If At First You Don’t Succeed: Chapter 9
Feb. 18th, 2024 02:01 pm![[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: 6077
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.
“What did you do?”
Ronon removed his hand from the cylinder—one more time, again, perpetually—and laid it on the desk. Moving his other hand to mirror its position on the other side of the cylinder, he leaned heavily onto them, shoulders hunched and head bowed.
What had he done? He’d failed. He’d failed at protecting the team. He’d failed at keeping them safe and he’d failed at keeping them alive and he didn’t even know why. All he knew was that it was his fault somehow.
“I don’t know.”
“I—what?”
McKay’s tone had shifted from accusatory to befuddled, as if he’d been primed for a denial and the fight it would trigger and was struggling to process the resigned admittance he’d gotten instead. Ronon took the opportunity of McKay’s silence to collect himself and prepare for facing them all again.
He’d killed them.
He had to get this right. This had to be the last time.
When he finally straightened and turned around, he could see the lines that had formed between McKay’s eyebrows, the two parallel tracks he always wore when he was confused by something and was unhappy about it. Which was usually; for all his desire to know things, McKay didn’t handle not knowing them very well.
Which meant Ronon was about to make him very unhappy.
“I don’t know what I did,” he repeated, “but I did something because time keeps looping and we keep dying and I’ve searched this entire place and haven’t been able to find what’s making it happen and I don’t know what else to do.”
He could hear the flatness in his own voice, the weary emptiness in the sound. He felt hollow enough to collapse in on himself, and every time he blinked he saw the flash of his blaster, as if that last visual had imprinted on his eyelids at death, a ghostly shadow.
How many times could the loop bring them back before the damage started wearing through? Did his body know that it had died? Did it remember, too?
The others were watching him, McKay too twitchy, Sheppard too tense, Teyla too still. They’d believe him, eventually. They always did. But Ronon didn’t know if it would matter.
“Say that again.”
Ronon focused on Sheppard, who was studying him with an appraising, anticipatory expression. He’d changed his stance slightly, shifting his weight toward Ronon and holding himself like an arrow in a bow: pulled tight and ready for release. Seeing him that way shifted something in Ronon, too, and he felt a warmth—not quite hope, but near enough—begin spreading tentative tendrils through his bones.
The burden of knowledge—or remembering—that he bore might be slowly destroying him, but the rest of his team didn’t have that weight. They were still ready to fight, and always would be. He had to be, too. He took a steadying breath.
“We start here,” he told them, pointing toward the floor. “I tell you about the loops. We go out into the facility looking for what’s causing them. Wherever we go, whatever we do, we die. Then we start over again.”
“And you found nothing that could be the cause?”
It sounded like Teyla was the first to believe him again, and Ronon was relieved that at least this part of the routine seemed to be going faster this time. But just as he turned to answer her, McKay spoke.
“We always start in this room?”
There was a brisk, slightly impatient efficiency to McKay’s tone, one Ronon recognized from having watched him have breakthroughs. Ronon turned to him with a nod, the warmth inside him seeping a bit more quickly.
“Yeah. We’re always here, in the same places, and you’re saying the same thing.”
“Show me exactly,” McKay said, stepping closer, his eyes darting around the area where Ronon was standing. “Where are you exactly when the loop restarts?”
Ronon resumed his position in front of the desk, then reached out to place his fingertips on the cylinder again. His body moved into place as if by muscle memory. He didn’t have to think about it so much as feel it; he could sense when he was in the right position by the way it felt, like settling into a pair of well-worn boots. Once set, he turned his head to look at McKay.
“I’m like this.”
McKay’s sharp gaze slipped up and down Ronon’s body, across the width of the desk, and then riveted to the cylinder under his fingers.
“You’re always touching that?” he asked, pointing to it.
“Yeah,” Ronon confirmed. “This is how I start.”
Eyes still fixed on the cylinder, McKay immediately strode forward, waving Ronon aside as he came. “Move.”
Ronon obligingly stepped out of the way, but gestured at the cylinder as he did so. “You already looked at it,” he told McKay. “Said it was just a big paperweight.”
McKay made a dismissive gesture, as if the opinion of a Past McKay he couldn’t remember being wasn’t worth listening to.
“But I didn’t know what I was looking for then, did I?” he confidently replied. Then he paused, face slackening with uncertainty as he looked to Ronon for confirmation. “Did I?”
Ronon thought back. The only time McKay had examined the cylinder was the first time, before the loops; he’d never touched it again. He shook his head.
“No.”
Rallying from his momentary self-doubt with a haughty nod, McKay bent over to scrutinize the cylinder from close range.
“Well then I haven’t actually looked at it,” he declared, squinting at one of the cylinder’s flattened ends.
Ronon hovered, primed and ready to haul McKay to safety at the first sign of trouble, despite the cylinder having never given any indications of being dangerous. Or at least he tried to hover. After about two minutes, McKay complained that he was blocking the light and shooed him over toward Sheppard, who had relaxed enough to lean against the edge of the table in the center of the room. Teyla joined them shortly thereafter, hauling herself up to sit cross-legged on the table top beside Sheppard.
Ronon stayed standing. Despite feeling like he could sleep for a week, he was also on edge. The anxiety and hope currently warring in his veins were a potent combination, and it was all he could do not to pace aggressively from one side of the room to the other. He wanted to run, wanted to run until he collapsed, run until he found some measure of peace again, but there was no way he was leaving this room.
There was no way he was going to let any of the others out of his sight again until they’d stopped the loops.
As far as he knew, the cylinder room was safe—at least, they hadn’t been killed there yet—so he was perfectly happy for everyone, himself included, to just stay put for as long as it took. But as the minutes stretched and McKay grew too quiet, Ronon started to worry there might not be a way out.
Then McKay let out a single, “Huh.”
Ronon was immediately on alert. “What?”
“At first I thought this was just a solid piece of metal,” came the distracted reply. “But there’s a very tight seam running around the rim of what must actually be an end cap, here.” He pointed at one of the flat ends of the tube.
“You going to open it?”
McKay was already pulling his knife from his belt, and he turned his head just far enough to give Sheppard a scathing look. “No, of course not. Why would I want to open the thing that might be an Ancient time control device? I was simply voicing my observations on it for posterity.”
“Need help?” Sheppard casually returned, completely unruffled by McKay’s acerbic tone.
“I think I can handle taking an Ancient device apart on my own.”
“You’ve practically perfected it.”
There was a snort of dry laughter, then McKay went quiet again as he focused on getting the cylinder open. As he worked, Ronon took note of how cautiously he handled it. It was obvious that McKay was very purposefully not touching the central portion of the tube—where Ronon himself had touched it—but keeping his contact limited to the inch or so at the end. Ronon wondered then what McKay already knew but wasn’t admitting, or what he at least suspected but wasn’t willing to say.
A few more minutes passed where the only sounds were the faint scraping of metal blade against metal cylinder, accompanied by a few muffled curses from McKay. Then there was the distinct shink of metal sliding across metal, followed by the dull clack of something heavy landing on a similarly solid surface.
“Got it!”
McKay’s tone of triumph might have been more comforting under other circumstances—usually when he figured something out, it was a good thing—but Ronon found himself suddenly seized by a not entirely irrational fear of what McKay had figured out this time. His arms started trembling slightly, and he realized his whole body had gone tense, as if he were bracing himself for a physical blow. He forced himself to relax, watching as Teyla slid from the table and back onto her feet.
“What is it?” she asked, her curiosity unmarred by any trepidations such as what Ronon felt.
“Definitely not a paperweight,” McKay quipped. “And—in case there was any doubt—definitely Ancient.”
He’d been leaning forward to look at the end of the cylinder, his position effectively blocking the others’ view, but now he sat back on his haunches and turned to look at them. Reflexively, Ronon stepped forward as the end of the cylinder was revealed, needing to know what it was and what part, if any, it was playing in his current nightmare.
At first glance, the view was disappointing. The end cap McKay had managed to remove lay on the desk a few inches to the side of the cylinder, and the void it had hidden appeared to be nothing more than a dark hole.
But in the next second, Ronon caught a small flash of light, followed by another, and another, winking their way through an unsteady rhythm.
He strode over, squatted down beside McKay, and peered into the recess. It was less than an inch deep, its back wall covered with a neat grid of tiny buttons and even tinier lights. Most of them were currently dark, but there was a row at the very top of the cavity that was producing the flashes of light Ronon had spotted from his position by the central table. The colors of the row went from red at the left, through orange and yellow in the middle, to what he assumed would be green at the far right. He had to guess about the last ones because they didn’t actually light up; the sequence would flit across the display, getting only about halfway—just into the yellows—before it stopped.
At the opposite end of the recess, near the bottom, was the only other active light. It was bright green, and was paired with an identical, but currently dark, light that appeared to be of the same shade.
Ronon took in the bright, cheery lights and fought the urge to pick up the device and fling it across the room. The thing that had kept killing them had been right here—literally under his fingertips—the entire time, while they had desperately and needlessly walked into danger elsewhere trying to find it.
He spoke through gritted teeth. “So this is the device?”
“How did the Ancients manage to make a time device so small?”
Sheppard’s voice was quizzical, and much nearer than it had been. Ronon startled slightly, not having noticed that Sheppard had come up behind him and was currently peering interestedly over his shoulder at the cylinder. A glance to his other side found Teyla there, mirroring Sheppard’s position.
A flicker of fear shot through him at the thought of them all being so close to the device, but he didn’t get a chance to raise his concerns before McKay had responded to his and Sheppard’s questions.
“They didn’t because this isn’t.”
McKay rose from his squat, plopping his hands on his hips as he got upright again. Ronon squinted up at him, having lost the thread of the conversation.
“What?”
“This isn’t the time device,” McKay repeated, gesturing vaguely toward the cylinder, “and the Ancients couldn’t have built one this small anyway. Because that would be impossible. The forces at play alone…there’s no way they could construct any type of time control device and make it smaller than, say, a jumper.”
Teyla was the first to get to the question. “So what is this?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s the remote control.”
Sheppard’s eyebrows rose slightly. “To the time control device.”
“Yes.”
“So there is an at-least-jumper-sized device around here somewhere that causes time to loop?”
“Presumably.”
There was something about McKay’s and Sheppard’s exchange that unsettled Ronon, though he couldn’t immediately put his finger on it. Then he looked away from the device and back over his shoulder at the two of them. He took in the eager possessiveness in McKay’s expression and the calculation in Sheppard’s eyes, and his stomach turned over.
Ronon knew McKay could be reckless; it was something he actually liked about him, most of the time. And he respected the streak of ruthlessness Sheppard usually kept hidden behind a facade of nonchalance.
But not now.
They’d already forgotten. He told them they’d died, and they’d already forgotten. He guessed it was easy to forget what you hadn’t experienced, but that didn’t quell the cold pit growing in his chest.
He rapidly stood, pivoting as he rose so that he was facing the others with his back to the device, almost like he was standing between them and it.
Between them and their deadly ambitions.
“How do we turn it off?”
McKay blinked at him for a moment, frowning faintly, no doubt having been pulled from scientific daydreams by the question.
“It’s already off,” he finally replied.
It felt like the ground had shifted beneath Ronon’s feet, and he had to grip the edge of the desk to hold himself steady.
“What?” he managed to croak.
“It’s off. Or at least the device isn’t active.” McKay leaned around Ronon to point at the open recess. “See the lights at the bottom? The left one means the remote is turned on, but the dark one on the right? That one would be lit up if the device was actually on. Y’know, if it was creating loops.”
He circled a finger in the air.
Ronon turned unseeing eyes from him to device and back, understanding but not yet able to comprehend what he was hearing.
McKay seemed to get that, because he added to his explanation, giving Ronon time to process it.
“I think that when you touched it a second time, when I told you to show me the position you started the loop in, that turned it back off. The first touch: on. The second touch: off. I don’t know exactly how it knows that it was you the second time—or whether it even cares; maybe any person touching it would change the settings. And then there’s the question of why this particular Ancient device doesn’t appear to require the gene, when you’d think that time manipulation of all things would be something they’d want to strictly control access to…”
Ronon barely heard anything McKay was saying. He was caught on the fact that all it had taken was his touch. Just a simple brush of fingers.
He’d been in this room every time, every loop, and it had never occurred to him that the cylinder was the key. They’d gone out into the facility, out into the woods, and straight into death over and over again trying to find the way out. And it had been right here all along. All he’d had to do was touch the damn cylinder again.
He felt like laughing, like crying, like he could tear down the walls of the facility with his bare hands. His voice was a hollow growl when he finally cut across McKay’s monologue.
“We’re leaving.”
He’d said those exact words before, with some effect. But this time the team was already in close proximity, still huddled together from their examination of the cylinder, so he was able to add actual physical herding to the equation. He began to slowly guide everyone toward the door.
“But what about—!” McKay protested, pointing over Ronon’s shoulder at the cylinder.
“Leave it,” Ronon tersely replied.
“Now wait a minute—!”
“It’s not worth it, McKay.”
Trying to herd three grown adults who were reluctant to be moved wasn’t as easy as it seemed—especially when using violence as a motivator was off the table—and Ronon wasn’t able to react quickly enough when McKay ducked under his outstretched arm. As he turned to follow McKay’s retreat, Sheppard and Teyla similarly scattered out of his reach. McKay had hurried back to stand by the cylinder, and raised his chin defiantly as Ronon advanced on him.
“Now I know that you said you didn’t find anything when you searched the facility,” he began, tone clipped and logical, “but locating technology and the like isn’t exactly your area of expertise. And now that we know there is, at the very least, a time control device somewhere in the facility, I think we can all agree that it’s imperative that I, with my particular skill set, have a look around.”
There was so much Ronon wanted to say that for a moment he couldn’t say anything.
“You did say that you had already explored the entire facility,” Teyla diplomatically pointed out.
“So you should already know what’s dangerous or not,” Sheppard added.
Ronon almost laughed at the implication that any part of the planet might be safe. They weren’t even safe just standing there debating what was safe or not.
“No.”
“Fine!”
McKay spat the word out as if it were a bad taste and turned a stubborn, fiery gaze on Ronon. The set of his jaw was too familiar, and Ronon braced himself for a fight.
“Fine!” McKay said again. “You can’t stop all of us, so at least one of us will get out!”
His eyes darted toward the door and Ronon took a reflexive step backwards toward it, ready to block the exit if need be. His blaster had already found its way into his hand, but he didn’t raise it like he had before. He just stood there and stared them all down.
“No.”
“We are not going to all run off into the facility.” Teyla’s voice was firm, her disapproving gaze turned McKay’s way as she laid a steadying hand on Ronon’s arm.
“Yeah, I don’t want to see the rest of this place badly enough to rush Ronon,” Sheppard said, “especially when he’s looking at me like he’s looking at me right now, so you’re on your own there, McKay.”
McKay deflated a little, but his face was still pink with anger. “We found a time manipulation device!” He huffed, flinging his arms in the air in a gesture of frustration. “We can’t just leave without even looking at it! I mean, knowing what powers it alone would be worth the effort. These types of things would require massive amounts of energy.” He paused and jabbed a finger at the cylinder. “Hell, even the damn remote control’s still working and I highly doubt anybody popped in over the past few millennia to change the batteries!”
Sheppard, who’d been watching McKay with an increasingly thoughtful expression, flicked an almost apologetic glance Ronon’s way. “He’s got a point.”
“Of course I have a point!” McKay barreled on. “We could be talking a whole bunch of ZPMs here! Or—or maybe even something more substantial, specially created for the device, or not quite refined enough for everyday power needs. Either way, think of what we could learn!”
Death. The device taught about death. And Ronon had learned enough.
“No.”
“We have the remote,” McKay persisted, again gesturing to the cylinder. “And now that we know how it works, there’s no chance of us accidentally—or intentionally—turning the device on. I don’t even want to!” he hastily added, as if his aversion to doing so might sway Ronon. “We just need to find the device so that I can study its construction. It’ll be fine!”
Ronon was pretty sure he knew where the device was. He remembered the only corridor he’d found with doors he couldn’t open. Two doors sealed shut, and the matching doors opposite them and the rooms those doors had led to: a control room, and a room that bloodlessly cut people apart.
His skin suddenly felt too tight, his chest too small for his lungs. His heart was racing as if he’d just sprinted through every corridor in the facility. He couldn’t breathe.
“No.”
McKay turned redder, his eyebrows lowering into a snarl of frustration and irritability. “Oh, come on—!”
“Ronon—”
“I can’t watch you die anymore!”
There was an echoing, stunned silence.
Ronon had been looking Sheppard’s way when desperation ripped the words out of him. He watched as Sheppard’s expression shifted, his eyes suddenly too knowing. Ronon had to look away, and caught Teyla’s stare instead.
Her face had softened with sympathy, and Ronon could tell that she was holding back from touching him again, as if she somehow knew that he wouldn’t be able to survive gentleness at the moment.
But it was McKay’s reaction that surprised him.
Ronon had seen McKay startle at his outburst, the jerking motion registering at the edge of his vision as he’d locked gazes with Sheppard. But when Ronon looked at him now, McKay was unusually still, his face devoid of any hints as to his thoughts or feelings.
His eyes were another story, though. There was so much swirling in their depths that Ronon felt his breath hitch. He tried to sort through what he was seeing, to grab on to anything he recognized in an attempt to read what was going through McKay’s mind and prepare himself for whatever he might do next. But there was too much for that kind of clarity, and before Ronon could decipher anything McKay’s expression had settled into one distinct emotion: resolution.
“Okay.”
McKay’s voice was clear and steady, and Ronon released the breath he’d subconsciously been holding. It caught again when McKay suddenly turned back to the device and hunched over it, but only for a moment.
“I’m turning this off first,” he explained as he poked a finger into the recess.
Ronon saw the flashing lights dance across McKay’s skin for a few seconds before the cavity went dark. With efficient motions, McKay settled the end cap back on the cylinder and began closing it up, talking as he worked.
“I suspect this thing is probably touch activated, actually,” he said, “given that it worked for you. Though there is always the chance that the Ancients not only left it behind but also left it turned on.” He let out a derisive snort. “We’ve seen them do stupider things, honestly. Anyway, there’s every chance it’ll just come right back on in the event that somebody else miraculously stumbles across this place, wanders in here, and touches it, but this is the best I can secure it outside of taking it apart, which I doubt you’ll give me the time to do.”
McKay finished closing up the device and straightened, turning away from it with a final look of resigned longing as he slipped his knife back into its sheath on his belt. Ronon stared at him, feeling too much to actually express any of it but, for once, wishing he could.
Seemingly unaware of his inner turmoil, McKay just gave him a sharp nod. “We can go now.”
Swallowing heavily around the sudden lump in his throat, Ronon returned the nod.
“Okay.”
Like he had for every disastrous step they’d taken so far, Ronon led the way out.
It wasn’t until they were back under the green-tinted shade of the forest canopy again that anxiety began crawling through his body, prickly and cold. Every shadow was a crouched animal waiting to pounce, every rustle of leaves the movement of the team being tracked. His skin burned with the memory of teeth and claws, and his eyes kept mistaking shadows on the leaf litter for blood. But they made it to the Gate without any signs of the vicious animals that had once attacked them.
That had never attacked them.
That had only ever attacked him in his memory.
Ronon pushed away those thoughts and stood with his back to the Gate while McKay dialed them out, half expecting it not to work, half anticipating the animals to burst from the tree line in an attacking wave. But they didn’t, and the Gate connected without any hiccups.
Still, he exited the planet face-on, keeping watch for any last-second dangers as he stepped backward into the wormhole. Then, in a blink, his view changed from seemingly benign forest to the comfortingly familiar sight of the Atlantis Gate.
As it shut down, revealing a suspicious number of armed people standing behind it, Weir’s voice rang out through the room.
“You’re late.”
Ignoring the crowd, Ronon turned on his heel to find her staring down at them from the control room balcony. There was a hint of playfulness in the tone of her reprimand, and a faint smile played at the corners of her mouth despite the tightness around her eyes. But the stiffness of her posture and the crushing grip she had on the balcony railing gave away her nerves.
Sheppard, halfway through passing his weapons over to a waiting MP, froze and squinted up at her in confusion. “What do y’mean?”
Beside him, Teyla was likewise studying Weir’s face with a wrinkled brow. “We were on the planet Rodney identified for reconnaissance,” she advised, her tone slow and cautious.
“We were only gone a couple of hours,” Sheppard added, after a glance at his watch.
Ronon was sure he saw Weir sigh—though whether in relief or exasperation, he couldn’t tell—before she pushed away from the railing and began walking through the control room toward the stairs.
“No,” she said, “you’ve been gone over twenty-four.”
“Hours?” Sheppard asked, expression incredulous.
Weir, descending toward them, raised her eyebrows. “Yes.”
Sheppard blinked at her for a second before he looked to McKay. McKay had been frowning at Weir’s words, too, but just then his face cleared and he nodded, snapping his fingers together as if recalling something from the depths of his memory.
“The—the time loop,” he said. “When we were caught in it, only we were caught in it. It probably only covered the planet, or maybe even just the facility itself; it couldn’t have touched much more than that, scale wise. Not without enough hardware that we would have easily found the device. But everyone and everything outside of the bubble that was created would have been unaffected. So while we kept looping through the same time—like recording over the same part of a tape deck over and over again—everybody else kept going through time linearly, just the one track.”
Sheppard nodded slowly. “So?”
“So we got out of sync. For us—” McKay waggled a finger between Sheppard and himself “—it feels like we’ve only been gone a couple of hours, because we only remember the last loop. But every loop we went through just added more time to what passed outside the loop. It’s kind of like we lost time and can’t remember it.”
“Ronon can.”
Everyone turned to look at Teyla.
“He remembers the loops,” she added, stepping to Ronon’s side and glancing up at him with a look he couldn’t read, but that left him feeling both supported and exposed. “He should know, at least roughly, how long we were stuck in them.”
McKay turned an impatiently inquisitive gaze on Ronon. “So? Was it twenty four hours?”
“I don’t know,” Ronon muttered. “It’s not like I timed it.”
“D’you know how many loops?” Sheppard pushed.
Ronon shifted uncomfortably and tried to count. “Seven? Eight? I’d have to think about it.”
He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to remember. He hoped he’d be able to forget.
He wasn’t sure if Weir understood that and drew Sheppard’s and McKay’s focus back to her at just that moment on purpose, or if he’d misread the brief glimpse he’d gotten of her expression before she turned away. Either way, he was grateful for the distraction.
“I’m sorry—did you say time loops?” she asked, throwing a curious glance between the two. “Someone care to fill me in?”
“Well, the good news is that we did find an Ancient facility,” McKay said with false brightness.
Weir gave him a wary look. “And the bad news?”
“Same as usual,” he replied, “in that the Ancients didn’t exactly leave a lot behind when they abandoned it.” He waved a hand in the air. “Y’know, aside from some kind of device that causes time loops.”
Weir’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Wait—you don’t know what the device is?”
“We, ah, didn’t stick around to find it,” Sheppard advised, shooting Ronon a glance from the corner of his eye.
“Because?”
“Because we kept dying.”
Weir blinked at Ronon for a few seconds, shock slackening her face.
“What?”
“The only reason we looped is because we died,” he explained.
Because he died. Because he’d touched the cylinder and it kept coming for him. Or maybe it just waited for him, knowing something would get him eventually. The rest of the team was no more than collateral damage.
He could see Weir putting together the pieces, could see the picture become clearer and more horrifying in her mind as everything she’d been told clicked into place.
“And you went through seven or eight loops—?”
For the first time—maybe because of Weir’s reaction, maybe because they’d had a moment to digest it themselves—the rest of the team seemed to fully grasp the reality of what Ronon had explained to them. He was sure they were going to ask, could already hear the What happened? and how it would sound coming from each of them, and he knew he couldn’t do it.
He didn’t know if he could tell them, but more worryingly he wasn’t sure he would be able to stop himself from telling them everything, and he was afraid that he might not survive it if he did.
Not now, not yet. Maybe not ever.
He caught Teyla watching him with sad, knowing eyes—just for a second, as fast as he realized they were looking at each other. Then she turned to Weir with a business-like air.
“I believe we should all be checked out by Dr. Beckett,” she said in a calm, resolute tone that made it clear she would suffer no arguments to the contrary.
Weir simply nodded. “I agree. I’m not sure what looping through time might do to a person, but I’d rather not have any residual effects decide to surprise us somewhere down the line.” She raised her chin toward the corridor that led to the infirmary. “Go.”
McKay, already headed that way, stopped to harrumph in her general direction. “The entire SGC was in a loop for months with no residual effects.”
Weir, on her way back up the stairs, just threw him a tired smile over her shoulder. “Different galaxy, different device, Rodney. Go get checked out.”
“We’re going,” Sheppard reassured her, nudging McKay back into motion.
McKay grumbled a bit, but he was still the first one through the doors once they reached the infirmary.
Beckett was talking with a nurse with his back to the door when they entered. Before anyone called out to him, almost as if he could sense their presence, he abruptly stopped talking and turned around. Ronon saw the concern that flickered in his eyes, and watched it melt into quickly-disguised relief once his roaming gaze had taken a quick survey of their bodies and registered no immediately apparent injuries.
He gently waved the nurse off with a whispered word, and walked toward them.
“Ah, so you’ve finally turned up, have you?”
“We didn’t realize we were missing until we got back.”
Beckett gave Sheppard an unimpressed look. “Lost track of the time, did you?”
“Quite literally, actually.” McKay hoisted himself up onto a cot, dangling his legs idly and smiling benignly at Beckett’s baffled expression.
Ronon knew he was relishing these few moments, when he knew about something that had happened and Beckett didn’t. Ronon also knew that Beckett knew that, and therefore wasn’t surprised when the doctor turned to Sheppard for further explanation instead. Because the thing McKay loved best about holding info over people’s heads was being the one to finally tell them.
“Did you all get knocked out or something?” Beckett asked, his gaze on Sheppard’s hairline—no doubt looking for telltale damage—while he waited for a response.
“Not exactly.” Sheppard cut Ronon a look again, the same hesitant one he’d used back in the Gate room. “At least, not that most of us remember.”
Beckett’s eyes stopped searching for injuries and snapped to Sheppard’s, direct and piercing. “Come again?”
“We—well, Ronon—found the remote control for a device that triggered time loops,” McKay butted in. “According to him, we kept looping over and over, with the loops only ending when we died.”
Beckett blinked at him. “But you don’t remember…?”
The question within the question was clear, and Ronon answered it. “I do.”
Beckett’s gaze shifted to him, now even more assessing and calculating. “Why only you?”
“Because he’s the one who touched the control and turned on the device.” McKay shrugged. “So I figure it was keyed to him somehow—fingerprints, sweat, skin cells, something. I mean, it would make sense that someone would have to remember the loop, otherwise you’d never be able to get out of it. But I have no idea what the actual designation method is since we didn’t study it there and we didn’t bring it back with us.”
“What a shame,” Beckett murmured, shooting McKay a mildly reproachful look as he circled around the end of a cot and moved toward Ronon. He had a penlight out and on in the next two steps, and was shining it in Ronon’s eyes after the following three.
Knowing the path of least resistance was to just let things happen, Ronon stood still. A second later Beckett hummed to himself, a low sound barely audible over the background noise of the infirmary, and stepped back.
“I’ll want to scan you. All of you,” he added, throwing a warning look over his shoulder at where McKay, Teyla, and Sheppard were clustered around one cot. Then he turned back to Ronon. “But I’ll start with you. We’ll need to see if going through the loops had any neurological side effects, among other things.”
Beckett muttered the last part to himself, disapproval seeping into his tone. It wasn’t clear whether it was directed toward Ronon and the others for once again getting themselves into trouble, or toward the Ancients and their dangerous devices. Ronon suspected it was probably both. And while he usually found the doctor’s disdain toward danger a bit overbearing, this time he found himself agreeing with the sentiment.
He’d been through too much death in too short a time to feel anything other than relief at the team finally being back within the relative safety of the city. And he was relieved; relieved and exhausted and grateful.
They’d survived, eventually, and had returned from the mission intact, without so much as a scar to show for it. They’d escaped and they were safe and that should have been good enough.
But even as Beckett prepared him to go under the infirmary scanner, Ronon couldn’t take his eyes off the others where they sat together across the room.
Because beneath the relief, he was still afraid.
Rating: R
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: Ronon Dex, Rodney McKay, Teyla Emmagen, John Sheppard
Word Count: 6077
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.
“What did you do?”
Ronon removed his hand from the cylinder—one more time, again, perpetually—and laid it on the desk. Moving his other hand to mirror its position on the other side of the cylinder, he leaned heavily onto them, shoulders hunched and head bowed.
What had he done? He’d failed. He’d failed at protecting the team. He’d failed at keeping them safe and he’d failed at keeping them alive and he didn’t even know why. All he knew was that it was his fault somehow.
“I don’t know.”
“I—what?”
McKay’s tone had shifted from accusatory to befuddled, as if he’d been primed for a denial and the fight it would trigger and was struggling to process the resigned admittance he’d gotten instead. Ronon took the opportunity of McKay’s silence to collect himself and prepare for facing them all again.
He’d killed them.
He had to get this right. This had to be the last time.
When he finally straightened and turned around, he could see the lines that had formed between McKay’s eyebrows, the two parallel tracks he always wore when he was confused by something and was unhappy about it. Which was usually; for all his desire to know things, McKay didn’t handle not knowing them very well.
Which meant Ronon was about to make him very unhappy.
“I don’t know what I did,” he repeated, “but I did something because time keeps looping and we keep dying and I’ve searched this entire place and haven’t been able to find what’s making it happen and I don’t know what else to do.”
He could hear the flatness in his own voice, the weary emptiness in the sound. He felt hollow enough to collapse in on himself, and every time he blinked he saw the flash of his blaster, as if that last visual had imprinted on his eyelids at death, a ghostly shadow.
How many times could the loop bring them back before the damage started wearing through? Did his body know that it had died? Did it remember, too?
The others were watching him, McKay too twitchy, Sheppard too tense, Teyla too still. They’d believe him, eventually. They always did. But Ronon didn’t know if it would matter.
“Say that again.”
Ronon focused on Sheppard, who was studying him with an appraising, anticipatory expression. He’d changed his stance slightly, shifting his weight toward Ronon and holding himself like an arrow in a bow: pulled tight and ready for release. Seeing him that way shifted something in Ronon, too, and he felt a warmth—not quite hope, but near enough—begin spreading tentative tendrils through his bones.
The burden of knowledge—or remembering—that he bore might be slowly destroying him, but the rest of his team didn’t have that weight. They were still ready to fight, and always would be. He had to be, too. He took a steadying breath.
“We start here,” he told them, pointing toward the floor. “I tell you about the loops. We go out into the facility looking for what’s causing them. Wherever we go, whatever we do, we die. Then we start over again.”
“And you found nothing that could be the cause?”
It sounded like Teyla was the first to believe him again, and Ronon was relieved that at least this part of the routine seemed to be going faster this time. But just as he turned to answer her, McKay spoke.
“We always start in this room?”
There was a brisk, slightly impatient efficiency to McKay’s tone, one Ronon recognized from having watched him have breakthroughs. Ronon turned to him with a nod, the warmth inside him seeping a bit more quickly.
“Yeah. We’re always here, in the same places, and you’re saying the same thing.”
“Show me exactly,” McKay said, stepping closer, his eyes darting around the area where Ronon was standing. “Where are you exactly when the loop restarts?”
Ronon resumed his position in front of the desk, then reached out to place his fingertips on the cylinder again. His body moved into place as if by muscle memory. He didn’t have to think about it so much as feel it; he could sense when he was in the right position by the way it felt, like settling into a pair of well-worn boots. Once set, he turned his head to look at McKay.
“I’m like this.”
McKay’s sharp gaze slipped up and down Ronon’s body, across the width of the desk, and then riveted to the cylinder under his fingers.
“You’re always touching that?” he asked, pointing to it.
“Yeah,” Ronon confirmed. “This is how I start.”
Eyes still fixed on the cylinder, McKay immediately strode forward, waving Ronon aside as he came. “Move.”
Ronon obligingly stepped out of the way, but gestured at the cylinder as he did so. “You already looked at it,” he told McKay. “Said it was just a big paperweight.”
McKay made a dismissive gesture, as if the opinion of a Past McKay he couldn’t remember being wasn’t worth listening to.
“But I didn’t know what I was looking for then, did I?” he confidently replied. Then he paused, face slackening with uncertainty as he looked to Ronon for confirmation. “Did I?”
Ronon thought back. The only time McKay had examined the cylinder was the first time, before the loops; he’d never touched it again. He shook his head.
“No.”
Rallying from his momentary self-doubt with a haughty nod, McKay bent over to scrutinize the cylinder from close range.
“Well then I haven’t actually looked at it,” he declared, squinting at one of the cylinder’s flattened ends.
Ronon hovered, primed and ready to haul McKay to safety at the first sign of trouble, despite the cylinder having never given any indications of being dangerous. Or at least he tried to hover. After about two minutes, McKay complained that he was blocking the light and shooed him over toward Sheppard, who had relaxed enough to lean against the edge of the table in the center of the room. Teyla joined them shortly thereafter, hauling herself up to sit cross-legged on the table top beside Sheppard.
Ronon stayed standing. Despite feeling like he could sleep for a week, he was also on edge. The anxiety and hope currently warring in his veins were a potent combination, and it was all he could do not to pace aggressively from one side of the room to the other. He wanted to run, wanted to run until he collapsed, run until he found some measure of peace again, but there was no way he was leaving this room.
There was no way he was going to let any of the others out of his sight again until they’d stopped the loops.
As far as he knew, the cylinder room was safe—at least, they hadn’t been killed there yet—so he was perfectly happy for everyone, himself included, to just stay put for as long as it took. But as the minutes stretched and McKay grew too quiet, Ronon started to worry there might not be a way out.
Then McKay let out a single, “Huh.”
Ronon was immediately on alert. “What?”
“At first I thought this was just a solid piece of metal,” came the distracted reply. “But there’s a very tight seam running around the rim of what must actually be an end cap, here.” He pointed at one of the flat ends of the tube.
“You going to open it?”
McKay was already pulling his knife from his belt, and he turned his head just far enough to give Sheppard a scathing look. “No, of course not. Why would I want to open the thing that might be an Ancient time control device? I was simply voicing my observations on it for posterity.”
“Need help?” Sheppard casually returned, completely unruffled by McKay’s acerbic tone.
“I think I can handle taking an Ancient device apart on my own.”
“You’ve practically perfected it.”
There was a snort of dry laughter, then McKay went quiet again as he focused on getting the cylinder open. As he worked, Ronon took note of how cautiously he handled it. It was obvious that McKay was very purposefully not touching the central portion of the tube—where Ronon himself had touched it—but keeping his contact limited to the inch or so at the end. Ronon wondered then what McKay already knew but wasn’t admitting, or what he at least suspected but wasn’t willing to say.
A few more minutes passed where the only sounds were the faint scraping of metal blade against metal cylinder, accompanied by a few muffled curses from McKay. Then there was the distinct shink of metal sliding across metal, followed by the dull clack of something heavy landing on a similarly solid surface.
“Got it!”
McKay’s tone of triumph might have been more comforting under other circumstances—usually when he figured something out, it was a good thing—but Ronon found himself suddenly seized by a not entirely irrational fear of what McKay had figured out this time. His arms started trembling slightly, and he realized his whole body had gone tense, as if he were bracing himself for a physical blow. He forced himself to relax, watching as Teyla slid from the table and back onto her feet.
“What is it?” she asked, her curiosity unmarred by any trepidations such as what Ronon felt.
“Definitely not a paperweight,” McKay quipped. “And—in case there was any doubt—definitely Ancient.”
He’d been leaning forward to look at the end of the cylinder, his position effectively blocking the others’ view, but now he sat back on his haunches and turned to look at them. Reflexively, Ronon stepped forward as the end of the cylinder was revealed, needing to know what it was and what part, if any, it was playing in his current nightmare.
At first glance, the view was disappointing. The end cap McKay had managed to remove lay on the desk a few inches to the side of the cylinder, and the void it had hidden appeared to be nothing more than a dark hole.
But in the next second, Ronon caught a small flash of light, followed by another, and another, winking their way through an unsteady rhythm.
He strode over, squatted down beside McKay, and peered into the recess. It was less than an inch deep, its back wall covered with a neat grid of tiny buttons and even tinier lights. Most of them were currently dark, but there was a row at the very top of the cavity that was producing the flashes of light Ronon had spotted from his position by the central table. The colors of the row went from red at the left, through orange and yellow in the middle, to what he assumed would be green at the far right. He had to guess about the last ones because they didn’t actually light up; the sequence would flit across the display, getting only about halfway—just into the yellows—before it stopped.
At the opposite end of the recess, near the bottom, was the only other active light. It was bright green, and was paired with an identical, but currently dark, light that appeared to be of the same shade.
Ronon took in the bright, cheery lights and fought the urge to pick up the device and fling it across the room. The thing that had kept killing them had been right here—literally under his fingertips—the entire time, while they had desperately and needlessly walked into danger elsewhere trying to find it.
He spoke through gritted teeth. “So this is the device?”
“How did the Ancients manage to make a time device so small?”
Sheppard’s voice was quizzical, and much nearer than it had been. Ronon startled slightly, not having noticed that Sheppard had come up behind him and was currently peering interestedly over his shoulder at the cylinder. A glance to his other side found Teyla there, mirroring Sheppard’s position.
A flicker of fear shot through him at the thought of them all being so close to the device, but he didn’t get a chance to raise his concerns before McKay had responded to his and Sheppard’s questions.
“They didn’t because this isn’t.”
McKay rose from his squat, plopping his hands on his hips as he got upright again. Ronon squinted up at him, having lost the thread of the conversation.
“What?”
“This isn’t the time device,” McKay repeated, gesturing vaguely toward the cylinder, “and the Ancients couldn’t have built one this small anyway. Because that would be impossible. The forces at play alone…there’s no way they could construct any type of time control device and make it smaller than, say, a jumper.”
Teyla was the first to get to the question. “So what is this?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s the remote control.”
Sheppard’s eyebrows rose slightly. “To the time control device.”
“Yes.”
“So there is an at-least-jumper-sized device around here somewhere that causes time to loop?”
“Presumably.”
There was something about McKay’s and Sheppard’s exchange that unsettled Ronon, though he couldn’t immediately put his finger on it. Then he looked away from the device and back over his shoulder at the two of them. He took in the eager possessiveness in McKay’s expression and the calculation in Sheppard’s eyes, and his stomach turned over.
Ronon knew McKay could be reckless; it was something he actually liked about him, most of the time. And he respected the streak of ruthlessness Sheppard usually kept hidden behind a facade of nonchalance.
But not now.
They’d already forgotten. He told them they’d died, and they’d already forgotten. He guessed it was easy to forget what you hadn’t experienced, but that didn’t quell the cold pit growing in his chest.
He rapidly stood, pivoting as he rose so that he was facing the others with his back to the device, almost like he was standing between them and it.
Between them and their deadly ambitions.
“How do we turn it off?”
McKay blinked at him for a moment, frowning faintly, no doubt having been pulled from scientific daydreams by the question.
“It’s already off,” he finally replied.
It felt like the ground had shifted beneath Ronon’s feet, and he had to grip the edge of the desk to hold himself steady.
“What?” he managed to croak.
“It’s off. Or at least the device isn’t active.” McKay leaned around Ronon to point at the open recess. “See the lights at the bottom? The left one means the remote is turned on, but the dark one on the right? That one would be lit up if the device was actually on. Y’know, if it was creating loops.”
He circled a finger in the air.
Ronon turned unseeing eyes from him to device and back, understanding but not yet able to comprehend what he was hearing.
McKay seemed to get that, because he added to his explanation, giving Ronon time to process it.
“I think that when you touched it a second time, when I told you to show me the position you started the loop in, that turned it back off. The first touch: on. The second touch: off. I don’t know exactly how it knows that it was you the second time—or whether it even cares; maybe any person touching it would change the settings. And then there’s the question of why this particular Ancient device doesn’t appear to require the gene, when you’d think that time manipulation of all things would be something they’d want to strictly control access to…”
Ronon barely heard anything McKay was saying. He was caught on the fact that all it had taken was his touch. Just a simple brush of fingers.
He’d been in this room every time, every loop, and it had never occurred to him that the cylinder was the key. They’d gone out into the facility, out into the woods, and straight into death over and over again trying to find the way out. And it had been right here all along. All he’d had to do was touch the damn cylinder again.
He felt like laughing, like crying, like he could tear down the walls of the facility with his bare hands. His voice was a hollow growl when he finally cut across McKay’s monologue.
“We’re leaving.”
He’d said those exact words before, with some effect. But this time the team was already in close proximity, still huddled together from their examination of the cylinder, so he was able to add actual physical herding to the equation. He began to slowly guide everyone toward the door.
“But what about—!” McKay protested, pointing over Ronon’s shoulder at the cylinder.
“Leave it,” Ronon tersely replied.
“Now wait a minute—!”
“It’s not worth it, McKay.”
Trying to herd three grown adults who were reluctant to be moved wasn’t as easy as it seemed—especially when using violence as a motivator was off the table—and Ronon wasn’t able to react quickly enough when McKay ducked under his outstretched arm. As he turned to follow McKay’s retreat, Sheppard and Teyla similarly scattered out of his reach. McKay had hurried back to stand by the cylinder, and raised his chin defiantly as Ronon advanced on him.
“Now I know that you said you didn’t find anything when you searched the facility,” he began, tone clipped and logical, “but locating technology and the like isn’t exactly your area of expertise. And now that we know there is, at the very least, a time control device somewhere in the facility, I think we can all agree that it’s imperative that I, with my particular skill set, have a look around.”
There was so much Ronon wanted to say that for a moment he couldn’t say anything.
“You did say that you had already explored the entire facility,” Teyla diplomatically pointed out.
“So you should already know what’s dangerous or not,” Sheppard added.
Ronon almost laughed at the implication that any part of the planet might be safe. They weren’t even safe just standing there debating what was safe or not.
“No.”
“Fine!”
McKay spat the word out as if it were a bad taste and turned a stubborn, fiery gaze on Ronon. The set of his jaw was too familiar, and Ronon braced himself for a fight.
“Fine!” McKay said again. “You can’t stop all of us, so at least one of us will get out!”
His eyes darted toward the door and Ronon took a reflexive step backwards toward it, ready to block the exit if need be. His blaster had already found its way into his hand, but he didn’t raise it like he had before. He just stood there and stared them all down.
“No.”
“We are not going to all run off into the facility.” Teyla’s voice was firm, her disapproving gaze turned McKay’s way as she laid a steadying hand on Ronon’s arm.
“Yeah, I don’t want to see the rest of this place badly enough to rush Ronon,” Sheppard said, “especially when he’s looking at me like he’s looking at me right now, so you’re on your own there, McKay.”
McKay deflated a little, but his face was still pink with anger. “We found a time manipulation device!” He huffed, flinging his arms in the air in a gesture of frustration. “We can’t just leave without even looking at it! I mean, knowing what powers it alone would be worth the effort. These types of things would require massive amounts of energy.” He paused and jabbed a finger at the cylinder. “Hell, even the damn remote control’s still working and I highly doubt anybody popped in over the past few millennia to change the batteries!”
Sheppard, who’d been watching McKay with an increasingly thoughtful expression, flicked an almost apologetic glance Ronon’s way. “He’s got a point.”
“Of course I have a point!” McKay barreled on. “We could be talking a whole bunch of ZPMs here! Or—or maybe even something more substantial, specially created for the device, or not quite refined enough for everyday power needs. Either way, think of what we could learn!”
Death. The device taught about death. And Ronon had learned enough.
“No.”
“We have the remote,” McKay persisted, again gesturing to the cylinder. “And now that we know how it works, there’s no chance of us accidentally—or intentionally—turning the device on. I don’t even want to!” he hastily added, as if his aversion to doing so might sway Ronon. “We just need to find the device so that I can study its construction. It’ll be fine!”
Ronon was pretty sure he knew where the device was. He remembered the only corridor he’d found with doors he couldn’t open. Two doors sealed shut, and the matching doors opposite them and the rooms those doors had led to: a control room, and a room that bloodlessly cut people apart.
His skin suddenly felt too tight, his chest too small for his lungs. His heart was racing as if he’d just sprinted through every corridor in the facility. He couldn’t breathe.
“No.”
McKay turned redder, his eyebrows lowering into a snarl of frustration and irritability. “Oh, come on—!”
“Ronon—”
“I can’t watch you die anymore!”
There was an echoing, stunned silence.
Ronon had been looking Sheppard’s way when desperation ripped the words out of him. He watched as Sheppard’s expression shifted, his eyes suddenly too knowing. Ronon had to look away, and caught Teyla’s stare instead.
Her face had softened with sympathy, and Ronon could tell that she was holding back from touching him again, as if she somehow knew that he wouldn’t be able to survive gentleness at the moment.
But it was McKay’s reaction that surprised him.
Ronon had seen McKay startle at his outburst, the jerking motion registering at the edge of his vision as he’d locked gazes with Sheppard. But when Ronon looked at him now, McKay was unusually still, his face devoid of any hints as to his thoughts or feelings.
His eyes were another story, though. There was so much swirling in their depths that Ronon felt his breath hitch. He tried to sort through what he was seeing, to grab on to anything he recognized in an attempt to read what was going through McKay’s mind and prepare himself for whatever he might do next. But there was too much for that kind of clarity, and before Ronon could decipher anything McKay’s expression had settled into one distinct emotion: resolution.
“Okay.”
McKay’s voice was clear and steady, and Ronon released the breath he’d subconsciously been holding. It caught again when McKay suddenly turned back to the device and hunched over it, but only for a moment.
“I’m turning this off first,” he explained as he poked a finger into the recess.
Ronon saw the flashing lights dance across McKay’s skin for a few seconds before the cavity went dark. With efficient motions, McKay settled the end cap back on the cylinder and began closing it up, talking as he worked.
“I suspect this thing is probably touch activated, actually,” he said, “given that it worked for you. Though there is always the chance that the Ancients not only left it behind but also left it turned on.” He let out a derisive snort. “We’ve seen them do stupider things, honestly. Anyway, there’s every chance it’ll just come right back on in the event that somebody else miraculously stumbles across this place, wanders in here, and touches it, but this is the best I can secure it outside of taking it apart, which I doubt you’ll give me the time to do.”
McKay finished closing up the device and straightened, turning away from it with a final look of resigned longing as he slipped his knife back into its sheath on his belt. Ronon stared at him, feeling too much to actually express any of it but, for once, wishing he could.
Seemingly unaware of his inner turmoil, McKay just gave him a sharp nod. “We can go now.”
Swallowing heavily around the sudden lump in his throat, Ronon returned the nod.
“Okay.”
Like he had for every disastrous step they’d taken so far, Ronon led the way out.
It wasn’t until they were back under the green-tinted shade of the forest canopy again that anxiety began crawling through his body, prickly and cold. Every shadow was a crouched animal waiting to pounce, every rustle of leaves the movement of the team being tracked. His skin burned with the memory of teeth and claws, and his eyes kept mistaking shadows on the leaf litter for blood. But they made it to the Gate without any signs of the vicious animals that had once attacked them.
That had never attacked them.
That had only ever attacked him in his memory.
Ronon pushed away those thoughts and stood with his back to the Gate while McKay dialed them out, half expecting it not to work, half anticipating the animals to burst from the tree line in an attacking wave. But they didn’t, and the Gate connected without any hiccups.
Still, he exited the planet face-on, keeping watch for any last-second dangers as he stepped backward into the wormhole. Then, in a blink, his view changed from seemingly benign forest to the comfortingly familiar sight of the Atlantis Gate.
As it shut down, revealing a suspicious number of armed people standing behind it, Weir’s voice rang out through the room.
“You’re late.”
Ignoring the crowd, Ronon turned on his heel to find her staring down at them from the control room balcony. There was a hint of playfulness in the tone of her reprimand, and a faint smile played at the corners of her mouth despite the tightness around her eyes. But the stiffness of her posture and the crushing grip she had on the balcony railing gave away her nerves.
Sheppard, halfway through passing his weapons over to a waiting MP, froze and squinted up at her in confusion. “What do y’mean?”
Beside him, Teyla was likewise studying Weir’s face with a wrinkled brow. “We were on the planet Rodney identified for reconnaissance,” she advised, her tone slow and cautious.
“We were only gone a couple of hours,” Sheppard added, after a glance at his watch.
Ronon was sure he saw Weir sigh—though whether in relief or exasperation, he couldn’t tell—before she pushed away from the railing and began walking through the control room toward the stairs.
“No,” she said, “you’ve been gone over twenty-four.”
“Hours?” Sheppard asked, expression incredulous.
Weir, descending toward them, raised her eyebrows. “Yes.”
Sheppard blinked at her for a second before he looked to McKay. McKay had been frowning at Weir’s words, too, but just then his face cleared and he nodded, snapping his fingers together as if recalling something from the depths of his memory.
“The—the time loop,” he said. “When we were caught in it, only we were caught in it. It probably only covered the planet, or maybe even just the facility itself; it couldn’t have touched much more than that, scale wise. Not without enough hardware that we would have easily found the device. But everyone and everything outside of the bubble that was created would have been unaffected. So while we kept looping through the same time—like recording over the same part of a tape deck over and over again—everybody else kept going through time linearly, just the one track.”
Sheppard nodded slowly. “So?”
“So we got out of sync. For us—” McKay waggled a finger between Sheppard and himself “—it feels like we’ve only been gone a couple of hours, because we only remember the last loop. But every loop we went through just added more time to what passed outside the loop. It’s kind of like we lost time and can’t remember it.”
“Ronon can.”
Everyone turned to look at Teyla.
“He remembers the loops,” she added, stepping to Ronon’s side and glancing up at him with a look he couldn’t read, but that left him feeling both supported and exposed. “He should know, at least roughly, how long we were stuck in them.”
McKay turned an impatiently inquisitive gaze on Ronon. “So? Was it twenty four hours?”
“I don’t know,” Ronon muttered. “It’s not like I timed it.”
“D’you know how many loops?” Sheppard pushed.
Ronon shifted uncomfortably and tried to count. “Seven? Eight? I’d have to think about it.”
He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to remember. He hoped he’d be able to forget.
He wasn’t sure if Weir understood that and drew Sheppard’s and McKay’s focus back to her at just that moment on purpose, or if he’d misread the brief glimpse he’d gotten of her expression before she turned away. Either way, he was grateful for the distraction.
“I’m sorry—did you say time loops?” she asked, throwing a curious glance between the two. “Someone care to fill me in?”
“Well, the good news is that we did find an Ancient facility,” McKay said with false brightness.
Weir gave him a wary look. “And the bad news?”
“Same as usual,” he replied, “in that the Ancients didn’t exactly leave a lot behind when they abandoned it.” He waved a hand in the air. “Y’know, aside from some kind of device that causes time loops.”
Weir’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Wait—you don’t know what the device is?”
“We, ah, didn’t stick around to find it,” Sheppard advised, shooting Ronon a glance from the corner of his eye.
“Because?”
“Because we kept dying.”
Weir blinked at Ronon for a few seconds, shock slackening her face.
“What?”
“The only reason we looped is because we died,” he explained.
Because he died. Because he’d touched the cylinder and it kept coming for him. Or maybe it just waited for him, knowing something would get him eventually. The rest of the team was no more than collateral damage.
He could see Weir putting together the pieces, could see the picture become clearer and more horrifying in her mind as everything she’d been told clicked into place.
“And you went through seven or eight loops—?”
For the first time—maybe because of Weir’s reaction, maybe because they’d had a moment to digest it themselves—the rest of the team seemed to fully grasp the reality of what Ronon had explained to them. He was sure they were going to ask, could already hear the What happened? and how it would sound coming from each of them, and he knew he couldn’t do it.
He didn’t know if he could tell them, but more worryingly he wasn’t sure he would be able to stop himself from telling them everything, and he was afraid that he might not survive it if he did.
Not now, not yet. Maybe not ever.
He caught Teyla watching him with sad, knowing eyes—just for a second, as fast as he realized they were looking at each other. Then she turned to Weir with a business-like air.
“I believe we should all be checked out by Dr. Beckett,” she said in a calm, resolute tone that made it clear she would suffer no arguments to the contrary.
Weir simply nodded. “I agree. I’m not sure what looping through time might do to a person, but I’d rather not have any residual effects decide to surprise us somewhere down the line.” She raised her chin toward the corridor that led to the infirmary. “Go.”
McKay, already headed that way, stopped to harrumph in her general direction. “The entire SGC was in a loop for months with no residual effects.”
Weir, on her way back up the stairs, just threw him a tired smile over her shoulder. “Different galaxy, different device, Rodney. Go get checked out.”
“We’re going,” Sheppard reassured her, nudging McKay back into motion.
McKay grumbled a bit, but he was still the first one through the doors once they reached the infirmary.
Beckett was talking with a nurse with his back to the door when they entered. Before anyone called out to him, almost as if he could sense their presence, he abruptly stopped talking and turned around. Ronon saw the concern that flickered in his eyes, and watched it melt into quickly-disguised relief once his roaming gaze had taken a quick survey of their bodies and registered no immediately apparent injuries.
He gently waved the nurse off with a whispered word, and walked toward them.
“Ah, so you’ve finally turned up, have you?”
“We didn’t realize we were missing until we got back.”
Beckett gave Sheppard an unimpressed look. “Lost track of the time, did you?”
“Quite literally, actually.” McKay hoisted himself up onto a cot, dangling his legs idly and smiling benignly at Beckett’s baffled expression.
Ronon knew he was relishing these few moments, when he knew about something that had happened and Beckett didn’t. Ronon also knew that Beckett knew that, and therefore wasn’t surprised when the doctor turned to Sheppard for further explanation instead. Because the thing McKay loved best about holding info over people’s heads was being the one to finally tell them.
“Did you all get knocked out or something?” Beckett asked, his gaze on Sheppard’s hairline—no doubt looking for telltale damage—while he waited for a response.
“Not exactly.” Sheppard cut Ronon a look again, the same hesitant one he’d used back in the Gate room. “At least, not that most of us remember.”
Beckett’s eyes stopped searching for injuries and snapped to Sheppard’s, direct and piercing. “Come again?”
“We—well, Ronon—found the remote control for a device that triggered time loops,” McKay butted in. “According to him, we kept looping over and over, with the loops only ending when we died.”
Beckett blinked at him. “But you don’t remember…?”
The question within the question was clear, and Ronon answered it. “I do.”
Beckett’s gaze shifted to him, now even more assessing and calculating. “Why only you?”
“Because he’s the one who touched the control and turned on the device.” McKay shrugged. “So I figure it was keyed to him somehow—fingerprints, sweat, skin cells, something. I mean, it would make sense that someone would have to remember the loop, otherwise you’d never be able to get out of it. But I have no idea what the actual designation method is since we didn’t study it there and we didn’t bring it back with us.”
“What a shame,” Beckett murmured, shooting McKay a mildly reproachful look as he circled around the end of a cot and moved toward Ronon. He had a penlight out and on in the next two steps, and was shining it in Ronon’s eyes after the following three.
Knowing the path of least resistance was to just let things happen, Ronon stood still. A second later Beckett hummed to himself, a low sound barely audible over the background noise of the infirmary, and stepped back.
“I’ll want to scan you. All of you,” he added, throwing a warning look over his shoulder at where McKay, Teyla, and Sheppard were clustered around one cot. Then he turned back to Ronon. “But I’ll start with you. We’ll need to see if going through the loops had any neurological side effects, among other things.”
Beckett muttered the last part to himself, disapproval seeping into his tone. It wasn’t clear whether it was directed toward Ronon and the others for once again getting themselves into trouble, or toward the Ancients and their dangerous devices. Ronon suspected it was probably both. And while he usually found the doctor’s disdain toward danger a bit overbearing, this time he found himself agreeing with the sentiment.
He’d been through too much death in too short a time to feel anything other than relief at the team finally being back within the relative safety of the city. And he was relieved; relieved and exhausted and grateful.
They’d survived, eventually, and had returned from the mission intact, without so much as a scar to show for it. They’d escaped and they were safe and that should have been good enough.
But even as Beckett prepared him to go under the infirmary scanner, Ronon couldn’t take his eyes off the others where they sat together across the room.
Because beneath the relief, he was still afraid.