Chapter 5

Incessant tapping was the first thing he became aware of, and he imagined rain hitting the building and sliding off the roof into deep, clear puddles. His throat was sore and dry but otherwise he felt alright. Better than any other time he'd woken up in the Natayans' cell.

The pain would come. He knew this absolutely. He was even a little surprised that he'd woken up again at all. The last thing he remembered was the hot metal rod being pushed into his stomach and back, of Jamayan finally losing his temper when John still refused to reveal the address to Atlantis.

His heart rate increased. If Jamayan had been willing to burn him and still keep him alive, what was he planning next? He didn't know how much longer he could hold out, or how much more he could put up with.

"Sheppard?"

Jamayan's voice sounded different today, almost concerned and full of worry. He must really be in bad shape for that. The tapping sound stopped abruptly, like a tropical storm that came and went in the blink of an eye.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and he jerked in surprise, igniting every nerve ending in his body. He moaned at the onslaught and tried to roll away from the touch, but his body was weak and shaking and refused to obey him.

"Ah, crap. Crap, crap, crap," Jamayan muttered above him, still with that worried tone. Maybe it wasn't Jamayan. John had a hard time attaching the voice he was hearing to the cruel, bearded face of his captor.

Noises erupted around him—beeping and cries for help, shuffling and clicking and scratching. John groaned again, wishing he'd just pass out and never wake up again.

"Colonel? Can you hear me, lad? I know you're awake," another voice said, this one also full of concern, but less panicky than the first voice.

Hands touched him, pushing against his arms, stomach, and chest. John whimpered at the pain that shot through his stomach and he remembered Jamayan coming at him with the metal rod, glowing orange at one end.

"No," he cried out. "No more, please. Please, stop—no more."

"Easy, lad. You're alright. You're home; you're safe." The second voice again.

He wondered if he could believe it. His body shook from the pain, but even as he considered it, the pain began to recede.

"I've given you a little something to take the edge off, but I really need you to open your eyes now, Colonel."

Hands held his face—soft hands with strong, confidant fingers.

"Open your eyes, John, just for a second. You've been asleep for three days now."

John blinked, expecting the blackness of the cell to materialize around him, or the dirty room with the chair. The ceiling—green and gray and blue—framed the face of a man with short brown hair and blue eyes.

"There you are," he said, and John heard the second voice.

He blinked away the blurriness and focused on the man who held his face in his hands. "Carson?" he whispered. He felt his lips move and the soft tickle of exhaled air but heard no sound.

"Aye, it's me. You're home, John. We got you back."

John nodded slightly, but already his eyelids were starting to droop. He blinked, and Carson was suddenly gone. John rolled his head on the pillow, soaking in the sights and sounds of the Atlantis infirmary.

"Hey." It was the first voice again, the one full of worry and panic and anxiety.

"McKay," John tried to say again, but could barely form the word with his mouth. He settled for smiling slightly and watched as McKay's face lit up and relaxed into a smile of his own. The scientist leaned back in his chair, his laptop balanced precariously on his lap, his arm heavily casted and in a sling.

John stared at the sling, then at McKay's face. McKay caught the look, and the silent question with it.

"You won't believe how hard it was to find you. We searched for days and days and days. Once we made it back to the gate and you suddenly stopped answering the radio, we knew something was wrong," McKay started, and then the words tumbled out of him, faster than John could keep up with. He smiled again as his friend spoke, the words traveling a hundred miles an hour out of McKay to swirl and rock John back to sleep.

John woke up in a haze of heat and sweat. This couldn't be the cell. The cell had been cold and damp. He tried to look around, even managed to roll his head back and forth, but his eyes remained stubbornly shut.

A noise above him startled him into full wakefulness, but it took a minute for his brain to process the sights and sounds. It was dark, but not black like the cell. Atlantis. He was home. A touch on his arm made him flinch, and he rolled his head toward the nurse standing next to him.

"I'm sorry, Colonel. I'm just going to grab Doctor Beckett." And then she was gone.

John pushed at the blankets covering him. They were stifling. His left arm and shoulder were bound tightly, but even beneath the drugs, tensing muscles shot bolts of pain throughout his body, and he groaned.

"Try not to move, Colonel," Beckett said. The doctor stood at the end of the bed, looking at his chart, then walked up to the monitors and studied them for a few minutes. "How are you feeling?"

"Hot," John breathed more than said.

"Aye," Beckett answered. He stuck a thermometer in John's ear then clucked at the numbers it showed. John closed his eyes as Beckett and the nurse talked above him. His whole body ached, and he had barely enough energy to squirm uncomfortably in the bed. Beckett talked to him again, but the words sounded foreign. For a split second, John thought of Afghanistan and the young Taliban soldier that had stood over him, barely old enough to understand what he had been involved in.

A hand on his shoulder brought him back to the present, and John rolled his head to the side. Ronon stared down at him, glancing occasionally at the nurse and Beckett on the other side until they finally left.

John blinked, surprised he hadn't noticed the larger man earlier. He was feeling the pull of sleep, too, but was not ready to surrender to oblivion yet. He had questions he needed answers to first.

"Sorry it took us so long to find you," Ronon said as he sat down on the chair next to the bed.

John shrugged, then winced at the pull on his left shoulder.

Ronon pointed at the shoulder. "Doc says you messed it up pretty well, but it should recover fully. Something ripped—muscles or ligaments—and you'll need physical therapy to, you know, make it better."

John nodded, feeling relieved and almost amused that it was Ronon and not Beckett giving him the rundown on his injuries.

"Beckett said the burns on your back and stomach are infected, but he's trying to stay on top of it. That's why you have the fever. Oh, and you had a bad concussion."

John nodded again, flinching at the memory of Jamayan jamming the burning orange tip into his flesh. "Jamayan?" he whispered.

"What?"

"The leader…"

"The guy beating you with the rod? Dead. When we got there, you were on the floor and he was hitting you with that rod. McKay tackled him."

John's eyebrows rose, a small smile flittering across his lips.

"I know. He moved faster than I could shoot. Jamayan kept trying to hit you, but McKay covered you and ended up getting his arm broken in two places. When McKay went down, I got him."

John relaxed into the pillow, exhausted from listening. So that's how McKay had hurt his arm. "My leg?"

"Beckett had to do surgery to get the bullet out, but he said it could have been worse. You'll need physical therapy for that also," Ronon answered. He leaned back in the chair, rubbing his face with his hands without realizing how tired and stressed out it made him look.

"I knew something was wrong when I got to the gate," he mumbled. "We radioed you and you didn't answer. I wanted to come back for you then, but that scientist that got hit with the arrow, he was in bad shape."

"How…how is he?"

Ronon shook his head. "Lost too much blood. That arrow nicked his heart. Sorry."

John felt a stab of guilt through his chest. He should have protected him. He should have done more. That man had placed his trust in John, and John had failed.

"Wasn't your fault," Ronon said, reading the expression on John's face. John shook his head—it was his fault, but there was nothing more he could do now but add yet another name to the list of dead.

"By the time we got back to the planet, you'd disappeared," Ronon said then paused, staring down at his hands. "Took us almost two weeks to find you."

John blinked slowly. Two weeks. Two whole weeks in that dark, damp, cold cell. Two weeks of being tortured by the Natayans. He shuddered, and watch the guilt crease Ronon's face. John could tell he'd almost reached his limit and that he'd be unable to fight the fatigue for much longer.

"S'okay…found me in…end…" he slurred.

"Sorry we didn't find you sooner, buddy." Ronon leaned forward again, squeezing John's shoulder. "Rest now. We can talk again later."

John's eyes slid shut almost automatically, but he just glimpsed Ronon relaxing into the chair and putting his feet up on the side of the bed before he fell deep asleep.

The fever persisted for days, and the rest of the week passed in a haze for John. When he'd first woken up, still somewhat lucid, he'd been hooked up to every contraption and tube the infirmary seemed to have. The two weeks of near starvation had convinced Beckett to put in a feeding tube, but he'd removed it soon after John had regained consciousness. Now, he was fretting again over John's weight, and contemplating putting the feeding tube back in.

"No tube," John muttered. His voice was still low and hoarse, but steadily improving. "Please," he added. He knew he was begging, but he didn't have the energy to do anything else.

"You were dangerously underweight when you were brought in, and the combination of the fever and the meds I've got you on has all but killed whatever appetite you had left."

"Please," John whispered.

Beckett chewed his lip as he stared down at his patient. John tried to look strong, or convincing—anything but the weak, vulnerable, sickly person he felt like lying flat on the bed.

"My appetite will come back. I can do this," John emphasized. "Please let me deal with this my way."

"Alright, lad. We'll try it your way, but if I don't see marked improvement in the next few days, we do it my way—no arguments."

John nodded, sighing in relief. Beckett pulled down the blankets and listened to John's heart and lungs. John stared at the ceiling and drifted, not really sleeping but not really awake either. He vaguely felt Beckett's hands on his face, then arms, chest, stomach. He winced slightly as the doctor peeled the bandages back to check on the burns. Beckett shook his head at what he saw, then moved down to check on the wound in his leg.

"I'll leave you be for a bit. Need anything?" he asked a few minutes later as he pulled the covers back up and tucked them in.

John shook his head. He knew he should be asking about his condition, asking to be allowed to take a shower, asking to be released, but none of the words seemed to get through the hazy fog in his brain. Beckett stared at him for a moment in open concern, which John knew would normally have made him a bit irritated at being treated like such a helpless victim. Instead, he shrugged it off and drifted off to sleep.

He stood in the field, the bright blue sky above him spotted with white clouds. The yellow grass was taller, almost to his waist, and he walked through it, scaring up a flock of birds. He watched their sleek black bodies shoot into the air and catch the invisible air currents swirling above his head.

The Jumper burned next to him, the entire thing encased in flames. Already, the metal was blackened, and soon there would be nothing but a dead husk left. The screaming from within had stopped long before, and the field was eerily quiet.

"Johnny?" a voice whispered across the field. John walked slowly, but he spotted the figure of his father standing near the edge of the woods. He waved, and his father waved back.

"Do you know the hell you put me through?" Again, the voice of his father, sounding much closer than the man standing on the other side of the clearing.

"Sorry, dad," John answered.

"Look, John! Look up, babe. Look at the birds!" And suddenly his mother was standing in front of him point up at the sky, her sun dress fluttering in the breeze. John stopped and stared at her, as young and beautiful and full of life as she'd been when he was a small child.

"You're missing the birds, Johnny! Look!"

John looked, again catching sight of the black birds making lazy circles around the field before settling down on the ground again. He watched the flapping of their wings, the curve of their necks as they ducked into air currents that shot them into the sky. When he looked back at his mother, she was gone—the spot she had stood in a moment before an empty space.

"Mom?"

"Johnny?"

John looked across the field at the sound of his dad's voice, and saw both his parents standing there, arm in arm. They waved, but before he could wave back, they turned and walked into trees, disappearing into the shadows.

"Wait!" John yelled, running forward. "Wait! Don't go, please."

"Sheppard? Sheppard, wake up," another voice sounded close to his ear. He groaned at the sudden onslaught of pain. He blinked, and when he opened his eyes again, the field was gone and the infirmary surrounded him.

"Sheppard?"

"Dream…" he whispered.

"Yeah," McKay answered. He sat down on the chair next to the bed with a pained sigh, cradling the arm in the sling.

"You okay?" John asked.

"Just broke my arm in two places. I'll probably never get full mobility again even after months and months of painful physical therapy."

"Your arm…" John blinked at the scientist.

"I mean, Beckett said it would heal eventually, but just because the chicken bones say one thing one day, doesn't mean they'll say the same thing the next, or that anything voodoo chicken bone reading tells you is actually reliable information."

"Chicken?"

"Uh, never mind. You're still a little too drugged out for that conversation."

John opened his mouth, still not following a word McKay was saying, but before he could ask, McKay held up his hand. "Again, never mind," the physicist said. He sat back in the chair, watching people walk pass through the infirmary. John relaxed back into the pillow, feeling exhausted again even though he'd just barely woken up.

"How are you doing?" McKay asked suddenly.

John jerked at the sound of McKay's voice. He'd almost drifted off to sleep again. He rolled his head on the pillow to look at the scientist, and shrugged his one good shoulder.

"Beckett said some of those...burns…were pretty badly infected." McKay spoke, grimacing at the words as if they tasted horrible. "You're healing a lot slower than he thinks you should, and he's been going on and on about your weight. What does he expect after the kind of treatment you received? I tried to tell him that, but you know how he worries."

John nodded. Sometimes talking to McKay was easy—a nod here and a grunt there, and McKay filled in the rest of the blanks.

"Do you know what you've put us through?"

For a second, John thought he heard the voice of his father, and he sat up—or tried to. Pain erupted in his shoulder, stomach, and back, and he collapsed almost immediately in a moan.

"Geez! What are you doing?" McKay cried out. John breathed deeply, working through the pain until it subsided to a more tolerable level. McKay stood over him, his hands reaching out for John, but hovering above him, not quite sure what they were supposed to do.

"Sorry, forgot," John whispered.

"Forgot? How could you forget? Although I guess you do forget, and then you do it all over again. That's why I took this picture—so you'll remember what you put us through every time you do this."

McKay held out a snapshot, which John took with shaking fingers and held up. It showed him in bed, his face black and blue and his eyes almost swollen shut. White bandages around his shoulder and midsection. The smaller burns not covered in bandages stood out red and angry against his pale skin. He was hooked up to all kinds of monitors, an IV, oxygen, and a feeding tube. If John didn't know better, he would have guessed the man in the photograph was either dead or soon would be.

"You can keep it. That way, the next time your deciding whether or not to do something that may be detrimental to your health, you'll remember this and think twice."

"Sorry," John mumbled. He reached over to set the photograph on the table next to the bed, but McKay grabbed it and set it down for him.

"Seriously," he asked after a long moment. "Are you sure you're okay? I mean, I know you're not okay—I'm not even okay—but are you going to be okay?"

John wanted to curl up on his side and pull the covers up over his head, but his leg was still propped up, his stomach was covered in painful burns, and his shoulder was completely immobilized. He closed his eyes instead, and felt a deep weariness.

"Just tired," he whispered. McKay wanted more than that, John knew, but that was the best John could come up with at the moment. Beckett wanted more too—more fight, more demands, more eating. So did Ronon, and Teyla, and Elizabeth.

He was so tired. He just wanted to sleep.

"Well, alright. If you need anything, just…um…call me or something."

The grimace on John's face slowly relaxed as he finally gave into the sleep pulling him under.

John woke up to the sound of Teyla humming next to him. The infirmary was bright, filled with sunshine streaming through the side windows. It had to be morning then. John vaguely remembered being woken up the night before to choke down half a cup of some broth, but otherwise, the night had passed dreamlessly.

He lay there with his eyes closed, listening to Teyla. She didn't realize he was awake yet, he was sure of that. His pain meds must have been recently topped off as well, because everything felt muted and warm and safe.

"John?" Teyla whispered. John's face twitched at the sound of his name, and he opened his eyes slowly to see Teyla sitting next to him.

"Hey," he answered quietly.

"How are you feeling this morning?"

How was he feeling? That had been the question on everyone's lips every time they came to see him. The problem was, he wasn't sure what he was feeling. He couldn't even bring himself to utter the usual I'm fine response.

He shrugged his good shoulder, and almost smiled when that small movement didn't immediately ignite a series of other aches and pains. Teyla leaned forward, running her fingers through his hair. She was the only one—other than nurses and doctors—that touched him, but he didn't mind as much as he thought he would.

He closed his eyes, feeling her warmth—a hand on his head and one on his forearm—and a lump bulged suddenly in his throat. He swallowed desperately against the sudden urge to cry, a little frightened at the power of the emotions swarming through him.

John managed to bring himself back from the brink of a sobbing deluge, but even fast blinking couldn't hold it all back. He felt a tear slide down the side of his face and he hoped Teyla wouldn't notice.

"John, what's wrong?"

John cringed, realizing Teyla had seen it all. He shook his head. "I don't know," he answered, whispering so low he almost couldn't even hear himself.

"Doctor Beckett thinks your are suffering from depression and that it is affecting your physical recovery," Teyla said.

John stared up at her, startled. No! he wanted to scream, but he couldn't. Maybe they were right; maybe he was depressed.

"Sorry," he mumbled, echoing what he'd said to both McKay and Ronon earlier.

"You do not need to apologize, John. You have done nothing wrong."

John nodded but could not bring himself to say anything more. He hoped desperately that they would talk about something else, or that a nurse would interrupt them, or that he'd just fall back to sleep.

He'd been home for two weeks though, and he should be getting better faster than this. He looked up at Teyla, only to see her look up and someone else coming toward them. Elizabeth.

"Hello, John," Elizabeth said, coming around to the side of the bed and smiling down at him. She looked tired, lines of stress and strain showing around the corners of her eyes and mouth.

John nodded, smiling slightly at her.

"How are you feeling?"

The question again. John gave his new standard response, a one-shoulder shrug. Elizabeth nodded, pulling up a chair and sitting back. She folded her hands in her lap, lacing her fingers together.

"What is it?" John asked. He knew she only ever looked like that when she had something she needed to say that might not be good news. He could feel his heart starting to pound in his chest.

"I've talked to both Doctors Heightmeyer and Beckett, and we think you need some time off to recover."

"Okay," John said slowly, not quite following where she was going with this.

"I mean, we think you need to get away from Atlantis for a while."

John's breath caught in his throat. They wanted him out of Atlantis? He looked from Elizabeth to Teyla, not quite believing what he was hearing.

"It is alright, John. We just want you to heal," Teyla spoke, no doubt trying to reassure the look of panic on John's face, but John's panic, if anything, increased.

"John, you're not being kicked out of Atlantis, but when you're here, you never really get any time off. Even sick or injured, you're still involved in everything that goes on." Elizabeth took a deep breath before continuing. "I've already cleared this with the SGC—you've been ordered to take seven to ten days of leave back on Earth when Carson releases you from the infirmary."

"After all you have experienced these last few months, you deserve a few days rest. We will be waiting here for you when you return," Teyla added.

One week. He could do one week. Deep down, he knew he needed it too. He was at the end of his limits—physically, mentally, emotionally. He flashed on the image of the crashed jumper, then the clearing, the attack by the Natayans, Jamayan standing over him with a burning metal rod.

"Rodney's going too. He needs a break as well. Your exact orders are to be gone at least seven days but no more than ten." Elizabeth paused, chewing on the bottom of her lip.

Slowly, John nodded. Seven to ten days—not so long really, in the bigger scheme of things. Elizabeth smiled in relief. She talked a while longer, mostly to Teyla, but John didn't really listen.

His mind played back the dream of the field, the burning jumper, of his father and mother standing at the edge of the clearing. His mother had died years ago, but he wasn't sure about his father. It had been years since they'd spoken, and John was suddenly consumed with the desire to either make amends, or end that part of his life once and for all so those deeper scars could finally heal.

Maybe, just maybe, seven to ten days would be enough time to visit his hometown and see what his old man was up to after all this time…

END

A/N: Now read "Going Home" by Titan5!