Blood & Water - Part I

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Title: Blood & Water
Rating: R
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: John Sheppard, Ronon Dex, Teyla Emmagen, Rodney McKay
Word Count: 10,175
Categories: gen, action/adventure, drama, hurt/comfort, team
Spoilers: none
Warnings: graphic depictions of violence/injuries, mild language
Summary: On a world isolated from the rest of the galaxy, Sheppard and team encounter a society with a unique view of the Wraith. Captured and forced to participate in the local practice of ritualistic combat, they have to literally fight for their lives—and no one escapes unscathed.

Part II
Part III


They went to P5Y-478 with limited intel.

The Ancient Database had little info to provide on the planet, all of it—as per usual—extremely outdated. It had offered up a handful of records about the indigenous plant and animal life, a chart of several-hundred-year-old atmospheric readings, and a few general observations on the hunter/gatherer civilization the Ancients had found on the planet, but that was it. The planet also wasn’t one either Ronon or Teyla were familiar with, so the team was going into their planned mission pretty much blind.

They was regularly the case, though, so Sheppard’s concerns were at a minimal level when they stepped through the Gate and into a small clearing surrounded by forest. They’d arrived in what appeared to be the planet’s mid-afternoon, based on the position of the sun in the sky. But that sun didn’t feel like it was at full strength, and the cooler temperatures and orange-hued leaves put Sheppard in the mind of autumn.

As the Gate shut down, he turned a slow circle, scanning the surrounding trees. There was no movement to indicate anyone was around; in fact, there weren’t any clear signs of other people at all.

“Anyone see a path?” he asked.

“Nope,” Ronon grunted.

“If there are still people on this planet, they may not use the Gate much, if at all,” Teyla pointed out. She was also studying the forest, eyes searching for any indication of a route for them to take. “I have traded on other planets like that. The people who live on such worlds avoid direct contact with the Gate themselves but happily trade with others who risk the travel.”

“So we’re gonna have to walk,” Rodney groused.

“We already knew we’d have to walk, but which direction?” Sheppard waved an arm at the trees. “I don’t want to hike for five miles just to find out we went the wrong way.”

“That way.”

Ronon was staring into the trees directly in front of the Gate, and Sheppard aimed his own suspicious squint that way. He hadn’t spotted anything in his own study of the area, but he wouldn’t be surprised if Ronon had caught something he hadn’t.

“You see something we don’t, buddy?”

“No. But that’s the way we should go.”

“Ronon is right,” Teyla agreed. “If there are people living here, they would most likely have settlements somewhere in line with exiting from the Stargate.”

Rodney looked like he’d just put that particular two and two together himself. “Teyla’s actually got a point. I don’t think we’ve ever encountered a village or a city that was built behind a Stargate. Y’know, unless it was built completely around the Gate.” He circled a finger in the air as he looked around them, as if reassessing their surroundings with new eyes. “I’ve never really paid attention to it before, but it makes sense.”

“Okay, so we walk in that general direction,” Sheppard decided, “and hope we run into a person, or a village, or at least a path.”

He considered the plan as he moved to the edge of the clearing, the team falling into step behind him. Tromping along in a more or less straight line, one behind the other, was their typical method of making ground when they were moving through wooded areas. But since they were going to be more in search mode than travel mode this time, he decided it made sense to adopt a different formation.

“Let’s spread out, side to side in a line,” he advised, ignoring the slightly confused look Rodney threw his way. “Stay in visual contact and within shouting range. We’ll keep pace together and if anyone spots anything that might give us an idea of which way to go, shout.”

Ronon walked off to Sheppard’s far left, leaving Rodney between them. Teyla took a spot out to Sheppard’s right and, at his signal, they all began walking.

Thankfully the undergrowth in the forest wasn’t that thick, and though some of the bushes grew taller than Ronon, there was still plenty of space to move through the trees without needing to cut a path. Not that that stopped Ronon from pulling out his sword a few times, taking whatever frustrations were on his mind at the moment out on some innocent shrubbery.

Sheppard split his focus between the area around him and the progress of his team. They were staying together, each studying their patch of forest with different expressions. Ronon seemed almost bored, while Rodney looked annoyed; standard for both of them. Teyla, in her usual way, appeared curious. Sheppard knew she always looked forward to encountering new Pegasus cultures, and he knew it was more than just her genuine interest in other people. There was always that underlying thrill of anticipation: maybe these people would be the ones who had successfully avoided the Wraith.

As time had passed, they’d also had to add the counterbalance to that hope: maybe they would again be the ones to bring the Wraith to a world.

Sheppard shook the thought away and refocused on the bushes around him. Everything looked untouched to him. Not that he was the galaxy’s greatest tracker, but even with the relative sparsity of the undergrowth there would have been something for him to pick up. He glanced behind him and noted the obvious signs of his own passage; he was sure no one else had been in this part of the forest for some time.

So it came as a complete shock when hands suddenly grabbed him.

“What the hell?!” he heard Rodney yelp.

A split second later, Ronon roared wordlessly and Sheppard turned in that direction only to see Ronon disappearing behind the undergrowth, five large men bearing him down. Closer by, Rodney was still upright and struggling to get free. Sheppard saw one of the three men grappling with him cock back his arm, and he barely had time to call out Rodney’s name before the man swung. He registered, with dazed pride, that Rodney had managed to react in time, turning his head with the motion of the punch just before it landed.

“Good job, Rodney!” he yelled, the name muffled by the hand that closed over his mouth. He was being pulled to the ground now, too, and though he tried to check on Teyla to his right, his sight line was already below the brush.

He kept struggling against the hands and arms—and at least one knee, if his lower back wasn’t lying—that were keeping him facedown on the forest floor. He could feel his weapons being stripped from him and he tried to wriggle his arms under his body so that he could get hold of his P90, ready to come up firing as soon as he was flipped over. But even more hands gripped his arms and pulled them out to his sides, pinning them to the ground.

He was calling his team’s names, and he could hear them responding, but their captors were yelling, too, and everyone’s words got lost in the din. Having removed what they were able to with him lying on his stomach, the men holding Sheppard flipped him over. Careful to hold his arms away from his body, they lifted up his torso and pulled his legs around until they had him sitting, then pushed him onto his back, once again pinning him to the ground. There were five of them that he could see, but movement around him was evidence of more. They removed his P90 and after a quick search confirmed they had taken all his weapons, they pulled him back to a seated position and set about removing his vest.

As they shifted their grip on his right arm in order to thread it through the vest’s armhole, Sheppard managed to wrench it free and punched the man nearest to him. He felt a momentary flare of satisfaction as the man’s head snapped back, but that was quickly erased by the sharp pain in his side as someone’s else fist made contact with his rib cage. Wheezing a bit, he looked up to assess the damage he’d caused. The man’s eye was already visibly swelling, but he was grinning at Sheppard, and Sheppard felt his stomach drop. Because the grin wasn’t one of anger or promised vengeance or even smugness. The man looked delighted to have been punched, beaming at Sheppard as if getting decked mid-struggle was the best thing that could have happened to him.

As he was lifted to his feet like a puppet by six sets of hands, Sheppard felt a tremor of unease.

He was carried through the trees by his arms and legs, suspended on his back as several men carted him along at an impressive pace. Periodically he could hear the rustle of leaves further away, but though he twisted his neck as much as he could, he wasn’t able to get even a small glimpse of his team past the bodies that surrounded him.

Because of his position, he couldn’t see much of anything besides those bodies, the tree canopy, and the sky. So his first sight of civilization was the prison cell his captors stopped in front of. The man who had been walking at his feet—between them, actually, with a firm grip on either ankle—stepped away to open the door, and Sheppard got his first look at his team’s prison.

It was a single-room building, and it looked disappointingly sturdy. He took in the stone construction, the solitary wooden door with an unusually complicated-looking lock, and the long window that took up the front facade of the building. The window was about two feet high, but there were bars set along its length, no more than six inches apart. Not even Teyla could wiggle through that.

Sheppard snapped a mental picture of all the details in the few moments it took for the door to be opened, and then he was literally tossed inside, the men holding him swinging him through the door like a rag doll. He braced himself to hit the floor, rolling as he did so. He heard the rest of his team follow behind him in short order, then the door shutting and locking behind them.

Cautiously, he got to his feet. His eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the dimmer light in their cell and he didn’t want to risk standing headlong into a low ceiling, so he took it slowly. Once fully upright and head no worse for the effort, he lifted a hand to explore the head space above him and was pleased to find that the ceiling was out of his immediate reach. No worries about Ronon getting brained, either.

He squinted at the figures moving around him, picking out the shadowy but familiar silhouettes of his team. Ronon was already standing near the wall to Sheppard’s right and scowling out the barred window. The faint huff of annoyance that came from directly in front of him confirmed the figure there to be Teyla, so the one still hunched over on the ground to his left had to be Rodney.

Gingerly, Sheppard fingered his ribs. They weren’t as bad as he’d expected, but he knew they’d be sore later, and he could already feel the bruises blooming on his limbs where he’d been held down. He figured the others were probably faring about the same.

“Everybody okay?” he asked.

Ronon and Teyla both answered in the affirmative, but Rodney was, unsurprisingly, a different story.

“No, I am not okay!” he snapped, sitting up to glare at Sheppard. He was holding the right side of his face, so the glare was one-eyed. “I got punched! In the face!”

“Yes, Rodney, I saw that,” Sheppard said as he stepped over and crouched beside him, pulling Rodney’s hand away so that he could see the damage. There was a vivid welt across Rodney’s cheek, but the skin hadn’t been broken and the gentle probing Rodney let him get away with didn’t reveal any indications of a fracture. Sheppard clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re gonna be fine, probably won’t even have a black eye. You turned with the hit just like I taught you,” he added, a note of praise in his tone.

“Yeah, all those times practicing you swinging your fists at me and the reflex to not get hit kicked in just like that.”

“You managed to elbow one of your captors in the nose,” Teyla informed him, sounding amused by the fact.

“Really?” Rodney asked in surprise.

“Flail your arms that much and you’re bound to hit something.”

Sheppard hadn’t planned on mentioning it, but Ronon wasn’t wrong. Rodney had hit the man more out of luck than skill. There had been no intent behind the contact he’d made; he’d just been trying to get free, even if he had managed to break the man’s nose in the process.

The pride that had started to appear on Rodney’s face instantly shifted to derision at Ronon’s comment.

“Oh, well, thank you Mr. One Man Army. Not all of us are capable of killing a grown man with just our pinkie.” He wiggled one of his own in Ronon’s direction.

“Don’t even need that.” Ronon’s grin was vicious.

“I know.”

“Can we escape?” Teyla asked.

Rodney gave a long-suffering sigh and grumbled his way to his feet. “Let me check.”

As he shuffled over to examine the cell door, Sheppard gave Ronon and Teyla a closer once-over. One of Ronon’s eyebrows was bleeding, a small trickle of blood making its way down the side of his face. It was his only visible injury, and, thinking of his own ribs, Sheppard wondered what kind of invisible ones he was hiding. Teyla had a split lip and she seemed like she was favoring her left leg a little, but when Sheppard raised his eyebrows at her in question she just shook her head and gave him a tight smile.

“I am fine. Do not worry.”

Sheppard wasn’t sure he believed her, but he didn’t argue. He could worry about all their injuries later. Right now they needed to get off this planet as fast as possible. Which he was starting to believe might not be very fast at all.

Rodney groaned, the sound caught somewhere between distress and frustration, and Sheppard felt any hope he’d had of a quick escape vanish.

“Rodney?”

“There’s no getting through there,” he said, throwing a thumb over his shoulder as he rejoined them. “Thing is solid wood and the locking mechanism is entirely on the outside; there’s no way to get to it from in here.”

“Can we ram it?” Ronon seemed poised to do just that.

“Sure, if you want to dislocate your shoulder. Again,” Rodney scoffed. “That’s about all that will happen. It’s set into a stone frame and it opens inward, so unless you think you can ram your way through stone, we’re stuck.”

Ronon’s body language indicated he was actually thinking about trying it, and Sheppard silently cursed his borderline self-destructive streak.

“That is not what we’re going to do,” he warned. “If we wind up having to fight our way out of here, everybody’s shoulders are going to be intact for it.”

Ronon grinned. “So long as we get to fight.”

If Sheppard believed in curses—and Pegasus seemed to determined to make him—he would’ve laughed at how prophetic their words would become.


-000000-


They’d been given bread and water, but none of the locals stopped to talk to them. Watching them bustle around outside, Sheppard felt it was more because something important was going on than because they weren’t interested.

The prison cell overlooked an open area that it was obvious had been purposefully cleared of trees and brush. It was grassy but unnaturally flat and looked very hard-packed, as though it had been trodden over for many generations. There were no signs of houses or other buildings that he could see, but they might have passed those on the way to the prison, when his view had been blocked.

Instead, the clearing was surrounded by wooden stands, tiered seats rising five levels high on three sides. There were numerous tents arranged behind the stands, which people kept coming and going from. He couldn’t tell what was in the tents, but they gave off the impression of being temporary structures, something set up for a specific occasion. And he thought he knew what for.

Given the literal ring in its center—designated by stones that bore the marks of having been deliberately worked to create the curved pattern—Sheppard was sure the open area was a sporting arena of some kind. The inside of the ring was soft dirt, light and clean, and looked freshly turned. The tents probably belonged to vendors, some maybe even to people who had traveled here just for whatever events were taking place.

He had been pondering why a prison would overlook such an arena, and none of the reasons were good ones. The smile of the man he had punched surfaced in his mind.

“Okay, so I doubt we’ve been brought here as guests of honor to preside over whatever’s going to happen out there,” he said, pointing toward the circle. “Any guesses on what the plan is for us?”

“Besides death?”

“Yes, Rodney, I’m looking for something a bit more specific.”

“Painful death?”

“Specifics that might help us plan an escape.”

“Excuse me, boy—would you come here, please?”

Sheppard turned at the sound of Teyla’s voice, and saw her gesturing through the bars at a young boy who was walking past. He appeared to be about ten or eleven, and though he stopped and faced them at Teyla’s summons, he didn’t come closer. He seemed both defiant and uncertain, his chin raised but his eyes wary.

“We will not hurt you,” Teyla promised him in her most reassuring tone. “We simply wish to know more about this place. What is going on here?” She pointed to the arena.

The boy took a few steps closer, his expression skeptical. “You don’t know about the Notari Festival?”

“We, uh, we don’t have that where we’re from,” Sheppard told him.

“Can you tell us more about it?” Teyla prompted.

“It happens with every Salvo moon,” the boy slowly replied, as though he couldn’t believe anyone wouldn’t know. Having knowledge over them appeared to calm any fears he might have had and he stared at them now in open curiosity.

“What’s that?”

“It’s when the moons of Bellus align and turn to blood. Twice a cycle we come to the hallowed grounds and celebrate sacred death with battle.” The words felt recited, as if they were ones the boy had heard or said many times before. He had turned to point to the circle and when he faced them again, there was a slight pout to his lips. “I’m too young to battle yet, but I have only ten cycles to wait. Then I can serve death with honor.”

“Sacred death?” Rodney weakly parroted.

Sheppard turned to ask Teyla whether anything the boy had said sounded familiar to her, but the words died in his throat when he caught sight of her face. She looked pale and was staring at the boy with wide, unblinking gaze.

“This is Bellus?” she asked, fear enough in her tone that a shiver ran up Sheppard’s spine.

“Didn’t you know?” the boy asked, frowning at them in obvious confusion. Then a call came from outside their view and he scampered off into the growing dusk without a backward glance.

Sheppard stepped back from the cell window and studied Teyla. She was gripping one of the window bars with one hand, knuckles white. Though she was still staring at where the boy had been standing, he could tell that she wasn’t actually seeing anything. Her gaze was unfocused, turned inward, and he realized her breathing had become fast and shallow.

Teyla was scared, and that meant Sheppard was terrified.

“Teyla?” he hesitantly inquired.

“It is a myth,” she muttered in disbelief.

“Apparently not.”

Sheppard pivoted to face Ronon. He was showing fewer outward signs of fear, but his expression was blank, and Sheppard knew that was a bad sign.

“What’s not a myth?” Rodney’s clipped tone indicated that he had picked up on his teammates’s concern, even if he didn’t understand the reason for it. “What are you talking about?”

“Bellus is a myth, was a myth.” Teyla’s voice was distant. “I always thought it was just a story, made up to frighten children around the fire.”

“That’s where I heard it.”

Teyla’s gaze cleared as she looked at Ronon. “What did your stories say?”

“That it was a death cult. That they worshipped the Wraith as gods,” he replied, the disgust he felt clear in his tone.

“Wraith worshippers?” Rodney was spiraling toward full-blown panic. “Oh, that’s just perfect.”

“They viewed violent death as the most honorable way to die,” Teyla continued, “and they willingly helped one another achieve that.”

“Through battle,” Sheppard posited.

Teyla nodded slowly, her eyes flickering to the view outside the window before resting on Sheppard’s face. “They would ritualistically fight to the death.”

“And anyone who went there would be forced to fight,” Ronon added.

Because of course that would be the case. Sheppard wondered if he could blame the Ancients for this, despite the fact that he doubted this particular religious movement had been in place the last time they’d been in the galaxy. The Wraith were their fault, though, so he decided Bellus and its death cult counted, too.

“Oh, well, they’re just gonna be disappointed, then,” he told the team, “because I’m not fighting any of you to the death. I don’t care what their cult believes.”

“You will not be fighting each other.”

Sheppard spun around to find a man watching them through the prison window. He was fairly sure that he recognized the man as one of the people who had carried him through the forest, though he could have been wrong about that. The man was as tall as Ronon, but a bit lanky, with a plain face and dark eyes that studied Sheppard with mild interest while Sheppard frowned back at him.

“What?”

“It would not be appropriate for you to fight one another,” the man explained, “though if you wish to do so while still confined, we won’t stop you.” He waved a hand at the prison. “You may always make your choice of death place.”

“Listen,” Sheppard started, switching into his negotiator voice, “this is all a big misunderstanding. We didn’t come here for your festival. We didn’t even know you were having a festival, or we wouldn’t have interrupted.”

“We absolutely do not want to interrupt your festival,” Rodney enthusiastically interjected.

“So how about you let us out, we’ll go back home, and we’ll come visit some other time when we won’t be in the way.”

The man frowned at him in confusion. “Why would you come here during Notari if not to battle?”

“Like I said, we didn’t know anything about this Notari thing until we got here.”

“But you were just discussing it,” the man insisted. “Surely you knew about it before you came.”

Teyla added her diplomatic tones to Sheppard’s. “We knew of it only as a myth,” she told the man, “as something from stories. None of us knew it was real until we were told of it by a child who passed by. If we had known, we would not have come.”

“You are cowards.”

The words were said in a speculative tone, almost as if he were amazed to discover that such a thing existed. Though there had been no hint of disdain or venom in either the man’s voice or his expression, Ronon had still immediately pressed himself up against the window bars as if desperate to squeeze through them and get to him. He stood there, vibrating with emotion, eyes locked with the man’s.

“Come closer and say that,” he ground out.

To possibly everyone’s surprise, the man actually did. He stepped closer, though still outside the reach of even Ronon’s long arms, and stared at them with the same look of curiosity. “You are cowards.” He repeated the phrase with the same indifferent inflection, as if he were merely commenting that the sky was blue. “No one here fears death. It is what we live for.”

A rough exhalation from beside Sheppard indicated that Rodney’s derision had been awoken.

“That sounds absolutely stupid,” he snapped. “Nowhere else have we ever encountered people who looked forward to dying, much less to doing so in brutal fashion. The entire concept of this place is ludicrous! People innately want to live, that’s the entire reason why we even have self-preservation instincts. We want to live and live some more, and then keep living again.”

“We do live,” the man serenely replied. “And we live to our fullest so that when death takes us, we are not afraid.”

“But death doesn’t ‘take’ you, does it?” Rodney countered with a sneer. “You go looking for it and then leap into its arms!”

“So, we’re cowards,” Sheppard interrupted, trying another tack. He ignored Ronon’s growl at the words and gave the man outside their prison a shrug. “We’re okay with that. We need to do more living to have lived to our fullest and not fear death. Let us go and we’ll get on with that, and then we’ll come back once we’re ready to battle.”

He hadn’t even finished before the man started shaking his head.

“Letting you go would be an indication that we feared to battle you. There would be no honor in any other battles we fought after that.”

Sheppard almost kicked the wall in frustration. “What if we refuse to fight? What then?” He thought he already knew the answer, but he had to ask.

“You will die,” the man stated simply, shrugging. “There is little honor in the death of a coward, but even less in the refusal to kill one. If that is the path you choose, we will respect it.”

“I’ll kill all of you.” Ronon, still pressed against the bars, had his teeth bared and was staring at the man with a raw expression on his face.

The man’s eyes lit up a bit. “You will have your opportunity, for four among us, at least.”

“Four?”

The man nodded once in confirmation as he turned his gaze back to Sheppard. “You have arrived on the second day of the festival, Cerris. The battles take place each night under the light of the moons. There will be three more nights after this.”

Sheppard suddenly felt sick. “How many people battle each night?”

“As many as are able before the moons set.”

Okay, maybe they could avoid fighting. If enough people went before them, and if those fights took long enough…

“But as guests, you will go first.”

Shepard sighed. “Of course we will.”

The man glanced over his shoulder toward the arena before facing them again. “I must go to prepare; I am scheduled to battle tonight,” he advised. Then he crossed his left arm over his chest and said, “May death find you well,” before turning and heading toward the tents on the other side of the arena.

Sheppard didn’t wait to see which he went into. Instead, he turned to assess his team. Ronon was seething, and despite not being happy about it, Sheppard wasn’t worried about him having to fight for his life. Ronon had been doing that for years; he would be fine. But while Ronon had few qualms about having to kill, Sheppard knew that Teyla—for all her skill and ferocity and pragmatism—didn’t like to kill other humans if she could help it. They were alike in that way, perfectly willing and capable if the situation called for it, but preferring to avoid being in that situation if they could. Sheppard turned to her and she met his gaze calmly, though her eyes were troubled. He knew that she wouldn’t like what she would have to do, but she would be able to do it. All Sheppard could do was trust that she could fend for herself, and he did.

But then there was Rodney.

“What’re we gonna to do?” Ronon rumbled.

“We’re going to die, that’s what we’re going to do!” Rodney was fully panicked now, his pupils huge in his face, a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead. “Or at least I’m going to die. You’ll all probably come out of this with barely a scratch and they’ll probably make Ronon their new Death King or whatever, but I’m just going to be dead!”

“We will not let them kill you, Rodney,” Teyla firmly told him, almost a chastisement.

“And how are you going to stop them, hmm?” he shot back. “Yell really aggressively through the bars while someone stabs me in the back?”

“I’ll go first.”

Rodney turned his glare on Ronon. “With the yelling or the stabbing?”

“If they let us choose, I’ll fight first,” Ronon clarified. “I’ll keep it going as long as I can, burn up time.”

Rodney gaped at him. “That’s your plan? Fight as long as you can and try not to die?”

Ronon gave him a bland look. “I can kill a man with one finger, remember?” He held up his right hand and wiggled his pinkie finger, mirroring Rodney’s earlier gesture.

“That’s not the point!” Rodney exclaimed, his frown coming back with a vengeance. He opened his mouth to continue on, but Sheppard interjected.

“You don’t think the locals will, y’know, hurry the fights along if they start to take too long?” he asked skeptically.

“I doubt they will interfere,” Teyla answered. “They seem to view fighting with enough reverence that I feel anyone interfering with the predetermined match-up would be viewed as behaving very dishonorably. It would imply a lack of faith in those battling.”

Sheppard sighed. “Okay, then I’ll go after Ronon, do the same.”

“No, I will.”

“Teyla—”

“I am a better fighter than you, John. I will be able to keep a battle going longer than you can and with less risk to myself.” She cut across him when he tried to argue, adding, “And we will need you to be as uninjured as possible so that you can lead us out of here.”

Sheppard found it deeply frustrating when the team turned the “you’re the leader” thing back on him, especially when they did it to make valid points, and he tried to be grateful they didn’t do it more often. And though he hated to admit it this time, Teyla was right. However much he wanted to argue, wanted to keep fighting about it because he hated putting any of them in danger before him, he had no counterpoints, and no better plan.

“Fine, then I’ll go last,” he begrudgingly agreed. “If we’re lucky, maybe we can take up the whole night and McKay will be safe.”

“Yeah, until tomorrow,” Rodney moaned.

“What?”

“You heard the man,” he said, waving a hand toward the window, “the fighting’s going to continue for three more nights after this. You really think they’re going to let us keep the same order every night, especially if they see that I don’t fight at all tonight? They’ll make me go first tomorrow.”

Sheppard grimaced. “Damn, you’re probably right.”

“I usually am,” Rodney sighed. This time, he didn’t seem too happy about the fact.

Sheppard mentally shuffled through their options—there weren’t that many—but didn’t see any other way to handle things, at least not at the moment. They were definitely overdue, so it was only a matter of time before Atlantis sent someone after them. If they could just keep Rodney out of the arena for long enough, help would show up and they’d escape before he had to fight.

“We just have to hold on until rescue, right?” Sheppard reminded them. “We’re already overdue, so a rescue team will show up within the next few hours at most. The three of us will keep the locals busy and with any luck we’ll get out of here before McKay has to so much as put up his dukes.”

Rodney looked hopeful at that thought, but Teyla seemed less convinced. The look she gave Sheppard told him she had a bad feeling about things, and that gave him a bad feeling. After holding his gaze for a moment, she turned to Rodney.

“While we wait, why don’t we review your self defense training, Rodney?” she casually suggested.

“What?” Rodney head snapped up, tension creeping back into his limbs. “Why?”

“We may still have to fight our way out during our escape,” she explained. “It wouldn’t hurt for you to have the training fresh in your memory.”

Her tone was so nonchalant, even Sheppard almost believed her. A quick glance at Rodney showed that he was suspicious, but had accepted her explanation anyway. He sighed and took up his stance facing Teyla, who began to walk him through what she’d taught him. Sheppard followed her, and was slightly surprised when Ronon stepped forward when he was through. He hadn’t realized that Ronon had been teaching Rodney, too.

Rodney wasn’t a terrible fighter—or at least not the worst Sheppard had ever seen—but his utter lack of confidence in his own abilities was a major hindrance to his success. He second-guessed himself too much and overthought what would otherwise have been instinct, what needed to just be reflex. Going through the refresher course with him didn’t do much to settle Sheppard’s nerves, though it did seem to steady Rodney’s, so Sheppard took it as a win.

Still, he was going to fight as long as he could to keep Rodney out of that circle.


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By the time darkness fell completely, torches had been lit around the arena. Sheppard could even make out a glow in many of the tents, clearly now being lit by lanterns of some sort. It gave the whole area a dreamy, fairy-tale kind of feeling that was completely at odds with what he knew would be happening just meters away from him, and very soon.

Even without the artificial sources, there would have been plenty of light, though. So much so that Sheppard almost wondered why the locals bothered with them. Above the arena, directly over the stands across from the prison, three moons were rising. They were like spotlights on the clearing between the trees, casting sharp shadows everywhere they hit. He’d noticed his own stark outline against the back wall of the prison, joined by the rest of his team’s, and found that once he looked away from the shadows, he couldn’t bring himself to look at them again. For some reason, their appearance felt ominous.

Sheppard felt his anxiety rising with the increase of noise and activity outside. People had been steadily streaming into the arena for what felt like hours, the wooden stands rapidly filling up and the crowd spilling onto the grassy area around the circle. He expected that someone would head toward the prison at any moment, and his eyes restlessly scanned the crowd, waiting for something to happen.

At some point the murmur of the crowd rose in volume, then a hush fell. A man who appeared to be in his early fifties or so stepped into the center of the stone-lined circle. He held a bowl in his hands and, with grave solemnity, he knelt to pour what was in it on the ground. Then he reached into a pouch on his belt and tossed a handful of some kind of powder over the same spot. Dusting off his hands, the man stood again. He lifted his head to stare at the prison and, without any other visible signal being given, every single person in the arena did the same. Sheppard took a deep breath.

“Looks like we’re on.”

“Finally.” Ronon went to the prison door and lurked there, waiting for it to open.

“Should we try to rush it or something?” Rodney asked, looking from the door to Sheppard to the view outside the window.

Sheppard shook his head. “It would’ve been a bad idea even before everyone in the area congregated outside to watch us. Even if we got out, we wouldn’t get far.” The suggestion did give him a new worry, though, and he shot Ronon a warning glance. “Don’t try to take on the entire populace, Ronon. You get one guy, and you need to make it last.”

Ronon spared him a look. “I only need the one. For tonight.”

Sheppard almost sighed. If they did have to fight their way out, or even make a run for it, he’d have to keep an eye on Ronon. This situation might be enough to make him go rogue on them.

The door finally opened and Ronon disappeared through it before it was quickly pulled shut again. The team moved to the window and watched him stride toward the circle. Sheppard suddenly registered that though the crowd was large and packed into every available space, all of them had purposefully avoiding standing on the side of the arena nearest the prison. Very deliberately, they had left the line of sight between the prison and the circle open.

“They want us to watch,” Teyla said in a flat voice.

“And we will,” Sheppard returned. “We can’t help Ronon fight, but look for any clues that might be helpful. The fighting style of his opponent, the behavior of the crowd, any reactions that indicate something either fighter did was particularly good or bad, anything.”

Teyla nodded and Rodney huffed. “So happy to learn exactly how I’ll die,” he whined.

Sheppard ignored him and focused entirely on what was happening in the circle. From the look of the opponent that waited for Ronon, they were going to be matched up with local fighters based on appearance. That concerned Sheppard for a moment—Rodney wasn’t a little guy, but that didn’t mean he was a bruiser, either—but he pushed down the feeling. He would worry about Rodney if and when it was Rodney’s turn.

The opponent Ronon was facing wasn’t as tall as he was, but was built about the same. And though he moved in a similar way to Ronon, it came across as more rehearsed and less intuitive. Ronon came to a stop inside the circle and stood there, unusually still, watching the man with a predatory gaze. The man didn’t appear to be fazed, though; if anything, he looked relaxed and ready, and Sheppard wondered if that was due to self-assurance or foolishness.

Sheppard was relieved to see that there were no weapons in sight, and none at hand for the fighters to pick up, either. Bare-knuckle brawls could be brutal, but it was much more difficult to accidentally die during one of them than during fights that involved weapons. And that was a point in his team’s favor.

The older man who had opened the proceedings said something to each of the fighters, and Ronon’s opponent repeated the gesture they had seen earlier, crossing his left arm over his chest and nodding his head slightly at the man and then at Ronon. The older man nodded in return and then backed out of the circle.

As soon as both of the older man’s feet hit the grass on the other side, Ronon leapt into action. Literally. And while his opponent might have anticipated some kind of immediate attack, it definitely wasn’t Ronon throwing his full body at him. Ronon toppled him, the two hitting the ground hard enough for Sheppard to wince in sympathy, but they both quickly rolled back to their feet.

Ronon was one of the most terrifying fighters Sheppard had ever seen, and he still doubted his own sanity every time he agreed to spar with the Satedan. And not only because Ronon didn’t believe in pulling his punches; Ronon was huge and insultingly strong, but somehow managed to also be agile and incredibly fast. It was a devastating combination, and meant he outmatched almost everyone he came up against.

That was definitely the case this time, and Sheppard wondered just how long Ronon would be able to draw out a fight with a less-than-equal opponent. It felt wrong to wish a harder fight on him, regardless of the situation. But Sheppard glanced out of the corner of his eye at Rodney standing beside him, gripping the window bars so hard his hands had started shaking, and wished it.

As the fight continued, Sheppard tried to identify any recognizable patterns in the local man’s fighting style, mentally prepping for his own round in the ring. There were some repeated motions that he caught, but mostly it just seemed like the man was doing whatever he could in the fight for his life. That wasn’t to say that he wasn’t at times successful, dealing Ronon a few hits and kicks that, while rare, were full impact.

At one point, after dodging a wild swing from Ronon, the man managed to strike him across the face with an elbow blow that sent Ronon staggering back a few steps. The two stared at each other for a moment afterward, both breathing hard. Sheppard imagined the local man was breathing that way from exertion, while Ronon was doing the same because of adrenaline. Ronon wiped his mouth, and Sheppard could see the blood that smeared across the back of his hand. Then Ronon grinned, wide and a bit feral, and lunged at the man again.

Not long after that, Sheppard became sure that Ronon was just toying with his opponent. The fight had been dragging on—Sheppard wasn’t sure for how long, since their watches had been taken—but no one in the crowd seemed bothered by how long it was taking. Instead, they all just watched with intense and unsettlingly quiet politeness as the two men in the circle wailed on each other.

The local man was weakening, though. He was having a harder time staying on his feet when Ronon made contact, and as the two circled around and the surrounding torch light fell on the man’s face, Sheppard could see that it was a bloody mess. Both his eyes were swollen and his nose was badly broken, but he just kept going.

Then Ronon hit him again and the man went down to his knees and didn’t get back up. Ronon backed away a few paces and prowled back and forth in front of the man, watching him with fiery eyes. He threw a quick glance the prison’s way, seemingly debating his next move. Then his body language shifted and Sheppard knew what was coming.

With a few broad sideways strides, Ronon launched himself airborne. He flew toward the kneeling man, the full weight of his body added to the forward momentum of his punch. The impact of Ronon’s fist against the man’s face was hard enough that Sheppard heard bones crunch. Beside him, Rodney flinched but didn’t turn away.

The local man hit the ground, landing on his back, and didn’t move. Ronon stared down at him as if unsure what he should do next. Without a weapon, actually killing someone wasn’t as easy as it seemed. Then someone materialized out of the crowd of spectators and knelt next to the downed man. They appeared to check him over before they said something and stood, their place taken by another who held out a knife.

They’re giving him a knife? Sheppard held his breath. Teyla had gone tense beside him and even Rodney seemed shocked. Despite the overwhelmingly bad odds, Sheppard wasn’t sure that Ronon wouldn’t just ignore his orders and start slashing away at everyone. Those fears proved unfounded, though, as Ronon took the knife without incident, its bearer melting back into the crowd to leave him and his opponent alone in the circle again.

Ronon studied the knife in his hand for a few moments, and Sheppard wondered what was going through his mind. Then he knelt, placed his hand almost gently on the downed man’s shoulder, and plunged the knife into his heart. The man didn’t even twitch, and Sheppard knew that he had been unconscious, whatever small mercy that might be.

Sheppard looked to his side to see that Rodney had turned away from the window.

Back outside, Ronon had been pulled away from the dead man. He was struggling against the hands that held him, but Sheppard felt it was more for show than any real intention to cause problems. Especially since Ronon allowed himself to be led back to the prison with only minor scuffling along the way.

In the circle, his opponent’s body was being reverently placed onto a litter that had appeared. Once the body was secure, a guard of six lifted the litter and slowly processed through the parting crowd to a tent that was set apart from the others, off to the left. Sheppard watched the litter and the people carrying it disappear inside, their indistinct shadows thrown against the interior of the tent walls by lantern light.

Sheppard turned to Teyla. She was already watching him.

“You ready?”

She nodded curtly, expression solemn, and moved to wait by the door. A minute later it creaked open and Ronon was shoved inside. Teyla gave them all one last look, then stepped through. As the door closed behind her, Sheppard gave Ronon a once-over. The cut above his eyebrow had widened, and the blood from it had joined the blood dripping from his nose. His knuckles were bloody and bruised, he was still breathing heavily.

“You okay?” Sheppard asked him.

“Yeah.” He bent over and put his hands on his knees, working to catch his breath, then lifted one hand to rub his side, no doubt an injury Sheppard couldn’t see. He wouldn’t meet Sheppard’s eyes, but he motioned to the window with his chin. “You think that was long enough?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

Rodney was back at the window already, and Sheppard joined him. He was unusually quiet, with a kind of compressed tension radiating from him—and Sheppard knew why—but they would have to deal with it later. For now, he focused on Teyla.

Teyla’s fight went much the same as Ronon’s. She fought a man similar to her in size, though she was much faster than he was. While he wasn’t able to make contact with her as often as Ronon’s opponent had with him, when he did it was more devastating; he was clearly stronger than he looked.

At one point he managed to get Teyla on the ground and before she could get back up, he aimed a well-placed kick at her side. Sheppard saw Teyla move with the blow, absorbing it as best she could, but he still worried it might have broken something. But she only looked winded when she rolled back to her feet, giving no indication she was in any kind of pain. Sheppard knew that could be a ruse, though, so he bit his tongue and waited.

After a while, Teyla gained the upper hand. The man hadn’t been the quickest to start with and as the fight wore on he slowed even more. Eventually, it was obvious even to the spectators that Teyla was purposefully holding back, engaging enough to keep the fight going but clearly able to avoid the man’s attack with ease. She had been right that the locals wouldn’t interfere, though. Sheppard could spot some frowns of disapproval in the flickering firelight, while a few others looked disappointed, but they all seemed content to let things play out as they would.

Once it became abundantly clear that there could be only one outcome to the battle, the knife came out again. The man appeared to perk up a bit on seeing it, like he got a second wind, but it was very short lived.

Rodney didn’t turn away this time. They all watched Teyla kill her opponent as he made a last ditch effort to take her down using sheer force. The man as much threw his body onto the knife as he was stabbed by Teyla, and Sheppard wondered if it was on purpose. Maybe having done enough fighting to have obtained the necessary honor, the man had simply decided to help Teyla with the final blow. It was a disturbing thought, but it was one Sheppard had the sneaking suspicion was true.

But whether the man had intended it or not, he was dead now. Teyla was divested of the knife that had killed him and led back to the prison. Another litter was brought out, and another somber procession made its way to the far tent.

Sheppard’s heart skipped a beat. His turn.

When Teyla appeared back in the cell, Sheppard took a second to check on her. She had bruising around one eyebrow, but he was happy to see she wouldn’t have a black eye from it. She still needed all her faculties, and blurred vision or an eye swollen shut wouldn’t be helpful. Her hands were bloody, as was the front of her shirt, and her eyes were empty when they met his. He gave her upper arm a squeeze, then strode through the door.

He could see his opponent already waiting in the circle. He looked young, barely even twenty, and Sheppard’s stomach turned. He told himself that this was what the guy wanted, that it was important to him and it wasn’t Sheppard’s fault that he was going to have to kill him. It was a fight to the death, after all, and Sheppard was going to get out of it alive, whatever he had to do. But as he walked closer, he could still feel his hands start to shake. The thought flashed through his mind that he hoped Rodney wouldn’t watch this time.

As Sheppard stepped into the circle, he noticed dark splotches marring the bright soil, which seemed to glow faintly in the moonlight. His stomach turned again as he recognized what it was: blood from the previous fights. The dirt had absorbed it, but it was still clearly visible, dark against light. He tried not to think about the fact that he was literally walking through other people’s blood, possibly even Teyla’s and Ronon’s.

The older man appeared at the edge of the circle again and looked at Sheppard and then his opponent. “May death find you well,” he intoned.

The young man nodded respectfully to Sheppard, crossing his arm over his chest. Sheppard nodded back and tried to ignore how young the eyes staring back at him were.

He and the young man spent the first minute of the match just circling each other. He thought he sensed nerves on his opponent’s part, but there was no change in the steady gaze that searched his. For all he knew, and for the way people they’d seen so far had acted, what he was seeing was probably anticipation. He wondered whether the man staring him down was wishing for death or victory. Maybe he didn’t even care which he got.

Sheppard would have been content to keep making circuits of the circle all night, but all too soon his opponent ended the standoff and came at him. The first few swings the man took at Sheppard were done with confidence, but not a lot of skill. Sheppard simply dodged the first ones, blocking others as the man got too close to evade.

Despite the fact that Sheppard wouldn’t rate himself anywhere near the top of the list of Atlantis’ best fighters—he was comfortably in the middle somewhere, he thought—he could tell that he easily outmatched his opponent. All the time he’d spent practicing with Teyla and Ronon meant that against such an unskilled fighter, he had a clear advantage.

Internally, he groaned. He had to keep this fight going as long as he could for Rodney’s sake, but he didn’t know how much he could hold back without it looking ridiculous. Then he wondered if anyone in the crowd would even notice the disparity in skill. Teyla and Ronon would, probably already had just from the man’s first few attacks. But would the locals? And would they even care? What if he just acted like the proverbial schoolyard bully holding his prey at bay with one arm while they pinwheeled theirs in his direction, too far away to reach their mark?

Distracted by the dark humor of the image, Sheppard didn’t notice the punch the man threw until just before it hit him. The unexpected blow knocked him on his ass, and he saw stars as he rolled away. Thankfully his vision had cleared by the time he got back to his feet, but his ears were ringing a bit and he could taste the salty, metallic tang of blood in his mouth. But he barely had time to spit it out before the young man was coming at him again, face oddly neutral.

The entire time they fought, the man’s face remained devoid of emotion. There was an intensity in his eyes, but no matter how many times Sheppard made contact with him, no matter how many times he went down, his face didn’t change. Sheppard almost wondered if he’d been drugged, but—lack of skill or no—the man still moved with too much control for that.

He definitely lacked any finesse or real-world fighting experience, though. There was no subtlety to his movements, not that that said much on its own—Ronon wasn’t exactly a subtle fighter either. But Ronon at least adapted his moves to his opponent, using what he saw and what he learned to better fight to win. Sheppard became more and more convinced that the man he was fighting was hoping for death, as his only tactic seemed to be to punch and kick as hard as he could, never mind how many times Sheppard blocked him.

As the two of them traded blows back and forth, Sheppard tried to keep an eye on the progress of the moons. They’d been told fighting would continue until the moons set, and he kicked himself for not confirming exactly what that meant. Was it as soon as the lowest moon in the sky hit the horizon? Was it once they had all disappeared below it? Or did it mean full sunrise? He could see that the moons had moved across the sky and were just behind the prison now. The image mirrored his memory of the position of the moons above the stands before the fighting started. Were they close to the end now?

He could feel himself tiring. It had been some time since they’d had food or water, and the tension from watching the others fight, plus fighting his own battle, was taking its toll. He didn’t think he could keep going much longer and still be sure he held the upper hand; exhaustion was too great a deficit to risk it.

His opponent’s face was a mess of bruising and blood, but the damage still didn’t hide the youth there. Sheppard felt the bile rising in his throat at the thought of what he was about to do, but he swallowed it down and reached for the cold place inside of him that he never looked in the face. He slid into it like ice water and took a breath.

When he hit the man this time, he didn’t hold back—and he didn’t stop. He kept swinging until the man stopped moving, and when he found the knife in his hand he didn’t let himself pause to think or feel or hesitate. He drove it in up to the hilt and immediately rose back to his feet, stepping away from the body he’d left behind.

Sheppard kept himself submerged in the cold until he was back in the prison cell. He didn’t remember the walk from the circle to the door and he didn’t try to. From somewhere outside his body there was the sensation of relief when Rodney, who had tried to walk out after Sheppard walked in, was nudged back into the cell.

No more fights tonight. The moons had set. They’d made it through.

Sheppard continued into the cell until he reached the far wall. Turning to lean his back against it, he slid to the ground and stared blindly across the room. He felt himself surfacing, could feel his hands starting to shake again, and he realized they were cold, colder than the rest of him. He looked down and saw it was from the blood drying on them. He rubbed them on the backs of his pant legs, wiping it away as best he could.

Teyla was kneeling beside him. She was saying something, and it took him a minute to process it.

“John, are you okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You sure?” Ronon was squatting on his other side, watching him with knowing eyes.

“He was really young.” It was all Sheppard could think to say.

Teyla’s sigh was full of sadness and regret, but not blame. “Yes, he was.”

Ronon gave his shoulder a squeeze of support and then dropped down to sit beside him. “We got through one night.”

“Go team.” Sheppard’s voice sounded hollow even to his own ears. He remembered why they had been fighting and looked up to find Rodney was still standing by the door. He wasn’t looking at any of them. “Rodney?”

Rodney’s gaze met his for the briefest of seconds before darting to somewhere just past his shoulder.

“Are you okay?” Sheppard asked him.

Rodney let out a humorless bark of laughter. “Oh, yeah, just peachy, never better. Nothing like watching a few battles to the death to make you feel just perfectly okay.”

Sheppard almost winced, as much at the bitter tone as the fact that Rodney wouldn’t look any of them in the eyes. They’d all fought before, all killed before—even Rodney—but what they’d had to do tonight was something else entirely. Whatever Sheppard and Teyla and Ronon were feeling about the actions they’d been forced to take, it was clear that watching them fight had deeply affected Rodney, too. Trouble was, Sheppard didn’t know how to fix it. Thankfully they had Teyla.

She softly called Rodney’s name and held out her hand.

Rodney hesitated for a heartbeat before walking over to stand beside her. She took his hand in hers, ignoring the way his hand twitched at the contact and the fact that hers were still stained with a stranger’s blood. She stared up at him until he finally met her eyes.

“We have been forced into a terrible situation. I know how this looks to you because I know how it feels to me.” She paused to glance at Sheppard and Ronon, her expression momentarily pained. “How it feels to us. But we have only been given two choices: kill or die. If those are my only options, I know which one I will choose.” Her voice hardened slightly, and Sheppard could see the set of her jaw in the light coming through the window.

“We had to, McKay.” Sheppard said resignedly. He needed to keep repeating it for himself.

“I know that,” Rodney replied, just a bit sharply. “And I’ve seen you all fight before, and I know what you’re all capable of, and I’m not blaming you—you were out there getting the crap kicked out of you for hours to try to keep me from having to go through it!— but that was, that was—”

“Brutal,” Ronon said simply.

“Yeah.”

The word was a sigh, and Sheppard knew that Rodney’s initial discomfort had been alleviated. He released Teyla’s hand to sink down to the floor beside her.

“Rescue will show up tomorrow?”

It made Sheppard’s chest ache to hear the doubt in Rodney’s voice, so he replied, “Rescue tomorrow,” with firm finality. “And then a trip to the infirmary,” he added, gingerly touching the swelling on his face.

“I’m gonna need stitches again,” Ronon said, amusement in his tone. “Keller’s gonna be pissed.”

“She probably has a suture kit specifically with your name on it,” Rodney sniffed.

“She has a specific off-world kit configuration she uses when it is for us.”

Sheppard looked around at Teyla in surprise. “Really?”

Teyla nodded, a smile waiting at the corner of her mouth. “Our kit always includes extra sutures, extra bandages, and extra hand sanitizer.”

It took Rodney a second, but he started spluttering in protest and Sheppard couldn’t help but laugh, even with the pain in his ribs.