Chapter Five

"I'm not an Ancient," the old man said.

"Oh, like hell you're not!" Rodney retreated a few more hasty steps along the path, catching himself when he stumbled over a root. "I'll have you know I've met Ancients before and haven't been impressed with a single one of them, by the way! I would ask why you haven't Ascended, but it's fairly obvious, I think. Is that why you won't tell us your name?"

"Shut up and listen for a minute."

"You shut up! I'm not going to fall for your Ancient tricks! Did they imprison you here, like Chaya? At least she was better looking!"

"Oh, for -- Was I ever this stupid?" the old man appealed to the sullen gray sky. "You're in a time loop, you fool."

Rodney stopped in his tracks. Water trickled down the back of his neck, ran off his hair into his eyes. "I'm in a what?"

The old man lowered the crossbow to point at the ground. With one hand, he gestured towards the nearest tower, just visible through the trees and the rain. "Those damn things are some kind of time machine. Don't ask me who built 'em, or how they work, because I've spent my life trying to figure that out and I still have no idea. And don't ask me why they're here, either, because I have no clue. Ancient experiment? Prison? Wraith trap? No clue. The guts of the things are locked up tight where I can't get at them, not for lack of trying, at least not with the tools I have -- which are basically rocks and sticks, and the scanner can't penetrate them." His voice twisted in scorn.

"A time machine," Rodney repeated, his throat locking up with horror as a very unpleasant picture began to emerge.

"What are you, a parrot? Yeah. It's tied into the DHD, so you can't dial offworld. If you try, it activates the trap and throws you back in time. That's why I pulled the control crystal -- to make sure no one, including me, tries to use the DHD while I try to figure out how it works and what makes it do what it does."

"But --" Rodney began.

"Shut up, I'm talking. You wanted the truth? Here's the truth, McKay. When I activated the gate, with no idea what I was doing, it reconstituted us in the past -- a process similar to what the Stargates use. But not exactly the same, because it didn't -- it doesn't --"

He broke off for a moment, his throat working until he managed to get his raspy voice back. "It didn't know what to make of Sheppard. Didn't know what damned species he was, with the -- with the Iratus DNA, whatever's left of that, and the Wraith feedings -- and that's why I think it was meant to trap Wraith, because it's the Wraith part of him that it got."

He took a step towards Rodney, his rough voice shaking. "What you get back if you trigger the machine won't be Sheppard. It'll be what he would have been if Beckett hadn't been able to reverse the transformation." Another step. "He'll be gone. Everything he once was, gone. Dead. Make no mistake. And you'll spend the next forty years trying to stamp out that lingering bit of hope that somehow, you can change him back. Trying to work up the guts to kill him before he kills you."

Rodney realized that he couldn't retreat any further because his back was pressed against a tree. "Oh God," he whispered in a voice that broke with horror. "You're me."

------

The rain was falling heavily outside the cave, sluicing down the hillsides and turning the quiet stream to a snarling torrent that came up past Sheppard's knees as he waded carefully across. He was soaked within minutes, although he discovered that the partly-cured hide draped over his shoulders shed the rain better than a standard Atlantis jacket would have. It at least helped keep his 9-mil mostly dry, though he wasn't sure how long the weapon would be able to fire in this downpour if he had to use it.

He paused on the other side, catching his breath. The cold water had helped to numb the pain in his leg, although it had also soaked the dressings. He tried not to think about infection, about the weakness in his limbs or the impossibility of catching up to Rodney. It had to be done, so he'd do it.

"Which way to the Stargate?" he asked aloud.

He wasn't sure whether to expect a response or not, but he got a vague sense that he should bear left. He wasn't absolutely sure if it came from some outside source, or just from his own subconscious recollections of the way to the Stargate.

So if I'm a monster in this reality ... dimension ... whatever, and Rodney's been living alone all this time, then who the hell am I talking to, anyway?

A disturbing answer nudged at him quietly -- maybe his own thought, maybe someone else's.

"Okay, no way. I am not talking to my own ghost."

There was no response, no answering sense of presence. Maybe he really was delirious. Raising a hand to his vest, he lightly touched the hard, square shape of the box through the canvas fabric, where it rested in a pocket. The dog tags rattled whenever he moved, answered softly by the jangling of the ones around his neck.

In all that great, rainy wilderness, nothing stirred, except for leaves bowing under the weight of the rain to release their burden of water onto his neck and shoulders. Trying to move as quickly as possible without putting undue stress on his leg, he pushed his way impatiently through the wet undergrowth.

Crutching through the wilderness, he tried to focus his mind away from his growing exhaustion and the stabbing pain in his leg, away from the cold seeping into his body and the ache in his shoulder. Unfortunately, the only thing to really think about was whatever set of bizarre circumstances had led to a version of himself and Rodney being trapped on this world for decades, caught in a never-ending game of cat and mouse.

Face it, John. Your life has become a B science fiction movie. Deal with it.

Alternate universe or time travel. Those were really the only options. Unless he wasn't really him, and he sure as hell felt like himself, so he just wasn't even going to go there.

Damn it, he shouldn't have taken this long to figure it out. He'd seen it, with both the alternate Rodney and the alternate Sheppard -- he just hadn't consciously admitted it to himself. The first time he'd ever seen this world's Rodney, when he was semi-conscious and half out of his head with pain, he'd known it was Rodney -- but, later, he'd rationalized it away. And he'd noticed that nagging sense of familiarity with the monster, but, again, it was so easy to not think it through, to just assume that it was a strange world and nothing on this world should be familiar ...

Seen through the lens of what he knew now, the events of the past couple of days snapped into sharp focus. The way that he trusted the old guy in the cave, instinctively, beyond all reason. The way that Rodney and not-quite-Rodney had clashed with each other, a deep-down rivalry bristling at the surface. Even the soft fur on the monster's ankle when it had held him down -- not fur, he realized now, touching his black wristband; not fur, but pilled fabric, worn threadbare after many years. Everything else must have been lost, because the creature obviously didn't need clothing. But, for whatever reason, it had never torn that off.

Whatever had happened, maybe he -- the other him -- wasn't entirely gone from the creature's mind.

That thought spurred him on, as much as concern for what was happening with the two Rodneys. One thing he knew for sure -- this world's Rodney wanted to keep them away from the DHD at all costs. And unless he'd just gone completely crazy from living alone all this time, he must have a good reason.

Sheppard had spent too much time trusting Rodney not to trust him now.

Which meant catching up to both of them before something very bad happened.

His head snapped up at a distant, shivering cry that shot a cold splinter of fear down his spine. He'd heard that before, the unearthly shriek that reminded him all too much of Ellia the Wraith's hunting cry.

"Damn it," he whispered, and tried to hurry, the 9-mil a comforting weight against his good leg.

------

It was like seeing the hidden picture in one of those silly, gimmicky paintings that Rodney had always scoffed at, where the sky and clouds and trees in an ordinary landscape went together to form the hidden image of a bird or horse or car. Once you'd seen it, you couldn't unsee it, and every time you looked at the painting it was all you could see.

Now that he'd seen his own features looking back at him from forty years of accumulated grime and pain, he desperately wished he could unsee it.

"Are you done now?" the older version of himself asked in that weird, low, raspy voice. No wonder he hadn't recognized his own voice, and even the cadence of speech was a little slower, more halting, after so many years of having no one to talk to.

Rodney carefully folded his hands over the P90, trying to still their telltale trembling. "Um," he said. "I don't know. Actually, I don't think so." Anger started rising in him, slow and hot. "Why all the evasion, then? Why keep jerking us around? You know how I react to being told not to do something, especially by someone with no credentials! What did you think was going to happen?"

The old man leaned back against a tree, resting the crossbow against his side while keeping the LSD where he could watch its screen; the cliff fell away into rain and mist behind him. He didn't meet Rodney's eyes. "I didn't want you to know who I was. Who we were. Either of you."

"Why, for pete's sake?"

The old man raised his head, and Rodney instinctively recoiled from the ravaged face that was undeniably his own underneath the scar tissue, beard and dirt. "Why do you think?" he asked softly. "What would you have done? All you had to do was listen to me; I'm sure Atlantis will find this world before too long and send a jumper, or the Daedalus will come and pick you up. You could have left this world, never knowing what had happened here."

"That's stupid," Rodney said flatly.

"What would you have done?" the old man repeated.

Rodney swallowed. He couldn't meet that too-familiar gaze; instead he dropped his eyes to his mud-covered boots. "So," he said, fumbling for some kind of territory that wasn't horribly personal. "You're the mole person who was digging holes around the gate, I take it?"

"The what? Oh. Don't be dense; I was trying to understand how to uncouple the towers from the DHD," his older self said impatiently. "Which would have been easier if I hadn't had to --" He broke off.

"What?" Rodney demanded, and then froze as a long shivering shriek rent the humid air -- a hunting cry, not far away.

It was pure instinct, not exactly cowardice, that made him duck behind his alternate-timeline double, placing the other McKay between himself and the source of the inhuman shriek. Old Rodney turned and glared at him.

By habit, he fell back on hostility and defensiveness. "What's that look for? Like you wouldn't have --"

"Shush!" Old Rodney looked down at the life signs detector. He tuned it slowly, staring at the screen. Rodney risked a peek.

"Oh shit," he whispered, seeing the fast-moving dot.

"Light bothers it, so it usually doesn't come out during the day ... except on dark days." Old Rodney glanced up at the heavy cloud cover.

"It? Don't you mean 'he'?"

"It," Old Rodney said coldly, "isn't Sheppard."

"I thought you just told me it was Shep--"

The bottomless pain in the other man's one remaining eye shut up Rodney the way that nothing else could have. Because it was his face, his pain ... in another life. There but for the grace... The snatch of phrase flashed through his mind.

"There," his older self whispered, taking one hand off the crossbow to point -- a quick, careless gesture that made Rodney shudder, because it was his gesture, but distorted, wrong. Maybe this was how Elizabeth had felt on Atlantis, seeing herself bowed by the weight of so many countless years.

Movement flickered between the trees, very different from the steady, ceaseless shifting of branches in the wind. In contrast to their random fluctuations, this was quick. Purposeful.

Rodney's rain-wet fingers closed tightly over the P90. He wondered, in panic-borne clarity, if it would even fire after getting thoroughly wet for days.

The movement among the trees stopped, and Rodney glimpsed a gray-blue head and shoulders, rearing out of the wet leaves: his first clear look in daylight at what the retrovirus and Ancient technology had wrought. The creature -- he couldn't bring himself to think of it as Sheppard -- had a forward-sloping muzzle with deep gill slits on either side, as if it had gotten stuck somewhere between a Wraith face and Iratus mandibles. The effect was almost doglike, until its thin lips drew back to reveal irregular Wraithlike fangs in a double row. Sheppard's dark hair had become a row of spikes that flexed and rose along its spine like a set of giant razor-sharp hackles.

Yellow eyes met Rodney's and he gasped out an involuntary "Oh, God." There was nothing human in those eyes, only hunger and a strange, burning, impersonal curiosity that was almost Sheppard's, but with all the warmth and humanity stripped away. One of the things that Rodney had first noticed upon meeting Sheppard was that when he looked at you, he really saw you -- not rank or title or gender or culture, but you. Those burning yellow eyes looked straight through Rodney as if he'd become a hole in the landscape -- a dinner-shaped hole.

The stare broke; the creature ducked away and vanished between the trees.

"Don't shoot 'til you can hit it," the old man whispered harshly, as if he'd sensed Rodney's finger tightening on the trigger. "You'll only give it your range if you miss."

"It's Sheppard," Rodney whispered back viciously. "It already knows the range on a P90!"

Old Rodney's shaggy head moved in a quick, negative jerk. "No. How many times do I have to tell you? It's not Sheppard. It doesn't think like him, doesn't remember the things that he knew -- most of 'em, anyway."

With a flurry of wet leaves, the sleek gray-and-black shape leaped out onto the path, just far enough away that Rodney didn't think he could hit it from here. No matter what the senile old ... him claimed, he didn't think that was a coincidence -- this thing was Sheppard, like it or not, and it damn well knew how far Rodney could shoot. It crouched on all fours --giving him a better view than he really wanted of its insectile, double-jointed legs -- and swept its head back and forth, studying them.

"Come on, you son of a bitch!" Old Rodney snarled.

The ridge of spikes on the creature's head rose and bristled, then flattened, in response to his voice. Rain pattered and glistened on the creature's head; droplets glimmered on the coarse dark hair, not quite dense enough to be considered a pelt, that sparsely covered the blue-gray skin of its shoulders and flanks. It crouched, the hard corded muscles of its legs -- all four of them -- flexing visibly.

When it jumped, the movement was nearly too fast to catch. Old Rodney's crossbow released with a harsh twang, but the creature twisted in midair with that same preternatural speed, and the bolt creased its shoulder and sailed harmlessly into the trees.

Through total panic reflex, Rodney squeezed off a quick burst of P90 fire that missed utterly, before an iron-hard blow sent him spinning around and sprawling in the brush. It felt like his arm had been nearly dislocated, but as he scrambled shakily upright, shaking his ringing head, he realized that it hadn't been after him -- it had gone after his gun. The shoulder strap had snapped, and even as he located the creature a few meters away, he saw it give the gun a hard blow that knocked it off the trail to vanish, spinning, over the edge of the cliff. Then it looked up at Rodney and its yellow eyes narrowed.

"Don't let it bite you!" Old Rodney called in the closest thing his hoarse voice could manage to a shout. "That's how it feeds!"

"That's how everything feeds!" Rodney's voice rose to a shriek as he evaded a swipe of the wicked ivory-colored claws. Considering the Sheppard-thing's horrible speed, it could probably have nailed him if it had wanted to; it seemed more to be playing with him, cat and mouse style, maybe just testing what else he could do.

"No -- like a Wraith! He got me once, took a couple years off, no more than that." Old Rodney's gnarled hands were a blur as he loaded another crossbow bolt. "I've seen him -- it kill birds like that, even a deerlike critter one time ... I used to find husks sometimes, but mostly he'd eat them after draining their life. I don't think he's fully adapted to feeding on energy."

"I don't need a life history!" Rodney yelled, putting a thick tree trunk between himself and the Sheppard-thing. It ducked around the tree, but he dodged the other way, like a cartoon skit; it would have been almost funny, if he wasn't running for his life. "I need help!"

A crossbow bolt skimmed the creature's neck and thudded into the tree, leaving a thin trail of black blood in its wake.

"I need better help!" Rodney protested, just before the clawed forepaws slammed into his chest and knocked him flat. He grabbed its bony forearms, trying to pry it away, but he might as well have tried to block one of Ronon's blows with a pillow; he was helpless against its tenacious, inhuman strength. The spiny, pebbly feeling of its skin was horribly familiar -- he remembered touching Sheppard's hand while the slowly transforming Colonel slept, remembered the way he'd jerked back in horror and then, cautiously, put out a finger and felt it again. On Sheppard, the weird spiny skin had been disgusting only in its strangeness, and only because it was taking his friend away from him. Here, slick with water and hot with the fierce fire of an alien metabolism, it made his stomach twist with revulsion.

From this close, he had far, far too intimate a view of the vaguely Wraithlike face with its forward-jutting muzzle, the yellow eyes with cat-slit pupils fixed intensely on him. The creature wasn't wearing any clothes, although the almost-pelt of sparse black hair extended down its sides -- apparently halfway to becoming flexible spines like the ones that trailed in a line down its neck and the ridge of its backbone. Clearly, Sheppard had taken a slightly different evolutionary path towards Wraithliness than a normal Wraith -- but, then, Ellia hadn't ended up precisely like a normal Wraith queen, either. You mix DNA in a melting pot, he thought hysterically, and there's no telling what'll come out.

The Sheppard-Wraith slid its head to the side, studying him like it was trying to figure him out. On the one hand, good, because it hadn't killed him yet. On the other hand, he couldn't avoid breathing in its musky reek, a predator smell that overwhelmed the clean damp scent of the forest. From this close, he could see a myriad of scars, fishbelly-pale against the darker skin, and even a few pinkish flecks that must be leftovers from when they'd shot it the night before -- good God, it had nearly healed already.

His breath strangled in his throat when he realized that what he'd taken for a band of darker hair on one of its ankles was actually Sheppard's wristband, faded with years.

"What are you waiting for?" he demanded breathlessly. Past the creature's spiky head, he could see that Old Rodney had the crossbow loaded and ready to go, trained on its skull, not five feet away -- there was no way he could possibly miss. "Shoot it!"

But he read the truth in his older self's face, the torment that he could see reflected in those too-familiar, time-blurred features. No matter how hard Old Rodney might protest that the creature wasn't Sheppard, he couldn't make himself kill it.

And the full realization left him sick. With his superior reasoning ability, and a virtually infinite amount of time to figure out ways to trap and hold it, his older self should have been able to kill it a dozen times over, no matter how fast it could regenerate. But he hadn't. He couldn't. It was Sheppard.

Even knowing everything he knew, Rodney didn't think he could, either.

Old Rodney's finger tightened on the crossbow's trigger, but his hand jerked; the crossbow bolt ricocheted off its skull, leaving a bloody stripe. Hissing, the creature released Rodney long enough to backhand the old man with impossible speed and strength. The blow twisted Old Rodney's arm backwards; the snap of bone was audible. The crossbow fell to the path as his right hand went limp and he staggered backwards with a hoarse cry.

Rodney thought, I am so totally screwed.

The creature gave the old man a quick look and then, blurry with speed, it crushed Rodney down to the wet leaves just as he started to scrabble backwards. He couldn't move, could hardly breathe.

The muzzle with its rows of glinting teeth darted down towards his neck, and Rodney managed to gasp out "Oh shi--"

-- before the bark of a gunshot made the creature flinch violently, much as Ellia had done when Carson had shot her. Caught by a sudden sense of deja vu, Rodney stared up at the creature's vaguely doglike profile against the leaden-gray sky, as it swiveled its impossibly flexible neck to look over its shoulder.

"Hey, Rodney, need a hand?" Sheppard's drawl was a little out of breath, but Rodney felt a sense of shuddery relief go through him -- the familiar Sheppard's here, everything's okay feeling -- along with a certain amount of irritation, because wasn't the idiot supposed to stay in the damn cave?

------

Knowing that he'd been Wraithified was one thing, but actually seeing the creature -- himself -- crouched on top of Rodney, about to rip out his friend's throat, brought a rush of emotion to the surface: horror, revulsion, and a blinding anger.

The 9-mil jumped in Sheppard's hands and he saw the impact in its side, as near the heart as he could get. He didn't dare try for a headshot, not with the head so very close to Rodney's head. But from here, he wasn't sure if the low-powered handgun could do much damage to its fast-healing body. The bullet certainly got its attention, at least; the spiky head snapped up and swiveled around to regard him from flat yellow eyes. He had to fight not to flinch away. Jesus, is that what I looked like? No wonder everyone was so freaked out when they saw me.

"Hey, Rodney, need a hand?"

"What do you think? And why are you here?"

Something inside him unknotted a bit; if Rodney could complain, then he was still at least mostly intact. "Yeah, good question, because it looks like you're doing just great without m--"

"Look out!" two voices shouted -- Rodney's, in chorus with that of his older self. The Iratus creature spun with snakelike speed and grace, releasing Rodney and leaping for Sheppard.

------

For forty years, Rodney had largely managed to avoid this -- getting caught in the open, going up against the Sheppard-creature in a one-on-one fight that he couldn't hope to win. The bare few times it had happened before, he'd come out of it damaged: missing an eye, missing some fingers, missing a few years of his life.

He still didn't know how he'd survived those early months, when the horror of what had happened to them hadn't quite sunk in yet, when he still thought he could talk to Sheppard, reason with him, bring him back somehow. In later years he'd mostly attributed his survival to Iratus-Sheppard being as confused about things as he was -- trying to cope with a radically changed body, a barrage of alien sensory input, hungers and needs that were unfamiliar and bizarre.

The overriding thing driving him was the ever-present awareness that he'd failed at his one true purpose in life, which was to understand things. The abiding principle by which he lived was the belief that all things could be broken down into comprehensible scientific maxims, and thus controlled.

But when it really counted, he hadn't done it. He'd dialed the DHD without even thinking about it, without noticing the slight differences between this one and a normal DHD. And he'd had many, many years after that to reflect on it, to figure out exactly what had gone wrong and to begin the slow process of figuring out how to undo it -- or, failing that, at least to survive until time looped back around to when he and Sheppard had been bounced from the Atlantis gate to this one, and stop himself from dialing it. Not that it would help him -- the experience with Elizabeth's older self, not to mention bucketloads of quantum theory, had taught him that much -- but at least one version of himself, of Sheppard, could escape. The alternative was that they'd remain trapped forever in an infinite cycle of guilt and death and pain. In fact, he had no clue if this was even the first time this had happened; maybe he and mutated Sheppard had killed each other so quickly in past cycles that they'd left no trace behind. This could have been going on for a very long time. An infinity.

But there wasn't even going to be a repeat of the cycle this time -- no do-over, no second chance to put things right, because they hadn't triggered the DHD and hadn't jumped back in time, and they were both about to die in front of him.

Vaguely, through the pain in his arm, he became aware that someone was shouting at him, and had been for some time. No -- not shouting; it was as if he could feel the words, reverberating through his whole body.

"Rodney! Don't let this happen -- stop me!"

It wasn't the first time he'd heard it, that incorporeal voice. He'd never dared imagine that it was anything more than a particularly vivid auditory hallucination; the alternative was even more horrific than the things he knew to be true.

"Rodney, LISTEN to me! Damn it, I know you can hear me."

But Sheppard, the real Sheppard, the fully corporeal one, had heard the voice too. And kneeling in the rain, half in shock and watching his worst nightmare unfold in front of him, knowing that this was the very worst time to go all Ghost Whisperer, Rodney did something he hadn't done since he'd been on this world. At least not when he wasn't drunk enough that he could rationalize it away afterwards.

He focused inward, and tried to respond.

"Sheppard?"

After so many years of conscientiously ignoring that voice, tuning into it was like struggling through molasses. But it responded to him.

It. He. There wasn't a tone to the voice, not as such, but in some bone-deep way he could feel a kind of sardonic amusement that he would have known anywhere, and every one of his defenses against the truth crumbled like spun sugar in the rain.

"I knew you could hear me, McKay."

------

The creature's weight bore Sheppard down, and he screamed in pain as his leg twisted under him. The world spun around him, but still he managed to react instinctively, bringing up his hands to hold it off with an arm across its scaly throat.

Me. It's me. Over and over, he kept telling himself that, as if it was vitally important that he didn't forget, as if he could forget. Against his forearm he could feel its heartbeat, a too-rapid tattoo like the flutter of a bird's heart.

"Hi again," he said into the blank stare of those yellow predator's eyes -- hawk's eyes, lizard's eyes, with nothing human behind them.

The creature's lips curled back from its jagged teeth. Sheppard had one arm across its throat, the other gripping a thin hard wrist -- but its other arm was free, and it curled its claws around his shoulder. He gasped in pain, but it wasn't really trying to hurt him, just immobilize him so that it could curl its neck down. Saliva glistened on its fangs. All his sarcastic retorts died in his throat, because it was him, and he was slowly losing ground to its implacable strength.

A shock ran down the length of the creature's body, and it was knocked forward, its chest flattened against his for just an instant before another impact slammed into the side of its head and it rolled away. Sheppard stared up in shock, blinking rainwater out of his eyes and then blinking again at the sight of a wild-eyed Rodney gripping a freaking tree branch in a white-knuckled, muddy grip. The second impact had broken the impromptu weapon in half, though Rodney didn't seem to notice that there was only about a foot and a half of jagged wood projecting from his fists.

"You're attacking it with a stick?"

"I don't have any weapons!" Rodney gasped, stumbling backwards, his pale face glistening with rain.

"God! Get my gun!" He tried to get up, but his trembling limbs wouldn't quite work right; shock and pain and cold left him uncoordinated and weak.

"I don't know where it is!"

Damn this dense undergrowth. The P90 was probably somewhere around here too, heaven only knows where. Sheppard managed to roll to his side just in time to see the creature crouch for another leap, and as the yellow eyes fixed on him, he thought, It's done playing. It means business this time.

------

Forty years of denial crumbled into pieces as the man who hadn't thought of himself as Rodney McKay in many years whispered, "Sheppard? It's you, right?"

"I'm not sure." The voice was faint, uncertain. "I think so, sometimes, but I forget things. I don't know how I'm here; I sometimes know who I am, but I have no idea WHAT I am."

But Rodney did. At least, he had a guess. It was beyond anything he'd thought the Stargate could do -- but the gate on this world wasn't exactly like a normal gate. And, after all, nobody really knew how the Stargates worked. That they demolecularized a person's molecules and reconstituted them on the other side was beyond question ... but the Ancients had believed that a person was more than just the sum of their molecules. And while Rodney had never believed in metaphysics, he also couldn't deny that he'd seen things that certainly implied the Ancients might have ... well, he thought of it as discovered a kind of physics we haven't figured out yet, but the fact remained that for the Alterans, consciousness existed independently of physical form, and it was not outrageous that their technology might reflect that belief.

It was not impossible that consciousness might be transmitted independently of physical form by the gate. And if the consciousness and the body could not be reintegrated on the other end -- the possibilities were disturbing.

"I think you're a kind of ... residual pattern of your thought processes, preserved by the gate." He didn't exactly speak aloud, but his lips moved, framing the words quietly as rain trickled down his face like tears.

"I'm a Stargate ghost?"

"Oh, trust you to put it in the most idiotically simplistic terms possible." The offhand insult was habit, a habit he hadn't indulged in half a lifetime. It felt ridiculously good.

"Are you okay?" Sheppard asked him softly.

"That's a stupid question." He picked himself up, his broken arm dangling uselessly at his side. In front of him, the fight played out with the slowness of nightmare: his younger self stupidly, hopelessly, attacking the creature with a broken branch, driving it off Sheppard.

"It's going to kill them. Us."

"It's you," Rodney murmured.

"No, it's not. It hasn't been for a long time, and you know that."

With a sharp backswing, the creature knocked the younger Rodney head-over-heels, sending him skidding to the very edge of the cliff. Sheppard, the younger version, lurched forward, only to be borne down by the creature's weight as it went for his throat.

"Rodney, please." Sheppard's voice was soft in his ear. "I don't want to live like that. I don't want to BE that."

He couldn't work the crossbow with only one hand -- and his maimed hand, at that. But he still had a weapon: the knife jammed into an ill-fitting, homemade sheath at his belt. Once it had been Sheppard's combat knife, a long time ago. It had been through a lot of use since then, but he kept it sharp.

The fingers of his maimed hand curled around the hilt. His grip might not be quite as sure as it had once been, but he still had two fingers and a thumb. With a sharp tug, he wrenched the knife out of the warped rawhide sheath.

The cliff was very high; he didn't think that even the Wraith-Sheppard's inhumanly resilient body could survive a fall from that height. The only reason why he'd never done something like this in the past was because he hadn't had a compelling reason to. Even after everything that had happened to him, he was still afraid of death. But if his death was the way out, for at least one timeline's version of Sheppard and himself, then maybe it was worth it.

"Rodney--" He wasn't sure if he could truly read the fear, the concern in Sheppard's bodiless voice, or if it was only his imagination. "Rodney, I didn't mean for you to -- "

His own voice was soft, so soft he could barely hear his own words. "I don't want to live like this either, Colonel. I never did. The very least I can do is save you."

------

One minute Sheppard was straining against the wiry weight pressing him down into the wet leaves -- the next, something hit the Iratus creature in the side, knocking it off him.

"Don't!" Rodney's voice, from farther away, was breathless -- the wind knocked out of him by his fall -- and ragged with desperation.

There was a great snapping of branches and crashing of leaves, and the creature's high unearthly shriek cut off suddenly with a wet distant crunch. Swallowing, Sheppard sat up slowly. The rainwater running into his eyes was warm; he raised a hand to find that at some point during the fight he'd gashed his forehead, and blood was trickling down his face.

Rodney knelt on the lip of the cliff, looking down. Not quite sure where the crutches were, not quite trusting his balance on them just yet, Sheppard scooted over to the edge to join him. All he could see were treetops, hazy in the gray cloak of rain.

"What happened?"

"I ... jumped. I mean, the other me." Rodney swallowed. "They went over the edge together."

Sheppard stared down into the mist. Nothing moved below them; there were no sounds. "Would a fall like that kill it?" The fall would certainly have killed the older Rodney, but he didn't want to think about that.

Rodney gave him a pale imitation of his usual irritated glare. "Do I look like Physics Google to you?" He frowned. "You're bleeding again."

Sheppard wiped impatiently at his forehead. "I know. See if you can find my crutches."

"Why? Oh my God, are you going down there?"

Since Rodney was making no move, Sheppard groaned and used his hands to push himself across the wet ground, feeling through the leaves. It wasn't as if he could get any wetter or muddier than he already was, after all. "If it's not dead, it'll be hurt pretty bad, and we'll never get a better chance to finish it off. Otherwise, it'll just heal and come back."

Something waved in his face; he looked up to see Rodney staring down a length of crutch at him, with an unreadable expression on his face.

"Thanks," Sheppard said, taking it from him.

"Colonel..." Rodney trailed off and looked away. "There's something you really ought to know. About ... them." He swallowed, and opened and closed his mouth without any sound coming out.

"They're us."

Rodney's head snapped up. "What? How did you --"

Silently, wordlessly, Sheppard opened the box and held it up so that Rodney could see the dog tags and American flag patch, nestled in the bottom. Then he tugged aside the fur cloak he was wearing to reveal the set of identical tags around his neck.

"Oh," Rodney said softly.

"I just don't know how." Sheppard went back to feeling around through the dead leaves for his other crutch and his 9-mil.

"Oh ... that. The, uh, the towers..." Rodney waved a hand in demonstration. "Time machine. Time loop. The DHD triggers them. When we came through the Stargate originally, we, uh -- jumped back in time. Maybe more than once. Maybe a lot of times."

"That's confusing." Sheppard's fingers closed over a rain-slick barrel. With a sigh of relief, he pulled the gun out of the underbrush and checked the action.

"Not any worse than Elizabeth going back and changing history so we didn't die when we came through the gate to Atlantis."

"Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Confusing as hell." Satisfied that the gun was as likely to fire as it could be in the rain, he tucked it against his side under the rain-shedding fur.

"What do you mean? It's basic quantum theory! Here." Rodney handed him the other crutch.

"Strangely, McKay, some of us in the room aren't physicists." Waving away an offer of assistance, Sheppard got to his feet by sliding his back up a tree. "Where's the P90?"

Wordless for once, Rodney pointed to the cliff.

"Oh, you're kidding."

Rodney scowled at him. "You -- I mean, the other you, the thing, it knocked the gun over the edge."

"Well, I guess we have to go down, then."

It took them awhile to find a route down to the bottom of the cliff, especially one that could be traversed on crutches. To keep their minds off what they might find at the bottom, Sheppard nudged Rodney into filling him in on what the older McKay had told him. He didn't bring up the voice that he'd heard back at the cave, and neither did Rodney; Sheppard had no explanation for that, but he knew he had heard it, knew that he'd felt something. And it was gone now, that elusive presence at the back of his awareness; he was equally sure of that. Maybe he'd been able to hear it because it really was him; maybe something to do with his ATA gene; maybe he'd just been the one it had chosen to make contact with. In any case, it was gone.

The path of broken trees and crushed vegetation down the side of the cliff was plain enough to follow. Sheppard gestured Rodney behind him, then realized that he couldn't carry the gun and move forward at the same time. Rodney, sighing, slipped a shoulder under Sheppard's other arm, and they cautiously approached the two bodies tangled in a heap of shattered branches, rocks and mud.

"They're, um... pretty dead, aren't they?" Rodney murmured.

That about summed it up. There was no chance, as far as Sheppard could see, that either of the two mangled bodies could still be alive, but he still checked the creature's broken neck for a nonexistent pulse. It was already growing cold in the rain. "Go see if you can find the P90," Sheppard said, slipping away from Rodney's supportive shoulder and sitting down on a log. Rodney vanished with a look of relief.

Sheppard rested the 9-mil on his knee and massaged a cramp out of his injured leg. He tried not to look too closely at the faces of the dead -- especially his own -- but his eyes were drawn to the knife buried up to the haft in the monster's side. My knife, he thought, recognizing the military-issue hilt. Black blood bathed the creature's side and Old Rodney's arm, although the wound by itself would not have been enough to kill it.

Brave, he thought. The word by itself seemed inadequate. Getting to his feet, he hopped a couple of steps closer, to close Rodney's staring eyes, and then the creature's yellow ones.

"Found it," Rodney said, behind him, and Sheppard jumped. "Hope we don't have to shoot anything soon, though." He passed Sheppard the crutches, and then showed him the P90, its stock cracked and magazine torn off by the fall.

Sheppard just grunted in response, resting most of his weight on the crutches as exhaustion began to catch up to him.

Rodney fiddled with the parts of the broken gun, not looking up. "I guess we ought to, um -- you know, bury them. Why don't you go back to the cave, Colonel. I can do this; you'd just be in the way."

"I need to be here," Sheppard said, and that was the end of that.

------

They buried the two bodies at the bottom of the cliff, in graves as deep as Rodney could manage to dig, with his stiff and aching shoulder. Sheppard helped where he could, but Rodney eventually shooed him out of the way; it was easier to do it on his own. After that, Sheppard went off into the woods and started locating rocks, rolling them over to the edge of the graves.

"Okay, you got me," Rodney panted, wiping sweat and rain off his face with a dirt-encrusted hand. "What the hell are you going to do, build a monument?"

"Build a cairn," Sheppard said, pushing another rock into the pile.

"A what?"

"A cairn. Shallow graves are something ... I've had a little experience with." Sheppard avoided Rodney's eyes. "You pile on the rocks so that animals don't get the bodies."

"Okay, first of all, that's really unpleasant, Colonel, and second, I don't think there are any animals left on this world; the other you ate them all."

"The world's a big place, Rodney." Leaning over to shift a rock, Sheppard nearly took a header into the open grave. He slid down shakily to sit with his back against a tree, his leg thrust out stiff in front of him.

"If you get pneumonia, I'm the one who's going to have to drag your ass back to the cave, you know."

"I'm not going to get pneumonia, McKay."

But by the time they laid the bodies in the graves, he was shivering and pale. Rodney glanced at him worriedly, but said nothing as they covered the dead Rodney's face with his fur cape, and then used a piece of the same to cover Wraith-Sheppard's. After a moment, thoughtfully, Sheppard laid the meticulously carved wooden box onto Old Rodney's chest, with the dog tags inside.

In silence, the two of them scooped dirt back into the graves -- in the steady rain, it was more like mud by now -- and then piled the rocks on top. When the cairns were complete, they just stood for a moment, exhausted, hungry and filthy, staring at the two forlorn piles of rocks in the rain.

"Think we should, uh ..." Rodney gestured uncertainly with one dirt-streaked hand. "Mark them somehow?"

"I don't know." Sheppard glanced at him, and despite the strain in his white face, faint humor glimmered in his eyes. "What do you want on your grave?"

Rodney glared at him. "It's not my grave, anymore than the old Elizabeth we found in Atlantis was Elizabeth."

"No, but you still know what you'd want on your grave, in case a situation like this ever ... came up."

Rodney contemplated a suitably sarcastic response, but he just didn't have the energy for it, and he let the urge bleed out of him in a long sigh. "I don't really ... I don't know. He wanted to be forgotten, mostly. He was ashamed of what he'd done."

"Rodney, he didn't do anything."

"That's it exactly. He didn't fix it," Rodney said, and he hated how small and fragile his voice came out.

Sheppard's hand tugged at his arm gently. "Rodney, you can't fix everything..." And then suddenly he was depending on that grip for most of his body weight, as his legs sagged under him. Rodney caught him.

"All right, consider the memorial service over. Cave, Colonel, now."

Later, they sat in the cave with the door open, listening to the rain patter outside. With the monster gone, there wasn't really any reason to keep the door closed, and it helped lighten the smoky oppression of the atmosphere inside. With the fire going, it was warm enough to be relatively comfortable, although Sheppard was huddled deep in a pile of furs, the intact LSD next to his hand.

Rodney poked through the contents of various misshapen baskets. "Looks like there's enough food to last us awhile ... if you can call it food. Smoked fish and, oh look, some kind of tuber." He held up the warty, misshapen thing. "At least that's what I assume it is. Maybe it's a science experiment."

Sheppard made a noncommittal sound.

Rodney set a clay-covered basket of water in the edge of the coals, looking at it with renewed interest now that he knew he'd made it. Well, not him exactly, but another him -- someone who'd been him until their paths had forked after they stepped onto this world. Sure, the basket was as ugly as Lucius's gourd, but it worked. He'd always been convinced that he could do anything he put his mind to, but if someone had actually asked him if he thought he could survive for forty years on a wilderness planet with nothing but the contents of his field vest, and with a monster hunting him ... well, he'd probably have said of course he could, but did he actually believe that? Not really, he thought, breaking the tuber into unappetizing-looking pieces and adding it to the water. And yet, he had.

"You didn't fail, you know," he said softly into the flames of the low-burning fire. "You did pretty damn good. Sheppard would have told you that, if he'd been able to."

"Talking to yourself, McKay?" came the soft drawl from the pile of furs in the corner.

"Yes," Rodney said, smiling just a little, and he got up and hobbled over to sink down onto the pile of straw next to Sheppard. Every part of his body ached; he wasn't sure if it was from infection or from the unaccustomed activity of the last couple of days. Maybe both. "You look like crap," he added, frowning down at the pale face that was barely visible under all the coverings.

" 'm fine," Sheppard slurred.

"No, no you're not." Sudden nausea rolled through Rodney's stomach, because Sheppard really could die, leaving him alone here. And he'd seen himself at the end of that: scarred and miserable, with no one to complain to, no one to tell him when he did something right.

"I don't know what the hell to do," he said, leaning back against the wall, and damn, he hadn't meant to admit that, but the words were already out. Maybe Sheppard had fallen asleep and hadn't heard.

No such luck; one eye cracked open. "About what?"

Rodney waved a hand vaguely at the cave around them. "I don't know how to get us off this world." His voice came out sharp, snappish, as it always did when he was frustrated. "I mean, the other me spent, what, forty years trying to figure out how to dial the DHD without triggering the time-jump effect, and he couldn't do it. Whatever this place was for -- and we'll probably never know, which drives me crazy, by the way -- it was obviously designed to be a prison. And we're trapped in it."

"Which is why we wait for Atlantis to find us. They've gotta be going nuts, looking for us."

"What if there was a bomb? What if there isn't any Atlantis anymore--ow!" Sheppard had worked a hand free of the covers to smack him lightly in the arm.

"Atlantis is fine, Rodney; we agreed on that."

"No, you and your stupid optimism agreed on that; I don't recall being given a vote," Rodney growled, rubbing his arm.

Sheppard just snorted, and closed his eyes. "Well, being this optimistic is hard work, so I'm going to sleep."

Rodney stared anxiously down at him. "But I'm making food. Well, it's sort of food. I'm starving. Aren't you hungry?"

" 'm hungry," Sheppard mumbled without sounding especially sincere. "Wake me up when it's done."

Rodney managed to wait all of forty-five seconds or so, before sticking a hand under the furs to make sure Sheppard was still breathing. With his hand on Sheppard's chest, he could feel small shivers along with shallow and rapid breaths.

Not good.

"McKay."

"What?" Rodney squeaked, jerking his hand back.

"Personal space," Sheppard said faintly, from under the blankets. "Remember it?"

"I was just -- uh --"

"Rodney." Sheppard rolled his head to the side, shifting so that he could look up at his friend. Fever-bright, his eyes were still focused, intense with conviction. "Rodney, they'll come."

"I know they will," Rodney returned, a little too quickly.

"They always do. We always do." Sheppard curled deeper under the blankets, his voice growing soft as it slid towards sleep. "Elizabeth's out there. Ronon and Teyla. Radek, Carson. They won't leave us, Rodney."

"I know." Rodney's hand slipped to rest on top of the pile of furs. "I know."

---

It was nearly a day later, and Rodney was dipping water from the creek, when his radio crackled to life. "Colonel Sheppard, Dr. McKay, this is the Daedalus. We're picking up your subcutaneous transmitters; are you reading us?"

"Oh, thank God," Rodney said fervently. Sheppard had been drifting in and out of sleep; he was still coherent, but feverish and in a lot of pain. "Yes, and I can't wait to hear how you found us, but right now beam us the hell out of here."

An hour or so later, he was showered and in clean scrubs, sitting on the edge of an infirmary bed while a brisk Daedalus corpsman bandaged his shoulder.

"Solar flare," Zelenka said, sitting on the chair opposite. "One in a million chance. Your wormhole was cut off from the Atlantis gate and bounced to this address. We've checked and it's not in the database; we'd never have dialed there on our own."

Rodney looked up from the laptop on his knees, where he'd been looking over the calculations that Zelenka had used to predict the new path of the wormhole and find where they'd gone. "This is ... alarmingly competent, Radek. I may have to add some duties to your workload; I think I've been underutilizing you."

Reading between the lines to the compliment underneath, with the skill of long practice, Zelenka grinned. "It is a relief to know I do not have to do your job anymore, as well as mine. Underutilized, indeed; overworked is more like it." And he patted Rodney on the arm before heading out the door, leaving him alone with Ronon and Teyla.

The corpsman had gone off somewhere and there was no one else around, so Rodney didn't mind as much as he probably should have when Ronon engulfed him in a bear hug. Rodney was pretty sure that the only reason why it hadn't happened earlier, in full view of everyone, was because Teyla had gotten to him first with one of her Athosian half-hugs, and he'd squeaked in pain when she'd put her hand on his sore shoulder. Ronon, showing remarkable restraint, had at least managed to wait until he was bandaged and doped up.

"Okay. Enough, enough. Put me down."

Ronon put him down, grinning. "We had no idea where you two went."

"Well, that makes all of us, because neither did we."

Both of them looked at him expectantly; they obviously expected a little more information. Rodney chased them off by irritably claiming exhaustion. He hadn't talked to Elizabeth yet and he wasn't really looking forward to it, because he had no clue what he was going to say.

They wheeled Sheppard in a little later, pale and asleep.

Rodney was half asleep himself, idly going over the past few days' reports on his borrowed laptop and making note of all the many things his staff had been screwing up in his absence, by the time Sheppard finally moaned and stirred out of the semi-coma they'd doped him into. Teyla and Ronon had been drifting in and out of the room -- right now they were off in the gym, getting rid of some excess energy.

"Not a dream," Sheppard murmured thickly, staring at the ceiling. "We're on the Daedalus, right?"

"Right, and we should be back on Atlantis in a few hours, where we'll be thoroughly debriefed, I imagine." Rodney looked over at him. "What are we going to tell Elizabeth?"

Sheppard blinked, then turned his head to the side, squinting sleepily. "Any specific reason why the truth is a bad idea?"

"I don't know, I just think ... never mind what I think, it probably wouldn't make any sense anyway." Rodney went back to staring at the gently rising curve of Atlantis's energy expenditures over the last few days and trying to figure out why the hell Coleman ever thought it would be a good idea to sync up the naquadah generators that way.

"For what it's worth, I agree," Sheppard said.

Rodney looked up. "Hmm?"

"About ... them. That they probably wouldn't want their story told."

Rodney laid the laptop aside, having lost interest in his calculations. "I definitely got that feeling from ... me. I mean, all he really wanted us to do was leave him alone. He didn't really want to go back. Of course, a lot of it had to do with feeling, you know, guilty and all." Rodney looked away; he didn't want to go through another round of You did the best you could, and besides, he was pretty sure that it hadn't been his other self's only reason, and maybe not even his main reason, for keeping them in the dark.

"And he was protecting me," Sheppard said. "The other me, I mean."

Damn Sheppard and his insights anyway. "Yeah," Rodney said reluctantly. "I think he was. Which brings us back to, what do we tell Elizabeth?"

Sheppard started to shrug, then winced when he discovered why that wasn't a good idea. "What do we have to tell her? We couldn't get the DHD working, we got attacked by something, and helped out by a local who got killed shortly before the Daedalus picked us up. Sounds like one of our typical missions, actually."

Rodney snorted. "Too bad Ronon and Teyla missed the fun."

"No ... not so much, really." Sheppard lay back and gazed up at the ceiling.

"Hmm." No, not so much.

"Rodney."

Sheppard's voice was soft. Rodney closed his eyes for a minute and debated pretending to have suddenly fallen asleep. Finally he said, impatiently, to the expectant silence beside him, "What?"

"I'm sorry."

This was just about the last thing he'd ever have expected to hear out of John Sheppard, for any reason. Rodney looked at him in shock. Sheppard was plucking at his blanket with the hand that wasn't strapped to his chest.

"What on Ear-- what in the Pegasus Galaxy are you apologizing for?"

"I thought it was gone." Sheppard tugged a thread from the blanket, winding it slowly and systematically around his finger. "The -- the bug thing -- you know? Rodney, on that planet, I tried to kill you. A lot. I mean, eventually, I did kill you."

Oh. That. The thought hit Rodney like a sledgehammer blow that he probably wasn't the one having the most difficulty dealing with what had happened on the planet, not by a long shot. "Er, no," Rodney said. "Technically, at the end there, I killed you."

"I'd call it self-defense, seeing how I was attacking you at the time."

Rodney snorted. "Oh, admit it, won't you? I, Rodney McKay, armed with a knife, killed you, Mr. Badass Wraith Monster black-ops military-type ... thing. I outwitted you for forty years and then killed you with hand tools."

"Okay, you sound a little too happy about that." But Sheppard's voice sounded a little less dragged-down, a little more like his usual irritatingly perky drawl.

"Face it," Rodney said cheerfully, buffing his fingernails on his blanket. "I am now officially badass."

Sheppard was startled into a laugh. "Officially, huh? Does that mean you'll be spending more time in the gym?"

Now it was Rodney's turn to laugh. "Ha! Why should I, when I clearly don't need to?"

At that point, Ronon and Teyla came trooping in, freshly showered and bearing trays of food from the Daedalus mess. They were annoyingly happy to find that Sheppard was awake -- "Hey, I've been awake for hours, and nobody commented on it!" "Shut up, McKay." -- and the conversation degenerated into a free-for-all catch-up and gabfest over reconstituted Salisbury steak and muffins. If anyone noticed that the two rescuees were a little less than forthcoming with precise details of the creature that had attacked them, or the customs of the local people who had helped them, no one commented on it. By the time the drugs started wearing off, Sheppard was mostly asleep, and the Daedalus medical staff chased their visitors off so they could rest for the remainder of the flight back to Atlantis. And Rodney could feel the horror of the planet receding to a quiet place in the back of his brain -- to be stored away with sinking puddlejumpers and Sheppard's voice saying So long, Rodney, and the other stuff of nightmares that vanished by daylight.

END

Author's Note: This was a phenomenally difficult story to write, because of the need to conceal Old Rodney's true identity until near the end. Rodney has SUCH a distinctive character voice that it's almost impossible to write dialogue for him without having it sound like him, or at least making it very evident that he's from Earth. I think I've done more re-writes on this story than on anything I've written to date, trying to obfuscate Old Rodney's identity while still having him act in character and dropping clues for the reader to find.

This story was originally begun last fall for the SpookMe ficathon, which gave "scary" prompts to participants to build their horror stories around. My prompts were "insects" (for which I used Iratus bugs) and "a locked room" (which I mis-remembered as "a locked box" until I'd already laid out my plot, at which point I decided to go with it). Kodiak had also asked for ghost stories last Halloween, which was what I was trying to do with the Sheppard Stargate ghost. I'm not sure how much sense ANY of the science in this story makes, but hey, it's Halloween...

I contemplated doing another rewrite of the story when "Vengeance" aired, presenting a very different "look" for the end-stage Iratus transformation than I'd envisioned in the wake of "Conversion". However, I decided to go with my original idea because Michael's transformation process was fairly different from what had happened to Sheppard in "Instinct", and I can't see any reason why different end results wouldn't be possible. Besides, IMHO, a giant predator lizard-creature was a lot creepier than a giant bug...

Incidentally, the initial idea that developed into this story was to have Sheppard as an old mountain guy, stranded by himself in the wilderness for umpteen years -- sort of like "Epiphany" taken to extremes. In the end, with the plot developing as it did, I used Rodney instead. But that was the first idea.

Thank you for reviewing; I know I'm terrible at responding, but I've really enjoyed reading all your speculation and thoughts on the story.