She crosses her legs, relaxing back into the chair in an easy, boneless sprawl. "It would be easier and quicker. But that way you don't get back everything."

"Such as?"

"Kneel."

His body reacts before he can stop it; he's halfway off the couch before he jerks around and lands flat on his ass, breath caught in his chest. He jerks his head around, fighting down the rise of terror, staring at her.

"You see my point."

If he had a gun, he'd shoot her. It might not kill her, but it would hurt. "I hate you."

"It would be easier," she says musingly. "We can even make it feel like it's your own will that you follow. They wanted to break you, so they didn't bother sugarcoating it. It's all there in the open. It's humiliating, isn't it? To know you're still that vulnerable? Know that you'll roll over for any of us at a word?"

"I'll kill you if you ever do that to me again."

She pauses, then slides off the chair, kneeling only a few feet away. That means something, though he doesn't know what. "You begged for it before," she says. "Because you didn't care. Because you wanted it. Now you're making, let's face it, pretty idle threats--but you're making them. You hate it. You don't want it. You'll *fight it*."

Blue eyes catch his. "Kneel for me."

It takes everything in him to force his ass to stay on the floor; it *hurts*, to stare at her and still stay still. She's not the strongest he's met; she's not even fully there yet. She's barely beyond *human*. But she can do this. She can make him crawl.

No, she *won't*.

"No." He bites his tongue against a rush of desire; everything's easier, he remembers that much, even if he's not sure why. Easier. It didn't hurt. Nothing clawed its way through his brain, nothing--

Then it stops, and he gasps in a ragged breath, going limp. He can feel the sweat slicking his skin, taste his own blood, hands cramped into fists from pushing into the floor.

When he can see again, she's kneeling in front of him, palms pressed to the floor on either side of his legs.

"They wanted everything from you, Rodney. They wanted that mind that holds secrets of the Ancients that no one else knows. They wanted the memories you carry. And they wanted you to crawl." Her mouth twists. "You gave them the one thing you could stand to lose. They got you on your knees. But they didn't get one. Fucking. Thing. More. They didn't get *you*."

He stares at her in bewilderment. "They broke me."

"You broke you," she says gently, settling beside him, shoulder pressed against his. "And you did it so brilliantly they couldn't stop you. They couldn't even find you when you were done." Her shoulder bumps his. "And good job, by the way. Resisting me. The first time I went before Sheppard, I was down so fast I hit my head on the floor. Concrete *hurts*." She rubs her forehead theatrically.

Rodney has a sudden vision of Cadman dropping on her knees and knocking herself out. "He made you do that?"

"Until I learned how not to." She bumps his shoulder again, then vanishes like quicksilver, already riffling through his cabinets. "Coffee?"

He stands up, wincing as he stretches cramped muscles, feeling like he just went through a small, but extremely active war. Or an all-nighter with the Wii. "Yeah." And maybe a nap.

*****

They play Trivial Pursuit until nearly midnight; Rodney and good caffeine are getting reacquainted, and he wipes the board with her ass. There's a chessboard in the closet that he's not thinking about, letting it settle in the back of his mind. Chess. Sudoku puzzles under the coffee table in handwriting that by no stretch of the imagination could possibly be his. Crystals that he can't help touching, half expecting--something--but he's not sure what that is. Or why he wants it.

She cleans up while he stares at the crystals, then starts to search the apartment. There's a thrumming something that he's been ignoring since they came in--psychosis wouldn't exactly be a surprise at this point--but the crystals had been part of it, and he searches the bookshelves, pulling paperbacks and journals aside, following the line of almost-something.

He can feel Cadman pausing to watch him, but she doesn’t stop him as he empties out desk drawers--no--shoving a hand under the couch--not quite--and suddenly, his mind focuses. *On*.

On the coffee table, green light bursts out, brighter than the overhead bulbs. Vaulting the couch, he ignores the twitch of his back and grabs for it, metal that warms and shapes to his hand as he curls his fingers protectively over the glowing stone.

*Off*, he thinks experimentally. It flips off. He's holding hideously ugly jewelry.

"What was that?" he asks slowly, but he suspects he might just already know.

Cadman kneels up, gently prying his fingers away and running the tip of her finger over it. It glows weakly until she pulls away. "That's what makes us kin."

*****
*****

He's never seen Sheppard do that.

One second, Sheppard is standing at his lab door, materializing like he always does, just to piss Rodney off. Then he's--not.

He's way too close, invading personal space like an army with a scorched earth policy, and Sheppard has a thumb against his pulse, staring at him like he's never seen him before. The hazel eyes flare up in vivid green, hypnotic and drawing, pulling at Rodney's unresisting mind like a magnet.

Rodney doesn't mind too much. "Sheppard?" he says slowly, waiting for Sheppard to crack a smile, say something, but Sheppard's not doing anything even close to that.

He actually gets *closer*, turning Rodney until his back is against the lab bench, spine bending uncomfortably before slim fingers slide around the back of his neck, tilting his head until Rodney realizes he's exposing his throat. "Relax," Sheppard murmurs, voice washing over him like velvet, thick and cushioning, urging him to just. Obey.

He should be terrified; this is like offering himself for *dinner*, for God's sake, and he likes Sheppard, but not like a cow likes a farmer.

He's warmer than Rodney had thought; he must have eaten recently. All hard muscle and bone, making Rodney shape himself to him, making him want to, silky hair tickling his throat as Sheppard's breath ghosts over his skin, damp and warm.

--smelling him? Sheppard lifts his head, meeting Rodney's eyes, and this, Rodney recognizes, but it's not the same. The weight is friendly, skimming, urging him to just. Answer.

"What's changed?" Sheppard asks him, fingers curving around the back of his neck, stroking the sensitive skin just below his hairline. Rodney lets the voice wash over him like the tide. "You're different, Rodney." Another breath against his jaw, breathing him in. "You're familiar."

"This morning. Carson. Gene therapy. It works."

There's a prick of fingernails against the back of his neck as Sheppard goes still, then he strokes the sharp pain away. "I thought it was just to use the tech," Sheppard says softly. "This is more."

"First generation trial; he's still working on it. Volunteer only. I--wanted to try it. So I could use the tech. I was a good candidate."

"Yes, you are. You really, really are."

"Rodney, I--Major!"

Sheppard's gone, and Rodney blinks his way back to his cool lab, his aching back, and utter humiliation. Pushing off the table, he turns on Sheppard, but Carson's standing there, looking scared and defiant all at once.

"What *the fuck* did you do?"

Sheppard's always been calm; calm when Sumner died, calm when they fought the Wraith, calm when they face the end of the world every week. This? This isn't calm. Rodney remembers a fight breaking out in the mess one day; something stupid. Something that only made sense if you were one of them. At the time, it had been an interesting theoretical reminder of who and what he worked with, but somehow, he'd never applied it to Sheppard, who had looked vaguely interested before standing up and throwing them apart with casual ease and a roll of his eyes, like he couldn't imagine anything stupider.

Then, Rodney had gone back to eating and asked Sheppard about a coming mission. Now he remembers what he hadn't thought of then; the impression left in the wall from a colliding body moving faster than the eye could follow over twenty-five feet; the silence that fell like a blanket over the room; the way Sheppard had glanced at them both before ordering them back to the barracks.

Sheppard isn't just the commander of a base a few dimensions away, Rodney realizes with a strange, almost painful jolt; he's not just Rodney's friend and the guy who has startling control over Ancient tech. He knew that. He did. But he didn't comprehend it until this second, with Carson and Sheppard facing each other like the two men in the messhall long ago, over something that Rodney can't understand. Sheppard isn't *human*, not even in theory, no matter how well he plays the part. Somehow, Rodney had forgotten.

Carson's eyes dart from Sheppard to Rodney and fix abruptly, like he just realized he's in the room. It's like Sheppard, but not quite the same; it's like Carson's always looked at him, except nothing like it at all.

"It wasn't supposed to do that," Carson says, taking a step toward him, then stopping when Sheppard growls and sidesteps, not quite blocking but close enough. "The mice didn't--"

"I could feel it on the other side of the fucking *base*." Sheppard advances a step, keeping between Rodney and Carson, lazy menace coating him like another skin, stripping away the trappings of humanity like they were never there at all. Rodney works with this, plays stupid video games with this, watches movies--Jesus, he stole *his Nintendo DS*. "Everyone here can feel it."

"I didn't mean to--"

"Bullshit. You used *my* gene." Sheppard takes another step toward Carson, then another, so deliberately slow it's impossible to mistake it for anything but a threat.

He's going to kill him, Rodney thinks dazedly, hand closing over the edge of the desk, trying to look away before he sees something he can't unsee, though he thinks maybe he's seen too much already.

Rodney tries to move, surprised his muscles know how, and knocks into a stool. Sheppard turns on him, and Rodney thinks, faintly, *teeth*, before Sheppard takes a breath.

"You're going to get a lot of visitors today," he says, sounding almost normal. "Carson's going to explain what happened." He looks at Carson again, then there's only air where he was standing.

Shakily, Rodney gets the stool, pulling it to the lab table so he can sit down. There's a strange humming in the back of his head, pulling him; absently, he reaches for one of the new boxes, following the pull until something touches him he recognizes in a flash of light.

Green light. Rodney picks it up, staring at it, then at Carson, still standing by the door. Pushing the box aside, Rodney runs his tongue over his teeth to be sure there's no inexplicable changes, breathing out in relief when it turns out his teeth are as blunt as ever. "So. Not what was expected?"

Carson swallows. "It seems," he says, taking the seat on the opposite side of the table, "my tests weren't entirely--accurate."

Rodney sees two heads pop in his door and closes his eyes, feeling the hum increasing. The entire damn *box*, in fact. Things that he didn't actually think were Ancient. "Just--start at the beginning."

*****
*****

Cadman's making French toast with the smell of coffee filling the kitchen. He almost wants to propose, but then he remembers she was stuck in his body once and saw him naked.

She looks up, surveying him critically. "You look like shit."

"Headache." He looks at the brooch, lying on the coffee table where he left it last night. "The first time--" He stops. The memory's already fragmenting, but there's something about it he needs to know. "When I got the therapy, I had a three day migraine."

"It does that if you haven't been using the tech for a while."

Rodney looks at her. "Not--not everyone."

She tilts her head. "Yeah." She drops another piece of bread into the egg mix. "So you remember getting it?"

Rodney doesn’t even have to try. "Needle, mice, warnings about sudden inexplicable cravings for undercooked meat--no, wait. That part no one *knew about*." Carson floats through his memory, looking apologetic and guilty and weirdly vindicated at the same time. It's hard to nail it down, so he doesn't try. "You're a natural carrier."

She nods and drops the bread into the pan. "But not like them."

"You will be." He watches her turn the toast with her spatula. "Is it worth it? What you're becoming? What you're giving up?"

Cadman flicks her ponytail off her shoulder. "I don't know yet," she says finally, frowning at the pan. "I just know I had to find out what I could be." When she lifts her head, there's nothing on her face but curiosity. "How many pieces do you want?"

*****
*****

"What the fuck was that?" Rodney tries to yell, but they're still in a base, and he's been the focus of curious eyes all day. And *people*. People that now are suddenly more complicated and less comprehensible; for the first time, he could feel the difference between human and not, between the latents and the real thing--and the faint realization that there's a sharp, sharp divide between even those. It's like-- "Don't you dare run off. You can sulk later."

Sheppard looks up from his book, eyebrow raised. "Bet you didn't even have to check the lifesign detector to find me," he says mildly, and Rodney's mouth snaps shut. "Bet you never even thought about it." He hadn't. He takes a second to be freaked out--not that he can do it, but that he didn't even *notice*--then sets it aside for later. It'll join the thousand other things that have made this day one he really, really wants to forget. Soon.

"You're hiding." Three levels down, in the places even the light-phobic found dark and confining. "And not very well."

Sheppard sets the book aside, frowning a little before he sighs. "No, not very well. You deserve an explanation."

"I have one of those. It's stupid. I want a better one. Preferably with someone who will look me in the eye when he does it." Carson's twitchiness had discouraged commentary and accusations both; Rodney gets the faint feeling that whatever is happening is more than John objecting that the gene is doing more than it should. Something personal, wrapped up in the people who were suddenly looking at him like they were seeing him for the very first time. "Carson was--" There are no words for what Carson was.

"Different line," Sheppard says, and Rodney wonders what it means that it makes sense to him now. With a sigh, Sheppard puts the book down, rubbing his face with an unhappy look. "It was my duty to explain, not his. I'm sorry, Rodney."

Huh. That was fast. Rodney takes another step into the room. "I'm listening."

"It was--unexpected," Sheppard says finally, shifting to the head of the bed, giving Rodney space to sit. When Rodney glances dubiously at the spot, Sheppard snorts. "I promise, no inappropriate--"

"Mauling?" Rodney says, but he sits. Waits. But Sheppard looks, of all things, horribly embarrassed. "Look, you tried to--" He can't say it. He really doesn't want to think it; he knows they don't go among the general population for what they need; they have volunteers (or prisoners of war, Rodney reminds himself uncomfortably, then brushes it aside) for that.

"I wasn't trying to--do that." Sheppard's eyes fix on the wall above Rodney's shoulder. "It's like--going into this room you know really, really well. Every day. All the time. It's almost as familiar as your own room. It *is* as familiar. And then suddenly, the room is there, but all the furniture is *yours*. And you know you didn't move it there."

Rodney stares at him; is that supposed to make sense? "I'm furniture?"

"No!" John sighs. "Okay, forget the furniture. It's instinct. You're kin. I could feel when you--" Sheppard stops, taking a breath. "This isn't something we talk about."

"People tried to *eat with me*," Rodney says, trying to impart the full horror of his afternoon. "They talked to me. I think they were *smelling me*--"

Sheppard flushes. "Modern fucking technology," he says, sounding a little hysterical. "Sure, clone it, just enough so you can use the tech, so you don't depend on us, great idea. No other side effects, really. Not for humans. It just fixes another stupid Ancient mistake. It was just for the activation so it would recognize you. And it's--" Sheppard looks at him, and Rodney has a whole new appreciation for the many ways Sheppard can look when he's hideously at a loss for words. It's backed with something else, though; confusion, a twisting mass of complicated feelings, laced with something metal-sharp and bright that feels like instinct under the barest control. "It's not doing what they thought it would. It's doing more."

"And?"

"It's--my gene. Everyone here who shares my bloodline recognizes you as like. As kin. And that, thanks to Sumner being territorial, is most of the military."

Rodney slow-blinks the fact he has no idea what Sheppard is talking about, then rewinds and thinks about lines of descent. "Different--lines of descent." Not that he ever cared before, being an intellectual exercise, but now it's kind of practical. "Huh. Is that why Carson was upset about Cadman?"

"Different lines of descent. He can be a little reactionary about that sort of thing." Sheppard stares harder at the wall. "So you read as ours. Very, very loudly. More than even the latents. You're still human. You just--don't quite feel the same."

And if that's not the understatement of the century, Rodney doesn't know what is.

"Okay." Rodney's not so sure, though, and Sheppard's uncertainty only confirms it. He can still feel Sheppard's breath against his throat, the insinuation of Sheppard's mind like gentle, implacable fingers. He didn't fight it because he didn't *want* to.

"It--surprised me," Sheppard says steadily, looking at Rodney's left knee with an unreadable expression while continuing the path of greatest understatements in the history of the world. "I--reacted instinctively. It won't happen again."

"Okay." Rodney pushes himself up, feeling weirdly unsettled. Unsatisfied. Part of it is what he can't know; it's not like Sheppard's people are all that forthcoming outside the obvious. Outsiders need not apply. But he'd expected--he didn't know. Something. "So am I supposed to--" Rodney has no idea.

"I need a fourth team member," Sheppard says suddenly.

Rodney sits back down. "I thought we--I mean, I thought part of the reason for the--" Gene, he thinks abruptly; the entire reason they were cloning the gene. "Oh. Because I have the gene?" Humans on missions with non-humans were problematic; they didn't have the defenses even latents did, couldn't operate the technology, couldn't really fight mental coercion, and that was just for a basic mission. The gene would fix at least part of that; training could help with the rest.

Sheppard bites his lip, eyes fixed on the wall. "Not exactly. We--it's not random, how we choose. It's--"

"Family." And suddenly, a lot about the SGC begins to make sense. "You mean Teyla's--"

"Parallel development with a common ancestor," Sheppard says. "Or so Carson assumes."

Sheppard's eyes focus abruptly on Rodney. "The reason the teams fall out that way is because it's dangerous. Not because humans can't do the work." Sheppard takes an unhappy breath, the kind that makes it clear he'd rather talk about anything but this. "In combat, in anything we do, we do together. Humans are--it's like a blank space. It's throws us off when we can't--"

"Track each other." That word doesn't even begin to describe what Rodney's been picking up today, but Sheppard leaps on it with naked relief.

"Right! That."

"And now you can? With me?"

Sheppard's slow blinks a complicated emotion that's half amusement and half something else entirely. "Rodney. No matter where you are, I'll find you."

*****
*****

"Gates," he says as Cadman picks up her sandwich. She pauses, hand half-way to her mouth. "It's--those aren't real, are they?"

He can see the debate on her face, which is all the answer he needs. Resting his head on the back of the couch, he stares up at the ceiling. "This is insane. That's like--a fantasy novel. And not even a good one."

"You *would* be okay with vampires and casting wards, but freak out at that." He hears her take a bite of her sandwich; if he focuses, he can hear a lot of things he's pretty sure he shouldn't be able to.

"It's shock," he tells her, not bothering to explain that his own body told him the truth on the first. Instinct, or something like it. Racial memory, even if it's not his species. *Knowing* without doubt what she was, what he wasn't quite. But Gates-- "I work with them--"

"Yes."

Rodney draws in a slow breath. "When I was in college," he says, surprised how easily the words come out, "it was this joke. I mean, it was one thing to be aware there were non-human species. That's--that's tangible. It's logical. I mean, I had a roommate--" But he stops there, feeling himself start to flush when the associations slot into place. "But--"

"But?"

He turns his head enough to bring her into view. "I don't know. I wonder how I reacted--"

"When you found out one of your theories was true?"

Rodney straightens; it clicks into place so fast he's dizzy. Of course. "Interdimensional gates," he breathes. "I *knew* it."

Cadman grins. "When I found out, I thought it was a practical joke."

Rodney grins back, lightheaded with the feeling of something like framework slotting into place. This is his *life*; this is what memory hinges on, giving each memory something to hang on, cling to, something he can build from. "I wish--" he stops, licking his lips. "Have I--" He can barely say the words, but something in him knows the answer even before he forms the question. "Have I ever been through one?"

Cadman swallows so fast she starts to choke; it takes him a second to realize she's laughing. He waits her out, starting to flush, but embarrassment's so much less important than realization. *Rodney. McKay. Physicist. Engineer. Gates.*

And *John*, who is part of it all, even if he doesn't know how yet, or why.

She finally straightens, red-faced and still coughing, answering with a voice scratchy and shaking with suppressed laughter. "Yeah. You have."

*****

He sleeps badly that night, wired from coffee and excitement; he wants to see it, touch it, remember it through his fingers and his eyes. He wants more than the vague stirrings of sureness; he wants the real thing.

He sees it in snatches of sleep; a glowing circle in the center of a wide, round room, powered by--God, he can't even imagine. Ritual magic, maybe, but he cant' imagine even the strongest practitioners could raise the power necessary to open a passage to another world. It would take hundreds, thousands to just create it, much less allow matter to pass through--

Before he realizes it, he's sitting at the desk, computer open as his pencil scratches down a legal pad he found beneath his desk. Leaving the lights off--he doesn't need them, he realized abruptly, not even on a moonless night--he writes familiar equations that he'd written on blackboards more times than he could ever count. A theory he'd told his classes for years, possible, but not likely. There wasn't enough power in the world; if the Ancients had done it (such a big if, in Rodney's opinion), they must have been far more powerful than anyone had ever proven (guessed).

They did it, though, and now humans could, too. Rodney stopped, hand feeling stiff, staring at the pages and pages of tiny symbols and numbers, the transitions between elements, the faint memory of lectures where he'd mocked the idea that all they needed were the right words. Words had power, he'd argued, but there's giving the evil eye to your next door neighbor, and then there's *changing the nature of the universe*.

Except it's not a change at all.

Cadman stares at him when she shakes him awake, bleary-eyed but vividly awake. He wonders if it feels wrong for her yet to sleep at night. "They stored power, didn't they? What was the key?"

She blinks at him slowly, rolling into a seated position on the couch and rubbing her eyes. "I--what?"

"You have to know this. Stored power, like a battery; we figured out how to do it, didn't we? To use the Gates?"

Cadman blinks again, then frowns at him. "I--you woke me up to ask me about *gate travel*? Do I look like a scientist?"

"But you know anyway." He waits, watching her face go through a series of complicated expressions, none of them pleasant. Finally, she sighs, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "You know something."

"Fine. Yes. Kind of. I'm a *soldier*, McKay, not a scientist. But yes, it was stored."

"It needed to be keyed with something. A focus. On a person, or a people to draw it from when it was created. So they could fill it. How did they do it?" Not words; words aren't indelible. Words change. They'd need something that wouldn't, that *couldn't* change. Or that they could change. A focus. A way to control it, call it--

Oh. "The gene," he says, sitting down beside her, hard. Then. "Blood. No, there's no way--" But that would release a lot of power. Human blood is powerful stuff, and non-human species had a history of being highly attracted to it. "They don't--I mean, we don't, *I* don't--"

"What? Oh--no no," Cadman straightens abruptly, following his train of thought. "It's *storage* of power. Lots of it. But not from death. The Ancients knew a better way." She pauses, shaking her head slightly. "It's complicated, but no, no one's reintroduced death as a viable means of getting power. Breathe."

Rodney does, carefully, relief so acute it's like pain. He doesn’t realize he's shaking until her arm circles his shoulders, and leans into her, aware she's projecting comfort and not even resenting it. It's familiar, bringing up hazy and uncertain not-quite-memories; of people he knows well, of bad--times?--when they--his, he thinks with a startling possessiveness that surprises him with its intensity--when they'd watch a movie, gather for a meal, or just sit together. Faint body-memories of a touch on the back of his neck, his arm, the driving need to find them, theirs to find him.

Kin, he thinks, letting calm wash over him. She's not quite them, but she's like them, and he wonders if that's what he's been missing, that invisible tie that's blank space.

"I can't feel them," he says slowly, wondering if she'll understand, wondering if he even understands what that means.

"You can." She brushes gentle fingers through his hair. "You do. They--they had to be careful, but it's there when you're ready. You're not yet."

*****
*****

He'd met Teyla when she'd come to the city with the others; scary hot and fierce under an almost frightening calm, radiating grief and rage so strongly even the human population could feel it. Like Sheppard, a little.

Like knows like, Sheppard had said once, and Rodney remembers how Sheppard had hovered near her, touching her, letting her touch him, so casually that Rodney could have guessed what she was just watching how Sheppard reacted to her. Like knows like, and she was kin, even if she wasn't of Earth.

Then, he hadn't been, and it had been strange and irritating, how she could focus Sheppard's attention just walking into the room. Now it makes more sense.

Sheppard had invited him with weird formality to his quarters two weeks after the offer to join the team, after Elizabeth's thoughtful agreement. She was all about integration, though; Rodney thinks half her agreement was to encourage everyone to stop acting like the others were out to eat them or ritually kill them for fun.

Meeting Teyla formally as she joined Atlantis, though, is different from meeting her like this; she'd been one of the few that hadn't been hovering over him that first day, though he'd felt her startled attention. Feeling awkward, he touches the crystals on Sheppard's door, surprised that it opens immediately instead of waiting for Sheppard.

Blinking, he goes inside, seeing Teyla cross-legged on the bed, Ford perched beside her. He gets a grin from Ford--a latent that since Rodney got the gene has been as friendly as a puppy--and a nod from Teyla that feels as warm as Ford's smile. Sheppard's sitting backward in his chair, frowning at the wall like it personally offended him in some way. It might have; Atlantis is as close to sentient as something not organic can be.

As the door shuts, Rodney clears his throat. When Sheppard's eyes fix on him in utter focus--and he's still not used to that, at all--he gestures toward the door. "Um. It just let me in--"

"It recognizes you." The corner of Sheppard's mouth curves in a slight smile. "Sit down. We have a mission in two days and I thought we should go over a few things."

"Right." Rodney sees a chair and gratefully avoids the bed, going straight over. It puts him basically in the center of a circle of two presumably friendly predators and a latent with them between him and the door; Rodney thinks that no matter how comfortable he used to be before this, there's no way he would have been able to sit here if he didn't have the gene. That's just instinct. "So."

"We went over arms training," Sheppard says mildly, like they just went down to the firing range and not a strange, surreal session that was like a cross between meditation and an acid trip. One second, he couldn't tell between guns; the next, he could. It was completely unlike anything he'd ever experienced in his life. Sheppard hadn't acted like it was anything terribly unusual, which makes Rodney think there's a reason his kind are so popular with the military. Two hours had transferred Sheppard's practical knowledge in full; he's still absorbing it, finding unexpected recognition of C4 and bullets and sudden realization he spent two hours reading about Ancient *weapons* for no particular reason.

He suspects there's a lot of that in his future.

What his mind, knew, though, his body had to learn the hard way; that had been firing range time, with Sheppard guiding him to learn how it felt in his hand, how to aim, how to fire, synching his body to the knowledge he now carried. He's not as fast as they are, but he's faster than he was, and that was something else he had to learn, adapt to a body that could do things it never could before. And learn what was instinct to them and to latents.

"Don't do that," Sheppard had snapped suddenly, hand jerking his chin down. "That's like an *invitation*--" He'd stopped, looking vaguely appalled. "And don't wear short skirts," he had finished faintly, sitting down abruptly on a chair that Rodney would swear hadn't been there a second ago. "I sound like my father."

Rodney thinks about it, touching his throat. "Oh." Then he frowns. "But before--"

"You were human. It didn't *mean* anything." Sheppard had run a hand through his hair. "It didn't mean the same thing, I mean. It didn't have the same--Jesus. No. I'm going to kill Carson. I can make it look like an accident. A very, very messy accident."

"Could you explain that?" Rodney had demanded, but there'd been a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that all those crazy quirks he'd observed with amusement in Sheppard and the others were suddenly going to be less *quirky*. Rodney had carefully ignored the *were human* part. It's comparative, he'd told himself; after all, there wasn't a term yet for the artificial gene carriers. But sitting here, without the suffocating feeling of being trapped by living, breathing predators, he has a bad feeling that it's more true than any of them have admitted yet.

Teyla looks at Sheppard in amusement. "We know," she says, gently, then turns to Rodney. "Has the Major explained why we are here?"

Rodney thinks that possibly it's more than just the quick get-to-know-you meeting that Sheppard had seemed to imply, with overtones of discomfort that made him a little suspicious. "So you would--get to know me," he answers cautiously. He can't interpret what he's picking up, but on a guess, Sheppard's the one with the discomfort bordering on low grade panic. "So it's not that."

"It is." Her eyes flicker to Sheppard. "It is a tradition."

"It doesn't apply to him," Sheppard says sharply, like this is an argument that's been going on for a while. "And it's not necessary. The gene he has is cloned from mine; what's done with me extends to him. The law of contamination applies."

"But he does not know. It was not his *choice*." Sheppard flinches, looking away. "I am sorry. I know this is difficult."

Rodney looks between them, aware of a simmering resentment that's been festering since this started. Like he's *stealing* something from Sheppard, like he had gotten the gene to horn in on his little exclusive club or family or whatever. Now Teyla's doing it too; maybe everyone is thinking it, and he's just not able to recognize it yet.

There's a horrible analogy here to high school and being chosen last for kickball, but Rodney shies away from going there. Exclusion doesn't feel any better in his thirties than it did then.

"That's not it," Sheppard says suddenly. "It's--"

"You were *reading my mind*?" Like this can't get more utterly humiliating. "I don't believe--no one told me that. Everyone--"

"No," Teyla says sharply, before he can really start, cutting him off. "Of course not. It is--complicated. This is--you and the others who have taken the treatment are new. We are--"

"It wasn't your *choice*," Sheppard says before Teyla can get any farther, and suddenly, he's back in the lab with Sheppard's anger like an exploding star. "It wasn't always, not for humans, not for latents. We don't do this, not anymore. That's our first law. And we broke it."

Teyla hesitates, then nods. "I know."

"A thousand years ago," Sheppard continues bitterly, "we took what we wanted. Our will was the only law. And this takes us right back to the gutter, back to being *things*, animals that deserve to be hunted down and destroyed."

Rodney thinks of Cadman, of Carson and Sheppard's silent argument, of that moment in his lab when he'd felt Carson's guilt.

"We can give him that choice now," Teyla says finally, meeting Sheppard's eyes. "The other--yes. The others who come after him will know, will be able to balance what they will give up for what they will gain. But we cannot take back what was already done."

Rodney clears his throat; three sets of eyes turn on him, startled, like they'd forgotten he was there. "I--" he looks between them; he's not even sure what they're *talking about*. "I'd have done it anyway."

Sheppard snarls something, standing up, radiating frustration. "You don't even know what this *is*--"

"Atlantis," Rodney says, letting everything that means to him fill his voice and his mind; they're better at this than he is. They have to be able to feel it. "This is--I waited my entire life for this chance." He wonders if there's any way to explain what's changed, how the technology lights for him now, how it recognizes him, *knows* him. How the universe has opened in ways that he never imagined before Carson gave him the gene. "Would you--is it because you wouldn't have chosen me?"

Sheppard freezes, and something in Rodney's stomach plummets. Teyla, though, throws a flickering glance at Sheppard, laced with amused affection, and he--thinks--he feels her laughing. "No, Dr. McKay," she says, sounding like she wants to laugh. "John is merely--being John. Sit down, Major. It is nearing midnight and Dr. McKay is not normally nocturnal."

That's not really true. Rodney sleeps when he falls over in exhaustion. When Sheppard's sitting, Teyla continues. "For us, it is--an act of trust. For you, it will be an act of faith as well. To acknowledge us as not just kin, but as your--" She hesitates, looking at Sheppard. "Team. To trust us with more than your life, but with your faith that we will never do you harm, to open yourself to us by choice. It is more than believing this; it is knowing without question, as you know your name, as you know yourself."

Rodney nods warily, flickering a glance at Sheppard, who stares at the wall, utterly expressionless, and then at Ford, who looks pretty much like always. "So what do I do?"

"You allow us to touch your mind," she says, which seems superfluous--they can all do that, can't they? "And begin to create our bond."

And suddenly, Rodney's staring at a knife and his instincts are apparently back with a vengeance. They all tell him to run.

*****

The original scrolls--and Rodney still flinches when he uses the word while he's typing on a laptop--had been fairly clear. No one, practitioner or theoretician, had gotten around the problem they ran up against when they'd first discovered Ancient technology; the Ancients were big, big fans of blood magic.

Part of it was practical; it was binding to a person, a family, a group. Human practitioners did it all the time. Part of it was the power that came with shedding it.

And part of it was elitism of the most irritating, enraging kind; humans couldn't use, couldn't touch it even when their blood was what powered it; they didn't have the blood mark, the identifying code that had been bound into everything the Ancients did. The gene, that single line of DNA that split the world into those that were human and those that weren't entirely and could choose to be something else. The Ancients might not have done it deliberately, but they'd severed humanity for all time from itself, creating a hierarchy that persists even now, no matter how many people preached equality when there couldn't be, not when what you were born decided your fate.

And Rodney, for one, never believed the Ancients didn't choose that, a way to subjugate a population that was growing into knowledge, into wanting more than to be dazzled children. A backhanded gift; you can touch this, use it, do as we do, but only when you are willing to give up what you are. When you are us. When you are *better*.

The gene was supposed to be a way around it, to finally give access to those who hadn't been born in a direct line of descent from the first humans that the Ancients changed. And maybe they knew that would happen, too, left it as one last mocking reminder, that no one outside the line of descent would ever be good enough. Rodney can touch the technology, hearing it in his dreams, access the power without thought. He can fly the ships, touch the city, feel the others like those born to it.

But he does it with a human-born body and a human-born mind that were never shaped to it. He's changed, but unlike a latent, unlike Sheppard and those after they have changed, he gave up his ability to choose. A latent can live their entire lives free of the others if they choose to; they can join their kin or block themselves from them. They can be *human* and only that, and Rodney never will be again.

Rodney is bound to it the way they aren't and never have to be, a way they can walk away from and he never can. He thinks they should have guessed it wouldn't be that easy; the Ancients had been possessive of their power. The people they'd bred to be their subjects were also the strongest source of that power. They'd never willingly share what they believed was theirs by right.

What Teyla asks of him is an illusion, for him to offer freely what they can already take: his thoughts, his feelings, a path into his mind that from them he can never block, not from those John Sheppard calls kin. What she's telling him is something else. They want him to know they would choose him. That what they have by right is what they would have asked for him to give to them as a gift.

He can't tell them no, not in any way that matters, but they want him, need him, to say yes.

*****
*****

Cadman pushes the laptop aside and shuts it down before he even realizes she's awake. "What--" He stares at the closed lid . "I was working on something."

"I know. It woke me up." She looks at him steadily. "Using my sleep to avoid doing it yourself isn't cool."

Rodney stares at her. "I steal *sleep*?"

Cadman huffs and pulls him unresistingly to his feet, pushing him toward his room. "Yes. You can. You do. And your teammates didn't let you get away with it, and I won't either." Sitting him on his bed with one casual shove, she cocks her head, studying him. "What were you doing?"

Rodney looks at the laptop halfway across the room. "I needed to know the question," he says lamely, because it doesn't make sense even when he says it. Frowning, he rubs his eyes, suddenly exhausted. "I'm tired."

"Now that you're not stealing sleep, I bet you are." She pauses, blue eyes vivid. "Tomorrow. You can ask me one question and I'll answer it."

"With the truth?"

She stiffens, but there's a trace of satisfaction on her face when she turns away, lights going out. "Yes. With the truth."

*****
*****

He's not on duty the next day; he woke up once to try and pry himself out of Sheppard's bed--he couldn't even begin wonder why he was there--and Sheppard growled something and fumbled his radio, talking to Elizabeth briefly before he threw it across the room.

"Work," Rodney told him, but he couldn't be sure. Ford was on top of his legs and Sheppard was jerking him back down, muttering something that sounded like, "Yeah, no. Stay," and Rodney did, falling asleep with the weight of Sheppard's arm over his waist, fingers twisted in his shirt.

It's not quite sleep, not really. It reminds him of exhaustion when he was awake too many hours and a little like being high, but in a good way. There's a weird, thrumming feeling at his wrist that he touches dreamily and finds a bandage, and he can taste something slightly sweet and metal-sharp on his tongue that he thinks he should recognize.

Right, he remembers vaguely. Team bonding.

Later, Teyla leaves, and Rodney feels a flare of something that resembles hunger, red-purple and strong enough to make his stomach clench, before it slowly begins to ease into blue contentment, warm with pleasure. It takes Rodney a second to realize what she's doing. It takes a lot longer to realize he should be horrified, but then Ford snores against his hip, dreaming of pretty girls in BDUesque bikinis and he forgets, drifting again. He wonders how much blood he lost, if that's the reason he feels so disconnected.

"Not much," Sheppard whispers against the back of his neck, words thick and filled with lazy pleasure, stretching against his back like a cat. Rodney feels Sheppard's fingers brush against the bandage, then curl around his wrist, drawing it back against Rodney's chest. "It's just intense right now. That's why this is private."

Teyla comes back eventually, thrumming with satisfaction, still bleary. She pushes him over, knocking him into Sheppard, who growls softly before settling against his side, sharing Rodney's pillow, warm and sleepily content, breath soft against Rodney's neck. "We used a great deal of energy last night," she says dreamily, head dropping on Rodney's shoulder, and all Rodney can think is that the movies had lied. Vampires did not traditionally put out in the guise of ritual sex. There was no ritual sex at all.

Sheppard snorts. "I wish," he mutters against Rodney's ear, so close Rodney can feel the movement of his lips. "Twelve fucking hour ceremonies in *Ancient*. Sex would at least be an incentive to *stay awake*."

"Hush," Teyla says repressively, but she sounds like she's laughing. "It is not so terrible as that."

Rodney feels Sheppard sit up on one elbow and opens his eyes enough to look at him, messy hair and radiating sarcasm and startlingly beautiful. Rodney can't take his eyes off him. He's everything he's always been, but even moreso, in a way Rodney can't explain. "You didn't have to take a blood oath from the entire military contingent," Sheppard says, then flops back down, bouncing the bed. "I didn't even know what they were *promising* me."

Teyla snorts, then Ford snores again, waking up enough to blearily to crawl up the bed and curl around Teyla. Rodney gives up trying to follow and drifts again, aware of John's hand settling against his hip beneath his shirt, one leg thrown casually over Rodney's calf, the weight of Teyla against his side, and the strange-familiar, humming contentment of his team filling some part of him that's been empty since he received the gene. Like he's been *waiting* for this, for them, for this effortless acceptance.

The next time he wakes up, stomach tight with hunger, Sheppard tells him to eat something, and Rodney realizes exactly what the entire *team bonding* concept really entails.

Sitting up, Rodney stares down at him. "I thought that was a myth. You can't really taste--can you?"

"Can with those I cross over--or apparently, get my gene." Yawning, he rolls onto his back like a giant cat, one arm covering his eyes. He's so relaxed he almost seems *stoned*. Rodney thinks the not-sex must have been pretty damn good.

"It was," Sheppard murmurs, voice husky, and Rodney scrambles out of bed before his suddenly less-lethargic body gives away how awake he really feels. "It is. Get a tray and bring it here. And get coffee. I always wondered what it tastes like."

*****
*****

Rodney wakes up with his entire education in his head like it never left; he sorts through it, looking for gaps, but the years of college are all there, including several roommates, a few thesis advisers, and all his defenses.

He collapses back into the pillow and stares at the ceiling. "Stargate," he says slowly, feeling the word. "SGC." That's who controls the gates, who found the way that they're powered. Closing his eyes, he thinks of his lab and his office. "That was eight years ago."

The bed shifts, Cadman sitting on the edge. He doesn't bother opening his eyes. "I'm still short a few years."

"Those are the ones they wanted," she says bitterly. He opens an eye to check her expression; it's caught somewhere between cool anger and slow, simmering hate. Rodney thinks the name Kolya, feeling the jagged edges tear at nothing, shredding his calm. There's a low grade panic that closes like a fist around his heart, expanding through his ribs like it's searching for his lungs to steal his air as well.

Cold water splashes over his face; Rodney sputters and blinks, sitting up, wet fabric clinging to his skin and hair plastered over his eyes. Pushing it back, he looks up at Cadman, who is putting down a glass on the bedside table and getting back into bed *beside him*. "What was that for? What are you doing here?"

She rolls up under the blankets, muttering into the mattress, and Rodney feels his mouth smile. "Your *back hurts*? Really?"

She snorts, curling up beside him, shivering; Rodney sighs and slides over enough, sharing warmth, feeling her uncoil like a spring. "Your fault," she mumbles into the pillow. "Couch sucks."

"Whatever." Something in him eases when he touches her, strengthening, the odd, aching hole easing. He's not sure what he's feeling; he's sure it's not all from her. Pleasure, and welcome, and relief so strong he catches his breath. Team, he thinks, and feels a gentle touch of confirmation before he drifts away.

*****

"Question," he says over lunch. At some point, he put the shutters back up; he has no idea why he bothers. Cadman isn't sensitive enough for it to be a problem.

Setting her sandwich down, she wipes her fingers methodically, eyes fixed on the tablecloth. "I was tired," she says unhappily. "Your couch sucks. You *stole sleep*."

"I didn't mean to." Setting down his fork, Rodney takes a deep breath. "There's something specific Kolya wanted, wasn't there? Something--" He hesitates, watching her face blank. "One question. You promised."

"I know." She blows out a breath, leaning back in her chair. "It's complicated. What do you remember?"

Nothing! He wants to tell her. I remember school and recruitment. I remember working at the SGC. I remember Elizabeth is my boss and I have a team and there's a place that's called Atlantis. And I don't know what that means. "It has something to do with gate travel."

Reaching down, she plays with her half-eaten spaghetti, mouth tight, then nods, almost as if to an unheard voice. "You--discovered something. They wanted it, wanted it badly enough to risk kidnapping you and stripping your mind. They didn't--somehow, they didn't know what you were, and when they discovered it, they wanted that, too. The artificial gene."

Rodney frowns, but in the hazy recesses of his mind, somehow, he'd remembered that. It's what makes him kin. "Carson's experiment."

"Yes." Shaking herself, she straightens. "What was done to you--by them, and by how you stopped them--it wasn't--it wasn't *safe*. The blocks are dissolving at a rate your mind can handle. If I push it--if *you* push it--" She hesitates, then looks up at him. "The first time you remembered, you were catatonic. We'd just gotten to you, and you saw us and then you weren't *there*."

Watching sunlight through the window, probably. Rodney shivers. "I don't remember anyone--in that place."

"We were ordered back. Heightmeyer made the final determination on how we should proceed and we were given specific instructions to not be seen. Your team was ordered off the planet and after your memory was blocked, all of us were under no-contact orders."

"J-John agreed?"

Cadman takes a deep breath. "He was the one who created the memory blocks and ordered you sent to earth, where there wouldn't be any triggers." Cadman smiles slightly. "And when I insisted I could help, taught me what I needed to know."

Screwing with his mind, in other words. On the other hand-- "How many days did I stay on the planet after you found me?"

"Ten. We kept you supplied and made sure you wouldn't--harm yourself. When you were ready, the jumper was outside. Everything after that--it was what you needed to see. We can't rush this, Rodney. We tried, and--" Her hands clench into fists on the table, but that doesn't hide the shaking. "We almost lost you. We had to gate you back because we didn't think we could keep it up for the time it would take the Daedalus to bring you to Earth. We barely got you out of the mountain before you started to see--to see what you shouldn't."

Mouth dry, Rodney stares down at his bowl, then pushes it away. One wrong step, one wrong *memory*, and he loses-- "I see."

"You don't," she says, voice so gentle it hurts. "And we don't want you to. You're family, Rodney." He looks up, startled by the intensity in her voice, even more startled by the certainty filling the blue eyes. "We'll get through this, I promise. You can do this."

"How do you know?"

She smiles, so sure he almost believes her just for that. "You're family," she says again, reaching across the table, one steady hand covering his. "You're going to get back everything."

*****
*****

Rodney keeps to his lab and quarters for the most part--it's always hard when a team loses a member, but harder when it's like this; Ford's a gaping hole in all of them, and John's barely leashed grief and rage seem to go on forever. Even Teyla, calm and calming, is barely suppressed her pain. Worse, John vanishes irregularly, a gaping hole like an open wound; the first time, Rodney hit the ground so fast that he didn't even have a chance to realize what had happened until it was over and Teyla was kneeling beside him, her face reflecting his shock. Every time after hadn't been easier; the tearing ache turning into a pain that never eased. This time, it's been two days and Rodney feels like he's in withdrawal and shot with speed both; he can't sleep, can barely eat, understanding for the first time why the teams are all kin to each other. You really had to care about someone to be willing to risk this kind of sharing, to recognize that one day, you might have to learn to live without it.

Bad enough to lose Ford; what John's doing is so much worse.

Teyla shows up in his room unexpectedly; getting out of bed, Rodney wordlessly grabs for his robe, following her down the corridor to John's room. Atlantis lets them in despite the locks, and Rodney's unsurprised to see John still awake, pale and brittle, knees drawn to his chest and green eyes blank. Still searching for Ford, pushing the limits of the bond to search a galaxy and killing himself in the process. Rodney reaches for him, touching skin so cold it burns his fingers; he flinches but keeps his hand in place, feeling Teyla curling up on John's other side.

He's too thin and too pale; Rodney tries to remember the last time he felt John feeding and there's nothing--Jesus, nothing since Ford left. "John," he says firmly as Teyla rests a hand on John's shoulder, fingers pressed to the pulse in his neck and closing her eyes, falling into a meditation pose. Shifting his hand, Rodney wraps it around a too-thin arm; it's not easy for him to *try* to feel them; he's not a latent and those parts of his mind never existed. Conversely, it makes it that much harder to shut him *out*--when Teyla breaks John's concentration, John may be able to keep her out, but Rodney's a wide-open signal that never *stops*. Closing his eyes, he waits, hand almost numb, feeling Teyla pushing, pushing, *John* she whispers softly. Then, *John!* like a shout; Rodney can feel it in his fingertips, ringing in the space behind his eyes, shivering over every inch of skin.

Rodney feels John jerk, breaking his concentration, and is hit with the tangled web of John's pain and anger like a punch in the gut. Gasping, Rodney tightens his hold before John tries to pull away, pressing his other palm against his forehead at the sharp stab behind his temples, stomach turning over in sudden, shocking hunger, like he hasn't eaten in weeks. Only part of it is his; the rest is John's.

"John," he whispers, feeling his vision dimming; for a second, he thinks John is withdrawing again at the feel of John pulling back, but the blank space doesn't come back. He's vaguely aware that he's being eased back against the mattress, that Teyla's joining him, radiating the same exhaustion, and that John's hovering over them both, one hand braced above Rodney's shoulder, kept in place by the grip Rodney has on his arm.

He won't let go. "Don't go," Rodney hears himself say; he can barely hear his own voice. "Please. I can't--" Deal with it. He knows that like he knows his name. "John, please."

"I won't." A hand touches his face, fingers pressing against his forehead, easing away the headache, though there's nothing to be done about the hunger until John gets up off his ass and *feeds* already. Not like half the base wouldn't give their souls for the chance. "Are you okay?" John asks, sounding stronger. Less terrifyingly blank--for once, he's not thinking of Ford. Rodney blinks carefully, opening his eyes, aware Teyla's as exhausted, as relieved, as he is.

"Lie down, John," Teyla says thickly. "I do not think I can do that again."

"You shouldn't have--" John cuts himself off. With a Herculean effort, Rodney shifts away from Teyla, making a space for John between them, safe and more importantly, surrounded on all sides. He might not be military, but he learned strategy from the guy currently lowering himself stiffly between them.

For a few minutes, none of them say anything; Rodney rolls onto his side, shifting his grip to press a thumb against the pulse in John's elbow, the ultra-slow beat that flutters so lightly it's almost not there. Automatically, his mind calls up the people he knows donate regularly; several are third shift and it's coming on lunch. Surely one or two or all would fall over themselves at the chance.

"You should feed," Teyla murmurs, echoing Rodney's thought. John makes a dissenting sound. "And you must stop searching. Ford left of his own free will." She breathes out a sigh. "I know that--"

"The first law," John says softly. "Choice. I know. I--" He feels so fragile; Rodney erases his list of potential donors. No one should see John like this, and right now, he's too exhausted to hide anything. Even a mindblind human could feel this. "I know," he says finally, sighing softly. The grief isn't eased, but now that he's open to them, it's easing. Sharing has its drawbacks--Jesus, does Rodney know it--but it has its advantages too, and this is one of them.

The twisting hunger, though, won't go away until John feeds. Rodney waits in dread for Teyla to offer to find a donor, but she's silent; when he looks at her, the brown eyes meet his and hold.

Oh. "John," Rodney says slowly, carefully, wondering if he'll have to make an actual offer or hope John takes it as a given; other than their bonding ceremony, he's never given to anyone, period. He remembers it didn't hurt--which he'd expected--and that it was kind of hot--which he hadn't.

Then again, this is *John*. If he wanted to wear diapers and be fed blood from a bottle, it'd be hot. Rodney shakes himself before that image gets strong enough for Teyla or John to pick it up, feeling John's body slowly warming from contact with his own. Easier to touch him, and dammit, *dammit*--

"…regulars are asleep," John's arguing with Teyla tiredly, words slurred. Tired and hungry. "I--"

"You might ask one who is not asleep," Teyla says softly, eyes half-closed. She's been sleeping as badly as Rodney has; Rodney can tell she's barely keeping awake enough to talk.

"Or me," Rodney hears himself say, so calm he almost doesn't recognize his own voice.

John's head snaps around. "No."

Rodney stiffens; while he hadn't necessarily expected John to be enthusiastic, but--

"No," Johns says quickly, sitting up. He sways, eyes clouding, and Rodney watches them sharpen, suddenly dropping to his throat. Abruptly, Rodney's aware of the hard pound of his pulse, wondering suddenly if John can hear it the way he can. "I--it's been too long," John says absently, tongue flickering out to lick his lips. Rodney sucks in a breath. "You told me you've never--"

"I can stop it if it gets out of hand." Teyla sits up, pushing her hair back. "You have never lost control before." She wants this, Rodney realizes, and for the same reason Rodney does--no one else should see John like this. More importantly, it's *them*, team, a way for them to connect again, after Ford, after John's days of absence. Something they need, maybe, and Rodney realizes he wants it, too.

The battle's over before John even really tries to fight; Rodney pulls a pillow over, making himself comfortable as Teyla crawls across them, stretching out on Rodney's other side. John stares down at him, focusing abruptly, and the brilliant green is swallowed by black pupil. Rodney makes himself relax, though he can't stop the hard beat of his heart or the fast pace of his breath.

John's hand cups his neck, curving around the back; dragging in a breath, John whispers, "You don't have to--" And Jesus, Rodney can *feel* what it's costing him, when everything in him is narrowed down to that patch of skin where the vein pulses thickly.

"I want to," Rodney answers honestly. Tilting his head back, he closes his eyes; a slow, languorous calm engulfs him. It's what makes it easier to feed, what donors get off on, this feeling; he's watched before, and none of them are ever exactly panting to get away. He feels John's fingers skim his cheek, then gently position his head, Teyla shifting until she's warm against Rodney's side, anchoring and reassuring when soft hair brushes Rodney's cheek and John's teeth sink delicately into his skin.

Rodney remembers this feeling from that first night, unshielded and fully open to him; from John, it's even more intense, echoing through all three of them. Not just satisfying hunger this time, but renewing their team's bond, closing the gap Ford left in them, curving around the tender feeling of loss and easing it. The pleasure he expected from John, but not from himself, an aching burn that flares and eases with every second that passes. He feels John's shift, body stretching over him, reaches blindly and fists his hands in the back of John's t-shirt, pulling him closer until he feels the length of John's body, warming by the second from the contact.

It feels too good to last as long as it does; when John finally pulls away, satisfied but not sated (too many days, Rodney thinks blearily), Rodney hears himself whine softly and tighten his grip. He can still feel John's longing like it's his own, more, *more yes, give it to me*, and John's tongue licks up the side of his throat over the wounds before he draws back, landing on the bed beside Rodney, though one leg traps both of Rodney's. "Jesus," John whispers, reaching up to finger the marks. "Are you--" John stops, blowing out a breath when Rodney stares at him, smiling shakily. "Thank you."

"You're welcome." Rodney hesitates; that wasn't enough, even if John looks a hundred times better than when they came in. "That wasn't enough--"

John leans toward him, tongue flickering over his lower lip, then stops himself. Dragging in a breath, he shakes his head. "It's enough for you," John says finally, but his fingers are still dragging along the skin of Rodney's neck, thumb pressed against the marks possessively.

Rodney wants to tell him no, not at all, but his own exhaustion and his team's are too much to get the words out. Teyla, being just a little more active, looks toward the door then shakes her head, pulling absently at the blankets until Rodney forces himself to move. They rearrange themselves, Rodney having exactly enough energy to curl up against John's side, focusing on the strong beat of John's heart, the warmth of his body, of Teyla on John's other side, blankets draped over them, and falls asleep against John's shoulder.