stringertheory (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stringertheory) wrote2024-01-28 04:34 pm
stringertheory) wrote2024-01-28 04:34 pm
If At First You Don’t Succeed: Chapter 6
Title: If At First You Don’t Succeed
Rating: R
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: Ronon Dex, Rodney McKay, Teyla Emmagen, John Sheppard
Word Count: 4011
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.
Coming back into his own body took Ronon longer this time, as if his mind were lagging behind, reluctant to return to the place where it had just suffered so much.
The first thing Ronon was aware of was McKay’s cool fingers as they wrapped around his wrist and sternly pulled his hand away from the cylinder Ronon’s brain hadn’t yet registered he was touching. McKay’s expression was irritation and bewilderment, and Ronon blinked dumbly at him for a few seconds, still mentally regaining his temporal footing.
He knew—he remembered—that the loop started with a question from McKay. And while he hadn’t actually heard it this time, he knew what had been said. Just like he knew exactly what expressions Sheppard and Teyla would be wearing when he turned around.
He was back at the beginning, in another brief reprieve from endless death.
The familiar and unassuming landscape of the empty lab suddenly seemed sinister, the sight of his teammates—unharmed and unknowing—as much harrowing as it was reassuring. They were alive, but they kept dying, and Ronon had no idea what to do.
It was that overwhelming sense of helplessness that finally yanked him fully back into himself. Awareness snapped into place with unpleasant abruptness, and he jerked his arm out of McKay’s grasp more roughly than he’d meant to. There wasn’t much finesse to any of his movements at the moment, though, and McKay seemed to pick up on that, since his responding frown was more confused than affronted.
Ronon took a stumbling step back, his gaze raking around the room. The others were watching him with varying levels of concern, and that image, so similar to so many of the previous loops, was the final trigger. He had to get out of the room, had to actually do something that didn’t feel like fumbling from one death to another, and he had to do it now.
Throat tight, he managed to push out a gruff, “Stay here,” and, hoping they would actually listen, he fled.
It felt like he found himself back in the crumbling hallway almost as soon as he thought about being there, the trip not even a shadow in his mind. Ronon knew why he’d been drawn there, had his blaster in his hand even before he turned the corner. The cracks and groans of the ceiling breaking away under his shots, the roar and rumble of it all coming down, were exactly what he needed. The enveloping physicality of the destruction—the dust that filled the air, the small bits of rubble that bounced past his feet and out into the hall—was oddly soothing. Standing there, watching the cascade of debris slow to stillness, he no longer felt like he was coming out of his skin. He’d done something tangible, and even if it wouldn’t matter in the end it was making him feel better in the moment.
He almost headed straight back to the others then, considering himself purged enough to face them. But without really thinking about it he turned left and headed up the stairs at the end of the main hall instead. The last place he’d died—where they’d died—was right at the end, an unremarkable and ominous door that he was going to make sure could never open again.
While Ronon didn’t know a lot about Ancient technology, he did know how to disable a door; McKay had taught him which crystal to remove to render the control panel inoperable. But he also knew that McKay knew how to fix that. And as he popped off the panel cover and tossed it aside, he knew that the gentle solution wasn’t what he was looking for anyway.
Grabbing his fear and frustration tight, Ronon reared back and drove his heel into the control panel. His skin prickled with unpleasant muscle memory as the damaged innards sparked and flared, the shattered crystals momentarily emitting a spastic glow before going dark. He hovered for a moment longer, wanting to make sure the door wouldn’t automatically open with the loss of power. It stayed shut, though, and when his exploratory shoves at its surface didn’t elicit a response, he turned and left.
On the way back to the others, he hesitated at the sealing room hallway. He didn’t actually need to deal with it; if he’d gotten anything out of the last loop, it was learning that as long as the team stayed with him, he could keep them away from the areas he already knew were dangerous.
But he still didn’t feel completely steady. So, on a whim, he took a few long strides into the side hall. Raising his blaster, he shot into the frame where the first door peeked out from the wall, not expecting anything to happen but figuring he could at least take out a bit more of his frustration on the place where the whole damn nightmare had started.
To his surprise, the door immediately whooshed shut. He was even pretty sure he heard it seal; at the very least, it didn’t budge when he pushed at it. Filing that information away for future loops—and not acknowledging the fact that he expected there would be more where he might need to use it—he finally retraced his steps to the cylinder room.
The rest of the team wasn’t there.
For a moment, Ronon looked wildly around the lab, wanting to believe that he’d just overlooked them, however impossible that would have been. He couldn’t understand why they would have left this time, especially since he’d told them to stay put. He didn’t think he’d been gone that long, anyway, certainly not long enough for them to think they needed to go after him.
But when he stopped to think about it, he realized he wasn’t actually sure how long it had taken him to satisfy his need for action. It felt like seconds; it felt like days. His sense of time was completely skewed, knocked off center by the loops. He had no idea how long he’d been gone and he panicked, wondering if he’d actually left the others alone for hours, triggering a frantic search and rescue operation.
Logic told him that was highly unlikely, though. If they’d been looking for him, they would have found him—he hadn’t gone that far. And between blaster fire and property destruction, he hadn’t exactly been quiet, either.
Instead, he knew with absolute certainty that they were on the other side of the facility, just like they had been before. He was sprinting through the corridors before the thought finished crossing his mind, the echoes of screams—how long ago had he heard them, now?—rattling in his ears.
He yelled the others’ names as he went, sure time was running out and danger closing in, just like it had been every time before. Risking it that he didn’t need to stop anywhere he didn’t get replies, he hastily moved deeper into the facility, quickly growing unnerved by the continued, unnatural silence. Unless everyone else had moved to a different level, they should have been able to hear him, even if only faintly. And they would have responded to his calls, which meant he should’ve been hearing them, too.
Then the thought hit him that they might already be dead.
Ronon stumbled to a halt, his body going cold. Somehow he knew it wasn’t true, though—not yet, at least. They were still alive, somewhere in the facility; he just had to find them. But he couldn’t continue to rely on silence as emptiness. Figuring he should start searching rooms where he was and work out from there, he resumed walking.
Fate or luck or the loop must have been guiding him, because he’d only checked three rooms—each small and empty—before he found the others.
He’d reached the end of the corridor he was in, where it widened slightly into a shallow chamber of sorts that contained four doors, paired together via the side and back chamber walls in the far left and right hand corners of the chamber. There were no visible control panels for any of them, and despite Ronon attempting to trigger them with motion, three of the doors—the two on the left and the one in the back wall on the right—remained stubbornly shut. The door on the right side wall was already open, though, so he stepped through it and into what was clearly some kind of control room.
The lower half of the room’s left side wall was entirely taken up by a control terminal, all lights and buttons and knobs and displays. Above that was a thick observation window. And on the other side of the window was the rest of his team.
The large, empty room they were standing in was shaped like a long, slim rectangle, with the smaller control room positioned along one of its longer sides. There was something on the far left and right walls in the room, but those areas were shadowy and with the viewpoint from the control room, Ronon couldn’t make out any details. He also couldn’t see any way into the room, but based on shape and layout, he guessed that its entrance was the other door on the right side of the chamber that he hadn’t been able to open.
The others were near that unseen entrance, but far enough out into the room that Ronon could easily see them. From the animated gestures McKay was making, and the scowl on Sheppard’s face, they appeared to be mid argument. Ronon couldn’t hear anything, though, and when he rapped on the observation window in an attempt to get their attention, the resulting thump was so muffled that only the sensation of him making contact with the glass let him know he’d actually hit it.
Though his knock hadn’t produced any sound, the motion seemed to have been enough to alert the team to his presence. Even as he pulled his hand back from the window, Teyla’s eyes shifted from Sheppard’s and McKay’s bickering figures toward him.
In the heartbeat before she registered his presence, Ronon was able to see the strain on her face. It wasn’t like Teyla to wear her distress so visibly, and Ronon felt his own unease spike at the sight. But then her expression cleared, the worry replaced by a small and faintly relieved smile. She said something to Sheppard and McKay which caused them both to turn in Ronon’s direction. On seeing Ronon, Sheppard also looked relieved, though in his case the expression still carried the tension of whatever argument he and McKay had been having.
Having spun around to face Ronon, McKay pinned him with a look Ronon couldn’t quite read. He wound up not having to, as a split second later it turned into an accusing glower, which he could understand easily enough, even without audio to convey whatever words McKay began spitting toward the window.
Figuring it wouldn’t make sense for there to be a control room if it couldn’t communicate with the room it was controlling, Ronon started searching the terminal for anything that looked like it connected to a sound system.
He found it easily enough; some of the terminal panels were almost identical to the ones in the control room in Atlantis, and it only took him seconds to find a button that looked exactly like the one that controlled the city-wide broadcast channel. Before activating it, though, he glanced back up at the window and hesitated. McKay was still going full steam—the only setting he had, from what Ronon knew—and for a few seconds Ronon debated just trying to figure out how to open the door without his help.
But another glance at the terminal and all the panels he didn’t recognize ended that line of thought. With a sigh, he pressed the intercom button.
“—only reason we even came in here, and if you hadn’t run off, this wouldn’t have happened!”
Ronon flinched slightly as the irate voice filled the control room, McKay’s words hitting closer to home than he could have known. While the team staying together hadn’t protected them any more than them being apart had, Ronon still couldn’t help but feel responsible for what occurred when he left the others alone, given that he was the only one who knew what was going on.
Teyla, however, was giving McKay a sharply disapproving stare. “This is not Ronon’s fault, Rodney.”
“Yeah, don’t blame Ronon,” Sheppard agreed. “You’re the one who said we couldn’t assume he hadn’t gone this way, McKay. And even if we did need to come this way, we could’ve just checked out this room from in there—” he jabbed a finger toward the control room window “—and moved on, but you were determined to come inside for some damn reason.”
“No one made you follow me!” McKay snapped.
“Somebody has to keep you from getting yourself killed!”
“Which is why I followed you both,” Teyla wryly cut in. She turned her exasperated stare toward Ronon. “Is there anything in there that looks like it would control the door, Ronon? There is nothing on this side.”
Reeling slightly, Ronon simply stared blankly at her for a few seconds. He hadn’t told them about the loops this time, hadn’t told them that they all kept dying. Not only had he run off, as McKay put it, but he’d left the rest of the team to walk blindly around a place that seemed determined to kill them in as many ways as possible. And he hadn’t even warned them about it. Again.
Stomach writhing with guilt, he dropped his gaze back to the terminal and started to more closely examine its various panels. “I’m not seeing anything that looks like the door controls I’m used to,” he admitted.
“That’s because it’s not a normal door control panel,” McKay snidely remarked.
Ronon cut him an annoyed glance. “You want me to just start pressing stuff, then?”
“No!”
McKay came right up to the window then, as if he might be able to crawl through it and, if his agitated expression was anything to go by, physically restrain Ronon from touching things.
“We have no idea what this room is even for; do you want to kill us all?” he exclaimed, before releasing a disgruntled sigh. “You’re going to have to describe the controls to me until we find one I recognize.”
Ronon surveyed the terminal again—there were a lot of controls—and gave McKay a doubtful look. “That might take a while.”
“Better than the alternative,” Sheppard mumbled.
Ignoring him, McKay flapped a hand at Ronon, directing him to the part of the terminal closest to the control room door. “Just start at that end and we’ll work our way across.”
Checking to make sure the intercom button would stay depressed without continuous pressure—it did, the first thing that had worked in their favor so far—Ronon moved to the end of the terminal. He described the first panel to McKay, who thought it was part of a temperature control system. Ronon asked if they should check it anyway, but McKay just snapped that he would rather not risk freezing to death—Ronon managed not to flinch this time—and they moved on.
They’d only gotten through one section of panels when a sudden noise made Ronon stop. It was a low rumbling paired with a humming whine, something that reminded him of large machinery, like engines. As he listened, the rumbling steadied and the whine softened until the sound coalesced into a kind of gravelly purr. He was staring back out into the chamber, since the sound seemed louder out there, when McKay called his name.
“Do you hear that?” Ronon asked him.
“Hear what?”
Teyla was moving toward the control room window. “I can feel it,” she said, her eyes on Ronon.
“It seems to be coming from here.” Sheppard walked slowly toward the left hand wall and the feature there Ronon still couldn’t make out.
“What are you—”
McKay had half turned to look over at Sheppard, and so Ronon saw the exact moment when he realized what was going to happen. He froze and went pale, face going blank with horror. Then he turned completely away, his back to the window. Ronon watched as he snapped his head from left to right, apparently looking at the two ends of the room, before he pivoted back around. The terror in his eyes was matched by the urgency in his voice when he told Ronon to start pushing buttons.
His own heart rate increasing in response to McKay’s behavior, Ronon frowned at him for a second. “What?”
“Just start pushing the damn buttons!” McKay repeated, his eyes wide. “Any of them! All of them!” He pressed up against the window, his fast, shallow breaths creating small fog clouds on the glass. “If you don’t get us out of here in the next fifteen seconds, we’re going to die!”
Behind him, Sheppard had started to wander toward the right hand side of the room. Teyla, hovering between him and McKay, shot Ronon a look full of fear. Without another word, Ronon started pressing buttons.
He tried to maintain a semblance of process as he frantically jabbed at the panels, not wanting to miss the right button or waste time pushing the wrong one twice. For a little while, he thought he might be able to get through them all before time ran out, that he might beat the loop and nobody would die this time. But he still had at least a third of the terminal to go when McKay’s voice distracted him.
“Sheppard! Get back!”
The humming sound was rising in pitch, and though Ronon wanted to stay focused on his task, knew it was the team’s only hope, he couldn’t help but reflexively look up. Sheppard was standing nearly in the center of the room, and as he turned in response to McKay shout, something happened.
Ronon could never describe what he saw, wasn’t even sure if there was anything to see (he thought about asking McKay, but decided he didn’t actually want to know). But he knew that something had happened because Sheppard went rigid, despite the fact that he was vibrating ever so slightly. His face was caught in surprise, mouth slightly open, eyes a little wide, still looking toward the rest of them.
Then there was pain, or at least the ghost of it, on his face. A line appeared across his midsection, just below the ribs, no more than a quarter inch thick. Or maybe it was more that something disappeared from that space, because it seemed to Ronon like that part of Sheppard just went missing, like a slice had been taken out of him by some invisible blade.
It all happened in the blink of an eye: Sheppard fine and then not fine. In that same blink, Teyla was darting toward him. McKay automatically followed suit, going after Teyla in turn.
“John!”
“Teyla, no!”
One hand still hovering over an unpressed button, Ronon watched in numb shock as Teyla stepped in front of Sheppard, arms raised toward him.
A similar line to his appeared across her at about chest height, and then Sheppard’s chest disintegrated into thin air. He crumpled to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut at the same time that McKay got hit.
Because McKay was stretching forward—seemingly trying to grab Teyla without completely following her—his line was askew, cutting across him from mid ribs on the left to the top of his right shoulder.
Teyla, still between McKay and where Sheppard had been standing, then lost her entire right side. Everything from armpit to hip bone disappeared in an instant and she collapsed in a lifeless heap beside Sheppard.
McKay stopped and stared down at them for what felt like an eternity, before he slowly and unsteadily turned and looked back at Ronon. The terror was gone from his eyes, replaced by a hollow and regretful sadness. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but before he could, his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell to his knees. He tottered there for a moment, his top half and bottom half wobbling unnaturally, like they weren’t completely connected, before gravity won and he toppled over face first.
It was over in seconds, everything happening so fast that Ronon didn’t actually feel the effects for a minute or so. Then the sorrow and agony hit him so hard that his knees buckled and he had to grab hold of the terminal to keep from falling on it. He was breathing erratically, his heart beating too hard in his chest as he struggled to process what had just happened. He could feel his fingernails cracking where they were digging into the metal of the terminal, but he was afraid that if he let go, he’d come apart.
But his friends were lying a piece of glass away from him—in pieces, the mocking voice from before said—and the only thought he could manage to hold in his brain was that he had to get to them.
Peeling his hands away from the terminal, he resumed pressing buttons, this time without any nod toward caution. It didn’t surprise him that the door control was only a handful of buttons away from the one he’d left off on. That was how the loop went: so close and so far and always ending in death.
The sound of the door opening had been lost in the slowly fading hum that still hung in the air, but Ronon knew he’d been successful from the gash of light that appeared on the floor of the room behind the glass.
In a body that felt like it didn’t fit properly, he moved in jerky steps out of the control room, through the now open door, and toward the bodies of his teammates. It hadn’t occurred to him to consider whether the room was safe before he went in. Even if it had, he wouldn’t have cared one way or the other. He had to go in. He had to see them. He didn’t care if it killed him. He half expected it would.
Even though he’d watched it happen, Ronon was still taken aback by seeing the damage to Sheppard’s and Teyla’s bodies up close. There was no blood, no mess, nothing that could visually match the horror of what had been done to them. But while the wounds left behind were clean, they were also devastatingly catastrophic. Entire portions of their torsos were just missing, as if neatly scooped out.
McKay’s injuries weren’t as immediately obvious and—remembering the last time he’d thought he’d found McKay lying dead face down on the floor—Ronon checked him for signs of life. He wasn’t surprised not to find any; even just kneeling beside him, it was easy to see how the top half of McKay’s body had slid an inch or so off-center from the lower half when he’d fallen over. His wound was less graphic, but no less severe and no less fatal than what Sheppard and Teyla had suffered.
On shaky legs, Ronon slowly rose back to his feet. He wasn’t sure what to do now, wasn’t sure he had it in him to think enough to do anything. He felt cold and afraid, which should have been a warning. But grief was still blinding despite how often he’d been through it and—for the second time—he didn’t sense the Wraith coming.
He died this time without doubt that he’d come back again, knowing the loop wouldn’t let him go so easily, wouldn’t just let him be at peace with his friends.
But he also died clinging to the knowledge that he was going to end it this time.
Rating: R
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: Ronon Dex, Rodney McKay, Teyla Emmagen, John Sheppard
Word Count: 4011
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.
Coming back into his own body took Ronon longer this time, as if his mind were lagging behind, reluctant to return to the place where it had just suffered so much.
The first thing Ronon was aware of was McKay’s cool fingers as they wrapped around his wrist and sternly pulled his hand away from the cylinder Ronon’s brain hadn’t yet registered he was touching. McKay’s expression was irritation and bewilderment, and Ronon blinked dumbly at him for a few seconds, still mentally regaining his temporal footing.
He knew—he remembered—that the loop started with a question from McKay. And while he hadn’t actually heard it this time, he knew what had been said. Just like he knew exactly what expressions Sheppard and Teyla would be wearing when he turned around.
He was back at the beginning, in another brief reprieve from endless death.
The familiar and unassuming landscape of the empty lab suddenly seemed sinister, the sight of his teammates—unharmed and unknowing—as much harrowing as it was reassuring. They were alive, but they kept dying, and Ronon had no idea what to do.
It was that overwhelming sense of helplessness that finally yanked him fully back into himself. Awareness snapped into place with unpleasant abruptness, and he jerked his arm out of McKay’s grasp more roughly than he’d meant to. There wasn’t much finesse to any of his movements at the moment, though, and McKay seemed to pick up on that, since his responding frown was more confused than affronted.
Ronon took a stumbling step back, his gaze raking around the room. The others were watching him with varying levels of concern, and that image, so similar to so many of the previous loops, was the final trigger. He had to get out of the room, had to actually do something that didn’t feel like fumbling from one death to another, and he had to do it now.
Throat tight, he managed to push out a gruff, “Stay here,” and, hoping they would actually listen, he fled.
It felt like he found himself back in the crumbling hallway almost as soon as he thought about being there, the trip not even a shadow in his mind. Ronon knew why he’d been drawn there, had his blaster in his hand even before he turned the corner. The cracks and groans of the ceiling breaking away under his shots, the roar and rumble of it all coming down, were exactly what he needed. The enveloping physicality of the destruction—the dust that filled the air, the small bits of rubble that bounced past his feet and out into the hall—was oddly soothing. Standing there, watching the cascade of debris slow to stillness, he no longer felt like he was coming out of his skin. He’d done something tangible, and even if it wouldn’t matter in the end it was making him feel better in the moment.
He almost headed straight back to the others then, considering himself purged enough to face them. But without really thinking about it he turned left and headed up the stairs at the end of the main hall instead. The last place he’d died—where they’d died—was right at the end, an unremarkable and ominous door that he was going to make sure could never open again.
While Ronon didn’t know a lot about Ancient technology, he did know how to disable a door; McKay had taught him which crystal to remove to render the control panel inoperable. But he also knew that McKay knew how to fix that. And as he popped off the panel cover and tossed it aside, he knew that the gentle solution wasn’t what he was looking for anyway.
Grabbing his fear and frustration tight, Ronon reared back and drove his heel into the control panel. His skin prickled with unpleasant muscle memory as the damaged innards sparked and flared, the shattered crystals momentarily emitting a spastic glow before going dark. He hovered for a moment longer, wanting to make sure the door wouldn’t automatically open with the loss of power. It stayed shut, though, and when his exploratory shoves at its surface didn’t elicit a response, he turned and left.
On the way back to the others, he hesitated at the sealing room hallway. He didn’t actually need to deal with it; if he’d gotten anything out of the last loop, it was learning that as long as the team stayed with him, he could keep them away from the areas he already knew were dangerous.
But he still didn’t feel completely steady. So, on a whim, he took a few long strides into the side hall. Raising his blaster, he shot into the frame where the first door peeked out from the wall, not expecting anything to happen but figuring he could at least take out a bit more of his frustration on the place where the whole damn nightmare had started.
To his surprise, the door immediately whooshed shut. He was even pretty sure he heard it seal; at the very least, it didn’t budge when he pushed at it. Filing that information away for future loops—and not acknowledging the fact that he expected there would be more where he might need to use it—he finally retraced his steps to the cylinder room.
The rest of the team wasn’t there.
For a moment, Ronon looked wildly around the lab, wanting to believe that he’d just overlooked them, however impossible that would have been. He couldn’t understand why they would have left this time, especially since he’d told them to stay put. He didn’t think he’d been gone that long, anyway, certainly not long enough for them to think they needed to go after him.
But when he stopped to think about it, he realized he wasn’t actually sure how long it had taken him to satisfy his need for action. It felt like seconds; it felt like days. His sense of time was completely skewed, knocked off center by the loops. He had no idea how long he’d been gone and he panicked, wondering if he’d actually left the others alone for hours, triggering a frantic search and rescue operation.
Logic told him that was highly unlikely, though. If they’d been looking for him, they would have found him—he hadn’t gone that far. And between blaster fire and property destruction, he hadn’t exactly been quiet, either.
Instead, he knew with absolute certainty that they were on the other side of the facility, just like they had been before. He was sprinting through the corridors before the thought finished crossing his mind, the echoes of screams—how long ago had he heard them, now?—rattling in his ears.
He yelled the others’ names as he went, sure time was running out and danger closing in, just like it had been every time before. Risking it that he didn’t need to stop anywhere he didn’t get replies, he hastily moved deeper into the facility, quickly growing unnerved by the continued, unnatural silence. Unless everyone else had moved to a different level, they should have been able to hear him, even if only faintly. And they would have responded to his calls, which meant he should’ve been hearing them, too.
Then the thought hit him that they might already be dead.
Ronon stumbled to a halt, his body going cold. Somehow he knew it wasn’t true, though—not yet, at least. They were still alive, somewhere in the facility; he just had to find them. But he couldn’t continue to rely on silence as emptiness. Figuring he should start searching rooms where he was and work out from there, he resumed walking.
Fate or luck or the loop must have been guiding him, because he’d only checked three rooms—each small and empty—before he found the others.
He’d reached the end of the corridor he was in, where it widened slightly into a shallow chamber of sorts that contained four doors, paired together via the side and back chamber walls in the far left and right hand corners of the chamber. There were no visible control panels for any of them, and despite Ronon attempting to trigger them with motion, three of the doors—the two on the left and the one in the back wall on the right—remained stubbornly shut. The door on the right side wall was already open, though, so he stepped through it and into what was clearly some kind of control room.
The lower half of the room’s left side wall was entirely taken up by a control terminal, all lights and buttons and knobs and displays. Above that was a thick observation window. And on the other side of the window was the rest of his team.
The large, empty room they were standing in was shaped like a long, slim rectangle, with the smaller control room positioned along one of its longer sides. There was something on the far left and right walls in the room, but those areas were shadowy and with the viewpoint from the control room, Ronon couldn’t make out any details. He also couldn’t see any way into the room, but based on shape and layout, he guessed that its entrance was the other door on the right side of the chamber that he hadn’t been able to open.
The others were near that unseen entrance, but far enough out into the room that Ronon could easily see them. From the animated gestures McKay was making, and the scowl on Sheppard’s face, they appeared to be mid argument. Ronon couldn’t hear anything, though, and when he rapped on the observation window in an attempt to get their attention, the resulting thump was so muffled that only the sensation of him making contact with the glass let him know he’d actually hit it.
Though his knock hadn’t produced any sound, the motion seemed to have been enough to alert the team to his presence. Even as he pulled his hand back from the window, Teyla’s eyes shifted from Sheppard’s and McKay’s bickering figures toward him.
In the heartbeat before she registered his presence, Ronon was able to see the strain on her face. It wasn’t like Teyla to wear her distress so visibly, and Ronon felt his own unease spike at the sight. But then her expression cleared, the worry replaced by a small and faintly relieved smile. She said something to Sheppard and McKay which caused them both to turn in Ronon’s direction. On seeing Ronon, Sheppard also looked relieved, though in his case the expression still carried the tension of whatever argument he and McKay had been having.
Having spun around to face Ronon, McKay pinned him with a look Ronon couldn’t quite read. He wound up not having to, as a split second later it turned into an accusing glower, which he could understand easily enough, even without audio to convey whatever words McKay began spitting toward the window.
Figuring it wouldn’t make sense for there to be a control room if it couldn’t communicate with the room it was controlling, Ronon started searching the terminal for anything that looked like it connected to a sound system.
He found it easily enough; some of the terminal panels were almost identical to the ones in the control room in Atlantis, and it only took him seconds to find a button that looked exactly like the one that controlled the city-wide broadcast channel. Before activating it, though, he glanced back up at the window and hesitated. McKay was still going full steam—the only setting he had, from what Ronon knew—and for a few seconds Ronon debated just trying to figure out how to open the door without his help.
But another glance at the terminal and all the panels he didn’t recognize ended that line of thought. With a sigh, he pressed the intercom button.
“—only reason we even came in here, and if you hadn’t run off, this wouldn’t have happened!”
Ronon flinched slightly as the irate voice filled the control room, McKay’s words hitting closer to home than he could have known. While the team staying together hadn’t protected them any more than them being apart had, Ronon still couldn’t help but feel responsible for what occurred when he left the others alone, given that he was the only one who knew what was going on.
Teyla, however, was giving McKay a sharply disapproving stare. “This is not Ronon’s fault, Rodney.”
“Yeah, don’t blame Ronon,” Sheppard agreed. “You’re the one who said we couldn’t assume he hadn’t gone this way, McKay. And even if we did need to come this way, we could’ve just checked out this room from in there—” he jabbed a finger toward the control room window “—and moved on, but you were determined to come inside for some damn reason.”
“No one made you follow me!” McKay snapped.
“Somebody has to keep you from getting yourself killed!”
“Which is why I followed you both,” Teyla wryly cut in. She turned her exasperated stare toward Ronon. “Is there anything in there that looks like it would control the door, Ronon? There is nothing on this side.”
Reeling slightly, Ronon simply stared blankly at her for a few seconds. He hadn’t told them about the loops this time, hadn’t told them that they all kept dying. Not only had he run off, as McKay put it, but he’d left the rest of the team to walk blindly around a place that seemed determined to kill them in as many ways as possible. And he hadn’t even warned them about it. Again.
Stomach writhing with guilt, he dropped his gaze back to the terminal and started to more closely examine its various panels. “I’m not seeing anything that looks like the door controls I’m used to,” he admitted.
“That’s because it’s not a normal door control panel,” McKay snidely remarked.
Ronon cut him an annoyed glance. “You want me to just start pressing stuff, then?”
“No!”
McKay came right up to the window then, as if he might be able to crawl through it and, if his agitated expression was anything to go by, physically restrain Ronon from touching things.
“We have no idea what this room is even for; do you want to kill us all?” he exclaimed, before releasing a disgruntled sigh. “You’re going to have to describe the controls to me until we find one I recognize.”
Ronon surveyed the terminal again—there were a lot of controls—and gave McKay a doubtful look. “That might take a while.”
“Better than the alternative,” Sheppard mumbled.
Ignoring him, McKay flapped a hand at Ronon, directing him to the part of the terminal closest to the control room door. “Just start at that end and we’ll work our way across.”
Checking to make sure the intercom button would stay depressed without continuous pressure—it did, the first thing that had worked in their favor so far—Ronon moved to the end of the terminal. He described the first panel to McKay, who thought it was part of a temperature control system. Ronon asked if they should check it anyway, but McKay just snapped that he would rather not risk freezing to death—Ronon managed not to flinch this time—and they moved on.
They’d only gotten through one section of panels when a sudden noise made Ronon stop. It was a low rumbling paired with a humming whine, something that reminded him of large machinery, like engines. As he listened, the rumbling steadied and the whine softened until the sound coalesced into a kind of gravelly purr. He was staring back out into the chamber, since the sound seemed louder out there, when McKay called his name.
“Do you hear that?” Ronon asked him.
“Hear what?”
Teyla was moving toward the control room window. “I can feel it,” she said, her eyes on Ronon.
“It seems to be coming from here.” Sheppard walked slowly toward the left hand wall and the feature there Ronon still couldn’t make out.
“What are you—”
McKay had half turned to look over at Sheppard, and so Ronon saw the exact moment when he realized what was going to happen. He froze and went pale, face going blank with horror. Then he turned completely away, his back to the window. Ronon watched as he snapped his head from left to right, apparently looking at the two ends of the room, before he pivoted back around. The terror in his eyes was matched by the urgency in his voice when he told Ronon to start pushing buttons.
His own heart rate increasing in response to McKay’s behavior, Ronon frowned at him for a second. “What?”
“Just start pushing the damn buttons!” McKay repeated, his eyes wide. “Any of them! All of them!” He pressed up against the window, his fast, shallow breaths creating small fog clouds on the glass. “If you don’t get us out of here in the next fifteen seconds, we’re going to die!”
Behind him, Sheppard had started to wander toward the right hand side of the room. Teyla, hovering between him and McKay, shot Ronon a look full of fear. Without another word, Ronon started pressing buttons.
He tried to maintain a semblance of process as he frantically jabbed at the panels, not wanting to miss the right button or waste time pushing the wrong one twice. For a little while, he thought he might be able to get through them all before time ran out, that he might beat the loop and nobody would die this time. But he still had at least a third of the terminal to go when McKay’s voice distracted him.
“Sheppard! Get back!”
The humming sound was rising in pitch, and though Ronon wanted to stay focused on his task, knew it was the team’s only hope, he couldn’t help but reflexively look up. Sheppard was standing nearly in the center of the room, and as he turned in response to McKay shout, something happened.
Ronon could never describe what he saw, wasn’t even sure if there was anything to see (he thought about asking McKay, but decided he didn’t actually want to know). But he knew that something had happened because Sheppard went rigid, despite the fact that he was vibrating ever so slightly. His face was caught in surprise, mouth slightly open, eyes a little wide, still looking toward the rest of them.
Then there was pain, or at least the ghost of it, on his face. A line appeared across his midsection, just below the ribs, no more than a quarter inch thick. Or maybe it was more that something disappeared from that space, because it seemed to Ronon like that part of Sheppard just went missing, like a slice had been taken out of him by some invisible blade.
It all happened in the blink of an eye: Sheppard fine and then not fine. In that same blink, Teyla was darting toward him. McKay automatically followed suit, going after Teyla in turn.
“John!”
“Teyla, no!”
One hand still hovering over an unpressed button, Ronon watched in numb shock as Teyla stepped in front of Sheppard, arms raised toward him.
A similar line to his appeared across her at about chest height, and then Sheppard’s chest disintegrated into thin air. He crumpled to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut at the same time that McKay got hit.
Because McKay was stretching forward—seemingly trying to grab Teyla without completely following her—his line was askew, cutting across him from mid ribs on the left to the top of his right shoulder.
Teyla, still between McKay and where Sheppard had been standing, then lost her entire right side. Everything from armpit to hip bone disappeared in an instant and she collapsed in a lifeless heap beside Sheppard.
McKay stopped and stared down at them for what felt like an eternity, before he slowly and unsteadily turned and looked back at Ronon. The terror was gone from his eyes, replaced by a hollow and regretful sadness. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but before he could, his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell to his knees. He tottered there for a moment, his top half and bottom half wobbling unnaturally, like they weren’t completely connected, before gravity won and he toppled over face first.
It was over in seconds, everything happening so fast that Ronon didn’t actually feel the effects for a minute or so. Then the sorrow and agony hit him so hard that his knees buckled and he had to grab hold of the terminal to keep from falling on it. He was breathing erratically, his heart beating too hard in his chest as he struggled to process what had just happened. He could feel his fingernails cracking where they were digging into the metal of the terminal, but he was afraid that if he let go, he’d come apart.
But his friends were lying a piece of glass away from him—in pieces, the mocking voice from before said—and the only thought he could manage to hold in his brain was that he had to get to them.
Peeling his hands away from the terminal, he resumed pressing buttons, this time without any nod toward caution. It didn’t surprise him that the door control was only a handful of buttons away from the one he’d left off on. That was how the loop went: so close and so far and always ending in death.
The sound of the door opening had been lost in the slowly fading hum that still hung in the air, but Ronon knew he’d been successful from the gash of light that appeared on the floor of the room behind the glass.
In a body that felt like it didn’t fit properly, he moved in jerky steps out of the control room, through the now open door, and toward the bodies of his teammates. It hadn’t occurred to him to consider whether the room was safe before he went in. Even if it had, he wouldn’t have cared one way or the other. He had to go in. He had to see them. He didn’t care if it killed him. He half expected it would.
Even though he’d watched it happen, Ronon was still taken aback by seeing the damage to Sheppard’s and Teyla’s bodies up close. There was no blood, no mess, nothing that could visually match the horror of what had been done to them. But while the wounds left behind were clean, they were also devastatingly catastrophic. Entire portions of their torsos were just missing, as if neatly scooped out.
McKay’s injuries weren’t as immediately obvious and—remembering the last time he’d thought he’d found McKay lying dead face down on the floor—Ronon checked him for signs of life. He wasn’t surprised not to find any; even just kneeling beside him, it was easy to see how the top half of McKay’s body had slid an inch or so off-center from the lower half when he’d fallen over. His wound was less graphic, but no less severe and no less fatal than what Sheppard and Teyla had suffered.
On shaky legs, Ronon slowly rose back to his feet. He wasn’t sure what to do now, wasn’t sure he had it in him to think enough to do anything. He felt cold and afraid, which should have been a warning. But grief was still blinding despite how often he’d been through it and—for the second time—he didn’t sense the Wraith coming.
He died this time without doubt that he’d come back again, knowing the loop wouldn’t let him go so easily, wouldn’t just let him be at peace with his friends.
But he also died clinging to the knowledge that he was going to end it this time.