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John wakes up in the infirmary, gasping like he’s been held underwater, and he doesn’t remember.
Someone calls for a doctor (Rodney, he knows that voice, it sounds like Rodney), there are warm hands holding him down, Teyla’s voice: “Stay calm, John. You are in Atlantis. You will be all right.”
His senses start to kick in: the beep of a heart monitor, his own harsh breathing, the infirmary blanket gripped in his hands and pain, the feeling of something like electricity fizzing along his skin, and he can’t—
A light flashes in his eyes (a pen-light, possible concussion) and Keller is talking, telling him to breathe normally.
He tries to, and when struggling to move exhausts him, he sags against the pillows and tries to blink away the spots. His team is all there—a sign whatever happened to him is bad enough to hold an audience, but he doesn't—
Ronon asks, “Sheppard, do you remember what happened?”
He doesn’t, and there’s someone missing. The first word he gets out is: “Elizabeth.”
Keller says, “Just relax, Colonel, don’t try to talk. Your body’s been through a lot. It’ll take a while to—”
Elizabeth was with him, the last time he was conscious. He doesn’t remember where he was or how he got from there to here, but he knows they were together. He still feels shocks along his skin, not unpleasant but strange, something familiar just outside his mental grasp, and he manages to say, “Where’s Elizabeth?”
They all exchange looks, Keller with Rodney, Ronon with Teyla, and John realizes there’s something he’s missing.
Teyla’s hand squeezes his shoulder. She asks, far too gently: “John, do you not remember?”
And then, with the sick, sinking feeling that’s been with him for almost two years: he does.
**
This is what they tell him: There was an accident with the Stargate, an explosion. They knew only he would have rematerialized through a random Stargate at high velocity, and they had no way to know where. They never would have found him if they hadn’t received an incoming wormhole from the planet five days later—no IDC, but nine small strikes against the gate-shield, in a rhythm that Rodney taps out on the hospital table next to John’s bed: dit-dit-dit dah-dah-dah dit-dit-dit.
They found him almost thirty meters from the Stargate, lying out in the open in an arid landscape, unconscious, alive, with no indication of other human life anywhere on the planet. The medical scanner shows evidence of a break across his spine that would have paralyzed him for life if the nerves hadn’t somehow remained intact, internal injuries that should have killed him long before he was rescued. Keller calls his potential for full recovery “astoundingly lucky.”
This is what he remembers: He was dying, slowly, alone—and then he wasn’t.
This is what he knows: Elizabeth’s alive, somehow, and she saved him.
**
He also knows it’s crazy, of course. So does everyone else. Rodney calls it a hallucination, brought on by blood loss or head trauma. Ronon suggests his mind gave him something to hold on to, a reason to fight through his injuries for a while longer.
Teyla says, “It is not uncommon near the point of death to be… visited, by loved ones,” and John turns over, rolling away from her, because he’d get up and leave if he wasn’t trapped in bed by IV lines and weak muscle control. Everything they’re saying is right, but it’s wrong and he can’t stand to listen to it.
He remembers: Elizabeth’s hand coming to rest on his chest, real and warm, and the crushing pain lifting enough for him to breathe. Her voice—here, John, drink this—as she poured cool water from somewhere between his parched lips. The night desert air was cold but she was warm, and he never had enough clarity to ask her how she got there, but he knows he would never have survived five days on that planet in the shape he was in. He’d certainly never have made it to the DHD. Certainly would never have crawled back from the DHD to where Rodney says they found him.
Ronon says, “So maybe there was someone else on the planet, and they left before we got there.”
“There was,” John says, frustrated, because he knows how he sounds but she’s the only thing he remembers clearly. When their arguments wear him down, he’s forced to consider it’s possible. Even when fully aware, even on Atlantis, he’ll catch a glimpse of a woman with dark hair turning a corner and for a moment he thinks—
But he was barely conscious enough to speak, on the planet. He wouldn’t have been able to draw out a Stargate address, let alone explain Morse code to someone who didn’t already know it.
He wonders if he’s crazy—if he isn’t, he wonders where she went.
**
He remembers her saying, on the planet: I wish I could do more.
He remembers her saying, on Atlantis: You don’t get to die alone, John. Even if—we’re still with you, you know that.
Sometime after her first brush with nanites, after he nearly died in Kolya’s Wraith torture chamber, after neither of them had slept right in weeks, they found each other on the same lonely pier. They spent six hours talking, sitting side by side, looking out at the black ocean. She told him what happened to her, in a voice so raw he held his breath. He told her things too, dozens of sentences starting with I never thought I’d tell anyone, like there was a spell over both of them, like they were bound together out of time. He told her he wasn’t afraid to die, but he was afraid to die alone.
He remembers how she hugged him, how he wrapped his arms around her and promised himself he wouldn’t close up again, wouldn’t let her close up, because the last time he’d felt anything like this with another person—exposed, but safe—he’d married her. It was different with Elizabeth, of course. Their lives wouldn’t permit romance as anything but an occasional fantasy, but there was always something intimate between them. Elizabeth knew him. She trusted him. She kept him honest, and she stood by him. She made him feel whole.
And he hasn’t felt that, not once since he left her behind on the Asuran planet, until a Stargate explosion broke his spine and she was there, kneeling next to him with tears in her eyes, saving his life and saying I wish I could do more.
**
He’s finally released from the infirmary. It’s happened a few times since coming to Atlantis—too many—that he’s been away from his quarters long enough that the first steps in feel surreal. A t-shirt over the back of a chair, a half-finished book he barely remembers on his nightstand—he’s changed so much since leaving those there that it feels like his bedroom is lying in state, a monument to the John Sheppard he was the last time he got dressed here.
The feeing reminds him most sharply of the Cloister, of the time he spent six whole months angry and lonely and abandoned and then returned home the same day he left. There was a piece of chocolate cake from last night’s mess hall dinner wrapped up on the top of his dresser, still fresh.
He stops three steps inside his bedroom doorway, remembering Teer and the others fading into—
McKay: “What is it with you and—”
—he remembers something else, the energy that crackled along his skin when he woke up in the infirmary—
He reaches for his earpiece but he isn’t wearing it, rummages around with shaking hands until he finds it.
“Rodney,” he says. “She ascended.”
**
This time, John tells them everything he remembers, no matter how crazy it makes him seem, because it all makes sense now: how she looked like herself again, how he accepted so easily it was her, how she touched him and healed enough of his injuries to keep him alive, how she knew where to find him. How she disappeared afterward, without a trace.
She’s dead, but she’s free, and grief and relief are tangled up together so tightly he can’t separate them. He thinks he’d walk through an exploding Stargate again right now if it meant he could hold her hand.
“I don’t get it,” Ronon says. “If these ascended people can do anything, why didn’t she heal you all the way?” He’s been frustrated with John’s long convalescence, with tagging along with other teams off-world.
Teyla chimes in: “If Doctor Weir were aware of us with the power to intervene, would she not have done so before now?”
“The Others wouldn’t let her,” Rodney says, sounding annoyed the way he always does when forced to answer what he considers remedial questions. “Ascended beings aren’t supposed to meddle. She didn’t want to get caught. But—” He lights up. “If she helped you, maybe that means she’ll find other ways to help us! Surely they wouldn’t notice if she happened to leave us a note? Just the locations of a ZPN or two?”
John glares. “Rodney.”
“I’m just saying!”
“Wait,” Teyla interrupts them. “You said… she would not want to get caught.”
Rodney crosses his arms. “Yes, I said that.”
“What would happen to her if she was?”
There’s a pause, then Rodney says, “Daniel Jackson had to interfere with a galactic war before the ascended Ancients in the Milky Way kicked him out. Saving Sheppard’s life might not even get her a slap on the wrist. She’ll be fine.”
**
Six days later, John wakes up in the middle of the night, and he knows.
**
He’s still not cleared for off-world duty and there are pressing emergencies requiring Atlantis’s resources, but John argues and badgers and sits in Woolsey’s office calling in every favor he can think of because he can’t let this be put on a mission schedule for next week or next month or when-we-have-time, what-evidence-do-you-have, wait-until-you’re-back-on-your-feet, even-if-you’re-right-you-can’t-even-know-where-she-is when he knows, he knows, he knows.
It’s Keller who ultimately turns the tide, telling Woolsey, “I think he needs to put this behind him.”
John doesn’t care what the rationale is, doesn’t care that the others are humoring him, because he gears up for the first time in six weeks.
The planet where he didn’t die is calm and quiet and looks familiar, even though he was barely conscious the last time he was here and there are no real landmarks to speak of. It’s empty, dusty and rocky, with only sparse low scrub for plant life and no water. John feels a chill go through him like—well, like he’s walking over what was almost his grave.
“Hey,” Rodney says, holding up his life-signs detector. “There’s actually someone here.”
John forgets that his body is still knitting itself back together, and he runs.
“Stay back,” he yells at the others when he catches sight of something pale and naked, huddled on the ground. Teyla hands him a blanket, and he tucks it under his arm as he approaches.
He can’t see her face, only pale skin and dark hair, and his heart is pounding. When he says her name it’s barely more than a whisper: “Elizabeth?”
She stirs, shifts until he can see her face, and he remembers, remembers everything about her he hasn’t been able to live without. He hears Rodney behind him—What’s happening? Is it her?—but he can’t tear himself away long enough to answer, can’t do anything but cover her body with a blanket and sink to his knees, can’t do anything but feel. “Elizabeth—” He touches her cheek, real, real, real. “—can you hear me?”
Her eyelids flutter and slowly blink open. “Who…?”
“I’m John,” he says. “You’re going to be okay. You’re not alone.”
Her eyes, her voice, as she whispers: “I don’t remember.”
He swears to himself that every day, every day, he’ll make it up to her. For leaving her, for all the years and pieces of her life she lost, for the afterlife she gave up to save him. “It’s okay,” he promises. “You will.”
*end*