Just a taste of what I'm going through at the moment...
They arrive in the control room, Sheppard and McKay and Teyla and Ford, returning to Atlantis from an uneventful mission of exploration. All is not as it should be. The lights are dim, and there is nobody around; the air is close and musty with a strange smell, like barbeque smoke and mould. Eerily familiar shapes are slumped about the room like sleepers at an all night party, their features shrouded by the darkness, still as the dead. And the noise… the comms system is on full blast, belting out music from the cache of mp3s and DVD compilations contributed by personnel to a communal store. Currently it is playing some eighties Euro pop selection, at an impossibly high volume that makes it hard for them to think, let alone hear if anything - anyone - were to approach.
They stare at one another, eyes gleaming in the fitful light, and make their way across the control room to the stairs, weapons trained on the empty darkness, eyes darting between the shadows, searching for movement. The corpses - for that is what they are - remain still. The smell alone should indicate there is no life left here. Major Sheppard shines his gun-light on one of the sack-like figures. A Wraith; or what is left of it, a burned out husk, a charred, grotesque shell. Most of the corpses around the room are Wraith. A few are human. All are similarly burned, as though a lightning storm had raged around the room.
They continue on, up the steps, wincing at the inappropriate cheeriness of the music, and its volume. They stop by the systems consoles, hoping to do something about the noise, but the equipment is broken, burned out by the same attack that must have caught the Wraith. Were the humans victim to that same implacable purge, or had they already been taken by the Wraith? No way of knowing, now. They continue on, making as though by some silent, group impulse to one room, the room with the command chair, from which Sheppard helped to stave off the first attack of the Wraith. This room is even darker than the one they have just come from, and they have to watch their footing among the carnage.
The chair spins slowly in the darkness, a roving pointer overseeing the destruction swathing the room. Bodies piled high, the charnel stench stronger here as its circling movement stirs the air. There is a figure in the chair, huddled and still in death, its knees drawn up to its chin. The music changes, something wilder and darker, discordant yet oddly beautiful, contrasting poignantly with the shadowed death. Does the City mourn its lost inhabitants in song? They approach the rotating chair without speaking, hesitant of what - who - they will find there. No one wishes to be the first to train their gun-light on the scene. They stop, a few feet short of the chair, watching its odd, deliberate gyrations and trying not to breathe too deeply.
Suddenly, it halts, coming to rest so that its macabre occupant is facing them, and the music cuts out. And the figure isn’t dead; it stirs, lowering its legs, sitting up a little straighter. A rogue gleam of light from one distant light at the far side of the room catches the familiar tousle of hair, and then this Sheppard speaks, his voice husky and oddly flat, so low that they have to strain to hear, their ears deadened by the music.
"Who are you? Why have you come? There’s nothing here. They’re all dead. I killed them. Have you come to judge me?"
And then the lights blaze up, and they stare in horror at the emaciated form, the taut mask of pain and grief and madness, the staring, hollow eyes. A heartbeat, two, and then they see the silvery snaking wires, the enmeshing cage of tubing that holds him to the chair, running around his body and in and out of his flesh, a hellish symbiosis of machine and man, a cybernetic travesty of life. He is one with the chair, one with the destruction around him, lord of this domain of death, lone unchallenged ruler of the darkness.
And then he wakes, heart pounding in the darkness, streaming sweat as the echoes of his screams bounce hoarsely from the walls of his quarters. Just another nightmare. Just another torment dredged from the insecurities of his soul to ravage his sleep, the one time he should be able to forget his failure and his self-disgust. And he knows he hasn’t killed them, that the city is safe - at least for now - but he is still alone, with his fear and his rage and his shame that he cannot articulate, broken by the torment of his captors and brought back to rot here uselessly, a living memorial to the folly of curiosity, the explorer undone.
And then the door bursts open, light streaming into the room, and Rodney is there, his face terrible with concern and compassion, bounding towards the bed; taking him in his arms and stroking him, soothing him, murmuring apologies.
"I’m sorry John, I couldn’t sleep, I wanted to get some work done in the lab. I shouldn’t have left you. I’m sorry. I’m here now, it’s all right. Shhh, it’s all right, I won’t leave you again."
Only it isn’t really all right, because Rodney shouldn’t have to stay here overnight, waiting for the nightmares and the waking screams so that he can cross the few feet between their two beds to comfort him and urge him back into sleep. They need McKay, his expertise; need his full attention, unclouded by disturbed nights and worry for his friend. But he needs him too; he is the only one who can soothe away the terrors of John’s sleep, the only one who can get him to eat, to make the painful effort of recovery of his shattered mind. And so he weeps silently against Rodney’s chest even as he is lulled back into restless slumber by the gentle hands on his back and in his hair and in his heart.