If At First You Don’t Succeed: Chapter 4
Jan. 15th, 2024 11:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stringertheoryTitle: If At First You Don’t Succeed
Rating: R
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: Ronon Dex, Rodney McKay, Teyla Emmagen, John Sheppard
Word Count: 3858
Categories: action, drama, angst, hurt/comfort, team as family
Spoilers: none
Warnings: graphic violence and injuries; temporary 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.
Ronon didn’t say anything the next time.
When he regained awareness with his fingers back on the cylinder and his friends alive again, he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t tell them about the loops, about them dying, about anything. It hadn’t helped when he had; after the discussions and the decisions and the detours, he’d just led them to a different death. And since he was convinced that he had to be the cause of it all, he would also be the solution.
He couldn’t look at Teyla, couldn’t see past the image burned into his mind of her bloody and broken and half-buried. If he looked at her now he’d get caught up in the memory of her body crumpling under his and he wouldn’t be able to hold it together. So he ignored her worried gaze and McKay’s sharp inquiry and Sheppard’s confused frown and strode toward the door, murmuring about needing to check something out and that he’d be back.
Once he was out in the hall, he ran for the far corridor first, the agony of dying under the weight of the collapsed ceiling still horrifically vivid in his mind. He also knew exactly what he had to do to prevent that particular situation from happening again, which made it the easier of the two death traps to deal with.
Stepping back into the dark, musty hallway, he scowled at the brightly illuminated doors at its end. They’d been a false beacon, a deadly lure that had drawn him and the rest of the team to their demise. But they wouldn’t get that chance again.
Pulling his blaster from its holster, Ronon aimed carefully. It only took two shots to bring the ceiling down, this time with everybody out of harm’s way on the safe side. As the dust cleared to reveal a thoroughly blocked corridor, small bits of debris still tumbling past his boots, Ronon felt a weight lift from him. One area secured. One less danger to worry about.
Pivoting on his heel, he headed back down the hall to the sealing room, stopping in the little hallway just outside its doors. This threat he was less certain how to neutralize. He didn’t know how the room worked, or how it was controlled. A quick examination of the area around the outside door didn’t reveal any signs of a control panel, nor did a cautious peek into the space between it and the inner door.
Ronon debated trying to bring down enough of the room itself or the hall leading into it to block off access, but he had no way of knowing whether it would work, or if it was even safe to try. While the other hallway had already been well on its way to collapse, this one wasn’t. It would take a lot more force to damage it, and without knowing what was above it or around it, it was a risk he wasn’t willing to take.
But he wasn’t willing to leave it alone, either. So with few other options, he settled on trying to force the outer door closed, figuring that would be enough of a deterrent.
While manually opening a door like this one was practically impossible once it had sealed shut, he thought he might be able to close it easily enough, if he could just get it started moving. He might even get lucky and have it seal on its own if he did, which—given the absence of any discernible controls—would ensure that no one from the team would be able to get inside.
Helpfully, the doors for the room were designed so that they didn’t fully retract into the wall, leaving about two inches exposed for him to get a purchase on. He was a little concerned that the door might decide to slam shut once he started pulling at it, so instead of taking the more practical stance of straddling the door jam—which would put him directly in the door’s path—he stayed safely on the hall side instead. Using the corridor walls for leverage, he braced himself and tugged.
His arms trembled as he struggled to get the door moving along its track, and he grunted out a frustrated laugh, thinking of how his current efforts to prevent everyone’s deaths were an odd mirror to the two times he’d been on the inside of the room, attempting to stop the same. He was having just as much luck closing the outer door as he’d had with opening the inner one—which was to say none.
But just as he was about to give up, the door finally budged, jolting out another couple of inches in a shuddering motion that caused Ronon to lose his grip and fall against the wall behind him. The impact momentarily knocked the wind out of him, the breathless sensation unnervingly and unbearably familiar. Ronon didn’t wait for the feeling to pass before he pushed himself back upright, fingers white-knuckle tight on the door, his resolve strengthened by a blazing surge of satisfaction.
With more of the door’s surface area now exposed, he was able to shift to pushing instead of pulling, which allowed him to put his full body weight behind the effort. Inch by slow inch, he slid the door shut. There was no tell-tale hiss of it sealing, but he was sure that wouldn’t matter. He was sweaty and aching from fighting with the thing on his own; he knew no one else on the team would be able to get it open again, at least not easily and not before he could stop them.
Wiping an arm across his face, he backed out of the short corridor, watching the door the entire way, not able to trust that it wouldn’t spring back open just to spite him. But it didn’t, not even when he glanced away, toward the room where he’d left the team, and then back again. Satisfied that he’d done what he could to make things safe, he headed back for the others.
The room with the cylinder was empty.
Ronon’s stomach slowly turned over, the acrid taste of fear rising in the back of his throat. He could feel his pulse fluttering in his neck, panic shimmering at the edge of his mind, and forced himself to stop and breathe deeply for a minute.
Head clearer, he stepped back into the hall and looked up and down it, thinking. If the team had headed his way when they left, they would have crossed paths. They would have either seen him in the hall or working on the sealing door and they would have stopped. But that hadn’t happened.
Which meant they had to have gone the other way, heading back past the stairs that led to the surface and into the right-hand corridor. Ronon couldn’t imagine why they would have done so, since they hadn’t finished exploring the left-hand one yet. But then he remembered how he’d abruptly exited the cylinder room saying he was going to check on something, and how they would have seen him turn out into the hallway, heading deeper into the facility. They must have decided to split up while he was gone, leaving this hallway to him and moving on to the other one.
Ignoring the voice inside him that wondered why one of the others wouldn’t have stayed behind with him—don’t we always split into pairs? it slyly asked—he rapidly walked back toward the entrance. He looked into the stairwell out of habit as he passed, but didn’t stop. The others were still in the facility, he knew that, could feel it in his bones.
At the other end of the main hallway, he turned left. This corridor was longer, and looked to only have more hallways branching off from it, as opposed to doors leading directly into rooms. Ronon’s heart dropped for a second; there were at least six branching hallways that he could see, with no telling how many rooms on each. If the others had split up to each explore alone, it might take him ages to find them all. He thought of the death-to-room ratio they’d experienced in the parts of the facility he’d seen so far and felt a little sick.
He wasn’t carrying a radio—he didn’t always take one, they were always in pairs at a minimum, he didn’t need to have one most of the time—and hated himself for a heartbeat. If he’d had one, he could have used it and gotten everyone back together easily.
Then he recalled how they’d found more than one Ancient facility to be shielded, even blocking radio signals coming from inside it, and decided it didn’t matter anyway. He’d just have to track them down the hard way.
Setting his jaw, he strode to the first connecting hallway and turned into it. There were only three rooms on it—one to each side, and one at the end. All were small and empty of either his teammates or anything of interest.
The next one was the same: just two rooms, larger than the three on the first hallway, but equally devoid of anything Ronon was looking for.
He was about to turn into the third hallway when he heard the screams.
They sounded as if they were both live nearby and broadcast through the static of a radio, and he spun on the spot, trying to pinpoint where they were coming from. There was an odd echo in the sound, but he could tell it was Teyla, Teyla in agony and somewhere, somewhere, but he didn’t know where.
Blindly, with only intuition guiding him, Ronon turned and ran further into the facility. He would pause for a half step at each hallway branch, staring down it half in hope, half in dread. The screaming was getting fainter, less sharp agony and more resigned torture, and the fading of it felt like the countdown of a clock, driving him on.
Then it stopped entirely and Ronon stumbled to a halt, chest heaving. He turned a circle again, more slowly this time, both wanting the screaming to come back so that he had something to follow, some sign that Teyla was still alive, and wanting to never hear those sounds from her again.
He got part of his wish, as Teyla’s voice didn’t return. Instead, it was Sheppard this time, his screams rough and guttural and somehow sounding farther away than Teyla’s had.
Ronon set out at a run again, with no clearer idea of where to go than he’d had before. All he knew was that he had to get to the team, wherever they were. And since that wasn’t where he was, he ran.
Sheppard’s screams had started to sound more like cries. Ronon felt there was something knowing in them, like whatever Sheppard was going through was something he’d been through before, like he was suffering all of those instances at the same time and not just the new one alone. That thought wasn’t comforting, given what Ronon knew of Sheppard’s past, and he picked up the pace. He was desperate to find Sheppard before his voice faded, too, desperate to be the one to stop whatever was hurting him instead of whatever it was stopping Sheppard.
Ronon no longer knew where he was in the facility, his mental map crumpled into a ball and kicked into the corner of his mind by his frantic race through the halls. At times he thought he was getting close to the others, then the sounds would seem to shift direction, leaving him spinning in place, trying to decide which way to go again.
When Sheppard’s screaming finally stopped, Ronon was at an intersection in the hallway, this one a cross with two long halls branching off at either side. He knew what was coming next, what had to be coming next, and he braced himself for McKay’s screams. They came all too quickly, loud and nearby. Nearby enough that Ronon’s head snapped to the left when they started, toward that hallway.
Reflexively he headed in that direction, his body instinctively taking him to McKay before he even made the conscious decision to move. He jogged along, glancing into each room or hallway intersection he passed but knowing McKay wasn’t in any of them. He could tell he was getting closer, the sounds of torture clearer than they had been before, and he had followed them about halfway down the hall when they suddenly cut off.
Ronon skidded to a halt in surprise. Teyla’s and Sheppard’s screams had faded into nothing at the end, like they’d been suffering right up to the point of unconsciousness. Or death. What was happening to McKay?
He’d been pretty sure McKay was just ahead, somewhere in the hallway that split off to his right, and he cautiously approached it and peered into its dim expanse. At first, he thought it was empty. Then he spotted something on the ground, tucked up against the right-hand wall a few dozen meters into the hallway.
Again, his body moved of its own accord, hurrying him toward the form even as he recognized it as McKay. He was lying on his side, face turned toward the floor, and Ronon faltered for a split second—he looked dead.
Grief and helplessness twisting inside him so tightly he could barely breathe, Ronon knelt beside McKay and gently turned him onto his back. Whatever else he had been feeling was rapidly swept aside by rage once he took in McKay’s appearance, though. The wrinkles that hadn’t been on his face earlier that day. The slightness of his frame, as if he shrunk in on himself. The tears in his shirt, just over the center of his chest, and the bloody mark beneath them.
Wraith.
Fury raced through Ronon’s veins like fire, fueled by grief and his own sense of failure. He’d tried to save the team from death on the other side of the facility, only to leave them to stumble into Pegasus’ greatest danger on this side. Quivering with the surge of emotion, he looked back over his shoulder for any signs of the Wraith, his hunter instincts kicking into gear and nothing left on his mind but savage revenge.
Then McKay moved under his hands.
It felt like the planet itself had shifted. Ronon almost fell over in shock, and it took him a second or two to process that McKay was alive as he blinked down at him, caught somewhere between horror and hope. Gingerly slipping an arm under McKay’s shoulders, Ronon carefully shifted him to sit up against the wall.
Ronon looked him over, not sure what to do and even less sure there was anything he could do. He’d been convinced McKay was dead, and everything about the way he looked said he was still close to it. But he squinted up at Ronon with such a familiar expression—harried annoyance mixed with fear—that Ronon almost smiled.
“Wraith,” McKay croaked, the effects of his screaming and the feeding having damaged his voice, too. “There’s a Wraith.”
Ronon nodded grimly. “I know. I could hear—” He cut himself off with a hard swallow, knowing Teyla and Sheppard were already dead. “I tried to get here faster.”
McKay shook his head, face contorting with pain from the effort, and focused milky eyes on Ronon’s face. “Not your fault,” he haltingly managed.
“No, it’s the Wraith’s,” Ronon spat.
The part of his mind that wasn’t caught up in grief or rage wondered how the Wraith had gotten into the facility in the first place. Had it followed them to the planet? Or been on the planet already and happened to see them go in? Or found the door open and came in itself, without knowing anyone else was around?
McKay seemed to know what he was thinking, because he said, “Stasis chamber.”
Ronon looked back at him. “It was in a stasis chamber?”
“Accidentally opened it,” McKay added. “Thought controls were for a different room.”
He ended the final word on a cough that caused his whole body to convulse. Ronon held on to his shoulder to keep him from toppling over during the spasms, then helped ease him back against the wall once they had stopped. Eyes closed and head resting against the wall, McKay pulled in a few shallow, shaky, water-logged breaths. It sounded like his lungs were giving out, and Ronon could see blood bubbling up in the wounds on his chest as he breathed. When McKay opened his eyes again, he was looking past Ronon, gaze dazed and distant.
“Wraith,” he repeated.
Ronon tried not to show his concern, sure McKay’s mind was giving out, too, and would be taking his body with it shortly. He just nodded again. “I know.”
“Wraith,” McKay rasped, with more urgency this time. His arms twitched, like he wanted to lift them but couldn’t manage it.
Heart aching, Ronon took one of his hands in his own. “I’ll find it and I’ll kill it,” he fiercely promised. “But first I need to take care of you.”
McKay shook his head, or at least attempted to, and the jerking motion was enough to give Ronon pause. He studied McKay’s face more closely, fully focusing on it like he hadn’t been able to bring himself to since he’d turned McKay over and seen the effects of the Wraith’s feeding. Behind the milkiness of McKay’s eyes, Ronon could see a sharp clarity, a growing fear. A second later, Ronon felt the same fear roll over him, like a wave of ankle deep, frigid water appearing out of nowhere.
If he hadn’t still been reeling from multiple deaths—his own, and the others’—Ronon might not have been so careless. If Teyla’s and Sheppard’s screams hadn’t still been echoing in his ears, he might have sensed the Wraith coming. If he hadn’t been so distracted by McKay’s state, he might have been able to recognize McKay’s warning for what it was and turned in time. But he didn’t.
When he thought about it later—when he had nightmares about it later—Ronon wasn’t sure whether he’d turned and then the Wraith grabbed him, or if the Wraith had grabbed him and turned him itself. It might have been a bit of both. But the end result was the same. He wound up pinned to the wall across from McKay, one of the Wraith’s hands around his neck and the other slamming his wrist against the wall, knocking his blaster away before he could fire it. Even as the gun hit the ground, the Wraith released its grip on his neck and slammed its hand against his chest.
The pain was immediate and consuming and full of memories that would have been crippling on their own. But Ronon refused to react to it, biting his tongue until he tasted blood and glaring at the Wraith through watering eyes. The Wraith just grinned in response.
“I always like to use fresh bait when it’s available,” it sneered with a backward glance at McKay, who stared back in feeble horror. “It always catches the best meals.”
Ronon clawed at the Wraith with his free hand, focusing on pulling its feeding hand away. Because it was so close to him, he couldn’t kick at it or put much power behind the punches he threw, but he bucked his body, hoping to force them away from the wall a bit and get more room. It didn’t work. The hand that was still around his wrist just squeezed tighter, bones grinding together and then breaking under the pressure with an audible, wet crack that made McKay flinch. Ronon determinedly clenched his teeth together, so hard the muscles in his jaw twitched from the strain, but he still wasn’t able stop the moan of pain that tore through him.
From the glint in the Wraith’s eyes, Ronon knew the break had been deliberate. From the satisfied intake of breath it took immediately afterwards, he thought it might have been done to improve his flavor; the Wraith seemed to savor the taste of pain.
Everything was pain now, though, all of it the same and yet different. If Ronon wanted to, he could have picked out each part of his body and described exactly how it hurt: stabbing, contorting, aching, throbbing, crushing. But really they were all just different words for dying.
He was dying, being killed by a Wraith after all, and this time he wasn’t getting out of it. It felt unnecessarily cruel, and if anything could have given him the strength to get away, the injustice of it all would have. But his weakening struggles barely even seemed to register for the Wraith, who kept its eyes on Ronon’s, clearly enjoying his slow and agonizing demise.
Beyond his own cries, as if from a distance, Ronon could hear McKay. He was frailly demanding the Wraith stop, issuing empty threats that rapidly dissolved into desperate pleas. The rawness in his voice hurt Ronon just to hear, and he couldn’t imagine what it was costing McKay to even talk. But Ronon knew what it was costing him, and he licked dry lips with a dry tongue and breathed around the burning in his chest and pushed out one word.
“Stop.”
The Wraith smiled mockingly. “Not until I’ve eaten everything I’ve been served.”
Ronon ignored him, gathering what remained of his strength. “McKay, stop.”
“Ronon…”
The anguish in his name was enough to tear Ronon’s gaze away from the Wraith and focus it on McKay. He was distantly alarmed to see that McKay was crying, the weak trickle of tears that only occurs in the utterly defeated, those too far gone not to cry and too far gone to fully cry. It was hard to see him that way, somehow worse than what the Wraith had done to him, and Ronon almost looked away again. But he forced himself to hold McKay’s gaze, not wanting him to feel alone despite the fact that he was watching Ronon die.
“It’s okay.” The pain was fading, and Ronon couldn’t manage more than gravelly whisper. “We’ll try again.”
For the first time since their first deaths, he actually hoped to wake up back in the room with the cylinder, to get another chance at getting things right. He could tell he was close to death, could feel it with the same certainty that he had known the sun was shining on his shoulders back in the woods above ground. But he wasn’t ready to be done, didn’t want this to be the way things ended. And if the damn loop would give him anything, it wouldn’t be.
McKay was frowning at him, confused, but Ronon didn’t realize, not remembering that he hadn’t told the others about the loops this go around. Instead, as his vision went dark, he weakly warned, “Don’t touch any buttons next time, McKay.”
His last memory was the faint hiccup of McKay’s laughter.
Rating: R
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: Ronon Dex, Rodney McKay, Teyla Emmagen, John Sheppard
Word Count: 3858
Categories: action, drama, angst, hurt/comfort, team as family
Spoilers: none
Warnings: graphic violence and injuries; temporary 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.
Ronon didn’t say anything the next time.
When he regained awareness with his fingers back on the cylinder and his friends alive again, he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t tell them about the loops, about them dying, about anything. It hadn’t helped when he had; after the discussions and the decisions and the detours, he’d just led them to a different death. And since he was convinced that he had to be the cause of it all, he would also be the solution.
He couldn’t look at Teyla, couldn’t see past the image burned into his mind of her bloody and broken and half-buried. If he looked at her now he’d get caught up in the memory of her body crumpling under his and he wouldn’t be able to hold it together. So he ignored her worried gaze and McKay’s sharp inquiry and Sheppard’s confused frown and strode toward the door, murmuring about needing to check something out and that he’d be back.
Once he was out in the hall, he ran for the far corridor first, the agony of dying under the weight of the collapsed ceiling still horrifically vivid in his mind. He also knew exactly what he had to do to prevent that particular situation from happening again, which made it the easier of the two death traps to deal with.
Stepping back into the dark, musty hallway, he scowled at the brightly illuminated doors at its end. They’d been a false beacon, a deadly lure that had drawn him and the rest of the team to their demise. But they wouldn’t get that chance again.
Pulling his blaster from its holster, Ronon aimed carefully. It only took two shots to bring the ceiling down, this time with everybody out of harm’s way on the safe side. As the dust cleared to reveal a thoroughly blocked corridor, small bits of debris still tumbling past his boots, Ronon felt a weight lift from him. One area secured. One less danger to worry about.
Pivoting on his heel, he headed back down the hall to the sealing room, stopping in the little hallway just outside its doors. This threat he was less certain how to neutralize. He didn’t know how the room worked, or how it was controlled. A quick examination of the area around the outside door didn’t reveal any signs of a control panel, nor did a cautious peek into the space between it and the inner door.
Ronon debated trying to bring down enough of the room itself or the hall leading into it to block off access, but he had no way of knowing whether it would work, or if it was even safe to try. While the other hallway had already been well on its way to collapse, this one wasn’t. It would take a lot more force to damage it, and without knowing what was above it or around it, it was a risk he wasn’t willing to take.
But he wasn’t willing to leave it alone, either. So with few other options, he settled on trying to force the outer door closed, figuring that would be enough of a deterrent.
While manually opening a door like this one was practically impossible once it had sealed shut, he thought he might be able to close it easily enough, if he could just get it started moving. He might even get lucky and have it seal on its own if he did, which—given the absence of any discernible controls—would ensure that no one from the team would be able to get inside.
Helpfully, the doors for the room were designed so that they didn’t fully retract into the wall, leaving about two inches exposed for him to get a purchase on. He was a little concerned that the door might decide to slam shut once he started pulling at it, so instead of taking the more practical stance of straddling the door jam—which would put him directly in the door’s path—he stayed safely on the hall side instead. Using the corridor walls for leverage, he braced himself and tugged.
His arms trembled as he struggled to get the door moving along its track, and he grunted out a frustrated laugh, thinking of how his current efforts to prevent everyone’s deaths were an odd mirror to the two times he’d been on the inside of the room, attempting to stop the same. He was having just as much luck closing the outer door as he’d had with opening the inner one—which was to say none.
But just as he was about to give up, the door finally budged, jolting out another couple of inches in a shuddering motion that caused Ronon to lose his grip and fall against the wall behind him. The impact momentarily knocked the wind out of him, the breathless sensation unnervingly and unbearably familiar. Ronon didn’t wait for the feeling to pass before he pushed himself back upright, fingers white-knuckle tight on the door, his resolve strengthened by a blazing surge of satisfaction.
With more of the door’s surface area now exposed, he was able to shift to pushing instead of pulling, which allowed him to put his full body weight behind the effort. Inch by slow inch, he slid the door shut. There was no tell-tale hiss of it sealing, but he was sure that wouldn’t matter. He was sweaty and aching from fighting with the thing on his own; he knew no one else on the team would be able to get it open again, at least not easily and not before he could stop them.
Wiping an arm across his face, he backed out of the short corridor, watching the door the entire way, not able to trust that it wouldn’t spring back open just to spite him. But it didn’t, not even when he glanced away, toward the room where he’d left the team, and then back again. Satisfied that he’d done what he could to make things safe, he headed back for the others.
The room with the cylinder was empty.
Ronon’s stomach slowly turned over, the acrid taste of fear rising in the back of his throat. He could feel his pulse fluttering in his neck, panic shimmering at the edge of his mind, and forced himself to stop and breathe deeply for a minute.
Head clearer, he stepped back into the hall and looked up and down it, thinking. If the team had headed his way when they left, they would have crossed paths. They would have either seen him in the hall or working on the sealing door and they would have stopped. But that hadn’t happened.
Which meant they had to have gone the other way, heading back past the stairs that led to the surface and into the right-hand corridor. Ronon couldn’t imagine why they would have done so, since they hadn’t finished exploring the left-hand one yet. But then he remembered how he’d abruptly exited the cylinder room saying he was going to check on something, and how they would have seen him turn out into the hallway, heading deeper into the facility. They must have decided to split up while he was gone, leaving this hallway to him and moving on to the other one.
Ignoring the voice inside him that wondered why one of the others wouldn’t have stayed behind with him—don’t we always split into pairs? it slyly asked—he rapidly walked back toward the entrance. He looked into the stairwell out of habit as he passed, but didn’t stop. The others were still in the facility, he knew that, could feel it in his bones.
At the other end of the main hallway, he turned left. This corridor was longer, and looked to only have more hallways branching off from it, as opposed to doors leading directly into rooms. Ronon’s heart dropped for a second; there were at least six branching hallways that he could see, with no telling how many rooms on each. If the others had split up to each explore alone, it might take him ages to find them all. He thought of the death-to-room ratio they’d experienced in the parts of the facility he’d seen so far and felt a little sick.
He wasn’t carrying a radio—he didn’t always take one, they were always in pairs at a minimum, he didn’t need to have one most of the time—and hated himself for a heartbeat. If he’d had one, he could have used it and gotten everyone back together easily.
Then he recalled how they’d found more than one Ancient facility to be shielded, even blocking radio signals coming from inside it, and decided it didn’t matter anyway. He’d just have to track them down the hard way.
Setting his jaw, he strode to the first connecting hallway and turned into it. There were only three rooms on it—one to each side, and one at the end. All were small and empty of either his teammates or anything of interest.
The next one was the same: just two rooms, larger than the three on the first hallway, but equally devoid of anything Ronon was looking for.
He was about to turn into the third hallway when he heard the screams.
They sounded as if they were both live nearby and broadcast through the static of a radio, and he spun on the spot, trying to pinpoint where they were coming from. There was an odd echo in the sound, but he could tell it was Teyla, Teyla in agony and somewhere, somewhere, but he didn’t know where.
Blindly, with only intuition guiding him, Ronon turned and ran further into the facility. He would pause for a half step at each hallway branch, staring down it half in hope, half in dread. The screaming was getting fainter, less sharp agony and more resigned torture, and the fading of it felt like the countdown of a clock, driving him on.
Then it stopped entirely and Ronon stumbled to a halt, chest heaving. He turned a circle again, more slowly this time, both wanting the screaming to come back so that he had something to follow, some sign that Teyla was still alive, and wanting to never hear those sounds from her again.
He got part of his wish, as Teyla’s voice didn’t return. Instead, it was Sheppard this time, his screams rough and guttural and somehow sounding farther away than Teyla’s had.
Ronon set out at a run again, with no clearer idea of where to go than he’d had before. All he knew was that he had to get to the team, wherever they were. And since that wasn’t where he was, he ran.
Sheppard’s screams had started to sound more like cries. Ronon felt there was something knowing in them, like whatever Sheppard was going through was something he’d been through before, like he was suffering all of those instances at the same time and not just the new one alone. That thought wasn’t comforting, given what Ronon knew of Sheppard’s past, and he picked up the pace. He was desperate to find Sheppard before his voice faded, too, desperate to be the one to stop whatever was hurting him instead of whatever it was stopping Sheppard.
Ronon no longer knew where he was in the facility, his mental map crumpled into a ball and kicked into the corner of his mind by his frantic race through the halls. At times he thought he was getting close to the others, then the sounds would seem to shift direction, leaving him spinning in place, trying to decide which way to go again.
When Sheppard’s screaming finally stopped, Ronon was at an intersection in the hallway, this one a cross with two long halls branching off at either side. He knew what was coming next, what had to be coming next, and he braced himself for McKay’s screams. They came all too quickly, loud and nearby. Nearby enough that Ronon’s head snapped to the left when they started, toward that hallway.
Reflexively he headed in that direction, his body instinctively taking him to McKay before he even made the conscious decision to move. He jogged along, glancing into each room or hallway intersection he passed but knowing McKay wasn’t in any of them. He could tell he was getting closer, the sounds of torture clearer than they had been before, and he had followed them about halfway down the hall when they suddenly cut off.
Ronon skidded to a halt in surprise. Teyla’s and Sheppard’s screams had faded into nothing at the end, like they’d been suffering right up to the point of unconsciousness. Or death. What was happening to McKay?
He’d been pretty sure McKay was just ahead, somewhere in the hallway that split off to his right, and he cautiously approached it and peered into its dim expanse. At first, he thought it was empty. Then he spotted something on the ground, tucked up against the right-hand wall a few dozen meters into the hallway.
Again, his body moved of its own accord, hurrying him toward the form even as he recognized it as McKay. He was lying on his side, face turned toward the floor, and Ronon faltered for a split second—he looked dead.
Grief and helplessness twisting inside him so tightly he could barely breathe, Ronon knelt beside McKay and gently turned him onto his back. Whatever else he had been feeling was rapidly swept aside by rage once he took in McKay’s appearance, though. The wrinkles that hadn’t been on his face earlier that day. The slightness of his frame, as if he shrunk in on himself. The tears in his shirt, just over the center of his chest, and the bloody mark beneath them.
Wraith.
Fury raced through Ronon’s veins like fire, fueled by grief and his own sense of failure. He’d tried to save the team from death on the other side of the facility, only to leave them to stumble into Pegasus’ greatest danger on this side. Quivering with the surge of emotion, he looked back over his shoulder for any signs of the Wraith, his hunter instincts kicking into gear and nothing left on his mind but savage revenge.
Then McKay moved under his hands.
It felt like the planet itself had shifted. Ronon almost fell over in shock, and it took him a second or two to process that McKay was alive as he blinked down at him, caught somewhere between horror and hope. Gingerly slipping an arm under McKay’s shoulders, Ronon carefully shifted him to sit up against the wall.
Ronon looked him over, not sure what to do and even less sure there was anything he could do. He’d been convinced McKay was dead, and everything about the way he looked said he was still close to it. But he squinted up at Ronon with such a familiar expression—harried annoyance mixed with fear—that Ronon almost smiled.
“Wraith,” McKay croaked, the effects of his screaming and the feeding having damaged his voice, too. “There’s a Wraith.”
Ronon nodded grimly. “I know. I could hear—” He cut himself off with a hard swallow, knowing Teyla and Sheppard were already dead. “I tried to get here faster.”
McKay shook his head, face contorting with pain from the effort, and focused milky eyes on Ronon’s face. “Not your fault,” he haltingly managed.
“No, it’s the Wraith’s,” Ronon spat.
The part of his mind that wasn’t caught up in grief or rage wondered how the Wraith had gotten into the facility in the first place. Had it followed them to the planet? Or been on the planet already and happened to see them go in? Or found the door open and came in itself, without knowing anyone else was around?
McKay seemed to know what he was thinking, because he said, “Stasis chamber.”
Ronon looked back at him. “It was in a stasis chamber?”
“Accidentally opened it,” McKay added. “Thought controls were for a different room.”
He ended the final word on a cough that caused his whole body to convulse. Ronon held on to his shoulder to keep him from toppling over during the spasms, then helped ease him back against the wall once they had stopped. Eyes closed and head resting against the wall, McKay pulled in a few shallow, shaky, water-logged breaths. It sounded like his lungs were giving out, and Ronon could see blood bubbling up in the wounds on his chest as he breathed. When McKay opened his eyes again, he was looking past Ronon, gaze dazed and distant.
“Wraith,” he repeated.
Ronon tried not to show his concern, sure McKay’s mind was giving out, too, and would be taking his body with it shortly. He just nodded again. “I know.”
“Wraith,” McKay rasped, with more urgency this time. His arms twitched, like he wanted to lift them but couldn’t manage it.
Heart aching, Ronon took one of his hands in his own. “I’ll find it and I’ll kill it,” he fiercely promised. “But first I need to take care of you.”
McKay shook his head, or at least attempted to, and the jerking motion was enough to give Ronon pause. He studied McKay’s face more closely, fully focusing on it like he hadn’t been able to bring himself to since he’d turned McKay over and seen the effects of the Wraith’s feeding. Behind the milkiness of McKay’s eyes, Ronon could see a sharp clarity, a growing fear. A second later, Ronon felt the same fear roll over him, like a wave of ankle deep, frigid water appearing out of nowhere.
If he hadn’t still been reeling from multiple deaths—his own, and the others’—Ronon might not have been so careless. If Teyla’s and Sheppard’s screams hadn’t still been echoing in his ears, he might have sensed the Wraith coming. If he hadn’t been so distracted by McKay’s state, he might have been able to recognize McKay’s warning for what it was and turned in time. But he didn’t.
When he thought about it later—when he had nightmares about it later—Ronon wasn’t sure whether he’d turned and then the Wraith grabbed him, or if the Wraith had grabbed him and turned him itself. It might have been a bit of both. But the end result was the same. He wound up pinned to the wall across from McKay, one of the Wraith’s hands around his neck and the other slamming his wrist against the wall, knocking his blaster away before he could fire it. Even as the gun hit the ground, the Wraith released its grip on his neck and slammed its hand against his chest.
The pain was immediate and consuming and full of memories that would have been crippling on their own. But Ronon refused to react to it, biting his tongue until he tasted blood and glaring at the Wraith through watering eyes. The Wraith just grinned in response.
“I always like to use fresh bait when it’s available,” it sneered with a backward glance at McKay, who stared back in feeble horror. “It always catches the best meals.”
Ronon clawed at the Wraith with his free hand, focusing on pulling its feeding hand away. Because it was so close to him, he couldn’t kick at it or put much power behind the punches he threw, but he bucked his body, hoping to force them away from the wall a bit and get more room. It didn’t work. The hand that was still around his wrist just squeezed tighter, bones grinding together and then breaking under the pressure with an audible, wet crack that made McKay flinch. Ronon determinedly clenched his teeth together, so hard the muscles in his jaw twitched from the strain, but he still wasn’t able stop the moan of pain that tore through him.
From the glint in the Wraith’s eyes, Ronon knew the break had been deliberate. From the satisfied intake of breath it took immediately afterwards, he thought it might have been done to improve his flavor; the Wraith seemed to savor the taste of pain.
Everything was pain now, though, all of it the same and yet different. If Ronon wanted to, he could have picked out each part of his body and described exactly how it hurt: stabbing, contorting, aching, throbbing, crushing. But really they were all just different words for dying.
He was dying, being killed by a Wraith after all, and this time he wasn’t getting out of it. It felt unnecessarily cruel, and if anything could have given him the strength to get away, the injustice of it all would have. But his weakening struggles barely even seemed to register for the Wraith, who kept its eyes on Ronon’s, clearly enjoying his slow and agonizing demise.
Beyond his own cries, as if from a distance, Ronon could hear McKay. He was frailly demanding the Wraith stop, issuing empty threats that rapidly dissolved into desperate pleas. The rawness in his voice hurt Ronon just to hear, and he couldn’t imagine what it was costing McKay to even talk. But Ronon knew what it was costing him, and he licked dry lips with a dry tongue and breathed around the burning in his chest and pushed out one word.
“Stop.”
The Wraith smiled mockingly. “Not until I’ve eaten everything I’ve been served.”
Ronon ignored him, gathering what remained of his strength. “McKay, stop.”
“Ronon…”
The anguish in his name was enough to tear Ronon’s gaze away from the Wraith and focus it on McKay. He was distantly alarmed to see that McKay was crying, the weak trickle of tears that only occurs in the utterly defeated, those too far gone not to cry and too far gone to fully cry. It was hard to see him that way, somehow worse than what the Wraith had done to him, and Ronon almost looked away again. But he forced himself to hold McKay’s gaze, not wanting him to feel alone despite the fact that he was watching Ronon die.
“It’s okay.” The pain was fading, and Ronon couldn’t manage more than gravelly whisper. “We’ll try again.”
For the first time since their first deaths, he actually hoped to wake up back in the room with the cylinder, to get another chance at getting things right. He could tell he was close to death, could feel it with the same certainty that he had known the sun was shining on his shoulders back in the woods above ground. But he wasn’t ready to be done, didn’t want this to be the way things ended. And if the damn loop would give him anything, it wouldn’t be.
McKay was frowning at him, confused, but Ronon didn’t realize, not remembering that he hadn’t told the others about the loops this go around. Instead, as his vision went dark, he weakly warned, “Don’t touch any buttons next time, McKay.”
His last memory was the faint hiccup of McKay’s laughter.