What Happened – Atlantis, 3rd Year

"Sheppard!"

John hesitated on the threshold to the infirmary after the mandatory post-mission checkup and just almost kept walking. He had a really good idea what McKay was going to say and…he didn't want to deal with it. Not now. He was beat up and beat down. He wanted a nap and a shower – in that order.

"John, please. Wait up."

Damn. He said please. "What do you want, Rodney?" John let his answer sound as gruff and unwelcoming as he felt. He knew McKay needed to talk. Shoot me in the head. He wanted McKay to hear that now was not the time.

"What happened on 657. The ambush. All those people."

"There were six of them, Rodney. Six against four. And they weren't people, they were mercenaries, enemies. They were trying to kill us because they didn't get the memo that Kolya's dead and can't make good on his bounty offer."

McKay was shaking his head. John knew it wasn't the facts he was rejecting. It wasn't the facts he wanted to hear, even though it was what he needed to hear.

"But I… But when we… I should have –."

"You did what you had to do, Rodney. Never forget that."

John tried the line that would have worked for any other soldier and wasn't surprised when it didn't work at all on McKay.

"But maybe there could have been something I missed. I keep going over the ambush in my head looking for something I should have done…differently." Rodney trailed off, looking desperate and pathetic. He was slumped with exhaustion and yet vibrating with nervous energy. He kept wringing his hands and wiping them on his jacket without even realizing the repetitive motion. He was heading towards FUBAR, and as his team leader (and yes, friend, dammit) John was the one to who'd have to pull him from the edge. Again.

John sighed, fighting his own exhaustion, and went for compromise.

"Go clean up. Sleep if you can. If you can't, come by. We'll…talk." He managed to force out the offer with only a small cringe.

"I could just – " Rodney pounced.

"Shower first. And rest." He knew the latter was hopeless, but if John had any luck in the universe, Rodney would find something else to obsess about and get distracted long enough for John to convince his body it didn't really need to arrange a complete physical breakdown.

As it turned out, John was pulling Touch and Go's over his laptop an hour later when the chime to his door bonged softly for attention. For a moment, John just stared at his hands, wallowing in the dread and then he heaved himself to his feet, snatched for his jacket and stood at the door only long enough to palm it open and wave Rodney in.

He was at the fridge, pulling out a six-pack before McKay even got as far as slouching through the door.

"Let's go to the pier. Do you need a jacket? You can borrow my sweater. It's clean. Sort of."

He threw the jacket at McKay and was back out of his door, leading him through the quiet, evening halls of Atlantis before Rodney had a chance to say more than, "Oh. Ok." John knew it was a cop out. A delay. An excuse to distract himself from the uncomfortable moment with scenery. On the other hand, it was the only way he was going to make it through the conversation without shooting himself or McKay, so he wasn't above stacking the deck in his favor.

It took another fifteen minutes for McKay to work up his courage on the pier, which was fifteen minutes and two beers longer than John would have had back in his room. The night was, gratefully, spectacular. The moon here looked larger than the one back home, and was more craggy. John had spent some serious time out here naming and mapping the craters, mountain ranges and mares. And unlike Earth's moon, this one rotated out of sync with its home planet to show different faces in fascinating combinations. Tonight it was rising out of the ocean with an almost pumpkin orange cast, setting the gentle waves on fire with sparks of firey reflection.

"Did I do the right thing, John?" Rodney asked softly at last. John sighed, wondering if he could sidle around the topic enough to satisfy McKay. Direct just didn't work with a guy as smart as Rodney. You had to convince, cajole, provide evidence. So he didn't answer the question with the you're sitting here, alive, aren't you, dumbass? that he really wanted to say.

"I had this instructor once. We were doing basic hand to hand combat training and most of us were stick jockeys who never planned to hit the ground and weren't taking it very seriously. One guy mouthed off *cough, ahem* and the instructor told us to choose someone to try to take him down."

"You?"

"Hell no! I was skinny, about half the weight of the instructor. That, and I made it a habit to start things without planning to finish them back then, AANCH."

"AA-what?"

"All Afterburner, No Compass Heading." Rodney chortled appreciatively. He was enjoying the story. John took another gulp of his beer. "No, we sent out this huge guy who'd also been bragging about doing martial arts his whole life."

"Let me guess. The instructor made short work of him."

"No. The instructor killed him."

"Excuse me?"

"Not literally. They danced around the mats for a bit. Our guy managed to get the instructor down and was about to pin him when he rolled, grabbed for a knife that had been lying just off the mats from knife practice and slit our guy's throat." John grinned at Rodney's shocked look. "It was a rubber knife, for practice. But if it had been real…"

"So, your point is…?"

John just went on. "We were pretty impressed, but someone *cough, ahem* pointed out that we were learning hand to hand and that, technically, the instructor had gone down so what exactly were we supposed to learn from him?"

"You didn't!"

"Yeah, well, AA -."

"NCH. What did the instructor do?"

"He called me to the mat, gave me the knife and said the same thing: try to take him down."

"Let me guess again. This time the instructor made short work of you."

"No. He shot me." Rodney stared, pulled a face until he was convinced John wasn't making it up, then just waved a resigned hand for him to continue. "I knew he could take me down easy, so I thought I'd cheat like he had. I danced on the mat for about ten seconds then cocked the knife to throw it at him. I'd gotten pretty good at that trick at the bar. I was sure he'd never see it coming and I'd have the last laugh."

"Ha, ha, on you."

"No kidding. I'd lifted my hand about as far as my shoulder when the instructor reached inside his padded suit, pulled out an M11 and fired at my chest." John raised his arm as if to throw a phantom knife as he spoke, then pantomimed grabbing for his heart. Rodney just raised an eyebrow so John shrugged. "The gun was loaded with blanks. Didn't harm a hair on my scrawny butt, but it made a hell of a bang and scared the hell out of me for about ten seconds until I realized I wasn't dead."

"So this guy taught you that the bigger weapon wins?"

"No. When I'd started breathing again, he put us back in line and chewed us new ones. He told us that his job wasn't to teach us fancy fighting tricks, his job was to keep us alive. That out there, when someone is trying to kill you, you have to use every skill, weapon, instinct and lucky toss at your disposal. You have to do whatever it takes to stay alive. And then he mopped the mats up with us for six more weeks."

Rodney had caught on and his face went skeptical. His jaw worked, but for once, he didn't seem to know what to say. John looked at the water below his dangling feet.

"Rodney," he started softly, "It's never easy to take another life. It's even harder when you have to do it the way you did today. But you're alive because you did. And you'd be dead if you didn't."

"So, survival of the fittest justifies all, is that it? I'm supposed to feel better about blowing another human being's face off just because I wanted to live more than that guy wanted to kill me?"

John looked him in the face. "Yes."

Rodney shook his head in frustration, then pulled the jacket around himself as if chilled, but it wasn't from cold. "I don't know, John. It's one thing to know, intellectually, that if I hadn't pulled the trigger when I fell on my back that thug would have shot me first. It's a whole other thing to see the consequences of, of, that and realize I was the one, that I could do –."

"You're still a good person, Rodney. The fact that you care proves that. We all hit the wall at one point or another and question our own…humanity. I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long for you to hit yours."

"Because I'm your civilian flunky who cringes behind Soldier Sheppard and Conan without taking any of the real risks?"

"No. Because you're tougher than I thought."

"Oh."

They both fell silent, Rodney had gone all thoughtful. A good sign.

"When did you hit your wall?"

Or not. John rolled his head and fought down the snap that would have pushed the question – and Rodney – away from him like a drone on autopilot. "Sheesh, McKay," he whispered, begging with body language for him to let it go.

"It would really help me to understand how you deal with it."

"How I deal with being a cold-blooded, soulless killer?" This time the snap got out before John could force it down. He popped a third can and gulped at the foaming liquid, feeling it burn his throat as it slid into a warm haze in his stomach.

"No, um. How you manage to stay such a…normal guy doing what you do for a living. It's not guilt that I killed a mercenary in self-defense. It's knowing I'm capable of doing that, that I'm the kind of person who will resort to unspeakable violence to save my own ass that's scaring me. I just reacted. I didn't think about taking a life or the consequences or alternatives. I just really didn't want to die. What if, next time, I kill someone unnecessarily? What if… what if –."

"What if you hurt someone you love?" John finished softly.

"Yes! Exactly! I feel like I'm a loose cannon all of a sudden. Like I've turned something on that I can't turn off."

"Like turning on a vacuum energy weapon and waiting for it to blow up the solar system?"

"Funny. And completely uncalled for, by the way. Distraught friend spilling his guts here."

"That's why it's called for."

"But you… I mean, how do you turn it off?"

"I don't. You can't. You just keep it under control as best you can. You know it's there when you need it. And you hope to hell you don't. Like anything, it gets easier with practice and experience."

"But you feel that way too? Like you're afraid of yourself? Like you don't know yourself anymore?"

"I did at first." Rodney seemed to be sorting things out on his own and all John had to do was express empathy. The man was more touchy-feely than any woman, but in this case, it seemed to be working out for the best.

"So, when did it first bother you?"

John sighed, realizing Rodney wasn't going to give it up. "1992. I was pulling Special Ops. My flight took a mission to extract a political defector from…hostile territory. My Blackhawk took fire and we went down behind the line. My wingman managed to get me and the rest of my crew out, but we had to fight our way from the crash site to the other ship."

"You hit the ground after all."

"Exactly. It wasn't until that mission that my instructor's lesson sunk in, permanently. The border troops were on us like flies on roadkill. It got real bad, real fast. We were outnumbered and outgunned. A sergeant from my wingman's crew was killed leading us to the landing site. He locked up when a squad rushed us, attempting live capture, which could NOT happen. He panicked and Kamikaze'd on a grenade. He gave up too soon. He went out well, took three other hostiles with him, but it was stupid. I ordered hand to hand and the rest of us fought our way to the rescue ship with knives and, in one case, a well aimed rock."

"You took out a squad of soldiers with knives and rocks?" Rodney's jaw hung open in awe. John hated the flicker of fear in the incredulous expression.

"Sgt. King got one with a stick, too. They'd been told to take us alive. We were out of ammunition. They didn't expect us to put up that much of a fight, and didn't know how to stop us without killing us, which would have pissed off their chain of command. They were confused and just disorganized enough that we got away."

John shot Rodney a nervous look. "I was pretty freaked out."

"I'm freaked out now, just hearing about it."

"It wasn't the close call. It was…what I did to escape." Rodney opened his mouth a few times, then apparently decided not to ask exactly what he'd done. John blew out a breath in relief.

"So, what did you do afterwards?"

"Well, I acted out like an ass for about a week before…something happened and I realized that even if I was a monster, I could use it for good. I could use it to protect someone I loved."

Rodney favored him with a curious stare at his choice of phrase, but, again, didn't press. John gulped the rest of the can and suddenly felt so sleepy, he had to put a hand on the deck beside him and scrubbed his eyes with the other.

"You're a good person, too, John." Rodney blurted suddenly. Now who was comforting who? But Rodney at least sounded more like himself. And he'd said "too". Mission accomplished.

"Great. We're all good people."

"A little messed up, maybe. But good."

"Definitely screwed up. Comes with the territory." John yawned.

"I've kept you up. I'm sorry."

"S'Ok. That comes with the territory, too. Besides, the Beer Mug Mare only comes around every sixty days or so," John flung an arm at the moon that had escaped the horizon and was glowing, nearly full, with almost chalky white light. "The dark, flat spot on the lower left quadrant. Looks like a beer mug with cracks?" he elaborated at Rodney's raised eyebrow.

"You named a mare basalt after a broken beer mug?"

"Cracked. Not broken."

"There's a difference?"

"Absolutely."

Rodney raised his can and toasted the moon. "To 'cracked, not broken', then."

John grinned. Rodney got it. He lifted his own can.

"To 'Cracked, not broken.'"

Fini