TITLE: Truth and Consequences

AUTHOR: 
Aelfgyfu

RATING: Teen

CATEGORIES: Epilogue, drama, angst

SUMMARY: Sam needs to have a talk with Rodney about the events of “Miller’s Crossing”

SPOILERS: “Miller’s Crossing” and previous episodes of Atlantis; scattered small spoilers for various episodes of Stargate SG-1

WARNINGS: disturbing subject matter (from “Miller’s Crossing”—hey, I didn’t do this to the characters myself); some language (including Czech, and I can’t swear tht the Czech means what I think it does)

DISCLAIMER: Stargate: Atlantis and its characters belong to MGM-UA, Gekko, Glassner/Wright Double Secret Productions, Stargate SG-1, Stargate (II) Productions, Showtime/Viacom, NBC/Sci Fi, and no doubt other persons or entities whom I've forgotten (this list keeps getting longer). No copyright infringement is intended. In fact, my stories make no sense if you haven't seen the shows, so I encourage you to watch! And get all the DVDs! Just like I do!

AUTHOR'S NOTES: Many thanks to Aurora Novarum, who did a fast and thorough reading for me so I could post it before the next episode aired! Thanks also to my husband, who suffered through the first version.

All remaining errors, infelicities, and incoherences are my own.

nemanželské dítě: Czech for “bastard.” I think. (The Internet says so, so it must be true!)

Truth and Consequences

by Aelfgyfu

Atlantis was truly beautiful in the night. Sam looked up at the spires, marveling as she still did when she had quiet time like this. Daniel really had to come back here; she was surprised he hadn’t made it already. She enjoyed the silence, the clean air, a posting where she didn’t spend much of her time under tons and tons of rock—

“Colonel Carter?”

Sam shut her eyes for just a moment. That was Radek Zelenka’s voice, and it sounded calm and quiet. Maybe he hadn’t come about something bad; she had shut off the lights on this balcony to admire the city, so maybe he just wanted to make sure nothing was wrong. He was much more thoughtful than some scientists she could name.

It didn’t take too much effort to put a smile on her face before she turned. Light spilled out of the open door behind him so that at first, she could only see a shadow with thin hair sticking up in several directions.

“What can I do for you, Doctor Zelenka?”

Zelenka stepped closer, and she could see his face a little better in the moonlight. He looked uncomfortable. “It’s not for me—well, I suppose in a way it is. You see—Rodney...Rodney is—how to put it? Rodney is not himself.” He paused, perhaps hoping Sam would jump in, but Sam didn’t know what he meant, so she didn’t.

She could hear Zelenka inhale before continuing, “He is not yelling, and for a day or so, we were all grateful. But Rodney is still...jittery, nervous.”

Sam hadn’t even noticed. She hadn’t seen anything odd from McKay—well, she’d hardly seen him since he returned from Earth. So much for her hopes Zelenka hadn’t come because of anything bad.

“He does not want to work with Wraith, but the one time someone suggested he ask his sister—well, that was the one time he shouted.” Zelenka winced, then shook his head. “Phillips did not realize how upsetting her suggestion would be.”

Zelenka held his hands out from his sides a little, shrugging. “Ronon is his friend too. I went to Ronon. Ronon told me he tries to talk, but Rodney just thanks him for helping on Earth and goes away.”

Sam didn’t know what to say. McKay had been back two days, but he hadn’t pestering her about anything; she probably should have noticed.

“I haven’t seen any effect on his work,” she said cautiously, hoping Zelenka would give her more to work with but not sure what to ask.

Zelenka let his breath out impatiently. “He and the Wraith made some breakthroughs in the coding problems. But is not enough, and—I fear he is tearing himself in two directions. The work they did to save Jeanie, that work might also be used to save Elizabeth Weir. He wants to do more; he feels he must, that losing Elizabeth was his fault. So, on the one hand, he works on disabling nanites at the individual level, shutting them down so that they cannot do anything further in a human being. Yet other avenues we are taking with the Wraith code show more promise for stopping the Replicators all at once; those may not help save Doctor Weir.”

Sam nodded. McKay had defied orders and Weir’s own wishes when he reactivated her nanites. His actions had probably saved all of Atlantis, but naturally they all worried about what Elizabeth was going through, and what she might now have become. McKay felt guilty, and with some reason.

But guilt hindered more than helped, and Sam was all too aware of the larger problem. “The Replicators are wiping out entire populations! He has to focus on the Wraith code; we can worry about what to do about Weir if we ever find her.” Damn. She hadn’t meant to sound so pessimistic. She understood the Lanteans’ respect, even love, for Weir. She shouldn’t be dismissing their hopes. “I mean—”

Zelenka nodded as he cut her off gently. “And he knows. So he tries to work on that problem, too. He goes back and forth, and he does not....” He shook his head. “Some people think Rodney neglects himself: he works long hours, he takes little time off. But physical comfort is very important to Rodney.” A sardonic note crept into his voice. “Rodney eats. If something interferes with Rodney eating, he cries, ‘hypoglycemia!’ until he can eat. Rodney sleeps. He needs less sleep than many, but when he has not slept enough, believe me, we can tell.”

Zelenka paused, his mouth slightly open. “I...I do not know if you know this; I do not know if you should know this.” Radek hung his head. “He used to talk to Kate Heightmeyer. Now we have new person; he will not see new person. He does not eat enough. He does not sleep enough. He is most unRodneylike.”

He looked at her, and the moonlight was just bright enough that she could see through his glasses the shadows under his eyes. She still wasn’t certain, however: “What can I do? I’m sure you know him better than I do!”

Zelenka nodded. “But he will listen to you;. He has great respect for you, Colonel Carter. He knows you know the Replicators. He knows you have made...difficult choices. We have all talked to him. He tells us all we do not understand, we do not know the Replicators as he does, and we do not know his sister—despite her being here for that very...memorable visit.

“John Sheppard tells him that Rodney did not put Jeanie through anything, that nemanželské dítě on Earth did it all. But Rodney will not accept that. Sheppard is...protective of Rodney, and Rodney knows it now. If Carson were here, maybe he could find words”—another shrug—“but Carson is gone.”

If McKay wasn’t listening to Sheppard and Ronon, it must be pretty serious. What of Teyla? The Athosian seemed distracted of late, and although losing all your people could do that, Sam had begun to think she’d have to talk to the woman. After Teyla had calmed down. Teyla had been furious when she returned from a scouting expedition with Lorne’s team to learn of the crisis on Earth only right before it was resolved. She thought she should have been recalled at once, and no amount of telling her she couldn’t have done anything the rest of her team didn’t do would placate her.

Zelenka continued, “You are blunt with Rodney. Rodney needs someone blunt, someone he does not believe will simply try to make him feel better. I think you know he is not so guilty as he thinks, and I hope you can help him.”

“Wow.” Sam didn’t mean to say that; it just slipped out. That was by far the longest speech she’d ever heard from Radek Zelenka (at least if she didn’t count tirades partly in Czech), and she could tell he meant it.

But who was she to talk to McKay? Wasn’t she at least as screwed up as he was?

Zelenka’s forehead was wrinkling up. “I know Rodney can be terrible pain sometimes—”

“No, no!” she cut him off. “It’s not that I don’t want to help; it’s that I don’t know what to say!”

“Good,” the scientist said with a thin smile. “Rodney knows when you have rehearsed something to say. He tends not to respond well to such things.” He nodded to her. “Sorry to bother you, Colonel. Good night.”

Oh, hell. She was sure Zelenka was right: he worked alongside McKay just about all the time. And he might even be right that McKay would listen to her. For all his bluster, McKay did respect her. She hadn’t been sure what to expect when she came, but from the moment she’d come onto the station, he had accepted her command. Even when Woolsey tried to countermand her orders, McKay didn’t hesitate. He followed her orders. And she’d worked with him on this Replicator code, or she’d tried to—but she had too many other demands on her time, and by the time she got to understanding where she was in the complex programming, something else always called her away. When she went back, she’d have to relearn most of what she’d learned before. It wasn’t working. She couldn’t just do science here the way she wanted. And she thought being on SG-1 had made it hard to keep up with her lab work!

Sam sighed. She was getting sidetracked. It was easier to think about herself and her own problems and frustrations than to think about Rodney McKay. She still felt a little awkward with him. She hadn’t told him they’d been married in an alternate reality; she didn’t plan to tell him.

She could work well now with this Rodney McKay. And this McKay had changed a lot, more than she would have thought possible. That didn’t mean she knew what to say to him. Damn, it was late. She had been trying just to enjoy the city, quiet her thoughts, get ready to go to bed.

Next time, she’d better enjoy the city from the balcony on her own quarters. Of course, they might just radio her there.

Sam didn’t want to sleep on this. She wanted to get it over with. She headed towards the labs. The hallways were on low, nighttime lighting. She passed a few people in the corridors, but not many.

McKay would probably overthink everything she’d said, later; overthinking everything herself before she said it wouldn’t make any difference, except that then two of them would be miserable, instead of just one. If she was really lucky, maybe she could reach him. She knew a lot about guilt, and mistakes. But she’d been lucky. She had great teammates, and great CO’s; they’d helped her to understand how much guilt to accept, and when and how to let it go. Maybe she had learned enough from them to be helpful.

She had no good excuse for going to see McKay, so she’d probably have to just plunge in. She reached the lab. The light was on, McKay was staring at a computer screen—and, in another corner of the room, there was someone else, a woman with long blond hair. She couldn’t remember the scientist’s name. Daniel was always so good at such things; why couldn’t she do it?

The woman looked up before McKay noticed her, and Sam quickly jerked her head back towards the door. The woman hesitantly held up a hand, pointed at the door and then herself. Sam nodded fast and hard.

The woman was on her way out before McKay even turned; he’d probably turned at her departure, not because he’d noticed Sam.

His eyebrows shot up, but he looked a little dazed. “Colonel Carter? What brings you down here this”—he shot a quick look at his computer screen—“this time of night?”

She walked closer and pulled up a stool.

“I’m, I’m still working on the code, as you can see,” McKay said, waving at his laptop. “The problem is—”

Be blunt, Zelenka had advised, and that fit her own understanding of McKay, so she went with it. “The problem is that you seem to be working yourself into the ground.”

She expected him to get angry, but instead, he hunched his shoulders. “What? Did somebody complain? Hey, I haven’t even—I—” He frowned at her accusingly. “Why would anyone complain?”

“Your friends are worried about you,” she said with a smile.

“What? There’s nothing to be worried about.” He turned back to the screen so that she could only see the side of his face. “I’m just fine. I’ve gotta work on this. The Replicators—”

“You know how many years we’ve been fighting the Replicators in my—in our galaxy, back home, McKay?”

His lips moved as he counted swiftly backwards. “Eight. That would be eight. Oh, but you wiped them out there, what, three years ago? So I guess it was five.”

“That sounds about right.”

He swiveled a little to look at her with suspicious eyes. “So? Oh, wait—I know where this is going. It’s tremendous hubris on my part to think I should be able to fix in a few weeks what the brilliant Samantha Carter—”

“No!” He’d changed, but he was still an ass sometimes. “It’s not about me; this isn’t one-upmanship! I’m talking about a tremendous threat in two galaxies—three! Don’t forget the Asgard couldn’t defeat them without our help! You’re not going to destroy that threat overnight. Which means you should get some sleep, and accept help where you need it.”

“And while I sleep, how many people might die?” His voice wasn’t very loud, but in the empty room it sounded like a shout. “How many worlds have they wiped out now? Six? That’s just that we know of. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people by now!” He slid off the stool to his feet. “I changed their programming, and now they’re killing everybody!”

“Which is so much better than what they would have done,” Sam said. Suddenly, she felt she could see her way clear. Maybe it was that feeling of the three a.m. epiphany, the brilliant idea that doesn’t look so smart after dawn. But maybe she was right.

McKay had started to pace away from her, but he turned back. “What?”

“What would they have done if you hadn’t changed their programming?” Think, McKay, she willed him.

“Well, they’d have hunted for Atlantis until they found us again. But they don’t know where we are right now, so we’re safe! But everybody else is a target! We don’t even know what happened to Teyla’s people; maybe they went somewhere they thought was safe—”

“So they’d be hunting us,” Sam repeated, trying to force McKay to stay on topic.

“Yes, but it could take years for them to find us!” McKay snarled. “And they wouldn’t be killing off—”

“These human-form Replicators know what’s in our heads. They....” Oh, God, she didn’t want to bring this up. But it was the only way to make her point. “They have Elizabeth Weir. They know how concerned she is about the galaxy, how hard she has worked not just to secure Atlantis, but to help everyone she could against the Wraith.”

McKay crossed his arms, then let them go and resumed pacing. “Fine. So what?”

“McKay, they know we want to help the humans in this galaxy. They know we feel responsible for awakening the Wraith.”

“That would be because we are responsible for awakening the Wraith,” he answered impatiently.

“And if we were still their main target, and they couldn’t find us? What might be the best way to smoke us out?”

McKay had just turned and started back towards her. He took another step or two before the penny dropped. “You think—?”

“I think they’d be killing off human populations they could find in order to draw us out. We’d feel we had to engage them.” She hadn’t really thought about this before. She’d been too immersed in one crisis after another to engage in what-ifs, and past experience had shown that playing that game only led to pain. But maybe this what-if was necessary.

He swung his arms a little, looking around the room. “Maybe. But maybe they’d just have kept looking for us, and left everybody else alone!”

“Rodney, honestly, I hadn’t thought about it until just, well, now. But think it through with me. Where did we find Reese?”

He shook his head. “I dunno. I read lots of files; I can’t remember all your planetary designations.”

“The designation isn’t the point, McKay. The point is that everyone on that planet was long dead! Not because the Replicators were hunting Ancients, or Lanteans, but because Replicators kill human beings. It’s what they do; it seems to be their...nature.” She knew Daniel was still convinced it wasn’t Reese’s nature, that things could have gone differently with her. She couldn’t swear he was wrong, but she couldn’t say he was right, and it was all academic now.

“McKay, even if they focused on us, spent years trying to get to us, what would they have done once we were gone?” She deliberately didn’t give him time to answer the question. “You’ve said it yourself: they think we’re inferior. They’re the better version, the upgrades.” She grinned. “And like Vista, they’re determined to wipe out the previous operating system completely.”

Her humor was lost on McKay, but he did seem to be reaching for the lifeline she was extending to him. “You really think—?” he asked again. Then he slammed a fist into a nearby table. “But then we’d have had years to fight them, and we might have won before they ever got their little nanites onto some of these other worlds!”

“Maybe,” Sam admitted, smirking at him. “But I’ve been fighting Replicators for years, remember. I was fighting alien threats before you ever got clearance!”

“That’s not true! I had clearance—”

He could be so easy to bait. “The point is,” she said, cutting him off with a wave of her hand, “that I know Replicators. Everything else is the enemy. They started with Reese’s world. Some of them escaped, and we think from there they went after the Asgard. Then—”

“Right,” McKay interrupted her, waving his hands. “I know this. In fact, I’ve worked on this theory myself! The Replicators were probably made here first, by the Ancients. Or maybe they did create them back in our galaxy, but they shut them down....” Sam let him run on, though she’d contributed to the papers they’d written for the SGC about the probable origins and history of the Replicators herself. In fact, she’d started the reconsideration of their origins after they were found in the Pegasus galaxy.

“Then a few of them made it to our galaxy, where some crazy inventor found them, maybe deactivated, and claimed them as his own invention. He either made your ‘Reese’ out of parts, or he reactivated a non-working human-form Replicator.”

“But whichever version we believe,” Sam interjected, “the Replicators were created by the Ancients—and turned from attacking the Wraith to attacking the Ancients. Now, they’re targeting us as the heirs of the Ancients and the possessors of Atlantis—”

“I know all this!” McKay was not as charitable as she was when it came to recapping shared knowledge.

“But we have no reason to believe they’d leave other humans in this galaxy alone!” Sam emphasized. “Finding that we’d returned may have shocked them back into action, and we’re their top priority because we represent the only real threat to them! But let’s face it: either in the course of removing us as a threat, or after we’re gone, they would destroy all human life in this galaxy.

“Turning the Replicators back to the Wraith as target was a brilliant idea, McKay.”

His eyes grew wide, but he didn’t preen, as she expected. Zelenka was right; he was really taking this whole thing hard.

“Maybe we should have foreseen the consequences—but they weren’t so easy to see at the time. You bought us all time. If you hadn’t changed their programming then and there, and they’d managed to trace the Apollo back to Atlantis? We’d all be dead, and they’d have started on those other planets already. Or if you hadn’t made it out? They’d have abandoned Atlantis, and the Replicators would still have won and would be finishing off the survivors as soon as they could find them. As it is, we’re not dead, and we have some help fighting them—even if it’s help we’d prefer not to have.”

McKay sank into a chair where he’d stopped walking. He looked at the floor. Sam was going to say more along the same lines, but she could tell he needed some time to process what she’d just said.

“So you’re saying it’s not my fault?” he finally asked, in a small, tired voice that she didn’t normally associate with McKay. He raised his face to look at her.

Maybe a little bit—but now was not a good time to argue about degrees of fault. “I think it’s entirely possible the outcome would have been a lot worse if you hadn’t reprogrammed the Replicators.”

“Oh.” He looked at the floor some more. “Well, thanks.” He didn’t sound entirely convinced¬—and if he did, Sam would be worried. She knew him well enough to know he’d be turning all this over in his head, probably for days. If he’d believed her too easily, he’d have been kicking himself and pulling it all to pieces afterwards. If he was dubious, he stood a better chance of coming around.

And there was another tactic she could take. Zelenka was right about another thing: McKay respected her. “Take it from me,” Sam said after another long pause, summoning the energy to say what she really didn’t want to say, “the woman who handed the anti-Replicator weapon to what became the biggest Replicator threat in our galaxy. I know the Replicators, and I know about making mistakes. In hindsight, my mistake with my Replicator double was obvious.” And even helping to defeat the Replicators in her own galaxy would never bring back all the people they’d lost in that fight.

McKay frowned. “You couldn’t know—” Then he smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile, and pointed at her. “Nice try.”

“Thanks,” she said, with just a little sarcasm, “but I’m not just saying this. You want to excuse me, but I should have known, then, not to trust her. You, on the other hand—you weren’t fooled by Replicators. You had a damned good idea: have our two enemies take each other out! And I won’t say if you’d known the Replicators better, you’d have seen this coming. I knew exactly what you’d done, and I think I can honestly say I know the Replicators better than anyone alive”—especially now that the Asgard were gone—“and I didn’t see it coming.”

McKay shrugged. “Point taken.” He squirmed a little in his seat. “So I need to keep working on shutting down the Replicators for once and for all.”

She seemed to have made her point, but it didn’t feel right. This wasn’t even what she’d really meant to talk to McKay about! She had to talk some more, before he buried the other issue even more completely.

“Fine,” he said, standing. “You’ve set me straight; I’ll get some sleep, make a fresh start in the morning—”

“Bullshit,” Sam said, and he physically started. She saved such language for really important occasions; it was nice to know that that tactic worked.

“I know what guilt is like,” she said. “Once you’ve got some, you just keep piling it on. And I know what it’s like to have an estranged sibling and finally get to know him—or her—again, and your nieces or nephews.” She frowned. “We have a disturbing amount in common, actually.”

She’d said it out loud partly because she hoped for a laugh, but she didn’t even get a snort. The look on McKay’s face was simply one of fear.

“McKay, the investigation isn’t complete, but the people in charge of securing your sister’s computer, and her connection with the SGC, are probably going to be fired, or demoted and reassigned; I don’t know whether they’re civilians or military. They might even face courts-martial for negligence.”

Yes, she’d definitely hit home. He was just gaping at this point, eyes wide and mouth wider.

“It’s not your fault that your sister was kidnapped! You were authorized to send that e-mail; we vetted it and forwarded it to her. The fault was all on Earth. The people who allowed that e-mail to be read are culpable.

“But the main culprit is Henry Wallace.”

McKay sank back into the chair and looked away. Now what? She’d expected some fight from him, not silence.

This time she pulled her chair over next to his and sat down. “McKay? What?”

“Look, I know it’s not my fault he bugged her computer, and I hope the people who should have made sure that didn’t happen get sacked, or keelhauled, or whatever you do to whichever branch of your military was responsible.”

Sam had to fight for a moment to keep from laughing at “keelhauled.”

“But Kaleb was right: it’s the e-mail that made Wallace decide she was worth kidnapping.” He hunched further. “But that’s not the worst thing! I told her we could escape, I told her I knew what I was doing, and then I blew it! And he would never have injected her with those damn nanites if I hadn’t tried to escape! She wanted to stay and cure the kid, but I said we should escape, and then I didn’t even know where I was! We got caught, and she got injected, and I—we—I had them break her legs!”

McKay took a gasping breath. She had no idea what to do, and of course none of his teammates were around to help. She started to put a hand on his shoulder, but then she pulled back, remembering that she never saw McKay touch people. Did others ever touch McKay?

“But she’s fine!” she argued. “The nanites healed her. You told me she didn’t even feel any pain, they did such a—”

“But none of it ever should have happened! If I hadn’t sent that e-mail, she never would have been kidnapped! She never should have gone through that! And her husband, and her kid....”

“And we’d be weeks behind on the recoding you’re doing,” Sam answered coolly. It wasn’t what McKay wanted to hear, but it was all she could think to say. “If you hadn’t sent that e-mail, if you hadn’t used all the help you could get to fight the Replicators, you’d be risking more lives here.” She wasn’t going to point out that some of their progress had come fighting to save Jeanie’s life.

“She’s my sister!” He looked at her, forehead creased, face reddening. “You say you know what it’s like to have estranged siblings? Well, we, we just made up, and I nearly got her killed! Or brain-wiped! Did you ever do that to your sister?”

“Brother,” she muttered. Louder, she said, “Didn’t happen, Rodney,” finally putting a hand on his shoulder in spite of herself. She felt a slight shudder run through him, but he didn’t pull away. “You couldn’t know. And you went after her to save her, putting yourself in danger. But you were also there to help her work on the programming!”

“She was better at it than I was! Wallace injected the wrong person!” McKay’s voice was quiet but full of anguish. “If I had waited for Sheppard and not gone looking for her on my own, they wouldn’t even have caught me. She would have been working, and she might have gotten the same work done without me, and she never would have been injected! Maybe Sharon would even have lived! And Wallace wouldn’t be dead, and Sheppard wouldn’t—”

He broke off, looking away, face even more guilty than before.

She was tired, and she was more than a bit frustrated at McKay’s attempts to take all the guilt for himself. And pissed at Barrett, who’d been an idiot this time out; had he never recovered from that brainwashing? “Okay. First of all, McKay, don’t you know how dangerous ‘what if’ can be?” She had to ignore that she’d just played that game herself with the Replicator scenario, but he was apparently tired enough to let that one slide. “I think the chances of your sister alone doing a better job on that code than the two of you did together are just slightly better than the chances of an angel coming down from on high to cure Sharon!”

He frowned, but he’d turned his face back to look at her again. His hands were clutching the seat between his legs, tightly.

“So, yeah, maybe you wouldn’t have gotten kidnapped too. And maybe Wallace would have injected Jeanie to lure you in, because she couldn’t finish it herself! He was desperate; he did crazy things, from giving you both access to his whole network to injecting her!”

“Are you even listening?” McKay was angry too. “If I hadn’t tried to escape, he wouldn’t have done it!”

“So: you led the escape, and you weren’t the best programmer there. Shooting nanites into her bloodstream was never a rational response to what you’d done, so even if you hadn’t tried to escape, he might still have done it!” That hadn’t come out very clearly, but McKay didn’t seem to mind.

“And what are you gonna do?” she continued. “Never try to escape again? Because the penalties are always worse for trying to escape than for not trying to escape—but we always try to escape anyway, because escaping always beats not escaping!” She remembered a favorite tactic her teammates liked to use when she blamed herself: shift the blame and make her defend someone.

“John Sheppard woke the Wraith by helping others escape; was he wrong to do that?”

“Ye—no! He couldn’t know! We had no idea! And he couldn’t just leave them there to die!” McKay looked confused, but he still added, “I know what you’re doing! It’s not the same! She wasn’t going to die until we tried to escape!”

“Then why did you try to escape?” Sam shouted, exasperated.

“Because I thought—“ McKay choked back his own shout. “I thought he would kill us, so he wouldn’t be arrested, but I was wrong. He was just trying to save his daughter! I thought I was saving us by escaping, but instead, I risked Jeanie’s life, and she damn near died, or had her brain wiped!”

“But she didn’t!” Sam threw her hands into the air. They were going in circles. She’d had conversations like this with Daniel, she told herself; she could handle McKay. “Maybe the escape attempt was a mistake, but don’t you think you’ve paid for that enough? You made a rational decision that he would kill you when you were done, one way or another, so he wouldn’t get caught! And when things went bad, you were willing to give your life! You did everything you could to save Jeanie—and, in the end, you did.”

“No,” McKay said with a catch in his voice. “I’m not the one who saved Jeanie.”

“What? Then who?”

He wouldn’t answer.

“Wallace? Wallace was trying to make it right. He nearly killed her; he saved her. It’s fair. I wouldn’t call him her savior,” Sam said with distaste. She knew what it was like to love someone enough to give your own life—but deliberately endangering innocent lives to save one person? She hoped she wouldn’t do that.

“He died horribly,” McKay whispered. “Do you know what it’s like? I’ve seen—have you seen Wraith feed? The worst—we watched while Kolya’s pet Wraith fed on John Sheppard. It was—oh, God.” He put his head in his hands.

Sam had taken her hand off McKay’s shoulder at some point, and she thought of putting it back, but his posture said “don’t touch me” as clearly as a sign.

“And you offered to do it. You would have. But we didn’t let you, because we need you to save lots of other lives,” Sam said in her best command voice. Her command voice had definitely gotten better.

Of course, McKay followed orders better than Daniel and Teal’c, and just knowing that made it easier to be in charge here.

“Sheppard—Sheppard’s pretending it’s all right, but he, um, the Wraith got Wallace right in front of him—”

“Cut the crap, McKay.” He jerked his head away from his hands, staring. Yeah, two bad words in one conversation. She was ticked he thought she bought Sheppard’s version. “Nobody believes Sheppard was giving a criminal a tour of the SGC! Sheppard let Wallace do it—gave him the chance to do it.” She’d told Sheppard off the record that she knew damned well he’d falsified his report, just so he didn’t think he could fool her and try it again. From the look in his eyes then, she strongly suspected he’d given Wallace a nudge, and maybe a heck of a shove in that direction. But McKay didn’t need any more suspicions on top of the ones he was already harboring.

McKay looked at her sideways, his face still bent towards his hands. She looked back, trying not to break his gaze in discomfort; she was sure he was looking for confirmation of his fears.

“I know Sheppard didn’t just feed him to the Wraith,” she said confidently. “He gave him a choice. Just like Wallace had a choice to steal government secrets or not to steal them, to kidnap you and Jeanie or not to kidnap, to inject Jeanie or not to inject—”

“Hell of a choice,” McKay said bitterly. “Life in jail or death by Wraith? But I’d have taken life in jail,” he said in an undertone.

“Would you? If you could save someone you’d endangered?”

There was a slight motion; she wasn’t sure, so she decided to take it as a shake of the head.

“I didn’t think so. But let’s not forget the real choice: death by Wraith, saving an innocent woman that Wallace had condemned to death himself; or a pointless death by lethal injection.”

“What?” McKay sat up straight, passed vertical, and nearly fell off the back of the chair.

“I’m pretty sure it would have been lethal injection,” Sam said smoothly. “The kidnapping took place on Canadian soil, but he brought you both back to the States, to his lab. So his attempted murder was on US soil.

“Now that alone wouldn’t necessarily get you the death penalty”—especially if you were a wealthy white defense contractor, which bothered her, but she kept that to herself—“but treason would. He repeatedly stole state secrets. He kidnapped a defense contractor and a government employee and forced them to use their classified knowledge for personal ends.”

“We’re Canadian!” McKay exclaimed, somewhere between outrage and disbelief. “This is an international mission! We’re not contractors or employees of your government!”

Sam frowned. Maybe the IOA paid McKay; payroll was one detail, thank God, that she didn’t have to worry about. But that was beside the point. “He ordered an assault on a CIA agent, tampered with security equipment—your subcutaneous transmitter—and shared all of this classified material with other people lacking clearance, any of whom could then sell it to another person or power. Wallace may have been looking out only for his family, but you can’t say all your guards and all those doctors were.” Sam wondered what they were going to do about that mess, and she was glad she didn’t have to clean it up. “And motive doesn’t much matter in treason, anyway.”

McKay’s mouth was turned down in a grimace of disgust.

“Treason. Multiple counts. There’d be no question. Secret tribunal, because we can’t have the evidence go public”—she didn’t like it, especially after her time on the alternate Earth with martial law, but it was the truth. “Within a few months, at most, he’d be dead. Lethal injection is generally the choice for treason, I believe.” And this repulsion she could let show, because it helped her case. “Did you know at least some patients feel the lethal injection? The drugs paralyze; they’re supposed to numb, but we know it doesn’t work at least some of the time. Maybe any of the time. And death isn’t instantaneous.”

McKay looked green, so Sam figured it was time to quit.

“John Sheppard is an officer in the US Air Force just like I am. I assume he reached the same conclusions I did. Wallace suffered a hell of a death, but don’t think of it as suicide. It was a choice between a horrible, painful death that would save an innocent woman who did all she could to help Wallace’s daughter—and a horrible, painful death after he’d let that woman die.”

Sam’s own stomach was turning. She hadn’t thought about it so graphically until now.

“I’m sorry, Rodney,” she said, putting a hand back on his shoulder, and she thought he leaned forward just a little, toward her hand. “I’m sorry you went through all that. And I’m really sorry for Jeanie, too. But I’m glad you both made it out of there okay.”

“And what about Sheppard?” McKay asked, still in a small voice. “Is he okay? Because I thought he was, but I’m not sure. You—you may be right, and maybe he did think of all of this. But still, what he asked that man to do—because of me, because he couldn’t let me do it....”

Sam swallowed. She wondered what choice she’d make, in his position. If it had been Daniel, offering to die to save Sha’re? Or Jack, for Charlie? Or Teal’c, for Drey’auc, or for R’yac? She couldn’t say what she would have done. She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know. She had told Daniel once that there were some things she could stand not to know, and that was one of the differences between the two of them.

She did know she wouldn’t have let any of her teammates sacrifice themselves.

“Maybe I need to have a talk with Colonel Sheppard too,” she concluded. Not that she figured it would get her anywhere. Probably better not even to try.

McKay was looking at her searchingly. “Do you really believe all this? I mean, everything you’ve just said?”

“Yes,” she said honestly. Especially the things about Sheppard. She knew the calculations he’d made, she was pretty sure. And he would hold that responsibility tightly to himself, never even admitting he’d pressed Wallace to offer himself, never realizing his secret was visible in his eyes. Maybe she’d talk to him. Maybe she wouldn’t.

“But I made mistakes!” he insisted.

She nodded. “Yes. So have I.” And she thought hers were worse, but that wasn’t a road she ever wanted to travel with McKay, in any universe. “We learn from our mistakes, and we try to fix them. That’s what Wallace did. He died fixing them. But he could at least save your sister, even if he couldn’t save his own daughter. And you weren’t the one who hurt and almost killed Jeanie.”

She stood up slowly, her back popping a little. When had she started getting old and stiff? How had Jack O’Neill stayed in the field so long? He said it kept him young, and that being in DC had aged him ten years already. But she felt sure Atlantis was aging her in its own way.

McKay stood uncertainly.

“We get some sleep,” Sam concluded, “and then we get back to work. Fixing mistakes, saving lives, doing the best we can. Knowing we’ll make more mistakes, but we just do our best and move forward.”

McKay nodded. “Carson used to say stuff like that.” It jolted Sam, a little; she’d heard that McKay had been good friends with the previous CMO, but while lots of people said Carson Beckett’s name, Rodney McKay wasn’t usually one of them.

“Oh, and thanks—for sending the Wraith,” McKay added. “I, um, we couldn’t have saved Jeanie without him.”

Sam wasn’t sure what to say, but “You’re welcome” seemed pretty safe.

“But aren’t you worried? I mean, he knows Earth—”

Right—he’d never asked, so she hadn’t give him the details. “Yeah, we had him on the Apollo for a few hours. Then we confined him in a sound- and light-proof container to be sent across the bridge and took him to P2A-347; he was let out and simply shackled for the last trip through the Stargate. It took a little longer than going directly, but I think we can’t be pretty sure he has no idea how to get there. He doesn’t even know the Bridge exists.”

“Oh,” McKay said. “That’s pretty...thorough.”

“Why, thank you!” High praise from Rodney McKay. She felt just a little smug, despite being now bone-tired, instead of merely exhausted, as she had been when Zelenka found her on the balcony.

They walked to the door.

“Um, thanks,” McKay said. “Really. I know I haven’t been; I mean, I know I’m not good at—just, thanks.”

Sam frowned. What was he trying to say? Probably better not to know.

“And I, uh, I’m gonna go get some sleep. I hope you will too.” He stuck his hands in his pockets awkwardly.

“I think I will.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

Finally she was alone again, taking a different route back to her quarters; she could have gone the same way as McKay, but that would have meant more awkward talking, or, worse, awkward not-talking. She wanted to clear her head.

Sam did seem to have done McKay some good. Her old teammates had told her she’d be good at this job, especially Teal’c. Maybe she would be.

Tonight, she would sleep. After a few minutes on her own, private balcony.

FIN

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