Work Text:
Come What May
by Sue
It was a dark and stormy night, made darker by the city's power levels dipping well into the 'alert' zone, despite Radek's and Rodney's feverish attempts to bring them back up to where they should be. Incredibly, despite their touted long life, practically drained ZPMs were useless ZPMs. Not even McKay had a valid explanation for their spontaneous depletion; they had begun acting flukely a week ago, to the day.. Before he had had time to analyze, dissect and work the anomaly, a Wraith-related exigency had surfaced.
With the dearth of power came the unthinkable. It was impossible to raise the shield. Beyond Atlantis' shaky walls, a storm that had blown up from nowhere, raged. It was a doozie of a tempest.
These venerable walls had withstood many violent onslaughts in their hallowed past, but there was something especially malevolent about this latest meteorological disturbance. The punishing winds, shrieking like maddened Wraiths, battered relentlessly, actually causing oscillation for the more vulnerable sites of Atlantis. The shield was sorely missed, but lamenting about the lack did nothing to getting it raised again any sooner.
Linking all this up had McKay, resident repair ace of all things gone haywire, very worried. His being unceasingly vocal about their inevitable date with impending doom irked Sheppard; if it wasn't one thing, it was always another, always. John wasn't having Rodney's incessant harping on the bleakest sundries, until his brain hatched the plan that saved, not today. Why hadn't he bailed them out already, as was the norm? If he was this agitated, then what was he waiting for? Stop whining; start acting or, "Or, we sit tight and ride it out, Rodney," Sheppard tossed into the genius' ire ring.
"Oh, and I suppose when strategic sections of the city are blown away, you'll recommend, what? Hope for the best, and count heavily on winding up back in Kansas, Dorothy and Toto at our sides? It wasn't terribly long ago when I told you that without the shield, Atlantis is remarkably fragile. Impotent ZPMs, no shield!"
"So this is my fault?" Sheppard had to smile, in spite of McKay's wicked scowl. Fitting, the use of impotent in connection with raising what needed to be raised. Granted, he appreciated pricky sarcasm, thick and full-bodied; juicy through and through; literally good enough to eat, but, it *was* annoying.
"I didn't say that," McKay fired back.
"So...come up with a fail-safe. Who knows, maybe lightning'll strike, generating sufficient power to bring our dome back once you figure out how the strikes can be harnessed. I've never seen such flashes, ever."
"Oh, that's just rich," McKay heckled. "A lightning rod constructed of, say...what?" The irate expression on his face changed dramatically with the germination of a tiny idea. "Say! Labyrinthic aether-flue grounding, along the lines of--yes, that just might work!"
"That's what I like to hear, whatever it is that means."
Having built up a full head of steam, McKay shot at him, "You see, it's like a tri-dimensional--"
"Not now, just do it." Largely lost in thought, while cowtowing to the stubborn streak in him, Sheppard refused to believe that they were in real trouble until the control room's windows, brutally pummeled, suffered total destruction and virtually imploded all about immediate personnel. "Ow!" escaped him.
Talk about glass being littered practically everywhere. Once the edged debris settled, the nerve center did look the worse for wear.
"Colonel," Radek, crawling out from under a shard-littered console, not looking as frazzled as the situation warranted, managed to breathe. A tech wasted no time reporting the precipitously-caused damage, and they soon witnessed maintenance personnel hammering up thick wooden slabs over the wreckage so the merciless, howling gusts were effectively shut out..
In the interim, Sheppard was a study in staring blankly into space.
"Colonel!" There was a good deal more obstreperousness in Zelenka's normally deferential tone.
"Yeah?" John replied, a faraway register in his.
"Are you all right?"
Rodney, standing elbow-to-elbow with Radek, gawked at his disheveled friend, but moved not a muscle until Radek repeated more forcefully, "Colonel Sheppard, I think you should sit; get off your feet." To McKay he mused aloud, "When did that happen? I thought he took cover when all of us did."
"Hard to tell in near-darkness, so guess again, because apparently he did *not*." Pointedly, McKay told John, "You've been hurt." Standing behind John and seeing the upsetting sight made his eyes bug-out. In the next breath, over his radio headset, he apprised Jennifer of the colonel's compromised position. "Hurry up with that medical team! Glass the size of a Floridian grapefruit," McKay stammered, shuddering, just naming the citrus, "embedded itself in Colonel Sheppard."
Now Rodney was picking up where Radek had left off; this was no time for these two to get cute.. Since when did whispering during a crisis become all the rage? Why were Atlantis' undisputed braniacs looking all fuzzy around the edges of his peripheral vision? Profound ringing was going on in John's ears; it was as though Zelenka, and McKay too, were forming animated, silent words... Instinct drove his right hand to the back of his head, and his touch was met with the unexpected...immediate painfulness and sticky wetness clinging to his palm and fingers. "Crap!" He reeled on unsteady feet, grimaced, thinking he knew how the walls felt. They, along with him, could come crashing down any moment now.
"How could you not know you're bleeding, and doing it profusely?" Rodney interjected, heaping upon him cross look after cross look, as though Sheppard had been planning this casualty for months. Again, over his headset, McKay spoke to Jennifer who was en route. "No, I didn't remove the glass. It dislodged spontaneously when Sheppard drove his hand to the back of his head. He may have cut one or two fingers."
John felt woozier now, as though McKay's pointblank accusation had dragged him into an awareness that hadn't a prayer of lasting. He maligned the sluggish feeling, and at a time like this, with Atlantis in trouble, he freely conceded, casting insistent eyes McKay's way. "I'm fine," he asserted, lying through gritted teeth, in denial about the command room beginning to lose its stability. Those lines with waves in them, squiggling before his eyes, weren't helping.
His charade was thoroughly unconvincing.
"No you're not," Teyla opposed, at her team leader's side, coaxing him to lie supine. Reflexively, she removed her jacket, using it to stanch his blood flow. John was still on his feet, ignoring everyone's insinuating looks of concern, feeling like crap.. Caving, while raging for his will to get the upper hand, he was going under, fast, succumbing to the trauma sustained. He sank to the floor, his knees buckling. What a revolting development!
"Colonel," Emmagen sang out, dipping to the floor along with him, bearing down all the more with her jacket on his sizeable wound from which blood was, thankfully, only trickling now. Her coaxing him to lie down flat on his back was at an end; enervated, John collapsed against her and she rested him down easy...
"John!" McKay shouted, tapping the radio transmitter at his ear and barking into the mouthpiece of his headset, "Where's that medical team!"
"Right here, Rodney," was Jennifer's immediate assertion, striding in with three assistants, a distraught Woolsey on their collective heels. Her decisiveness warned all that she was in full-out vulnerary, Chief Medical Doctor mode, assuming complete charge of Colonel Sheppard's precarious turn of events.
"This place is a shambles!" the city's new leader shouted skittishly, having been summoned from his orderly office to the control room's wreakage.
"He's lost a lot of blood, hasn't he?" McKay postured while facially instructing Zelenka to run the multi-interfaced program he had smoothly re-calibrated, enabling fractured pulse energy salvage and subsequent redirection to where power was needed most, which had better be the city's salvation. It was clear, if only to himself, that Atlantis was hard-pressed to withstand much more battering from this scary storm. Harnessing lightning bolts was an idea whose time had come, if his expertise and putting it into practice ran true to form so the shield could be restored.
"More than I'm comfortable with, but despite my discomfort," she looked up from John's semi-unconscious body, "the wound is, for the most part superficial.."
"Superficial?" McKay bleated, his tone clarifying that her cursory examination was way off.
"Yes, Rodney, it is," Jennifer verified as conclusively as any trained professional would have responded. "It's extensive, jagged, angry and ugly-looking, but my unqualified opinion?" Her team had the colonel on the adjustable single fold aluminum stretcher. "He'll live." She signaled for her people to head out. Keller was calm, cool collectedness incarnate, but often, even superficial injuries were nothing to downplay when there was this much blood loss.
Before making their move, Sheppard's visceral moan echoed throughout the insufficiently-lit control room, grating against all present. Wrenchingly, the colonel gave way to delirium accompanied by involuntary flinching, accentuating his twitching. Swirling in the throbbing catacombs of his brain was the foregone conclusion that diving into the frigid water below to get off this sinking ship, which bore a striking resemblance to the RMS Titanic, was a beaut of an idea. There wasn't just one iceberg, there were two, twins of Mt. Everest, which were ending the ship's maiden voyage.
"Women and children first--then me," John gabbled.
"Oh, yeah. Sure," Rodney justified, hurling accusation, "he sounds like the picture of health. As coherent as a venal user on speed, or like me, for that matter, when I overdosed on Wraith enzyme."
"Move!" Jennifer irritably pitched to her staff and they swiftly obeyed.
"I'm going with him," Teyla spoke up, wasting no time departing with the team.
"Not as disoriented as he appears," McKay duly noted to Chuck, and those close by, seeing John thrust his unbloodied hand at Teyla, waiting for her to grasp it.
"Why aren't you in a lifeboat?" Sheppard tossed at her weightily.
Squeezing his hand, she freely acknowledged, "I was waiting for you."
"Just peachy; but that's my girl," he managed to chuff out before properly blacking out, which he swiftly did, his lips going slack along with the rest of his screwed-up face.
/oOo\
Communications was just not happening, making it a real challenge to keep a civil tongue in his mouth. Sucking it up, mentally wadding his frustration into a neat roll, John tried contacting Atlantis again, but it was still no go. "CRAP!"
There were forests, and then there were forests; this one topped them all for verdant richness and variety of dense foliage. Innocent looking berries, appearing ripe for the picking and eating were tasteless and sour, the trio had brusquely discovered. What looked like fresh water, clear and cold, was brackish swill. Where were Power Bars when they were needed most, he grumbled. Strangely, they lacked water for this expedition, having brought none.. No food, nor water; these oversights were inexcusable.
How could so much negligence happen, John continued to harp, ready to 'power' curse... How in the galaxy were Ronon, Teyla and he getting out of here after crash landing the puddlejumper? He credited himself for some of the negligence. He had miscalculated, over-compensated, then changed his mind when he should have erred on the side of safety. Just when he had begun to think that he knew all there was to know about gateships, too--wrong! The H.U.D. was a tool, not a substitute for sound judgment. Mixing up second guessed mental commands is bad, a definite mistake, and he had made all of them pay the price. This overgrown copse of a planet lacked a 'Gate, wouldn't you know it; well, they hadn't come upon one yet anyway. It was a big sphere, lots of ground to cover, which they had, but so far, they hadn't found a DHD, complete with Stargate, nor seen anybody.
"Hey, Sheppard..."
"What?"
"Found something."
"Yeah? What?" John looked away from the charred-looking tree stump and his eyes fell on Dex.
The Satedan waved him over, motioning for him to do so quickly. "Ever see one this little?" His tone was saturated with amusement, sporting an edge.
"What the hell?" John set his jaw hard, his patience ultimately running out, having worn thin long ago. "Are you kidding me?"
"How're we supposed to fit through that?" Teyla complained, sounding tired and ready to throw in towels. Her face wore a scowl every time she looked John's way, but she hadn't spoken a word blaming him for their hapless predicament.
"Damned if I know," Sheppard slung at his companions, scrunching down to get a better, closer look at the exasperating anomaly. "If McKay were here--"
"But he isn't," Emmagen reminded, as though she'd just honed her tongue.
John shook a finger at her testily. "Be nice."
She looked at him, tincturing her scowly facial expression with, 'when am I not?'
"Ever heard of 'Gulliver's Travels?'"
"Who's Gulliver?" Ronon wanted to know.
"This guy, a fictional dude, who traveled a lot."
"Oh."
Teyla sounded resigned when she said, "Another Earth reference which you realize we know nothing about."
"Bingo!"
"So, what about him?" Ronon struck a familiar pose, crossing his arms over his chest.
"One of his travels landed him in this place where he was the giant amid lots of little people."
Nodding, Teyla inserted, "So you think we're going to come across little people, we being the giants among them."
He was going to say, 'bingo' again, but thought better of it. "You make it sound impossible."
"I didn't say that," she defended.
"No, but you look as though you want to. Okay, so it's fictional, but you get the idea."
Shrugging, she hunkered down next to him, and for curiosity's sake, stuck a pinkie through the miniature-sized ring. "Now where do you suppose the DHD is?"
"No clue," Sheppard yielded.
"Uh...oops........I think I've found it," Ronon announced with a good deal of qualification. He kicked at what he'd just stumbled over... His 'oops' sounded involuntary this second time. Gulping, as his eyes fell on something else he'd managed to wrack up, Ronon bit back breath.
"Those, 'oops' have too much clumsy-me attached to them," John predicated.
"Guess I broke that," the Satedan audibly mused, meaning the equally Lilliputian DHD for starters.
The surfing enthusiast now held the useless, for all intents and purposes, squashed mechanism in his palm, looking beyond downcast. Yet, blithely he said, "It wasn't all that useful this size anyway. Like that shrunken 'Gate."
"And that goes for McKay too?" the anxious Satedan disturbingly inquired.
"What!!" John and Teyla chorused..
/oOo\
The colonel thrashed in the infirmary bed as though he were lashed to an operating table in Frankenstein's castle, struggling to free himself from the mad doctor's lastest experiment about to go horribly wrong.
"I never knew he was such a sleep-talker," McKay jabbered, flooded with empathy for his dear friend. In Rodney's presupposing estimation, the somewhat deep, convexed-shaped gash, that had required a number of strategically-placed stitches, wasn't as superficial as first supposed; Jennifer had 'red-herringed' him yet again. Rodney cast chary eyes at Keller, wishing Carson was here, not missing from Atlantis, off doing research on that planet which grew plants ideal for concocting more effective medicines. "You're sure he'll be fine?" Overwhelming emotional involvement for John was a signpost mired in his voice.
"Following a few days of complete rest, he should be," the doctor assured.
Soft-spokenly, Teyla reccommended, "Perhaps it is time we leave, allowing Colonel Sheppard to rest."
"Well, resting comfortably he isn't at the moment. Shouldn't you be giving him a sedative?"
"I'd prefer not to," she patronized, singularly for Rodney.
"He isn't concussed. He was gouged."
Dr. Keller smiled at her former suitor patronizingly with a small sigh.. "Less drama, Rodney. This is one of several men who survived having an entire building fall on him. He was struck by flying glass. No actual brain damage sustained. His wound's been properly attended to, and he should settle down on his own, once he wakes up."
"And that would be when?" Rodney badgered, making interesting expressions with his candid face. "He spills to the floor?" Acting on impulse, fearing that his prediction was all too near to being fulfilled, he thrust out his arms and ready hands were primed for preventing the colonel from dislodging himself from the bed. "John, John, wake up!"
"RODNEY!" Sheppard caterwauled, stentorian enough to wake those long dead.
"Good lord, man, I'm not in the next county; no need to raise the roof."
"But--you're dead--D-EAD! Tiny and dead. R-Ronon squashed you flat by accident near the itsy-bitsy D-H-D." His voice got caught in his disconsolate groan.
"No I didn't," the Satedan reflexively snapped, appall stippled in his face. "What's he talking about?"
"He's raving, and you sit atop your medical high horse claiming a sedative shouldn't be administered. Layman here, who obviously knows pain and suffering when he hears it."
"Keep talking to him, Rodney," Jennifer authoritatively instructed, egging McKay on. "He's coming around."
Teyla jumped in before the alarmist. "John, it's all right. Rodney is fine; we all are.. We've come through the storm. Rodney and Doctor Zelenka were able to re-establish power to erect the shield."
"Mainly, me," McKay corrected with conviction, and a highfalutin roll of his eyes.
"John, please, hear us. We're all all right. Come back to us; wake up. John."
Beneath Sheppard's eyelids, a lot of rapid eye movement was going on, with his orbs seeming as though they were busy digging their ways through the lids. Surreally, his face contorted in a grimace of loathing as dread inundated him. "We're going down! Teyla, we've got to dive for it and swim hard, as far away from the ship as we can or we'll be sucked down with it when it sinks! Unsinkable my ass!" He struggled within McKay's hands, warring against the expectant icy cold inclemency of the North Atlantic that waited below, numbing his turbulent subconscious in overdrive. "Hurry! Take my hand! We'll make it--one-two-three-JUMP!"
"Still dreaming," Rodney humanely remarked, tightening his hold on him. With sketchy acceptance, he discerned, "this isn't medically acceptable, I know, but it's for his own good."
"You're right, it's *not* acceptable," Jennifer matched, coming forward as though she'd restrain McKay if she had to, having anticipated his intention.
"I'll be gentle." And so saying, he began shaking his team leader, lightly. "Come on, John, snap out of it. This can't be doing your psyche any good." Sheppard didn't respond the way Rodney wanted him to, so his shakes became more aggressive. "Wake up--JOHN! That's an order!"
"Here's mine," Keller snapped, rankled, then fired, "Enough melodrama already! This is *my* field of expertise, remember? Release my patient!"
Scoffing to a degree, McKay threw back at her, "You said it yourself, it was hardly blunt force trauma, just a shallow basal wound." Blithely, Rodney persisted with impersonating wind incarnate. "Snap out of it," he meant for Sheppard, but he judged Keller needed an assist, dismounting from that roan of a high horse.
"Who resigned, and made you Chief Medical know-it-all?"
"Now, listen--"
"No! You listen, Rodney!"
"Well?"
Teyla and Ronon hemmed the burbling soldier and the resolute scientist in, watching on, silent, but adding their unuttered votives to McKay's spirited efforts, while Jennifer flayed Rodney with blistering scowls.
Sparking, electrodes, placed at the sides of his head, delivering the precise voltage wouldn't have worked any better than the verve and urgency, laden in McKay's loud, chimeric-shattering voice. Sheppard, with eyes still closed tight, swallowed several times. What a relief...his breath went in, and breathing out was happening; he hadn't drowned, neither had Teyla. The sound of her confident voice reverberated in his recovering mind. And Rodney--still alive, somehow, was the best! The best? Yes, of course it was.
John's nostrils flared, and through gritty-feeling, clenched teeth he raspily flared, "For a totally squashed, defunct Lilliputian, McKay, you shout really loud--and you're unbelievable strong too!" Summarily surprised by Sheppard's tirade, Rodney let go of him as though he'd received a shock from direct current. John fell back against the bed's firm support, and his eyes slowly fluttered open, expelling him from the irrefutably 'realest' dream he'd ever had in his life, childhood included. Following several choky coughs, along with fitting his fingers about the snug bandage that hugged his neck like a posture collar, Lt. Colonel John Sheppard haltingly said, "Crap, that was wild."
"I take it you mean your dream," McKay helpfully supplied, but John looked at him with such that Rodney couldn't hold back. "Well, of course, what else, huh?"
What felt like a mighty effort made his eyes close again. Sounding terse, he conveyed, "Before anyone asks, NO; I can't give you details, 'cause everything's all sketchy and mostly forgotten." Having said that, and once he'd yawned, then he woke up.
End