Amy Griswold - The Lost

“Major Franklin, you have the bridge.” Sam stood up, making her way to the infirmary.

Her people were in pretty good shape. A medical corpsman was treating three or four people for mild electrical burns from the shield control panels shorting, and Sam stopped to say an encouraging word to each of them. If the worst to show for her ship’s first battle was a damaged shield array and some second degree burns that wouldn’t keep people off their feet a full day, you had to call that a win.

Only it wasn’t, of course. They didn’t have McKay back, and they hadn’t destroyed Queen Death’s hive ship, though Sam thought they’d fairly well crippled it. She thought they’d taken out the hyperdrive and all of the forward weapons systems and done some major structural damage. That wouldn’t be easy to fix either. It would be months before that ship was flyable again. But Death was queen of a big alliance. She’d probably shift her flag to another ship.

And then there was Sheppard. Sam looked around the screen in the infirmary, where Sheppard was hooked up to monitors and drips. Teyla sat on the metal stool at the beside, her feet up on the rung and her arms crossed over her stomach. Ronon leaned against the wall behind her, his head back against the bulkhead and his eyes closed.

The doctor came over as Sam approached. “How’s he doing?” Sam asked quietly.

The doctor glanced back at him. “Not too bad for someone stunned that many times. He’s still out cold. I’ve got him on a drip to replace electrolytes, and a heart monitor because we detected arrhythmia as a result of the amount of electrical current his body absorbed. It’s pretty much the equivalent of being struck by lightning.”

“Lovely,” Sam said. She looked over at Ronon and Teyla. She’d spent a lot of hours waiting like that.

“He’ll be ok,” the doctor said. “I think it’s unlikely he’ll suffer any permanent effects. But even a stun beam can be dangerous if you do it over and over. The Wraith don’t usually fire more than necessary to incapacitate a human being.”

“It was Rodney,” Teyla said harshly, and Sam came over to stand on the other side of the bed. “Rodney did not know us. He resisted. John…” She shook her head, her eyes falling to Sheppard’s face. “I do not think he ever realized what had happened. That Rodney was…not himself.”

“It’s some kind of medical thing,” Ronon said. “Like Michael. I don’t know. I don’t know what it was. But he was a Wraith.”

“A retrovirus?”

“I don’t know,” Ronon said again, shaking his head, anger plain in his voice. Not anger at her, Sam thought. Anger at himself, that he had not somehow parsed the impossible.

“We couldn’t have known,” Sam said. “Todd may not have known.”

“Or he was playing some game of his own,” Teyla said, and there was a bitter edge in her voice. “I do not think he serves Queen Death. I do not think he truly serves anyone’s interests besides his own.”

Sam nodded. “We’ll be back in Atlantis in nine hours and a bit. Sheppard may be up and awake by then, and we can all sit down and debrief. But until then you might want to get a meal and some rest.”

“I think we would prefer to stay here,” Teyla said. Unsurprisingly. Sam had sat that watch herself way too many times.

“I’ll have somebody bring you up something,” she said, and turned to go.

Night had come, and the towers of Atlantis glittered through the falling snow. The debriefing was over, and Teyla left the conference room, Woolsey and Carson still talking behind her. Yet everything that could be said had been said and said a thousand times while she and Ronon and Sam and Mr. Woolsey and Radek and Carson and Jennifer had deconstructed everything over and over. There was nothing more to be said. There was no more information to share. There were only empty, gaping questions.

Through the glass doors of the control room balcony Teyla thought she saw a familiar figure outside despite the cold and darkness. She hugged her jacket about her as the doors opened before her, but the wind hit her like a punch in the chest as she stepped out of the shelter.

“John? I thought you were in the infirmary.”

He didn’t turn around, just stood at the rail, his shoulders hunched against the cold. “Keller let me out. I’m not sure she wanted to see me any more than I wanted to see her.”

Teyla drew a deep breath and came and stood beside him. “How are you feeling?”

He shrugged. “I still can’t feel my toes. How many times did I get stunned, anyway?”

“Six,” Teyla said matter of factly. She shook her head. “At least we know so much of Rodney remains. He has always been overkill!”

John snorted mirthlessly. “That’s true. I suppose I should just be glad he had a Wraith stunner, not a P90. You wouldn’t be bringing much home if he’d shot me six times with that.” He shook his head, looking out into the night. “I don’t know what happened, Teyla.”

“It all happened very fast,” she said. “I did not have any way to incapacitate Rodney except to shoot him, and if I had tried that I probably would have killed him.” Teyla shook her head. “I could not risk it.”

“You did the right thing,” John said, and she knew he was thinking of Ford, of the time he had not taken the shot when he might have.

Teyla took a step closer, her shoulder against his arm, side by side at the rail. “We will get him back.”

“You know that’s not very likely, don’t you?” John looked at her sideways.

“In that other reality, Rodney spent twenty five years trying to find a way to change the past and save me. Do you think I will give up on him?” He was silent, so she continued, lacing her hands together in the cold. “You looked for a long time before you found me when I was Michael’s prisoner, and you nearly succeeded once before you at last did. We did not know what we were up against this time. We did not know that Rodney would not come with us willingly. We had no reason to expect what happened. Next time we will know.”

“And how are we going to take him down without killing him?”

“Ronon’s stun pistol.” She shook her head. “We will get a zat gun from the SGC. Something else. We will figure it out. But we are not going to give up. We will get Rodney home.” She nudged him with her shoulder. “You may be sure of that.”

John looked away. Whirling snowflakes landed on his dark hair, sticking whole and complete. “Teyla, is there something we need to talk about?”

He sounded so strained, so uncertain. “No,” she said quietly. “There is nothing you need to say. There is nothing you could say to me that your actions have not said a thousand times.”

His eyes closed, and she thought the faintest hint of a smile played around the corner of his mouth. Or perhaps he was laughing at himself, inarticulate always in the face of so much to say. “Ok,” he said. He lifted his arm and she slid under it, warm against his side as the cold wind swirled around them, his chin resting on the top of her head.

Beyond, the snow fell soundlessly into the sea.