Syzygy

This wasn't fair, Rodney managed to think as he tumbled through the cold, salty water like a sock in a washing machine. Space vampires and evil hostage-taking, knife-wielding kidnappers he survived, only to have a land tsunami pounce him and drag him to a painful death? Land tsunami for god's sake, there shouldn't be land tsunamis -- but here it was, wonderful discovery, really interesting, except for how it was going to kill him any second now.

Add M4S-210 to the long, long lists of planets in the Pegasus galaxy that had it in for one Doctor Rodney McKay. It was a planet of towering black peaks under slate-colored skies forming a valley on either side of the gate; a wide, monochrome swath of rounded rocks and boulders that stretched as far as the eye could see between them; and a steep drop into a gray ocean behind the gate. More importantly, it was a planet of randomly attacking land tsunamis.

It had come from across that wide plain of stones, though Rodney hadn't really noticed it when it was just a dark ribbon low on the horizon. Especially not since he had been squirming around under the DHD at the time, up to his elbows in its crystalline intestines. There was something different about its composition, a fascinating anomaly detected by the energy signals the MALP had picked up, and confirmed when Rodney had opened it up to find several additions to the standard crystal banks. He'd had Sheppard and Teyla working on the gate itself, going over it with measuring equipment, recording the readings for the team of scientists who would be back here as soon as Rodney could figure out what he was looking at, and which people he would need.

Ronon had been the furthest away from the gate, checking out their surroundings. Supposedly watching their backs, though to be fair, there was very little even Ronon could do against what amounted to a shallow, fast-moving sea. Plus, while Rodney was working very hard to not have his last thoughts be about what he did wrong and Ronon did right, Ronon had warned them. Sort of. Rodney had simply assumed that it wasn't all that bad -- water trickling in from distant rains, or something, maybe going to get their feet wet. Maybe even force them back to Atlantis for dry clothes. It was only when it drew near with the speed of a charging rhino and the hiss and roar of angry snakes fighting equally pissed-off lions, rattling the heavy boulders like so many grains of sand, that the magnitude of the phenomenon became obvious.

At least he had managed to get Sheppard and Teyla back to safety. Here the tsunami itself had helped, literally sweeping the struggling colonel off his feet and into the gate to Atlantis that Rodney had managed to dial open before he lost his own footing and tools and any sense of what was up and down. Teyla had seemed equally tempted to throw her grasp of basic physics to the wind and dive headlong into the billions of tons of water that were crushing down on Rodney, but Ronon had yelled something -- Ronon hadn't heard what, he'd been too busy doing his own screaming at the time -- and then she was gone, too. Back to Atlantis, Rodney really didn't want to consider any other possibilities. Which left Ronon, last seen charging towards the gate, and himself, floating gracefully as a turnip in the sudden, raging sea. Boulders flashed by over his feet and under his head and his eyes were stinging and his nose was burning and he was gulping down more water than air.

Rodney had been dragged under again, his BDU and tac vest wet lead molded to his body, making him sink. Tugged against a rock, he kicked, since his feet happened to be underneath him at that moment. The kick sent him bobbing up like a less buoyant cork, and that's when he knew he was really dead and this was not fair. A surprise sea he might have survived, but the improvised waterfall cascading off the edge of the cliffs half a klick from the gate he never would, and that was exactly where he was headed right now -- him and the rest of the water, gushing towards the tall drop into the roaring ocean, the permanent ocean, too far below.

The edge was there, right there, foaming and frothing and on Earth people paid to see pretty waterfalls from a safe distance but this was not pretty, it was horrible and terrifying and no amount of thrashing could convince the monstrous current not to toss him over the edge like a chewed up piece of gum through the window of a speeding car.

Rodney was going over, he was going to die, it was shockingly clear to him, and it was stupid and he was going to get smashed, a pointless, painful death -- and something did smash into him, along with all that water, something soggy and softer than a rock, though almost as solid, and it said "Got you". There was a ridiculous whiff of wet leather, and Rodney felt strong arms wrap tightly around him, another body pressed so close around him that he couldn't even open his mouth to speak Ronon's name -- it was all going too fast, falling together towards the surface with spray rushing up with a whistle of wind in his ears, and they were crushed between the two roaring oceans, pulled under, and there were bubbles, white bubbles and red pain and a silent blue darkness that swallowed them whole.

Rodney woke up to a headache as if his skull was being crushed between a rock and a hard place. Everything was extremely uncomfortable, and he was shivering, and each shiver that wracked through his body sent a sharp spike of pain through the pounding in his head. The pain wormed its way through the rest of the body, gnawing dully at every nerve. This was not good. He couldn't even hold on to the vague hope that the damned land tsunami had been nothing but a bad dream brought on by the really disastrous combination of ruus wine and too much coffee, because dreams didn't hurt, and the Athosians didn't have beds carved out of damned rock.

On the bright side, he didn't think he was dead, which was a point in this scenario's favor. A very, very small point. Rodney really didn't want to open his eyes, because he was pretty sure what he would see
would make the point so minuscule as to need a microscope to count. But what was he -- man or ostrich?

Mole, maybe. Rodney blinked. No, his eyes were open -- it was just that dark, wherever he was. Could be night. Hadn't been night before, he didn't think, but he could always hope. Dark, and cold, and hard -- oh, god. He was in a dungeon. It even smelled like a dungeon -- dank, with lots of less pleasant undertones that made nausea spike in his gut. He moved to wrap his arms around his shaking body, and his hands brushed a wall about three inches from his nose. Hard stone. Hard, dank stone. Roughly hewn, and radiating a deep chill.

If he was at a nose-length away from the stuff, he was probably lying down on it, too. No wonder his back hurt. With a groan, Rodney tried to shove upright. His muscles weren't really cooperating. Stiff and sore and feeling for all the world like they'd been ripped out and replaced with old, worn-out elastic bands. There was a lot of trembling going on, he noticed with vague disapproval. And pain, too, unspecified pain all over.

Right then, his mind kicked into a slightly higher gear than what a lame donkey could manage, and he realized there were a lot of things he needed to think about. For one -- how had he gone from dying horribly from drowning and tumbling down a waterfall to being in a dungeon? There was that, and then -- Rodney's muscles all locked in place. Not him -- them. The last thing he could remember was Ronon grabbing him, falling together, since Ronon had decided to go for a spectacular superhero dive, only to fail on the triumphant superhero flying away from danger. That part Ronon really did need to practice more. But -- Ronon had been there, right there, and now?

Another groan, and Rodney managed to force his body to sit upright. He squinted into the darkness. A vague, blue light spilled in from somewhere up on Rodney's left -- from behind bars, of course. A small window, high up and set with bars, because this was a dungeon. A cell in a dungeon in which he was locked up. Locked up, but still busy -- he had teammates to find (well, hopefully just the one) and injuries to catalog. He swallowed, hard. Panic could wait. The faint blue light was absorbed by the darkness before it reached the hard cell floor, so Rodney couldn't even tell how big the room was.

"Ronon?" Ow. That was barely a croak. How could his throat feel so dry, after all that water? He cleared it, making a harsh sound, and tried again. "Ronon?" The lack of reply made a a bunch of things inside him tighten up, as if his existing internal organs had been shoved aside to make room for a whole new organ designed to move panic and worry around his body more efficiently.

Rodney hesitated. From the way the sound of his voice carried -- or rather, didn't carry -- the cell couldn't be very big. It probably didn't have a big hole waiting to swallow him and send him down a chute to a secret oubliette either, so he could actually attempt to move, and not just strain his ears listening for some kind of reply. If there had been one, he might have missed it, if Ronon was -- sleeping, or over in the next cell, or something.

It wasn't impossible, because there was background noise here -- halfway familiar, but all wrong. Water, maybe, and the hum of power or lots of voices talking, he couldn't be sure. There was the fast beating of his own heart -- too fast, that really couldn't be good -- and his own shivery breathing. Which -- echoed? Was he imagining things, or were those slow breaths coming from somewhere through the dark?

"Ronon?" Rodney winced as he shifted his weight on his hands and knees. His pain was becoming more eloquent, and one of his knees was really getting into the whole thing, throbbing with gusto as he felt his way across the rough stone floor. "Ronon, I really, really hope that's you," he muttered. 'Things that live in dark holes' was something else he'd rather not consider right now.

No reply. It was aggravating. "Hey, Ronon! Ronon, you can wake up now." Rodney must have shuffled his way across a good two or three meters now -- the light overhead was at a different angle, which he would be able to estimate more exactly once his head stopped pounding so damn much.

His eyes were finally adjusting to the supremely dim light in here, because by now he could make out a more solid black backdrop to the general darkness -- the wall on the other side of the cell. He anxiously scanned the bottom of it for a big lump of sleeping Satedan. Rodney's eyes caught on another faint light. It was the regular, hairline outline a door, and below that -- blocking the bottom part of the rectangle, making it easier to make out -- was a shape that looked familiar even under these dismal lighting conditions.

Crawling wasn't fast, and Rodney somehow forgot about how important it was to keep breathing. By the time he'd gotten to Ronon's side and felt a pulse under the tentative fingers he'd put on his teammate's neck, he was seeing brighter spots swim around the darkness. His sigh of relief was turned into a gulp, interrupted by his lungs' demand for air. "A pulse, you've got a pulse -- that's good, keep doing that."

Ronon's skin felt cold and clammy -- sort of like Rodney's own. Dungeons, he reminded himself. They'd do that. He frowned. There was something else he should probably be remembering, something he should be noticing, but the strong, steady beat under his fingers was oddly compelling. The breathing too -- he could hear it more clearly now, and it was definitely the sound of air going in and out of Ronon's lungs. "Good. Breathing. Breathing is good." For a little while, he just sat there next to Ronon, feeling Ronon's heartbeat and his own, listening to their breathing.

Once he felt confident that they both had the hang of beating hearts and breathing lungs, he decided that waking up would be a good next step. And not just for Ronon -- for both of them, since this headache was making him all fuzzy around the edges, like he was trying to see his own thoughts through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. But at least he was making an effort, sitting up and all. He told Ronon as much, and stressed how important it was to wake up, but it wasn't until he shook the sleeping man lightly by the shoulder that Ronon decided to pay attention.

Ronon woke up the same way Ronon did a lot of other things -- silently, and quite violently. There was no warning. One moment Ronon was doing his best impression of a sack of potatoes, the next his hands were around Rodney's neck.

"Stop it, let go, it's me," Rodney choked, batting at Ronon's obscenely muscular arms.

"McKay?" The grip around Rodney's throat eased a little.

"Yes! Let me go!"

The pressure disappeared. "Sorry."

Rodney coughed. His chest hurt more than his throat. "No, that's all right. Waking up in a dungeon makes me homicidal, too."

"Yeah." He felt more than saw Ronon slump back against the door. Squinting, he could just make out Ronon's head tilted a little forward, his arms at an awkward sort of angle over his chest. "Are you okay? Are you hurt? How did we get here?"

Ronon's head came up, his eyes glittering strangely in the dimness. "You don't remember?"

"Remember what?"

"They brought us here," Ronon said by way of non-explanation.

"Who? What?"

"McKay. You were there."

"I was?"

"Yeah."

Rodney's brain was scrambling to catch up with the information it was getting. "What? Wait. I was awake for this?"

Ronon paused. "Seemed like it."

"Oh. Okay." No, wait. That was not okay. "Oh, no. Oh, no, I've got amnesia. This is bad -- antegrade amnesia, could be a serious concussion -- look at my pupils!"

"McKay!" Ronon growled, and Rodney realized he'd been hearing his name for a little while now.

"Right. It's dark. Do you have any of your gear?" Rodney froze. Did he have any of his gear himself? He patted himself down, feeling torn, damp cloth and nothing much else. His vest was gone, the pockets of his BDU empty. Well. This certainly explained some of the chill he'd been feeling. God, he hated concussions, and now he was probably getting hypothermia, too.

"They took it. You really don't remember?" There was an edge to Ronon's voice.

"What, don't you ever get concussed?" he snapped.

"No."

"Right." Of course, he would get swept off and captured together with someone who probably rode down waterfalls for fun, and who had escaping from Wraith imprisonment down to a fine art. Though right now Rodney decided that Ronon's proficiency was more useful than humiliating. After all, their recent Hiveship excursion would have been less pleasant if it hadn't been for Ronon and his knives.

Another little bit of Rodney's brain unscrambled itself with a brief burst of extra pain, and the certain knowledge that he was missing an important factor in the escape equation he'd started drawing up. Somewhere recently, there had been something -- he blinked. Ronon was silent now, but Ronon's silence could say a lot. Like when Rodney had asked him if he was hurt, and Ronon hadn't answered, and -- "Oh, god. You're hurt, aren't you?" Rodney turned to Ronon, hands hovering uncertainly just over the outline of a body he could barely see. He seemed to be in one piece, but it was so dark. "Are you bleeding -- I can make a tourniquet. Unless that will just make things worse -- don't tourniquets sometimes make things worse?"

"I'm not bleeding." Ronon's vague answer did nothing to calm Rodney down. Not bleeding was not the same as not having every bone in his body broken, and Rodney couldn't see enough to do anything.

"This sucks." Rodney settled down next to Ronon, his back to the door. It was just as cold as the walls had been. He shivered, and scooted a little closer to Ronon -- not close enough to jostle any broken bones, but then Ronon moved too, and their shoulders were touching. It was only marginally warmer than leaning against dank stone, but Rodney didn't protest when Ronon shifted up against him.

"So, what happened?" he asked, because if he had a damned gap in his memories, he needed all the facts he could get.

Ronon shared what he knew, which wasn't much. Rodney quizzed him for more information (it was definitely quizzing, not 'pestering', no matter what Ronon said), and distantly noticed what was either the slowest light bulb or fastest sunrise he had ever seen spark through life outside the window.

Apparently, after going over the edge of the waterfall, Ronon had managed to get them both back to the surface, and then he'd found a handy rock to hold on to until some guys showed up in a weird little boat. The way Ronon told the story, it sounded like no big deal, but Rodney had seen the sea. He had seen the waves, and he hadn't seen any rocks at all. Ronon conveniently glossed over how much time he'd spent on whatever desperate perch he had found. Ronon did stress the fact that Rodney had apparently been awake enough to insult him for not rescuing him to some warmer, drier place, but Rodney snorted and blamed it all on blunt force trauma.

Light streamed through the barred window, pink on black. It cleared a space for itself in the darkness, which muted into soft shadows in the corners. For the first time since waking up, Rodney could actually see, rather than feel his way around like a nearsighted bat. He grasped one of the many opportunities provided by being able to see to turn and give Ronon a once-over. His idle curiosity twisted into an ugly kind of shock.

"Oh, god. Ronon, your hands, how -- what -- why didn't you say anything?" Ronon's hands looked as if he'd run them through a mixer, all scraped raw and swollen and, oh, that looked remarkably painful, and Rodney found himself going a little green. He swallowed, but couldn't stop staring.

Ronon stirred to life. "S'okay. Most of them are just dislocated," he said with a nod at his mangled fingers.

"Just?"

"I've had worse."

Rodney's jaw worked for a couple of seconds, unable to form actual words. Because he knew it had to be true. The way Ronon was just sitting there, not complaining at all when his fingers, his hands -- it wasn't all warrior training or stoicism, it was just the way things were for Ronon, and he'd learned to deal. What it must take for a man to get to that point -- Rodney ruthlessly shoved those thoughts aside, together with the leap of logic he'd just made to answer the how part. Hanging onto a rock and an unconscious scientist while hungry waves washed over you -- okay, that was enough guilt for now. "Having had worse doesn't mean you shouldn't say something! Why didn't you -- wait. Are you having worse right now? You are, aren't you, that's why you're haven't been beating down the door trying to escape!"

Ronon grimaced. "Right leg. Clean break. It'll heal fine."

"If they come and fix you, yes! Where are they, why haven't Sheppard and Teyla come back for us yet? I sent them back, I know I did -- our rescue is getting to be way overdue, here!" Rodney could hear his own voice climbing ridiculously high, which explained why Ronon was not-so-subtly leaning away from him. It didn't stop him from cursing the slowest rescuers in the history in rescues, as well as captors who'd just throw injured people in dungeons and not come to check up on them.

When he finally paused, he was feeling much warmer. Ronon was looking at him with a mixture of annoyance and amusement. Rodney glared at him, and then his eyes skidded to Ronon's other shoulder. It wasn't the one he hadn't been leaning against, thank goodness, because it looked like a textbook case of "painful" -- one giant, swollen bruise. Rodney sucked in a breath.

"Okay, this is ridiculous. You've done something to your shoulder, too, haven't you?"

Ronon shrugged -- a one-shouldered shrug, Rodney noticed. "It's not like you can fix it," he said calmly.

"You don't know that!" Rodney snapped back. "I have my CPR cert, and I've read a lot of medical literature, I'll have you know!"

Ronon gave him a doubtful look. "What? Carson does it all the time, and I'm a genius!" And with that, he sat up straight, facing Ronon. His hands hovered somewhere between the two of them, uncertain.

"I'm just going to -- um." Rodney made a vague gesture, pointing back and forth between Ronon and himself. He quickly maneuvered himself so that he was on Ronon's other side, managing to avoid Ronon's eyes all the while. Then he tried to place one hand on Ronon's shoulder in a confident manner. He was still cold enough that his fingers trembled slightly, pale against the vivid bruising. Since he could keep his hands steady though fixing nuclear weapons on no sleep at all, it had to be the cold.

Rodney leaned over to examine the part of Ronon's shoulder he could see, pushing Ronon's short sleeve aside. Ronon winced, and Rodney snatched his hand away as if he'd been burned.

"Sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to -- it's just that it's really hard to see, with your shirt. Maybe you could..." He made a complicated, gesture to indicate that he wasn't really asking his teammate to strip, but that the shirt was hindering his efficiency in delivering any kind of medical assistance.

Ronon gave him a long look.

"Or I could take a look at your leg," Rodney suggested, already prepared to back down when Ronon pulled his shirt up with his good arm.

It was already torn up, so together they worked it off without too much effort, and Rodney set the damp cloth aside.

"Okay -- any other injuries I should know about?" Rodney looked over Ronon critically. And froze, because right there, below Ronon's fang necklace, was an ugly, puckered mark he knew only too well. He'd seen it up close on Gaul, on Abrams, on others they'd been too slow to save. He stared -- he'd known Ronon's history, of course, but only as abstract facts, a few lines in a report back to Earth a year ago. Knowing was different from seeing it like this, written in Ronon's skin, standing out from all the other scrapes and bruises.

This time it was Ronon who looked away. His expression was unreadable, but the way he turned to offer Rodney his injured shoulder was clear. This was no time to linger over old scars. And Rodney was going to let it go, really, he was -- but then he caught sight of the deep furrows carved into Ronon's back, and his fingers stilled on Ronon's shoulder.

"What?" Ronon asked, shifting warily.

"Um," Rodney stuttered. "Nothing, really, except --" Except that at some point, the Wraith had aborted their feeding on Ronon only to cut him open. Had inserted a piece of their vile technology deep into his living tissue, and the thought made Rodney's flesh crawl and his teeth stand on end. He tried not to imagine how many minutes he would have lasted after that, in Ronon's situation.

"Except, this shoulder -- I think it's been dislocated." Focusing on the odd, hard angle the shoulder was sticking out on, the way it felt too soft beneath the bruises -- it still made Rodney feel a little sick, but at least it was something they could both deal with, right now.

Ronon settled a little under Rodney's hands. "Feels that way," he admitted.

Trying to think more like Ronon, and less like himself, Rodney steeled himself. "Yes, so. Do you want to try and pop it back in?"

"Yeah."

Rodney screwed his eyes shut. God. This was disgusting, he wasn't sure he could do it, at least not without throwing up. "Okay. Um. I think, if you --"

"Here." Ronon's wounded hand nudged his own, moving it so it had a steady grip. "Just do what I tell you."

Rodney nodded, teeth clenched too hard for speech. He listened to Ronon's brief instructions over the sound of his own violently beating heart, thinking about how he really couldn't pass out now, because Ronon was counting on him. He could do it.

And he did. It was every bit as disturbing as he'd imagined it would be, and after it was done they were both pale and breathing hard, but he was still conscious, and Ronon's shoulder did look -- well, it still looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to it. But at least now it had been tended to, even if it was just in a basic first aid kind of way, and that made Rodney feel better.

Rodney was just putting the last hand to the sling he had improvised of Ronon's discarded shirt, when a noise rose above the background murmur. Muted through the thick door, it was still recognizable as footsteps, and they were coming closer.

They both tensed, and looked up. Ronon started moving, as if he wanted to stand up. Rodney stopped him -- hello, broken leg! -- and instead helped him move over to lean against the wall opposite the door.

Before it could swing open, Rodney scrambled to his feet. He felt oddly vulnerable without the familiar weight of his vest, and with his hands empty of any weapons or equipment. He'd never before realized how much he liked his P90. He missed the presence of his more martially inclined teammates between himself and the door even more than he missed his weapon. But he squared his shoulders. He was the only one fit enough to do any standing right now, so he stood. Arms crossed, chin up. Still a little unsteady on his legs, but he was confident that his attitude more than made up for any physical weakness.

The heavy door swung inwards, slowly and silently. The shadows on the cell floor shifted with the influx of new, white light on the dark stones. Rodney first registered two important things about the shape standing in the doorway -- one, it was uniformed, and two, it was carrying some kind of gun. He'd already had the time to groan before he realized it wasn't a Genii uniform, and the gun wasn't one he'd been threatened by before.

Rodney looked up from the gun, and found the man holding it. He had blond hair pulled back in a tight queue, and cold blue eyes. His uniform was a gray and black with some kind of round, purple insignia over his heart. He was flanked by two henchmen -- well, one henchman and one henchwoman, both sporting the same kind of queue, both lacking any circles on their monochrome uniforms.

The man made a gesture with the barrel of his gun that Rodney, through two years experience with armed captors of various kinds knew meant 'move over or I'll shoot you'. Rodney was sure it was supposed to be very intimidating, but right now his headache made it hard to care. He might have rolled his eyes as took a step back, coming to stand right in front of Ronon's outstretched legs.

"So, these are the demons of the Three Dark Moons," the man said thoughtfully.

"Excuse me?" Rodney said.

The man looked at him as if surprised that Rodney spoke. "You came during the night of the Three Dark Moons -- an unlucky time, when evil walks the world."

"We weren't walking, we were floating," Rodney said, because how did you argue with that kind of utter lack of logic? "Besides, it was day when we got here." That point won, he moved to his brilliant conclusion. "So we're not demons. Now, can we get someone in here to fix his leg?"

The man's lips quirked in a humorless smile, showing a predatory glint of teeth. "I fear you misunderstand me -- I'm afraid I don't know your name?"

Rodney drew himself up a little straighter. "Doctor Rodney McKay."

"I am Til Va Corrin," the man nodded pleasantly. "And I never said that I thought you were demons, Doctor Rodney McKay."

"That's very enlightened of you," Rodney offered. "Does that mean you'll let us go?"

Til -- the Til? -- shook his head. "I am not beholden to the old ways. Others here are. I have been tasked with their protection. From all dangers, including demons."

"But you just said--"

"That I don't think you are anything but mortal men, yes." His eyes narrowed, and his gun was raised a fraction higher. "I think that you are Wraith-worshiping spies."

Ronon reacted before Til had spit out the last word. He growled, actually growled, low in his throat, and Rodney took an automatic step closer to him, getting firmly between his teammate and the very stupid man in the doorway.

"We're not Wraith worshipers," Ronon snarled from behind Rodney. Til, far from being intimidated, seemed coldly amused. He walked closer, his gun trailed on Rodney while he cocked his head to look at Ronon. His henchpeople followed, making the small cell feel very crowded.

"Well, Ronon -- that was your name, yes? Ronon. If you were Wraith worshipers, that's exactly the sort of thing you would say."

"What? That's insane! Does that mean that if we say we are Wraith worshipers, we aren't?" Rodney's head was really hurting too much for him to argue with imaginary logic.

"No. You know exactly how to say what we want to hear -- pretending to be just like us, before selling us out the Wraith." Til's voice was rising, and there was a strange, feverish light in his eyes that frightened Rodney much more than the gun had. This wasn't just a job for the guy -- this was a mission, a sacred conviction. This wasn't about protecting anyone -- this was a Pegasus galaxy witch hunt. "You think you're so much better than us, think that the Wraith will protect you -- well, you are sorely mistaken if you think your lying ways will work in my Haven."

Rodney swallowed. God help them, they were dealing with a fanatic.

"You're wrong," Ronon's voice was low, and tight with anger. Rodney was roughly shoved aside by Til, and by some unseen signal his flunkies knew to step in and grab him by the arms before he could recover his balance.

"We'd never work with th--" Ronon was still talking when Til walked up to him, and kicked him in the stomach.

The blood drained from Rodney's face, and he sucked in a breath as Ronon doubled over, gasping. "Stop it!" The next few seconds were a blur to Rodney -- his own voice shouting, rough hands on his bruised arms, Ronon adding his own curses to Rodney's, and through it all he could hear Til's henchwoman's low giggle, a sound as out of place as a rose in a Wraith hive.

Til turned his face to Rodney, his calm expression not quite composed enough to smooth out all the edges of his raging insanity. His lackey had fallen silent. "Maybe if you tell me the truth, I won't execute you right now," Til said, emphasizing the last two words by aiming his gun dead between Ronon's eyes.

They might have disarmed Ronon, but the look he was giving Til through his damp hair held more daggers than he'd ever carried on his person. From the tension in his shoulders, Rodney suspected he was about three seconds away from trying to grab the gun from Til.

"Don't," he said, desperately, trying to lock eyes with Ronon.

"Don't what?" Til said, because of course everything was about him.

"Don't -- you can't do this, we're not Wraith worshipers or spies or whatever paranoid delusion you're suffering! We're explorers, we came through the gate when it was still light, we were just--"

"You were just what?" Til asked, his voice low and deadly. Ronon hadn't moved. Rodney's hands clenched, and he tried ineffectively to wriggle free of the grunts' grasp.

"Looking around," Rodney said. "Before the giant wave snatched us up--"

"The water of the Three Moons, yes," Til said, and then gestured impatiently with the gun, even though he was the one who had interrupted Rodney. "What were you doing?"

"Exploring! It's what we do, we're explorers, I told you -- we didn't know there was anyone here."

"Where do you come from?"

Oh, crap. Rodney's mouth fell shut. He wished Teyla was here. Teyla could always lay things out in that steady, reasonable tone. She could probably have found some way of explaining how his lack of security clearance meant the fanatic nutcase couldn't actually be told the truth. Atlantis was still supposed to be destroyed -- he couldn't blow their cover now, but --

Til didn't give him any time to come up with a decent lie. He just closed the distance between them, and swung the gun around to clip Rodney across the face with the barrel and the back of his hand.

Rodney's head snapped to the side, deafening pain thundering through him, stirring up stars and leaving him with the taste of blood choking him. The only thing keeping him upright was the pitiless grip the uniforms on either side had of him. He groaned, which made him cough, and it was horribly miserable and painful and didn't get better by the fact that Til stood impassively right in front of him. Waiting to beat up the injured man some more, no doubt. It was like a cat with a mouse, if a cat would ever sink so low as to have two of its buddies holding the mouse down.

Pain was ringing in his ears and shooting down from his head, waking the nausea coiled in his stomach. Rodney was so distracted by trying to keep from throwing up violently at the dangerous man with the gun that he missed when Ronon first started getting up. He caught on pretty quickly once Til turned to stare, though.

Ronon had hoisted himself upright using the wall -- all of his weight on his right leg, the arm not in a sling pressed back against the rock to steady him, and he still managed to look magnificently threatening. He was naturally gifted that way. "Leave him alone," Ronon warned.

It was deeply satisfying to see Til flinch back, ever so slightly, before he raised a cool eyebrow at Ronon. No doubt he'd mentally run through his list of assets, and come out several henchpeople, guns, and working arms and legs ahead of Ronon.

"We're not spies. This was an accident," he continued.

"I've already told you--" Til snarled, but Ronon cut him off.

"We would've drowned if your men hadn't found us. Seems like a stupid way to start a mission, if it was one," Ronon said, with the kind of impeccable logic that came from not being concussed. Or being used to thinking through concussions -- this was Ronon, after all.

"Listen to him!" Rodney panted, the most he could contribute to the current goings-on.

For a moment, it seemed as if Til was thinking it over. At least he wasn't hitting anyone, which was the most rational he'd been for most of the too-long time Rodney had known him. Then he snapped once more. "No! No, I won't be fooled by your kind again--!"

Again? Crap, crap, crap. Rodney wished his hands were free, so that he could bury his face in them. Nothing like having failed utterly once to send you right over the edge of dedication and into madness. Especially when there were Wraith involved.

Til advanced on Ronon, his gun out. "I could execute you right here. It would be better than what you deserve."

Rodney's teeth ground around a curse. "Listen, we can explain," he said, desperately, because he could, if Til would just listen to him. As he'd recently reminded Ronon, he was a genius.

"No!"

And then Rodney was staring down the muzzle of a gun held by someone who right now made Kolya seem like an eccentric but kindly old uncle. The world grew very small. Very small, very muzzle-shaped. Rodney was still breathing -- still talking, actually -- but unless Sheppard and Teyla showed up right away he wasn't sure how long he'd keep doing either.

"No?" A new voice spoke the word in a very pointed question. Rodney's mouth closed. "But I have always found explanations from living men so much more informative than the blood of dead ones." It was a woman, somewhere behind Rodney, and for a wild, elated moment he thought rescue had arrived. Then he realized that Teyla would probably have caused more of a fuss. His celebration stillborn, Rodney looked over at Ronon, trying to judge how apprehensive he should be of this new development.

Ronon's entire body still looked like he was planning on taking Til on and winning, but there was the hint of something calmer in his eyes when they fixed on whoever was standing behind the henchguys.

"Come on, move aside." There was a bit of shuffling around, each guard trying to tug Rodney in a different direction.

"I take it the prisoners have been disarmed, Til?" The answer was affirmative, of course, and the woman's voice was dry when she continued. "Then your people may step outside. I'm sure we will be perfectly safe together."

Rodney stumbled as the hands gripping him vanished. A strong hand under his elbow was the first he saw of the woman who had come to his rescue. "Yes, quite safe, I daresay," she said with a cool glance at Til.

She reminded Rodney of Teyla -- she could have been Teyla's aunt, maybe, dressed in Sunday fineries, if the Athosians had Sundays. Her face wrinkled, her long silver hair in a braid, she had that calm strength that Rodney he had come to associate with Athosian women. She wasn't Sheppard, or Teyla, but he had never been happier to see a complete stranger in his life.

"Please, Lina. Stand back, we don't know --"

"I know these men are in no shape to pose a threat to me," she interrupted Til. Lina was obviously not familiar with Ronon, who was always in shape to pose a threat, but Rodney wasn't going to tell her that. Rodney himself did his best to look utterly harmless, which wasn't very difficult at all.

"I have brought my aides. Let them administer to these people's injuries, and then have them sent to the reception chamber." Her tone took a stern turn. "Without any bloodshed, please."

"As you will," Til said, curtly.

Lina let go of Rodney's arm, and nodded at him and Ronon. "I will see you soon."

She left in a swirl of her long, aqua coat. Three people bustled into the cell after her exit -- none of them wearing anything like a uniform, Rodney noted with considerable relief. He took the opportunity to duck past Til and go stand by Ronon's side. The aides clustered around them, and Rodney took charge of the situation, ordering them about with comfortable familiarity of long habit. They seemed more confused than resentful at his manner. As long as Til didn't get too close, Ronon stayed calm, pragmatically allowing the two men and young woman to tend to him.

The aides had brought decent first-aid supplies -- clean bandages, splints, and some kind of ointment which they rubbed all over Ronon's shoulder and fingers, and Rodney's knee. They offered no clean clothes, but they had brought enough dry cloth that Rodney could rub himself down. They worked efficiently and quietly, not talking more than absolutely necessary. Of course, being interrupted by things like the setting of broken bones did distract a little from polite conversation.

During that particular process, Rodney babbled inane assurances that Ronon was doing fine, that it was looking great, and Ronon glared at him even as he turned a sickly shade of pale beneath his tan. At which point Rodney should probably have stopped talking, but the words were the only thing he had that distracted him from giving in to the urge to do a little manly passing out.

With that ordeal behind them, they were both a little drier and less dirty and more bandaged than they had been. The younger of the men invited them to follow him to Lina. It was time to go. Rodney suspected that Ronon's tolerance of the strangers wouldn't stretch to relying on them for support. As they stood, Rodney insinuated himself under Ronon's good arm. Ronon looked quizzically at him.

"What? You can't walk with only one leg, and you're not going to hop to our appointment, are you?"

Ronon answered with a flash of his teeth. "I could," he said.

"Yes, and that would definitely give the impression we want to give, of being sane, rational, non-demon possessed people," Rodney shot back at him, without much heat.

Ronon gave him another assessing glance, then some of his considerable weight settled more solidly onto Rodney's shoulders. Right then he was intensely grateful to Lina for her aides' ointment -- now that was some good voodoo. His knee hardly hurt at all. So if they could just arrange for him to soak in a tub of the stuff, he would be be fine, battered body and slowly breaking back and all.

Their guide led them out of the cell, where Til and the guards closed in behind them. The corridor outside was warmer and less dank, and the dark stone here was cut as smooth as velvet. The white light they had seen in the cell came from what looked like round stones set high in the ceiling. Rodney thought they might be Ancient, from their design, but he had no way of knowing without taking a closer look. Asking questions was not going to happen -- Til would probably take it the entirely wrong way, thinking it was Rodney's cunning way of spying for the Wraith.

Their footsteps, slow and halting as they were, echoed loudly as they passed another few doors, and then headed down a curving hallway that sloped gently downwards. It was like being inside of a giant black seashell, with this constant, indistinct mumble like the sea around them.

They passed a few people on their way, who all ducked their head politely to their guide, and then stared at the odd procession with an unsettling mix of unabashed curiosity and dread. Even Rodney noticed that they seemed to be a very diverse bunch. They reminded him of people he'd seen in the thriving market places Teyla had brought them to, coming from many different planets to sell and buy their goods and trade rumors and favors.

Ronon noticed it, too. "So it is a Haven," he said in a low voice.

"A what?"

"A Haven. I'd heard rumors. Didn't know they were real."

"But this is one, so they are," Rodney hurried Ronon through his explanation. "What are they?"

"A place to hide. People come from all over. Get away from the Wraith."

"No talking," Til warned them.

"But you've never been to one?" Rodney's curiosity was stronger than Til's low menace -- after all, that Lina woman had said 'no bloodshed'.

Ronon shook his head. "They wouldn't have welcomed someone like me," he said, and then he winced and they both stumbled as Til gave him a hard shove.

"Shut up!"

It was just a lucky coincidence that Til's orders matched Rodney's natural inclination to think, and not talk, at the moment.

Because, of course. People might have shunned him, but Ronon had been as much as a victim as anyone else -- more, even. He'd been taken, implanted with that horrible little device. He hadn't returned home -- hadn't wanted to bring the Wraith there. But he had nowhere else to turn, even with the Wraith quite literally at his heels. Even if he'd known about a place such as this Haven, he would never have risked drawing the Wraith's attention to it, even if they had been willing to offer him refuge. Rodney had thought he'd known exile when he'd been sent off to Siberia. Siberia was cold and distant, but they'd had all the latest scientific journals and their own beds and regular meals. Rodney had still been on the planet he'd called home for his entire life, and most importantly of all -- nobody had been hunting him for sport, trying to eat him on a regular basis.

This close, he could hear Ronon's labored, measured breathing. Keeping pace with Rodney, his face set in grim determination. Walking like he had run for so long. Stubborn to the point of insanity, ready to go on when Rodney himself had been quite sure all hope had been lost and they would die horribly. Rodney straightened up a little, taking more of Ronon's weight without complaint. In response, Ronon breathed a little easier.

"Through here," the guide spoke softly.

The hallway came to curved end, its wide walls slit with doors that spun open like those in the conference room back on Atlantis. The architecture here was still vaguely mindful of marine life, but it was also very clearly Ancient -- Atlantis's midnight cousin. The room through the doors was lit in an aqua glow. Rodney noticed with interest that it came from behind giant, milky white ovals set in the black walls. It reminded him of a sunken city, of how the light through the windows had looked when Atlantis was still on the bottom of the Lantean ocean.

Inside, the walls were bare of any decorations, but the floor was covered by thick carpets in blues and greens. The furniture was made of some kind of glossy, chestnut wood -- there were several tables, spread with documents and pieces of machinery, ringed with high-backed chairs. The bits and pieces of their gear that the water hadn't stolen away from them, including Ronon's gun, lay on a small desk on the other side of the room.

Lina waited at the head of the biggest table, in the center of the room. It was a massive, oval piece, inlaid with fanciful designs in what looked like mother-of-pearl. There were only two other chairs by it, at the opposite end of the table. At Lina's gesture, Ronon sprawled into one of them, his leg stretched awkwardly in front of him, while Rodney gingerly installed himself in the other.

"So, you are the demons," Lina said, her face unreadable.

"Actually, as we were trying to explain," Rodney shot a dark look at Til, who was hovering within convenient beating-distance of them, "we're explorers."

"Yes. Of course. I am Lina Mael, Speaker for the Conclave of the Haven. And the report states that you are -- Doctor Rodney McKay?"

"That's me."

"And Ronon Dex."

Ronon hesitated, then he shrugged. "Yeah. Told your guys so when they fished us out of the damned ocean."

Lina looked at them both for a long moment, her hands folded on each other. "Well, gentlemen. You present me with quite the problem."

"How so?" Rodney asked.

"Your most unfortunate arrival during our night of the Three Dark Moons. The fact that some of our people think that you are demons." She held up a hand to still Rodney's protests. "The fact that others yet think you Wraith worshipers."

"We're not," Ronon said in a tone that indicated very clearly that he was tired of repeating himself.

Lina leaned slightly forward. "No. You, boy -- are you one of the Travelers?"

Rodney and Ronon exchanged a confused glance.

"No," Ronon said.

"Who?" Rodney asked.

Lina's wrinkles creased as she narrowed her eyes. "Satedan, then?"

Ronon's head came up. "Right," he said, with a hint of approval.

"Ah, yes. And considering Sateda..." She made a delicate gesture with one hand. "Perhaps even a Runner?"

Ronon nodded. "Used to be."

It was difficult to impress Rodney without the use of shiny Ancient technology or new kinds of math, but he had to admit that the old lady was pretty good.

"See, Til. A Runner. Not a Wraith worshiper -- Sateda never had that form of foul treachery -- and I would trust a former Runner over my own kin."

"What about the other one?" Til asked with a cold glare of his blue eyes for Rodney.

"I'm from Canada," Rodney explained quickly. "You probably haven't heard of it."

"A Kanadan and a Satedan?" Til was all skepticism.

"Canadian, actually. And, yes -- why not?"

"The Doctor is right. We here in the Haven know how adversity can bring the most different of people together. After all, the Conclave accepted your people's service as keepers of the peace, did we not?"

Til nodded stiffly. Whatever Lina was talking about, it was not one of his happy buttons. Of course, from what Rodney had seen of him, the guy's happy buttons numbered two, and were labeled 'pain' and 'death'.

"Yes," Lina said, and raised her folded hands to rest her chin on them, elbows on the table. "Which leaves me with the problem of you two."

"But we're not spies, or demons, or anything. We'd just like to -- get home? Through the gate?" Rodney didn't like the way she'd called them a problem.

"Nobody not of the Haven can leave."

"We'll, lovely as this stay has been," Rodney said with heavy sarcasm, "we really have other places we need to be."

"That, I am afraid, is impossible. I'm sure you can understand why. If word of our sanctuary got back -- no."

Ronon crossed his arms over his bandaged chest. "We need to get home," he said.

"Yes -- they'll be looking for us!" They would be, already -- the real question was why Sheppard and Teyla hadn't managed to find them yet.

"That is not your concern," Lina said sternly.

"I'm sorry, but from where we're sitting, I really think it is!"

Til took a step towards him, and Rodney flinched, instinctively. He hadn't seen Lina give any sign, but Til froze as suddenly as he had moved. Now he was close enough that another punch would really hurt, Rodney thought, and his split lip and bruised cheek throbbed a little harder.

Lina didn't pay Til any heed -- but she didn't call him off, either.

"Okay, then. What do people do to stay?" Ronon asked.

Rodney turned to him, incredulous. "Stay? We can't stay, we've got -- home. Remember home? Where they need me? A lot, for everything." He said the last with a meaning look at Lina. He was an important person -- killing him would be a terrible waste of his genius.

Ronon shook his head, obviously picking up on something Rodney was missing. He addressed Lina again. "Like I said. What does it take, to join your Haven?" There was a glint of challenge in his eyes.

The cut from the knife hardly hurt at all. When everything else on him did, that should have been a relief, but between the heat searing his exposed skin and the fumes making his eyes sting, Rodney didn't have the energy for positive thinking. Positive thinking took a lot of energy -- it was far better to just be realistic, and accept that everything that hadn't gone to hell yet probably would, and sooner rather than later.

Take his current situation. Old saying were often annoyingly vague or inaccurate, but -- out of the frying pan and into the fire, that was him. Or to be precise -- out of the dungeon and into the giant underground volcano. Lovely.

And his freshly bandaged hand did hurt, as he hoisted himself over another crumbled wall. Not as much as his other injuries, of which he had many, but enough to make him curse the stupid bonding ritual and of course it had to involve knives. Rodney had accused Til of making it up on the spot, but Lina had given him a stern look, and Ronon had squeezed his hand a little harder, and he wasn't even sure the knife that had nicked them had been clean. It had probably not been sterilized. It had probably been full of alien microbes, and now his hand was going to get infected and he was going to die.

But not yet. He was too busy to die right now. From the hot, red glow licking the walls and ceiling of the chamber ahead of him, there was another open source of magma somewhere down on what had been the floor of a lower-level chamber. And Rodney had to get from one end of this former corridor to the other. Former corridor -- currently a ledge, precariously attached to the wall some meters above the lethal stew of molten rocks waiting below.

Rodney adjusted the cloth hung over his mouth and nose. It had been soaked with the same bitter concoction that they had made him swallow before sending him in here, but by now it was almost completely dry. All of his clothes were. That was another thing he might have found in his heart to be grateful for, if it hadn't been for the fact that they were getting so hot to the touch that he kept expecting them to ignite.

Rodney stepped through the archway, and carefully touched the wall reaching up to the ceiling -- not too hot. This glossy black rock that Haven was constructed of did have some interesting properties. But he could develop a passion for geology later -- for now, he was simply desperate for something to lean against as he braved the perilous passage. Some parts of the corridor's wall towards the open chamber below still remained, but the chunks of black rock embedded in great, rough globs of solidified magma were too low to serve as anything but a constant reminder of just how violent the volcanic activity could get in here. Further proof towards the McKay theorem of 'we're so screwed'.

"Don't look down, don't look down," Rodney mumbled as he shuffled his way forward. Then he did. It was like looking into a stargate to hell. Instead of being watery blue, this was liquid fire. It was set deep in the floor, where the boiling rock had come welling up, an unstoppable force. The magma pool was contained right now, but from the way the rest of the ground was an uneven, dull black, it was clear that it had swept up and covered the floor at some point. Or several points, actually. And the hole itself was right below Rodney.

"Oh, no." Rodney screwed his eyes shut. He could feel his knees growing weak, and cursed, because he had to keep moving. If he didn't, if he wavered now, he risked falling into that kettle of hellfire below. Panic squeezed his throat like a malevolent tie-knot. Falling down there would be a more horrible death than even regular burning to death, and then Ronon would die too, and it would be terribly bad all around. He managed move one foot, and then the other. Easy does it, little by little, not far now. He might have been speaking out loud -- he really didn't know anymore.

Didn't know anything except the heat and the fear and how wrong it was that he was the one trekking through a bad déjà vû of the supervolcano-planet. Ronon should have been the one doing this -- Ronon would have been good at it, would have been back already, blessed by the Ancestors and proven worthy and free to go about his business and all that. Instead, he had wagered his life on Rodney's -- what? His skills? Rodney didn't have any volcano-survival skills, not unless there were Ancient warships he could bring to life around, and he hadn't seen many of those here.

Maybe he should try asking Ronon about it again, when he got back. If he got back. He'd tried asking before setting out, on this journey to 'the old places', as Lina called them. He had called Ronon all sorts of things for choosing to trust Rodney with his life, instead of accepting the extension his injuries had earned him. But Ronon hadn't listened to anything Rodney said -- had just given him a flat stare, telling Rodney that there was no damned way he was waiting in a dungeon until the next triple eclipse, the syzygy that Rodney had finally figured out was what had drawn the monster tide across a whole continent.

Rodney himself hadn't had any choice at all -- he was as fit as most refugees arriving in Haven, and like them, he was expected to ask the Ancestor's permission to stay, and to bring proof of his journey. He had tried to argue that the others coming through the gate choose to do so knowing what awaited them on the other side, that he and Ronon hadn't known at all, that it wasn't fair. The plea had fallen on deaf ears. It had also fallen on Til, who had sneered that it proved they had no business there at all, and then delighted in telling them how anyone who failed to get the blessing was promptly 'returned to the tides'.

If he didn't make it back alive, Ronon was going to take a long walk off a short pier, literally. Barbaric, maybe, but it had served to protect this Haven from the Wraith for untold generations. Lina had laid out the terms and conditions for joining the community in a way that reminded Rodney of Elizabeth. Like Elizabeth Weir, Lina Mael wasn't a hard woman, but she put the safety of her people and her city before everything else. Before her own heart, even. Definitely before the lives of two bedraggled strangers fished out of the ocean on a cursed night.

A finger of colder air touched Rodney, and he lurched forward, surprised to find himself on solid ground. He was through the archway, was over the ledge of doom. His mind stuttered a little. He was in the damned mines of Moria. This was a giant underground hall, the ceiling lost in the red-tinted darkness. He could just make out passages heading in all directions -- not stairs, but the same sloping, curving pathways they had seen in Haven. Some went up, others went down, and Rodney's head felt faint.

Lina had given him instructions, had told him how to find the Chamber of Blessing, but he had been too busy panicking over the whole crossing liquid fire that had just been mentioned to remember what. He knew he should. Knew he could, when he wasn't toasted and concussed and miserable, and now he would get lost and wander endlessly in the dark and then starve to death, and it would totally serve Ronon right for deciding to claim beat-up, weak, volcano-crossing amateurs as his kin.

Rodney imagined the cut in his palm stung a little. Not only had Ronon been crazy enough to bet on Rodney's completing the Trial of Blessing without falling into pits of molten lava or getting lost or passing out from exhaustion. No. For Rodney to be allowed to take the blessing in Ronon's stead, he'd first had to argue with Lina and Til that Rodney was his family. Having admitted being from different planets made that rather difficult, and Rodney was too taken aback by the whole concept to be much help, but all of a sudden Ronon knew as much as Teyla about various local customs, and then they were swearing an oath that included blood.

Ronon, of course, hadn't seemed particularly bothered by that. But he hadn't seemed bothered by the whole family thing, either. He had just shrugged, and said, "We'll, we're a team, aren't we?", and that had been it.

Which left Rodney in the unenviable position of scuttling through a network of collapsed passages and bubbling magma flows. The geothermal forces of this planet had done quite a number on the Ancients' interior design for the past ten thousand years, but the rituals of Haven had stayed the same. Or maybe it had been a gauntlet from the very beginning, pits of hot lava and all -- Rodney didn't know, and he found that he didn't much care, either.

Right now he the only thing he cared about was remembering if Lina had said to go up or down after crossing the chamber with the ledge. "Think, think!" And no, thinking about sitting down and resting his eyes and especially thinking about food and water was right out. Wouldn't do any good. But he'd been walking for -- a while, a long while. Long enough to be parched from the heat, and hungry, despite the simple meal he had been served before heading down that deep, dark passage.

He walked towards the other side of the great chamber, and nonsensically, Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King started drifting through his mind, his fingers twitching with the long-forgotten habit of distilling all music he heard into chords to play. One could get lost in music, too, but then all one had to do was listen. Listen for the right way, listen for the dissonance -- a murmur as faint as a moth's wing.

Rodney shook himself, blinking furiously. The music fell silent. "Oh, no. No, no, no." That hadn't been a hallucination, but it was getting close. He was was beginning to let his mind wander down some seriously strange paths, and he hadn't even reached his goal yet. And once he did, if he did, he still had to go all the way back. Before next dawn. Because the terms and conditions had included a deadline -- the really deadly kind of deadline, the ones they should all be used to by now. But it was one thing to face them on Atlantis, with Zelenka and his science division at his back, or in the field with his team, and another to be dealing with them all alone in the dark. Been there, done that, and down that path lay hallucinations -- and possibly whales.

"No whales in here, though," he told the silent stones, and almost laughed. No whales -- no moths. But he'd heard -- something. A moth's wing! Right. Something soft, carried on the midnight silence of this place. A surprisingly clear thought manifested, scolding him for being an idiot and wasting his time babbling when he could be reasoning. The thought continued to analyze the sound for him -- not a moth's wing, but a running Ancient power source. Familiar. Almost soundless, but not quite. And it was coming from the closest upwards passage.

Rodney picked up his pace. Inside the tunnel, the air was a little less choked with the smell of burning rock, which allowed his head to clear a bit. There was a light coming from up ahead -- a light at the end of the tunnel, Rodney thought, and spent a couple of seconds worrying whether it was the light at the end of the tunnel, before he realized he still hurt all over, and was most certainly still in this world.

In a place of the size of this complex, there wasn't really any such thing as walking just a little bit to find something. Everything turned into a trek. It was like Atlantis had been in those miserable days before they discovered the transporters. So Rodney walked. He knew exactly what he was looking for it -- the door that opens, Lina had said, and he could almost here the reverent capitalization of the words as she spoke. Rodney wasn't going to revere opening doors. That's what doors did, they opened.

Except few of the people who came to Haven had the Ancient gene. Rodney did, and instead of being a help, this proved to be a massive headache for him -- a metaphorical one to go with his pounding migraine. Once he had entered a more intact part of the structure, gone up and away from the magma, to where things like lighting and ventilation still worked, his gene started activating everything he touched. Doors he leaned against slid open, bathrooms with broken plumbing revealed alongside empty labs and chambers even his experience with Ancient architecture couldn't quite determine the purpose of.

The Ancients were long gone, of course, but from the way Lina and Til had spoken, they'd left some kind of message behind. Probably another hologram -- one that would provide him with the information he needed to prove he had been 'blessed'. The problem was that there was no way to know if it was a hologram in a chamber like the one on Atlantis, or if these people had managed to poke something completely different into playing mysterious judge of all that came before it. For all Rodney knew, this whole trial culminated in a meditation on the Ancients' garbage disposal system, and the big secret lay in getting yourself screened as a non-recyclable organic item.

Rodney ended up pausing to look into every dusty, long-abandoned chamber he passed. A few things caught his interest -- there was one lab where they had clearly worked on alternative DHD. He couldn't resist a quick peek, and inside he found dismembered versions of both the Milky Way and the Pegasus dialing devices. The central oval table held bits and pieces that could be put together to form a whole standard DHD, and still have a whole crystal bank left over.

Actually -- Rodney decided to take a little more thorough peek. What he saw here looked awfully familiar. An extra crystal bank -- the extra crystals in this planet's DHD, the very thing he'd been busy examining before the land tsunami decided to change all of their plans for them. This was it, this was exactly the same. Excitement at the discovery made him slough off a little of his exhaustion, and after taking a careful look at how everything was assembled, he stashed the crystals away in those of his pockets that were still whole enough to hold them.

Jangling a little now, the delicate chime of crystal on crystal, his feet set him on what felt like a familiar path. Up through a corridor and around a bend -- and there was the hologram chamber. Except for the colors here being shades of onyx and jade rather than copper and aquamarine, it could have been the one back home. Rodney hurried over to the podium, and slumped forward a little in relief as a glow swirled to life in the center of the room. It solidified rapidly into the image of a dark-haired Ancient man with a hawkish profile who spoke in lilting tones broken by static, welcoming him to Vivetica. Rodney had never been so thrilled to be mistaken for a ten thousand years overdue laborer in his life.

The way back was a blur of red on black, of blistering heat and endless tunnels. It was still a mad gauntlet, but Rodney was frankly getting too exhausted to be terrified anymore. His lungs felt scorched, as if he'd inhaled the heat from a giant bonfire, his eyes were so dry it hurt to blink, and his injured knee had taken to giving out on him at the most inopportune moments. He hardly felt his new collection of scrapes and bruises over his old, and he could only work up a vague kind of alarm at the wet, red stain spreading below the now soot-colored bandage on his hand. When he fell -- and he was falling more and more often, damn that knee -- the temptation stay where he was and simply close his eyes was strong. Would have been overwhelming, but the only thing he had to occupy his mind, other than an endless litany of complaints, was that Ronon was counting on him.

Rodney couldn't give in, couldn't just lie down to sleep, not even for a little while, because doing so would be to leave Ronon to face the solemn justice of Haven alone. And they didn't leave people behind. They didn't, and he needed to get back, grab Ronon, and head through the gate to have words with Sheppard about that, because this was the worst rescue ever. Where was his jumper, come to fly him over all obstacles? Where was the medical team with the bandages and the painkillers? Were were those of his team who could actually do the whole physical thing, with the walking and the climbing and the death-defying balancing over lava pits?

One foot ahead of the next, step by step, Rodney walked. It was getting difficult to breathe. That could be a problem. One foot, then the next. Another pile of rubble, like the uncountable ones he had already scrambled over. Loose rocks rattled, then gave way as he put his weight on them. A dust cloud rose around him, grit in his mouth, the pain from his injured knee numbing the rest of the leg folded under him. He clawed at the debris, using it for leverage. Finally, he stood, automatically, shakily, because it was what he did, here and now. He didn't fix broken technology or come up with brilliant last-minute solutions or solve deadly mysteries. He simply got back up if he fell, and kept walking.

But in the end, something had to give. Rodney laboriously hoisted himself up on a giant boulder. It was set in dried, black magma, and blocked the entire lower part of the hallway. It was a few paces across, and he leaned against the wall for support. His arms were shaking now, and he didn't think he had a good leg anymore -- the endless succession of graceless falls were taking their toll. He had noticed at some indeterminable time before that the lights had seemed to grow brighter, but now it was as if someone had turned the dimmer down again.

The passage ahead, the ceiling, the boulder beneath his feet -- it was all beginning to blur together, a cascade of black darkness closing in. It didn't seem to matter if he had his eyes open or closed, so he closed them. The heat at his back still pressed him forward, and his feet still moved, but everything else was growing disconnected. It was like someone was unplugging his circuits, one after the other, and the final spark as they went out caused jarring short-outs. Made him think he smelled fresh bread, made him feel cold and hot at the same time, made the sound of voices ring out over his own harsh breathing.

With the next step he took, his foot came down on empty air. A lightning thought slithered through his hazy mind, stirring panic and informing him very clearly that being so high up, this was a fall he might not wake up from.

Rodney waited for the impact.

An impossible hallucination caught him, the same familiar smell of leather as in the tsunami-made waterfall, the same steadfast reassurance. "Got you." Something wrapped securely around his back, lowered him to the ground.

Rodney stirred, opened his eyes. Saw a big tan blur with purple spots and a slash of white. Shapes moving behind it, gray and black and blue. He tried to speak, but his throat was coated with sandpaper.

"It's okay, McKay. You did it."

Rodney's head listed weakly to one side -- not quite the vigorous shake he'd been going for, but Ronon still answered him. "What?"

Not done yet. His tongue was a lump of rock, to go with the sandpaper of his throat, but he managed to form a word, in a rasping, urgent whisper. "Vivetica."

"I'll tell them," Ronon said, calm. "It's okay. I've got it. Vivetica." A ripple of movement behind him, someone twisting the kaleidoscope of dark colors.

Again, Rodney tried to speak, to ask -- was it enough, could they please not get thrown in the sea now?

"It's fine." Ronon shifted, cool against Rodney's burning skin. His bandaged hand supported Rodney's head. "You made it." It was such a firm assurance that Rodney finally allowed himself to relax. All the colors fell through the kaleidoscope and into nothing.

"We passed your test!" Rodney argued from his cushion-lined chair. "Why can't you just let us through the gate?" Arguing meant gesturing, and right now, with all of his muscles acutely sore, gesturing meant pain. This meant that arguing put him in a bad mood.

Lina shook her head, blue highlights shining off her silver hair in the marine glow of the reception chamber. "It's not that we won't allow you -- you can't go through."

"Why?" Ronon asked, leaning forward on the table.

"After the great waters cross the land, it's often so."

"What, you mean--"

"The ring is half-buried in boulders, yes," Lina said dryly.

"Is it broken?" Ronon sounded concerned.

"No, it would take more than that to break a gate. But even if it's just a couple of boulders, it could keep the event horizon from forming," Rodney explained. Then he snapped his fingers. "And that would explain why At-- uh. Why Sheppard hasn't come back yet!"

"They can't?"

"Exactly!"

Something very much like relief lit Ronon's eyes. "Then we dig it out," he said, decisive.

"It's not urgent, for us," Lina said. "We have gotten used to this inconvenience, and it doesn't happen all that often."

"I should imagine not," Rodney said, wishing he had enough information on this planets' moons to calculate their relative orbits. "But it's urgent for us." Rodney imagined that Elizabeth probably feared the worst by now, if they hadn't managed to dial back after Sheppard and Teyla were washed into the gate room. He didn't even try to imagine what his teammates would have been doing these past two days.

"Let's go up there and fix it." Ronon grabbed his cane, preparing to stand. "Now."

"I can see that you are very determined to contact your home," Lina said softly.

"Yes, well -- my paperwork increases exponentially if I'm not there to keep an eye on it, and make sure Zelenka doesn't sneak extra stuff in there."

"Not many who come to Haven still have a home."

Rodney couldn't help a quick look at Ronon, but the Satedan just nodded. "We're lucky," he acknowledged. Ronon's planet, like Ronon's past, was another of those abstract concepts that Rodney didn't really want to understand, but he knew that 'lucky' was not a word he would ever use about himself if what had happened to Sateda happened to Earth.

Rather than joining in this talk about homes and luck, Rodney pointed straight at Lina. He'd had yet another brilliant insight. "What was that you said about getting used to it?"

"Excuse me?" Lina asked, confused.

"Right now, when you were talking about the gate, about the flooding. You said that your people had gotten used to the inconvenience?"

"I did."

"So -- does that mean things used to be different? Less inconvenient?" Now Rodney's arms were hurting again, but he couldn't keep his hands from gesturing excitedly.

"Well -- many years ago, the Ring of the Ancestors seemed to be protected against the waters," Lina spoke slowly, her eyes on Rodney.

"I knew it!" He snapped his fingers at her. "The extra crystal bank -- the crystals I brought back from the old labs, they're shield circuits!" Not like their own energy iris over the gate, but an actual shield, such as the one that protected the whole of Atlantis.

"A shield for the ring?"

"Yes! Yes, it makes perfect sense! It's what that hologram guy said, that they were here to do energy extraction research -- there's the geothermal, of course, but considering the moons and the ocean -- well, we already know how massive the tidal forces can get. And if they were here to study that -- they knew about the extreme spring tides all along, so naturally they would have built something to protect the gate. An automated system, even, so they didn't have to be there -- it's quite elementary, once you have all the information."

Rodney became aware of Ronon's and Lina's eyes fixed on him as he talked. "Uh. What?"

"This shield," Lina said, tentatively. "Is it something that could be repaired?"

"Are you kidding? You've got me here! And I've got the crystals! Of course it can be repaired."

Lina's wrinkled face broke into a bright smile. "In that case, I suggest we all take the submersibles up to the ring as soon as possible." She stood up. "Let me call my aides, and a few of the strong laborers. We have rocks to move."

Rodney was back exactly where he had started -- up to his elbows in the planet's DHD. This time, the damp rocks underneath him felt far more uncomfortable, the sky was a slightly warmer shade of gray, and Ronon was leaning casually against the device while he worked.

"Aren't you done soon?" Ronon asked. Again.

"This is delicate work here!"

"Thought you said you could do it."

"I am doing it!"

"Do it faster."

For no reason that Rodney could discern, Ronon had decided there was some kind of competition going on between Rodney fixing the DHD, and Lina's people clearing the gate of rocks and boulders. It was obviously quite childish and pointless, and Rodney did not just grit his teeth at the sight of that ridiculously strong guard casually tossing a boulder the size of a breadbox aside.

"Come on, McKay. Work!" Ronon's contribution to this non-competition was to completely miss the point that cheerleading was supposed to be cheering.

"I'm working! Would you just -- make sure Til doesn't accidentally drop a rock on my head, or something?" Rodney didn't trust that uniformed bastard. He had thought that the man would have a stroke when Lina formally welcomed him and Ronon to Haven. And if Til had come along to help them with the clearing of the gate, he certainly wasn't winning any points for his team, the way he hovered at the fringes of that activity to glare over at the DHD.

"I am," Ronon informed him.

Rodney nodded distractedly, and went back to trying to even out the power distribution between the fifth and second crystals, where the fittings had gotten worn by giant waves and passing boulders. It took some fiddling with his borrowed tools, but he was almost done. He just needed to make a couple of tiny adjustments after fixing the fourth and third crystals firmly into place, and then -- there! He traced the connections with his fingertips, tapped the crystals lightly to make sure they were properly slotted. He would need to activate it to make sure, but now it all felt right. It would work, he knew it would.

"There, done!" From the corner of his eye, he could see that there were still a few boulders waiting to be cleared from the gate. He had kicked their asses. He squirmed out, and found Ronon looking quite triumphant.

"Here." Ronon offered Rodney his good arm, and Rodney clasped his hand. He needed all the help he could get to stand up without falling over.

"We're done over here!" Rodney shouted at Lina, who was overseeing the stacking of excavated boulders in a pile right in front of the gate, where the rocks would get disintegrated by the incoming energy vortex. Clever, that.

"I have yet to see any proof of that, Doctor Rodney." It was a very logical kind of retort, but it was accompanied with a wave at her people to work faster. Obviously Ronon wasn't the only one who'd had some pride at stake in this operation.

"Oh, you'll get proof, but we need to be able to actually use the gate for that to work." Rodney and Ronon shared a grin.

Til scowled.

The people still milling about with rocks and levers and whatnot all promptly dropped what they were doing and scrambled to safety when the gate started dialing.

"Rodney!" Lina called to him, her frown almost audible. "I didn't mean you should prove it right now."

Rodney was staring at the gate. He hadn't touched anything. "No, it's not me -- I didn't dial anything! This is an incoming wormhole."

"Incoming...?" Lina might not be familiar with his terminology, but she got the gist of what he was saying. "Everybody, to the ladders, now! Submerge the ships as soon as you've boarded -- run!"

"Think it's Atlantis?" Ronon asked in a low voice.

Rodney looked about him, wild-eyed. There was a very disciplined chaotic retreat going on -- nobody shoved anyone else out of the way, but everyone ran really, really fast. Everyone except Lina's aides, who drew up around her when she stayed where she was, hands planted on her hips, and Til. "I don't know -- I hope so, it should be, if they were still trying to dial back in, but you've probably noticed that we haven't been very lucky lately!"

They still weren't. Before the event horizon had exploded into existence, Til turned towards them, his face drawn in fury.

"You! Traitors, you sold us out, you betrayed us."

Til drew his gun in a jerky motion, not pausing to look at what came out of the shimmering surface behind him, completely oblivious to Lina's sharp order to stop, and Rodney's high-pitched protests. The man was trembling with emotion, spots of color high on his cheeks. "I knew it, I knew it -- I should have done this the first time I set my eyes on you, you scum."

Til's words were getting garbled into a litany of curses, but his aim grew steady, and Rodney had the time to reflect that this was why you didn't want your armed teammate to have his trigger finger wrapped in heavy bandages -- then Ronon made a quick, powerful motion.

There was a blur in the air, and a sharp crack followed by a dull thud as Til's eyes crossed, and he slumped to the ground.

Wood was rare in Haven, but T'Mala, Lina's female aide, had helpfully scrounged up a cane of smooth, creamy wood for Ronon to lean on. It was too short and too heavy to make a good crutch, but it apparently made for an excellent missile to hurl at Til's head to keep him from shooting people on the spot.

Rodney's heart had skipped a couple of beats, and his knees were both threatening to give out on him again, but he shot Ronon a shaky smile. "Excellent aim."

"Yup," Ronon agreed, before turning to stunned Lina. "Sorry," he called. "It was for his own good." Ronon didn't look the least bit sorry at all as he nodded his head at what had come through the gate.

A jumper. A beautifully boxy jumper, with none of the lethal, sharp and pointy angles of a Wraith dart. It hovered hesitantly above them before setting down with a great whoosh of air.

"These are your friends?" Lina asked, drawing closer.

"Yes, it's safe, please don't shoot anymore." Rodney rushed towards the jumper, before realizing that Ronon hadn't pulled ahead of him -- was actually lagging behind, his face tight with concentration as he hobbled across the boulders. Right. No cane. Considering the spectacular manner in which Ronon had lost the cane, Rodney decided he probably owed Ronon one. He stayed, waiting for Ronon to catch up and place a hand on Rodney's shoulder. By the time they had arranged themselves, there was no need to go anywhere. The jumper's hatch was opening.

Sheppard and Teyla stepped out, P90's at the ready, looking very unsure of their welcome as they trailed their weapons at Lina and her three aides. Not that the weapons would have done them much good, the way they both turned to stare at Rodney and Ronon.

"It's about time!" Rodney called to them, because it was what was expected in a situation like this.

Sheppard and Teyla stopped staring, and started moving towards them.

"McKay, you are never going anywhere near water again without adult supervision!" Sheppard barked back at him.

"That will be a little difficult, considering where we live!" Rodney shot back.

"Hey," Ronon said. "Don't shoot those guys over there."

"Right." The other two both acknowledged the information -- to Lina's relief, Rodney assumed.

Then Sheppard was there, and Teyla. She took a gentle hold of Ronon's shoulders, and touched her forehead to his when he bent down. "I am glad to see you," she said, her eyes shining.

Sheppard was looking at them both with an expression Rodney didn't think he'd ever seen before. He had very little time to ponder that before Teyla distracted him, gripping his shoulders and tipping her head to his. Rodney froze, but she smiled up at him, and he fumbled his hands into action, reaching clumsily for Teyla's shoulders. It was too late to pull back, so he committed fully to his chosen course of action. He ended up bumping his forehead against Teyla's with a little too much vigor, and scrambled back, apologizing. "Sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to --"

"It's all right, Rodney. I am very glad to see you, too." Teyla's smile was dazzling, the energy around her belying the dark circles under her eyes.

"You both look like hell," Sheppard said.

"You don't look so hot, either," Rodney remarked, though Sheppard only had a couple of bruises, and no visible broken legs or dislocated joints at all.

"What's going on here, what happened to you? I saw that guy over there -- was he going to shoot you?" Sheppard's voice held an accusing tone, like it was somehow Rodney's own fault that random fanatics decided he was a threat that needed eliminating.

"Uh. Long story," Rodney said, and then Ronon interrupted them all.

"Lina," he said, "this is the rest of our team. They've come to give us a ride home."

Lina nodded, but seemed to hesitate at the word 'team'. Rodney sighed. He felt another couple of blood oaths coming on. Oh, well. He had started this thing with Ronon -- he might as well finish it with all of them. He had survived flood and fire. Two little cuts? No big deal at all. Not if it was what it took to return home together.