Supporting Character, Week 1: Fear Itself
Title: Fear Itself
Author: penknife
Genre: Supporting Character Appreciation Day
Prompt: Paranoia
Word Count: ~3550 words
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Summary: Evan wishes it was easier to tell the difference between paranoia and a realistic sense of how many things really are out to get them.
Notes: Episode tag for 4x03 "Doppelgangers" and 4x05 "Tabula Rasa."
Before the alien entity that kills people in their dreams, Evan hasn't had nightmares in a while. Or, all right, he's had the run-of-the-mill ones where he's forgotten his homework and his teacher (who looks strangely like Teyla) tells him that he's going to have to repeat sixth grade, or where he suddenly realizes he's sitting in a staff meeting wearing nothing but his underpants. He's pretty sure everybody has those, although right now it probably isn't a good time to go around asking people about their dreams.
He can't remember clearly what he dreamed while he was sleepwalking, although he's heard from enough people that it involved pointing a gun at Sheppard and Carter and yelling that they were Replicators. He spends that night sleeping in the infirmary just in case he starts wandering around trying to shoot people again, and then the night after that Kate Heightmeyer is dead, and Sheppard and McKay have nearly both died, and nobody gets to sleep until really late.
He goes to bed after two and gets up at six, and if he dreams anything, he can't remember it; he wakes up thinking that he'd like to sleep some more. And then the next evening they've sent Dr. Heightmeyer's body home for the funeral, and he's had two nights in a row without much sleep, and that's always a bad plan. And he would be tempted to go down to Keller and ask her for something that will for sure make him sleep without dreaming, except that, funny thing, sleeping under sedatives can lead to sleepwalking, and he'd rather not go there either.
He lies down and stares at the ceiling for a while. It's tempting to get up and go find something to do; his mind helpfully provides a whole list of things that would be useful, from reorganizing the armory to finishing that sketch he started before the whole glowing-crystal incident. That'll only postpone the inevitable, though, so he makes himself lie still and keep his eyes closed.
He doesn't wake up pointing a gun at anybody, which was the main thing he was worried about. All right, he wakes up thrashing in bed, his heart hammering, his hand reaching for his pistol, but that's pretty much par for the course. He's used to the nightmares; it's just that he was starting to think that little bonus of working for the SGC was starting to go away.
He tried to explain to Ronon once about the Goa'uld, but he's not sure that Ronon was impressed. He suspects that alien eels that take over your brain don't sound like much compared to alien soldiers who can suck your life out through your chest. It's not the Wraith he has nightmares about, though.
"Once they get into your head, they know everything you know," Evan said. "They can pretend to be you. Like what happened to Colonel Caldwell."
"That sucked," Ronon agreed, but Evan thinks he's mainly thinking about what would have happened if the bomb had gone off, or maybe what it must have felt like to be Caldwell, watching from behind his own eyes as people talked to the Goa'uld pretending to be him. He doesn't get what it would be like to wonder all the time if it had happened to someone you knew.
He tried not to let it get to him. They checked out incoming teams when there was any chance they'd had contact with the Goa'uld; he's used to doctors who give you brain scans the way normal doctors take your temperature. And the Replicators might have looked human, but back home, they never really did that good a job at actually pretending to be human. Most of the time it wasn't even really a worry, just a reminder in the back of his mind that there was one more thing to be careful about, right up there with looking both ways before he crossed the street.
But the dreams got pretty bad sometimes. It was usually his team; he'd watch them getting ready to walk through the stargate with the sick sense that something was wrong, but in the dream he was never sure until one of them turned his way and his eyes flashed, or his movements went hard and artificial, his smile all wrong.
Sometimes it was other people, his mom, his sister -- the nights that he watched a Goa'uld wearing his sister's body strap his baby nephew into the car seat and drive away with a scary little smile were bad. Sometimes it was SG-1, or Hammond, or one of the doctors, anyone he trusted. Usually he couldn't raise his weapon in time, struggling to drag his hand up as if it weighed a hundred pounds.
The worst nights he could, and he fired and fired until he realized that he'd made a terrible mistake, there'd never been a Goa'uld or a Replicator, he'd killed somebody for nothing and it didn't matter how much he wanted to take it back. Those were the ones that hung on the strongest after he woke up, the ones that left him watching talk shows in the middle of the night because (probably) nobody on them was going to suddenly turn out to be an alien.
There was a point where it did start getting to him -- he kept waking up too freaked out to go back to sleep, and that turned into worse dreams the next night, and then into wondering whether that meant he was under some alien influence, or just that the stress was getting to him. He talked to Dr. Fraiser about it finally, not really sure which answer he was hoping for.
"Frankly I think that if you weren't a little concerned about the possibility of someone you know being infested by a Goa'uld, it would be a sign that something was wrong with you," she said. "It's not paranoia to worry about something that could actually happen."
"I guess not," Evan said.
"I can give you something to help you sleep, in the short term," she said. "And you should work on ways of managing your stress. What do you do when you're not at work?"
"When I'm ..." He gave her a deliberately quizzical look, and she smiled.
"Yes, I know. A foreign concept. You might try finding a hobby."
"I used to paint," he said. "When I was a kid. I don't really have time anymore."
"Make time," Dr. Fraiser said. "Consider that a prescription. Routine maintenance to avoid extended down time."
He didn't exactly take her advice at the time, but he did start sketching again when he couldn't sleep. It helped to feel like he could things that were really in front of him and make them solid under his pencil. He started actually finding the time to paint when he got to Atlantis, where trying to capture the spires of an alien city on canvas never really gets old.
And the nightmares stopped, or at least he would have said so a couple of days ago.
He gets up resignedly and pulls on his clothes, leaving his bed unmade for the moment on the theory that he's going back to sleep in it at some point. He reaches for his sketchbook.
It isn't on the table by the bed.
There's a moment where his chest clenches before he decides that he probably left it in the infirmary. He took it down there along with a book in case he couldn't get to sleep at all, and maybe he forgot about it. He can't find the book, either. That's a good sign that he just misplaced them.
Not that objects are now disappearing into some disturbing alternate dimension. Not that he's still dreaming, and the really bad part just hasn't gotten started yet.
The reasonable thing to do would be to just try to go back to sleep, but now it's going to bother him. He heads down to the infirmary instead, telling himself that it doesn't mean anything that the corridors are dim and he doesn't run into anyone on the way. It's the middle of the night. People are sleeping. As you do.
The infirmary is lit, which helps a little, and Dr. Keller is in her office, despite the fact that it's the middle of the night. She sticks her head out as he starts looking around for the sketchpad and book.
"Back already?" she asks. "I would have thought you were ready to stay out of here for a while."
"I think I left a couple of things down here," Evan says. "My book, and a sketchpad."
"One of those midnight art emergencies?" She opens one of the cabinets speculatively and rummages through a box. "I think these are yours. We try to put things away out of reach of other people's bodily fluids."
"Considerate of you," Evan says.
"We aim to please," Dr. Keller says. She looks him over. "No more sleepwalking, right?"
"No sleepwalking," Evan says. "Just a little trouble sleeping."
"Tell me about it," Dr. Keller says. "I think it's safe to say that this has left everybody a little freaked."
Evan smiles a little. "Is that a technical medical term?"
"Oh, sure," Dr. Keller says. "It's not all the way to 'traumatized' but a little bit past 'distressed.' I think we get to use that one a lot."
"You don't think that's a problem?"
"You mean in the sense of, do I think it would be a good thing if alien entities stopped invading Atlantis, or in the sense of, do I think being freaked out right now means that something's wrong with you?"
"More the second one," Evan says. "I think we're all pretty clear on the first one."
"I can take a look," Dr. Keller says.
"You want to scan my brain?"
She shrugs. "Would it make you feel better?"
"It might."
"This is a weird place to work," she says. "Come over here and lie down, and I'll take a look at your brain for you."
"Not as weird as the SGC," Evan says.
"Okay, I usually try not to argue with my patients, but I can't see how that's possible," Dr. Keller says.
He shrugs. "You're in an alien city, you expect it to be a little strange. It's not as weird as going to work every day and dealing with aliens that take over your brain and then coming home and going grocery shopping."
"I'm hearing things that take over your brain as a theme here," Dr. Keller says. "You want to talk about it?"
He closes his eyes as the scanner traces him in light. "I really do know that Colonel Sheppard isn't a Replicator," he says.
"That's good," Dr. Keller says. "And now I'm hearing a 'but.'"
He opens his eyes. "Would we necessarily know?"
"I'd know," she says after a moment. "I just had him in here as a patient, remember? And while there's such a thing as doctor-patient confidentiality, I don't think it's breaking it to tell you that he's definitely not a Replicator. He's also not infested with nanites or carrying some alien space plague that will kill us all, okay? He's fine. And you're fine. Your brain looks perfectly normal."
"That's good to hear," Evan says, sitting up.
"I know it can get pretty stressful," she says. "It might not be a bad idea for you to talk to--" She breaks off awkwardly like she's just remembered that she can't send him to go talk to Dr. Heightmeyer because Dr. Heightmeyer's dead, and is aware that reminding him of that will not be reassuring.
"I'm okay," Evan says. "I'm good. I was just a little freaked."
"Well, okay," Dr. Keller says. "If you're still having trouble sleeping in a few days, come back and talk to me, though."
"Sure," Evan says.
"And try not to worry about it," Dr. Keller says. "This place makes a lot of people jumpy." She shrugs. "If it had been up to me, I would have told Teyla to go ahead and shoot Colonel Sheppard and Colonel Carter with the ARG. Just for everybody's peace of mind."
Evan can't decide whether that makes him feel better or not.
*****
It's a couple of weeks later that people start getting sick from what at first looks like a fairly harmless virus that turns out to cause progressive amnesia. Just another day in the Pegasus Galaxy. Evan hands out stunners to the security team, downs the stimulants that are supposed to help them remember who they are, and prepares for a long day of herding frightened people into the makeshift infirmary they've set up in the mess hall.
The first sign that things are going seriously off the rails is when they try to get Zelenka to go back to the infirmary. Up until then, a lot of people have seemed grateful to have somebody calm telling them what to do, and a few have argued with them but eventually moved along.
"Come on, Doc," Evan says. "We need to take you down to the mess hall, now and I'd appreciate it if you'd come along quietly and not--"
Zelenka mutters something in Czech, and then adds, "I am coming, do not shoot." He's carrying some kind of metal rod that Evan hopes isn't a piece of vital equipment that Zelenka can't remember taking apart.
"We're not going to shoot you," Evan says. "Just come with us."
Zelenka follows them reluctantly down the corridor, and they're heading for the transport chamber when there's a yell from behind him. He swings around toward the noise.
Corporal Jacobs is down, clutching his head, and Zelenka has some kind of access hatch in the floor already open, scrambling down it as Evan raises the stunner. He fires, but the stunner fire crawls harmlessly around the hatch cover, and he can hear Zelenka's footsteps somewhere below.
"That son of a bitch," Jacobs says, trying to sit up and swaying like the world is reeling. "Took a swing at me--"
"I can see that," Evan says, kneeling to check out the man's head. He feels like he ought to go after Zelenka, but he's got a man down, and he's pretty sure that Zelenka knows the access tunnels in the city backwards and forwards. He doesn't really want to crawl around in there with somebody who apparently gets paranoid when he's losing his memory.
"Okay," he says to Jacobs, who's staggering to his feet propped up by someone else's arm. "Let's get you down to the mess hall, and then we'll swing back and see if Dr. Zelenka's changed his mind."
He can't remember if they ever do, because that's the point when things start getting increasingly weird. He hasn't forgotten that they're supposed to be rounding up civilians and taking them down to the mess hall. They've got the stunners if people won't come quietly, and they've started having to use them.
It's just starting to bother him that he isn't sure how they got into this situation, or how getting all these people down to the mess hall is going to help. Maybe they've got some answers about what happened. Once they've secured the city, they can start asking questions.
Every now and then he remembers that he has pills that are supposed to keep them from forgetting things. He's not sure how he knows that, but when he remembers, he takes a few of them. They're not working too well, but they're better than nothing.
It's getting harder and harder to stay calm, though. He's got to stay on top of the situation. They've got to secure the city. He remembers that. He's got to remember that, even though he can feel it starting to slip out of the corners of his memory.
He has pills that are supposed to keep them from forgetting things. He takes a couple, dry-swallowing them and wondering if it's a sign if whatever's wrong with them that he can feel his pulse pounding in his ears.
After it's all over, he wakes up in the infirmary. It's pretty crowded in there, but apparently the situation's calmed down enough that they've got patients in the infirmary rather than in the mess hall. He's pleased to have remembered that.
There's an IV in his arm, and he feels pretty terrible. On the other hand, he can remember his own name.
"You are back with us, then?" someone says from the next bed. When he looks, it's Zelenka, sitting up in bed with a laptop propped on his knees.
"What's going on?" Evan says, and then when Zelenka frowns, "No, I mean, I remember Colonel Sheppard and Ronon coming back with the antidote, and then --" He winces as that particular memory returns. He's now held his commanding officer at gunpoint twice in three weeks. That just can't be good.
"Rodney found a way to deliver the antidote through the ventilation system," Zelenka says. "Apparently most people are on the mend. I am hoping to get out of here as soon as Dr. Keller is satisfied that I remember my own name."
"I have to apologize to Colonel Sheppard," Evan says.
"You could, but he is still unconscious," Zelenka says. "Dr. Keller says that is probably temporary."
"Probably?"
Zelenka shrugs, as if to point out that in a world where there are any certainties, a children's disease would not have made the entire city lose their minds. He sets down his laptop and hesitates awkwardly for a moment before he speaks. "She also says that I did no permanent damage to your Corporal Jacobs," he says finally. "Still I should apologize to you as well as to him. It was unforgivable."
"We were all a little crazy," Evan says. "It was my fault, anyway. I didn't figure you'd put up a fight."
"It is strange the things that stay with you as certainties," Zelenka says. "For Rodney it was his mathematics, lucky for the rest of us." He shrugs one shoulder instead of finishing the thought.
"Look at it this way, if we ever do get invaded by aliens who give us all amnesia as part of their cunning plan, you'll be on it," Evan says.
"There is that," Zelenka says, and bends his head over his laptop.
*****
When he gets his chance to apologize, Colonel Sheppard says it's not his fault. "Forget about it," he says.
"Very funny, sir," Evan says. "I'd really like to stop threatening to shoot you, though."
Colonel Sheppard shrugs. "Sounds good to me. No more alien mind-affecting stuff for a while, okay?"
"It's a deal," Evan says, but he can't shake the feeling that alien mind-affecting stuff wouldn't make him crazy in that particular way if he weren't, somewhere deep down, a little crazy in that particular way. He's not sure what to do with that. He wonders what he's going to dream about, and whether Zelenka's wondering the same thing.
He's getting undressed that evening when he finds the picture, still in his jacket pocket where he must have put it back after he stopped needing to look at it. It's a Polaroid of Sheppard looking uncomfortable, which is both probably a result of the situation and Sheppard's natural expression in pictures. The handwriting is his own: LT. COL. JOHN SHEPPARD. HE IS YOUR COMMANDING OFFICER. TRUST HIM!
He did. There's no reason that couldn't have been faked, too, part of the same elaborate plot to take over Atlantis that he's pretty sure he believed in by that point. But it hadn't felt like one. He knew his own handwriting, knew he'd taken the picture, the same way he'd have known if he'd drawn it, remembered the pencil strokes, bone-deep.
That's something. It's a better thing to be certain of than that anyone could turn out to be an enemy. He knows there's a sense in which that's true, too, but it's one that he can live with.
He sits down on the bed and picks up his sketch pad, drawing from memory, quick strokes to capture something he might try to paint someday, although he's better with landscapes than people. He roughs in the arch of the gate and the slant of the ramp, and starts sketching in his old team getting ready to step through the gate.
He's thinking about a particular day, a routine mission where the worst thing that happened to them was that Ritter got sunburned and they saw a lot of trees. That really happened. The things in his dreams didn't, not that day, not to them.
It's maybe not that big a thing to hold onto, but he sleeps with the Polaroid and the drawing both next to his pillow. He dreams that he can't find his car keys, and he's going to be late to work. He tears the house apart looking, and he's starting to wonder if he dropped them out in the yard somewhere where he won't ever get them back. Then he wakes up and opens his eyes in the darkness long enough to remember that he didn't bring his car to Atlantis, so that's all right.
He closes his eyes again and sleeps until morning.
Author: penknife
Genre: Supporting Character Appreciation Day
Prompt: Paranoia
Word Count: ~3550 words
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Summary: Evan wishes it was easier to tell the difference between paranoia and a realistic sense of how many things really are out to get them.
Notes: Episode tag for 4x03 "Doppelgangers" and 4x05 "Tabula Rasa."
Before the alien entity that kills people in their dreams, Evan hasn't had nightmares in a while. Or, all right, he's had the run-of-the-mill ones where he's forgotten his homework and his teacher (who looks strangely like Teyla) tells him that he's going to have to repeat sixth grade, or where he suddenly realizes he's sitting in a staff meeting wearing nothing but his underpants. He's pretty sure everybody has those, although right now it probably isn't a good time to go around asking people about their dreams.
He can't remember clearly what he dreamed while he was sleepwalking, although he's heard from enough people that it involved pointing a gun at Sheppard and Carter and yelling that they were Replicators. He spends that night sleeping in the infirmary just in case he starts wandering around trying to shoot people again, and then the night after that Kate Heightmeyer is dead, and Sheppard and McKay have nearly both died, and nobody gets to sleep until really late.
He goes to bed after two and gets up at six, and if he dreams anything, he can't remember it; he wakes up thinking that he'd like to sleep some more. And then the next evening they've sent Dr. Heightmeyer's body home for the funeral, and he's had two nights in a row without much sleep, and that's always a bad plan. And he would be tempted to go down to Keller and ask her for something that will for sure make him sleep without dreaming, except that, funny thing, sleeping under sedatives can lead to sleepwalking, and he'd rather not go there either.
He lies down and stares at the ceiling for a while. It's tempting to get up and go find something to do; his mind helpfully provides a whole list of things that would be useful, from reorganizing the armory to finishing that sketch he started before the whole glowing-crystal incident. That'll only postpone the inevitable, though, so he makes himself lie still and keep his eyes closed.
He doesn't wake up pointing a gun at anybody, which was the main thing he was worried about. All right, he wakes up thrashing in bed, his heart hammering, his hand reaching for his pistol, but that's pretty much par for the course. He's used to the nightmares; it's just that he was starting to think that little bonus of working for the SGC was starting to go away.
He tried to explain to Ronon once about the Goa'uld, but he's not sure that Ronon was impressed. He suspects that alien eels that take over your brain don't sound like much compared to alien soldiers who can suck your life out through your chest. It's not the Wraith he has nightmares about, though.
"Once they get into your head, they know everything you know," Evan said. "They can pretend to be you. Like what happened to Colonel Caldwell."
"That sucked," Ronon agreed, but Evan thinks he's mainly thinking about what would have happened if the bomb had gone off, or maybe what it must have felt like to be Caldwell, watching from behind his own eyes as people talked to the Goa'uld pretending to be him. He doesn't get what it would be like to wonder all the time if it had happened to someone you knew.
He tried not to let it get to him. They checked out incoming teams when there was any chance they'd had contact with the Goa'uld; he's used to doctors who give you brain scans the way normal doctors take your temperature. And the Replicators might have looked human, but back home, they never really did that good a job at actually pretending to be human. Most of the time it wasn't even really a worry, just a reminder in the back of his mind that there was one more thing to be careful about, right up there with looking both ways before he crossed the street.
But the dreams got pretty bad sometimes. It was usually his team; he'd watch them getting ready to walk through the stargate with the sick sense that something was wrong, but in the dream he was never sure until one of them turned his way and his eyes flashed, or his movements went hard and artificial, his smile all wrong.
Sometimes it was other people, his mom, his sister -- the nights that he watched a Goa'uld wearing his sister's body strap his baby nephew into the car seat and drive away with a scary little smile were bad. Sometimes it was SG-1, or Hammond, or one of the doctors, anyone he trusted. Usually he couldn't raise his weapon in time, struggling to drag his hand up as if it weighed a hundred pounds.
The worst nights he could, and he fired and fired until he realized that he'd made a terrible mistake, there'd never been a Goa'uld or a Replicator, he'd killed somebody for nothing and it didn't matter how much he wanted to take it back. Those were the ones that hung on the strongest after he woke up, the ones that left him watching talk shows in the middle of the night because (probably) nobody on them was going to suddenly turn out to be an alien.
There was a point where it did start getting to him -- he kept waking up too freaked out to go back to sleep, and that turned into worse dreams the next night, and then into wondering whether that meant he was under some alien influence, or just that the stress was getting to him. He talked to Dr. Fraiser about it finally, not really sure which answer he was hoping for.
"Frankly I think that if you weren't a little concerned about the possibility of someone you know being infested by a Goa'uld, it would be a sign that something was wrong with you," she said. "It's not paranoia to worry about something that could actually happen."
"I guess not," Evan said.
"I can give you something to help you sleep, in the short term," she said. "And you should work on ways of managing your stress. What do you do when you're not at work?"
"When I'm ..." He gave her a deliberately quizzical look, and she smiled.
"Yes, I know. A foreign concept. You might try finding a hobby."
"I used to paint," he said. "When I was a kid. I don't really have time anymore."
"Make time," Dr. Fraiser said. "Consider that a prescription. Routine maintenance to avoid extended down time."
He didn't exactly take her advice at the time, but he did start sketching again when he couldn't sleep. It helped to feel like he could things that were really in front of him and make them solid under his pencil. He started actually finding the time to paint when he got to Atlantis, where trying to capture the spires of an alien city on canvas never really gets old.
And the nightmares stopped, or at least he would have said so a couple of days ago.
He gets up resignedly and pulls on his clothes, leaving his bed unmade for the moment on the theory that he's going back to sleep in it at some point. He reaches for his sketchbook.
It isn't on the table by the bed.
There's a moment where his chest clenches before he decides that he probably left it in the infirmary. He took it down there along with a book in case he couldn't get to sleep at all, and maybe he forgot about it. He can't find the book, either. That's a good sign that he just misplaced them.
Not that objects are now disappearing into some disturbing alternate dimension. Not that he's still dreaming, and the really bad part just hasn't gotten started yet.
The reasonable thing to do would be to just try to go back to sleep, but now it's going to bother him. He heads down to the infirmary instead, telling himself that it doesn't mean anything that the corridors are dim and he doesn't run into anyone on the way. It's the middle of the night. People are sleeping. As you do.
The infirmary is lit, which helps a little, and Dr. Keller is in her office, despite the fact that it's the middle of the night. She sticks her head out as he starts looking around for the sketchpad and book.
"Back already?" she asks. "I would have thought you were ready to stay out of here for a while."
"I think I left a couple of things down here," Evan says. "My book, and a sketchpad."
"One of those midnight art emergencies?" She opens one of the cabinets speculatively and rummages through a box. "I think these are yours. We try to put things away out of reach of other people's bodily fluids."
"Considerate of you," Evan says.
"We aim to please," Dr. Keller says. She looks him over. "No more sleepwalking, right?"
"No sleepwalking," Evan says. "Just a little trouble sleeping."
"Tell me about it," Dr. Keller says. "I think it's safe to say that this has left everybody a little freaked."
Evan smiles a little. "Is that a technical medical term?"
"Oh, sure," Dr. Keller says. "It's not all the way to 'traumatized' but a little bit past 'distressed.' I think we get to use that one a lot."
"You don't think that's a problem?"
"You mean in the sense of, do I think it would be a good thing if alien entities stopped invading Atlantis, or in the sense of, do I think being freaked out right now means that something's wrong with you?"
"More the second one," Evan says. "I think we're all pretty clear on the first one."
"I can take a look," Dr. Keller says.
"You want to scan my brain?"
She shrugs. "Would it make you feel better?"
"It might."
"This is a weird place to work," she says. "Come over here and lie down, and I'll take a look at your brain for you."
"Not as weird as the SGC," Evan says.
"Okay, I usually try not to argue with my patients, but I can't see how that's possible," Dr. Keller says.
He shrugs. "You're in an alien city, you expect it to be a little strange. It's not as weird as going to work every day and dealing with aliens that take over your brain and then coming home and going grocery shopping."
"I'm hearing things that take over your brain as a theme here," Dr. Keller says. "You want to talk about it?"
He closes his eyes as the scanner traces him in light. "I really do know that Colonel Sheppard isn't a Replicator," he says.
"That's good," Dr. Keller says. "And now I'm hearing a 'but.'"
He opens his eyes. "Would we necessarily know?"
"I'd know," she says after a moment. "I just had him in here as a patient, remember? And while there's such a thing as doctor-patient confidentiality, I don't think it's breaking it to tell you that he's definitely not a Replicator. He's also not infested with nanites or carrying some alien space plague that will kill us all, okay? He's fine. And you're fine. Your brain looks perfectly normal."
"That's good to hear," Evan says, sitting up.
"I know it can get pretty stressful," she says. "It might not be a bad idea for you to talk to--" She breaks off awkwardly like she's just remembered that she can't send him to go talk to Dr. Heightmeyer because Dr. Heightmeyer's dead, and is aware that reminding him of that will not be reassuring.
"I'm okay," Evan says. "I'm good. I was just a little freaked."
"Well, okay," Dr. Keller says. "If you're still having trouble sleeping in a few days, come back and talk to me, though."
"Sure," Evan says.
"And try not to worry about it," Dr. Keller says. "This place makes a lot of people jumpy." She shrugs. "If it had been up to me, I would have told Teyla to go ahead and shoot Colonel Sheppard and Colonel Carter with the ARG. Just for everybody's peace of mind."
Evan can't decide whether that makes him feel better or not.
*****
It's a couple of weeks later that people start getting sick from what at first looks like a fairly harmless virus that turns out to cause progressive amnesia. Just another day in the Pegasus Galaxy. Evan hands out stunners to the security team, downs the stimulants that are supposed to help them remember who they are, and prepares for a long day of herding frightened people into the makeshift infirmary they've set up in the mess hall.
The first sign that things are going seriously off the rails is when they try to get Zelenka to go back to the infirmary. Up until then, a lot of people have seemed grateful to have somebody calm telling them what to do, and a few have argued with them but eventually moved along.
"Come on, Doc," Evan says. "We need to take you down to the mess hall, now and I'd appreciate it if you'd come along quietly and not--"
Zelenka mutters something in Czech, and then adds, "I am coming, do not shoot." He's carrying some kind of metal rod that Evan hopes isn't a piece of vital equipment that Zelenka can't remember taking apart.
"We're not going to shoot you," Evan says. "Just come with us."
Zelenka follows them reluctantly down the corridor, and they're heading for the transport chamber when there's a yell from behind him. He swings around toward the noise.
Corporal Jacobs is down, clutching his head, and Zelenka has some kind of access hatch in the floor already open, scrambling down it as Evan raises the stunner. He fires, but the stunner fire crawls harmlessly around the hatch cover, and he can hear Zelenka's footsteps somewhere below.
"That son of a bitch," Jacobs says, trying to sit up and swaying like the world is reeling. "Took a swing at me--"
"I can see that," Evan says, kneeling to check out the man's head. He feels like he ought to go after Zelenka, but he's got a man down, and he's pretty sure that Zelenka knows the access tunnels in the city backwards and forwards. He doesn't really want to crawl around in there with somebody who apparently gets paranoid when he's losing his memory.
"Okay," he says to Jacobs, who's staggering to his feet propped up by someone else's arm. "Let's get you down to the mess hall, and then we'll swing back and see if Dr. Zelenka's changed his mind."
He can't remember if they ever do, because that's the point when things start getting increasingly weird. He hasn't forgotten that they're supposed to be rounding up civilians and taking them down to the mess hall. They've got the stunners if people won't come quietly, and they've started having to use them.
It's just starting to bother him that he isn't sure how they got into this situation, or how getting all these people down to the mess hall is going to help. Maybe they've got some answers about what happened. Once they've secured the city, they can start asking questions.
Every now and then he remembers that he has pills that are supposed to keep them from forgetting things. He's not sure how he knows that, but when he remembers, he takes a few of them. They're not working too well, but they're better than nothing.
It's getting harder and harder to stay calm, though. He's got to stay on top of the situation. They've got to secure the city. He remembers that. He's got to remember that, even though he can feel it starting to slip out of the corners of his memory.
He has pills that are supposed to keep them from forgetting things. He takes a couple, dry-swallowing them and wondering if it's a sign if whatever's wrong with them that he can feel his pulse pounding in his ears.
After it's all over, he wakes up in the infirmary. It's pretty crowded in there, but apparently the situation's calmed down enough that they've got patients in the infirmary rather than in the mess hall. He's pleased to have remembered that.
There's an IV in his arm, and he feels pretty terrible. On the other hand, he can remember his own name.
"You are back with us, then?" someone says from the next bed. When he looks, it's Zelenka, sitting up in bed with a laptop propped on his knees.
"What's going on?" Evan says, and then when Zelenka frowns, "No, I mean, I remember Colonel Sheppard and Ronon coming back with the antidote, and then --" He winces as that particular memory returns. He's now held his commanding officer at gunpoint twice in three weeks. That just can't be good.
"Rodney found a way to deliver the antidote through the ventilation system," Zelenka says. "Apparently most people are on the mend. I am hoping to get out of here as soon as Dr. Keller is satisfied that I remember my own name."
"I have to apologize to Colonel Sheppard," Evan says.
"You could, but he is still unconscious," Zelenka says. "Dr. Keller says that is probably temporary."
"Probably?"
Zelenka shrugs, as if to point out that in a world where there are any certainties, a children's disease would not have made the entire city lose their minds. He sets down his laptop and hesitates awkwardly for a moment before he speaks. "She also says that I did no permanent damage to your Corporal Jacobs," he says finally. "Still I should apologize to you as well as to him. It was unforgivable."
"We were all a little crazy," Evan says. "It was my fault, anyway. I didn't figure you'd put up a fight."
"It is strange the things that stay with you as certainties," Zelenka says. "For Rodney it was his mathematics, lucky for the rest of us." He shrugs one shoulder instead of finishing the thought.
"Look at it this way, if we ever do get invaded by aliens who give us all amnesia as part of their cunning plan, you'll be on it," Evan says.
"There is that," Zelenka says, and bends his head over his laptop.
*****
When he gets his chance to apologize, Colonel Sheppard says it's not his fault. "Forget about it," he says.
"Very funny, sir," Evan says. "I'd really like to stop threatening to shoot you, though."
Colonel Sheppard shrugs. "Sounds good to me. No more alien mind-affecting stuff for a while, okay?"
"It's a deal," Evan says, but he can't shake the feeling that alien mind-affecting stuff wouldn't make him crazy in that particular way if he weren't, somewhere deep down, a little crazy in that particular way. He's not sure what to do with that. He wonders what he's going to dream about, and whether Zelenka's wondering the same thing.
He's getting undressed that evening when he finds the picture, still in his jacket pocket where he must have put it back after he stopped needing to look at it. It's a Polaroid of Sheppard looking uncomfortable, which is both probably a result of the situation and Sheppard's natural expression in pictures. The handwriting is his own: LT. COL. JOHN SHEPPARD. HE IS YOUR COMMANDING OFFICER. TRUST HIM!
He did. There's no reason that couldn't have been faked, too, part of the same elaborate plot to take over Atlantis that he's pretty sure he believed in by that point. But it hadn't felt like one. He knew his own handwriting, knew he'd taken the picture, the same way he'd have known if he'd drawn it, remembered the pencil strokes, bone-deep.
That's something. It's a better thing to be certain of than that anyone could turn out to be an enemy. He knows there's a sense in which that's true, too, but it's one that he can live with.
He sits down on the bed and picks up his sketch pad, drawing from memory, quick strokes to capture something he might try to paint someday, although he's better with landscapes than people. He roughs in the arch of the gate and the slant of the ramp, and starts sketching in his old team getting ready to step through the gate.
He's thinking about a particular day, a routine mission where the worst thing that happened to them was that Ritter got sunburned and they saw a lot of trees. That really happened. The things in his dreams didn't, not that day, not to them.
It's maybe not that big a thing to hold onto, but he sleeps with the Polaroid and the drawing both next to his pillow. He dreams that he can't find his car keys, and he's going to be late to work. He tears the house apart looking, and he's starting to wonder if he dropped them out in the yard somewhere where he won't ever get them back. Then he wakes up and opens his eyes in the darkness long enough to remember that he didn't bring his car to Atlantis, so that's all right.
He closes his eyes again and sleeps until morning.