Empty Vessels – part ten of eleven

by Eildon Rhymer

The first thing he was aware of was that nothing hurt, but that it should do. The second thing was that he only had the vaguest idea of where he was, but that even this was somehow an improvement on what had gone before.

He opened his eyes. Atlantis. Infirmary. Home. His throat was raw and his lips were dry, and as he struggled to shape words, a doctor came hurrying to his side, and said something about how pleased they were to see him awake. He tried to say that he was pleased, too, but the numbness stole his words.

He remembered who he was, though. It was amazing how comforting that felt, as if all you needed in life was to know who you were and your place in the world, and that nothing else really mattered that much, after that.

The second time he awoke, he realised what an absolute staggering lie that was.

They came to him separately: Teyla, Ronon, McKay. They said little, and their faces were clouded.

The pain was worse then, since whatever drugs they had been giving him were wearing off, but he tried to smile. "Hey, guys. We're still alive. That counts as a win." There was more, too. Thinking about it when alone, he realised how miraculous it was that the four of them had drawn together even though they had no idea who they were. Despite everything, they had stayed together, they had defeated their enemy together, they had escaped together, and together they had found home.

Apparently that counted for nothing.

"I shot you," Ronon said miserably, the next morning.

"Yes." Sheppard nodded, wincing at the pain of even that small movement. "It has come to my attention."

"I nearly killed--"

"But you didn't," he said firmly. "I'm not planning on dying any time soon. And you also shot that rock thing, and saved us all." Ronon did not look convinced. Brooding did not suit him. "And, hey, I shot you first, that time when I… uh… shot… uh… everyone."

Ronon was looking down at his hands. "I shouldn't have--"

"These things happen. Don't beat yourself up about it. If anything, it was the rock's fault."

"But you nearly…" Ronon twisted his hands, and by the hands alone, looked almost like McKay. Sheppard remembered what Ronon had been like in the tunnels, incessantly apologising, almost afraid to use his gun. It was as if the memory loss had killed something essential that made him who he was. "I didn't used to be like this," he mumbled.

Sheppard almost asked him what he meant, then thought he understood. He had never meant to be like this, either. He had joined the Air Force because he had longed to fly; he had never thought to become the sort of man who could kill sixty men with a single flick of a switch, or someone whose job it was to order men to their death. After the first few deaths, he had hated himself, but he had come to realise that it fell to some people to do these things, so that millions of civilians didn't have to.

"The world didn't used to be like this," he said, and pain and the memory of the tunnels made him more serious than he would normally have been. "We become what we have to be." Ronon looked up slightly. "Hey, it would be great to wake up and find that the Wraith have gone, and the Replicators, and all the other bad guys who want to rip our hearts out, but until they have…" He shrugged, not wanting to say more. They became what they had to become; they bore that burden. It wasn't easy, but it had to be done.

Ronon's gaze was unreadable. Sheppard had never seen him look as lost as this. Ronon had refused to break under the weight of seven years of terrible memories, but looked close to breaking after one day without them.

"You're on my team," Sheppard said. "Hell, we kick Wraith ass. It's not an ideal world, but it's the world we're landed with, and I sure as hell feel safer knowing you're there guarding my back, not afraid to shoot when you need to." Ronon still said nothing, so he said, "No-one wants this sorry world, but…" Then he died away, not quite able to bring himself to complete it. He was telling a man much younger than himself that it was better to kill than to pursue peace.

But however warped the message, it seemed to reach Ronon. Sheppard watched his hand clench into a fist, but all Ronon said was, "Still sorry I shot you, though."

"I don't hold grudges, not for honest mistakes." Sheppard settled down into the pillows. "Hell, I've made enough of my own. Would be hypocritical to start blaming…" The pain stole the end of the words away. He tried again. "And if I don't blame you when I'm the one who, to quote McKay, looks like he's been attacked by a demented blowtorch, don't you go blaming yourself. And don't let Rodney blame you, either. You know what he's like - blames others when he thinks he's at fault himself. Tell him I said so. No, don't. Not that."

Rodney paced up and down, to the door and back. "Spit it out, McKay," he heard Sheppard say.

He stopped, frozen between one step and the next. "What?"

"I've already had Ronon --" Sheppard's voice cut off. "What's troubling you?"

"What, you're a shrink now?"

He didn't meant to say anything, he really didn't. He twisted his hands, then slumped down heavily on the chair. "I made… false assumptions," he said. "I misread the evidence and decided I was some military hero. I as good as told you I was your commanding officer--" He saw Sheppard flinch ever so slightly at that. "-- and I made you elect me as leader."

Sheppard nodded, but said nothing.

"Then…" He twisted his hands. "I was terrified. I didn't know what to do. I nearly got us all killed."

"We're still here."

"That's not the point!" He felt suddenly, irrationally furious with Sheppard. We're still here. That was the attitude of someone who still had amnesia. It was the attitude of someone who saw only now, not the awfulness that had led to it. Life wasn't like that. Life was full of worry and pain and agonising over all those things that might have gone wrong, and had managed to be plucked from the jaws of disaster by some miracle, but would probably go twice as wrong next time.

By the time he gathered himself for words, Sheppard was looking at him steadily. "You did well, Rodney."

How dare the man contradict him? How could he…? Oh. He pressed his lips together.

"The way I remember it," Sheppard said, "you took control."

"But I was terrified. I never knew what to do. I kept on having to tell myself that I… that I was supposed to know, but I didn't. I was…"

"And you think everyone else isn't?" Sheppard said harshly. When Rodney looked at him, he was painfully easing himself back into the pillow. "Welcome to the great secret of military leadership: playing a part," Sheppard said, with half a smile. "Everyone who looks as if he's in control is anxious underneath, just trying not to show it to the people under his command. When he shouts that order, he's praying that this guess is the right one."

"Really?" Rodney's hand opened and closed again. "Even you?"

"Well," Sheppard said, after too short a silence, "not me, of course. Everyone else." His smile faded. "You did well, McKay; I mean it. I know I'm not one to… well, to say these things, but…"

"Then don't!" Rodney blurted out. As Jet, Sheppard had looked up to him, and asked him to lead him. Things had changed between them, but that was then. Now they were back homr, he needed things to be the same again.

"You did well," Sheppard said firmly. "You took control. Things happened that would normally have made you run around in panic, but you didn't. Because you thought you were the leader, you acted like one."

"Huh," he said, at a loss for anything else to say. Was Sheppard saying…? He swallowed. Yes, yes, it was true. He'd assumed he was the leader, and he'd made sure that he acted like one. There had been a few times when he had pushed his fear aside and managed to speak firmly and calmly to his terrified troops – to Sheppard, anyway. Perhaps… And that was the big one. He swallowed again. Perhaps he could do this again. Perhaps he had cast himself in the narrow role of the terrified scientist, and the emotions followed on, doing what he expected them to. Perhaps all he needed to do was…

"Huh," he said again. "A moral lesson, coming from you?"

Sheppard shrugged. "You've caught me on an off day. Morphine. Won't happen again."

"What?" Ronon demanded, opening the door

McKay was shifting from foot to foot, but he made a visible effort to stop. "I want…" His hand clenched at his side. "You were teaching me fighting last year…"

Ronon gripped the edge of the door, but said nothing.

"We stopped because I… Well, I…" McKay straightened his shoulders, and looked straight at Ronon. "I said it was your fault that Sheppard was hurt, and… well, it was in a way, because, you know: smoking gun? But the way I see it now, none of us were really ourselves in there. It was the rock's fault – yes, let's blame the rock. But at the same time…" The hand clenched and unclenched again. "We stopped the lessons because… well, with a brain like mine…" He let out a breath. "I want to start them again."

He clutched the door tighter. "You think I'm good for nothing but fighting?"

"Of course not," McKay protested. "You're… you can be funny. You're… probably lots of things, but there's no denying the fact that you're good at fighting, just like there's no denying the fact that I'm – hello? Genius! So I just thought…"

He trailed off. Ronon knew his expression was forbidding, but he could not bring himself to soften it, not yet. He remembered what Sheppard had said; he had thought about it all day. Perhaps fighting wasn't all he was, but it was the main thing he could contribute to the situation that they found themselves in. People took on different roles in war-time than in peace. It was not perhaps the role they would have chosen for themselves, but given the situation they found themselves in, it was the best role. Ronon was good at fighting, and through fighting he could save lives, so it was nothing to be ashamed of. And even as he fought, he found time for laughter and friendship and fellowship – more, perhaps, after this experience than he had looked for before.

"On one condition," he said, pushing himself off from the door. "You teach me science."

"That's good," McKay said, then his eyebrows shot up. "What? I can't 'teach you science.'" He said it the words with great emphasis. "It took years of study to get me where I am… and that's only with a huge amount of native genius to start with, and… science! It's huge. I can't teach you 'science.'"

Ronon grinned. "Teach me some of it, then, and I'll teach you how to avoid getting eaten by a rock."

"Crystalline entity," McKay said stiffly, "and it almost ate you, too."

Ronon laughed, slapped him on the shoulder, and led the way to the gym.

"What, you mean now? We're starting now?" McKay said, trailing behind him.

"You think I should retrain as a shrink?" John said.

Teyla smiled weakly. "Ronon and Rodney do seem happier."

"And you?" John asked.

Teyla's breathing hitched. She let out the breath, and touched his arm. "What about you?"

His answer came almost too easily. "Nothing to worry about. My brain was almost eaten by a rock, then I spent four days asleep, and here I am."

Could it really be that easy for him? She remembered, and surely he must remember too, that he had pleaded for help. Jet, the wounded man in the tunnels, had been far more open than John Sheppard ever had been. He had ceded command to Rodney, and he had shown weakness in a way that was shocking to anyone who knew him.

If he had still been Jet, perhaps she could have asked him. If he had been the John Sheppard of a few days ago, half-asleep with pain and morphine, she could have said something, but now she bit her lip, and said nothing.

"You're beating yourself up about something," John said.

It was not something she wanted to say. Her people had always been so important to her, but there were only a few that she would go to when she was troubled. Her team-mates helped her in so many ways, but their relationship was not founded on the open discussion of emotions. They knew each other, perhaps, even more closely than that.

"I… did not like the person I became when I had no memories," she said carefully.

John shrugged, as if that meant nothing.

"I was willing to leave you in the darkness," she confessed. "When we thought you were dead, I cared little --"

"You didn't know us," John said, as if that explained it all.

There were times when she knew that her team-mates would never fully understand her. They were all very different people, and they saw things differently. Not that it mattered, of course. Not that it normally mattered at all. Sometimes you could be closer to people different from you than to people who were the same.

"The darkness was taking things from us," she said. "It would be easy to blame the darkness --"

"The killer rock." John's grin was child-like.

Despite herself, she smiled. "The killer rock. However, while I know that it… took things from me, I have to accept that I have the potential to act the way I acted then." She pressed her hand to her chest. "That is what is at the heart of me, when everything is stripped away."

"Bullshit," John swore. Teyla snapped her head up. "Bullshit," John said again. "The way I see it…" He shifted in the bed, whether from pain or from his usual reluctance to talk about matters of the heart. "Everyone has the potential to do bad things, but it's who we are that matters – who we are, shaped by everything we've done and everything we remember." He stopped, and he could tell that he was about to add a flippant remark, but perhaps something in her face stopped him. "It doesn't matter what we could have been. What matters is how we act, now, every day, knowing what we know."

Perhaps it was true. She had been like a new-born child in the tunnels, robbed of all the usual things that made her herself, and which informed her decisions on how to act.

John shrugged again. "There's bad in all of us." He said it like a flippant comment, but she saw how his expression turned suddenly serious.

"And what matters," she said slowly, "is how we act every day." She had the potential to be that impatient, cold and heartless person, who pushed everyone else aside, but she was not. When she had been robbed of the memory of everyone dear to her, she had acted a certain way, but the real Teyla Emmagen, with full knowledge and memories, would never act that way. What she had done in the tunnels did not reflect on who she was, but perhaps, she thought, perhaps it would become something to remember and guard against – a glimpse into a mirror that could not be allowed to become true.

"And if there is bad in all of us," she said, "it only makes us all the more remarkable when we overcome it."

"Oh, and a team went back," Rodney informed him, "and found all those savages dead. The place was clearly some Ancient facility once upon a time, though we knew that already, because of the lights. They took a sample of the rock - the crystalline entity, I mean. It isn't native, but that's as far as the bumbling idiots have gotten with their investigations. Might even be man-made, for all they know. It seems quite dead, though – that much they're sure of. Ronon's phaser-blaster thing took care of that. Seriously, is there anything that thing can't kill?"

"Can't kill me," Sheppard said, then wondered if it was too soon to joke about such things.

"That's because nothing can kill you," Rodney said, as if this fact caused him mild irritation.

"Which is just as well when you're on my team," he retorted, "Doctor Blow Up Five Sixths of a Solar System."

"And we're on to that again." Rodney threw up his hands. "A killer rock tries to eat us from the inside out, and what does he choose to talk about: a little mistake of mine that's two years in the past. Bugs!" he said pugnaciously. "You turned into a bug."

Ronon stepped in at this point, and then Teyla. Sheppard tried to listen, but sleep was already claiming him. "We're good?" he murmured, when there was a lull in the talk.

They did not answer immediately. "I believe so," Teyla said. Rodney grunted in a vaguely embarrassed fashion. Ronon gently punched Sheppard on the shoulder.

"Good," he said. He had had a lot of time to think, and he still didn't really understand why he was less disturbed by what had happened than the others had been. Yes, he had begged the others to help him, and had looked up to McKay as a leader, but he'd been hurt, and he'd lost his memory. He's always known that he had the potential to be afraid – no, more than just the potential. When the iratus bug was attached to him… When Kolya's Wraith had been feeding on him… He flinched inwardly, shying from the memory. Yes, he'd been terrified then, though years of practice had allowed him to push it away and show little of it on his face.

As Jet, in the darkness, those years of practice had disappeared, and he had given in to something that Sheppard had always known existed. But that didn't matter. What mattered was how John Sheppard acted every day of his life, not how a made-up man called Jet acted when he had no memories to pin his behaviour on. If someone under his command had seen him that way, it might have been different, but this was his team, and they knew him through and through, even those things that he still shied away from telling them.

He said none of that, though, but he did decide to say that thing that had felt so miraculous a few days before. "We teamed up. Even though we didn't remember anything…"

"Made for each other," Rodney quoted, sneering. "Please don't start talking about fate."

"Wasn't going to," he said, closing his eyes.

Perhaps he even slept for a while, because when he opened his eyes, they were still at his bedside, but in different positions, and they were talking quietly, apparently unaware that he was awake.

He almost said something more, then decided not to. The man called Jet would have said it, he thought. Jet had remembered so little, that he believed in being open about the little that he had. Jet had been a creation of the darkness, with nothing admirable about him. Jet had been…

No, he thought. Perhaps he could learn a lesson from Jet, after all. "It's not fate," he said, and watched them turn to face him, each with their own infinitely-familiar expression on their face. "It's choice. That's better."

Teyla smiled. Ronon's eyes went distant. Rodney cleared his throat. "And you called me Hero," he said. "Hero. Let's not forget that."

"Yes." Sheppard settled into the pillows. "That was irony."

"Insight," Rodney said. "Out of the mouths of babes and… and colonels with no memory. I'm a hero. I, my friends, am a hero. He said it."

Sheppard lacked the will to argue, because although he would never say as much, he knew that it was true. Not just Rodney, but all of them. He slept, though, before he had to find a way to avoid saying it.

They were still there when he woke up, bickering gently, with laughter and silence and smiles.

END

Note: Thanks for reading, and thanks to all you've made comments along the way. I'm afraid I don't have time to reply to the comments on yesterday's parts, since in a few minutes I'm going out for the rest of the day on a charity walk from coast to coast on my surprisingly-not-so-little-after-all island, but they were much appreciated.

As I said at the start, this story was hard to write, for reasons that I suspect are obvious – i.e. the out of character behaviour, and the fact that the characters had no memories to draw on. I ended up judging my own story rather harshly, and was pretty insecure about it, so the reviews along the way have really helped. Thank you!