Teyla smiled.
"Teyla?"
This voice didn't belong here, shouldn't be here. Couldn't be here. Her smile crumpled into a frown. Maybe that terrible travesty of a wormhole trip had damaged her mind. It was possible, surely, and that meant-
"Teyla, it's alright. You're safe now."
Perhaps. But she was also quite mad, apparently. However, it might be best to simply play along. "Dr. Weir?"
"Welcome back." There was a smile in the voice now, and a hand clasped Teyla's. "How are you feeling?"
"Hungry." Which was the truth. She was famished and only vaguely recalled when she'd last eaten… The bread and soup Ronon had brought her? When had that been? The morning before they freed Rodney. "Rodney is hurt," she stammered, aching with shame for forgetting about a team mate, however briefly. "He needs-"
"Rodney's doing alright." Elizabeth Weir's soothing voice cut through her anxiety. "He's holding his own. It was touch and go for a while, and the doctors had to remove a lot of fluid from his chest, but he's resting comfortably now. And Ronon's fine, too," Dr Weir added, anticipating Teyla's question.
Yes. She could hear him now, arguing with someone. Teyla smiled, listened some more. There were quite a few people here, and a number of strange voices. A woman, two men; they, too, were arguing with a third man, older, by the sound of him, but familiar all the same. She should- "Dr. Zelenka!"
It sparked a soft laugh. "Yes. He's here, too," Dr. Weir confirmed.
"Hey, Teyla." A whole new voice, very close, very familiar.
"And so is Colonel Sheppard," announced Dr. Weir.
He had to be crouching by the bed or cot Teyla was lying on, and suddenly there was another hand on her shoulder. Alive and real. She'd barely dared to believe it. Somewhere, in the darkest corner of her mind, she'd feared that the skull that had brought them here had been his, that the real John Sheppard was dead. Provided that this one was the real one.
"We…" She cleared her throat. "You're not the one I met… before. He was Major Sheppard… He found you, didn't he?"
"Yes." It sounded charged, thick with grief and anger and guilt.
She shouldn't ask, there was too much sadness there, sadness she didn't need, but she couldn't help it, felt a duty to know. "What happened to him?"
"Junior saved our lives," he replied curtly.
And paid a high price for it. The thought cut like a knife, but she was not given any chance to mourn him now or remember his bravery or acknowledge that, in every way that mattered, he'd been as real as the man sitting by her side now. She sensed it coming a split-second before the ground started to heave, just as an animal would. Except, what she sensed wasn't the earth preparing to strike, it was the scorn of Charybdis and its determination to destroy them so that it could survive.
The tremor built, and as the jolts grew in violence the sounds all around Teyla seemed to climb over each other into a cacophony of noise. The clatter of equipment shaking and falling, the far-off wails of panicked people, closer by yells of frustration or warning, and the electronic screams of life-support machinery.
"Rodney!" Dr. Weir let go of her hand, scrambled away.
"The Stargate!" That was Zelenka.
His outcry provoked a stampede of stumbling feet and then answering calls of "It's holding! The frame is holding"-what- ever that might mean.
"I don't care!" An unfamiliar voice, a woman's, full of fear and resentment. "Let it go! It's killing us all!"
`No!" Zelenka again. "You're wrong, Selena! We mustn't lose the gate."
The air seemed to get thinner by the second, and Teyla was struggling for breath. But more terrifying than that or the quake or the noise and confusion all around her was the unshakable certainty that they were about to run out of time. Charybdis was winning. Chaos and entropy were winning.
She tried to sit up, found herself pushed back down onto the cot by strong hands. "Stay put," Colonel Sheppard ordered. "It'll be over in a minute. Everything's fine."
"No, it isn't, Colonel!" Teyla couldn't remember ever shouting at him, but she did so now. "We must leave! We must leave immediately!"
Radek Zelenka had always been of the opinion that the most serious disease his esteemed colleague, Dr. McKay, suffered from was chronic hypochondria. This time it was different. The reunited members of the Atlantis team had gathered around Rodney's cot to stare down at his haggard face and wait. It reminded Radek of nothing so much as being eight years old again and forced to participate in his grandmother's wake. The lifeless, ancient death mask had scared the living daylights out of him, and he'd had nightmares for weeks. Much as he would now, no doubt.
His tension was threatening to build into a headache, and it wasn't improved by Selena who hovered in the background, silent now but still disapproving. More disapproving than she'd ever been. He'd had to fight her every step of the way, to expend manpower to salvage the Stargate, to get medical help, to spend precious oxygen on keeping Rodney alive. Determined to protect her own people, she'd drawn the line between them and us, and Radek was them now and it hurt. They'd been together for most of their adult lives, they'd worked together, lived together, loved each other, and all of that had suddenly turned into a thing of the past, didn't count anymore. Selena had made it quite clear that he had only himself to blame. He'd made his choice and, as far as she was concerned, he'd chosen wrong.
Now she spared him a baleful look and slipped out of the tent. He felt relief when she left, and that hurt, too. Gritting his teeth, he forced his attention back on Rodney.
All the physicians who'd been rounded up to take care of the new arrivals had returned to their duties with the evacuees. All but one. He sat on a rickety stool, his gaze glued to the bank of small monitors that recorded Rodney's vital signs, such as they were, and he obviously was dismayed by something-or everything-he saw. McKay was hanging on by his fingernails.
"I've never seen anything like it," the healer mumbled and pointed at the EEC screen. "It's almost as if there's two of him, and whatever the other one is, it's keeping him alive."
"It's Ikaros," Teyla said softly. "Ikaros is still there."
"What?" Dr. Weir and Colonel Sheppard snapped in unison, and Ronon launched into a choppy explanation. Evidently Rodney himself had been none too specific about the state of affairs.
"So the bottom line is that we need him to get us back, but we can't trust him, because the guy who got us into this mess in the first place might be sitting inside his head, running the show?" Sheppard asked. "Great. Just great."
"We can trust him." Teyla had sat up on her cot next to Rodney's and tilted her face in the direction of Colonel Sheppard as if searching for his gaze.
"Teyla, you have no way of knowing that," Dr. Weir replied reasonably. "Ikaros lied to us before, and-"
"Wake him up," Colonel Sheppard snapped at the physician, adding a slightly sheepish, "Please."
"I can't do that. He's-"
"Please," echoed Teyla. "We can't wait."
Her earlier warning seemed to resonate through the tent. We must leave! We must leave immediately! Radek was inclined to agree. The quake that had rocked the hillside half an hour ago had been more vicious than any that had come before, and the air quality had taken another turn for the worse since the activation of the gate.
The physician was an elderly man, not used to having his authority questioned, let alone overridden. With an indignant grunt he picked up a couple of nerve stimulators and slowly guided them from Rodney's forehead down the entire length of his body. "I will not be held responsible for any consequences," he growled at last, setting the devices aside. "He is waking up now."