SGA: Sleepwalker (PG-13), Gen.
Sometimes he thinks he can even hear people talking in the walls, and it sounds like they're saying come home.
Note: This story was inspired by a bunny from shadowserenity.
Rodney wakes up and there is something written in blood on his far wall. "You have to make it stop," it says. The blood trail ends at the door and his quarters had been locked--sensors say no one entered, no one left, the entire time he was asleep.
Carson suggests ghosts until the DNA results come back.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
It didn't start there.
----
It's 10:47. Later than he thought.
Cadman smiles and says 'sir' as she walks by, and Teyla is beside him, grinning widely and thanking him for flying her to the mainland.
He doesn't remember leaving let alone getting back, but he smiles at her anyway, and says "no sweat" before turning into a separate hall.
He leans against the wall for a moment to catch his breath. His legs are burning like he's just made it back from a run, but he can't remember that, either.
-----
Rodney's kept them grounded for days.
He's on the verge of something and can't afford the distractions of going off world and running for his life from the latest batch of restless Pegasus natives, so he's been chained to his desk almost a week. He's running off caffeine and ambition, and Radek has given up on him, gone instead to work on the puddlejumpers with most of the staff.
John was off flying again, Rodney thinks. He doesn't have much time at the moment to socialize, so he doesn't know for sure.
"Another one?" Miko asks.
Rodney scrolls over the new data. Like with everything else, it comes easily.
-----
When John wakes up the next morning, everything of his is boxed away, neatly stacked and labeled in the front right corner of his room. The Johnny Cash poster has been rolled and secured with a rubber band, leaning against the wall beside the box marked Hail Mary.
He should probably mention something like that to someone.
It's just that for the Pegasus galaxy, it really isn't all that odd. And it's not hard to unpack again, and put everything back exactly the way it was.
-----
It's two weeks before they catch it.
He's been so distracted studying the ancients experiment logs that he wasn't paying close enough attention to the current Atlantis readouts--it's Kavanaugh, of all people, to point out the power drain.
He traces it to a small room on the northeast side, and sends Sheppard.
He'd check it out himself, but he has work to do.
-----
"Creepy," Ronon says, succinct as usual and sounding a little bored.
Teyla is the only one unarmed, but John knows that doesn't mean she's any less dangerous than them. She just doesn't need a gun; she can do more damage with the pair of sticks strapped to her back.
He interrupted her right when she was finishing training. He found her in the gym standing over two of his largest marines.
It was a little unnerving when she mentioned how they took them down together. He usually just watches. He rarely fights with anyone but her.
"In here," John says, and points with the light on his P90 to the door down the farthest hall. "This is it."
-----
"Hey, Rodney," John says.
Rodney distractedly taps his comm. "What did you find?" he asks.
"Find?" John repeats. He's using that tone again, the one that makes him sound slow and clueless. If it were anyone else, Rodney would be impatient already.
"Yes yes," he snaps. "Where I sent you?"
"Rodney," John says. "You didn't send me anywhere."
"Yes I did," he says. "You took Ronon and Teyla."
"Ronon and Teyla are off world, visiting some of our trading partners," John says. "How long have you been awake?"
Rodney frowns and pulls up the city schematics. The readings are all normal. "Never mind," he says.
He's obviously more tired than he thought.
-----
He's been on stand down for over two weeks, and John has never been this tired. Carson keeps giving him these looks like he'd like to corner him somewhere for tests, and he can't stand to look at his own reflection.
It's wrong somehow. Too pale maybe. Too shadowed. John only likes expressions he can control.
"When are Ronon and Teyla getting back?" John asks Weir, over lunch.
Weir gives him a strange narrowed eye look. "They haven't gone anywhere," she says.
John nods. "Right," he says. He remembers now.
-----
Rodney doesn't know how it's happening.
The Ancient database is vast, he couldn't get through the whole thing if he made it to 199, and the life expectancy on Atlantis averaged closer to 45.
After spending all of his free time sorting through it and trying to pick out the most valuable parts, it was suddenly showing up all on its own--waiting for him when he woke up.
The Ancients experiments with ascension and regeneration and artificial intelligence--and if he was overwhelmed enough he didn't know where to look first, Atlantis was happy to guide him to the most pertinent part.
He almost doesn't even hear Kavanaugh when he speaks. "So what did Sheppard say?"
"About what?"
"The power drain," Kavanaguh says, irritated.
Rodney pauses, brings up the schematics again. "There isn't one," he says. "There never was."
-----
No one has heard from Ronon or Teyla for awhile. John tells people they're on the mainland. He's pretty sure it's true.
He might have even flown them himself. It's a little hard to be certain in the state he's in.
John used to sleepwalk when he was a child, and once he'd made it all the way to the street, woke up caught in the glare of a pair of headlights. This is a little like that. Even when you're awake you're still dreaming, tracing steps you think you've taken already.
Sometimes he thinks he can even hear people talking in the walls. And it sounds like they're saying come home.
-----
You have to stop it.
Rodney found more information waiting for him when he woke up, but not in a computer file. First night in his quarters for over a week and he wakes up to find his wall smeared in blood.
You have to stop it.
Rodney should probably be less surprised by this message than he is. After all, isn't he the one that's always expected to save the world? No reason for things to change now, just because they were on their home base.
"Maybe it's a ghost, we haven't had one of those yet," Carson jokes, but it's not. When he tests the sample the computer says its John's.
-----
John wakes up with blood on his hands. He's grateful to find it's only his.
His right palm is split open from one side to the other, cutting the lifeline straight in half. If he believed in that sort of thing he might have taken it as a sign, but he recognizes the torn edges of skin left by his hunting knife.
Blood is smeared across the mirror in his bathroom, too, and he stares at his reflection through the lines of red. It's blurred and hard to recognize, and when he moves he can almost see the stages--like a slowly moving cartoon.
"Sheppard," Rodney says from over the radio. His voice sounds tinny and small. "Sheppard?"
John finds his earpiece on the counter, and crushes it beneath his hand.
-----
Rodney decides to go see the room for himself.
He straps on his pistol and heads off alone, because as with everything else ever, he's going to have to do this all for himself.
The lights don't come on when he walks inside, so he flips on the flashlight and runs it across the floor.
There's a young woman in a white dress laid out on an altar in the middle of the room, and Rodney frowns and moves closer, breathing harsh and loud in the too silent room. From this side she looks like she's only sleeping, but when he moves around her, he sees the metal skeleton on her left side, the wires and gears instead of veins or tissue.
An android. Incomplete. They never gave her a name, but he read the file already. Discontinued because they ran out of time, couldn't hold off the Wraith long enough to make a guardian for their city.
So they left without finishing her.
-----
They're all looking for him.
He overheard them in the halls. They think he's sick. He visits the armory and throws a P90 over his shoulder, straps a pistol to his thigh and grabs a hunting knife. He wears weapons like some warriors wear armor.
He visits the infirmary next, grabs a few supplies and slips out again unnoticed. John wraps the palm of his hand in gauze and then stays out of the general areas. Atlantis hides him from sensors when he asks.
And then she tells him where Rodney is.
-----
When he turns away from the half finished android and shines the light on the wall behind him, Rodney finds Ronon and Teyla staring back at him with wide unresponsive eyes.
They're in stasis. Teyla's mouth is half open as if she were about to issue a warning, her hands pressed against the glass, palms out, while Ronon is a little bloodied--blow to the back of the head, most like, and the trails of blood slipping down his forehead have frozen mid path along with all the rest of him.
He reaches out to activate his radio only to find he can no longer speak. He opens his mouth voicelessly, and there's a burning in the back of his mind, like a needle's been stuck straight through the brain.
When he turns around she's standing, and the way she's backlit by the light from the hall she could almost pass for human.
"You're going to finish me," she says. "And then I'm going home."
-----
He's been here a few times before.
John wraps his fingers around the metal of his gun, coils around it like a lover seeking warmth. This place is familiar, but he doesn't feel safe at all.
Rodney is on his knees and Teyla and Ronon are in the stasis pods behind him. John hears Teyla's voice, John, she says, John John John but her mouth doesn't move. She's not awake.
He's been here before.
"You're obviously defective," Rodney is saying, but his voice is rough and strained. "Why would I help you?"
"To save him," she says.
John presses the gun to his own temple, the very moment she asks.
-----
Rodney hates being manipulated.
All that research that was falling right into his hands was practice so he could finish her, that strange drive that was just slightly more obsessive than his usual was her, whispering encouragement in his mind.
Ancient technology could interface with the gene carriers, and she was no exception.
"Correct," she says, in answer to his thoughts. She kneels down in front of him. The gears behind the clear left eye are turning as she moves, clicking faintly, soft enough it would be soundless if she had skin. "Unfortunately your gene is weak. You're hard to reach."
She stood, and the hall light slid through her open side like it was going through a lattice, coming to rest in strange patterns at Rodney's feet.
"John is another story entirely," she says. "He's hard to control when he's awake, but he hasn't been truly awake for days, and asleep, he's mine."
-----
John's finger is putting pressure on the trigger. It's an absent fidgety motion, an amateur's mistake, but he's tired, and his arm is going numb.
He can remember it now, somewhat. He's been trying to protect her, the city, and everyone keeps getting in his way. Teyla and Ronon tried to tell McKay about her too soon, so she stored them away.
She only wants to find them, the makers. She only wants to go home.
John doesn't really want to return to Earth himself, but he's not that worried. He's fairly certain she never really intended to take him with her anyway.
-----
"Let him go," Rodney says.
John's eyes are as blank as Teyla's and Ronon's, but they're half-lidded, and his hands are shaking. Rodney's eyes focus in on the gun in John's hand, which isn't steady at all.
"You can't reach the rest of us," Rodney says urgently. "Not like you reach him. Do you really want to give that up?"
"When I find them, the makers, I won't need him," she says. "I just want to return to them."
"You want them dead," Rodney says, because this link thing is more pronounced for her, but some thoughts leak both ways. "You want revenge, but we're not them. We didn't make you. We didn't--"
"I know everything you've done!" she screams.
-----
She is the city.
That was all John needed to know, all he'd asked, and he'd been satisfied. He doesn't question the city, it's in his soul to follow this place.
Still, her yelling sets him on edge. He hears everything she says twice, trapped as he is with her echo in the back of his head, louder even than the real thing.
If he doesn't give in, we'll start with Ronon, she says. He's of no use to me at all.
"Let him go," Rodney is saying. "He's going to slip. He's going to shoot himself, just let him go, and I'll do it, I'll fix you, just--"
Lower it, she says, and the gun goes down.
-----
Rodney lets out a breath of relief as John's gun goes to his side, but his expression remains unchanged, more robotic than even hers. "You'll have to tell me how," Rodney says. "This is a little out of my admittedly freakishly large purview."
Holographic schematics appear in the middle of the room, spinning slowly in place.
John remains at the door, like a sentry, hand flexing on the gun and eyes straight ahead. Rodney would try and talk to him, bring him around, but she knows everything he's going to do before he does it, and her look suggests he'll be better off if he plays along.
"What about Ronon and Teyla?" he asks, as he moves along the wall, eyes tracing the diagrams from ceiling to floor, picking out the parts he knows, intuiting the rest.
"They're fine for now," she says. "I have no interest in them either way."
-----
Her thoughts are something like a caress, a suggestion or a kiss--his eyes catch sight of Ronon again, and he watches him carefully but he never moves. Teyla is just as still, but then she's not, her eyes are open, then closed, and she's screaming.
Ignore it, the city says. Rodney doesn't seem to notice. He doesn't turn around.
John decides it's only a waking nightmare, because when he looks at her again, she hasn't changed position at all.
"I don't have the right equipment," Rodney says.
Get it for him, the city says, she says, get it, get it now.
He goes.
-----
Rodney glances up anxiously as John leaves the room. He was more of a threat at the moment than a friend, but he still feels sickly alone, the moment he's gone.
"I would have helped you," he tells her. "If you'd just asked. I would have loved to try and fix you."
"On your terms," she says. "I'm living by my own now."
He narrows his eyes. "When did you wake up?"
"With the city," she says, and her voice is almost graceful, when she isn't threatening death. "They put me to sleep when they left. They thought I could be forgotten."
"They did forget you," Rodney says. "Even if you make it to Earth you won't find them. They aren't there."
-----
John watches his feet as they make their way down the hall. One step and another, curiously casual, and he's so tired he doesn't know how he can stand.
His mind remains stuck in this weird place between sleep and being wide awake, and he thinks he could think a whole lot clearer, if he could only pick out the parts of this that were real.
On the desk, she tells him.
He moves to the desk, picks up the crate when she tells him to, and starts heading back.
You'll be rewarded for this, she says. I may spare you when I get rid of the rest.
John knows he's supposed to be grateful, but this isn't quite the city he knows.
-----
"You're lying," she says. "I will find them, and they will pay for abandoning me here!"
"They ascended," Rodney tells her, and this isn't him, not him at all, it was Sheppard that liked to do the whole baiting thing. But he can't quite stop himself. "And I'm afraid even good little androids don't go to heaven."
John walks in, walks past him, and never looks up. He sets a box on the counter and never says a word, but his eyes are slipping side to side, like he's fallen into REM sleep without closing his eyes.
"Fix me," she yells. "Stop lying and FIX ME!"
Rodney winces, but John let's out a short cry, and falls to his knees.
Rodney wonders if maybe all the yelling will finally wake him up.
-----
Her voice is like a gunshot, and the louder she gets the harder it is to think. The world has gone soft focus, he can barely make Rodney out.
A little longer, she says.
Then, reluctantly, he hears, tell me the truth--are the makers on your Earth?
John wonders if he's supposed to lie. This is the first time he's been asked anything instead of told, and he rests his forehead against the floor, trying to relearn the right way to breathe, to speak.
"They found one frozen in Antarctica," John says. "No sightings since."
-----
John's answer startles him, only partly because he never heard her ask the question.
"Sheppard?" he says, hesitantly.
"Do not speak!" she shouts. "You're lying, both of you!"
The lights flicker, and two burn out, going dark after a brief afterglow from a hail of sparks.
"You asked for the truth," Sheppard says, but his voice isn't the way it's supposed to be, Rodney realizes that this time. It's too emotionless, too matter of fact.
Like someone talking in their sleep.
-----
John hears Teyla again, and this time, Ronon joins her. She blew out power, Ronon says. We're suffocating.
Help us, John, Teyla says. You have to help us.
He looks over at them again. Neither one of them has them moved.
"Kill him," she says. Her hands are clenched, the unfinished one is creaking as metal slides against metal, but she doesn't seem to notice, not like he does. "I'll finish myself."
Rodney's eyes go wide and John pushes himself up off the floor, like he's being lifted up by strings, but when he fires his gun, it's at the other wall, hitting the release on the stasis pods and sending Teyla and Ronon tumbling out onto the floor.
He's stronger than she thought.
-----
Rodney watches as Teyla and Ronon gasp for breath, like they've just been saved from drowning. John is even paler than he was before, standing out conspicuously in the half-light.
Her eyes are just as clouded.
"I said kill him," she says, and she sounds like a child now, tired of never getting her way.
Rodney doesn't know why he didn't realize it before. He's read Daniel's report on Reese. He should really know better. He should have allowed her illusions and let her think she could have what she wanted.
Now that she's been denied her revenge she's got nothing left to lose.
-----
You do as you're told, she says. Do as you're told.
John feels like he's trying to walk through quicksand, and there are too many places to listen to at once. Sheppard, Ronon says. John, Teyla says.
"Sheppard," Rodney says.
Kill him, she says.
The city was warm and inviting and it opened to him, welcomed him, and she's different. She had him fooled but he's starting to wonder, now, why she needs him if she's what he thought, what she claims.
"Wake up, Sheppard," Rodney is yelling. "Please you have to wake up."
Kill him, she says again.
One voice is louder than the other. He raises his gun, and shoots her point blank in the head.
As soon as her eyes close, he opens his.
Note: This story was inspired by a bunny from shadowserenity.
Rodney wakes up and there is something written in blood on his far wall. "You have to make it stop," it says. The blood trail ends at the door and his quarters had been locked--sensors say no one entered, no one left, the entire time he was asleep.
Carson suggests ghosts until the DNA results come back.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
It didn't start there.
----
It's 10:47. Later than he thought.
Cadman smiles and says 'sir' as she walks by, and Teyla is beside him, grinning widely and thanking him for flying her to the mainland.
He doesn't remember leaving let alone getting back, but he smiles at her anyway, and says "no sweat" before turning into a separate hall.
He leans against the wall for a moment to catch his breath. His legs are burning like he's just made it back from a run, but he can't remember that, either.
-----
Rodney's kept them grounded for days.
He's on the verge of something and can't afford the distractions of going off world and running for his life from the latest batch of restless Pegasus natives, so he's been chained to his desk almost a week. He's running off caffeine and ambition, and Radek has given up on him, gone instead to work on the puddlejumpers with most of the staff.
John was off flying again, Rodney thinks. He doesn't have much time at the moment to socialize, so he doesn't know for sure.
"Another one?" Miko asks.
Rodney scrolls over the new data. Like with everything else, it comes easily.
-----
When John wakes up the next morning, everything of his is boxed away, neatly stacked and labeled in the front right corner of his room. The Johnny Cash poster has been rolled and secured with a rubber band, leaning against the wall beside the box marked Hail Mary.
He should probably mention something like that to someone.
It's just that for the Pegasus galaxy, it really isn't all that odd. And it's not hard to unpack again, and put everything back exactly the way it was.
-----
It's two weeks before they catch it.
He's been so distracted studying the ancients experiment logs that he wasn't paying close enough attention to the current Atlantis readouts--it's Kavanaugh, of all people, to point out the power drain.
He traces it to a small room on the northeast side, and sends Sheppard.
He'd check it out himself, but he has work to do.
-----
"Creepy," Ronon says, succinct as usual and sounding a little bored.
Teyla is the only one unarmed, but John knows that doesn't mean she's any less dangerous than them. She just doesn't need a gun; she can do more damage with the pair of sticks strapped to her back.
He interrupted her right when she was finishing training. He found her in the gym standing over two of his largest marines.
It was a little unnerving when she mentioned how they took them down together. He usually just watches. He rarely fights with anyone but her.
"In here," John says, and points with the light on his P90 to the door down the farthest hall. "This is it."
-----
"Hey, Rodney," John says.
Rodney distractedly taps his comm. "What did you find?" he asks.
"Find?" John repeats. He's using that tone again, the one that makes him sound slow and clueless. If it were anyone else, Rodney would be impatient already.
"Yes yes," he snaps. "Where I sent you?"
"Rodney," John says. "You didn't send me anywhere."
"Yes I did," he says. "You took Ronon and Teyla."
"Ronon and Teyla are off world, visiting some of our trading partners," John says. "How long have you been awake?"
Rodney frowns and pulls up the city schematics. The readings are all normal. "Never mind," he says.
He's obviously more tired than he thought.
-----
He's been on stand down for over two weeks, and John has never been this tired. Carson keeps giving him these looks like he'd like to corner him somewhere for tests, and he can't stand to look at his own reflection.
It's wrong somehow. Too pale maybe. Too shadowed. John only likes expressions he can control.
"When are Ronon and Teyla getting back?" John asks Weir, over lunch.
Weir gives him a strange narrowed eye look. "They haven't gone anywhere," she says.
John nods. "Right," he says. He remembers now.
-----
Rodney doesn't know how it's happening.
The Ancient database is vast, he couldn't get through the whole thing if he made it to 199, and the life expectancy on Atlantis averaged closer to 45.
After spending all of his free time sorting through it and trying to pick out the most valuable parts, it was suddenly showing up all on its own--waiting for him when he woke up.
The Ancients experiments with ascension and regeneration and artificial intelligence--and if he was overwhelmed enough he didn't know where to look first, Atlantis was happy to guide him to the most pertinent part.
He almost doesn't even hear Kavanaugh when he speaks. "So what did Sheppard say?"
"About what?"
"The power drain," Kavanaguh says, irritated.
Rodney pauses, brings up the schematics again. "There isn't one," he says. "There never was."
-----
No one has heard from Ronon or Teyla for awhile. John tells people they're on the mainland. He's pretty sure it's true.
He might have even flown them himself. It's a little hard to be certain in the state he's in.
John used to sleepwalk when he was a child, and once he'd made it all the way to the street, woke up caught in the glare of a pair of headlights. This is a little like that. Even when you're awake you're still dreaming, tracing steps you think you've taken already.
Sometimes he thinks he can even hear people talking in the walls. And it sounds like they're saying come home.
-----
You have to stop it.
Rodney found more information waiting for him when he woke up, but not in a computer file. First night in his quarters for over a week and he wakes up to find his wall smeared in blood.
You have to stop it.
Rodney should probably be less surprised by this message than he is. After all, isn't he the one that's always expected to save the world? No reason for things to change now, just because they were on their home base.
"Maybe it's a ghost, we haven't had one of those yet," Carson jokes, but it's not. When he tests the sample the computer says its John's.
-----
John wakes up with blood on his hands. He's grateful to find it's only his.
His right palm is split open from one side to the other, cutting the lifeline straight in half. If he believed in that sort of thing he might have taken it as a sign, but he recognizes the torn edges of skin left by his hunting knife.
Blood is smeared across the mirror in his bathroom, too, and he stares at his reflection through the lines of red. It's blurred and hard to recognize, and when he moves he can almost see the stages--like a slowly moving cartoon.
"Sheppard," Rodney says from over the radio. His voice sounds tinny and small. "Sheppard?"
John finds his earpiece on the counter, and crushes it beneath his hand.
-----
Rodney decides to go see the room for himself.
He straps on his pistol and heads off alone, because as with everything else ever, he's going to have to do this all for himself.
The lights don't come on when he walks inside, so he flips on the flashlight and runs it across the floor.
There's a young woman in a white dress laid out on an altar in the middle of the room, and Rodney frowns and moves closer, breathing harsh and loud in the too silent room. From this side she looks like she's only sleeping, but when he moves around her, he sees the metal skeleton on her left side, the wires and gears instead of veins or tissue.
An android. Incomplete. They never gave her a name, but he read the file already. Discontinued because they ran out of time, couldn't hold off the Wraith long enough to make a guardian for their city.
So they left without finishing her.
-----
They're all looking for him.
He overheard them in the halls. They think he's sick. He visits the armory and throws a P90 over his shoulder, straps a pistol to his thigh and grabs a hunting knife. He wears weapons like some warriors wear armor.
He visits the infirmary next, grabs a few supplies and slips out again unnoticed. John wraps the palm of his hand in gauze and then stays out of the general areas. Atlantis hides him from sensors when he asks.
And then she tells him where Rodney is.
-----
When he turns away from the half finished android and shines the light on the wall behind him, Rodney finds Ronon and Teyla staring back at him with wide unresponsive eyes.
They're in stasis. Teyla's mouth is half open as if she were about to issue a warning, her hands pressed against the glass, palms out, while Ronon is a little bloodied--blow to the back of the head, most like, and the trails of blood slipping down his forehead have frozen mid path along with all the rest of him.
He reaches out to activate his radio only to find he can no longer speak. He opens his mouth voicelessly, and there's a burning in the back of his mind, like a needle's been stuck straight through the brain.
When he turns around she's standing, and the way she's backlit by the light from the hall she could almost pass for human.
"You're going to finish me," she says. "And then I'm going home."
-----
He's been here a few times before.
John wraps his fingers around the metal of his gun, coils around it like a lover seeking warmth. This place is familiar, but he doesn't feel safe at all.
Rodney is on his knees and Teyla and Ronon are in the stasis pods behind him. John hears Teyla's voice, John, she says, John John John but her mouth doesn't move. She's not awake.
He's been here before.
"You're obviously defective," Rodney is saying, but his voice is rough and strained. "Why would I help you?"
"To save him," she says.
John presses the gun to his own temple, the very moment she asks.
-----
Rodney hates being manipulated.
All that research that was falling right into his hands was practice so he could finish her, that strange drive that was just slightly more obsessive than his usual was her, whispering encouragement in his mind.
Ancient technology could interface with the gene carriers, and she was no exception.
"Correct," she says, in answer to his thoughts. She kneels down in front of him. The gears behind the clear left eye are turning as she moves, clicking faintly, soft enough it would be soundless if she had skin. "Unfortunately your gene is weak. You're hard to reach."
She stood, and the hall light slid through her open side like it was going through a lattice, coming to rest in strange patterns at Rodney's feet.
"John is another story entirely," she says. "He's hard to control when he's awake, but he hasn't been truly awake for days, and asleep, he's mine."
-----
John's finger is putting pressure on the trigger. It's an absent fidgety motion, an amateur's mistake, but he's tired, and his arm is going numb.
He can remember it now, somewhat. He's been trying to protect her, the city, and everyone keeps getting in his way. Teyla and Ronon tried to tell McKay about her too soon, so she stored them away.
She only wants to find them, the makers. She only wants to go home.
John doesn't really want to return to Earth himself, but he's not that worried. He's fairly certain she never really intended to take him with her anyway.
-----
"Let him go," Rodney says.
John's eyes are as blank as Teyla's and Ronon's, but they're half-lidded, and his hands are shaking. Rodney's eyes focus in on the gun in John's hand, which isn't steady at all.
"You can't reach the rest of us," Rodney says urgently. "Not like you reach him. Do you really want to give that up?"
"When I find them, the makers, I won't need him," she says. "I just want to return to them."
"You want them dead," Rodney says, because this link thing is more pronounced for her, but some thoughts leak both ways. "You want revenge, but we're not them. We didn't make you. We didn't--"
"I know everything you've done!" she screams.
-----
She is the city.
That was all John needed to know, all he'd asked, and he'd been satisfied. He doesn't question the city, it's in his soul to follow this place.
Still, her yelling sets him on edge. He hears everything she says twice, trapped as he is with her echo in the back of his head, louder even than the real thing.
If he doesn't give in, we'll start with Ronon, she says. He's of no use to me at all.
"Let him go," Rodney is saying. "He's going to slip. He's going to shoot himself, just let him go, and I'll do it, I'll fix you, just--"
Lower it, she says, and the gun goes down.
-----
Rodney lets out a breath of relief as John's gun goes to his side, but his expression remains unchanged, more robotic than even hers. "You'll have to tell me how," Rodney says. "This is a little out of my admittedly freakishly large purview."
Holographic schematics appear in the middle of the room, spinning slowly in place.
John remains at the door, like a sentry, hand flexing on the gun and eyes straight ahead. Rodney would try and talk to him, bring him around, but she knows everything he's going to do before he does it, and her look suggests he'll be better off if he plays along.
"What about Ronon and Teyla?" he asks, as he moves along the wall, eyes tracing the diagrams from ceiling to floor, picking out the parts he knows, intuiting the rest.
"They're fine for now," she says. "I have no interest in them either way."
-----
Her thoughts are something like a caress, a suggestion or a kiss--his eyes catch sight of Ronon again, and he watches him carefully but he never moves. Teyla is just as still, but then she's not, her eyes are open, then closed, and she's screaming.
Ignore it, the city says. Rodney doesn't seem to notice. He doesn't turn around.
John decides it's only a waking nightmare, because when he looks at her again, she hasn't changed position at all.
"I don't have the right equipment," Rodney says.
Get it for him, the city says, she says, get it, get it now.
He goes.
-----
Rodney glances up anxiously as John leaves the room. He was more of a threat at the moment than a friend, but he still feels sickly alone, the moment he's gone.
"I would have helped you," he tells her. "If you'd just asked. I would have loved to try and fix you."
"On your terms," she says. "I'm living by my own now."
He narrows his eyes. "When did you wake up?"
"With the city," she says, and her voice is almost graceful, when she isn't threatening death. "They put me to sleep when they left. They thought I could be forgotten."
"They did forget you," Rodney says. "Even if you make it to Earth you won't find them. They aren't there."
-----
John watches his feet as they make their way down the hall. One step and another, curiously casual, and he's so tired he doesn't know how he can stand.
His mind remains stuck in this weird place between sleep and being wide awake, and he thinks he could think a whole lot clearer, if he could only pick out the parts of this that were real.
On the desk, she tells him.
He moves to the desk, picks up the crate when she tells him to, and starts heading back.
You'll be rewarded for this, she says. I may spare you when I get rid of the rest.
John knows he's supposed to be grateful, but this isn't quite the city he knows.
-----
"You're lying," she says. "I will find them, and they will pay for abandoning me here!"
"They ascended," Rodney tells her, and this isn't him, not him at all, it was Sheppard that liked to do the whole baiting thing. But he can't quite stop himself. "And I'm afraid even good little androids don't go to heaven."
John walks in, walks past him, and never looks up. He sets a box on the counter and never says a word, but his eyes are slipping side to side, like he's fallen into REM sleep without closing his eyes.
"Fix me," she yells. "Stop lying and FIX ME!"
Rodney winces, but John let's out a short cry, and falls to his knees.
Rodney wonders if maybe all the yelling will finally wake him up.
-----
Her voice is like a gunshot, and the louder she gets the harder it is to think. The world has gone soft focus, he can barely make Rodney out.
A little longer, she says.
Then, reluctantly, he hears, tell me the truth--are the makers on your Earth?
John wonders if he's supposed to lie. This is the first time he's been asked anything instead of told, and he rests his forehead against the floor, trying to relearn the right way to breathe, to speak.
"They found one frozen in Antarctica," John says. "No sightings since."
-----
John's answer startles him, only partly because he never heard her ask the question.
"Sheppard?" he says, hesitantly.
"Do not speak!" she shouts. "You're lying, both of you!"
The lights flicker, and two burn out, going dark after a brief afterglow from a hail of sparks.
"You asked for the truth," Sheppard says, but his voice isn't the way it's supposed to be, Rodney realizes that this time. It's too emotionless, too matter of fact.
Like someone talking in their sleep.
-----
John hears Teyla again, and this time, Ronon joins her. She blew out power, Ronon says. We're suffocating.
Help us, John, Teyla says. You have to help us.
He looks over at them again. Neither one of them has them moved.
"Kill him," she says. Her hands are clenched, the unfinished one is creaking as metal slides against metal, but she doesn't seem to notice, not like he does. "I'll finish myself."
Rodney's eyes go wide and John pushes himself up off the floor, like he's being lifted up by strings, but when he fires his gun, it's at the other wall, hitting the release on the stasis pods and sending Teyla and Ronon tumbling out onto the floor.
He's stronger than she thought.
-----
Rodney watches as Teyla and Ronon gasp for breath, like they've just been saved from drowning. John is even paler than he was before, standing out conspicuously in the half-light.
Her eyes are just as clouded.
"I said kill him," she says, and she sounds like a child now, tired of never getting her way.
Rodney doesn't know why he didn't realize it before. He's read Daniel's report on Reese. He should really know better. He should have allowed her illusions and let her think she could have what she wanted.
Now that she's been denied her revenge she's got nothing left to lose.
-----
You do as you're told, she says. Do as you're told.
John feels like he's trying to walk through quicksand, and there are too many places to listen to at once. Sheppard, Ronon says. John, Teyla says.
"Sheppard," Rodney says.
Kill him, she says.
The city was warm and inviting and it opened to him, welcomed him, and she's different. She had him fooled but he's starting to wonder, now, why she needs him if she's what he thought, what she claims.
"Wake up, Sheppard," Rodney is yelling. "Please you have to wake up."
Kill him, she says again.
One voice is louder than the other. He raises his gun, and shoots her point blank in the head.
As soon as her eyes close, he opens his.