'I can't believe you made out with that woman...even if it was part of your escape plan. That is so...so...'

Though he'd known McKay was unlikely to let that go without comment, Sheppard had hoped he might get back to Atlantis and out of his bloodstained slave clothes before he started on him. They'd just made it back to the jumper and he was trying to get comfortable on one the bench seats in the rear compartment, lying on his right side to keep the pressure off his back and injured leg as Stackhouse readied the craft for take-off.

'...so not what happened. I did not make out with her, Rodney!' he protested for the third time since the flight had started. 'Like I said, I didn't do anything.'

'So what...you just lay there and let her have her way with you?'

'Yes, Rodney. That's exactly what I did.'

'You are such a Kirk!'

Sheppard rolled his eyes, losing his temper now. 'That was sarcasm, Rodney. Nothing happened. I smashed her over the head with a pitcher.'

'So, she didn't do anything?'

Sensing he wasn't going to drop the subject until he threw him a bone, Sheppard gave him a few minor details. 'Well, she tried kissing me a few times, stuff like that.'

'That doesn't sound so bad.'

Sheppard just glared at him, no answer necessary.

'Well, at least Sarayah was good looking. Ford and I got jumped by Bigfoot's less hairy sister!'

Ford snorted out a laugh, clearly far less traumatised by the experience than the scientist was. Not for the first time, Sheppard wondered if Rodney might actually still be a virgin...

'So what else did she do...you know...this time?'

Sheppard huffed and rolled his eyes in Rodney's direction. 'McKay! I am not giving you a blow by blow account of what she did just to satisfy your seedy little voyeuristic tendencies!'

'There was blowing?'

'GO!'

'What? No, seriously, what is it with you and alien women? They can't keep their hands off you!'

'GO!'

'Why so tetchy all of a sudden? At least it was better than the whipping!'

'He said go,' Ford warned.

Carson chose this as his opportunity to interrupt. 'All right, lads. Let's not squabble. Could you give me some room so I can examine my patient, Rodney?'

McKay shuffled away, muttering something about never getting assaulted by sexy aliens.

'How're you feeling, son?' Carson asked, checking the dressing on Sheppard's leg. 'And don't say your fine because I'll know your lying.'

'Sore,' he admitted, hoping that would placate the medic.

'Aye, I'll bet. And how's the back?'

'Sore,' he repeated, wondering how long a single word could pass as a satisfactory answer.

'How about the memory? Can you remember anything about the last few hours before you woke yet?'

A few flashes of frantic struggling, pain, and unwanted fumblings troubled him, but he forced them down, not sure he wanted to remember them. 'No...things are still pretty hazy.'

'Well, I'm not surprised. From what the women told me, the drug Sarayah administered has a lot in common with Rohypnol. You might never remember everything.'

Right at that moment, with Sarayah's ragged breaths and screamed threats still echoing in his head, Sheppard didn't think that was such a bad thing.

'Anyway, we'll be able to sort you out properly once we get you back to Atlantis. You let me know if you need more pain management.'

'Will do, Doc.'

As Carson moved away, Sheppard rounded on Ford. 'Lieutenant, what exactly was happening when you people found me?'

Ford shrugged. 'Not sure, Sir. I was recovering from the stunner when the others turned up. I think it was Dr Weir who got to you first. I guess she's the one to ask.'

Cringing, Sheppard closed his eyes and dropped his head onto the seat. 'Well, that's just great,' he sighed.

'Perhaps you should just get some sleep, Sir,' Ford suggested. 'Worry about that stuff later.'

'Yeah, maybe.'

Closing his eyes, he tried to enjoy the relative comfort of that jumper seat compared to the floor of the dormitory hut and his rancid blanket bed. He lay there, pain nagging all over his body, forcing back what few flashes of memory he had, until a voice broke his concentration.

'So, how are you doing, John?'

It was Elizabeth.

Sheppard cracked open one eye to peer at her. 'Tired,' he grunted, hoping she would take the hint.

'I'm not surprised. You've had a difficult few days.'

Realising she wasn't going anywhere, he opened the other eye. 'That's one way of putting it.'

'I don't think the ladies of Medulsa will be forgetting you in a hurry.'

'Well, I wish I could say the same...but what with the amnesia...'

'Yes, that must be very disconcerting.' She stared at him, a smirk of amusement twisting at her mouth as she battled to keep it at bay.

Finally, curiosity got the better of him. 'Lieutenant, could you give us some space?'

Ford looked at him as if to ask how he was supposed to do that since there were seven of them crammed into a puddle jumper, then silently made his way up to the forward section.

Elizabeth took up his vacant seat opposite where Sheppard was lying. 'Something you want to discuss?' she asked, the glint in her eye telling him she knew exactly what was on his mind...or wasn't to be more precise.

'I understand you were the one who...you know.'

'Found you?'

He nodded, chewing his bottom lip.

'That's right. That muscular woman, Alishia was it? She broke in through the door of Sarayah's hut just as we arrived in the jumper. I could tell there was trouble, so I figured you'd be involved somehow.'

'How did you know where to find me?'

'Luck, mostly. We arrived in the village as one of the guards from your camp brought Allanae the message about the impending Wraith attack. We offered to fly her to the camp to speak to you in person about the threat and the Ancient device, and when we arrived Sarayah was...disciplining you.'

'I don't really remember much after that woman gave me the laced drink...' he admitted, holding back the expletive he'd been about to use to describe her.

'So I understand.'

It became blatantly clear that Elizabeth had no intention of making this easy for him. He shifted, propping himself up a little more to feel less...vulnerable. 'She was pretty mad with me.'

'Yes...I got that,' Elizabeth nodded, tilting her head and waiting for him to say something else.

This was agony. Sheppard knew she was aware of the issue he was skirting around, but she seemed determined to make him squirm. He supposed she was probably pretty mad at him, too, and this was her revenge. A rush of colour rushed to his face left him feeling uncomfortably hot. The jumper suddenly seemed too tightly packed, something he'd never experienced before. 'When you got there, was she...I mean...was I...'

She feigned puzzlement. 'Were you...?'

'Oh c'mon, Elizabeth. Gimme a break!' he finally blurted out.

She broke out in a broad smile. 'Don't worry, I won't tell anyone what I saw, Major.'

Sheppard pressed his lips together and counted to ten. 'Actually, I was rather hoping you'd at least tell me.'

'Are you sure you want to know?' she teased.

'Elizabeth!'

She laughed now, unable to contain it any longer. 'It's all right, John. Your honour is still in tact...at least as in tact as it was when you arrived there.'

He chose to ignore that jibe. 'So, she didn't...do anything?'

'Not much...crazy as she undoubtedly was, unless she holds the galaxy record for speed dressing drugged men, I'm pretty sure she didn't get far beyond drugging you.'

Sheppard sighed with relief and laid back. 'Well, that's good to hear.'

'I just had to straighten you out a little,' she elaborated.

'And that's not so good,' he winced, unable to remember that. The constant smirk she wore made him think she was just pulling his leg, but he wasn't sure.

'Well, here's something else that's not so good to hear. Thanks to you, we'll all be in isolation for the next few days when we get back, at least until we can be sure none of us is incubating that sickness from the camp.'

'Yeah, sorry about that,' he said, feeling guilty that he'd dragged them all into the camp. 'Although, if one of us has it, we might be able to use it.'

'If we don't die of it first,' Elizabeth pointed out. 'Although Carson assures me there's a good chance we'll be unaffected. The fact it was only infecting the men and not the women of Medulsa suggests it affects people with a compromised immune system, probably due to their poor diet and exhaustion.'

'Make sure you tell McKay that. He'll have developed every imaginable symptom before we make it back if you don't.'

'It's only a two minute flight,' she smiled.

'I know.'

'Well, on the upside, we have a lot to discuss about what happened down there, so this will give us plenty of time.'

Sheppard grimaced. In his heart, he'd known he wouldn't get away with the havoc he'd caused without some kind of reprimand, but he'd been hoping for some time to recover before having to face the music. It didn't seem Elizabeth planned it to go that way. He ran a hand back through his hair, catching the bump on his temple left by one of the many pistol whippings he'd endured. 'I screwed everything up, didn't I?'

'Oh, that's one way of putting it.'

'I can't believe we were so close to getting our hands on both the Ancient tech and a possible natural defence and I blew it.'

'Well, if it's any consolation, if you hadn't insisted on staying there, it's doubtful you would have found out about either of those things. So, if I look at this pragmatically, I can see we haven't lost anything – we just haven't gained anything, either.'

He sighed again. 'I guess. But perhaps if I hadn't pushed them so hard to change their society, they would've eventually let us in and we'd have found that stuff out anyway.'

She arched an eyebrow, seemingly surprised by his self-deprecation. 'I doubt that would have ever happened, so don't beat yourself up about it – especially since it looks like they did more than enough of that to last you a lifetime.'

'Tell me about it.'

'Actually, it may not have been a complete failure,' Rodney interjected. Though Sheppard was pissed that he'd obviously been listening in to their conversation, he was happy to hear anything that might make him feel better right now. 'Like I told you, I had to run some diagnostics on the machine while we were checking what was wrong, and I did some more just before you switched it on. So, I should have collected enough data to extract something useful.'

He opened up the laptop he'd been clutching all the way back to the jumper and fired it up. His excited smile soon slipped. 'Oh nonononono, this can't be right!'

That figures, Sheppard thought, waiting to hear just was the problem was this time.

'What's wrong, Rodney,' Elizabeth asked, rolling her eyes at his melodramatic outburst.

'It's all gone!' he gasped, jabbing in instructions to try and recall the data, his expression growing progressively more desperate. 'That device must have sent out a massive EM pulse when it fired. The memory's been wiped.' He sat back and sighed. 'I went through all that for nothing!'

Sheppard raised his eyebrows, but didn't comment, turning back to Elizabeth to see his incredulity reflected on her face.

Ignoring Rodney as he ranted on, she continued their conversation. 'You know, much as I was annoyed with you for refusing to come back to Atlantis, you made me look at my attitude toward the plight of those men, and I didn't like what I saw.'

Her confession surprised him. 'Really?'

'Really,' she nodded. 'I would have torn strips off anyone who called me sexist before all this, but when I got back to Atlantis after seeing you that first time, I realised you had a point. At some subconscious level, I was less worried about the oppression they faced because they were men, and that was wrong.'

'Well, I'm glad you see it that way...' He felt like pointing out the fact everyone was making a joke of what Sarayah had or hadn't done was pretty sexist, too. He doubted they'd be teasing Teyla if she'd been the one treated that way.

'I'm not finished,' Elizabeth said, her manner now more serious.

Here it comes, Sheppard thought, preparing himself for the inevitable lecture.

'That said, I don't expect to be blackmailed into changing my views ever again, John. This is the second time in only a few weeks that we've had this conversation. I am the leader of the Atlantis expedition, and I've already promised to defer to you on all things military, but this was not a military issue, no matter how you looked at it.'

'I know, and I'm sorry...I got carried away –'

'I understand that, John. But I can't afford you to keep doing that. I know I'm sometimes guilty of thinking too much, but you're guilty of the opposite, and not thinking things through. Perhaps we should agree to trust each other before you go rushing off on any other moral crusades.'

'I was worried that if we got back to Atlantis, things wouldn't seem so bad –'

'Believe it or not, I'm an intelligent woman, and if you'd just come back to Atlantis and discussed your concerns with me, I would have listened.'

'Listened, yes – but would you have done anything?'

'I would have tried to talk to them about the issue. Whether it would have been as successful as your approach I suppose is very doubtful.'

'So what you're saying is that even though I went about it all the wrong way, I secured the best possible result?' he asked, giving her a lopsided smile.

She smirked. 'I suppose that's true, but don't let it go to your head.'

'I'll try not to.'

'Unlike that drug they gave you.'

His smile dropped instantly. Elizabeth's eyes twinkled with delight at his discomfort. 'You haven't told me everything, have you?' he asked cautiously.

She dropped her gaze to her feet, still smiling. 'You know everything you need to know,' she grinned.

'Don't do this!' he pleaded. 'I've been tortured enough already. What's the big joke?'

She forced the smile from her face and fixed him with her green gaze. 'Let's just say you were rather...chatty when I found you.'

'Yeeaaah...and?' he pressed.

'The drug helps you to forget your inhibitions, right?'

'Oh God!' he groaned. 'What did I do?'

'It wasn't so much what you did...as what you said,' she said, prolonging his agony.

He covered his eyes. 'This is going to be bad, isn't it?'

'No...actually it was quite flattering. You told me I had very pretty eyes.'

He parted his fingers and peered out at her. 'That's it? That's not so bad.'

'No...not bad at all. And if Simon and I ever break up, I might consider the offer you made, too,' she smiled. 'Now, you get some rest. You're safe now.' She stood up and patted him gently on the shoulder, then made her way back to the forward section.

Sheppard watched her go, embarrassment burning even hotter now. Her words had jarred loose another moment of memory. Had he really said that to her? He knew this teasing was her way of gently punishing him for oing against her authority, but it was leaving him with a deeply uneasy feeling he just couldn't put into words. He was military...he was supposed to suck it up, so that was what he'd do.

She sat down next to Teyla, the two of them giggling as they glanced over at him and the jumper finally began its journey to the gate. He groaned, closing his eyes to shut it all out for a while longer. Something told him the next few days in isolation were going to be the longest of his life.

A/N: Thanks for reading to the end of the story. If you've enjoyed it please let me know. It's good to feed the muse! :D