Chapter Text
John woke up in darkness, and it took a long time to recognize the squishy-brain feeling of some really, really good drugs. He could make out soft lights, soft shapes, but his eyes wouldn't focus; somewhere he thought he heard someone else breathing, but it might've been a blurred echo of his own. He hardly seemed to be inhabiting his own body and it was a struggle just to put two thoughts together. Had he been captured? Who would've captured him? P96-402 was supposed to be uninhabited--
He tried to sit up, and suddenly snapped back into himself: pain exploded through his body, every nerve lighting up, every inch of him aching and burning. Somebody moaned. It might've been him. "Kharoush?" he heard, a long way away, but stars burst in front of his eyes and then he was gone again.
For a while he might've dreamed, dark shapes and bad feelings without substance or structure. The next time he woke up, the drugged feeling was not longer quite so intense; he was aware of a constellation of hot spots across his body—not quite painful, not with the medication, but balanced precariously on the edge. Even the slightest tensing of his muscles, even breathing sent warning flares shooting across his nerves from arms and legs, stomach and shoulders. His head was pounding fiercely; he was nauseated; one leg was alarmingly numb below the knee. Even with his eyes closed, the world around him was very gently spinning.
He'd been shot at least twice in his stomach, he decided, based on the burning feeling that radiated deep into his muscles. At least once in the chest, too, maybe once in the back—shot, that was right, ambushed over an hour into the mission. They had been attacked on an uninhabited planet, while Hughes had his nose in his instruments, while Sumner was bitching about getting sent on another nature walk, while Garcia was looking the other way.
Sumner had been shot in the face before he finished a sentence. That had been all their warning before Jaffa had come boiling out of the trees. It was also the last thing John remembered.
He listened carefully, but there was no sign of anyone else in the...wherever he was. Just wind and distant bird song, the sounds of the outdoors. When he dragged his eyes open the first thing he saw was a white wedge of doorway covered by a sheer curtain, glowing with sunlight and rippling in the breeze. He had to look away from that door if he wanted his eyes to adjust to the dimness of the rest of the room, but looking away meant turning his head to his other side, meant white spots in his eyes and redoubled pounding inside his skull and a spike of nausea that made his abs spasm painfully. Concussion, he thought, but the word wandered around his mind for a while before it connected to anything, and it didn't exactly help.
He closed his eyes and spent a little while treading water against unconsciousness. Time stretched out and squirmed away from him, even measured in careful, shallow breathing, and the throbbing in his head and stomach refused to retreat. It was tempting to just go to sleep again, to let the pain and nausea pass him by, but they'd been attacked and he needed to know the location of his team mates. Whatever was left of them. He forced his eyes open, willed them into focus.
He found himself looking at a panel of golden metal etched with ornate hieroglyphs, about an inch from his nose. Goa'uld writing. He was on a Goa'uld ship. Just great. Never been a prisoner of war before, he thought, and let his eyes fall shut again.
The third time he regained his grip on consciousness—and knew himself to be conscious, not lost in murky dreams—his head was facing to the left again. That meant somebody had moved him, though he didn't remember being touched. The doorway was dark now, and the dingy brown curtain across it hung limp—nightfall or a closed door? A small white crystal in the middle of the floor glowed like a lantern, throwing some light on the rest of the room—about ten meters across at the widest point, with a high ceiling, filled with a jumble of odd debris. Cargo crates, he decided, and broken pieces of metal and machinery that must've come from the yawning black gaps in the walls themselves. He was in some kind of cargo area. Not exactly a jail cell, though of course he wasn't exactly in any shape for a jail break. Maybe his captors just weren't very smart.
The curtain moved with a hiss, and John shut his eyes again. He listened as someone else came into the room, someone breathing heavily and walking with a loud, thumping tread; there was a momentary sound of rain from the outside, a muted grumble of thunder, quickly cut off. Also a sloshing sound, and a thump, like a bucket of water being set down. More stomping around the room, and indecipherable muttering in a man's voice. From the odd additional rattle, the newcomer was kicking at the debris that littered the floor, mostly on the far side of the room from where John lay. There was one very loud crash and an indignant "Oh, come on—" quickly cut off. John caught a whiff of smoke.
This was followed shortly by the sound of boiling water, the crackle of plastic, and smell that was almost, though not quite, exactly like a freshly-opened box of corn flakes. Supper time, apparently.
He listened to a little more clattering and puttering—this guy apparently had no reason to keep quiet, but no particular reason to make a lot of noise, either. There was more plastic snapping, some vague grunts and slurping sounds. After a few moments, the footsteps started again, moving around back and forth across the room. Eventually, they starting coming back towards John.
He he reflexively fisted his hands in the thin blanket under him. Not that he could exactly start a fight—he wasn't sure he could even lift a gun, much less aim it—but there was a principle to the thing. He wanted to know who exactly had him completely in their power and what they meant to do with him. Since the last known inhabitants of the planet were a load of trigger-happy Jaffa, he wasn't real optimistic about his prospects.
The footsteps stopped suddenly about foot away. "Oh, no no no no no," the man said, rapid as gunfire. "Whatever it is you think you're about to try, just don't, okay?"
Damn. John squinted up at the figure silhouetted above him. "Or what?" he croaked through his dry throat. "You'll kill me?"
The man snorted. "That would be completely counterproductive after all the effort I put into saving you." He crouched down at John's side, and the change in angle suddenly cast dim illumination on his face: broad forehead, a strong chin, sharp nose, dark hair that receded into a stark widow's peak. No forehead tattoo, though; just an anxious expression and a bruise on his temple. He pulled down the thin blanket that covered John's torso, and his mouth twisted down unevenly at whatever he saw there. John couldn't raise his head enough to get a good look at himself, though that didn't stop him from trying. "Stop that," the man said sharply. "I don't want to have to treat another collapsed lung from you."
"Doesn't feel collapsed," John observed. He hardly even felt short of breath, actually, and that was just as likely to be from the radiating pain in his chest. Shot, he remembered. He'd been shot a lot.
"And for that reason alone you should be saying, 'Thank you,'" the man declared. He pulled something out of his pocket and slipped it over the fingers of his right hand. John saw something start to glow against his palm, and tried to recoil away from it, one part training and one part reflex and one part common sense that strange glowy space rocks are bad. That turned out to be a very bad idea, though, and his vision sparked over from pain for a few seconds while the man yelped and grabbed at him, pushing him back down on the lumpy pallet. "Stop it! Just stop it, okay? What part of stop it do you not understand?"
John didn't have the breath to answer that right away, so he could only watch as the man lifted the hand device into his line of sight. It wasn't a model he'd seen before, or at least, not that he could remember; it certainly wasn't a full-sized ribbon. "The hell is that?" he managed to wheeze.
"It's a healing device, you nitwit!" the man said with a growl. "If I wanted to torture you, I could just poke you in one of your various open wounds, couldn't I? Now, for the third time, stop moving so I can treat you."
He was talking like John was the biggest annoyance ever, but he was also still looking at him with that slanted, anxious frown. When John didn't make any further attempts to escape, the man lifted the healing device and took a deep breath. With a look of fierce concentration, he waved it over John's chest, producing a faint pink glow.
It felt like...John supposed this was more or less what it would feel like if you injected Alka-Seltzer directly into a vein. It was a ferocious tingling, but painless, like half his nerves had been briefly put on mute. But when the device stopped, all the sensation came rushing back, just as bad as before. "Not real good at this, are you?" he managed to ask.
"Shut up," the man said. He tried the device on another spot, with more or less the same results, and then dropped his hands and his head with a sigh. "How do you feel?" he asked, strangely accusatory.
"I've had worse," John said as lightly as possible.
The man huffed at him. "I sincerely doubt it."
He tried the device on John's leg, the one that had heretofore been numb; this time, it worked a little too well, and feeling returned in a rush of fire. It felt like something had taken a bite out of his calf muscle or at least gnawed on it a little, but he could still wiggle his toes, so he supposed it could've been worse. He managed not to make a noise but couldn't suppress a grimace, and the man with the healing device made a small noise, sort of satisfied, even if he was still frowning.
When he traded the hand device for a sort of long silver pen, John shook his head. "No more drugs."
"What are you, a masochist?" the man asked. "You have holes where your species is not supposed to have holes. You'll be in agony."
"Messes with my head."
"The blunt trauma messed with your head," the man said fiercely.
John tried his best to point forcefully, despite the fact that his arms felt like jello. "Not supposed to sleep with a head injury."
That earned him an eye roll. "And I'm supposed to take medical advice from some brain-damaged...whatever the hell you are? What are you?"
"Major John Sheppard, SG-4," John offered.
"How lovely for you." He adjusted something on the pen, frowned, and adjusted it again. He bit his lip for a moment, and then gave John a penetrating look before his shoulders slumped again. "All right. While I could very easily inject you with anything I like at the moment, since we do have to stretch our supply a little longer, I'll give you a reduced dose. And if you keep trying to move around, I swear I will tie you to the wall. Do we have a deal?"
"Deal," John said. The man huffed at him, and pressed the pen into his elbow. The mushy-brain feeling returned with a rush of warmth, but not so quickly that John wasn't able to ask. "What's your name?"
Okay, well, so it actually came out like, "Wasserrame?"
But as his eyes slid shut, the other man answered, "McKay."
\\\
John woke again briefly, just long enough to drink some water and engage in exercises with an improvised bed pan that he was never telling anyone about ever. Especially not the part where McKay had to hold him up, had to hold the damn cup to his lips for him, though John drew a line when it came to assisted peeing. That was more than enough to exhaust him, and he passed out again for another untold span of hours, dreaming vague dreams that he didn't remember upon waking.
When he woke up properly, the doorway was open again, and glowing with sunlight. For a moment he couldn't see where McKay was, though he had some nagging sense he couldn't quite explain that he was somewhere nearby. Eventually he spotted a pair of cream-colored boots and trousers protruding from one of the gaping wounds in a wall. Or did he have to call it a bulkhead, since they were on a ship? "Morning," John called out.
McKay huffed at him. "It's early afternoon," he replied without emerging from his hiding place.
"Thanks." John's headache was still pretty bad, but either he was getting used to the rest of his injuries or they were marginally improving. Or possibly he was still really drugged. Either way, McKay wasn't watching, and so John carefully pushed down the blanket over his chest and felt out his wounds. They were covered in slippery, irregularly-shaped dressings, sort of like a giant Band-Aid made of cling-wrap, but he could still feel raw, irritated skin around the edges; a staff wound on his left chest, close to his heart, and one lower down on the same side, precariously close to a kidney. Two low on his stomach, too, one of which hurt like a son of a bitch to touch with even the slightest pressure. Hadn't he been wearing a tac vest? No, he remembered now—they'd stopped for a water break, and he'd seized the chance to quickly strip off his jacket because of the rising heat. You could do that kind of thing on an uninhabited planet, just like Garcia could wander away into the trees, and Sumner and Hughes could stand out in the open and argue about whether to push on or start making their way back to the gate. It was, after all, an uninhabited planet, with no signs of life larger than a rabbit for miles. It was a goddamn nature walk. You could let your guard down.
"Hey! What are you doing?"
John opened his eyes to see McKay had crawled out of the open bulkhead and was glaring at him; he had a smudge of dirt or something on his forehead, not a bruise, which made his scowl slightly less ominous than it could've been. "Seriously, on most planets people learn to stop poking thing that hurt when they are children," he added. "I have a four-year-old niece who knows better than that."
"Where's my team?" John asked. "I came through the stargate with three other men."
McKay flinched and looked away. "They, uh...they're gone. Dead. In the ambush."
John shut his eyes again and concentrated on slow breathing for a moment. Not like he should've expected any different; not like he deserved it. They'd let themselves get caught flat-footed and they should've all been killed, except somehow John hadn't been, somehow he'd gotten rescued and the rest left behind...
"I couldn't save you all," McKay added in a blurt. "I, when I heard your weapons I followed the sound, but there were too many Lion Guards and you were the only one I could get to, so I...got you." He grimaced a little, and then busied himself with the jumble of tools spread out around him, picking them up and putting them down again sort of at random.
"Thanks," John said, and looked away, biting down before he said anything else.
McKay huffed. "Yeah. Well. What was I gonna do, leave you to die?"
John almost said yeah, because it wasn't like any of them deserved a rescue when they were caught by surprise like that. It wasn't like a total stranger owed them anything, not against a dozen heavily-armed Jaffa on a planet no one was supposed to be on. Then he took a closer look at McKay's drab clothes, all shades of cream and sand and khaki, and something suddenly slotted into place—the clothes and the technology and the help. "You're Tok'ra, aren't you?" he asked.
McKay's demeanor changed gears like a mountain bike; he huffed a little and winced like John had hurt him. "Your powers of deduction are truly a marvel, Major Sheppard," he said. "What gave it away, the free health care or the distinct lack of rhinestones in the decor?"
"I'm still kind of new at this whole aliens thing," John said defensively. "What're you doing here? This planet's supposed to be uninhabited."
"Supposed to be," McKay echoed. "As we both found out in such dramatic fashion."
"You get shot down?" John asked, taking a second look at the debris that littered the floor.
"No, no, we enjoy landing like this," McKay growled. "Seriously, how do you tie your shoes in the morning without hurting yourself?"
"You're the one who keeps giving me drugs," John pointed out. "S'not my fault I'm stoned."
McKay selected a tool and burrowed back into the wall with a dramatic sigh. "Yes, we were shot down. The High Council had no idea any of the System Lords were even aware of this planet, let alone present in strength, so we weren't prepared for a firefight. Luckily the cloak is still functional—about the only thing that is, at the moment, and it's sucking up most of our auxiliary power—but for the time being, we're safe where we are."
"For the time being," John echoed.
"Well, we weren't exactly outfitted for a wacky camping adventure," McKay said, making something hum loudly. "Aside from tight food and medical supplies, the water recyclers are offline along with the rest of life support, hence the need to prop the doors open so we don't suffocate. And unless you count the birds that keep crashing into the side of the ship, there's not much in the way of living off the land to be done around here, so don't even ask"
Okay. Might as well go for the full sit-rep; it would keep his mind off...other things. "What about escaping through the gate?" John asked.
"What, are you feeling up for a little hike?" McKay did something that made the ship's overhead lights flicker on briefly, but otherwise the door remained the only illumination. "Forget about it. The Lion Guards' camp is between us and the gate, and now that they know the SGC is interested in this planet they've almost certainly put up a twenty-four-hour guard. Only way we're getting off this planet is flying."
"When we gonna do that?"
The lights flickered again, and McKay let out a frustrated growl. "Well, if you don't stop distracting me, about the same time that the sun runs out of hydrogen and explodes!"
John rolled his eyes. "You got a real nice bedside manner, McKay."
"What do you want? I'm not that kind of doctor."
Something about that sentence nagged at John, but he was starting to feel sleepy again, and it was hard to concentrate. "Anything I can do to help?" he asked.
"Not until you've got two functioning legs and experience programming in Goa'uld," McKay said.
"I'll keep you posted," John said, and pulled the blanket back up before closing his eyes again.
\\\
In the dream he was walking along a beach, wet stones shifting under his boots; some had been rounded by years of the relentless waves, but some were fresh-broken shards with edges that could cut. The cliffs to his left were the source of the black rocks, sometimes twice his height, sometimes five times. To his right, the water rippled like mercury, too thick and slow, and one horn of a copper-colored moon was just peeking above the horizon.
\\\
The next few times he awoke, McKay was gone, and John didn't have much to do except poke at his injuries and think. The SGC should've sent a MALP after them, at least, when they missed their return window, but if McKay was right and the gate was under guard...well, General Landry wasn't likely to approve a rescue mission against that many Jaffa unless he had concrete proof that somebody on the team was alive, and while John wasn't sure exactly how long he'd been out, it had probably been long enough to miss any radio hails.
He was probably already listed as MIA. His father would be so proud.
When McKay did return, he was limping a little on one side and had a couple of long scratches on his hands. He caught John examining the inflamed area around one bandage and rolled his eyes. "I bet you picked on your scabs as a little kid, too," he declared. "Is there any point in telling you to stop that? Are you even capable of learning?"
"What happened to you?" John asked, nodding at McKay's hands. "Birds not as stunned as you thought they were?"
"My symbiote can heal it," McKay said, and took up the healing device again. "Speaking of which..."
"Didn't work so well the last time," John pointed out.
"You weren't even conscious the last time," McKay informed him while waving the device over John's wounds. "And it's not working because you're not strong enough."
"That hurts, McKay," John said.
"I meant physiologically," he said, drawing the word out so each syllable dripped with condescension. "You were shot about six times with staff weapons, you had a concussion, major internal bleeding, neurological damage, collapsed lung caused by a pneumohemothorax, broken bones, et cetera et cetera...this thing, it accelerates the body's natural healing processes, but you're only giving it so much raw potential to work with. Speaking of which, you need to eat something."
John was hungry in a sort of abstract way; it was more like he knew he ought to be hungry, but wasn't actually feeling it, which bothered him less than actually being hungry would've. "I guess so," he said, but McKay was already leaving to go do something else. He watched as McKay boiled some water on something like a hot plate and added it to a plastic pouch, the same stuff that smelled like corn flakes. "That smells like corn flakes," John told him.
"It's a blend of complex carbohydrates and vegetable protein," McKay said, prodded the contents of the pouch. "And it tastes like wood chips, but you need the nutrition, so try not to puke."
"But you make it sound so delicious," John muttered. Experimentally, he tried to push himself up; he got to an incline of about thirty degrees on trembling arms before his body's protest got the better of him, though getting back down hurt just as bad as getting up.
It also got McKay to squawk indignantly at him. "Hey! Did you not just hear what I said? Do you want to tear something open?" he demanded.
"I want to sit up," John said.
McKay pinched the bridge of his nose. "Look. Let me use small words for the benefit of the brain damaged here. Your body is currently too weak for me to heal artificially. That means, if you re-injure yourself in any way—if you get so much as a shaving cut—and while we're on the subject, that's something we're going to have to look into, because you are the hairiest man I have ever seen—if you injure yourself further, it will have to heal the natural way. So if you, I don't know, get a blood infection in one of those staff wounds, or tear open your spleen, or throw a clot, I can't save you. Nobody can. The medical supplies we brought on the ship are almost gone, the medical supplies I found in your kit are laughably inadequate, and I? Am an physicist, not a physician. Do you understand the risks at play here?"
His tone was relentless, almost vicious, but he was looking at John with wide blue eyes that did nothing to cover up his anxiety. McKay was clearly afraid, afraid for John, far more afraid that he would've expected. Of course, he was down in hostile territory with a wounded man to take care of—John knew intimately how that felt, how the needs and responsibilities and what-ifs could weight down on you until you felt like choking. And by John's estimation, McKay had been at this for a couple of days already, all alone--
Well, not alone. He was a Tok'ra, so he had a partner right there in his head with him. Symbiote. Whatever. It was still a rotten situation, so John took a deep breath and told himself not to make anything worse. "All right. I'm made of glass. I get that," he said as evenly as he could manage.
"I hope you do," McKay said fiercely. He brought the pouch of protein mush over and crouched next to John's head. "And I also hope you realize that I don't enjoy this any more than you do. I have much better things to do that spoon-feed somebody with the self-preservation instincts of a retarded moth."
"Thanks," John said, or tried to, except for how he got a spoon full of protein mush in the middle of the word. It was exactly as bad as McKay made it sound, but he choked it down anyway. "Bleagh."
"I know, right?" McKay scooped up another spoonful. "Typically I like my food highly processed and fairly bland, but this is just an insult to the gastrointestinal system. I'm pretty certain I've eaten school supplies during my life that have tasted better."
"Could be worse," John offered. "I had to eat bugs once."
"Now, see, bugs are okay with the right spices," McKay said. "Tanys has had them. Once they're cooked, it's basically like a lot of tiny shellfish"
"These were still moving."
"Oh. Gross."
John choked down another bite of the mush, which was denser than mashed potatoes and more sticky than refried beans; it was like somebody had mixed sweet potato casserole with tiling grout, he decided. "Who's Tanys?" he thought to ask while he recovered from the next bite.
"Hmm? Oh, my symbiote." McKay lined up the next spoonful. "Open up."
Symbiotes again. John looked at McKay while he ate, trying to picture the alien snaked curled around his spinal cord, the one that could control his body like a puppet. Except it didn't, because the Tok'ra were supposed to be the good guys. McKay had been doing all the talking, all the touching, but any minute he could be gone, and alien could be looking out of his face. Would John even be able to tell when it happened? Maybe it already had....
"You know, you don't actually have to chew this stuff," McKay said.
Reluctantly, he swallowed. "I'm thinking."
"Well, don't. Trust me, it's even worse when it's cold."
Half a pouch of protein mush, and John started to feel sleepy again; the constantly being tired thing was already starting to get old. McKay, however, insisted on one more round with the healing device, and this time he helped John roll over onto his front so he could look at the wound in his back. John shut his eyes and let the bubbly feeling of the alien technology seep through him, along his spine and then further up, his neck, the back of his head— "I hit my head, right?" he asked, though he wasn't sure it came out clearly since his face was mashed into a folded Tok'ra jacket that served him as a pillow.
"Hmm? Oh, yeah, doozy." The device switched off, and McKay flipped John over again, way more easily than was fair. Stupid Tok'ra super-strength. "Get some sleep."
"Kay."
He was almost asleep when he thought he heard McKay whisper quietly, sadly, "Get better, all right?" But he might've been mistaken, and anyway, there wasn't much time to think about it.
\\\
He walked on the beach as the moon rose. The stones were slick and wet, and in places enough water had pooled to make them slimy with green growing things. John had to go slowly and keep his eyes on his footing, straining in the dim moonlight to see his own feet. A little behind him, he heard the stones click and shift and slide.