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stringertheoryTitle: If At First You Don’t Succeed
Rating: R
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: Ronon Dex, Rodney McKay, Teyla Emmagen, John Sheppard
Word Count: 7068
Categories: action, drama, angst, hurt/comfort, team as family
Spoilers: none
Warnings: graphic violence and injuries; temporary main character death
Summary: In a far corner of the galaxy, Ronon watches Sheppard, Teyla, and McKay die over and over again. And he follows them, over and over again.
He’s the only one who can remember, the only one who can save them—if he can figure out how.
Time isn’t running out, but that might be the problem.
It was a Monday, and they were in the woods again.
Ronon strode between two large trees, one eye on the rest of the team walking ahead of him and the other on their surroundings. He was only half on guard, keeping watch more out of habit than because he expected them to run into anything dangerous. Based on what McKay had told them during the mission briefing, he doubted there was much in these particular woods to be worried about. The planet was uninhabited, and the Ancient database had said it had no large predators, either, eliminating two of the primary causes for concern on most worlds.
The weather could still try to kill them, Ronon supposed, leveling a measuring squint at what bits of cloud-speckled blue he could see above him through the tree canopy. But there wasn’t much he could do about that, on guard or not.
Not that he expected they’d be outside for long enough to get into trouble of any kind anyway. McKay had promised they wouldn’t have to go very far to get from the Gate to the facility they were looking for. Since what McKay considered “far” would usually barely register on Ronon’s scale of distance, he’d half expected the facility to be in sight as soon as they came through the Gate.
It hadn’t been, though, and while they’d been walking for about twenty minutes, Ronon could tell they hadn’t actually covered much ground. Yet no one appeared interested in speeding things up, not even McKay. And Ronon was sure he knew why.
For a few months now, they—along with a couple of other teams—had been scouring planets from the database, and so far no one had found a single thing worth finding. At least nothing Ronon thought was worth finding. Or that McKay did.
McKay had been the driving force behind the searches, and his frustration had grown with every mission they’d returned from empty handed. Frustration that he—like with everything else—had been very vocal about. Even now, shuffling along through the trees at the front of their little pack, he was muttering to himself. And while Ronon couldn’t make out any of his words, the irritable undertone in his voice was unmistakable.
Just behind him, Sheppard quietly murmured something that caused McKay to audibly scoff and gesture sharply with the scanner he held.
Ronon knew that Sheppard shared McKay’s frustration, even if he was much quieter about it. As the missions had progressed, Ronon had noticed a growing tension in Sheppard, a tightness in how he held himself, shoulders braced almost as if for a blow. He and Sheppard didn’t talk about it much, Sheppard’s position in Atlantis. Sheppard didn’t talk about anything much. But Ronon understood the pressure he was under, knew what it was like to have others you looked after, others you answered to.
Finding nothing wasn’t good enough when any day now they might need something to keep them alive.
While Teyla had been more placid about the whole thing, Ronon could tell that even she was starting to measure the wasted mission hours against all the other things she could have been doing. For his part, Ronon was generally content enough to go wherever they needed to go and do whatever they needed to do. He just wished there was more doing to be done; he was getting restless.
Resisting the urge to sigh, he rolled his shoulders and sucked in a deep, slow breath. The air on the planet was cool and smelled pleasantly of rain and something darkly floral, a welcome contrast to the summer heat they’d left back on Atlantis. For a moment, he idly wished they wouldn’t actually find the facility and could instead just spend a few hours wandering through the trees. The mission would probably have the same result either way, and he’d much rather spend the time outside than scouring another abandoned site.
But just then McKay let out a faint exclamation, and Ronon knew that his wish had gone unheard.
About a hundred feet ahead of them Ronon could see a small clearing through the trees. In its center, an unnaturally square mound rose sharply out of the forest floor. The mound was only a few feet taller than Ronon, and not much wider than that on each side, but obviously manmade despite its small size.
Grass and small plants covered the mound’s surface, a blanket of green doing what it could to mask the artificial shape. It seemed almost purposeful, and Ronon wondered whether the Ancients had originally designed the mound to blend in to its surroundings, or whether nature had simply reclaimed the space over time.
As Teyla and Sheppard began to pull at the vines that covered the near side of the mound, searching for an entrance, Ronon took up a defensive position, studying the tree line. He was close enough to the rest of them now that he could finally make out McKay’s grumbling.
“It’ll probably be nothing,” he was grousing, frowning at the scanner in his hand. “Again.”
Ronon caught Teyla rolling her eyes as she tugged at a particularly stubborn vine, and he shook his head, amused. He wasn’t sure whether it was the lack of things to tinker with that annoyed McKay most, or the fact that he’d been wrong every time so far when he’d told them the mission would be worth the trip. Knowing McKay, he’d probably say both, and then add a handful of other reasons on top of them.
As Ronon watched, McKay—who had begun a slow circuit of the mound, eyes glued to the scanner in his hand—disappeared around the mound’s far side. By the time he reappeared—now glowering down at the scanner—around the front, Teyla and Sheppard had uncovered the mound’s entrance. Concealed behind the vines had been a nondescript door which, now visible, was clearly of Ancient design. It could have easily been a door on Atlantis, except that it didn’t appear to have a control panel or any other kind of control mechanism. Ronon was just about to ask whether anyone could see one when McKay provided the answer.
“Great. A door without a way to open it,” he sourly spat. “It probably doesn’t have power, either. So I’ll have to sit here for ages trying to get it open and once I finally manage it, it’ll turn out to be nothing more than an empty gardening shed or something equally lackluster.”
Ronon smirked in McKay’s direction, ready to make an admittedly mean comment about him maintaining his losing streak. But just then Sheppard reached forward to pull a last dangling vine away from the door. As his fingers brushed over it, the door slid open with an only slightly rusty-sounding swish.
Instinctively, Ronon froze, his hand flying to his blaster where it rested in its holster, fingers curling protectively around its grip. But nothing immediately emerged from the dark void of the doorway, and curiosity drew him closer.
After exchanging glances of surprise and wariness, the others had crowded together at the entrance in order to peer inside the opening, and Ronon joined them, positioning himself so he could see over Teyla’s head.
Beyond the doorway was a shallow landing which led onto a stone staircase that descended into the ground. Lights along the wall had flickered to life when the door opened, illuminating another landing below them, about thirty feet down. The air coming up the staircase smelled fresh, if a little earthy, and Ronon could hear the very faint humming of the lights.
McKay let out a noise like the combination of a sigh and a grunt. “Then again, I could be wrong.”
Sheppard gave him a wry look. “Somebody note the time; McKay admitted his fallibility.”
“I have been known to occasionally—rarely!—make the odd mistake. Now and then. On the rare occasion.”
“We are aware, Rodney,” Teyla dryly replied.
While McKay frowned at her, seemingly debating whether he wanted to be insulted by her comment or not, Sheppard leaned halfway through the door and peered down the staircase.
“So,” he said, “the lights are on but nobody’s home?”
Shifting his growing scowl from Teyla to Sheppard, McKay waved a hand toward the open door. “Unless there are some Ancients in stasis down there then, yes, nobody’s home.”
Sheppard took a step back and shot him a guarded look. “Could there be Ancients in stasis down there?”
McKay fully sighed then. “The fact that the ‘lights are on,’ as you so eloquently put it, would indicate that whatever is down there was worthy of a power source that would last for an exceptionally long time. However, there was nothing in the database indicating that this facility was used for stasis, something I’m positive they would have made a point to document. And I highly doubt that the Ancients would have chosen this planet—which is in the proverbial middle-of-nowhere, as far as the galaxy goes—to house their frozen family and friends, anyway.”
Sheppard didn’t look like he fully bought that explanation, his expression flat as he studied McKay. “So we aren’t about to walk into a lab full of long-dead Ancients whose consciousnesses are trapped in an AI reality?”
A hint of unease rippled through McKay’s frown, and he shifted uneasily on his feet. “Well obviously I can’t promise that,” he hedged, “but it isn’t like that was something the Ancients routinely did. The Aurora was a one-off situation.”
Remembering his very first encounter with the Ancients—or, at least, the first time he was there when Sheppard and McKay interacted with some of them—Ronon grimaced in disgust. The idea of being trapped in a stasis pod for centuries, not really dead and definitely not really alive, still made his skin crawl. He’d even had a few nightmares after the Aurora about getting stuck in a pod, nightmares he always woke up from struggling to breathe.
If the only thing they could find down those stairs were stasis pods, he’d rather they didn’t find anything at all.
Unsurprisingly, McKay didn’t feel the same way, though. When Sheppard just continued to stare at him with an unimpressed expression, he finally threw up his hands in exasperation.
“Look, I have no idea what’s down there, but I do know that the Ancients built it—if the design of the door wasn’t evidence enough of that, the fact that it opened for you should be.” He jabbed a finger in Sheppard’s direction before redirecting it toward the stairwell. “So there are definitely Ancient things of some kind down there, even if it’s just the stuff they forgot to clean out of the wastebaskets before they packed it in. Personally, I’ve got my fingers crossed for some abandoned devices, maybe a ZPM or two if we’re lucky—the power has to be coming from somewhere, right? But, frankly, I’ll take some desiccated Ancients in depleted stasis pods if that’s all we get because at least that’s something.”
There was a pleading whine in McKay’s tone by the end of his outburst that surprised Ronon a bit. He’d known that McKay was growing increasingly frustrated by their lack of finds, but hadn’t realized just how desperate he was to find something, anything, until now. And Ronon was pretty sure Sheppard was having the same epiphany. He was watching McKay with a purposefully blank stare, but Ronon saw his gaze dart to Teyla for just a split second before he looked back at McKay and gave an exaggerated sigh.
“Fine,” he drawled, “but you’re going first.”
McKay instantly nodded and made a move toward the door. “Okay.”
Seeing how Sheppard’s eyes widened slightly—he clearly hadn’t expected McKay to agree so easily—Ronon reached out and grabbed McKay by the back of his vest, holding him in place. At the same time, Sheppard shifted into his path, one hand on McKay’s chest and the other raised in a stop gesture.
“I was just joking, Rodney,” Sheppard said with a huff of amusement, “but I appreciate the enthusiasm.” He looked over McKay’s shoulder and gave Ronon a crooked grin. “Ronon’ll go first.”
Ronon leveled a mild glare Sheppard’s way, but otherwise didn’t comment as he released McKay and moved around them both to duck through the doorway and stand at the top of the staircase. He took a second to just listen, but he didn’t hear anything else aside from the humming of the lights. So without looking back, he started down the stairs.
About halfway down the temperature dropped significantly, like he’d stepped into cold water, goosebumps tingling across his skin for a second or two until his body adjusted. The sounds of the team following behind him—Sheppard, then McKay, then Teyla, he could tell—seemed loud in the confined space, and as he got closer to the bottom, he could also just make out the hiss of air moving through still unseen vents.
The bottom landing opened to the right, into a hall that ran parallel to the stairs. Out of an abundance of caution, Ronon used the cover of the landing to check both ways down the hall before he stepped out into it.
Unlike Atlantis, the hallways here didn’t curve, the stone walls instead taking sharp turns about forty feet away in either direction. To the left, the hallway turned back to the right; to the right, it went to the left. Ronon wondered whether the two branches reconnected somewhere out in the facility, squares instead of circles.
The lights from the staircase were present in the hall, too, elongated ovals set near the ceiling that emitted a warm, bright glow. A few in the hallway were out, though, leaving small patches of shadow along the corridor. Still, it was bright enough to see clearly, and clear enough to see that they were alone. At least for the time being.
With no doors in sight yet, Ronon waited until the rest of the team had joined him in the hall and then asked which way they wanted to go.
Sheppard took a second to look both ways down the hall before he shrugged. “Take your pick. Since you’re taking point, you can decide.”
“Unless I see something we need to stop for!” McKay quickly added.
With a roll of his eyes, Ronon turned and headed to the left. “We’re gonna stop for everything, McKay,” he threw over his shoulder. “That’s why we’re here.”
“Oh, right. Of course.”
Around the first turn was another straightaway. About a third of its lights were out, but Ronon could still see a short set of stairs roughly a hundred yards ahead of them that led up to another corridor. The space at the top of the stairs was dark, and from where he was currently standing he couldn’t tell how much further the hallway extended past it.
For now, he focused on the part of the hallway they were in and could see. There were doors here, offset along the walls so that none of them opened directly across from one another. Even those doors on the same side of the hall were spaced some distance apart, which McKay was sure meant that the rooms behind them would all be large. But for the second time that day, he was proven wrong.
The first room they checked was about the size of Dr. Weir’s office, and looked like it had had a similar function. It held a desk, a chair, and the remnants of a computer terminal that excited McKay for the roughly three seconds it took him to discover that its core was missing. He stalked from the room in disgust, impatiently tapping his foot against the floor until Ronon got them going again.
The next room was, somewhat unexpectedly, a bathroom. It was fairly small, too, which led a deflated McKay to conclude that the facility wasn’t actually all that large. Once Teyla pointed out that it might make sense for a large facility to have many small bathrooms rather than a few large ones, though, he perked back up again and quickly urged Ronon on to the next door.
McKay’s hopes for a large facility to explore were bolstered by the next room, which was much bigger than the previous two, and about twice the size of the larger labs on Atlantis. Tables had been arranged along each of its walls, with a larger oval one set in its center. There were a few chairs, too, including one that was upended and half under a table against the far wall, as if its occupant had left it in a panic. The lights along the right-hand wall were all out, so that side of the room was in heavy shadow, but there was enough illumination from the rest of the lights to see the few things that had been left behind.
None of it seemed particularly interesting—Ronon thought it mostly looked like boxes and papers—but he felt himself drawn to one item. On the table with the upended chair under it, just outside the darkness left by the non-functional lights, was a cylinder. It was about a foot long and lying on its side, just a long black tube with no apparent dials or buttons or display.
It was unremarkable in every way, but for some reason Ronon felt compelled to touch it. He couldn’t say why, though he rationalized it to himself that he planned to see if it was something worth pointing out to McKay. He wouldn’t have needed to point it out, though, because even as his fingers made contact with the cylinder—it was slightly warm to the touch, which he hadn’t expected—McKay barked out his name.
Ronon jerked back his hand and turned to glower in McKay’s direction, slightly embarrassed. “What?”
“What did you do?”
Ronon frowned. He hadn’t felt anything happen, or heard anything, or seen anything. And nothing seemed different. He didn’t think he’d done anything. Except touch the cylinder. Which hadn’t done anything. “What are you talking about?”
“Did you touch that?” McKay demanded, stalking closer and pointing aggressively at the cylinder.
Ronon didn’t see the use in lying, so he just shrugged. “Yeah. So?”
McKay froze, his eyes skimming over the cylinder before they darted around the room. He looked back over his shoulder toward the door, as if expecting someone or something to come through it, and then up at the ceiling, as if expecting the room to suddenly fold in on itself. After several seconds of absolutely nothing changing—aside from Ronon, Teyla, and Sheppard, shooting each other bemused looks—McKay finally relaxed. Stepping over to Ronon’s side, he picked up the cylinder. He turned it over in his hands a few times, studying it with narrowed eyes, before setting it back on the table with a dull thud.
“Looks like we got lucky and you just picked up a ridiculously large paperweight,” he announced. He sucked in just enough breath to form a sigh that he somehow managed to make sound like a shout, then glared at Ronon again. “New rule: nobody touches anything until I look at it first.” He turned to give Teyla and Sheppard their share of his disapproval. “Understood?”
Sheppard just leveled a bland stare his way. “Getting a little bossy there, McKay.”
“If you want to kill us all, I can name five ways off the top of my head that I would prefer to you screwing around with some abandoned Ancient device, Sheppard!” McKay snapped back.
“We will be careful, Rodney,” Teyla calmly interjected, shooting Sheppard a warning look.
She turned it on Ronon, too, which he didn’t think was entirely fair. He hadn’t been the one baiting McKay. And he’d only touched the cylinder thing on accident. And it wasn’t actually anything important.
Still, he thought it was best if he put some distance between it and him, so he stalked back out into the hallway with a grumbled, “C’mon, then.”
The next room was smaller again. Its entrance was actually recessed about ten feet from the hallway, creating its own mini corridor. Unlike the other rooms they’d explored so far, the door here was already open when Ronon got to it. The doors plural, actually: the room had an outer door and an inner door, which led McKay to believe it was probably a medical lab of some kind. That made Ronon pull up short, and he stopped between the two doors to throw McKay a skeptical and questioning look.
“Should we be going in here, then?”
McKay flapped a hand in his direction from behind Sheppard. “Yes, yes, I’m sure it’s fine. If there was anything to be worried about, we’d have already been exposed just by being in the facility. Going in the room won’t be any more dangerous.” Then he added, with a hint of sarcasm, “Just don’t touch anything.”
Ronon gave him a dark look, but continued through the doorway.
As it so happened, the only thing in the room was a lab bench pushed up against the far wall, with a few small glass containers on its surface, all empty. McKay immediately strode over to the bench and started going through its drawers, and Ronon came to peer over his shoulder while he searched. Aside from a few more glass containers, the drawers were empty, and McKay slammed the last one shut in annoyance.
“Just one damn thing, is that too much to ask,” he mumbled to himself.
“Seems like it,” Ronon unhelpfully responded.
McKay swiveled to face Ronon, cheeks red and mouth already open with a retort. But even as he got fully turned around, his eyes shifted past Ronon and back toward the door. He looked almost confused, and Ronon turned to look behind him as well.
Teyla was standing in one corner of the room, staring up at an oversized vent set in the ceiling. Sheppard was between her and the door, and was in the process of leaning back against the wall when McKay called out his name. He looked up, but before his eyes made contact with McKay’s, his momentum had already taken him to the wall.
Just as Sheppard’s back hit the wall, the room’s inner door slammed shut, causing him to pop back upright and turn to it in surprise. Ronon strained his ears, but couldn’t make out the sound of the outer door closing as well, though something told him it had. The fact that he didn’t hear it close bothered him more than the possibility that it had closed, though he didn’t know why.
“McKay?” he asked, turning to their resident scientist for an explanation.
“I don’t know,” came the clipped response. But it was McKay’s expression—fear mixed with uncertainty—that told Ronon things were about to get very bad.
Then, Ronon finally picked up another sound: a faint hissing, coming from the ceiling. For the first time, he noticed that there were vents like the one Teyla was under in each of the room’s four corners. He walked to the one across from Teyla’s and squinted up at it. The black grate obscured any view of what lay behind it, and it was too high up for Ronon to reach, even if he had been able to see any way of getting it off.
He held up a hand, but didn’t feel anything—air or moisture—coming out of the vent. The hissing was increasing in volume, though, and while he might be imagining it, it felt like the air was getting staler, thinner. He looked over at Teyla, who quickly joined him in his corner, her expression grave. Silently, he boosted her up, putting her within touching distance of the grate above him. When her hand was still a foot or more away, she aggressively retracted it, the force of the motion causing her to wobble slightly in Ronon’s grip. She hopped back down to the floor and turned to face the rest of them.
“The vents appear to be sucking the air out of the room.”
Though she said the words without any inflection, Ronon could see the hints of horror in her face. Immediately, he pivoted on his heel and went to the inner door, determined that he would get it open or die trying. Sheppard came to help him, while Teyla and McKay began looking for a control panel.
Ronon didn’t remember seeing a panel outside, and he silently berated himself for not looking for one inside before he’d let the rest of the team follow him in. Then he wondered how the doors could have closed if they didn’t have any controls, something that also seemed to be on Sheppard’s mind.
“How did the doors close in the first place, Rodney?” Sheppard asked through gritted teeth as he pushed his shoulder against the unyielding door.
“I don’t know! There must have been some kind of trigger!” McKay threw a glare full of terror and blame Sheppard’s way. “Did you touch anything? You touched something just to spite me for my new rule, didn’t you?”
“No! The only thing I touched was the wall. When I leaned on it.”
A flicker of hope passed across McKay’s face and he shifted over to where Sheppard had been just before the doors shut, his fingers scrabbling across that area of the wall in a desperate search for a seam. Ronon wasn’t convinced he’d find anything; from his vantage point, with his cheek almost pressed against the door, the wall looked completely smooth. But if anyone could find a hidden panel, he’d bet McKay could. And he definitely needed to this time.
Despite pushing with all his might—and with Sheppard doing the same beside him—Ronon could tell that the door hadn’t budged at all. Since all the air was currently being sucked out of the room, the door probably had an airtight seal, and some kind of locking mechanism to keep the seal set. If that was the case, there was no way he and Sheppard would be able to get it open manually, no matter how hard they pushed at it. There was the possibility that the seal might have degraded after so many centuries and would simply give way under their combined pressure, but with the state of Atlantis in mind, Ronon wasn’t betting on it.
He pounded a fist against the door, ramming his shoulder against it in fury when it barely vibrated from the impact. Unless McKay found a control panel, they were screwed.
Teyla had come to help McKay in his search, squatting below him as she ran her fingers over the wall with deliberate calmness. She was breathing faster than usual, though; Ronon could see the rapid, shallow rise and fall of her shoulders as she fought for breath. He was becoming lightheaded himself. He could feel his pulse throbbing in his head, and there was something like a tingling or burning in his fingertips and his toes.
And yet he felt calm, even a bit euphoric. That seemed wrong, though his brain couldn’t seem to latch on to why. Instead, he watched in fascinated slow motion as Sheppard dropped to his knees. He was still pressed against the door, but Ronon couldn’t tell whether he was pushing at it or not. Ronon kept at it, though, refusing to give up despite the weakness spreading through his body and the increasingly persistent voice in the back of his head telling him to find something more interesting to do.
Below McKay, Teyla had stopped examining the wall and was instead sitting back on her heels, staring at the nearest corner of the room. Ronon blinked in that direction, wondering what could be important enough to distract her, but there was nothing there. Her expression was oddly dreamy, almost content, in sharp contrast to how she was gasping for breath. She leaned forward and started to crawl toward the corner, but collapsed almost immediately.
As she crumpled to the floor, McKay slid down the wall and landed beside her. He was feebly thumping at his chest, as if trying to force his lungs to take in more air. His panicked gaze locked on to Ronon’s face for a few seconds.
“Hypoxia,” he croaked.
Then he let out a delirious-sounding giggle before his eyes closed and he slumped over, partially on top of Teyla’s unconscious form.
Ronon let out a grunt of laughter, then frowned. What was funny? Something was funny. He laughed again, the sound choked off by his lack of oxygen.
He couldn’t get enough air, he was breathing water, his chest was on fire, he couldn’t see straight. But he was still pushing. He had to keep pushing for some reason.
Why was he pushing? Right. They were all suffocating. He had to open the door. He had to. He had to push.
He was on his knees now—wasn’t he? Or was that Sheppard? No, Sheppard was across the room, watching him with an expression of such deep disappointment that what air was left in Ronon’s lungs erupted from him like he’d been punched in the stomach. Why was Sheppard disappointed? Oh, right—he had to get the door open. Because they were dying.
But he couldn’t feel his hands anymore, wasn’t sure he had hands anymore, and as he blacked out his only thought was how could Sheppard expect him to open a door without hands.
-00000000-
There was something warm under his fingertips, something smooth and solid. It was a cylinder, a chunky black tube that looked vaguely familiar. Ronon frowned at it as he pulled his hand away. Hadn’t he just been somewhere else?
He turned to look around the room, struck by the strange impression that he’d expected it to be smaller. He didn’t know why he’d expected that; he remembered walking into the room, remembered every detail about it down to the lights being out on the right hand wall. But there hadn’t been lights on the right hand wall, just one big round one in the ceiling, right?
Ronon shook his head sharply, baffled and uneasy. He felt off, like his body wasn’t behaving the way his brain was expecting it to. Subconsciously clenching and unclenching the hand that had been touching the cylinder, he cast another, more suspicious look around the room, pausing when he caught McKay watching him with an expectant gaze. Feeling like he was missing something, maybe lots of somethings, Ronon warily stared back.
“What?”
“I asked you what you did,” McKay testily replied.
“I didn’t do anything,” Ronon said, feeling very much like he had done something—or hadn’t done something—but he couldn’t remember what. And if he couldn’t remember, how would McKay even know? Therefore, he hadn’t done anything.
But McKay just scowled and jabbed his finger in the direction of something behind Ronon. “Didn’t you just touch that?”
Ronon turned around, his eyes finding the cylinder again. Right, he had touched that. He couldn’t remember why.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “It’s just an oversized paperweight.”
Even as he said the words, he felt like they’d come from somebody else, like he was just repeating something he’d heard before. He was frowning again, still confused but not sure why he was confused, which only made him more confused.
McKay raised his eyebrows in mock surprise and put his hands on his hips. “Oh, and how would you know that it’s just a paperweight?”
“There’s nothing on it,” Ronon gruffly explained. “It’s just a tube.”
McKay gave him an imperious stare, before turning to address the room at large. “Well, I don’t like relying on luck to keep us not dead, especially where the Ancients are concerned, so new rule: nobody touches anything unless I’ve looked at it first, understood?”
“A bit heavy on the bossiness, there, McKay.”
“If you want to kill us all, I can name five ways off the top of my head that I would prefer to you screwing around with some abandoned Ancient device, Sheppard. So you’re going to keep your hands to yourself this time.”
All of a sudden, without understanding why, Ronon knew he had to get out of the room. He brushed past McKay, missing seeing surprise replace the glower on his face. Sheppard caught his gaze as he neared the door, though, and Ronon could see the questions in his eyes. In answer, he subtly shook his head. There was nothing for Sheppard to worry about, at least not that Ronon knew, because Ronon didn’t even understand what was bothering him anyway. Sheppard gave a similarly subtle nod, and focused back on McKay as Ronon stepped out into the hallway.
“C’mon, Rodney. Next room, chop chop. We’ve got a whole facility to explore, and there’s nothing of interest here.”
“But—!”
“We will be careful, Rodney,” Teyla reassured him, “but we have a lot of ground to cover. We should move on.”
Feeling marginally better now that he was in the hall, Ronon looked back inside the room at McKay. The conflicted look on McKay’s face clearly showed how torn he was between his desire to have the last word and his desire to see more of the facility. But after throwing a final disheartened glance around the space, it seemed discovering things he could actually tinker with won out, and he stomped to the door with an aggrieved sigh.
“Fine, but I get to decide whether we leave the next room so quickly or not.”
Sheppard gestured with his head for Ronon to move them on. “So long as you make that decision within five minutes of me deciding it’s a worthless room, then sure,” he told McKay.
Behind Ronon, McKay huffed in annoyance and began bickering with Sheppard, but Ronon wasn’t listening. As much as he’d wanted to leave the room they’d just been in, the closer he got to the next one, the more he wanted to go back. And he couldn’t understand why.
He’d been caught off guard by McKay’s reprimand back in the other room, when he’d touched the cylinder. Or, even more so, he’d been caught off guard by his own behavior. He didn’t touch things a lot—unlike Sheppard—so he was probably just feeling a bit guilty about doing something so uncharacteristic. That was when his uneasiness had started, anyway, so that had to be the cause.
Still, the shadowy rectangle of the corridor branch they were approaching seemed ominous in a way that Ronon couldn’t shake. When he finally drew level with it and looked in, he could see that the short hallway was actually well-lit and not dark at all, absolutely no different from where he was standing looking into it. Ten feet inside it was a doorway, the door already invitingly open. Pushing aside his lingering unease, he started toward it.
Even before he took two steps, he knew that there would be a second door beyond the first one. He stopped just outside the outer door and looked back at McKay.
“It has two doors,” Ronon told him. “Should we go in?”
McKay seemed a little surprised by the question, but he did contemplate it for a few seconds before he answered. “It might be a medical lab, but since the doors are already open we would’ve been exposed to anything that might be in there as soon as we opened the door topside. At least as far as breathing goes.” He gave Ronon a pointed look. “But don’t touch anything.”
Ronon knew the reminder was meant as much jokingly as it was seriously, but his chest still tightened fractionally as he stepped through the first door. If he hesitated for the barest of heartbeats before stepping through the second one, no one would have noticed.
The room behind the doors wasn’t very big, and there was nothing in it but a lab bench with a few glass bottles scattered on its surface. Somehow, Ronon knew there wouldn’t be anything in the drawers, either, and he almost said as much as McKay moved over and began opening them. Remembering how annoyed McKay had been at their abrupt exit from the previous room, though, Ronon bit his tongue and left him to it. Turning a slow circle, he studied the rest of the room instead.
Not that there was anything to study aside from the bench. Teyla had moved to the corner by the door, and Sheppard was standing between her and the exit, watching with evident amusement as McKay scraped each drawer open for inspection before bitterly shoving it closed again.
Something about the way Teyla and Sheppard were standing niggled at the back of Ronon’s mind, like he had seen them in exactly those positions before. And maybe he had; they’d been in enough abandoned Ancient facilities for this scene to have played out somewhere before.
But then Teyla titled her head back to look up at the ceiling above her, and Ronon’s stomach dropped. With fearful reluctance, he followed her gaze to the black grate in that corner of the ceiling. Then his eyes moved to the three other corners, each with their own grate. And there, in the center of the ceiling, the only light in the whole room. A large, round light.
His heart stuttered, hard, for one slow beat, then picked up again at a faster pace. Images flew through his mind almost faster than he could process them.
We’ve been here before. We came in here and the doors closed. We died here. We died here.
“We have to go!” Ronon yelled, causing the others to jump.
But it was too late. Even as he pivoted and took a step that was more like a lunge in the direction of the door, he saw Sheppard leaning toward the wall. Sheppard’s back made contact with the surface, the doors slammed shut, and Ronon heard a faint hissing.
McKay had whipped around at Ronon’s shout, and Ronon saw his annoyed gaze dart from Ronon to the closed door to Sheppard, who had pushed back off the wall. “What did you touch?” he demanded.
Sheppard gave him a defensive frown. “I didn’t touch anything, Rodney! Except the wall.” When McKay pushed him out of the way to get to the area he indicated, he added, “But there’s nothing there!”
Reflexively, Ronon moved to the door and placed his palms against it. But he didn’t push, not even when Sheppard appeared at his side and started doing just that. Sheppard was already breathing a bit fast, grunting slightly as he struggled futilely with the door. But Ronon felt almost hollow. He’d done this—they’d done this—and they hadn’t gotten out. It had all come back to him once he saw the grates: they’d died in this room and hadn’t even gotten close to finding a way out and nobody else remembered. Why didn’t anyone else remember?
McKay was frantically running his hands over the wall, muttering, “Find the panel, find the panel,” over and over to himself, the wheezing of his breath growing louder each time. Teyla was on her knees below him, searching the lower part of the wall. They weren’t going to find anything, Ronon knew. He wasn’t sure there was anything to find.
Numbly, he pushed against the door, almost like he had to. He wasn’t putting much effort into it, though. He didn’t see the point. His head was already starting to swim a bit, and his hands were shaking.
They were going to die again.
A tendril of panic rose inside him, his heart racing with it. But almost as it came it was washed away, replaced with an empty serenity. Ronon smiled to himself, certain now what he needed to do.
He stepped back from the door and watched with faint disinterest as Sheppard pushed against it, his feet scrabbling for purchase on the smooth floor as he slowly slid lower, his strength leaving him along with his breath. Stepping over him, Ronon gently pushed McKay away from the wall, nudging Teyla with his leg at the same time. Teyla didn’t move, since she had already passed out, but Ronon didn’t notice. Instead, he used what strength he had left to grab Sheppard—who was on his knees by that point, still feebly pushing at the door—and hauled him over to the wall.
Sheppard blinked at him with unfocused eyes, then smiled drunkenly, flopping a hand onto Ronon’s shoulder with an obvious lack of coordination. “Ronon, buddy,” he said, needing to take sharp breaths between each word. “What’re you doin’?”
“Trying something different this time,” Ronon forced out, before he pushed Sheppard against the wall, aiming to put him in the exact same spot he’d been before the doors had closed.
Ronon looked toward the door, sure something was supposed to have happened. It was still shut. But it was supposed to have opened; he’d put Sheppard back.
Just to make sure, he used trembling arms to pull Sheppard away from the wall and then pushed him against it again. And again. And again. McKay laughingly mumbled something like, “Put your Sheppard in and shake him all about,” and Ronon looked down at him, confused. He’d forgotten McKay was there. Why was he on the floor?
McKay stared up at him, face pink and eyes glazed. He gasped for air and his eyes cleared for a second, focusing on Ronon with penetrating terror. Then they closed and he slumped over onto his side.
“No time for sleep,” Ronon slurred out with a slow tongue.
His chest was burning and he rubbed at it, not realizing he’d released Sheppard in the process. Already unconscious, Sheppard fell to the floor in a way that would have been painful if he’d been awake. Ronon didn’t notice. He was sure he had to go somewhere. Outside? That seemed like a good plan, but he didn’t think he could walk. He’d crawl. He could do that.
But then there was a door. A door that was closed. A door he had to open. He had to push. He had to.
He put his palms against the door and blacked out even as he pushed.
Rating: R
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: Ronon Dex, Rodney McKay, Teyla Emmagen, John Sheppard
Word Count: 7068
Categories: action, drama, angst, hurt/comfort, team as family
Spoilers: none
Warnings: graphic violence and injuries; temporary main character death
Summary: In a far corner of the galaxy, Ronon watches Sheppard, Teyla, and McKay die over and over again. And he follows them, over and over again.
He’s the only one who can remember, the only one who can save them—if he can figure out how.
Time isn’t running out, but that might be the problem.
It was a Monday, and they were in the woods again.
Ronon strode between two large trees, one eye on the rest of the team walking ahead of him and the other on their surroundings. He was only half on guard, keeping watch more out of habit than because he expected them to run into anything dangerous. Based on what McKay had told them during the mission briefing, he doubted there was much in these particular woods to be worried about. The planet was uninhabited, and the Ancient database had said it had no large predators, either, eliminating two of the primary causes for concern on most worlds.
The weather could still try to kill them, Ronon supposed, leveling a measuring squint at what bits of cloud-speckled blue he could see above him through the tree canopy. But there wasn’t much he could do about that, on guard or not.
Not that he expected they’d be outside for long enough to get into trouble of any kind anyway. McKay had promised they wouldn’t have to go very far to get from the Gate to the facility they were looking for. Since what McKay considered “far” would usually barely register on Ronon’s scale of distance, he’d half expected the facility to be in sight as soon as they came through the Gate.
It hadn’t been, though, and while they’d been walking for about twenty minutes, Ronon could tell they hadn’t actually covered much ground. Yet no one appeared interested in speeding things up, not even McKay. And Ronon was sure he knew why.
For a few months now, they—along with a couple of other teams—had been scouring planets from the database, and so far no one had found a single thing worth finding. At least nothing Ronon thought was worth finding. Or that McKay did.
McKay had been the driving force behind the searches, and his frustration had grown with every mission they’d returned from empty handed. Frustration that he—like with everything else—had been very vocal about. Even now, shuffling along through the trees at the front of their little pack, he was muttering to himself. And while Ronon couldn’t make out any of his words, the irritable undertone in his voice was unmistakable.
Just behind him, Sheppard quietly murmured something that caused McKay to audibly scoff and gesture sharply with the scanner he held.
Ronon knew that Sheppard shared McKay’s frustration, even if he was much quieter about it. As the missions had progressed, Ronon had noticed a growing tension in Sheppard, a tightness in how he held himself, shoulders braced almost as if for a blow. He and Sheppard didn’t talk about it much, Sheppard’s position in Atlantis. Sheppard didn’t talk about anything much. But Ronon understood the pressure he was under, knew what it was like to have others you looked after, others you answered to.
Finding nothing wasn’t good enough when any day now they might need something to keep them alive.
While Teyla had been more placid about the whole thing, Ronon could tell that even she was starting to measure the wasted mission hours against all the other things she could have been doing. For his part, Ronon was generally content enough to go wherever they needed to go and do whatever they needed to do. He just wished there was more doing to be done; he was getting restless.
Resisting the urge to sigh, he rolled his shoulders and sucked in a deep, slow breath. The air on the planet was cool and smelled pleasantly of rain and something darkly floral, a welcome contrast to the summer heat they’d left back on Atlantis. For a moment, he idly wished they wouldn’t actually find the facility and could instead just spend a few hours wandering through the trees. The mission would probably have the same result either way, and he’d much rather spend the time outside than scouring another abandoned site.
But just then McKay let out a faint exclamation, and Ronon knew that his wish had gone unheard.
About a hundred feet ahead of them Ronon could see a small clearing through the trees. In its center, an unnaturally square mound rose sharply out of the forest floor. The mound was only a few feet taller than Ronon, and not much wider than that on each side, but obviously manmade despite its small size.
Grass and small plants covered the mound’s surface, a blanket of green doing what it could to mask the artificial shape. It seemed almost purposeful, and Ronon wondered whether the Ancients had originally designed the mound to blend in to its surroundings, or whether nature had simply reclaimed the space over time.
As Teyla and Sheppard began to pull at the vines that covered the near side of the mound, searching for an entrance, Ronon took up a defensive position, studying the tree line. He was close enough to the rest of them now that he could finally make out McKay’s grumbling.
“It’ll probably be nothing,” he was grousing, frowning at the scanner in his hand. “Again.”
Ronon caught Teyla rolling her eyes as she tugged at a particularly stubborn vine, and he shook his head, amused. He wasn’t sure whether it was the lack of things to tinker with that annoyed McKay most, or the fact that he’d been wrong every time so far when he’d told them the mission would be worth the trip. Knowing McKay, he’d probably say both, and then add a handful of other reasons on top of them.
As Ronon watched, McKay—who had begun a slow circuit of the mound, eyes glued to the scanner in his hand—disappeared around the mound’s far side. By the time he reappeared—now glowering down at the scanner—around the front, Teyla and Sheppard had uncovered the mound’s entrance. Concealed behind the vines had been a nondescript door which, now visible, was clearly of Ancient design. It could have easily been a door on Atlantis, except that it didn’t appear to have a control panel or any other kind of control mechanism. Ronon was just about to ask whether anyone could see one when McKay provided the answer.
“Great. A door without a way to open it,” he sourly spat. “It probably doesn’t have power, either. So I’ll have to sit here for ages trying to get it open and once I finally manage it, it’ll turn out to be nothing more than an empty gardening shed or something equally lackluster.”
Ronon smirked in McKay’s direction, ready to make an admittedly mean comment about him maintaining his losing streak. But just then Sheppard reached forward to pull a last dangling vine away from the door. As his fingers brushed over it, the door slid open with an only slightly rusty-sounding swish.
Instinctively, Ronon froze, his hand flying to his blaster where it rested in its holster, fingers curling protectively around its grip. But nothing immediately emerged from the dark void of the doorway, and curiosity drew him closer.
After exchanging glances of surprise and wariness, the others had crowded together at the entrance in order to peer inside the opening, and Ronon joined them, positioning himself so he could see over Teyla’s head.
Beyond the doorway was a shallow landing which led onto a stone staircase that descended into the ground. Lights along the wall had flickered to life when the door opened, illuminating another landing below them, about thirty feet down. The air coming up the staircase smelled fresh, if a little earthy, and Ronon could hear the very faint humming of the lights.
McKay let out a noise like the combination of a sigh and a grunt. “Then again, I could be wrong.”
Sheppard gave him a wry look. “Somebody note the time; McKay admitted his fallibility.”
“I have been known to occasionally—rarely!—make the odd mistake. Now and then. On the rare occasion.”
“We are aware, Rodney,” Teyla dryly replied.
While McKay frowned at her, seemingly debating whether he wanted to be insulted by her comment or not, Sheppard leaned halfway through the door and peered down the staircase.
“So,” he said, “the lights are on but nobody’s home?”
Shifting his growing scowl from Teyla to Sheppard, McKay waved a hand toward the open door. “Unless there are some Ancients in stasis down there then, yes, nobody’s home.”
Sheppard took a step back and shot him a guarded look. “Could there be Ancients in stasis down there?”
McKay fully sighed then. “The fact that the ‘lights are on,’ as you so eloquently put it, would indicate that whatever is down there was worthy of a power source that would last for an exceptionally long time. However, there was nothing in the database indicating that this facility was used for stasis, something I’m positive they would have made a point to document. And I highly doubt that the Ancients would have chosen this planet—which is in the proverbial middle-of-nowhere, as far as the galaxy goes—to house their frozen family and friends, anyway.”
Sheppard didn’t look like he fully bought that explanation, his expression flat as he studied McKay. “So we aren’t about to walk into a lab full of long-dead Ancients whose consciousnesses are trapped in an AI reality?”
A hint of unease rippled through McKay’s frown, and he shifted uneasily on his feet. “Well obviously I can’t promise that,” he hedged, “but it isn’t like that was something the Ancients routinely did. The Aurora was a one-off situation.”
Remembering his very first encounter with the Ancients—or, at least, the first time he was there when Sheppard and McKay interacted with some of them—Ronon grimaced in disgust. The idea of being trapped in a stasis pod for centuries, not really dead and definitely not really alive, still made his skin crawl. He’d even had a few nightmares after the Aurora about getting stuck in a pod, nightmares he always woke up from struggling to breathe.
If the only thing they could find down those stairs were stasis pods, he’d rather they didn’t find anything at all.
Unsurprisingly, McKay didn’t feel the same way, though. When Sheppard just continued to stare at him with an unimpressed expression, he finally threw up his hands in exasperation.
“Look, I have no idea what’s down there, but I do know that the Ancients built it—if the design of the door wasn’t evidence enough of that, the fact that it opened for you should be.” He jabbed a finger in Sheppard’s direction before redirecting it toward the stairwell. “So there are definitely Ancient things of some kind down there, even if it’s just the stuff they forgot to clean out of the wastebaskets before they packed it in. Personally, I’ve got my fingers crossed for some abandoned devices, maybe a ZPM or two if we’re lucky—the power has to be coming from somewhere, right? But, frankly, I’ll take some desiccated Ancients in depleted stasis pods if that’s all we get because at least that’s something.”
There was a pleading whine in McKay’s tone by the end of his outburst that surprised Ronon a bit. He’d known that McKay was growing increasingly frustrated by their lack of finds, but hadn’t realized just how desperate he was to find something, anything, until now. And Ronon was pretty sure Sheppard was having the same epiphany. He was watching McKay with a purposefully blank stare, but Ronon saw his gaze dart to Teyla for just a split second before he looked back at McKay and gave an exaggerated sigh.
“Fine,” he drawled, “but you’re going first.”
McKay instantly nodded and made a move toward the door. “Okay.”
Seeing how Sheppard’s eyes widened slightly—he clearly hadn’t expected McKay to agree so easily—Ronon reached out and grabbed McKay by the back of his vest, holding him in place. At the same time, Sheppard shifted into his path, one hand on McKay’s chest and the other raised in a stop gesture.
“I was just joking, Rodney,” Sheppard said with a huff of amusement, “but I appreciate the enthusiasm.” He looked over McKay’s shoulder and gave Ronon a crooked grin. “Ronon’ll go first.”
Ronon leveled a mild glare Sheppard’s way, but otherwise didn’t comment as he released McKay and moved around them both to duck through the doorway and stand at the top of the staircase. He took a second to just listen, but he didn’t hear anything else aside from the humming of the lights. So without looking back, he started down the stairs.
About halfway down the temperature dropped significantly, like he’d stepped into cold water, goosebumps tingling across his skin for a second or two until his body adjusted. The sounds of the team following behind him—Sheppard, then McKay, then Teyla, he could tell—seemed loud in the confined space, and as he got closer to the bottom, he could also just make out the hiss of air moving through still unseen vents.
The bottom landing opened to the right, into a hall that ran parallel to the stairs. Out of an abundance of caution, Ronon used the cover of the landing to check both ways down the hall before he stepped out into it.
Unlike Atlantis, the hallways here didn’t curve, the stone walls instead taking sharp turns about forty feet away in either direction. To the left, the hallway turned back to the right; to the right, it went to the left. Ronon wondered whether the two branches reconnected somewhere out in the facility, squares instead of circles.
The lights from the staircase were present in the hall, too, elongated ovals set near the ceiling that emitted a warm, bright glow. A few in the hallway were out, though, leaving small patches of shadow along the corridor. Still, it was bright enough to see clearly, and clear enough to see that they were alone. At least for the time being.
With no doors in sight yet, Ronon waited until the rest of the team had joined him in the hall and then asked which way they wanted to go.
Sheppard took a second to look both ways down the hall before he shrugged. “Take your pick. Since you’re taking point, you can decide.”
“Unless I see something we need to stop for!” McKay quickly added.
With a roll of his eyes, Ronon turned and headed to the left. “We’re gonna stop for everything, McKay,” he threw over his shoulder. “That’s why we’re here.”
“Oh, right. Of course.”
Around the first turn was another straightaway. About a third of its lights were out, but Ronon could still see a short set of stairs roughly a hundred yards ahead of them that led up to another corridor. The space at the top of the stairs was dark, and from where he was currently standing he couldn’t tell how much further the hallway extended past it.
For now, he focused on the part of the hallway they were in and could see. There were doors here, offset along the walls so that none of them opened directly across from one another. Even those doors on the same side of the hall were spaced some distance apart, which McKay was sure meant that the rooms behind them would all be large. But for the second time that day, he was proven wrong.
The first room they checked was about the size of Dr. Weir’s office, and looked like it had had a similar function. It held a desk, a chair, and the remnants of a computer terminal that excited McKay for the roughly three seconds it took him to discover that its core was missing. He stalked from the room in disgust, impatiently tapping his foot against the floor until Ronon got them going again.
The next room was, somewhat unexpectedly, a bathroom. It was fairly small, too, which led a deflated McKay to conclude that the facility wasn’t actually all that large. Once Teyla pointed out that it might make sense for a large facility to have many small bathrooms rather than a few large ones, though, he perked back up again and quickly urged Ronon on to the next door.
McKay’s hopes for a large facility to explore were bolstered by the next room, which was much bigger than the previous two, and about twice the size of the larger labs on Atlantis. Tables had been arranged along each of its walls, with a larger oval one set in its center. There were a few chairs, too, including one that was upended and half under a table against the far wall, as if its occupant had left it in a panic. The lights along the right-hand wall were all out, so that side of the room was in heavy shadow, but there was enough illumination from the rest of the lights to see the few things that had been left behind.
None of it seemed particularly interesting—Ronon thought it mostly looked like boxes and papers—but he felt himself drawn to one item. On the table with the upended chair under it, just outside the darkness left by the non-functional lights, was a cylinder. It was about a foot long and lying on its side, just a long black tube with no apparent dials or buttons or display.
It was unremarkable in every way, but for some reason Ronon felt compelled to touch it. He couldn’t say why, though he rationalized it to himself that he planned to see if it was something worth pointing out to McKay. He wouldn’t have needed to point it out, though, because even as his fingers made contact with the cylinder—it was slightly warm to the touch, which he hadn’t expected—McKay barked out his name.
Ronon jerked back his hand and turned to glower in McKay’s direction, slightly embarrassed. “What?”
“What did you do?”
Ronon frowned. He hadn’t felt anything happen, or heard anything, or seen anything. And nothing seemed different. He didn’t think he’d done anything. Except touch the cylinder. Which hadn’t done anything. “What are you talking about?”
“Did you touch that?” McKay demanded, stalking closer and pointing aggressively at the cylinder.
Ronon didn’t see the use in lying, so he just shrugged. “Yeah. So?”
McKay froze, his eyes skimming over the cylinder before they darted around the room. He looked back over his shoulder toward the door, as if expecting someone or something to come through it, and then up at the ceiling, as if expecting the room to suddenly fold in on itself. After several seconds of absolutely nothing changing—aside from Ronon, Teyla, and Sheppard, shooting each other bemused looks—McKay finally relaxed. Stepping over to Ronon’s side, he picked up the cylinder. He turned it over in his hands a few times, studying it with narrowed eyes, before setting it back on the table with a dull thud.
“Looks like we got lucky and you just picked up a ridiculously large paperweight,” he announced. He sucked in just enough breath to form a sigh that he somehow managed to make sound like a shout, then glared at Ronon again. “New rule: nobody touches anything until I look at it first.” He turned to give Teyla and Sheppard their share of his disapproval. “Understood?”
Sheppard just leveled a bland stare his way. “Getting a little bossy there, McKay.”
“If you want to kill us all, I can name five ways off the top of my head that I would prefer to you screwing around with some abandoned Ancient device, Sheppard!” McKay snapped back.
“We will be careful, Rodney,” Teyla calmly interjected, shooting Sheppard a warning look.
She turned it on Ronon, too, which he didn’t think was entirely fair. He hadn’t been the one baiting McKay. And he’d only touched the cylinder thing on accident. And it wasn’t actually anything important.
Still, he thought it was best if he put some distance between it and him, so he stalked back out into the hallway with a grumbled, “C’mon, then.”
The next room was smaller again. Its entrance was actually recessed about ten feet from the hallway, creating its own mini corridor. Unlike the other rooms they’d explored so far, the door here was already open when Ronon got to it. The doors plural, actually: the room had an outer door and an inner door, which led McKay to believe it was probably a medical lab of some kind. That made Ronon pull up short, and he stopped between the two doors to throw McKay a skeptical and questioning look.
“Should we be going in here, then?”
McKay flapped a hand in his direction from behind Sheppard. “Yes, yes, I’m sure it’s fine. If there was anything to be worried about, we’d have already been exposed just by being in the facility. Going in the room won’t be any more dangerous.” Then he added, with a hint of sarcasm, “Just don’t touch anything.”
Ronon gave him a dark look, but continued through the doorway.
As it so happened, the only thing in the room was a lab bench pushed up against the far wall, with a few small glass containers on its surface, all empty. McKay immediately strode over to the bench and started going through its drawers, and Ronon came to peer over his shoulder while he searched. Aside from a few more glass containers, the drawers were empty, and McKay slammed the last one shut in annoyance.
“Just one damn thing, is that too much to ask,” he mumbled to himself.
“Seems like it,” Ronon unhelpfully responded.
McKay swiveled to face Ronon, cheeks red and mouth already open with a retort. But even as he got fully turned around, his eyes shifted past Ronon and back toward the door. He looked almost confused, and Ronon turned to look behind him as well.
Teyla was standing in one corner of the room, staring up at an oversized vent set in the ceiling. Sheppard was between her and the door, and was in the process of leaning back against the wall when McKay called out his name. He looked up, but before his eyes made contact with McKay’s, his momentum had already taken him to the wall.
Just as Sheppard’s back hit the wall, the room’s inner door slammed shut, causing him to pop back upright and turn to it in surprise. Ronon strained his ears, but couldn’t make out the sound of the outer door closing as well, though something told him it had. The fact that he didn’t hear it close bothered him more than the possibility that it had closed, though he didn’t know why.
“McKay?” he asked, turning to their resident scientist for an explanation.
“I don’t know,” came the clipped response. But it was McKay’s expression—fear mixed with uncertainty—that told Ronon things were about to get very bad.
Then, Ronon finally picked up another sound: a faint hissing, coming from the ceiling. For the first time, he noticed that there were vents like the one Teyla was under in each of the room’s four corners. He walked to the one across from Teyla’s and squinted up at it. The black grate obscured any view of what lay behind it, and it was too high up for Ronon to reach, even if he had been able to see any way of getting it off.
He held up a hand, but didn’t feel anything—air or moisture—coming out of the vent. The hissing was increasing in volume, though, and while he might be imagining it, it felt like the air was getting staler, thinner. He looked over at Teyla, who quickly joined him in his corner, her expression grave. Silently, he boosted her up, putting her within touching distance of the grate above him. When her hand was still a foot or more away, she aggressively retracted it, the force of the motion causing her to wobble slightly in Ronon’s grip. She hopped back down to the floor and turned to face the rest of them.
“The vents appear to be sucking the air out of the room.”
Though she said the words without any inflection, Ronon could see the hints of horror in her face. Immediately, he pivoted on his heel and went to the inner door, determined that he would get it open or die trying. Sheppard came to help him, while Teyla and McKay began looking for a control panel.
Ronon didn’t remember seeing a panel outside, and he silently berated himself for not looking for one inside before he’d let the rest of the team follow him in. Then he wondered how the doors could have closed if they didn’t have any controls, something that also seemed to be on Sheppard’s mind.
“How did the doors close in the first place, Rodney?” Sheppard asked through gritted teeth as he pushed his shoulder against the unyielding door.
“I don’t know! There must have been some kind of trigger!” McKay threw a glare full of terror and blame Sheppard’s way. “Did you touch anything? You touched something just to spite me for my new rule, didn’t you?”
“No! The only thing I touched was the wall. When I leaned on it.”
A flicker of hope passed across McKay’s face and he shifted over to where Sheppard had been just before the doors shut, his fingers scrabbling across that area of the wall in a desperate search for a seam. Ronon wasn’t convinced he’d find anything; from his vantage point, with his cheek almost pressed against the door, the wall looked completely smooth. But if anyone could find a hidden panel, he’d bet McKay could. And he definitely needed to this time.
Despite pushing with all his might—and with Sheppard doing the same beside him—Ronon could tell that the door hadn’t budged at all. Since all the air was currently being sucked out of the room, the door probably had an airtight seal, and some kind of locking mechanism to keep the seal set. If that was the case, there was no way he and Sheppard would be able to get it open manually, no matter how hard they pushed at it. There was the possibility that the seal might have degraded after so many centuries and would simply give way under their combined pressure, but with the state of Atlantis in mind, Ronon wasn’t betting on it.
He pounded a fist against the door, ramming his shoulder against it in fury when it barely vibrated from the impact. Unless McKay found a control panel, they were screwed.
Teyla had come to help McKay in his search, squatting below him as she ran her fingers over the wall with deliberate calmness. She was breathing faster than usual, though; Ronon could see the rapid, shallow rise and fall of her shoulders as she fought for breath. He was becoming lightheaded himself. He could feel his pulse throbbing in his head, and there was something like a tingling or burning in his fingertips and his toes.
And yet he felt calm, even a bit euphoric. That seemed wrong, though his brain couldn’t seem to latch on to why. Instead, he watched in fascinated slow motion as Sheppard dropped to his knees. He was still pressed against the door, but Ronon couldn’t tell whether he was pushing at it or not. Ronon kept at it, though, refusing to give up despite the weakness spreading through his body and the increasingly persistent voice in the back of his head telling him to find something more interesting to do.
Below McKay, Teyla had stopped examining the wall and was instead sitting back on her heels, staring at the nearest corner of the room. Ronon blinked in that direction, wondering what could be important enough to distract her, but there was nothing there. Her expression was oddly dreamy, almost content, in sharp contrast to how she was gasping for breath. She leaned forward and started to crawl toward the corner, but collapsed almost immediately.
As she crumpled to the floor, McKay slid down the wall and landed beside her. He was feebly thumping at his chest, as if trying to force his lungs to take in more air. His panicked gaze locked on to Ronon’s face for a few seconds.
“Hypoxia,” he croaked.
Then he let out a delirious-sounding giggle before his eyes closed and he slumped over, partially on top of Teyla’s unconscious form.
Ronon let out a grunt of laughter, then frowned. What was funny? Something was funny. He laughed again, the sound choked off by his lack of oxygen.
He couldn’t get enough air, he was breathing water, his chest was on fire, he couldn’t see straight. But he was still pushing. He had to keep pushing for some reason.
Why was he pushing? Right. They were all suffocating. He had to open the door. He had to. He had to push.
He was on his knees now—wasn’t he? Or was that Sheppard? No, Sheppard was across the room, watching him with an expression of such deep disappointment that what air was left in Ronon’s lungs erupted from him like he’d been punched in the stomach. Why was Sheppard disappointed? Oh, right—he had to get the door open. Because they were dying.
But he couldn’t feel his hands anymore, wasn’t sure he had hands anymore, and as he blacked out his only thought was how could Sheppard expect him to open a door without hands.
-00000000-
There was something warm under his fingertips, something smooth and solid. It was a cylinder, a chunky black tube that looked vaguely familiar. Ronon frowned at it as he pulled his hand away. Hadn’t he just been somewhere else?
He turned to look around the room, struck by the strange impression that he’d expected it to be smaller. He didn’t know why he’d expected that; he remembered walking into the room, remembered every detail about it down to the lights being out on the right hand wall. But there hadn’t been lights on the right hand wall, just one big round one in the ceiling, right?
Ronon shook his head sharply, baffled and uneasy. He felt off, like his body wasn’t behaving the way his brain was expecting it to. Subconsciously clenching and unclenching the hand that had been touching the cylinder, he cast another, more suspicious look around the room, pausing when he caught McKay watching him with an expectant gaze. Feeling like he was missing something, maybe lots of somethings, Ronon warily stared back.
“What?”
“I asked you what you did,” McKay testily replied.
“I didn’t do anything,” Ronon said, feeling very much like he had done something—or hadn’t done something—but he couldn’t remember what. And if he couldn’t remember, how would McKay even know? Therefore, he hadn’t done anything.
But McKay just scowled and jabbed his finger in the direction of something behind Ronon. “Didn’t you just touch that?”
Ronon turned around, his eyes finding the cylinder again. Right, he had touched that. He couldn’t remember why.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “It’s just an oversized paperweight.”
Even as he said the words, he felt like they’d come from somebody else, like he was just repeating something he’d heard before. He was frowning again, still confused but not sure why he was confused, which only made him more confused.
McKay raised his eyebrows in mock surprise and put his hands on his hips. “Oh, and how would you know that it’s just a paperweight?”
“There’s nothing on it,” Ronon gruffly explained. “It’s just a tube.”
McKay gave him an imperious stare, before turning to address the room at large. “Well, I don’t like relying on luck to keep us not dead, especially where the Ancients are concerned, so new rule: nobody touches anything unless I’ve looked at it first, understood?”
“A bit heavy on the bossiness, there, McKay.”
“If you want to kill us all, I can name five ways off the top of my head that I would prefer to you screwing around with some abandoned Ancient device, Sheppard. So you’re going to keep your hands to yourself this time.”
All of a sudden, without understanding why, Ronon knew he had to get out of the room. He brushed past McKay, missing seeing surprise replace the glower on his face. Sheppard caught his gaze as he neared the door, though, and Ronon could see the questions in his eyes. In answer, he subtly shook his head. There was nothing for Sheppard to worry about, at least not that Ronon knew, because Ronon didn’t even understand what was bothering him anyway. Sheppard gave a similarly subtle nod, and focused back on McKay as Ronon stepped out into the hallway.
“C’mon, Rodney. Next room, chop chop. We’ve got a whole facility to explore, and there’s nothing of interest here.”
“But—!”
“We will be careful, Rodney,” Teyla reassured him, “but we have a lot of ground to cover. We should move on.”
Feeling marginally better now that he was in the hall, Ronon looked back inside the room at McKay. The conflicted look on McKay’s face clearly showed how torn he was between his desire to have the last word and his desire to see more of the facility. But after throwing a final disheartened glance around the space, it seemed discovering things he could actually tinker with won out, and he stomped to the door with an aggrieved sigh.
“Fine, but I get to decide whether we leave the next room so quickly or not.”
Sheppard gestured with his head for Ronon to move them on. “So long as you make that decision within five minutes of me deciding it’s a worthless room, then sure,” he told McKay.
Behind Ronon, McKay huffed in annoyance and began bickering with Sheppard, but Ronon wasn’t listening. As much as he’d wanted to leave the room they’d just been in, the closer he got to the next one, the more he wanted to go back. And he couldn’t understand why.
He’d been caught off guard by McKay’s reprimand back in the other room, when he’d touched the cylinder. Or, even more so, he’d been caught off guard by his own behavior. He didn’t touch things a lot—unlike Sheppard—so he was probably just feeling a bit guilty about doing something so uncharacteristic. That was when his uneasiness had started, anyway, so that had to be the cause.
Still, the shadowy rectangle of the corridor branch they were approaching seemed ominous in a way that Ronon couldn’t shake. When he finally drew level with it and looked in, he could see that the short hallway was actually well-lit and not dark at all, absolutely no different from where he was standing looking into it. Ten feet inside it was a doorway, the door already invitingly open. Pushing aside his lingering unease, he started toward it.
Even before he took two steps, he knew that there would be a second door beyond the first one. He stopped just outside the outer door and looked back at McKay.
“It has two doors,” Ronon told him. “Should we go in?”
McKay seemed a little surprised by the question, but he did contemplate it for a few seconds before he answered. “It might be a medical lab, but since the doors are already open we would’ve been exposed to anything that might be in there as soon as we opened the door topside. At least as far as breathing goes.” He gave Ronon a pointed look. “But don’t touch anything.”
Ronon knew the reminder was meant as much jokingly as it was seriously, but his chest still tightened fractionally as he stepped through the first door. If he hesitated for the barest of heartbeats before stepping through the second one, no one would have noticed.
The room behind the doors wasn’t very big, and there was nothing in it but a lab bench with a few glass bottles scattered on its surface. Somehow, Ronon knew there wouldn’t be anything in the drawers, either, and he almost said as much as McKay moved over and began opening them. Remembering how annoyed McKay had been at their abrupt exit from the previous room, though, Ronon bit his tongue and left him to it. Turning a slow circle, he studied the rest of the room instead.
Not that there was anything to study aside from the bench. Teyla had moved to the corner by the door, and Sheppard was standing between her and the exit, watching with evident amusement as McKay scraped each drawer open for inspection before bitterly shoving it closed again.
Something about the way Teyla and Sheppard were standing niggled at the back of Ronon’s mind, like he had seen them in exactly those positions before. And maybe he had; they’d been in enough abandoned Ancient facilities for this scene to have played out somewhere before.
But then Teyla titled her head back to look up at the ceiling above her, and Ronon’s stomach dropped. With fearful reluctance, he followed her gaze to the black grate in that corner of the ceiling. Then his eyes moved to the three other corners, each with their own grate. And there, in the center of the ceiling, the only light in the whole room. A large, round light.
His heart stuttered, hard, for one slow beat, then picked up again at a faster pace. Images flew through his mind almost faster than he could process them.
We’ve been here before. We came in here and the doors closed. We died here. We died here.
“We have to go!” Ronon yelled, causing the others to jump.
But it was too late. Even as he pivoted and took a step that was more like a lunge in the direction of the door, he saw Sheppard leaning toward the wall. Sheppard’s back made contact with the surface, the doors slammed shut, and Ronon heard a faint hissing.
McKay had whipped around at Ronon’s shout, and Ronon saw his annoyed gaze dart from Ronon to the closed door to Sheppard, who had pushed back off the wall. “What did you touch?” he demanded.
Sheppard gave him a defensive frown. “I didn’t touch anything, Rodney! Except the wall.” When McKay pushed him out of the way to get to the area he indicated, he added, “But there’s nothing there!”
Reflexively, Ronon moved to the door and placed his palms against it. But he didn’t push, not even when Sheppard appeared at his side and started doing just that. Sheppard was already breathing a bit fast, grunting slightly as he struggled futilely with the door. But Ronon felt almost hollow. He’d done this—they’d done this—and they hadn’t gotten out. It had all come back to him once he saw the grates: they’d died in this room and hadn’t even gotten close to finding a way out and nobody else remembered. Why didn’t anyone else remember?
McKay was frantically running his hands over the wall, muttering, “Find the panel, find the panel,” over and over to himself, the wheezing of his breath growing louder each time. Teyla was on her knees below him, searching the lower part of the wall. They weren’t going to find anything, Ronon knew. He wasn’t sure there was anything to find.
Numbly, he pushed against the door, almost like he had to. He wasn’t putting much effort into it, though. He didn’t see the point. His head was already starting to swim a bit, and his hands were shaking.
They were going to die again.
A tendril of panic rose inside him, his heart racing with it. But almost as it came it was washed away, replaced with an empty serenity. Ronon smiled to himself, certain now what he needed to do.
He stepped back from the door and watched with faint disinterest as Sheppard pushed against it, his feet scrabbling for purchase on the smooth floor as he slowly slid lower, his strength leaving him along with his breath. Stepping over him, Ronon gently pushed McKay away from the wall, nudging Teyla with his leg at the same time. Teyla didn’t move, since she had already passed out, but Ronon didn’t notice. Instead, he used what strength he had left to grab Sheppard—who was on his knees by that point, still feebly pushing at the door—and hauled him over to the wall.
Sheppard blinked at him with unfocused eyes, then smiled drunkenly, flopping a hand onto Ronon’s shoulder with an obvious lack of coordination. “Ronon, buddy,” he said, needing to take sharp breaths between each word. “What’re you doin’?”
“Trying something different this time,” Ronon forced out, before he pushed Sheppard against the wall, aiming to put him in the exact same spot he’d been before the doors had closed.
Ronon looked toward the door, sure something was supposed to have happened. It was still shut. But it was supposed to have opened; he’d put Sheppard back.
Just to make sure, he used trembling arms to pull Sheppard away from the wall and then pushed him against it again. And again. And again. McKay laughingly mumbled something like, “Put your Sheppard in and shake him all about,” and Ronon looked down at him, confused. He’d forgotten McKay was there. Why was he on the floor?
McKay stared up at him, face pink and eyes glazed. He gasped for air and his eyes cleared for a second, focusing on Ronon with penetrating terror. Then they closed and he slumped over onto his side.
“No time for sleep,” Ronon slurred out with a slow tongue.
His chest was burning and he rubbed at it, not realizing he’d released Sheppard in the process. Already unconscious, Sheppard fell to the floor in a way that would have been painful if he’d been awake. Ronon didn’t notice. He was sure he had to go somewhere. Outside? That seemed like a good plan, but he didn’t think he could walk. He’d crawl. He could do that.
But then there was a door. A door that was closed. A door he had to open. He had to push. He had to.
He put his palms against the door and blacked out even as he pushed.