sga_saturday | Amnesty week # 14 From out the Fire (Reply)

Title: From out the Fire
Author:

scarlettandblue
Prompt: #14
Warnings: Character death (I mean it seriously)Extra warning: Everyone dies
Pairing: John and Rodney and kind of John and Rodney
Summary: Future fic. Goes AU after the Season 5 episode Inquisition.

Disclaimer: I don’t own them, I only wish I did. I’m doing this for fun not profit so please don’t sue me.

When they came through the gate the first thing they saw was an oddly familiar statue formed from a pile of rocks. Torren glanced at Melena as she stopped at his side. It looked like this was the place, so the New Coalition had not lied. He glanced back to the Ring of the Ancestors and saw that the Altar Device was missing which meant once through the gate there might be was no way to dial out.

He pressed his communicator, “Atlantis, this is the place. Send the portable....”

He hadn’t even finished the sentence when the blue waters rippled and Marketa Zelenkova pushed the portable DHD through. “This is really it?” she asked, her bright blue eyes darting round taking in the clearing and the statue.

“Looks like it.” Torren replied, then he pressed the communicator again and said, “Okay Atlantis, shut the gate down and we’ll try dialling out. We don’t want anyone else stuck here for a week if it doesn’t work.”

But there was another ripple and three more figures came through pushing an all terrain transporter piled high with gear, then the wormhole shut down.

Torren sighed, but he’d known there would be no stopping these three, and he supposed he could forgive them.

“Oh look, that is so cool,” Mer headed towards the statue, I’ve seen pictures of them, but never a real one, Rodney must have made this.” He glanced back at John, and his eyes were sparkling at the idea.

“Yeah.” John smiled back, but there was a feeling of unease in his belly, because this was seriously weird.

“Oh, do you think? Could they still be…..?” Mer was looking through the trees that surrounded the clearing, in the direction the statue indicated.

“No, it’s been too long.” Melena answered sadly.

And John shivered at the thought of what they would find, somewhere on this uninhabited planet.

“Yeah.” Mer sighed and then he glanced back at John and he smiled, crooked and a little sad. It always made John feel like his heart was breaking when Mer turned that expression on him. It reminded him of all the time when they had been at odds with each other.

It made him remember how he had felt before they were together. When he had fought against it. Because the idea of being with Mer was like a betrayal, like a set up, like something that wasn‘t real. Because back then he felt like his very existence was cosmic joke played on him by a callous unfeeling God.

He had been cloned from a DNA sample that had been stored for thirty years. It had been in the final days of the Great Wraith War, Sheppard and McKay were long gone and the city had needed one person to operate the systems that allowed it to run as a great war machine, its original purpose. When it was clear no one within the city had a strong enough expression of the gene to function as the conduit, a failsafe system within the Atlantis AI had created him.

He had been cultured in a lab, his physical growth accelerated until he was adult sized, then his body had become an interface. The battle had lasted three years, but in the end Atlantis drove the last of the Wraith to their deaths and the city returned to its home planet. His unconscious body had been discovered by Torren’s team when they cautiously entered the city for the first time since its return to New Lantea. He was in stasis, in a tank of thick viscous fluid that had nourished and nurtured him and kept his just conscious enough for the city to use him.

When they freed him from the tank and revived him John’s screams had terrified them all and in the end Melena had stunned him with her Father’s gun just to quiet him. It had been a kindness.

Carson and Zelenka had both wept when they saw John for the first time, and each had begun an interrogation of the various City systems to try and discover how he had come to be there. At first they had all thought he was the original. And everything that followed came from that initial mistake.

By the time Carson realised that John was a clone Zelenka had already set the process in motion. He had been searching for McKay because of course thinking John was the real Sheppard he assumed that the real McKay must also be somewhere in the city, in stasis or some other confinement.

Two weeks later an alarm went off in the infirmary and Carson was directed to a lab he had never seen before. And there in another stasis tank was the clone that Zelenka had created by accident. Mer.

They had called John down to the lab, thinking he would be happy, that this would be something pleasing to him.

John had stared at the tank. At the sapphire blue goop surrounding the pale body and all he could feel was horror. He had told them to destroy it before it was aware. He told them it would be a kindness to snuff out its existence before it could ever know itself. He screamed at them that it was an abomination. Because it was.

His existence had been an unfortunate and unwanted side effect born from the necessities of war. He knew he was only a pale shade of the original. And that hurt in ways that he didn’t have words to explain. But that feeling of being lesser, of lacking something was bearable because he still had all of the real Sheppard’s memories. He remembered duty, he remembered sacrifice, he remembered service. All the things that had been trained into the real Sheppard over the course of his military career, which made it possible for him to survive. Because there was always the hope he might serve again.

But he also had memories of Rodney. And he knew, in his gut, he absolutely knew that condemning McKay to a lesser existence was a cruelty beyond measure. Rodney had been so incredibly unique, with his towering intellect and his quicksilver mind that did not recognise any kind of boundaries. And he didn’t understand how anyone could anyone imagine this half life, this cloned existence would be anything other than unimaginable torture for Rodney McKay.

But Zelenka had turned his weathered face to John and had reminded him that McKay was the only man he had ever know who could always rise above the choices others tried to impose on him. And Carson shook his grey head and said, in a voice made even more shaky with emotion, that they were not monsters. That however he had come to be McKay was alive and that was more joy than he had hoped to see in his life again.

So John had left them to it. He had walked away, but when he had gone far enough he had waited out of sight until he heard the others approach. Teyla and Lorne, and Ronon and Jennifer. They were all so old now. It was just one more thing that made his present existence seem like it was drawn in a haze of greys and browns, while his memories of Sheppard’s real life were jewel bright and so sharp it cut his heart to ribbons.

It had been strange, waiting for the screaming to start. His body tense because he remembered the pain of waking to this new world. The memory of three years as a living, a killing machine, overlaid with thirty seven years of John Sheppard’s life. The pain of feeling himself out of step, out of time. The sickening lurch of reality that even now made it feel like his existence was a thread of gossamer stretched to the point of breaking.

But there was no screaming. There was no panicked call for a medical team. There was just a soft murmur of voices that gradually rose and spread into the unmistakable sound of joy and laughter.

John had left the city the next day.

It had taken three years for them to find him, and by then he had completely lost himself. That Rodney was the one to bring him back was probably the thing that had broken him in the end. But that had been a good thing in its way.

Back in Atlantis again, his many wounds were treated, and his damaged mind was gentled. First with drugs that gave him his first peaceful sleep followed by a soft hazy calm that seemed to cushion him through the days. Then with hours of some weird alien discipline that Teyla taught him. Stretching and bending and weaving his body without ever touching his opponent, it was like Yoga and Tai Chi mixed with a kind of violent Pilates. But strangely it soothed him, and made him feel like he really belonged in his body for the first time.

The next strange thing he learned was his name. The City had simply refused to accept the designation John Sheppard, as if The City knew something he didn’t, he was listed as John McKay. Shortly after that he learned that Mer did not take kindly to being called Rodney. And The City had him listed as Meredith Sheppard.

The last strange thing he learned was, Mer was nothing like the Rodney McKay he remembered.

Still it took him another two years of fighting what he wanted. Of being a total prick to Mer. Of fucking, or trying to fuck anyone else that would have him, until finally everyone on Atlantis and on all the worlds they had any kind of contact with refused to take him to their beds, because he was such an incredible dick. And because everybody knew each time he slept with someone new it broke Mer’s heart a little more.

It took him another five lonely, frustrated months before he broke down and approached Meredith. Then it took another seven months when Mer would laugh at him, and tell him no way in hell was he interested in an intergalactic slut like John who would sleep with anything that had a pulse, and in the case of that drunken night on MK11 63 something that probably didn’t have a pulse but might have been a deranged alien sex-bot, or possibly sentient pond slime. And finally it took three occasions when Mer kicked his ass with Teyla’s weird alien yoga-Tai-lates so spectacularly John was near to crying in the end.

Then there had been that fourth time when Mer had outclassed him and wiped the floor with him. And John was on his knees panting and heaving for breath. Tears welled in his eyes and because he hurt so fucking much he couldn’t stop them falling. He didn’t know what to do or where to go, he was so beaten down, so tired of fighting himself. And he started to beg Mer to please, please do something because he couldn‘t stand it any more.

And just like that, Mer had knelt in front of him. Had stroked his fingers down the side of John’s face. Had leaned in and kissed him softly on the lips and whispered that everything was going to be okay.

Then the strangest thing of all had happened. John discovered that he belonged. He belonged at Mer’s side. He belonged in Mer’s bed. And it didn’t make him an impostor in someone else’s life. It didn‘t make his love less real because the real John Sheppard had loved Rodney McKay. Because he was John McKay and he loved Meredith Sheppard and that was strange and unexpected in so many ways that John knew for the first time since he had come to exist that all that mattered was the life he was living now.

And it had been a good life since that day, until now.

Because they were on the planet where John Sheppard and Rodney McKay had been exiled after they were judged guilty of high crimes against the Pegasus Galaxy by the Coalition so many years ago.

Originally the sentence had been execution for Sheppard as an example, with McKay to be taken into the custody of the Coalition and Beckett to be freed, because the Judges accepted that while the original Beckett had been guilty of his crimes it would be wrong to punish the clone Beckett in his place.

McKay had refuted the sentence and argued if he was a guilty as John then he should face the same penalty. And while the Judges had no qualms about executing Sheppard, a military man, one whose trade was death, they had balked at killing a scientist, so the sentence had been commuted to life in exile for them both.

McKay had persuaded The Coalition to allow him to return to Atlantis to collect essential medical supplies for his life threatening allergies, and to put together some essential tools and supplies. He had argued that it was also a death sentence to exile them on an uninhabited world without the means to grow food or build a shelter.

The Judges reluctantly agreed and had given McKay 24 hours to collect what he needed. They held Sheppard as hostage, on pain of death if McKay did not return within the time allowed. Perhaps they thought Rodney would not return. Or if he did return there was no way McKay would have time for much in the way of preparations in just 24 hours. No doubt the Judges felt Sheppard and McKay scratching out a harsh desperate existence was a fitting punishment.

It was still one of the great mysteries of Atlantis. Even now, when the Torren and Jinto were the only ones still around who had lived through that day and they had both been too young to understand what was going on, everyone wondered where Sheppard and McKay had been sent, And everyone on Atlantis still talked about the 24 hours when McKay had returned. Everyone puzzled over the tasks he set the various science departments, as well as the military. And the destinations he handed out to various gate teams, with lists of what he wanted them to bring back.

The whole city worked to create this thing. The military had called it a care package. The scientists, with a splendid dash of irony called it an ark. McKay said it was just his and Sheppard‘s Desert Island Discs, which made no sense to most people, because all the data he took was on memory sticks and a huge back up hard drive.

But when the time was up the Puddle Jumper was packed with care. Every thing that McKay had requested was on board, some of it was obvious, crates of MREs and medical supplies, clothing and blankets, as well as tools and seeds and tubers and bulbs to plant for crops. Other things were carefully concealed, slotted together to form a false bulkhead wall around the whole interior that was packed with the strange assortment of minerals and crystals and rare metals and various machined parts. Compartments were created that hid computers and other pieces of equipment as well as the eight special carriers the Zoology department donated to house the twenty seven sedated small animals and birds that had been collected from various worlds by some of the gate teams.

Everyone knew each item that McKay had brought to his exile, but no one could imagine what he had planned to make with it once he and Sheppard arrived.

And now they were here, and Mer was rushing headlong through the trees because maybe he had an idea. If anyone could have an idea what they were going to find it would be Mer.

John chased after him because he had a terrible feeling. He was aware of Torren and Melena following behind him. Ryuu must have stayed behind in the clearing with his half-sister.

John stumbled to a halt as he broke through the tree-line and reached the rocky shore. Mer was just standing there. When John reached his side he could see the dismay clearly marked on his face as he stared at the ramshackle little shelter by the edge of the water. It wasn’t like anything they had been expecting.

It must have barely sheltered them from the elements and sitting on that barren shore as the mist rolled in it was like the wreck of a ghost ship. And suddenly John didn’t want to know what they were going to find inside. He wished they could just turn around and leave this place. He squeezed Mer’s shoulder gently and said, “I think we should let Torren or Melena look inside.”

Mer was looking a little lost, he nodded absently and replied, “Yeah, maybe we should.” He shivered and his expression was haunted as he carried on, “I feel strange, like something is watching me, or lying in wait. And that is just stupid because I know all we are going to find in there is bones, and what harm can the bones of long dead people do?”

John shivered too, because that mist was rolling in fast, and it was undeniably creepy to be standing there wondering about the bodies he knew they were going to find, the long dead bones of someone who was essentially him. He looked around at Torren who had stopped a pace back from them and asked, “Do you think you could look. See if they’re in there? What’s left of them.”
His voice was choked with a strange emotion, a watery feeling in his belly like fear.

Torren and Melena headed down to the edge of the water then along until they could see inside the little shelter. They paused, then both of them stepped forward and Melena crouched down and carefully entered inside. John could feel how tense Mer was. And he was aware of his own body thrumming with the pent up feeling that his DNA remembered as the intense high he would get before flying a combat mission.
Finally Torren called to them and Mer and John made their way down to the shore. It was getting colder. The mist coming off the water had a clammy chill to it, and it was making strange patterns against the flash light Melena was shining inside the shelter.

“Can you tell if it’s them?” Mer’s voice was a little wavery.

Melena stepped out and held something out to them. “There are some old blankets and ragged clothes inside, and there were some bones on top of them that appear to be two small animals curled around each other, but no evidence of human remains. And I found these as well.”

The relief John felt was like a cloud lifting, and he breathed a sigh. Mer took the two circlets of grey metal, they looked like crowns of some kind, set with smooth blue and green gems. John took the pebble shaped object she handed to him. It reached out to his mind immediately, the way all Ancient tech did. But he was certain no Ancient had made it. Because it was carved from a pale dense wood inlaid with a filigree of brass coloured metal, and set with a strange smooth dark blue stone that seemed to have specks and shimmers of gold in its depths.

It fit his hand like it had been made for him and when his mind asked it, what are you? it whispered in his head R2D2. So he told it to show him.

And suddenly an elderly man was standing there. He was bent over but and seemed to be fiddling with something, but then he stood up and he was face to face with John. He had lost most of his hair and what was left was a white wispy circlet around the back of his head. His face was jowly and there was a haunted look in his faded blue eyes that was very familiar to John.

Torren and Melena stepped to the side hands hovering over their weapons, but every one from Atlantis had seen holographic images before.

Mer gasped and reached his hand forward for a second, he was about to speak when a quavery and annoyed voice startled them, someone off camera was saying, “Is it on, are you going to start it?“

And the old man muttered, “Yes, yes I’m just about to.”

He straightened a little more and stared disconcertingly just to the left of John, so it was obviously a recording and not an interactive hologram, then he began, “My name is Doctor Rodney McKay and this will be my last message. If someone happens to stumble upon this place and manages to get this thing working then I would ask you to see it reaches the people of Atlantis, if they are still to be found out there. I’m sure they will be happy to reward you.”

“Rodney,” The off camera voice whined, “That’s not how it’s supposed to go, you say Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope.“

Mer turned away to look at John and there was a soft fond look on his face.

It mirrored the expression on the face of the old man in the holograph.
But then he hid it, and blustered, “If you think I’m going to say that you are deluded. Well I suppose the fact is you are deluded. You’re the one who thought surfing a storm swell, at night was an appropriate activity for a man of your age.”

“Yeah, I know.” And the off camera voice suddenly sounded much older and there was an edge of pain in the way his voice broke a little and he started to cough.

“John,” The old man hurried off camera and there was some rustling and muttering, and the coughing gradually eased and then stopped. Eventually he shuffled back into view again, looking grey and haggard, He scrubbed his face briefly then spoke quickly and quietly. “Colonel John Sheppard the military commander of the Atlantis expedition and I have been here for some forty-five years, exiled because of our actions when we first came to the Pegasus Galaxy. It's true we were ignorant of the dangers in this galaxy, at first. We didn‘t understand how things worked here, perhaps as well as we thought we did. So yes, we were guilty of the things they charged us with, but it is fair to say our intentions were pure, dispite how things turned out. And John, especially John, only ever acted with bravery and honour, which made his punishment especially cruel.”

The old man in the holograph paused again glanced away and then spoke even more quietly, “John had an accident a month ago, and despite everything, every medical advancement at my disposal, I have not been able to cure the infection that started when a broken rib pierced his lung, and now it has spread from his lungs to his bones. I can keep the pain under control but it will kill him in a matter of days, because he has grown so weak.”

He stopped again and bent down then surprisingly stood up with his arms full of two grey and a brown sinuous fury creatures. They nuzzled into his neck and he closed his eyes for a moment before he said, “Despite being exiled from our people we have had a good life here, we built something…”

He glanced towards the sky behind him then continued, “ Something remarkable I suppose, and my only regret now is that we’ll be leaving Snoopy and Manfred to fend for themselves. But they are as close to cats as I have ever seen in this galaxy so I’m sure they will soon be tucking into the local wildlife with relish. I have freed the rest of our domesticated stock and since they are all bred from wild animals native to this kind of environment they will be fine.”

He leaned down and the two creatures jumped down from his embrace and he whispered something to them quietly before standing up wiping his eyes as he addressed the recorder again. He had the two circlets in his hand now which was a strange kind of symmetry because Mer was standing in the same place holding the same two objects all these years later.

“We have decided to try something each of us rejected at different times in out lives Ascension. And believe me I know! It’s like the worst cosmic joke ever told. And if there is anyone left alive who remembers John or I then I’m sure the idea of either of us ascending will have them peeing in their adult diapers. But the truth is I can’t bear to see him go, and he can’t bear to leave me. And I have had time to perfect these devices now. If this message ever reaches the people of Atlantis then maybe you would find it enlightening to visit this place. You’ll find the sonic screwdriver in Ukshuk. Unless you‘re descendants of Kavanagh in which case you can piss off right now.”

Mer and John burst out laughing because they both knew what a huge ass Kavanagh was even though they had never met him.

Then the old man stepped out of view and John told the device to stop showing them. He had an idea that it had probably continued to record for some time, the device whispered softly in his mind that it had forty seven hours of recorded footage.

But John didn’t want to hear their voices off camera. He didn’t want to know what Rodney and John might have said to each other in those final hours. And he really didn’t think it was something anyone else should hear either, so he told R2D2 to keep the visual part of the recording from that point onwards, but to delete the sound.

In his own mind he didn’t doubt that Sheppard and McKay had ascended. The fact that Melena had found discarded clothes but no human remains was proof enough for him. But he understood that some would only believe if they could see.

John understood enough of how ascension worked to guess that at some point there would be two brilliant flashes of light off camera that would record the moment it happened. He imagined a scientist, probably Miko’s youngest daughter Natsuko, would sit quietly and watch the whole recording so she could mark the time and date. And somehow that seemed fitting.

No one moved or spoke for several seconds. Then Mer said, “You know most people mistakenly think The Sonic Screwdriver is some kind of inter-dimensional Swiss Army Knife. But it’s main purpose is as a key that can open any lock.” Then he unceremoniously dumped the Ascension crowns, or whatever they were, on the rocky ground and ran back up towards the trees

John, Torren and Melena glanced at each other and shrugged, they knew Mer would be back soon enough. They all turned to gaze up the beach and after a while Torren said what they had all been thinking, “Weird to see him as an old man.”

Melena smiled and added, “I knew it was true, that you and he came from thier DNA, but seeing it with my own eyes is incredible, Mer really is Dr McKay, come back to life.”

And John smirked and added, “Did you notice how bald he was?”

There was a sound of undergrowth being crashed through and Mer appeared again running through the trees. He reached them panting and out of breath, so he had to wait a few moments before he could brandish the strange cylindrical object that really did look like a Sonic Screwdriver in John’s face, and say, “Early Male Pattern baldness is scientifically proven to be a sign of a high level of manly testosterone, you mop- headed-twink.”

Then he twisted the cylinder and pressed the button and the twisting spires and vaulted arches of the most beautiful, unimaginable floating city any of them had ever dreamed of materialised out of the mist above the lake.

The title for this story came from:
The Fire of Drift-wood
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow