Initiating Program/Do Sheppards Dream of Electric Sheep?

[mashimero]

Artist: chkc
Title: Initiating Program
Medium: Digital Painting
Pairing(s): None
Notes: Thank you to Neevebrody for her ever-helpful betaing skills and to Mashimero for organizing this event!

Author: nny
Title: Do Sheppards Dream of Electric Sheep?
Wordcount: ~5,400
Rating: G
Pairing(s): none
Summary: “It will do no good,” Teyla said, disdain and frustration edging her voice closer to a low tone that tugged at Rodney’s stomach painfully. “As I understand it we have come to this too late. His sentence has already been passed.”

“It’s what?” Rodney asked blankly, even as John’s foot twitched slightly against his hand, as his head moved against the pillow in the uncomfortable shrugging motion that said nothing so loud as bad dream. 

Notes: With huge thanks to mashimero for her incredible patience, chkc for the beautiful art, and torakowalski, ladyflowdi and catwalksalone for reading and checking way above and beyond the call of duty. So grateful, guys, thank you.

Do Sheppards Dream of Electric Sheep?

More than anything else on this planet, even more than the ugly and overblown red flowers that everyone seemed to use as a decorating motif, Rodney hated Sheppard’s bed. More specifically, he hated how it looked like one of the ones in the infirmary back on Atlantis; it was offensive, a jarring note of the surreal in a setting that was already twanging against his last nerve. A Star Trek set of a Viking great hall complete with fire pit and wall shields, dimly lit save for the small bleeping corner of machinery and gurneys with their quiescent wired-up occupants; Sleeping Beauty’s castle, if the spiders knew how to weave together the Ancient equivalent of fibre optic cables.

John was pushed negligently up against one of the earthen walls, sprawled inelegantly and even snoring slightly, air whistling between his parted lips. If it weren’t for the web of wires he’d look like any other grunt catching a quick nap – except John never relaxed that much in front of anyone that wasn’t team, no matter how much his leaning might resemble it. It had taken Rodney longer than it should have to notice that, to tell which smiles were genuine, which particular angle of the shoulders meant he was happy, but it was like an optical illusion that you couldn’t un-see. A vase became two faces became the tight set of his mouth that belied his seemingly peaceful sleep.

The ink had dried red-brown on the papers that were pasted, lopsided, above his bed – it reminded Rodney uncomfortably of blood but he was pretty sure it wasn’t, because these people didn’t seem to have the balls for direct intervention, if John’s condition was any indication. He swallowed and shifted his weight, forcibly suppressing the urge to reach out and touch John, find reassurance in the gentle tick of his pulse beating against the thin skin of his wrist.

Hooked sickle-curves in the word on the right-hand sheet of paper spelled out ‘Wraith Waker’, with ‘Wraith Killer’ slashed sharply onto the other. Placed side by side like that it seemed like they ought somehow to balance each other out, but the Angun clearly didn’t think so because John had been placed here, sleeping and defenceless as they discussed his fate with Teyla in whispered hissing voices across the other side of the hall. Teyla hadn’t let him come with her; Teyla never let him come, probably for valid reasons.

The disadvantage of paying attention to people, of it mattering enough to work out when Teyla was laughing inwardly and when she was genuinely pissed, of it being important to tell the difference between Ronon’s expressions enough to be able to tell if he’d punch you or slap you on the back (and to recognise them soon enough to run away from both of them anyway), was that you couldn’t stop. Rodney turned away from Teyla’s increasingly frustrated hand gestures, the implacably straight spines of the Angun, and focused instead on the beaker full of hideous red someone had placed near John’s head.

None of them even spared him a look at the ringing crash.

Ronon had disappeared outside a while ago, the dark look on his face hinting that there would be some seriously scorched foliage in the woods surrounding the village when he was through. He’d jerked his head at Rodney as he’d left, practically an engraved invitation as far as Ronon was concerned, but Rodney had never managed to get past the rationing mentality he’d developed before the Daedalus had ever shown up and he still held the important things close – bullets, epi pens, coffee, the things he was pretty sure he’d die in fairly short order without – like someone was going to try to take them away.

When Teyla came back across he’d given in without noticing, his hand spanning the width of John’s oddly defenceless ankle, rendered impossibly narrow merely by the removal of his boots.

“They will not be swayed,” she told him, her voice raised enough that the Anguni elders could have no trouble hearing either her words or the disdain that rang in her voice. “He is to be punished according to their customs.”

“Like hell he will,” Rodney retorted, his hand tightening. “Where’s Ronon? He can – “

“It will do no good,” Teyla said, disdain and frustration edging her voice closer to a low tone that tugged at Rodney’s stomach painfully. “As I understand it we have come to this too late. His sentence has already been passed.”

“It’s what?” Rodney asked blankly, even as John’s foot twitched slightly against his hand, as his head moved against the pillow in the uncomfortable shrugging motion that said nothing so loud as bad dream.

“His case is a complicated one.”

Teyla and Rodney rounded on the woman who had spoken, standing shoulder to shoulder between her and John. Her long cloak whispered against the dusty floor as she came to a halt, just beyond their reach; her dark eyes were kind. Sympathetic. Rodney kind of wanted to punch her in one of them.

“Complicated how?” Rodney snapped, half-expecting Teyla to put a restraining hand on his arm; apparently she was as pissed as him, though, or nearly. “Complicated by the fact that he’s innocent?”

“Impossible,” she said flatly. “The oracle is never wrong.”

It was their name for the gate that crowned the path to their village, huge and Wraith-scarred and apparently made up of Ancient tech; when John had passed through it had flashed blue and orange and red red red, and before Rodney could even start to speculate what it meant they’d been surrounded. The Angun had told him that it indicates guilt, some kind of mind- or emotion-reading device, probably another in the long list of Ancient machines designed as a cheat sheet; up up down down left right left right B A start, rearrange the crystals just so and you find the short cut to ascension.

It was more effective than any shoplifting security system, Rodney’d give them that, but –

“But Sheppard’s a self-flagellating flyboy with bad hair and a hero complex the size of the Pegasus galaxy,” he protested. “He feels guilty for anything and everything up to and including the cancellation of Firefly! Guilt doesn’t confirm – and what do you do with the ones who don’t feel guilty, anyway? You can’t tell me Pegasus doesn’t have sociopaths; I’m pretty certain I’ve met some of them, so - ”

“Rodney.”

He took a breath and a step back; the woman’s tightly wound posture relaxed slightly.

“We deal with all our criminals,” she told him stiffly, “whether they are proved so by the oracle or not; the difference is only the punishment which is accorded them.”

“And what punishment precisely is that?” Teyla asked, her voice deceptively calm.

“In his case? As I have said, it is complicated.”

“Because he’s –“ Rodney began mutinously, stubbornly; Teyla snapped his name with less patience than he’d ever heard from her, and he stared at her in shock.

“I am sorry,” she said in milder tones that still had an edge of steel to them. “Please.”

“No,” the woman answered. “I am the one who should be sorry; I have been imprecise. I don’t know precisely what word I should use to describe what has been done. It is not a punishment, not yet, but instead a trial of a sort. The Ancients left us more devices than the oracle alone, devices that can more clearly indicate the extent of each prisoner’s guilt.” She cast a look at the collection of beds, the still forms in them, and there was a detachment in her expression that made Rodney feel faintly sick. “They are put into a false sleep,” she continued, “and their dreams allow us to judge more accurately the apt justice that should be meted.”

“A virtual environment,” Rodney breathed, the machinery suddenly clicking into place in his mind. It was so much more primitive than the Aurora’s equipment that he hadn’t linked them before, but that was obviously what he was looking at. “Do you have any idea what you’re – the amount of damage you could be doing, do you even know how this stuff works?”

“Enough,” she told him coldly. “No prisoner is harmed by their time in the dream state, they emerge exactly as they were. What happens afterward depends on – “

“ – their subconscious manipulation of the virtual environment, yes.” Rodney pinched the bridge of his nose. “I mentioned the self-flagellation, yes? We’ll be lucky if Sheppard hasn’t flung himself on a mental hand grenade already. What is it precisely you expect them to do?”

“Merely to prove to us the content of their character. Their humanity,” she answered.

Teyla let out a breath, and Rodney watched the almost seamless transition from a tension he hadn’t even realised was ratcheted so high into a state that was almost relaxed.

“For John that cannot prove too difficult.”

Rodney was so busy looking at her that he almost didn’t catch the small shift in the Angun woman’s expression.

“You’ve done something,” he said flatly. He waved Teyla’s hand away impatiently – “don’t shh me, you only get to shh me if they’re not clearly bastards, we made a deal - ” and then pointed at her accusingly. “Don’t lie to me, you’ve done something and you’re hoping I won’t find out about it, I know that expression.”

“Is this true?” Teyla’s voice was at its coldest, its most threatening. The Angun woman opened her mouth to protest, to argue, but courage that managed to stand up against Teyla’s subtlety didn’t stand a chance against the gentle whine of Ronon’s gun coming from just behind her head. The man moved like a cat.

“There are… parameters,” the woman finally answered, her mouth twisting in protest. She raised a hand quickly, and it wasn’t until that point that Rodney noticed the way the other council members had circled them, the weapons that were trained on them. Rodney fumbled at his thigh holster, belated, but he was happy this time to follow the signal of Teyla’s small hand on his wrist.

“What parameters?” he snapped instead, impatient with her reticence. “What precisely have you managed to find to screw this up even further than it already is?”

“Kialla,” a rat-faced man snapped warningly, and that was great – Rodney had a name to put on his revenge list now, somewhere close to the top.

“It is not permitted,” she said, mouth tight and face paler but still resolute, even in the face of Ronon’s gun and the worrying smell of burning that had followed him in. “Only those under sentence and members of our council may know what the trial involves.”

“Fine,” said Rodney, and he could tell the grin on his face wasn’t one of the reassuring ones; the painful grip that materialised around his wrist didn’t even give him pause, and he squinted along the barrel of his freed gun. “Which one of you do I have to shoot to get a look at it?”


* * * *


“…can’t even find any kind of logical power module; you’d think if they were going to be creating a virtual reality they’d be paying more attention to the latter half of the name, but what can you expect from the kind of floaty-robe hippy ascended-wanna- No. Oh, no, please tell me I didn’t just - what the hell did I just step in?”

His processors came online slowly; slowly enough for the voice to register as diagnostic/repair (trusted) and therefore not a threat before the possibility of reaction was realised. The voice was coming from somewhere in the unfinished architecturally unsound spaces inside him, the echoes making something in the left hand side of his chest cavity buzz uncomfortably (but not quite unfamiliarly). He (query: designation?) reached with the unformed parts of himself, coiling wires around –

“Hey. Hey! I need my lungs!”

- and extracting the diagnostic tool so that he could analyze, categorise satisfactorily.

It was – unexpected, in form. Long-term data storage was corrupted, unusable, but something flickering in the back of some unregarded system suggested that the tool was smaller than (it should be) was practical. He should not have to lift it to be able to meet its eyes. (The flickering unregarded process-thought said that the input devices ought to be blue.)

“Well this is just unsettling,” it remarked, scanning him quickly and efficiently. “I expected – I don’t know what I expected, but this is - ” another, needless, scan of his casing. “What have they done to you?”

It was formed differently from him; smaller and smoothed over, whole and complete, wrapped in a cloth outer-casing of a new variant of gray, different to the walls and the bars and the dull metal sheen of him. It had no obvious defensive capabilities, and it examined the weapons-graft he was equipped with for far longer than a mere systems check could explain.

“Of course,” it said. Its vocal apparatus needed attention.

There were flaws in his design and execution, this was evident. Besides being unfinished, incomplete, there were certain redundancies; tilting his processing unit to one side somehow made thought-processes come quicker and more smoothly.

The diagnostic tool squinted at him, drawing conclusions from this change in posture.

“You don’t – no. Of course you don’t, it would make things far too easy if you had any idea who I am.”

“Diagnostic,” he said; it sounded as though rust had gotten into his vocal apparatus. “Repairs.”

“Mostly you just call me Rodney,” it told him. Its facial expression looked somehow badly engineered. “If you give me a minute I’m sure I can come up with a witty acronym.” Then, “Ha!” it said. “Well done. That was almost an expression.”

The wires that held it – system error? – brought it closer, and it reached to touch his casing, just between his visual apparatus; the pla-skin was stretching strangely there, rumpled against Rodney-diagnostic’s hand. Temperature sensors registered the impractical heat of it, each tiny finger-appendage registering separately as it moved across the pla-skin to beside the speaker system (rebelliously designated ‘mouth’.)

The pla-skin there was flawed, file-rough; the tiny hand made a strange sound as it scratched across the uneven surface.

“The question,” it muttered, poorly volume-controlled; audio sensors dialled up to receive it, “is how much of this is actually you.”

“What is ‘you’?” it queried, and was answered with a burst of sound that registered, somehow, as dismissive.

“Well not that,” it answered. “Monotone from you makes my teeth ache. You ought to be all over the vocal register, nasal and drawling and volume control impaired. I never thought I’d want to hear your laugh.”

The tool – Rodney – turned its head quickly, one side to the other and back again, then pushed at the wires that held it. Heat registered again, somewhere that – were he finished, and whole, and complete – his own fingers ought to be.

“This, though? Interrupting my work? That’s all you, Sheppard. If we’re going to get you close to anything resembling the humanity they want you to prove, you’re going to have to put me down.”

The unformed parts of himself uncoiled, lowering diagnostic-Rodney.

“Wait!” it told him, echoing uncomfortably-painfully loud in adjusted audio sensors. “Wait, those weren’t – were those there before?” It was gesturing – uneconomical and inefficient in its motion – at the metal designation-tags, registering cold against designation:Sheppard’s pla-skin.

“They are part of me, Rodney,” he said, vocal apparatus forming the name-word strangely and slow; Rodney-diagnostic made a low stuttering sound that would not register as a recognisable status indicator, caught somewhere in the designation-blankness between ‘satisfactory’ and ‘not’. When nothing more was said, designation:Sheppard lowered the diagnostic tool back into place, where it could get back to its analysis of the deepest parts of him; having it there was strange and uncomfortable, but registering closer to complete.


* * * *


Rodney blinked his eyes open and for a moment Ronon and Teyla, standing protectively over his bed, looked improbably small and unbearably far away. He flung his arm over his eyes and blinked frantically against the scratchy material of his sleeve, trying to clear them of the stinging.

“You said - ” he started, then cleared his throat painfully. “You said difficult, not – not impossible, not inhuman.” When he lowered his arm he was looking past both of them to where Kialla stood alone, regal and straight backed and worrying her robe between her fingers, which was something, at least.

“Your friends will have to be removed.”

“Please,” Ronon said. “Try.”

“This is not standard!” she burst out, darker colour bursting blotchily onto her cheeks. “The severity of his crime should not allow this level of loyalty, it makes no logical sense.”

“The severity of his mistake,” Teyla emphasised the word carefully, “does not have any reflection in the formation of his character. You were wrong,” implacable and unforgiving and a pronouncement etched in stone; Kialla visibly flinched back from her words.

“The oracle - ” she said faintly.

“Machines aren’t people,” Ronon said, and Rodney couldn’t help but laugh, hoarse and uneven.

“Machines aren’t people and that’s barely even him! How the hell is he supposed to prove his humanity to you when you’ve done everything in your power to remove it from him?”

Kialla’s expression had fallen apart around her; her mouth moved mechanically and she sounded almost as robotic as John. “The parameters were adjusted to match the severity of his crime. The proof of humanity in such a case must be hardest won, or else what proof is it?”

“They’ve turned him into some kind of cyborg,” Rodney said, gesturing jerkily and incompletely as he tried to frame it in words Ronon and Teyla would understand. “Part human, part machine and temperamentally Replicator.” He moved quickly to correct their expressions, scrubbing at the air as though he could erase what he’d said. “Not – I only mean the blankness, the – there was nothing - ” unbidden, the sound of the machine’s voice, tripping over a drawl in the long vowels of his name – “barely anything of Sheppard in there, and if they want to get him closer to humanity…” his voice trailed off and his hands described a box in the air. “There’s nothing I can fix him with, just a bare blank cell, walls, bars, the whole nine yards - which looks a hell of a lot like a punishment to me.” He bit the words out sharply, like they could hurt Kialla, like anything could make up for what was happening. “Innocent until proven guilty.” He flung the words at her. “Your people should look that one up.”

“I’m sorry,” she said softly, and if the transition from the virtual to the real hadn’t left him so unsteady he would have hit her, for that.

“So fix it,” Ronon said flatly, but she spread her hands helplessly.

“I cannot. If the dream, the virtual environment does not run its course - ”

“Like the Aurora.” Teyla’s face was carefully composed but there was pain in her voice. “There is no telling what effect a forcible extraction could have on John’s mind.”

“Which brings me back to what the hell am I supposed to do?” Rodney snapped, his hands clenching into fists around the impossibilities.

“We are not inhuman,” Kialla said carefully. “All the tools he will need to prove himself are in the reality that is constructed around him, no amount of negative intervention by his own mind will alter that.”

“Do not blame him,” Teyla told her, her voice low and dark; Rodney was grateful he couldn’t see her expression. “Lay no part of this at his feet.”

“Well isn’t this ironic,” Rodney said, handing his data pad – the one he had so carefully hooked into the Ancient machinery, by-passing sub-routines and failsafes that he barely even understood – to Ronon. “Don’t let her touch anything,” he told him softly, before continuing. “I’ve got to go into a computer to help John prove his humanity, something a two minute conversation with any one of us could have taken care of, to a group of people I’m not convinced even know what it is.”

“Go with luck,” Kialla said helplessly.

“Go to hell,” Rodney snarled, and lay back down.


* * * *


Diagnostic-Rodney had fallen silent some time ago, and designation:Sheppard had slowed processes almost to stasis again; without external stimuli his resources were inefficient. Only sensors continued, calculating the dimensions of the small blank room, how long the supply of oxygen might last (although why this seemed significant was less calculable.) The loud sudden curse that echoed in his chest cavity was jarring, sending vibrations flickering sharp-unpainfully through the flaw in the left side of his chest.

System errors were to be encouraged when they sent unformed wires curling around the tool again, pulling it back out to where visual apparatus could track it. Rodney came spitting emotions and curses like each was as easily formed as the other; the pla-skin around designation:Sheppard’s stereo-mouth stretched strangely upward on one side.

“You’re impossible,” he was told, at volume inefficiently judged. “You’re like a child! This place doesn’t have the facilities for computer golf, so you’re going to have to let me get back to attempting to find something that will help you meet whatever arbitrary standards of humanity the Angun ascribe to.”

Long-term data storage was corrupted, unusable, but somehow the words tripped a switch and triggered an echo.

“Relax, Rodney,” he said, unprocessed and unthought.

If his processors had been slower, his reactions less honed, he would have lost his grip on Rodney; the tool lost structural integrity somehow, its lower half buckling and its balance failing so that it stumbled and almost slipped between wires. The unformed parts of designation:Sheppard were inadequate to the task of defying gravity, and he moved quickly to catch Rodney with his other appendage. For a moment it was strange and unwieldy, cold and angular and wrong, but then fingers were curling to support the small figure, Rodney’s weight comforting and substantial in the palm of his hand.

“Oh,” Rodney said in a small voice, vocal apparatus inadequate (breathless). “Oh.” And he leaned his weight forward, for balance, one small arm wrapping around John’s finger and his forehead (there could be no other name for it) resting heavily against his thumb. Against that, the gentle whispering hiss of metal bars retracting into the ceiling almost went unnoticed; the strident echoing blare of the siren that followed was less easy to ignore.

“What did I do?”

(Designation) Sheppard’s audio sensors could just hear Rodney’s small voice, trapped underneath the mechanical bellowing.

“What did I do, what did I touch?”

The ringing in Sheppard’s processors echoed the external noise, query piling on query running through system echoing with the only possible response.

“Let’s go check it out,” he said, his voice slowing and curling inefficiently around the words.

“But we have no idea what’s out there!” Rodney protested, voice sliding up into an octave that couldn’t have been programmed deliberately. “There’s absolutely no guarantee that we’ll be safe, and we don’t even know if that’s the way to get out of this damned place, and - ”

Sheppard deliberately stretched the pla-skin around his eyebrow, arching it upward.

“I’d say don’t give me that look,” Rodney said after a moment, voice unsteady, “but the fact that you have the look to give it is pretty incredible at this point, so I don’t think the argument would really stand up in court.”

“I don’t understand,” Sheppard said, carefully curling his voice up at the edges.

“That’s okay,” Rodney said, “I don’t make sense.”

The corridor was long and repetitive, a pattern of blank walls interspersed with metal bars fronting empty cells, Sheppard’s heavy feet clanging against brushed steel floor without turning or variation. Rodney was sitting in the palm of his hand, knees drawn up to his chest and fingers braced against his temples, the pla-skin of his casing furrowed across his brow.

“Still nothing?” he said, after a moment or two. Sheppard tried tilting his processor again, moving it to a somehow inquisitive angle; Rodney sighed. “I’m trying for a Stargate because nothing feels safer, but frankly anything would do. Neon lights, blinking arrow, exit sign; even a corner would be comforting at this point.” He slumped back, resting his weight against Sheppard’s fingers. “My mind tricks are rusty.”

“Mind tricks,” Sheppard echoed flatly.

“Jedi,” Rodney told him, short and dismissive as though he wouldn’t understand. (He shouldn’t.) “It was worth a try.”

“Do or do not,” Sheppard said slowly.

“That counts!” Rodney shouted, aiming his small face up at the ceiling, voice echoing far louder against Sheppard’s – ears – than should be possible from his tiny frame. “That has to count, how can that not count?” And then to Sheppard, urgently, “you try, okay? Picture a door or a window or – I don’t know, a damned Puddlejumper.”

Something shot through him at the last word, a sparking electrical surge of wires and nerves and metal and bone, an exhilaration that felt like a disruption to gravity and wind against his face. The unformed parts of him moved and lashed, beating against the dull metal of the wall before sliding sinuously together, weaving improbably into something that more closely resembled a hand, his hand, the way that his hand ought to be.

Ahead of them a hatch, improbably green against the pale metal wall.

“You’re a genius!” Rodney yelled. “I’m a genius! We’re - ”

The corridor pulsed around them.

For a moment designation:Sheppard could see through the images that surrounded them, could read the coding that made up their world and the coding that had engineered this flawed flesh; he could see the way that the metal walls rippled as the world was rewritten.

“ – going to die,” Rodney finished, his voice turned small.

It was nothing but a dark cloud, a formless mass, rippling gently between the re-solidified metal walls, between them and the slowly opening hatch, but something felt scraped out in Sheppard’s corrupted data storage as though it had been taken directly from the place where his fear was coded.

“We only have to get through it,” Sheppard said slowly. “If we moved fast - ”

He hadn’t known pla-skin could sting so much at a tiny back-handed slap.

“I cannot articulate how much I appreciate that you’re getting back to your old self,” Rodney hissed, “but now is not the time to remember the suicidal heroism!” It could almost have been a compliment, if Rodney’s tone didn’t so clearly equate ‘hero’ and ‘idiot.’

Sheppard – smiled. The slight shift of his weight was met not with the clang of metal against the brushed-steel metal of the corridor floor, but instead the gentle creak of rubber soles.

“Hey,” he said, as his fingers closed around Rodney like a cage, “there is no try.”


* * * *


Rodney was vertical almost before his body had registered that it was awake, rolling out of his bed to land barely upright on shaking legs. He crossed the space between his bedside and Sheppard’s without noting anything else in the room, his hands barely steady as he cupped them around John’s face. His thumbs pushed open John’s eyelids, smoothed over his cheekbones as his face crumpled around them.

“Ow, Rodney,” in familiar nasal tones, “would you - ” but Sheppard’s weakly batting hands landed on nothing; Rodney was already stumbling across to where Ronon held a rat-faced man against the rough earthen wall. Teyla held Kialla’s hands behind her nearby but the woman was making no effort to escape, the tumbled mass of her dark hair not hiding the tears that were sliding down her face.

“If you’d killed him,” Rodney told the man Ronon held, voice steadier than any other part of his body, and low, and resolute, “I would have ended you. As slowly as I could have managed it.”

“Observe your justice,” Teyla said, pushing Kialla forward slightly.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Rahden wouldn’t - ”

“Caught him messing with the machines,” Ronon told her, implacable.

“He wouldn’t,” she insisted. “Rahden - ”

No one with Ronon’s full strength barely leashed behind the hand that held their throat would have spoken, it was true, but something about Rahden’s face suggested he wouldn’t have even if he could.

“How many prisoners have proved their humanity to you?” Rodney demanded of Kialla. “Whatever the hell that word means to you, how many have managed to meet your standards?”

“Your Colonel,” she said hopelessly, “is the first.”

“Because he’s been altering the parameters,” Rodney shouted, “rewriting the code to make things more – how the hell could they succeed when every deck was stacked against them. It was already an indescribably difficult task, and he made it impossible!”

“It was necessary,” Rahden hissed, his voice cutting off unevenly as Ronon closed his hand a little tighter.

“You’re not allowed to talk,” he said.

“I should kill you,” Rodney growled, rounding on Rahden.

“No killing,” Sheppard said from behind him and Rodney turned to face him helplessly. Sheppard was Bambi unsteady, arm braced against the side of his bed, hair impossibly rumpled and skin marked with red creases and whole.

There was something uncomfortably stuck in Rodney’s throat and he swallowed hard, letting out a small noise that he would never admit to.

“Not even a little?” he managed, after a moment, and Sheppard’s mouth curled into a grin.

“Pretty sure that’s not how Atlantis does it,” he said, and Teyla nodded solemnly behind him. Rodney looked appealingly at Ronon.

“You think we should kill him, right?”

Ronon shrugged. “On Sateda we would have killed him already.”

“Hey,” Rodney said, face brightening, “loophole?”

“No killing,” Sheppard repeated, and Rodney’s hands clenched into useless fists.

“Fine,” he said through teeth that were clenched half in anger and half in residual fear. “Fine.” He caught the rough-spun cotton of Rahden’s sleeve and pulled on it, not caring that Ronon barely managed to pull his hand out of the way before his hold did some kind of permanent damage.

“Rodney,” Sheppard snapped behind him, barely a shadow of his usual tone of command, but Rodney didn’t pause in pulling Rahden through an archway into the sun-bright clearing and towards the edge of the village, the man barely able to keep up and stumbling behind him. He didn’t slacken his pace until they were standing before the Ancient gateposts, huge and Wraith-scarred and draining all the colour from Rahden’s face.

“Observe your justice,” he said, and shoved him in the small of his back, watching as the man fell to his knees between the gateposts which flashed blue and orange and red, red, red.


* * * *


“Atlantis? This is Sheppard.”

The crackle of the radio in his ear was reassuring in the same way as knowing the right names for things, as clothes, as the slight ache in muscles held tense for too long.

“Colonel? It is good to hear from you. We were considering becoming concerned.”

“Hey, nothing to worry about, Doc,” John told him, the smile as clear in his voice as it was on his face. “Rodney just broke a penal system again.”

“I - ?” Rodney sputtered, inarticulately flailing and incredibly, unprogrammably, ridiculously human. The quick back-handed slap stung just as much as in the virtual reality, but John was pretty sure no smile could have even approached how good this one felt.





The end.