Sabine Bauer - Mirror, mirror

"Watch where you're stepping!" Rodney yelled, making her ears ring.

Scrabbling noises, accompanied by cussing, and then Ronon shouted, "Teyla! Reach up!"

She flung up an arm, gasped as calloused fingers snapped around her wrist and pulled, threatening to tear her shoulder from its socket. A splintery wooden edge dug into her bel- ly-eaves? — and she found purchase there with her free hand and pushed herself up, anything to ease the strain on her arm. Shingles under her fingertips, rain slick and mossy, but enough were cracked or missing to hold on. Between Ronon's and her efforts, she rolled out of the water and up onto the roof at last and lay there panting, struggling to control the shivers that all but shook her bone from bone.

The roof heaved under her, dipped a fraction, as Ronon leaned further over the edge to haul in Rodney. She didn't stir, merely listened to the now familiar scrabbling, a curse or two, Rodney's groans, a couple of heavy thuds that marked success. The two men had slumped onto the shingles, and for a while all she heard were their harsh breaths, her own coughing, the creak of strained wood, and the ferocious bellow of the river.

Finally, the coughs eased to occasional hiccups, her lungs hurt a little less, and Teyla was able to draw enough breath to speak. "Thank you, Rodney."

"You're welcome. Feel free to mention my conspicuous heroism whenever you see fit." There was a pause during which he spluttered up what sounded like a pint of water. "I don't suppose anybody had the foresight to bring a thermos with hot soup? Something hearty. Chicken noodle, maybe. I haven't exactly been stuffing myself lately, so if you want to ensure my continued functioning, you'd better-"

"McKay!" Ronon's deep voice cut through the diatribe like a knife. "You were going to explain Ikaros."

"Nothing I'd rather do."

Eavesdropping was childish and frowned-upon, but Teyla couldn't help it. She sensed reluctance, resentment, fear too, and a stirring of the presence inside Rodney as it slowly, embarrassed almost, rose to the surface. No doubt in her mind that this was, in fact, Ikaros. It bled all the awkwardness and anger of a teenager, and this one was angrier than most, and for good reason probably. A lot of the anger was directed at itself, not that it would ever admit that.

"Rodney was right in trying to stop me," it said. "Unfortunately the way he went about it was more than usually asinine."

As it spoke with Rodney's voice, she saw the images unfolding in its mind. Those last moments on Mykena Quattuor, Ikaros joining with his creation in a column of swirling light, and Rodney sailing through air and into that light in an attempt to prevent what had been inevitable already. She also felt the merging of entities, Ikaros and Rodney, both terrified by what was happening to them, and a third…

"Charybdis is with you?" she croaked, vaguely registering that she sounded almost as terrified as Rodney and Ikaros had felt. As well she might. If it was true, then nothing either Rodney or Ikaros told them could be trusted, because the one trait that marked the Charybdis entity was an all-consuming will to survive, no matter what the cost.

"Yes," said Ikaros. "And it's getting stronger. It's attempting to… stop us from resetting events."

Ikaros didn't say kill us, but that was what it-he-had meant.

Ronon didn't quite stifle a growl. "You mean you knew that thing was sentient when you let it loose?"

"I didn't know!"

"But you suspected." The silence that followed proclaimed that Ronon had stumbled upon the truth. "McKay was right. We should have fried your circuits."

"Can you repeat that?" This was Rodney rather than Ikaros.

"We should have fried-"

"No. The other bit. The part where you said McKay was right."

"Fine. You were right. Does it make a difference?"

"It might, the next time."

"If we don't reach the Stargate and get off this planet, there won't be a next time "

Ominously, there was no reply.

Teyla scraped a handful of rain off her face, absently thinking that this didn't make a difference either, given how soaked they were. "Rodney?"

When he finally spoke, he sounded beaten, and it wasn't just the crushing exhaustion they all suffered. "Get off this planet? That's your master plan?" He gave a sour laugh. "I suppose it struck you as the least stupid out of a staggering number of pisspoor options, but where exactly do you think we'll be going?" Some shuffling indicated that he must have sat up. "Assuming that the ZPM I found is still functional and that I'll be able to reconnect the dialing console, you do realize that we'll never get off the planet, don't you? All the gate will do is flip us into a different timeline, which, judging by our combined experiences, will probably be worse than this.

"Of course we can then repeat the process and visit other timelines ad infinitum." Rodney sighed. "Ikaros has a theory. In the simplest of terms, Charybdis has enabled the Stargate system to let an infinite number of CTCs intersect with a Cauchy surface. There's-"

"Can't trust anything Ikaros says," Ronon cut in. "Even if I understood it "

He was right, and Teyla's own instinct was not to trust either of them, but the notion that they'd been bounced through time rather than space made some sense at least. "What is that, CTCs?" she asked.

"Closed timelike curves." There was impatience swinging in Rodney's voice. "In a CTC time bends back on itself. Think rollercoaster-" He stopped himself, his frown audible. "On second thought, don't think rollercoaster. I don't really want to have to clear that up as well. Time runs in a loop, endlessly. Which, coincidentally, would explain-"

"Why you're sixteen and I was over seventy in my timeline," she finished for him. "Our ages are all over the place, but using the Stargate readjusts them."

"Yes. Thank you. That never would have occurred to me," he snarled. "So, as I was saying, trying to activate the gate won't get us anywhere."

"Got us here in time to save your neck," Ronon observed dryly. "And Teyla found me. Gate works just fine if you've got the DNA of the person you want to hook up with."

"You had my DNA? How? Not that I'm nosy or anything… His tone shifted abruptly. Ikaros resurfaced with a snort. "DNA? That's a bit pedestrian, though the general idea has some merit. In actual fact it's the unique combination of quantum states characterizing an individual that the gate system recognizes. A similar concept, I grant you, but- For God's sake!" Rodney again. "Does it matter? I want to know how they came by my… quantum states."

A shuffling noise indicated that Ronon was moving. He shuffled some more, then there was a yelp of disgust from Rodney, and Ronon said, "Thumbs up for perception."

She understood then and a small, desperate urge to laugh did battle with revulsion and won, hands down, when she conceived the mental image. He must have still kept the alternate Rodney's pickled ear in his pocket, forgotten until this moment.

"That is revolting!" yelped Rodney, followed by a breath of relief Apparently someone-either he himself or Ronon-had tossed the offending body part into the river. "Where did you get it?"

"Don't worry. He didn't scream.

"Didn't scream?"

"He was dead."

"You might try sounding a little less amused!"

"I might," Ronon conceded, sounding unrepentant.

His words half drowned in the labored groan of tearing wood. An eddy had grabbed the roof and yanked it into a violent series of jounces. A bone-rattling impact, and a few moments of utter stillness. Then the joints burst, shrieking in protest, and their precarious raft shot forward again.

"Whatever you do, don't move!" bellowed Ronon. "And hold tight!"

Needlessly. Lying motionless, barely daring to breathe, Teyla held on for dear life, feeling the list of the structure, feeling that it wanted to capsize and would if they so much as shifted a millimeter.