Dying, John Sheppard thinks, is far more mundane than popular fiction would have him believe. He's done his fair share of it, come close enough to see its bloodshot eyes and smell its morning breath--Iratus bugs, nuclear weapons, gunshot wounds, cranky dinosaurs, Wraith, Rodney McKay--but he remembers no light, no tunnel, no friendly angels guiding him. His life never once passed before his eyes.

This time he can't really tell what it was that got him. A bear with a thick, scaly tail? An alligator with fur? The most distinguishing feature is teeth.

It's dead now, lying in a steaming heap, its clawed front paws only a few feet from Sheppard's head. It's scratched deep gouges in the frozen ground.

The alligator-bear thing. The allibear. The beargator. The beargator's mouth, stacked with teeth in layers like a shark, is stained red. Its own blood is a sort of standard science fiction green.

He can't stop staring at the open maw. He actually can't--his head won't turn, he can't make his muscles obey him. He could close his eyes but that would feel too much like inviting the end. And there won't be any white light.

Like a radio station coming into range, he hears McKay's voice. It's saying, "Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus," over and over. Sheppard is reminded of driving through the South, one religious station replacing another. The content would be about the same, too. Every 'Jesus' is punctuated with a movement of some kind. Sheppard's body is being tugged or pushed at.

Another voice somewhere farther off says something that isn't 'Jesus' but other than that it doesn't quite come together. The beargator's bloody toothy jaws grin at Sheppard. He can smell blood, thick and meaty and dirty. On a spot under its head, the beargator's greasy green blood has mixed with the prime Sheppard claret. No demons rise, but it does turn into brown sludge.

The station switches to less religious programming: "I know what they're called, I don't know where they are! Subclavian means 'under the collarbone' right? So I'm looking under the fucking collarbone or I would if I could find the fucking collarbone in the fucking mess!"

A safer, warmer voice says, safely, warmly, but with a tinge of impatience, "Please, Dr McKay, do not raise your voice."

Tug, tug, tug somewhere, hands, fingers, all off somewhere in a distant mist, fingers wandering the horizon like gentle giants. A hand on his face, and his head is turned to look straight up at the heavy, sullen sky. Before this, stepping through the Stargate on point, he said, "Looks like we'll have a white Christmas, guys."

McKay, predictably, muttered that he hated Christmas and he especially loathed the thought of all the happy screaming children and if that made him Scrooge then so be it.

It's still not snowing.

The smell of blood is very strong now, and the hand on his face is sticky.

McKay's face appears in his field of vision, mostly a pale blur, but he knows it's McKay. Not just because he's talking and talking and talking, but because his eyes are blue, the only blue eyes on this planet.

"Sheppard? Sheppard? Please say something. Do you think--"

McKay disappears and is replaced by Teyla and Teyla's warm, safe voice. "We will take you to the gate now, do not be worried."

Sheppard isn't. Worry has not occurred to him.

"That's not helping much! It's not going to hold! Yeah, okay, fine, you do that, go ahead. Careful!"

The next voice is a soft growl: "I won't hurt him."

Then the world moves, the sky shifts, and Sheppard's limbs are rearranged and hung at awkward angles, moved rhythmically. His head lolls back and the landscape is upside down, the grey, naked trees hanging from a brown sky, their branches floating in a pale, unbroken grey sea. His body briefly becomes more real and he feels his feet dangling, he feels his left arm dangling, he feels his right side blaze to life with ripe, rotten, swelling agony.

His lungs contract. His throat stings.

Off to his side he hears McKay yelling, "--shake him some more, would you, maybe you can pull off some more limbs!"

He closes his eyes

            and opens them again. McKay is still yelling, but the shaking has stopped and all the pain is gone. The landscape is gone. He's looking up at something grey, though, but in a different shade. A soft, welcoming grey, not a grey threatening snow.

"--explain this! If you let them take him--"

"I'm not letting them do anything."

It's warm in here. He can hear several voices, a sort of hum of anxiety overlaid with the argument going on, such a familiar argument. McKay is always arguing with Weir about something; McKay is always arguing about something, period. Weir sounds less amused than she usually does.

"He'll never come back," McKay says.

Carson Beckett says, "Rodney, not in here."

"Back me up here, Carson. Tell her! You know it's the only way."

"Not here," Beckett repeats, and the argument moves away until the soft swish of doors silences it completely. A shadow moves over Sheppard's face; he feels it as just a shadow, and realizes he's closed his eyes again.

He opens them, and there's McKay again, there's McKay's voice, now quieted down significantly, but still saying things like, "You can't seriously bring that up. That has nothing to do with this, this is Sheppard."

And Elizabeth, also subdued, sounding tired (McKay sounds tired, too, but his tired does not actually sound tired the way anyone sane would define it), saying, "I can and I will, until I'm sure it's not all happening again."

"This is not about me! Don't make this about me, for once I'm admitting that it is not about me, I do not figure in this equation. No Nobel prizes. Nothing. I won't even demand that Carson mention me in his acceptance speech."

Sheppard must have missed something in between because next (he's still staring at the ceiling--he knows where he is now, of course. Carson's infirmary, a very familiar place indeed) there's McKay again, sounding almost choked up, saying, "If you want him to be stuck somewhere as a useless cripple and never fly again--"

"He'll never be useless."

Outright venomous now: "Oh, please. Write that on a get-well card. You know how he feels! You know him, too. Why are we even having this conversation? You may be a humanist but even you can't be that clueless."

Sheppard doesn't hear what Weir has to say about that. Static. Grey. And McKay, whispering now: "Thank you," so humbly, so earnestly that Sheppard thinks it must be a hallucination.

"Just ask him," Weir says. "Nothing done without consent."

"Yeah," McKay says, not a hallucination this time, definitely not. "Because he'll pick being permanently--permanently damaged over...being not."

"We can't promise the desired outcome," Beckett says gently. "We don't--"

"What a time to embrace professional humility, Carson! You don't get all vague and fuzzy about your miraculous voodoo experiments when you're jabbing them into my arm."

"I like Colonel Sheppard," Beckett says. Things must be grim, because that's a McKay line. Sheppard almost feels like laughing, but he can't quite coordinate his face into a smile.

And he opens his eyes again. It gets easier. He looks up and sees Ronon Dex's big hairy face.

Ronon nods gravely. He says, without moving his eyes from Sheppard's, "He's awake." His voice is very soft, blurry around the edges. He smells like ozone and leather and leaf sap. "Good to see you, Sheppard."

"Aaaah," Sheppard whispers. He meant to say, "You too." Maybe with practice.

They all gather, looming over him and staring until he feels like a goldfish in a bowl. Ronon looks wary, Teyla is smiling but it's her default smile, the one that means she's covering something else. McKay looks scared.

Weir tries to smile at him but she's not doing as well as Teyla. So it's bad then, Sheppard thinks and steels himself. Things have been fuzzy so far, with the snatches of conversation not really coming together, he's just let them wash over him, like watching a movie when you're really tired. Remembering only bits and images like McKay's eyes and the grey sky, and the bloody gape of the beargator.

"How are you feeling, John?" Weir asks and pats his hand. They're all standing on the left side of the bed, sort of huddled together. McKay is tucked in so close to Ronon that from this angle he looks like a second head growing out of Ronon's shoulder.

Sheppard is feeling pretty good, actually. Not completely together, no, but in a hazy, floaty way. Kind of a sweet, mellow high. He realizes he must be on morphine.

"Aaah," he says again. He clears his throat. It feels just a little sore. "...drugged..." he manages, but at least something is working. "Pretty woozy."

"It's a morphine drip," Beckett says, helpfully. He's actually standing on the right side of Sheppard, futzing with what looks like a basket covering Sheppard's right arm.

"I figured." Teyla keeps smiling, McKay's mouth seems to tighten even more. "Wanna tell me what's going on?"

As one, they turn to look at Beckett. He looks manifestly uncomfortable. Shouldn't he be used to giving people bad news?

"I'm afraid it is quite serious," Beckett says, but before he can actually explain anything, McKay pipes up, "But we can fix it."

"Thank you, Rodney. As I was saying, it's serious. I was unable to save the arm, although the shoulder is mostly intact. There's significant muscle damage, of course, but I'm confident--"

The sweet, mellow high is turning into twisting vertigo. "The arm?"

"I'm truly sorry. It was simply too, er, mauled... too chewed-up, frankly, to reattach."

"Reattach." He sees the beargator's bloody teeth. That pain, the memory of it quickly faded as painful memories do, but... He looks at the basket on his right. It's covered with a green cloth. It's far, far too small to contain a whole arm. He thinks he might be panicking a little but it's happening slowly, running through him like heavy oil.

"Basin," Beckett snaps and a stainless steel bowl appears under Sheppard's nose. He's still trying to figure out what it's for when he throws up.

After he's been wiped off like a messy child and offered some ice to suck on, he feels, well, not ready, but reasonably prepared. So he says, "Just give me the gory details. Assume I don't remember anything."

And Beckett tells him while everyone else hovers nervously. "Irreparable trauma," he says, and "Wrenched from its socket," and "Very nearly exsanguinated."

Then McKay nudges Weir aside and leans over Sheppard and says, his voice set low, conspiratorial, "We found something, though."

Sheppard's feeling of dizzy, crashing dread holds up for a moment while he tries to imagine what McKay has found. A small alien hatching in the shoulder ball socket, maybe, or, hey, it could be a new species of tree on the mainland that bears fully formed chocolate bars. It doesn't have to be relevant, this is McKay.

"In one of the flooded parts--I think I mentioned this to you when I first went down there but maybe you weren't listening. Don't think I don't know you tune me out, I know--"

"Rodney!" Weir says, sounding scandalized.

"Right," McKay says and leans in even closer. Sheppard can count every eyelash. "An Ancient hospital. Damaged, but a lot of supplies were still intact. I've...we...well, mostly--Okay, a collaboration: Carson and I have been putting together something."

"Am I supposed to guess?" Sheppard says. His voice is raspy and it just sounds tetchy instead of mildly sarcastic.

McKay's expression goes from tentatively hopeful to hurt, and he mutters, "A robotic prosthesis."

Sheppard looks at Weir, who is making a tight, displeased face. "So this is what all the yelling was about?"

"Oh, uh, so you heard that," McKay says, blushing and adding quickly, "and I'd like to say that I wasn't actually crying, it was a stress reaction."

"Nothing will happen without your consent," Weir says. "I just want to make that very clear."

McKay grabs that like the terrier he is: "Yes, yes, of course you can choose to go back to Earth and have some physical therapy and maybe in ten years they'll actually invent a shoulder disarticulation prosthesis that is more than a glorified hook!"

When Weir snaps her head around to stare at him, McKay actually shrinks back. When she turns to Sheppard again, her gentle, caring expression is restored, if a little tense. "As I was going to say, I want to make it clear that I need your informed consent before anything is done."

Already recovered, McKay blurts out, "We haven't given him any information yet!"

"I think--" Beckett tries to say but McKay talks right over him.

"Look, Colonel, I have everything on my laptop, schematics and projections and test runs--Zelenka is ready to test on mice--"

"Sorry, Rodney, I am not," Zelenka says. Sheppard hasn't even seen him in the crowd. "Tomorrow, maybe, if I stop sleeping as you have."

Sheppard sees McKay draw a deep breath, the kind that precedes something loud and vicious, and he sees Weir's gentleness crack around the frustration underneath.

"Guys," he says quickly. His throat really is very sore, and he still tastes vomit in his mouth. And, yeah, let's not forget. Let's not forget the reason for all this. He feels that his own façade might be cracking. "Give me a few, okay?"

"A few what?" McKay says immediately. Zelenka elbows him, everyone else ignores him.

"Of course," Weir says, looking grateful. "As long as you need."

"There's a button over there," Beckett says, pointing at the side of the bed. Sheppard has spent time here, on various occasions and for various reasons, and he remembers that the buttons are usually on the right side. Very thoughtful of them. "Just push when you're ready."

He nods at Beckett and watches them file out. Ronon bows his head, Teyla raises a hand. McKay lingers for a second (Weir is actually tugging at his arm as if she's afraid he'll stay behind and raise hell like a naughty schoolboy), looking crabby and freaked out and, Sheppard notices now, exhausted.

"I'm sorry," McKay says. Sheppard remembers McKay's hand on his face, leaving smears of blood. Please say something.

"Hang on, McKay," he says. "I'd like to see those schematics."

He brightens visibly, and Weir relaxes her grip on his arm. "I've got 3D animations," he says. "Patient histories from the Ancient database, circuit models, you name it."

Listening to McKay burble happily about technology might be soothing, actually. "In thirty minutes okay?"

"Yeah, that's fine," McKay says, and he sidles up to the bed and pats Sheppard's shoulder awkwardly. "Look, uh--"

"Rodney?" Weir says. "Let's give him some privacy."

"Right. Yes. Of course." He nods gravely, puffing himself up a little. "Colonel."

"Doctor," Sheppard says, and McKay rolls his eyes very briefly before scurrying out after Weir.

Sheppard lies still for a while and breathes. He doesn't close his eyes. He wants to stay focused on the medbay, the familiar surroundings, the dull grey ceiling.

He lifts his left arm. His arm, period. There's an IV needle in the back of the hand, fastened with a piece of tape. The knuckles are scarred. The left hand always bears the brunt of the mistakes of the right hand.

Well, that won't happen again, he thinks and lets the arm drop. He can't feel anything on his right side and that's almost worse than pain. The basket hides the evidence; it would be easy to pretend right now.

He tries to sit up. It's easier said than done. He's weak and uncoordinated as a newborn and cushioned with morphine. When he does manage to brace himself, the movement disrupts the basket and the edge of it scrapes against something and he gets to spend some time fighting nausea and reconsidering his position on nothingness vs. pain.

He closes his eyes and thinks about flying, something that should help, the best thing about his life--the sweet, miraculous gifts that are the puddle jumpers, their perfect, smooth, secret acceleration, clearing atmo in less than ten seconds, space, so much of it, so much space and all of it there for him to fly around in if he pleases, the way the jumpers are like parts of him in ways the helicopters never were even though he was told, many times, that he was a natural, that he was flying with his mind and not his hands. None of them knew what that really meant.

He could fly a puddle jumper without his right arm. He'd just have to ask McKay or Zelenka to switch some stuff to the left side, it'd be a moment's work for them. What he wouldn't be able to do is fight.

He has to open his eyes, then, to stop the world from twisting on its axis too fast, to find up and down again.

McKay is sitting in a chair a few feet away, staring at his laptop, not typing but just staring anxiously at something. He's chewing on his knuckles.

Sheppard blinks and backtracks, but no, there's nothing. He closes his eyes in an empty room, he opens his eyes in a room with McKay in it.

"Hey, Rodney," he says and McKay startles violently and almost drops his laptop.

"Crap!" he says, and performs an intricate comedic dance that involves standing up in a half-crouch and turning around twice, widdershins, while squeezing the laptop between his elbow and his hip. "Jesus, crap! Sorry."

His eyes look too bright, too wide, and there's a nice bloodshot effect going on; he looks like the fifth pot of coffee, or maybe he's already moved on to stealing uppers from Beckett.

"You're awake," he says now.

"Yeah," Sheppard says, because he doesn't want to say, "When was I asleep?"

McKay settles back into the chair and pets his laptop a little, quick strokes on the lid, sliding it open with endearing gentleness. "So, uh," he says, looking at the screen, tapping some keys, poking the touch pad. "How are you? Feeling, I mean, how are you feeling?"

Sheppard opens his mouth to say, "Not too bad," or "All right," or one of those other rote answers, but he can't quite go there. What the hell kind of question was that, anyway?

"Just a flesh wound," he mutters, but his voice feels dry and croaky and probably sounds worse because McKay actually squirms, pulls his shoulders back sharply as if someone's poked him in the back unexpectedly.

"Do you want me to laugh? Cause I can try." He's actually turned to Sheppard now, fixing him with that sleep-deprived glare. "I'm naturally pessimistic, you know, I don't know if you've noticed."

"Can't say I have," Sheppard says. He's thirsty, he feels swaddled in cotton, he's not in pain but he knows the pain is right there, ripping merrily into his nerves and knowing it even if he can't feel it is creepy. He's back to nothingness vs. pain again. "You think I can have some water?"

"I don't know," McKay says, looking baffled, as if this was some bizarre non sequitur that he has to process for a while.

"You could ask someone," Sheppard says. "Or you could get some yourself. I'd get it but I seem to be indisposed."

McKay shoots out of the chair and almost drops the laptop again, deposits it very carefully on the bed, makes a warding gesture with both hands--don't move!--and shuffles around the room for a while, aimlessly, apparently searching for water.

There's a pitcher on a shelf by the door, condensation drizzling down its sides in seductive tendrils. "Do you need directions? I can draw you a floor plan."

"Hm? Huh. Hm. Oh!"

And I'm the one currently high on opiates, Sheppard thinks while Rodney sloshes ice water into a glass.

"Um. Wow," he says when he sees the robot arm. McKay has called up a snazzy rotating 3D projection and he's beaming at Sheppard, he's practically glowing with pride. He loves this thing like only McKay can love a Terminator arm.

To be fair, it's less clunky and metallic than the Terminator arm, it's more a sort of delicate grey-white and the surface seems smooth and almost transparent, with tendons of darker grey and random glowy stuff running up and down it. It makes absolutely no attempt at looking like a real, human arm.

You'd think the Ancients had thought of a way to grow human skin for their fake body parts.

"This is actually all obsolete Ancient technology," McKay says, flipping to a diagram of the shoulder joint. It has a ball that's presumably meant to fit in Sheppard's socket. He shudders and looks at McKay instead of the screen.

"Obsolete?"

"Yes, it predates their work on Ascension. This is part of their pre-Ascension attempts at immortality. Apparently there was a craze." He shakes his head, tsk tsk, those wacky Ancients. "A cyborg craze. It looks like this for a reason. They wanted to show off their robot parts. So, uh, sorry about that. I've been trying to get Wogan and Sjöberg to grow a culture of your skin but they claim it'll take them years to perfect. They're probably too busy with their pet mutated bacteria. Biochemists, can't trust them."

Sheppard thinks, faintly horrified, a culture of my skin? and he thinks, a cyborg craze? "There was a craze?"

"Yeah, they were--" He breaks off and cuts his eyes away from Sheppard quickly, looks back, stares him too squarely in the eye. "They were doing it on purpose. I've only had a short time to study this, but it's pretty advanced, pretty... It's not just an arm. It'll be better than your own arm--Not that you wouldn't prefer to have your own, I mean, because it's yours--it'll have functions. It's got its own naquadah power source that'll outlast you by about five hundred years, and it's designed to interact seamlessly with your nerves and muscles in fascinating ways that I'm sure Beckett will talk about ad nauseam once he gets a chance. But from what I can glean, we're lucky that it's you--we, Atlantis, er, not you, you're not lucky, I mean, you are, relatively speaking, but it probably doesn't quite compensate--because I don't think it'll work as well with anyone less, well, Ancient."

"Yeah, Rodney, that gives me a real warm tingly feeling," Sheppard mutters, and McKay gives him a little sidelong sympathetic glance and futzes a bit with the computer, bringing up more data.

"You'll probably be able to control it intuitively," he says. "It'll take some practice but nowhere near the struggle you'd have on Earth, with a myoelectric or body-powered arm."

"How sure are you that it'll work as advertised?" Sheppard asks. McKay is looking pretty confident, but McKay has looked confident in the past, right up until things started exploding.

And clearly McKay is thinking about the same thing because Sheppard catches a flash of guilt on his face.

"You'll have a second opinion from Beckett," he says, clearly trying not to sound angry. "A third from Zelenka, if you want."

Sheppard wants to hold up his hands--there are so many gestures that will remind him of the harsh truth now--and ends up pulling at the IV and twitching his bad side painfully. "Hey, that's not what I meant. I meant 'how sure are you that it'll work as advertised?'"

McKay scowls at the screen, flips quickly between images. The robot arm really does look pretty cool, in all fairness. Sheppard thinks he'd be thrilled if he wasn't the one with the missing body part.

"I wouldn't risk you," McKay mutters indistinctly. He straightens his back and clears his throat and says, louder, faster all the time, getting worked up, "Although Elizabeth seems to think I would. I don't know what kind of idiot she thinks I am--I mean, she was full of dark hints about my motivations, she kept telling me I was 'too emotionally involved' but unless she's completely given up on logic and reason--not impossible, of course--I guess she meant I had homicidal urges toward you, not--Um. Well, I'm not feeling homicidally inclined, and I do care whether you live or die, so!"

"So...what? I'm not sure I heard an actual answer in there," Sheppard says. He's not sure what he's after here. What does he want McKay to say? He doesn't want a robot arm, he knows that, but he's pretty sure he's thinking about it as the opposite of having his own arm, not the opposite of sitting in a veteran's hospital on Earth with no arm at all.

He turns his head away from McKay's face and McKay's expression that always shows too much--anger and frustration and worry and pain and still traces of scientific fucking glee--but the view on the other side is not exactly soothing. He wants his arm back so he can get out of this bed and go punch something hard, repeatedly.

"I'm pretty sure," McKay says. His voice is just as telling as his face. There's no escape with McKay, there's no escaping McKay. Now he sounds a little hoarse: resignation, maybe. And he's still afraid. "But it's only half technology. The rest is medicine, and you know how that works. Or doesn't."

"Okay," Sheppard says. His hand has been knotted into a fist for so long now that it's going numb.

"Okay, what?"

"Okay okay. Tell Weir okay. I don't want to go back to Earth. You know that, she knows that."

"Yeah," McKay says. "I know." And he touches Sheppard's hard, numb fist, covers it with his warm palm. Bizarre--McKay hardly ever even tries to be comforting, he just doesn't know how, just like he doesn't know how to woo a woman or stay on the right side of people who can kill him.

Sheppard relaxes his fist and holds McKay's hand. For two seconds, until he realizes that he's going to do some spectacular falling apart unless he gets to be alone right now.

"Just go tell her," he says, not turning his head. "I need to close my eyes for a second." He pulls his hand away.

He hears McKay shuffle around, picking up his laptop, pushing the chair back. And, "I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault," Sheppard says, angrily.

"Still, sorry." And he leaves, and Sheppard can't relax even alone, no matter how long he waits and counts every breath.

He must have slept, though, because there's that time lapse again, he opens his eyes--they feel crusty, glued shut--and sees Beckett and Weir in the room. Beckett is pulling a monitor on a trolley closer to the bed, trailing cables.

"How long before you can operate?" Sheppard says, and they both jump. Weir drops the PDA she was carrying and it makes a broken noise, the crash and the sound of pieces scattering.

Beckett rushes to his bedside and fusses over his IV, shines a light in his eyes, asks him about nausea and pain and disorientation, all of which Sheppard are feeling right now.

Finally Beckett says, "Physically, you'll be ready in a week, when the swelling has gone down. Barring infections or other complications. I can't tell you how close Rodney and Radek are to finishing the tests on the arm. They seem to disagree rather violently." He pats Sheppard's arm briefly. "You are doing quite well under the circumstances."

***

It takes exactly a week. It feels longer. Sheppard has never much liked spending time on his back, and Beckett has lowered the morphine dosages--the pain is exhausting and distracting, a constant hum with sharp, intermittent spikes. The phantom pains are worse than the real ache from the wound, his confused, mauled nerve endings telling him inventive stories: now he's being burned, now his fingers are being twisted and broken, now he's being cut to ribbons.

McKay and Zelenka bring him the arm to see before the surgery, their faces flushed and shining with the same exhausted excitement.

It's a very graceful, sleek thing, even turned off--dead--"We won't activate the power source until it's, uh, connected," McKay says--its skin translucent and milky. It doesn't feel like plastic.

"It's a metal alloy," Zelenka says, showing him a spectroscopic analysis. "Naquadah, rmitrian, sedok. Nothing we find on Earth."

Sheppard runs his fingers over the thing. Not like plastic or metal, and not alive, but it feels warmer than he thought it would, soft and hard at the same time. He can see the dull dark grey joints through the skin.

"We adjusted it for size," McKay says. He points at the hand, at the lightly curled fingers. They don't have nails, just a low ridge right before the tip. "We, uh, scanned your--" McKay breaks off and looks uncomfortable, sharp, feverish color spreading over his face, his mouth turning downwards suddenly. "That is, we, we."

Gently, Zelenka says, "We modeled it on original arm."

"It's an exact match," McKay says. "Total weight, the length of each bone. To make it easier to get used to."

Sheppard looks at it. It has the look of something Ancient. Something ancient, lowercase ancient, too, from a long time ago, from a galaxy far, far away. He has an image of this arm lying in some long-abandoned supply closet, forgotten for millennia. Who was it originally meant for? "They were doing it on purpose," McKay said, and Sheppard wonders if someone got cold feet, decided not to go through with it. Sorry, doc, I think I'll stay organic.

And here it is now, waiting for him.

McKay is stroking it, too, touching its fingers with something like reverence, petting its smooth, pale surface. His hand brushes Sheppard's, and it's warm and a little rough-skinned and hairy. Shivers down Sheppard's spine, and his missing hand twists violently, as if it's being bent backwards in some machinery.

He must have made a sound because both McKay and Zelenka look up.

"According to the documentation," McKay says after a while, "the nanites in the arm should--"

"The what?" Sheppard says, too loud.

"Nanites," McKay says, frowning. "They're tiny--"

"I know what they are," Sheppard snaps. "I'm just not sure why you haven't mentioned them before. This is starting to sound less than comforting."

"Can I finish my sentence? Thank you," McKay says with a sour curl of his mouth. "The nanites in the arm should assist your nerves, in fact activate regeneration."

"Nerves don't regenerate."

McKay scowls at him. "I know! Carson has already told me that about fifty times in the last week. What I'm saying is that with the help of the helpful little nanobots, your severed nerves will, in fact, regenerate, and as they and the muscles of your shoulders heal, your brain and your body will come to regard the arm as a part of you. Or so the Ancients tell us."

Sheppard's mouth feels numb, and he knows he's looking freaked out but he can't smooth his expression away. "What if it's just some ten thousand year old catalog, something they dropped in the mailbox--special offer now, get your own?"

"More like twelve thousand, really," McKay says.

And Zelenka says, "We cannot know, not one hundred percent positive. But the calculations are correct, and the tests and scans--what we can test and scan--verify the documentation."

Sheppard looks one more time at the arm. The shoulder end of it is a mess of cables, thin silvery ones that fray delicately into strands so fine that they wave like seaweed whenever someone waves a hand or walks past. In the middle of all that, a knob of solid metal, shiny with some kind of clear lubrication.

"Yeah," he says, "okay, fine. Plug it in."

McKay looks uncomfortable again. "I'm going to be, um, assisting. At the surgery. Carson insisted--actually, he asked Radek but Mr Squeamish here claims he faints at the sight of blood." Zelenka is nodding emphatically, his glasses sliding down his nose. "That was going to be my excuse, but it's really only useful once."

"I'm sure it'll be thrilling," Sheppard says, picturing McKay in scrubs, then picturing McKay with blood up to his elbows, a nauseatingly familiar image.

"I'm not going to touch anything, I promise you that. I'll be there strictly to oversee the technical side. Turning on the power source, making sure everything is online, that sort of thing." His eyes are bloodshot, pupils constricted. Every few seconds, his eyelids droop, eyelashes performing a slow, graceful downward sweep, an almost blink, almost closing, before quickly snapping up again.

"Just get some sleep first, okay," Sheppard says, his own eyes feeling raw and dry. He lets them close and adds, "I know I will."

***

When he wakes up, there's a crowd again, and people file past him as if he's already dead, there are nods and serious looks, "Good luck," and "See you on the other side," and small touches. Ronon just says, "Sheppard," and Sheppard says, "Yeah." Teyla whispers a prayer of the Ancestors, which gives Sheppard no comfort, but her gentle smile does, and she bends to touch her forehead to his and he gets an eyeful and enjoys it without feeling like a dog for once.

McKay stands in the back of the crowd, his arms crossed, his face set.

***

His lungs burn. His throat burns. There are teeth grinding against his bones, tearing, tearing, he can hear tendons snapping and the wet, greasy pop of the shoulder dislocating.

He opens his eyes, already seeing the bloody steaming gape of the beargator, the allibear.

It takes him a moment to realize that what he's actually seeing is a white-sleeved, latex-gloved hand clutching his shoulder. A nervous voice says, "Doctor, I'm seeing a lot of blood."

Sheppard rolls his eyes upward and sees Carson Beckett's tired, stubbly face. He's saying, "There's not much I can do at this moment."

Sheppard runs out of breath and gasps, which is when he realizes he's been screaming. And struggling. There's no monster.

He has woken up from surgery before, but never like this. His entire right side is in agony, as if every nerve has been torn and hangs exposed like live wires scraping sparks on a wet street. It doesn't feel like phantom pain, this pain is real and vivid, 3D, loud and proud. Moving takes more energy than he thinks he has to spare but his head rolls on his neck, lolls heavily to the right, and he sees grey and white and a mild, chilly glow.

The world grows fuzzy around the edges, then dark flowers billow into his field of vision and the light gets smaller and smaller.

And brighter and brighter, red through his eyelids.

He opens his eyes. There's a lamp in his face.

"Turn that off," he says. He sounds just a little creaky, but not slurred or anything. All edges are clear and sharp. The pain in his shoulder is clear and sharp, too, but it's a very specific pain, a knowing pain. It runs in a clear and sharp circle around the shoulder, radiating clear and sharp arrows along the muscles of his chest and back and side.

Someone turns the lamp aside. Beckett leans over him, looking even more tired and stubbly than before.

"How'd it go?" Sheppard asks, looking up, not looking to his side. He can feel the cut-off point, it's a cold line where he stops and something else begins. It's not giving him anything but a dumb, mechanic pull. And that pain, like tiny claws scrabbling over him--through him.

He keeps his eyes on Beckett, tries to decipher his expression, but Beckett always looks vaguely concerned and apprehensive, it's drawn permanently in the lines of his face. So he looks concerned and apprehensive and he says, "The operation was successful."

He looks concerned and apprehensive and like he's not saying everything. Standard bedside manner. Sheppard's been through that part before, too.

"How are you feeling?"

His knee-jerk response is always, "Fine," or at least, "Okay," but lying to the doctor is a bad habit he's trying to break, so he says, "Battered." And then he adds, "Like I'm still in the ring."

Beckett nods. "I imagine it's painful. Your nerves are actually growing--the images show it clearly. I have never seen anything like it."

"Didn't believe McKay, huh?" Sheppard says.

"There's believing and then there's seeing," Beckett says, smiling a brief, baffled smile. "I'm afraid I can't offer morphine. Nothing more potent than ibuprofen. There are non-chemical ways of alleviating pain that we might try."

"It's not more than I can stand," Sheppard says. He doesn't think he's lying.

"Nevertheless, if it continues unabated."

"I'll let you know."

"Oh, I know what that means, Colonel," Beckett says, the smile there again, a little frayed and worn; so many worn out faces around here. Atlantis is not good for the complexion. "But everything is looking fine. There's no rejection. It's as if your immune system hasn't even noticed anything is going on. Which is what the information in the data base suggested."

"I can't feel it," Sheppard says, sounding whiny and insecure to his own ears. But maybe this is a valid reason to be less than manly.

"Give it a little time. There's still a lot of damage that has only just begun to heal. Try not to move."

He's not sure he can move right now. There are sticky pads on his forehead and chest, EEG, ECG. He's on a drip of something. His wrist--his own wrist--is actually tied to the side of the bed with a soft Velcro strap.

He gives it a pointed glance and Beckett clears his throat and goes to take it off. "You were reacting, ah, violently. We were worried you'd tear the sutures."

"Bad dream," Sheppard says. He flexes his fingers--and suddenly he feels something, something, he feels... something, vague and distant and distorted.

Maybe just another phantom, he thinks. His skin is crawling.

***

He sleeps and wakes from a dream about MX6-N33, where he limped in the sweet-smelling grass on four stumpy legs, his thick scaly tail trailing behind him.

The pain is the same, but it's moved a little, pushed deeper under the skin, and the edge between his own flesh and the new arm is no longer cold and clear, but hard to find at all, just a gradual tapering off of sensation.

He's alone. The sensor pads are gone.

He moves, just a small, careful flex, one muscle at a time. It hurts, but he recognizes this kind of pain, the tenor of it. He's healing. He can see a place where it'll start feeling good to move, not too far off. It's still too sore and the small sharp claws are still there, like he's teething. Soon I'll want to chew on some shoes, he thinks.

He's also hungry, he realizes, and thinking about that makes his stomach cramp and ache. And thirsty. And he needs a bathroom break.

The button is still on the left side of the bed. He pushes it and doesn't look to the right. He hasn't looked that way at all. He can clearly feel that something is attached to him, something alien and encroaching, something revoltingly alive.

Possibly projecting some anxiety there, he thinks and pushes the button again, but he can't shake the feeling that the arm is alive--not alive like his own arm, but alive and separate from him. Did McKay even tell him about that? Was it supposed to be an AI? Cold shivers are dragging skeletal claws down his spine and he thinks he might be having some kind of panic attack, of all things.

I don't like this, he thinks, feeling childish and contrary.

The nurse shows up--she's not actually a nurse as such, Sheppard knows, she's got a PhD in something related, she's Dr Demazeau, call me Laura, please, but she's working as a nurse because in Atlantis, the assistants, nurses and lab techs are the people who only have one doctorate--smiling and asking him how he's feeling. Instead of telling her that he's feeling pretty damned sick of telling people how he's feeling, he just asks for some water and something to eat. And the bedpan--that part added in an elaborately casual afterthought kind of way. He's spent a lot of time here, he keeps getting hurt in new and interesting ways, but it doesn't make the humiliation of having to piss lying down any easier.

She's very young, looks like a college freshman, but again, in this place, it doesn't mean much. McKay got his first PhD at eighteen, he told Sheppard once when they were sharing--or McKay was sharing, something he does at regular intervals; coming up with random tidbits that he insists Sheppard know about him. What he said was actually, "I was behind my own projected curve but I spent more time on the thesis than I should have because I was, well, you might say 'high strung' or, if you're my advisor, 'obsessive-compulsive.' I had to really railroad through the second one or I'd've looked like a chump."

McKay never insists that Sheppard reciprocate when they're sharing. McKay is very happy to talk about himself. Sometimes Sheppard wonders if McKay even notices whether he's listening or not, but then, of course, McKay will surprise him with some insight. Like, "Don't think I don't know you tune me out."

And there, he has successfully distracted himself from the fact that an attractive young PhD has pulled aside the sheet and is poking around places he prefers not to have poked, at least not without some participation from himself. He wonders if she knew this was what she signed up for when she decided to go on the trip. She's one of the old guard, came through the wormhole without knowing whether she could ever go back.

What did she think she'd find here?

***

Beckett comes in not long after, to shine his little flashlight in Sheppard's eyes and ask him how he's feeling.

"Not quite like a million bucks," Sheppard says. "Maybe more like five hundred. Enough for a night in Vegas, not enough to charter a jet and go to Monte Carlo."

Beckett is frowning suspiciously at something and doesn't seem to appreciate clever gambling metaphors.

"On a scale from one to ten," he says, "where would you put the pain you're in right now?"

"More than a stubbed toe," Sheppard says, feeling cold and vicious suddenly, feeling like blaming Beckett for things that aren't his fault, "and less than having my arm ripped off."

"That's a fairly wide range," Beckett says, completely unconcerned. "Everything looks very promising. There is no infection, and still not the tiniest hint of a reaction from your immune system, nothing at all. I am quite amazed."

"So, when can I leave?"

"Oh, no, no, you're not even a day out of surgery! It's healing well but you mustn't move around too much yet. And I've seen no indication that you can move the arm at all. Although I don't suggest you try too hard. Wait for it to come to you, so to speak." He smiles what Sheppard thinks is meant to be an encouraging smile, but on Beckett's hangdog face it looks kind of morose.

Or maybe that's more projected anxiety.

He hasn't tried at all to move the arm. He hasn't, in fact, thought much about it, and right now, he realizes, he is actually a little ticked off at Beckett for bringing it up.

Denial? he thinks. Denial.

He returns Beckett's smile. "I'll just lie here and, uh, get better."

Beckett looks just a little uneasy at that. "Right, Colonel. Er, Kate Heightmeyer told me to tell you that she'll come by tomorrow morning to see you." He holds up a hand before Sheppard can say what he thinks about that: "I recommend that you talk to her. You've been through massive trauma--even without the added stress of this alien technology, it's something that you'll need to deal with."

"I'll deal with it," Sheppard says, and maybe his voice is a little harsh there, maybe almost a growl. Beckett continues to look uneasy.

"Elizabeth also wants to see you, and of course, your entire team has been camping outside in the hallway for the past twenty-four hours. If you're feeling up to it, perhaps I could allow a short visit."

Sheppard weighs the pros (distraction, distraction, distraction, and seeing his team, his people) against the cons (McKay poking at the arm, inevitably; having to tell everyone how he's feeling again; the looks on their faces) and says, "Maybe not yet."

"All right," Beckett says. Sheppard thinks about them sitting out in the hallway. He's sat there himself.

"Just send them in," he says.

***

"Hi," McKay says. He's standing at a respectful distance, but his eyes are on the arm. He looks brimful of barely-contained excitement.

Teyla, next to him, knows that it's rude to stare, and she is focusing on Sheppard's face, her expression mild and sympathetic. At least someone knows--Ronon actually walks right around the bed and peers at the arm. A second later McKay follows.

"It looks strong," Ronon says, sounding almost impressed. Sheppard keeps looking at Teyla.

"You would not believe it," McKay says. "Hey, Colonel, can you move it yet?"

"No," Sheppard says.

He must have been giving Teyla some kind of help me, please signals because she gives McKay and Ronon a look over Sheppard's head.

"So, um," McKay says and comes around the bed again to stand a few feet behind Teyla. He actually looks contrite. "Um."

Teyla says, "You look well, Colonel Sheppard."

"I was just going to say he looks kind of like he's going to snap at any second," McKay says and leans forward. He's not looking all that together himself, frankly.

"Nah," Ronon says, nodding at Sheppard.

"Just not that fond of hospital food," Sheppard says, wishing someone had thought to prop him up a little so he wouldn't have to lie here helplessly and stare up at them.

McKay makes a face. "What are you talking about? They serve the same food here as everywhere else."

"Not after major surgery."

"Really? Do you get jell-o? I've never had surgery. My body is a virgin temple." He frowns as if he's backtracking. "Not actually literally virgin," he adds, and Ronon chuckles and slaps him on the back hard enough that he falls against Teyla.

They all seem kind of jittery, actually. Not surprising. Sheppard hates sickbed visits himself. He hates them even more when he's in the sickbed, but it's bad enough when it's someone he knows. Even worse when it's someone he cares about. Their faces look pinched and they all have matching bags under their eyes, although McKay's are the most impressive. But then he has the kind of skin that shows everything--right now he's blushing a little, and the skin that isn't blushing is too pale which makes for a charming effect.

He decides to get some things out of the way, to clear the air. "It'll take me a while to get on my feet," he says. Understating it, perhaps, but this is no time for a defeatist attitude. At least not for expressing it. "You should talk about reassigning the teams."

They look at each other, back and forth. McKay's blush has faded and he's just pale now, with the shadows under his eyes dark like bruises. Teyla has gone carefully blank. Ronon is scowling.

"At least one officer per team, that's how it works," Sheppard says, and before McKay--who's already lifting his hand, pointing at Ronon--can get a word in, he adds, "Officer from Earth."

"That's just speciesist," McKay says sullenly.

"I'm coming back," Sheppard says--not adding the 'right?' at the end of that sentence. "It's temporary. Talk to Major Lorne. Actually, I'll talk to him. As soon as they start giving me solid food."

"Of course," Teyla says. Ronon shrugs.

"Yeah, whatever," McKay says. He's not looking happy, and unhappy on McKay comes out angry: "I'm gonna have to come back in a while and run some diagnostics on that thing that I'm not allowed to look at right now. Don't give me the eyebrow! Do you want it to work or not? I'm not doing this for my own gratification."

"I'd believe you if your face didn't light up like a Christmas tree whenever you look at it."

"Well, it's a pretty cool piece of work, which you'd understand if, uh..." He fixes his eyes on a spot somewhere slightly to the left of Sheppard's ear and straightens up, his hands behind his back. "Right. I'll come back later. Take care."

***

Weir doesn't actually ask him how he's feeling. Instead she goes for the bright smile and chirpy "You look better!" approach. If this is good, Sheppard thinks, gritting his teeth, I must have looked completely FUBAR before.

He stops any awkward smalltalk by going straight for awkward shoptalk. Reassign the teams. Major Lorne is already in charge while Caldwell is off base. Ask him to come by. ETA for the triumphant return of the new and improved Sheppard still undetermined.

"The Ancients have probably designed it to be a gentle transition," Weir says, her smile perhaps a little brittle now.

"Yeah, kind and gentle," Sheppard says. His shoulder aches dully. The arm is now feeling like it wants to pretend to belong to him, but can't quite. He can't move it. He hasn't tried very hard. "It takes a little getting used to," he tells Weir because she's looking at him as if she expects something else. If he doesn't say something she will.

"I can only imagine." She smiles again and he looks her in the eye, going for earnest. His vision blurs, doubles, twitches back into focus. She frowns. "Are you all right, John?"

"Huh," he says. "Uh." It's hard to move his eyes and when he does manage, the swirl of the room makes him dizzy.

"You don't--I'm calling Carson," she says and gets up. No, wait, he wants to say but the dizziness is pushing him into the mattress like a 6G acceleration.

She's not even at the door before his whole body cramps up and the barfing starts.

***

"I haven't been able to determine what caused the reaction," Beckett says. "But we must assume it's connected to either the surgery or the prosthesis itself."

"There's nothing wrong with the arm," McKay says, sounding as if those were fightin' words. "Look, we checked and double checked and double checked double. He is the perfect candidate, as perfect as is still alive in any galaxy today."

"Hi, I'm still here," Sheppard says. He is--indefinitely, it seems--on an IV again, and the little sensor pads are back.

"Yeah, and you're looking like crap and I can't believe this quack can't figure it out. What did you do to him, Carson?" McKay has apparently had just enough of a nap to come out bristly and hostile, and his face is pulled into a disgusted expression that's making him look a little like a dog Sheppard once had, a mutt with a truly nasty disposition. He had to be put down after he mauled the neighbor's cat.

No one bothers to argue with McKay at this point. Beckett looks long-suffering. Weir closes her eyes briefly and rubs her forehead.

"Fine, fine," McKay snarls. "Can I run the diagnostic program now?"

"Please do," Sheppard says. He's still not sure whether there'll be more hurling and he'd like all these people to leave, but apparently that's not going to happen until they've poked him to their satisfaction.

McKay bends over the arm and his expression smooths out into something almost affectionate. "This might--I don't actually know. Can you feel much yet? If you can, this might, well. It shouldn't hurt, but I can't actually predict that without more input from you." And he's holding what looks like a gigantic hypo.

"Are you going to--McKay, where's that going?"

"Since you can't control the arm yet, I have to hook it up mechanically," McKay says, looking up. He squints at the needle in his hand. "Hm. I'm sorry. At this point I don't have much of a choice."

"Just be careful with that thing," Sheppard says, and there's the dizziness again, and he's staring at the arm, its damned smooth lifeless surface, and the gentle, faint glow underneath.

"I'll pretend it's my own arm," McKay says. As if he isn't already, Sheppard thinks and watches the needle, nausea churning in his stomach.

Then everything happens very fast. He feels the needle, very faintly feels it slide in smooth and sharp--McKay has stuck it in the elbow joint, probably in a place it belongs, some kind of socket, because Sheppard can feel something click just before he's flooded, he's scorched and assaulted with, with, with.

There's a crash and he hears it and he feels it broken down into waves coming at him, the dips and rises measured and analyzed and the pain that isn't pain and.

His body is falling--he feels the shift, vertigo--lands on something hard and on something soft, and he's pulled forward helplessly and he bites off a scream. He can feel a struggle and he can't tell if he's having convulsions or just throwing up or what. Or what--he has to force his eyes open.

He's looking down at McKay's face gone purple, at his gaping mouth, bulging eyes, and fingers clawed around something smooth and cool and ungiving.

Sound comes back, as sound, not as curves or diagrams. There's a lot of yelling. Sheppard feels hands on his shoulders and he tries to let go. Let go, he thinks, makes it a command, and the arm goes limp, goes numb, and McKay pulls in a great, hacking gasp and kicks himself backwards, his eyes glazed, his teeth bared.

Sheppard does the same, pushes himself away and he notices distantly that he's using both arms, both his arms. He slides over the cool tile, his bare feet scrabbling, his fingers scratching at the surface.

The nausea is gone. He stares at McKay. McKay is curled up, panting, his hands at his throat, protective. He's staring back. Sheppard doesn't think McKay's ever been afraid of him before.

"Are you okay?" he asks, feeling stupid for asking. "Rodney?"

Beckett is kneeling by McKay's side, pulling his hands away, reaching for his throat. McKay makes a choking, horrified sound and slaps Beckett away.

Sheppard gets his feet under himself and realizes he can probably stand up. It's not just the nausea that's gone, it's the dizziness and the pain, too. The arm--the right arm, the wrong arm--feels numb as if it's holding back, but that's it. The rest of him is okay. More okay than anything has been since MX6-N33.

He gets to his feet. Around him, people are standing back at a careful distance. From a less careful distance, Ronon is pointing a stunner at his face.

"Please don't shoot me in the face," Sheppard says.

"Don't make me," Ronon says.

"I'm getting back on the bed now, okay." He steps over a fallen table, a broken laptop. His legs feel a little shaky. He doesn't quite remember how long since he used them. A while. A week and change. How long was he unconscious after the accident? The attack. The incident.

Ronon's stunner follows him, unwavering, as he lies down. He can hear McKay's labored breathing and Beckett murmuring something soft and soothing.

"Ronon," he says. "Restraints. Make sure I can't get loose. If McKay's okay he can do his thing now. Or get Zelenka. I--we need to know what just happened. McKay?"

"Don't try to speak," Beckett says. "I'd like to get a few x-rays, check for fractures of the hyoid or thyroid--"

McKay shoves him away almost angrily. His color has gone from that horrible almost-purple to pink, and his eyes are focused on Sheppard. There's a little blood on his mouth. Sheppard hopes he just bit his tongue.

"Dr Zelenka?" Weir is saying. She's tapping her headset. "Infirmary, please."

McKay slaps the floor and crawls to his feet, making angry gestures as soon as his hands are free. He's unsteady and leans against the foot of the bed, and Sheppard can still hear his breaths rattling in his throat. He doesn't even try to speak, which is downright eerie.

"I'm sorry," Sheppard says.

Ronon is strapping him down but good, not the wussy Velcro ties this time but proper leather--was he just carrying those around? For what purpose, exactly?

McKay is leaning on the bed, still staring at him. He tries to backtrack, tries to find the place where he could have done something differently. It would help if he knew what exactly happened but all the memories, the sensory information, are confused and tangled.

"I think," he says, going with what he does know, "the arm came online."

McKay stumbles up along the bed, carelessly pushing Ronon aside--and Ronon lets himself be pushed without complaint; Ronon knows when respect is due--and snaps his fingers, snap, snap, and Beckett and Teyla and Weir all flock around him, offering things: the needle, rescued from the floor; a piece of cable; a laptop to replace the one smashed on the floor.

Sheppard definitely feels it this time, but not as pain. It's unpleasant and strange, but distant, cut off from the rest of him. There's no sudden flash of too-much-information.

McKay gives him a look that he can't decipher at all--that's eerie too--and hooks up the cable, taps a few keys on the laptop. He coughs, and winces immediately. His throat looks red and swollen and rubbed raw--Sheppard can see the spots that will show bruises first, fingerprint bruises all around his throat, tucked under his jaw.

McKay raises his hands in frustration and then types something, his mouth pressed into a tight line. He finishes with an angry stab, spins the laptop to face the crowd and walks away.

Sheppard can't see it, but Weir leans forward to read. "'It's fine'," she says. "It's fine?"

"It feels fine," Sheppard says. "Apart from the part where it tried to kill him. I think I saw this movie."

Weir looks at him. She's looking a little ragged, too, by now. He's just sucking the life out of everyone, isn't he? For a second he thinks maybe he should have let them send him back to Earth. But it feels like a sacrifice so much greater than just plain dying.

"I'm going to have to keep the restraints on until we have some more answers," Weir says as if she's the one who ordered them put on in the first place. Sheppard can forgive her for that.

"Good idea," he says as if he has some kind of say in this. "Would you tell McKay--" He has no idea what he wants to tell McKay. He's said sorry. He meant it. He shrugs, and his two arms both move in their restraints. He can feel the leather scrape against both wrists. "Well, I'll tell him myself when I see him."

***

He gets to stay strapped to the bed for a few hours until Zelenka has run more tests and come to the same conclusion as McKay.

"Something is obviously wrong," he says with an apologetic half-smile, "although not everyone would claim this about wanting to put hands around Rodney's throat, I'm sad to say."

"I wasn't even thinking about it," Sheppard says.

"Have you retained the control? Please describe it to me."

He likes Zelenka's matter of fact ways, far less emotional and immediate than McKay, who can be exhausting with his involvement. Weir is too much right now, too, with the conflict far too clear on her face. For a diplomat, she has a really weak poker face.

He says, "I haven't really tested it much."

"Still getting used to this thing, I understand," Zelenka says. "Well, I think Rodney has missed something, but not something I can find. Maybe when he stops, ah. When he wishes to speak again, he will look over it and dazzle us all with his brilliance."

"Hm," Sheppard says and his hands--both of them--twitch in their restraints. "How is he?"

"He is afraid, and he does not like it," Zelenka says. "I know, he's always afraid and so loud about it. But he is afraid to solve this mystery."

"I really don't carry any grudges," Sheppard says. Then he has to think about that, check if he's actually telling the truth. He thinks he is. McKay is a pain in the ass but he's, well, their pain in the ass. A necessary one, a pretty welcome one. "But I mean, I didn't break anything or, uh, cause brain damage?"

Zelenka slides the needle carefully out of its socket. That still makes Sheppard shiver with revulsion. "We won't know until he comes out of hiding."

He thinks Zelenka might be fucking with him in some low-key way, but there's really no way of knowing. Zelenka has an excellent poker face.

"I will recommend that you are released. You should play with your new limb and see what it can do. It will surprise you, I think. Rodney was so excited, and I admit I am too. It is near-AI, full of potential." He pauses to point at Sheppard's temple. "The limit is you."

***

Beckett comes in with Weir just moments later and they release him from the straps and look at him with their bad poker faces as he sits up.

"What happened," he says, preparing to lie, "was that McKay shoved a needle into my arm and I was overwhelmed. I'm not going on a killing spree."

I think, he thinks.

"Are you still overwhelmed?" Beckett asks.

"No," Sheppard says. He's not. The arm is pretending to be just another arm. He's not quite buying it, but at least he's not getting his senses analyzed and presented on a curve.

***

He checks himself out the next day.

"There's nothing wrong with you," Beckett says with obvious reluctance. "Apart from, ah, the mechanical part and some bruising around the shoulder there's simply no evidence of your recent major trauma. I'm afraid I can't quite explain it yet. I'd like to--"

"I think I'd like a little break from the testing, okay?" Sheppard says. "Maybe in a few days?"

Beckett makes a face as if he really wants to throw up his hands and tell Sheppard that's not playing fair. He doesn't say anything, though, just nods morosely and Sheppard is free to go.

He takes his unnaturally healthy body and his mechanical part back to his quarters.

The place seems a little dusty and unused although he's only been away for ten days. There's a pile of clothes on the bed that he doesn't remember putting there. Someone must have come in here to get the clothes he's wearing now, a standard issue shirt and a pair of sweatpants he only uses for workouts. Judging from the mess, it was either McKay or Ronon.

He shoves the clothes off the bed and lies down. Gets up again two minutes later because he really has spent enough time on his back. He kills half an hour folding the clothes very slowly, staring at his mismatched hands the whole time. The fake one works as if it's always been there, as if there never was a real one at all.

It's perfect. He's fine. He can go back to work.

He shoves the hand that's not his hand in his pocket. The sleeve covers it. It's still playing possum, still holding back, and when he can't see it, he can almost forget that anything has happened.

When you're assigning a personality to your robotic prosthesis, it's time to look in the mirror.

He rolls his head back and forth a couple times. He lifts his shoulders and lets them drop. He stretches his back. He's a little tense.

Then he walks into the bathroom. There are mirrors on the walls there, two of them, floor to ceiling, merciless in the bright light. He's not sure what the Ancients were going for there--he certainly doesn't want to see that much of himself first thing in the morning--but on the other hand it seems perfectly in character. They were strange and kind of disturbing in many ways, the Ancients.

He looks at his face first. Pretty safe: a little pale under the ten day beard. He looks tired, not surprisingly. Looking his age. Even the hair seems a little deflated.

Bad posture, too. He straightens up and pulls his shoulders back.

"Fine, you bastard," he mutters at his own reflection, and tugs off his shirt--quickly, like pulling off a band-aid.

He looks away from the dismayed expression in the mirror.

They did this to themselves on purpose, he thinks. The Ancients were clearly both stranger and more disturbing than has been evident until now.

The Arm--capitalized, definitely--is erasing the divide between itself and him. It's sent creepers into the living flesh of his shoulder, demurely, flawlessly grey wedges pushing into his skin like roots into soil.

Get used to it, he thinks and meets his own eyes. Get over it. This is you.

Deliberately, he pictures life without a right arm. Fucked balance, writing with his left hand. Disability, honorable discharge, pension, helplessness, tedium. Never flying again. Atlantis beyond his reach forever. Bitterness, resentment, aging, death, oblivion. Plenty of time to feel really sorry for himself.

He lifts the Arm and watches it move. It doesn't look quite real here in the sharp light--it doesn't move like an organic thing, it looks almost CGI, as if he's watching a movie of himself and the Arm is a special effect by Industrial Light & Magic. A really good one, but just an effect.

For a second, he wants to swing and punch out the mirror with his CGI hand. Instead he concentrates, focuses inward, and tells the Arm, fine, come out, you can stop pretending now.

It's nothing like the barrage of that first contact. It comes online slowly, like a computer booting up. A moment of confusion where it meets his mind and tries to accommodate him, before it resolves a way of communication. Menus appear.

It's intensely, spine-tinglingly creepy. It's fascinating like everything Ancient is fascinating.

He blinks and sees his expression clear from stupefied to something at least half aware. He'll have to practice that part. He can't be walking around looking like he's listening to voices in his head, not when he's supposed to be ready for command.

He's got an interface in his head. That's cool, he can work with that. He and Ancient tech are like this--his Ancient CGI middle finger crosses over his Ancient CGI index finger, and one side of his mouth makes a twitch that wants to be a smirk.

He can see--feel? sense? think?--folders and sub menus, he can pick and choose. The Arm is a computer, of course, and now he is the Arm.

"Yeah, makes sense," he says out loud. This is what the kinky bastards would do.

***

He wanders around his quarters and tests his control. It's intuitive, like flying the jumpers, like using the chair. He can do it without thinking, and the Arm is an arm, a part of his body--that still doesn't feel good to think but okay. Fine. Okay--or he can ask it to do specific things that no arm should be able to do. That part takes a little more concentration.

Good news: his handwriting is the same. He can pick a pin off the floor. He knows the exact temperature in the room--after some adjustments in Fahrenheit, Centigrade and Kelvin as well as in the scale the Ancients use.

Bad news: he needs to take a leak. He needs a shower. He's going to have to touch his own skin with this thing. He's avoided that so far. Briefly, he longs for Dr Laura the overqualified nurse.

***

He sleeps after the shower, and dreams about MX6-N33 again. When he wakes up, he's rolled onto his right side and the Arm is wedged under his head. A good thing about an indestructible naquadah alloy body part is no pins and needles.

His room temperature is 70.8152°F, 21.564°C, 294.714 K, 0.028 Ancient.

Thank you, Arm, he thinks and makes a face. He will go stir crazy if he has to sit around for much longer.

***

People smile and nod at him in the hallways, but they give him a little more berth than usual, and when he walks into her office, Weir looks startled for a fraction of a second before she pastes her bad poker face on.

"John," she says. "I didn't expect to see you back so soon."

"I didn't exactly have anywhere very interesting to go," he says. "I'd like to go back to work."

"No," she says immediately. "I don't think that's a good idea."

He crosses his arms and waits for her reasons, waits so he can disagree.

"You haven't talked to Dr Heightmeyer yet," she says. She's standing up, leaning lightly on her desk, but the tips of her fingers are white. "We don't know enough about your--" She actually has to clear her throat and take a breath there. "About your new arm. Carson is still not positive that it's not--"

"Carson is not the expert on the arm," he says, reasonably. "He said I'm in perfect health."

"No one else is positive, either."

"You are all just waiting for it to take me on that killing spree, aren't you? So far all it's doing is telling me times, dates and ambient temperature. And I can shave with my eyes closed."

Her eyebrows come up at that, but she doesn't smile or back down. "Just give it some time, John. You have a lot to get used to."

Seems like I'm not the only one, he thinks. He says, "Some time. Okay."

***

Things to do in Atlantis when you're suspended from duty until further notice: cleaning your guns, reading your book (page 184: "Thank you very much, I will go on alone," said Prince Andrew, wishing to rid himself of his staff officer's company, "please do not trouble yourself any further."), strumming sad songs on your guitar.

After a few moments, he takes the guitar and puts it in the back of his closet. He was never very good at it anyway. The Man in Black looks at him reproachfully from the wall.

"Sorry, Johnny, it's just too damn creepy," he says and goes down to the gymnasium instead. Might as well let Teyla beat him up for a while.

"Your balance is off," she tells him, crouching over him with her knee digging into his sternum. "You are trying to lead with your left arm."

"I thought switch-hitting was supposed to confuse and distract you," he says, but her eyes meet his firmly and he adds, "I don't want to hurt you." He holds up the right arm, the Arm, and waggles its grey alien fingers at her.

"I understand," she says, and helps him up, fearlessly offering her right hand to his, not flinching at the touch of metal.

For a second, he feels dizzy and weak and only Teyla's hands on his upper arms keep him from falling over. Then it passes.

Teyla gives him a narrow-eyed look.

"I'm fine," he says. "I just have to work myself into shape again."

***

In the mess hall, they find Ronon at a table, working his way through a meal that could feed a small village for a week. "Sheppard," he says.

"Ronon," Sheppard says. "How's it going?"

"Lorne asked me to come with him on a mission," Ronon says. "I said I'd go."

Sheppard sits down carefully and picks at his food (fish or fowl? He can't tell, beyond that it's off-white and covered in bright yellow sauce) with his left hand and says, "Good. Good."

"He asked me also," Teyla says.

"Yeah, you'll be useful," Sheppard says. "We don't know enough about the Rotonians." That was supposed to be his mission. Three days on Rotonia, listening to speeches about crop yields and irrigation, and hopefully some successful trade negotiations. Rotonia has great food, great wine, thirty miles of sandy beaches with perfect breakers and no sharks. "You could take my board," he says. He's explained the idea.

"I don't go in the water unless something is chasing me," Ronon says with a perfectly straight face, and Sheppard can't tell if he's actually serious or not. The Arm suggests that Ronon's posture has changed minutely and also that his pupils have dilated. It offers a diagram illustrating the changes.

Thank you, Arm, Sheppard thinks and stuffs the hand in his pocket.

"So, is McKay going on this mission, too?" he says casually. "He was pretty excited about the cuisine. And they had that bean that was almost like coffee."

"Doctor McKay has not been well," Teyla says, looking uncomfortable. (Pupils: contracted 30%, muscle tension increased 23%, the Arm displays in a soothing light blue and green block diagram.)

Ronon leans towards him and says, in a rough murmur, "It's not an easy thing to deal with. When your leader turns on you."

"I didn't turn on him!" Sheppard blurts out, and it comes out sounding embarrassingly scandalized.

"Yeah, you did," Ronon says, with one eyebrow cocked. "With all due respect. Sir."

"Have you tried to talk with him?" Teyla asks. "He has been somewhat... dismissive of my attempts." That little pause contains everything Sheppard needs to know. McKay must be in a state.

"Nah, I haven't seen him since, since that thing with the, yeah," he says eloquently and holds up the offending limb again. "Okay, I'm going to go talk to him."

"Good luck," Ronon says.

***

Sheppard goes, but he's only halfway--in a deserted piece of corridor somewhere just west of the xenobiologists' labs--when he gets dizzy again, a quick stab of vertigo, his field of vision narrowing, his stomach churning restlessly.

He staggers into the lab, which is thankfully deserted--the xenobiologists tend to camp out on the mainland a lot, collecting specimens and spying on watering holes or whatever they do. Someone's left a bucket labeled with the biohazard sign and "XBio LAB. DO NOT TAKE. WE HAVE CAMERAS." carefully printed in black Sharpie underneath standing right inside the door, and he gratefully drops to his knees and adds his recycled lunch to the strange and malodorous goo already there.

"Oh, fuck," he whispers. The dizziness is passing, the nausea is sated now that he's purged. Wow, he really has to learn to stay away from the Athosian tree pea sauce.

He looks up and sees a tall, thin woman standing in the door staring down at him.

"Uh, hi. Doctor Mathiessen." Apparently not all the xenobiologists are on the mainland this week.

She makes a choked noise and grabs the bucket from right under his nose and carries it to a desk, squinting down into it as if it wasn't full of vomit.

"This contains an alien life form," she says without looking up. "God knows what your stomach acids have done to it..."

"Look, I'm sorry, Doctor," Sheppard says, getting to his feet. He feels almost all right now, actually. Just needs to brush his teeth and shower and maybe a few weeks sound sleep. "I've had this stomach thing--"

"I know, I know, wait, shh," she says, holding up a hand in a gesture that reminds him of where he was going. McKay will have to wait until after the shower. "Oh, oh, oh, oh my God!"

"Dr Mathiessen?"

She's scrabbling for her laptop, typing frantically without actually looking at the screen at all. "Thank you, Colonel Sheppard. I can't believe this! Amazing, amazing."

"The what now?" he says. There's some leftover fuzz in his brain, a little delay before each thought processes. "Uh, I just barfed in that bucket."

"Yes, of course. And apparently the pH is now--maybe it's not the pH... but what else would it be? What did you eat last? This yellow stuff looks like Athosian peas?"

"That's right. Plus some mystery meat and some, uh, lettuce type things."

"Thank you." She types that down, then something else.

He stands in the door with his hands in his pockets. When she doesn't continue, he asks, "What did it do?"

She looks up, and for a second, he is sure that she'd already forgotten he was there at all. "Initiated mating behavior," she says.

"There's an animal in there?"

"Well, it's not precisely an animal, it's complicated," she says, and then she shakes her head and says, "I'll make sure you get the report, Colonel." And if that's not a dismissal he doesn't know what is.

"Right, good. Glad to be of help," he says and leaves.

***

McKay's quarters are dark and quiet and there's no response to Sheppard's knocks.

He stands in the hallway and thinks he could, if he wanted to, override the lock and open the door himself. Or he could go get his life signs detector and find out if the room's really empty. Or he could use the sensors on the Arm.

He puts its hand on the cool, dark glass of the door and considers.

The door opens with the familiar sigh and whoosh. McKay stands behind it, blinking in the light, hair flattened on one side of his head and pillow creases on his cheek.

His eyes focus and he flinches.

Sheppard lets the arm drop.

McKay takes a step backwards and says, "Wha--What do you want?"

Now there's a question with a lot of answers. "Apologize? For, you know." He makes a gesture: curls his robot fingers. Sorry about that, sorry about that.

McKay stares at him. "For you know? That's very, you know, articulate of you." His voice is hoarse, breaks on 'you'. He steps further back, out of the light, waving his hands in a shooing motion. "Great, yeah, apology accepted, please leave."

"Hey," Sheppard says, "I did not want to hurt you."

"At the time, you hid your reluctance very well, Colonel." He crosses his arms and lifts his chin, familiar McKay battle stance, and even in the low light Sheppard can see the bruises on his throat, five discrete smudges.

McKay follows his gaze and drops his head, tucks his chin down against his chest awkwardly.

"Don't you want to know what happened?" Sheppard asks.

"I know what happened," McKay blurts out, his voice getting raspier with each word. "The stimulus of the needle brought the arm online and forced the link to your brain, not yet fully established, to immediately connect. You overloaded, the arm reacted to protect you. I know more about that thing than anybody else."

"No, you don't," Sheppard says. "Not anymore."

It's too dark in the room, McKay's face is just a pale blur--he's actually backing up further. And just that thought, and the Arm turns up the contrast, clarifies, saturates--what am I, PhotoShop? Stop it.

It turns on the lights instead.

"Right," he says. "I'm finding out some stuff."

McKay has turned his face away and thrown up an arm to shade his eyes. Now he lowers it slowly to squint suspiciously at Sheppard. "Like how to turn on the lights without touching the switch? Very special, but I think you could already do that."

"That's not what I meant," Sheppard says and steps into the room--and McKay shuffles back another step, seems to change his mind and stands his ground.

"Allow me to point out that I'm not comfortable," McKay says, his voice now gravelly and cracking, "with you and your homicidal tendencies in my domicile. This is my private space, my inner sanctum, a place for quiet contemplation and--" He has to break off to clear his throat very gingerly (and pointedly).

"Maybe you shouldn't talk."

"You're right," he says, in a croaky whisper. "So maybe you should leave."

Sheppard holds up his robot arm. The lights under the dove-grey membrane of the metal alloy skin move subtly. There's a pink tint to it, as if it's trying to impersonate flesh and blood. Without much success, he thinks, and the color changes, almost imperceptibly, to a warmer orange--no, to a colder lilac. "You have got to be kidding," he mutters at it.

And looks up, to see McKay staring at him with eyes gone wide and round. His expression is slack with fascination.

Oh, of course, not staring at him. At the Arm.

"You have got to be kidding!" Sheppard says again, louder, resisting the urge to hide the Arm from that rapt gaze, resisting the other urge which is to break something. Instead he thrusts his hand--knit into a robot fist--at McKay and the whole arm flashes dark angry red like a fucking mood ring.

"...?" McKay says, voicelessly.

"You accuse me of homicidal tendencies!" Sheppard says, almost yelling, almost--and I'll give you homicidal tendencies, McKay, these are my homicidal tendencies right here-- "But you would fuck this thing if you could."

"..." McKay says, coughs, winces, and tries again, "..."

"Stop talking!" The Arm goes first, and McKay backs up until he hits the wall, and Sheppard lets it touch him. It wants to; in its vague, robot way it's eager to please, to appease, it tells him McKay's rate of respiration has increased to 40 breaths per minute, it tells him that his pupils have dilated, that his heart rate is climbing rapidly.

McKay leans the back of his head against the wall, and the bruises circling his throat are glowing points of sickly heat--Sheppard runs cool grey fingers over them and knows what blood vessels are broken and how far the healing process has progressed. McKay swallows painfully, his Adam's apple sliding against the hand.

Sheppard knows that he could crush McKay's throat without even moving.

"Ahh," McKay says, whatever that's supposed to mean.

"Did you know that the Arm sees in the dark?" Sheppard asks, and McKay's eyes move to his face quickly, and back to focus on the Arm again. Off, Sheppard thinks and the lights blink out. McKay's face stays clearly visible--or not visible, more like... "It's like a memory of something I've never seen. I know I'm not using my eyes but the image is right there. If I want it to."

He turns it off and the Arm is just an arm, and the darkness is perfect and impenetrable. McKay's breaths sound louder when he's hearing only with his ears.

His robot fingers on McKay's skin are just like his old fingers, but it's like standing with your eyes closed at the precipice of a great chasm. The ground feels even but you know it's there, one step away.

He realizes he's hidden his real hand behind his back, and he keeps the robot fingers curled lightly around McKay's throat, listening to his rasping breaths--letting a little more in, a little more, enough to hear the rush of his blood, enough to taste the sharp spike of adrenaline in his sweat and feel the suppressed trembles in his muscles--draws his own shaky breaths and slides his own flesh and blood down McKay's chest and belly. And McKay's breathless silence doesn't stop him.

He's dizzy already, feeling weak and still angry, and he wonders if the Arm is doing this, is cutting off the world until all that remains is his hand on McKay's fly, and his other hand listening and telling him what's going on inside.

"It'll make a really good lie detector," he whispers and drags his left hand knuckles-first downwards, ignoring the zipper, and McKay's hips jerk and his throat whistles desperately under Sheppard's careful, careful pressure.

The Arm tells him, in a small aside, that with 97% certainty, McKay's trying to say 'please'.

The world heaves and rolls and McKay snaps forward with a strangled whimper, grabs his shoulders frantically.

Sheppard's mental viewfinder widens to let in the rest of his own body: his quivering knees and his tense back and his achingly hard cock.

He cringes back, staggering, tearing loose of McKay. Before he shuts it up the Arm tells him that McKay is most likely saying 'what?'.

He knows he could punch right through the wall--right through McKay, too--but instead of swinging, he shoves both hands into his pockets and turns on the lights.

They're mercilessly bright. Sheppard closes his eyes briefly. He hears/sees/feels McKay thump back against the wall with an arm over his face.

He opens his eyes. McKay is lowering his arm. His eyes seem unfocused, pupils still too wide in the glare of the lights. He might be trying to speak.

Before that can happen, Sheppard turns and walks out.

***

The anger falls off him almost immediately. He's been in his quarters for a few measly minutes when he's already feeling pretty sheepish and trying to backtrack and figure out where the hell that whole thing derailed so fatally.

Not like it's not a long-established fact that McKay gets hard over Ancient tech.

All in all, that was a lousy apology. And now he'll have to do it again.

He thinks about the bruises on McKay's neck, about McKay's rapt fascination. And about McKay's hands clamping onto his shoulders, almost desperately.

The apartment feels close and claustrophobic. To be off planet, he thinks, or even just flying a transport run to the mainland. Back to work, back to doing what he's here for.

He paces for about three steps before he makes himself stop. Impulse control, impulse control. The last embarrassed shreds of arousal are still lingering somewhere under the nerves. Acting like a caged animal is not having it together, it's not being ready to get back to work.

He tries War and Peace again. If that's not big enough to keep him distracted, nothing will be.

Not five pages later, McKay stomps into the room, wearing a fresh uniform and an expression of stony determination. His hair is damp and he's wielding the screwdriver he used to override the lock like a rapier.

"Shut up," he says--voice back, if somewhat scratchy, McKay is whole and unstoppable--holding up the screwdriver en garde. "I have a speech--"

"Uh," Sheppard says, but McKay makes a stabbing motion with the screwdriver.

"--that I need to get out before my voice box craps out on me again. Thanks for that, really, it's a very symbolic thing to do, crush a person's vocal cords, I appreciate the dramatic flair." The screwdriver comes down, his other hand comes up in an indulgent wave. "No matter. You apologized, I accepted. Let's put that behind us, although I reserve the right to bring it up and rub it in whenever you piss me off. As you're always happy to do with my transgressions. So, about, uh..."

This ends in an attack of coughing that doesn't sound entirely genuine. The stony determination has dissolved.

"McKay..." Sheppard says.

McKay draws a long, deep, painful breath and blurts, "About the part where you molested me and then ran out with your tail between your legs, I mean."

"Hey!" Sheppard says.

"I don't even know why I expected something more creative from you. More creative than homophobia and manly--"

"Hey," Sheppard says again, louder.

McKay stops and blinks. He's crossed his arms. He's standing close enough to the bed that he's looking down at Sheppard. His damp hair clings to his temples. "What?"

Sheppard stands up, hardly bothering to fight the anger building up again. "If you wanted to fuck my robot arm you should have done it before you put it on me."

And that gets him... not the flash of guilt expected--and McKay's utterly transparent face would have shown him if there was any at all--but perfectly blank incomprehension. He can even see McKay backtracking through his memory banks. Sees him find it.

Sees him open his mouth to say something, close it again. Scowl.

Sheppard tries to cross his own arms and realizes he's still holding War and Peace. He settles for keeping his arms at his sides in a hopefully stern manner and thanks the luck of the genetic draw that has made him two inches taller than McKay and blessed him with a blush-safe complexion.

McKay huffs and taps his fingers against his bicep and says, "Sometimes you're really surprisingly dense." His tone suggests he's not surprised at all. He seems to have recovered his balance; reaching a position of moral and intellectual superiority so easily will do that to McKay.

"I don't think it's a very far-fetched assumption to make," Sheppard says and waves his nervously blue-tinted arm in front of McKay's face.

McKay catches himself following it with his eyes like a bird hypnotized by a snake and twists his mouth sourly. "That's clever, really clever." He coughs again, maybe not faking this time because his voice is fading when he says, "Are you feeling objectified? Are you afraid I only love you for your cybernetic parts? Are you a thirteen-year-old girl?"

"Who said anything about--" Sheppard says but McKay's already talking again, even faster now.

"What do you want, diary entries, a signed affidavit, what? I can do you a grand declaration. A hoarse grand declaration but that's what I'm working with here, thanks to you."

"A grand declaration of what, exactly?" Sheppard says, feeling like he's not having the same conversation as McKay.

McKay looks a little thrown himself. "Of what? Of...you know, love, hot mushy feelings, ridiculous romantic notions. I'm not just the hard-nosed scientist, you know, I have a heart. I just have to keep a strictly professional façade or I'll get no respect around here, too many military poombahs walking around, oh so ready to dismiss me as just another--"

"Hot mushy..."

McKay draws himself up to his full height--still comfortably shorter than Sheppard--his hands locked behind his back, his chin raised. "That's not the speech I had prepared, actually," he says, not quite meeting Sheppard's eyes. "But consider my position here for a second. I've had far too many opportunities to contemplate life without you to not be completely aware of--of the repercussions of, uh. A lot of time for personal revelations, what with your apparent death wish. Who gets their arms ripped off by mutant alien monsters?"

"No big deal," Sheppard says, feeling a touch of dizziness, completely unlike the previous spells. A personal revelation. "You can fix almost anything."

"Not just fix, improve," McKay says, nodding to himself. Then he clears his throat with a wince. "Quick, are there some other excruciatingly personal things I have to blurt out before I fall silent for the rest of the night?"

"No," Sheppard says, putting War and Peace down on his bedside table next to his sidearm. "We're good."

"Good, good," McKay mutters, staring at the book. His pulse is picking up a little; right now, Sheppard feels it like a subtle pressure in the back of his mind. "Um."

Impulse control, Sheppard thinks and takes a step towards McKay. McKay's eyes focus on him. The widening of McKay's pupils feels like gravity, the rush of blood to McKay's face like a hot wind.

This is a symptom of post-traumatic stress, right? he thinks and reaches out with his eager Ancient hand to cup McKay's face.

McKay's not going to be any help at all. He's swaying into the touch as if he has no idea he's doing it, he's pulling in every breath like it hurts him. McKay, it occurs to Sheppard, not for the first time, never tries very hard to control his impulses.

He's not trying now, that's for sure. He's leaning in, a hand skidding nervously over Sheppard's chest. And this was crazy when it was a fight and it's just plain stupid now that it's not.

They kiss and Sheppard thinks, I won't even be able to say it seemed like a good idea at the time, and McKay clutches his shirt and pushes closer. The world tilts and whirls and he clutches back until it rights itself, and then he has his all-knowing hand on McKay's throat again, so close to the pulse that the blood roars like a great river.

***

He wakes up from dreamless sleep feeling absolutely amazing. Monte Carlo, here I come, he thinks, not quite ready to open his eyes and leave this perfectly comfortable place and time.

He remembers waking up once, earlier, snapping out of sleep in a panic, as if someone were choking him where he lay. It had taken him a while to find himself again, recognizing the room, the bed, the person snoring next to him.

Going backwards, he remembers the part where they walked the fifty feet of corridor back to McKay's quarters--"I have a prescription mattress and I will walk naked through a bramble patch to sleep on it." "Fine, but I'm going to put my clothes on for the walking if you don't mind."--and the part where he held McKay face down into the prescription mattress and pushed in slowly, slowly, and McKay quivered under him, his fists knotted in the sheets.

Lying in the dark and getting used to McKay's heavy arm around his waist and McKay's warm breath on his neck, and breathing a little easier himself with every steady inhalation.

And now he feels great. Tensions resolved, good sex repeatedly. A really comfortable bed.

He opens his eyes and lets the world in, and he is no longer in McKay's room. He is in the infirmary again, covered in little sticky patches, surrounded by monitors that go beep beep beep in a rhythmic fashion--although now speeding up, agitated.

The 'and it was all just a dream' fakeout was always one of his least favorite endings.

But McKay is slumped over in a chair by his side, half of him on the bed, fast asleep and drooling on a stack of printouts. He looks like he's been there a while. A wheely table next to him has a pile of powerbar wrappers, three cafeteria trays stacked on top of each other and laden with used plates and glasses and cutlery, and an empty coffee pot, and numerous drying rings where he's put down his mug.

Sheppard tries to push himself up. He's still feeling pretty good, but nothing messes with a nice mellow mood like waking up in the hospital.

There's resistance, the Arm is caught in something and he tugs it loose. He feels things unplugging and cables curl up and rattle to the floor; contacts click off in his head, programs shut down before he's aware they were running at all. The computer lets out a distressed bleat.

"What the hell?" he says out loud, louder than he intended to. McKay's already waking up, stumbling to his feet and looking around frantically.

His eyes meet Sheppard's and he stops moving. "Oh God," he says, very quietly, and for a second he looks like he's about to burst into tears. Then he shakes his head and blinks and says, louder now, "Oh God," and launches himself at Sheppard, grabs him with desperate, rough hands and kisses his face aimlessly, again and again, before letting him go and stepping back.

"Don't move, don't move, wait here. Keep your eyes open," he says and backs out of the room. "Hang on, stay awake," he's still saying from around the corner.

"McKay?" Sheppard says, and McKay comes back immediately, looking frantic and shaken.

"Never mind," he says, "just a second," and takes Sheppard's human hand and turns it in his own, rubbing his thumbs over the knuckles. "I just...I want you to know that I knew you'd be back."

"Rodney, I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Another one of Carson's medical mysteries. I'm starting to think he secretly enjoys giving people bad news. He'll be sheepish now, I bet."

Sheppard curls his robot fingers around McKay's wrist, not hard, but McKay blinks and blinks and his face goes still and tight for a second. Then he says, "You've been brain dead for, uh...forty... forty-five hours. My extremely well-educated guess at this point is that the Arm did it. What I have no clue of is why. I'm sure it's no surprise that Carson is even more clueless. He wants to take it off."

Sheppard doesn't even notice he's tightened his fingers until McKay tries to jerk loose. Sheppard lets him go and he rubs his wrist and says, "Oh yeah, and he said there was no way you'd wake up again. No higher brain functions."

McKay looks like he has things to say but he's keeping them in, not right for McKay, not how things go with McKay. He's standing by the bed, Sheppard is sitting on the edge, naked under his sheet and starting to feel cold inside and out. The lingering remnants of his good mood are evaporating in the smell of hospital and stale coffee and McKay who's clearly not taken any breaks in his vigil. Forty-five hours.

"Everyone else is waiting," he says suddenly. "At least they were, uh, three hours ago. Carson fed them some medical jargon so I could have a little time alone here. I must have fallen asleep. I didn't think that was physically possible with this much coffee and stress, but there you go. They're going to remove the Arm."

"I'm in a coma for two days and you're already pulling the plugs?"

McKay crosses his arms. "They probably won't do it now that you're awake! And for the record, I was fighting them--as I may have mentioned, I had a theory about what was going on and I wanted some time. But the argument was that nobody wanted some kind of demented Terri Schiavo situation, and also, did you hear me when I said no higher brain functions?"

"I heard you," Sheppard says and stands up. He feels strong, not a hint of dizziness, nothing to tell him he's been lying here like a dead man still breathing for days. If he didn't know better he'd think McKay's playing some kind of elaborate prank on him, but McKay's kind of prank is simpler and usually food-related.

"Um," McKay says. Sheppard looks around.

"Clothes?"

"Well, see," McKay says, looking around, too. "You weren't exactly wearing any at the time. Which leads me to another interesting plot point in this disaster..."

Sheppard can see that plot point in Technicolor.

"It falls under the doctor-patient confidentiality, don't worry," McKay says. "I'm sure now you're up and about Carson will be needling me a lot more about it, though. So far he's been acting like I'm your widow. He gave me his handkerchief yesterday, it was disturbing." He fishes a gingham hanky from a pocket. It looks used.

"You couldn't make something up?"

"Trust me, I tried. I know I'm a genius, but it wasn't--I... Just not the type of situation I find myself in a lot." He's balled up the hanky in his hand and is hunching his shoulders, staring at Sheppard. "Anyway, what does Carson care? The only one who'd care is Caldwell, I guess, and he's never finding out."

Sheppard makes himself stop hunching in sympathy and says, "Okay. Now, I would like to get out of here, please."

McKay snaps his fingers and turns around, muttering, "Right, yes, right," scanning the shelves and equipment as if someone might have stashed some shirts and pants behind a monitor or in a drawer. "I can get some from your quarters."

Sheppard catches him by the arm. "Hey," he says. "If you could maybe neglect to warn anybody of my miraculous awakening. I'm not too keen on having more needles stuck in me today."

McKay looks at Sheppard's fingers digging into his arm and nods. "Then I better just get you some scrubs from Carson's locker."

***

He steps into the hallway a little ahead of McKay and the crowd gasps.

"That's what I meant," McKay says.

Weir has clapped a hand over her mouth. Sheppard thinks, they should be used to last-minute rescues by now, shouldn't they?

Carson Beckett is giving him a shocked, blank stare, mirrored on the faces of the rest of the medical team.

Sheppard raises a hand, feeling just a little sheepish. "Hi." They are still staring, although he can see Weir collecting herself, preparing to speak. "Feel free to start the Sleeping Beauty jokes."

Major Lorne, replacing an unbecoming goldfish gape with a grin, says, "I would, sir, but McKay just isn't my idea of Prince Charming."

Behind Sheppard, McKay makes a sound that could be a choked giggle.

***

There will be needles and scans and other medical shenanigans no matter what he feels about it, but not before Weir has hugged him and Ronon has patted his shoulder with curious gentleness, and Teyla has touched her forehead to his. Not before he has made it back to his quarters for a shower and a change out of Carson's scrubs.

McKay is right behind him into the transporter and all the way to his door.

"Are you going to keep following me around?" Sheppard asks, leaning against the closed door.

McKay frowns. "Yes?"

"I'm not going to pass out in the shower," Sheppard says, taking care to enunciate clearly. "But you look like you might. Go to bed, McKay. You're about to keel over and I'm sure we'll need you with a functioning brain."

He also takes care to ignore the flash of panic on McKay's face. It's gone in a second, anyway. "Right, you're right. I can function on very little sleep, as you're probably aware, but it does eventually impair performance. In some areas. So... yes. Uh."

He's not leaving, he's looking around as if searching the walls for a hidden clue.

Sheppard sees the clue in perfect definition, and he realizes that he has not for one second considered the implications of sleeping with someone on his team, that he has no idea what compelled him to jump McKay's bones like a hormonally addled teenager. That's not the kind of impulse he usually has trouble suppressing.

He watches realization dawn on McKay's face, followed by a belated, futile shutdown. "Right. I'll see you, uh, Colonel."

But last night--what feels like last night--is still clear and coherent (if not explicable) in Sheppard's memory, and he remembers kissing McKay and meaning it, and he remembers McKay looking at him with the same fascination he usually reserved for robotic arms and other marvels of technology.

So he says, "Rodney, wait," and McKay waits, sullenly downturned mouth and shuttered eyes. Sheppard opens the door. "Come on."

***

"No, nothing like that," he says, for approximately the twentieth time. "No nausea, no dizziness, no passing out, no puking, no uncontrollable rage."

Beckett jots down something on a pad as if this was some kind of news. Maybe he's timing Sheppard's temper.

"But you were feeling rage earlier?" Kate Heightmeyer asks.

He smiles through perfectly controllable annoyance and says, "I was off balance."

"You'd been through a traumatic amputation--"

"It was more specific than PTSD," he says before she can get her teeth into that. "McKay has a really neat theory about all this."

Beckett scratches his head. "I've heard it. I just can't find any traces of, well, anything."

"So I'm good to go?"

"We'd just like a better picture of what happened, John," Weir says, tapping her pen on her own pad. She catches him looking and stops.

"I wouldn't mind a better picture myself."

"It's unfortunate that the Arm does not retain anything in its memory bank," she says, and if Sheppard were the paranoid type, he'd start suspecting her of suspecting him of something suspicious.

"McKay has a theory about that one, too." He straightens up, projecting thank you, that is all, I am done here. "But nothing much to go on right now. I would like to return to duty sometime before the Wraith find us again." He doesn't say 'and you need me' because that was enough push for now. He certainly did not say 'before the Daedalus returns and Caldwell gets a say.'

"Speaking of McKay..." Weir says, lifting a delicate eyebrow.

"He's bound to wake up sooner or later," Sheppard says casually. McKay had babbled frantically for thirty minutes, laying out semi-coherent theories with big gestures that occasionally knocked things off Sheppard's bedside table, and then he passed out mid-sentence and has not stirred since. "He must have worked up some sleep debt."

Beckett makes a face. "I'd say. You could always get a couple of lads to carry him out of your room if you want your bed back. I'm sure he won't even notice."

"I think I've slept enough for a while, thank you," Sheppard says, smiling at him. He doesn't quite suspect Beckett of innuendo, but he's keeping watch nevertheless.

He picks up a pen and twirls it, and hey, that's not something he's tried before but if he doesn't think too hard on it, the robot fingers will twirl faster than humanly possible, they will continue faster and faster until he consciously stops them. He looks at the blur of blue and red and grey, fascinated.

"Right," he says, putting it down. When he looks around, all three of them are blinking and closing their mouths. "So how about it?"

"Well, you seem to have adjusted," Weir says, with the pursed mouth and wide eyes of mildly impressed but maintaining objectivity. "You are needed, you know that."

Beckett nods with a small frown. "Perhaps give it a few days to watch for relapses."

"There won't be any," Sheppard says. He hasn't been that sure of anything in a while. "Whatever it was, it's gone now."

"'Whatever it was'," Weir says. "I'm not sure I like that part."

***

McKay is sitting on his bed when Sheppard gets back to his quarters. He's freshly showered, but his eyes are still puffy with sleep, still bloodshot with residual exhaustion. He's barefoot and his t-shirt is inside out and hitched up in the back as if he was too distracted to finish pulling it down.

He's hunched over his laptop--no, wait, that's Sheppard's laptop--typing furiously.

The door closes behind Sheppard with its soft pneumatic whoosh. McKay holds up a finger. "Shh," he says without looking up. Types a rapid burst, hits enter with a flourish. Then he looks up. "Okay, you may speak."

"Hi, Rodney, how do you do?" Sheppard says.

"I could use some coffee. You don't have a coffee maker in your quarters. I am confident that the information from your Arm reboot is somewhere in the database. I've written a new search algorithm. It's only a matter of time. Did Weir give you your badge and gun back?"

"Yes, she did," Sheppard says, patting an imaginary badge clipped to his belt. "But she said I can't beat up anymore suspects."

"Good, good," McKay mumbles, already distracted. He's tapping his fingers on his thigh. "Come on, come on. Okay, this is going to take a stupid amount of time. I should have done it on my own laptop." He looks up and meets Sheppard's eyes. "I've got an hour or so to kill."

"I was thinking I'd take a jumper out for a spin," Sheppard says. "Gotta test the equipment."

McKay narrows his eyes. "You probably need a supervisor, then. If you're testing. Control...group."

"Not really," Sheppard says. "But I wouldn't mind some company."

***

There's no click when the interface connects, just an instant opening of all channels, the input from every sensor in the jumper pushing forward in a clear, organized burst, making his own dull human senses superfluous. He thinks he closes his eyes. The microphone in the jumper's dashboard picks up McKay's voice and loops it into Sheppard's head.

"Are you going to show off? If you're going to show off I want back on the ground. I have things left to contribute to science! I still haven't built my own ZPM!" Sheppard can barely feel McKay's hand leave his shoulder. "I haven't had time, of course. Desperation may be the mother of invention but it's also really time-consuming."

Sheppard's mouth feels distant when he says, "It's necessity."

"What?"

"Necessity is the mother of invention. Now shut up for a second and let me fly."

"Desperation sounds more urgent," McKay says. "I'm perfectly comfortable making changes to Plato's text. You know, I remember you asking me to tag along." But he does fall silent, and Sheppard flies.

Oh yeah, he thinks with some small coherent part of his brain, oh yeah. I'm never going back down.

He keeps the jumper in atmosphere for a while. The intertial dampeners usually take a lot of the fun out of acceleration (zero to mach 5 in 0.311 seconds and that's with a light foot) but now that he's connected to the sensors directly he can experience it all without his brain liquefying. After three or four jumps across the ocean and back, he takes her up into orbit, leans back and feels the suck of gravity like a siren song, painless but insistent. And then vacuum spreads around him, all that information about nothing...

"Not to disturb your moment of Zen and the Art of Spaceflight, but you look insane." A pause. Sheppard tries to open his eyes. "And you're crying, do you know that?"

He blinks and blinks and pulls himself out of his tangle of data. Yup, his face is wet. "Takes a little getting used to," he says, his voice loud and alien in his ears. McKay's staring at him, slowly shaking his head.

"This is true. Grown man weeping like a baby. While making orgasm faces. A little recommendation: in the future, when you have passengers, keep your mouth closed and your eyes open."

For a second, he wants to try to explain. But McKay's not a pilot, and some things just don't translate. McKay has turned away and is bringing up graphs and tables on the screen in front of him, his eyes twitching over the scrolling numbers. His mouth is hanging open a little and Sheppard almost says something about orgasm faces.

"This is probably not the time," McKay says without taking his eyes off the screen, "but I like that there's nowhere to run. It's pretty clear that you were suffering from some kind of brain fever and thus your judgment was impaired. So..."

So. Sheppard says, "Are you offering me an easy out, McKay?"

McKay's eyes cut away from the screen to meet his. McKay's stubborn jaw rises. "If you need it, Colonel."

"I'm not much for the path of least resistance, really."

"No," McKay says, his mouth thinning. "You're more for using your own hard head to knock out the resistance. But I'd prefer it if you didn't knock me out."

That's fair. More than fair. Sheppard says, "Okay. You know it was stupid and it shouldn't happen again, right?"

McKay nods, still looking him dead in the eye. McKay doesn't always take the path of least resistance, either, although he probably thinks he should. "But it wasn't bad, am I right?"

"It wasn't bad, no," Sheppard says.

***

And with that, things go back to normal. The thing about living on a floating city in a distant galaxy while taking regular trips into outer space and to other planets, Sheppard thinks at one point while gearing up for a completely routine mission, is that nothing is too weird to deal with after a while.

Normal in Atlantis is not even in the same galaxy as normal on Earth. As it were.

Sheppard puts his pack down in a corner and goes down to the gate. McKay and Ronon are discussing the relative merits of Athosian brownies versus the real chocolate deal. Teyla is watching them like an anthropologist watches a tribal ritual.

"Ready?" Sheppard says, interrupting. McKay looks at him like McKay looks at anthropologists.

"When you are, Colonel."

It's raining when they step through the gate, a cold, thin, wind-whipped drizzle that stings his face and drives a chill through his field uniform before they've made it across the first muddy field. The Arm tells him it's fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit, with a nor'-northeasterly wind of 20 miles per hour.

He can smell the ocean behind them, hear the breakers hit the sand. Surf's up but the season is over. The wind could accelerate to a storm in a heartbeat, with a planet-spanning ocean on its back.

McKay's meter lets out a sharp, cranky bleat. Then McKay says, "Shit."

"Elaborate," Sheppard says, already hunching down and bringing his P-90 up, easing off the safety. Behind him and beside him, Ronon and Teyla do the same. The whine of Ronon's weapon cycling up mixes with the sound of the wind snapping in the treetops, the sea birds crying out mournfully, the humming of the multimeter.

"We walked right into something here." McKay is waving an arm around, indicating--what? Tree line, birds, ocean, mud?--the people running towards them, just clearing the trees.

The bad part about this is that it's still basically a routine mission. There have been Wraith, or Wraith barbecue leftovers, or threat of impending Wraith on roughly 40% of the worlds they've visited since they first came to the galaxy.

The Rotonians have firearms, nothing more effective than your early six-shooters and the like, but that's plenty effective enough when they're fired at short range.

"They're shooting at us!" McKay bellows and dives forward with all the grace of a seal on dry land, belly-flops in the mud and fumbles at his holster. "Why are they shooting at us?"

"Hold your fire," Sheppard snaps at him. Teyla and Ronon are already down, flattened against the ground.

"Rodney," Teyla murmurs, "Rodney, the Wraith are making them see things that are not there."

"They're shooting at us!" McKay screeches and he's got his 9mil out and he's not too choosy about where he's pointing it.

Ronon slaps a hand on his ankle and says, matter-of-fact tone sounding exactly like a threat, "McKay, put it away or I'll put it away for you."

And McKay twists frantically and the gun is now pointed at Ronon.

"Don't touch me!"

Sheppard, still on his feet because the Arm has told him--the whole time, in graphs and curves--that none of the shots are even remotely in range yet, takes two quick steps and then the Arm reaches out and the barrel of McKay's gun is in his hand and his softly glowing fingers clamp down effortlessly and smoothly and the steel bends like toffee.

McKay's face crumples and he lets go of the gun like it's burning his hand. His eyes stay on it, though, on the fingers crushing it.

"Whoa," Ronon says mildly.

"They're running towards the gate," Teyla says into the brief silence.

Ronon nods. "The Wraith must have been here for a while."

"It's a trap, you idiots, it's a trap!" McKay still sounds panicky, as if he's never encountered the Wraith, as if he's never been under fire. "And you took my gun."

It is a trap, no doubt. They were waiting. Sheppard crouches and waves a finger, his normal index finger, in front of McKay's face. "Don't point it at team members."

"We have to get back to the gate!"

They turn and look. White hair and black coats stand out well in the grey daylight. It's not a big party, but there'll be more in the forest. They'll have darts on the way.

"We'll have to go through them first," Ronon says.

Sheppard puts his P-90 in front of McKay, uncrouches and says, "McKay, chill. All of you, try to round up the civilians, get them focused. Whoever's left." He starts walking across the field towards the gate, arms swinging by his side. The Wraith won't shoot him if they think they can feed.

The Arm murmurs soothing statistics about distance and Wraith weapon ranges and likelihood of a fast, violent end. "Don't tell me the odds," Sheppard says out loud. The Wraith are approaching, not too fast. They're wary but the one with a visible face is looking hungry to him.

"Howdy," he says. "Not the best weather today." Behind him people are shouting.

The leader hisses at him, showing all his pretty teeth. "Why do you guys have teeth anyway?"

They come just close enough, their weapons ready but not firing and when one of the bonefaces takes a step forward the Arm shoots out, faster than a striking snake (actually faster than most snakes, the Arm confirms) and grabs the barrel, twists it to the side to clear Sheppard from the line of fire and pistons the weapon forward into the Wraith's midsection. Sheppard feels his entire body lurch with the force and it hurts something in his shoulder but the Wraith spews black blood and falls.

Entirely without his consent or participation the Arm swings the weapon around and fires it at another Wraith, blocks the return fire--blocks the return fire: he doesn't even realize that until later. Everything happens just a little faster than his brain can parse and it catches up after the fact, after he's standing over three bodies and the last Wraith, the leader, is dangling by its crushed throat with robot fingers digging deep into its unnatural green-white flesh.

He's back in control and he releases the gurgling, choking thing and it drops onto the wet grass. Its eyes have rolled up into its head and a thin, grayish froth is rising from its mouth.

His hand is stained black over a fading red glow. He wipes it on his jacket.

He turns around, dazed, and there are people skidding to a halt, staying well out of his way as if-- Their expressions of horror aren't what you usually see, nobody is shocked by the Wraith around here, nobody doesn't expect them, so what--

McKay's there, Sheppard's P-90 clamped in his hands. He's staring too.

"What are you?" a tall man in a muddy but clearly expensive red coat says. "What are you?" He takes a step backwards when Sheppard holds up his hand.

McKay makes a soft whimpering sound and bends double and vomits all over his own shoes.

***

After the marines stand down, he goes straight up to the control room still in his black-bloody gear. Weir's not there.

"She's in the infirmary," the tech tells him. "Good to see you back, sir."

McKay's in bed, scowling mightily while Carson fiddles with a drip.

Dr Mathiessen is also there, talking to Weir. Sheppard catches her mid-sentence and hears, "hormones" and he hears "enzymes" and he hears "parasite" and then he hears "Colonel Sheppard's vomit."

"I'm back," he says, as if they hadn't all been waiting--a pale, trembling McKay coming through alone would have been enough to go to battle stations and all round freakout mode. The marines waiting by the gate had sighed their relieved sighs in unison when they recognized the team.

Weir looks almost guilty, but she recovers quickly and says, "Thank God. Everyone back? Are the Rotonians safe?"

"Well, as safe as anyone is in this galaxy. There weren't that many left, though. We gated them to--"

Weir interrupts him--as if Rotonians suddenly mean nothing. "Sarah has just found some interesting mutations in her culture. What did you say it was, a fungus?"

"Not quite," Mathiessen says. "Our understanding of the taxonomical relationship of the indigenous species of this galaxy is still rudimentary. We may have to add some kingdoms." The last part comes with a small flash of teeth. Weir doesn't smile back. "Whatever this parasite is, it's very aggressive." Mathiessen turns to Sheppard. "It's clear that it was introduced to my culture when you, ah, regurgitated in the bucket."

"The what now?" He has two things to say right now, one's about making sure McKay's all right, the other is about how the Rotonians refused to come to Atlantis with him because he is Not Human, after he saved their raggedy asses. And Mathiessen is talking about funguses?

"But it can't have been contagious person-to-person or Atlantis would have engaged the quarantine failsafes," Weir says.

"I suspect it's probably transferrable through fluid exchange. What do you think, Dr Beckett?"

Beckett looks up from whatever he's doing and meets Sheppard's eyes.

"Fluid exchange?" McKay says from the bed. He sounds perfectly calm now, as if he's asking out of general curiosity.

"Well," Beckett says. "However it, uh... transferred, it's certainly not airborne."

"They keep telling me I have your space bug," McKay says, conversationally. "I keep telling them they're insane."

"You did go kind of ballistic out there," Sheppard says. Fluid exchange, Jesus fucking Christ. There are still traces of Wraith blood on his hand, but underneath, it's tinted a nervous teal.

"But I have no real symptoms," McKay says, clearly still more annoyed than scared. "I was freaked out, I threw up. You know I have a delicate constitution."

"Nevertheless," Beckett says wearily. "It's there."

"This is ridiculous."

"No doubt Colonel Sheppard received a larger initial dose, more...directly applied. He was in medical shock. The parasite would have established itself quickly in his brain. You're healthy, Rodney, so it's taken longer."

Sheppard sits down in a chair by the door. He's resisting the urge to lean his head in his hands.

"Okay, fine. So fix me, Carson."

Beckett throws Sheppard a helpless glance. McKay follows it and rolls his eyes almost violently. "Don't look at him! He gave me the damn thing in the first place."

Beckett starts to say something but McKay talks right over him. "And if you give me any safe sex schpiel I'm going to punch you directly in the nose and blame my alien STD mood swings."

Weir and Mathiessen work really hard at controlling their faces, and Mathiessen makes a small gesture. "Excuse us," Weir says. "I'll be back in a moment." No one pays any attention. Weir walks out after Mathiessen.

Beckett says, "I'd really rather not be talking about sex with you at all, Rodney, if you don't mind."

"What, jealous?" McKay says harshly. Then he slumps back in the bed, deflating. He seems pale. The Arm confirms. Blood pressure under ideal. "Right, right. This is so typical. Why am I always the guy who tries something once and gets the lifelong scars?"

"It took some pretty radical measures to get rid of this thing," Sheppard says. "But it's gone now. So maybe you don't need to worry about lifelong scars yet."

"But--" Beckett says.

McKay sits up again, making small, restless gestures with both hands. "Wait, wait, wait."

Sheppard and Beckett both wait, but McKay is muttering to himself and reaching for his laptop.

"...the easiest way would be--speaking of radical measures, I mean--just chop something off..."

"Rodney, what are you talking about?" Beckett says helplessly.

"...but of course we already took the most advanced one and put it on him." He's hunched over the keyboard, his eyes flickering rapidly over scrolling data. "Yeah, as I thought. Well, fortunately for me, I have a Plan B."

"I'm not a hundred percent sure I know what Plan A was, McKay," Sheppard says just to say something. "Or that I like the sound of it--and Plan B is usually worse."

"Too bad, I kind of liked the idea of Rodney McKay, Bionic Genius," McKay says, ignoring him completely. "Okay, leave the dying man to work."

Sheppard reaches for him--with the Arm, so he knows that McKay's heart is beating steadily, if too fast, and the blood pressure is going up again. There is a small but insistent distortion in his brainwave pattern (brainwaves, too? Sheppard thinks, Jesus, why haven't we put one of these on Beckett?) that nags like a name on the tip of his tongue. "Rodney--"

"What did I just say? Dying! That's what I said." His heart rate goes up another notch. Sheppard crosses his arms, feeling cold. The hairs on his organic arm are standing up.

A few minutes later Weir comes back in, nervous eyes and tight mouth, but McKay shushes her immediately. She turns to Sheppard and Beckett.

"He's very focused when he's working for his life," Beckett says.

"What are the odds?" Weir asks. She is flexing her fingers, relaxing her fingers, flex, relax, flex, relax.

Sheppard runs his robot fingers through his hair--it's a truly bizarre sensation if he dials up the input, every single hair a discrete pinprick of data: angle, tension, approximate age, health. He's not at risk of hair loss. Good to know. He shrugs deliberately. "It's McKay."

McKay smacks the table and yells, "Get me Zelenka!" He's loud, even by McKay standards.

"I'm going to talk to Dr Mathiessen again," Beckett says quietly. "Look at her data, work on a Plan C. Just in case."

***

Sheppard is watching minute seventy-four of an epic McKay vs. Zelenka shouting match. He's lost count of the turns, he has no idea where they're going, but they are using names and terms like profanities, McKay's eyes are bloodshot, Zelenka's hair is like a swarm of tiny aerials reaching for space, and the tone of the yelling has just changed radically.

"--if we connect the--"

"--connect opposite poles--"

"--poles it shouldn't fry the circuit any--"

"--any more than we are able to repair, and we have auxiliary power--"

"--power won't be an object, not if we reroute the naquadah source through--"

"Right here, right here, you see? Nanobots would pass through--"

"Please, I was there first, Radek, this one's mine."

"You are shameless, even on deathbed you will not hesitate to cheat."

"I'm not dead yet, and as everyone can see, my brain is superior to yours even under the influence of a deadly alien parasite. Beckett!" McKay stands up suddenly, actually shoving Zelenka aside. Zelenka doesn't comment, just steps back and holds up his hands. McKay points at Sheppard. His eyes are red-rimmed and wild. "You, I need you."

***

Weir looks like she wants to say no. But she looks at McKay's red, angry face and blue, angry eyes, and she meets Sheppard's eyes briefly and says, "Go ahead. If you think--"

"I don't think," McKay interrupts, already turning away. "I know."

"John?"

Sheppard grabs McKay's arm, holds him still and runs a finger over the skin just under his t-shirt sleeve. But a lie detector doesn't work here, it won't work because McKay always believes his own press, McKay always believes his own science. The Arm can't predict the future.

McKay gives him a withering look. "Backing out, John? Are you going to bring up my resume of past mistakes again?"

"No, we've been through that enough," Sheppard says. "But I just really don't want to accidentally kill you."

"Don't worry, you'll be a completely passive participant. No one can blame you." But not even McKay believes that. "Welcome to the other side of the fence. I notice that you haven't asked about possible side effects for yourself."

"That's not--"

McKay jerks away from his touch and waves his hand dismissively. "Spare me. I know how you work. We've calculated that the connection can be supported by the power source of the Arm, but there's a...let's say up to twenty-five percent chance that it'll burn itself out completely and you'll lose it."

He must have made some kind of face because McKay leans back and crosses his arms and says, dripping with smugness, "Ha."

"I'm not backing out, Rodney."

McKay sneers. "Of course you aren't, Saint Sheppard."

"You're not acting like someone who needs my help to survive," Sheppard says evenly, lifting an eyebrow.

McKay leans towards him with gritted teeth, and his voice reaches previously unexplored levels of volume and pitch: "It's the DEADLY BRAIN PARASITE TALKING. Idiot."

"That's what I thought," Sheppard says.

***

Beckett looks up at McKay from his preparations. "It won't be a large incision, but you may feel some discomfort--"

"I'm already feeling discomfort," McKay says. He's staring at his own arm. He's already bitched his way through a dozen shots of local anesthetic, but now he's quiet and almost thoughtful. As thoughtful as McKay ever is. "I have a very delicate constitution. I think you better restrain me."

"What?"

"He's right," Sheppard says. He's been there. "Uncontrollable rage and other side effects."

He's lying on his own table next to McKay's, his Arm trailing cables like a snarl of vipers.

"Is this going to hurt?" he asks while Beckett brings out the restraints--the lightweight ones, not the proper leather gear. "Any predictions?"

"Why are you asking me? Do I look like the Stupendous Yappi?" McKay mutters. "Just shut down the sensors and hope for the best. It's your arm. But it's not actually your skin. Ow, ow, not so tight, I'd like to have use of that if I survive this insanity."

"All right," Beckett says, with a thin smile that's probably supposed to be reassuring. "Let's begin, shall we?"

McKay turns his face away when Beckett cuts.

It's not a very complicated procedure--it seems kind of anticlimactic, actually.

"You shouldn't have to do anything, Carson, so don't even try," McKay says tightly. He's looking now, through the fingers of his right hand. "Those are my nerves right there. Just let it go where it wants to go."

"Yes, Rodney," Carson says, and he's not completely mellow, either.

The cable is semi-translucent and milky white like the Arm. One end is coming out of a socket near John's elbow. The other end is going into the shallow little slash on McKay's arm. It touches flesh and pulses with gentle pink light. It looks a little obscene, actually. Kinky bastards, Sheppard thinks and then his Arm flashes bright red and goes hot, then cold, then hot again and then nothing.

"Ow, what the--" McKay says and flails with his free arm. "Ohhh, it's there." He looks at Sheppard and then his eyes roll up in his head.

***

The first words out of McKay's mouth, upon waking, are, "Am I cured?" Then he says, "I'm hungry," which pretty much answers the question. Sheppard has had a Milky Way bar on standby for two days.

"Everything's clear," he says. "You look good."

McKay does look good: his skin is the warm pink of restored health, his eyes are bright, his heartbeats bip merrily on the monitor by the bed. The EEG draws the jaunty spikes of complex brain functions again, quite a sight after forty-eight hours of flat lines.

"I feel pretty good," McKay says around a mouthful of chocolate. "Kind of...happy. Ready to face the world anew, full of vim and vigor, enthusiastically looking for new challenges, etcetera, etcetera. Anything happen while I was down?"

"No, Rodney, the entire universe came to a complete standstill without you to push it around."

McKay looks heavenwards. "Not even badly applied sarcasm can bring me down."

Sheppard, who has not left this room in two days, puts his hand on McKay's and says, "That was only fifty percent sarcasm. Glad to have you back. And your vim and vigor, too."

McKay swallows and looks down at Sheppard's smooth, grey hand. "And that?"

Sheppard looks down, too. The fingers he's folding around McKay's warm palm are picking up a cautiously happy salmon pink glow. It is suggested to him, somewhere in some running process in his brain, that McKay's temperature is slightly elevated. After a while, though, this is ignored as an acceptable deviation. "It's only just coming back online. And once more I'm reminded that there is such a thing as too much information."

"No, there isn't," McKay says with some heat. "That's just something ignorant idiots came up with to excuse themselves."

Sheppard shrugs.

"Don't give me that stoic crap," McKay says, pulling his hand out of Sheppard's grip. "You would have been a complete wreck if you'd lost it."

"You would have done the same for me," Sheppard says. Not even the Arm can be sure about that, though.

"I'd like to think I would," McKay says. "But of course I would have found a way to repair it, you do realize."

"I thought it was equivalent to reloading a ZPM?"

"That's something I need to do, too, so all the better." He's gingerly pulling needles out of his arm, wincing and hissing. "When did you disconnect the..." He waves his hand in a vague circle. "Uh, when did you disconnect us?"

The incision on his arm has been neatly stitched up and wrapped. "A couple hours ago," Sheppard says, "when your brainwaves normalized."

The Arm has been returning slowly online since then, trickles of information percolating through his brain, small spikes of sensory surprises, like someone fumbling through a dark room for a light switch. He still feels a little hollowed out in places. "Your clothes are still here," he says.

McKay gives him a suspicious look, but it's brief, hardly more than a flicker. "Oh, good, good. I guess there's a crowd waiting breathlessly outside the door?"

"Yup."

"Ah, the welcome wagon. 'How was your coma, Dr McKay?' Oh, thanks, very restful, didn't feel a thing. Brain dead, you know how it is." He stops in the middle of the room, looking thoughtful. "Sometimes I forget to reflect on how consistently weird things are around here."

Sheppard stands up and uncricks his neck and shoulders. He's getting hungry, too. He ignores a helpful readout regarding blood sugar levels.

"Like this," McKay is saying, sidling up to him. "This is weird, how I can do this." His hand stops halfway between them. "Wait, I can do this, right?"

"You can do that," Sheppard says, but he doesn't wait for McKay, he leans in first.