Something like a crossroads song (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
charlieblue) wrote2008-07-18 10:41 pm
charlieblue) wrote2008-07-18 10:41 pm
FIC: Soldier, Scientist, Live a Lie and Fail to Die.
Title: Soldier, Scientist, Live a Lie and Fail to Die.
Pairing: Mostly gen with pre-slash Sheppard/McKay
Rating: R
Word Count: ~3000 + links to multimedia (just some companion pictures).
Warning: Torture, violence, swearing, killing.
Notes: Just a concept-fic, a prologue to a ridiculously bigger AU inside my head.
Disclaimer: Stargate: Atlantis, colon and all, does not belong to me.
Summary: Spies AU. Dr. McKay, brilliant military scientist is imprisoned in a top secret military complex. Sheppard, an operative deep undercover at the SGC, is sent to retrieve him.
‘Conspiring with enemies of homeworld security.’ That had been the falsified, confidential accusation.
‘Aiding and abetting terrorists in the creation of weapons of mass destruction.’ That was what the SGC had told officials, in their sealed report.
He never got a trial.
The man was only one among the many nameless, all of them tortured, all hidden away in the darkest corner of the far-reaching and well-oiled US military machine.
Some of them, the man knew, had been there for years, all but stripped of their humanity in this timeless and unmeasured space of infinite punishment.
Infinite, yes, for they had no time, no means of measurement or order, no knowledge of how many hours, days, weeks, months, years had passed; sleep cycles were forbidden and there was no rest for them that were deemed wicked.
He could not know when night became day and day became spring and spring became Christmas and Christmas turned into decades of shattered amnesia.
This was a place more secret, more brutal, and far more infamous among those who knew of it than Guantanamo Bay had ever managed to be.
He dug nails grown sharp and long into the tip of a trembling finger, and let the blood drip and pool into the sharp curve of his palm, watching as it slid down across the scar that twisted its ugly way through his skin.
The lights, those fucking, glaring, almighty lights hadn’t been turned off in ohgodhedidn’tknowhowmany days and his vision was twisted, full of shining colours and miniscule blurs, and the pressure behind his eyes seemed to be slowly forcing his face outward into a grotesque mask.
It made the spatial thinking required for writing, his exercise in regained humanity, ever so slightly and rather irritatingly difficult. Yet he treasured those times, loved forcing the electrical impulses of age-old muscle memory through the choked and gasping neural pathways.
He had to be very careful. Never knew what was delirium, what was mere flashes of desperate, pain-induced hallucination.
The cell is empty. The cell is empty. The cell is empty. The cell is empty. There is nothing here. Nothing but nothing. Ergo, he is nothing. In being nothing, he is able to survive. Survival indicates life. Life is something. But something must be nothing. No, no, nothing must, must, must be something. Or something like that.
Regardless of the possibility of errors, he wrote, he wrote in his own blood because there was nothing else and because it was the one thing that allowed him to transcend the grey, unending walls that had become his existence in its entirety.
Stars, stars and supernovas, time travel, gravity pulls, the putty of matter and the immutability of entropy; his blood wrote and rewrote the laws of science and washed them away in an anarchy of sheer, insane genius.
He smiled, wide and crooked, eyes glimmering a bright, brilliant blue in the stark white lighting, and liquid that had yet to evaporate trailed down his naked torso, warmer now, than it had been when they’d hosed him down with the high-pressure, glacial water that was employed specifically to keep him from sleep and coherent thought.
He prayed to God in order to haughtily condemn Him for His invention of two hydrogen atoms covalently bonded to a single oxygen atom.
He wondered idly if maybe they were worried what might happen if someone like him was able to think clearly in a place like this. Worried about what he might figure out, what he might achieve.
And yet.
No one escaped, no one ever truly became free of the horror that this prison was.
Even now, the nameless man could feel his mind bending and adapting to this place despite all his efforts to remain unbowed.
Of everything, of all the betrayals he had endured, it was this one that was the most terrible.
-
Rising military scientist, brilliantly leading the human race into a new era of galactical technology. That was how they talked about him, despite his numerous personality flaws, for all was forgiven in the face of what he could do, and had done, for them.
Then one day, just one day, just one hour in that one day had led it all stumbling and crashing down the rabbit hole.
‘Conspiring with enemies of homeworld security.’ That had been the falsified, confidential accusation.
‘Aiding and abetting terrorists in the creation of weapons of mass destruction.’ That was what the SGC had told officials, in their sealed report.
He never got a trial.
He hadn’t known, hadn't realized the extent of his mistake in being honest at the time, after that god-awful-one-hour meeting.
He had, quite obliviously, gone home, gone to his high-end apartment, full of state-of-the-art technology, unsettled and still furious with SGC for what they’d told him, still burning with all the answers, the denial and refusal he had sent spinning and cutting their way.
He had been full of sparking neurons, of electric ideas and simmering, ticking-time-bomb resentment.
Then, three hours later, a SWAT team had assaulted the penthouse, had dragged him from his seven computers and his fifth coffee with too little cream and far too much sugar, and dragged him, kicking, screaming and sedated, all the way into hell.
-
The prisoner jumped, eyes wide, staring out at the masked interrogator who had just arrived outside his barred cell door.
'Dear me, Doctor.' The voice was high and cruel, mocking the prisoner with fragments of a destroyed life.
'You really aren't looking so good.'
The prisoner stayed frozen, arms loosely curled around his knees, eyes unblinking.
'Not ready to talk yet?' The man tutted, moving forward, hands trailing the bars with deliberate intent.
'Such a terrible pity. We used to hear about you, even all the way out here, you know. We all heard about what you did, about who you helped. And you know what?'
He leant forward, and the prisoner knew he was spitting, even through the hood.
'It was ...disgusting, it was fucking sick what you did, and we are all gonna just keep on punishing you for the rest of your godforsaken life. No one, not one godamned soul is gonna stop us. Do you even know how many men, women, how many children died that night?'
Tears prickled at the prisoner's eyes and he gasped out, finally moving.
'It wasn't - I didn't, no ... no.'
The man's voice rose an octave.
'Oh, that's right, I'm so sorry. It wasn't you. Didn't get that memo.'
His voice dropped to a whisper.
'They're coming for you soon, you know. It's almost playtime.'
The prisoner curled tighter, eyes dropping.
The interrogator smirked beneath his hood and walked away, leaving the man to stew in his own fear.
-
The prisoner had a number, for there were no longer any names, no more titles or accolades. That much he did know, that much he had managed to figure out, and it was a constant piece of knowledge, a good, steady companion within this madhouse.
The filing systems they had introduced for the prisoners, that was what did this to them, reduced each of them to pure strings of words, numbers, murders, statistics, pictures and conspiracies, webs of ones and zeroes defined only by the information that was known and subsequently offered, whether it be of their own free will or dragged from screaming, gasping, torn lips.
The prisoners were not human beings any more, oh no, they were files, encoded and filthy, just waiting to be hacked and cracked and crumbled into a million pieces of code to be picked up and examined, then swept up and deposited in a vault of countless others just like them.
The man shivered, wrapping his arms around himself, careful not to close his eyes, for fear they would see him, and drag him out, out into the tunnel to be pummelled by the water that hit like a million beatings of blunt instruments once bloody fucking more.
The sound of boots had become a siren, a blasting, shuddering beacon of suffering and cruelty rending its way through already broken trains of thought, a herald of strange faces grinning down at him in nightmarish joy as he writhed and begged.
He heard them now, clanging down the floors and his thoughts scared easily these days, skittering away to the corners of his mind, taking cover from reality to leave only the husk of him, only the pleading, insane animal they expected him to be.
Then all of a horrifying sudden, something changed.
With a deep and resounding clang, the lights shut off.
In the complete darkness, the nameless man raised his head slowly, panic lurking in his clenched hands, relief swamping his swollen eyes as of their own accord, they took this opportunity, this rare, rare time, to finally rest.
He wanted to stay awake, wanted to figure out this new game, this new tactic, but the sick, nauseating dog lurking in the pit of his mind reared its ugly and blessed head.
He had not slept in so long, and the overwhelming instinct, that utterly basic, primal need overwhelmed him, sending him crashing straight down into unconsciousness.
He didn’t know whether it was moments or hours later, but he was jolted awake, still wrapped in the blessed protection of darkness, to the sharp and merciless hail of gunfire.
-
Under the cover of pelting rain, with the aid of newly developed stealth technology, the helicopters had approached undetected, cutting their way through the stormy sky with glistening blades.
Black-clad men, masked and armed to the teeth had slid easily down wire lines, were fluidly moving across the roof of the complex, guns held tight, green lasers sweeping back and forth across the barren landscape.
The intruders’ bullets whirred through the night, felling the guards with deadly and indiscriminate accuracy as they sprinted across the slippery roof in tight, deadly formation.
The guards, despite being expertly trained and highly experienced, had never stood a chance, dying with their eyes bulging in shock, hands still vainly groping for triggers.
As the intruders reached the hub of the roof-top entrance, one man and one woman moved forward through the gracefully shifting configuration, swiftly and efficiently applying plastic explosives around the thick metal door that loomed over them.
Within moments, the door was a twisted and smoking hulk on the floor, and the group was inside, sprinting down the stairwell, night-vision goggles already well in place; the self-sufficient generators that provided electricity to the complex were already disabled, swiftly dealt with just prior to the primary assault.
The last man to enter the complex also happened to be the man leading the operation.
Highly intelligent, both feared and respected by his men, he had been chosen for this mission precisely because of his tendency to impulsive and adaptive behaviour.
He turned, feline and graceful, cool gaze sweeping the roof.
This was a rare mission for him; a complex and large-scale operation. Being deep undercover at the SGC afforded him little freedom for such movement and endeavours.
But for this, they had pulled him in, created a certifiable and legitimate reason for his absence, because for this, they had needed him leading his team.
They, being the people he worked for, had only managed to gain the most basic of information on the inside workings and layout of the complex. They did not tolerate failure, most especially not when it came to that which they truly desired.
And the man they were breaking out tonight was such a one.
The leader checked that his sentries were in position and guarding their escape route with the most advantageous positions. This was a snatch and grab by a small, crack team. They could not afford delays.
John Sheppard grinned wolfishly, teeth glimmering in the darkness, and turned easily, a decidedly unmilitary swagger in his step, and disappeared down into the darkness.
-
Despite the fact that the people guarding this place had grown lax and had become far too reliant upon absolute secrecy to guard them, and were nowhere near prepared for a professional infiltration, the assault got messy, and it got messy fast.
Their route to the target’s cell and the man’s number, this was the information they had, and they used it to the greatest degree possible, moving swiftly and avoiding all unnecessary encounters with the hostile guards.
Regardless, by the time they neared the man’s cell, manoeuvring their way through the deliberately labyrinthine complex, the situation had become nothing less than a bloodbath.
In the confined hallways and stairwells, with sharp corners and intersections, close combat violent and messy, and the body count was rising rapidly.
Sheppard frequently checked and counted his team - a natural instinct - and nodded sharply when one of them was severely injured and the two closest grabbed him, supporting him without hesitation.
No man left behind.
The corridors glowed a nightmarish green through the night-vision goggles, and the smell of old blood and industrial cleaning fluids crackled through the looming hallways.
Sheppard and his team moved fast, hard and fast, all defensive wedges and deadly points, ignoring the men and women huddled miserably in the cells they ran past.
Sheppard fought hard when they encountered resistance, ducking the swipe of a knife and violently slamming the guard’s wrist against the wall, and, feeling the bones snap and grind beneath the skin, Sheppard allowed the violent killing joy he kept so tightly under wraps to take over, grabbing the knife as it fell and twisting beneath the screaming guard’s arm, gripping his neck tightly from behind and slicing the knife through the jugular in one smooth motion, the spray of blood splattering up across his face.
Facing backward, he took a single moment to examine the rest of his team, engaged in similar struggles at the crossroad of corridors they had reached, satisfied as each was dispatching their enemies with brutal efficiency.
Then unyielding, ruthless momentum propelled him forward once more, and he dispatched three more guards, shattering collarbones with swift jabs, twisting a man’s neck, slamming another against a wall and crushing his larynx, his own hard breathing mingling with the man’s dying exhalation, eyes glittering behind the night-vision goggles.
All around him, violence reigned, professional and deadly, but animalistic still, with bodies left where they lay, blood pooling in slippery hazards with which, he noted with a detached irony, they would have to take care on the way out.
They dealt with the cell doors of the target the same way as they had with the one on the rooftop. Small, shaped charges were placed and within moments, there was no longer any barrier between them and their prey.
It was Sheppard himself, face splattered with blood, who strode forward through the smoking remains of the target’s cell door.
He shoved his night-vision goggles up onto his forehead, unclipped a flashlight from behind his back on his vest, and brought it up to shine on the man standing with his back against the furthest wall, hands pressing back into the surface as if it were holding him upright.
Come to think of it, it probably was.
As the light skittered across the room, it illuminated walls covered with flaky scrawlings the dark, rusty colour of old blood.
Sheppard’s eyebrows rose slightly as he took it all in, noted the complex equations, the swirling spirals and interlinked words and symbols, arrows pointing through squares and lines, creating a morbid spiderweb of images that stretched out across the entire cell.
Sheppard signalled Cadman, standing behind him fresh from demolishing the cell doors, and she flicked open a slim digital camera, swiftly taking pictures of the walls, the flashes causing the man in the cell to jerk, hands curling, head tilted down, glaring out at them, at the dark figures moving forward through the smoke.
Good. Sheppard thought. The man isn’t completely broken.
Swiftly, he assessed the damage that was obvious to the naked eye.
Dark, heavy bruising circled up around the ankles, wrists and neck, with purpling and yellow stripes across his torso that were indicative of older beatings. He couldn’t assess internal injuries without a more lengthy examination.
There were blackening circular burns at strategic points, far too perfect to be from to anything other than electrodes. Redness and blisters around the ears were suggestive of waterboarding that used boiling water. Judging from the awkward stance, genital torture was also likely possibility.
Sheppard’s lips twisted in disgust momentarily, and then he stepped forward, one hand stretched outward, carefully not pointing the flashlight straight at the man’s face.
The man’s eyes were wide and aware, glowering at him from under long lashes with the burning look of a wounded animal. He licked his lips, mouth working soundlessly for a moment before he spoke, and when he did his voice rasped painfully, as if it had never been used it for anything but screaming.
‘What … no, no, no. Who-who are...?’
Sheppard, always cold, always emotionless, careful to never connect to any people encountered on missions, felt the man’s eyes slice through him
like daggers, as if this tortured, half-insane man saw straight through the carefully constructed layers of his persona.
With the adrenaline and aggression of fighting only just subsiding and his paranoia in full swing from being on such a reckless mission, Sheppard felt simultaneously like shooting the man point blank and shoving him up against a wall.
Instead, Sheppard smiled easily, charmingly, and tilted his chin up arrogantly.
‘We,’ he gestured easily with one arm, ‘are here to rescue you, Special Agent Rodney McKay.’ He drawled the words, curling the fingers of his outstretched hand, as if to say come here, come to me.
Then he spoke the three simple words, code words, embedded with inalienable directives.
‘Trinity take wing.’
-
RodneyMcKayMcKayMcKayRod-Rod-neyRodneyMcKayRodney. Special Agent.
The names slunk through his mind like an indolent bolt of lightening.
Not a number, no, not at all, not anymore.
Rodney swallowed, nodded, and looked at the ground, the light from the flashlight a painful reminder of maddened wakeful hours.
Sleeper. Sleeper awaken. The old, ingrained impulse shot through his brain, and he replied with the three appropriate words.
‘Pegasus will soar.’
Warily, Rodney painfully lifted a hand to the man's outstretched one and felt the him take it, thoughtlessly caressing the bruises around Rodney's wrist with soft fingers.
He frowned, feeling the damaged skin pull, and chanced a glance upward. This man, he was all sharp edges, cold eyes and cruel smiles, and yet somehow he seemed more human, more real than anyone he had encountered since waking up in this place.
The man stared back at him, and his face flickered unreadably. Rodney, unable to stop, reached out with his other hand, as if through water, as if waking from a drowning dream, and felt the hard beating of the man’s heartbeat through his chest.
Real. True, living, breathing evidence that the world outside existed.
For a moment, neither moved.
Behind the man, the other dark figures stayed still, guns up and pointing down the hall, waiting patiently.
Then the strange, dark man, he grinned, teeth gleaming, and moved like a snake, roughly tightening his hold on Rodney’s wrist, sending starbursts of white hot pain shooting up his arm, and pulled him close, so close his teeth grazed Rodney's ear.
'We have a new mission for you Rodney McKay.' He hissed, lips distracting, grip harsh.
Then he led Rodney out of the cell, handed him off to the waiting team, and Rodney was so, so, so dizzy; the pain swallowing up any and all rational thoughts as he was rushed back through corridors, through wastelands of blood and bodies, and eventually, finally, his consciousness swirled and turned to black.
The last thing Rodney remembered of that night was gazing down upon a squat, sprawling structure and hearing the whump whump of his soul as he flew up, up and out of the land of living numbers and human beasts.
-
Sheppard, for his part, rode in the helicopter cargo bay across from the unconscious man, and didn’t take his eyes off McKay until he delivered him to the directed drop point.
-
Pairing: Mostly gen with pre-slash Sheppard/McKay
Rating: R
Word Count: ~3000 + links to multimedia (just some companion pictures).
Warning: Torture, violence, swearing, killing.
Notes: Just a concept-fic, a prologue to a ridiculously bigger AU inside my head.
Disclaimer: Stargate: Atlantis, colon and all, does not belong to me.
Summary: Spies AU. Dr. McKay, brilliant military scientist is imprisoned in a top secret military complex. Sheppard, an operative deep undercover at the SGC, is sent to retrieve him.
‘Conspiring with enemies of homeworld security.’ That had been the falsified, confidential accusation.
‘Aiding and abetting terrorists in the creation of weapons of mass destruction.’ That was what the SGC had told officials, in their sealed report.
He never got a trial.
The man was only one among the many nameless, all of them tortured, all hidden away in the darkest corner of the far-reaching and well-oiled US military machine.
Some of them, the man knew, had been there for years, all but stripped of their humanity in this timeless and unmeasured space of infinite punishment.
Infinite, yes, for they had no time, no means of measurement or order, no knowledge of how many hours, days, weeks, months, years had passed; sleep cycles were forbidden and there was no rest for them that were deemed wicked.
He could not know when night became day and day became spring and spring became Christmas and Christmas turned into decades of shattered amnesia.
This was a place more secret, more brutal, and far more infamous among those who knew of it than Guantanamo Bay had ever managed to be.
He dug nails grown sharp and long into the tip of a trembling finger, and let the blood drip and pool into the sharp curve of his palm, watching as it slid down across the scar that twisted its ugly way through his skin.
The lights, those fucking, glaring, almighty lights hadn’t been turned off in ohgodhedidn’tknowhowmany days and his vision was twisted, full of shining colours and miniscule blurs, and the pressure behind his eyes seemed to be slowly forcing his face outward into a grotesque mask.
It made the spatial thinking required for writing, his exercise in regained humanity, ever so slightly and rather irritatingly difficult. Yet he treasured those times, loved forcing the electrical impulses of age-old muscle memory through the choked and gasping neural pathways.
He had to be very careful. Never knew what was delirium, what was mere flashes of desperate, pain-induced hallucination.
The cell is empty. The cell is empty. The cell is empty. The cell is empty. There is nothing here. Nothing but nothing. Ergo, he is nothing. In being nothing, he is able to survive. Survival indicates life. Life is something. But something must be nothing. No, no, nothing must, must, must be something. Or something like that.
Regardless of the possibility of errors, he wrote, he wrote in his own blood because there was nothing else and because it was the one thing that allowed him to transcend the grey, unending walls that had become his existence in its entirety.
Stars, stars and supernovas, time travel, gravity pulls, the putty of matter and the immutability of entropy; his blood wrote and rewrote the laws of science and washed them away in an anarchy of sheer, insane genius.
He smiled, wide and crooked, eyes glimmering a bright, brilliant blue in the stark white lighting, and liquid that had yet to evaporate trailed down his naked torso, warmer now, than it had been when they’d hosed him down with the high-pressure, glacial water that was employed specifically to keep him from sleep and coherent thought.
He prayed to God in order to haughtily condemn Him for His invention of two hydrogen atoms covalently bonded to a single oxygen atom.
He wondered idly if maybe they were worried what might happen if someone like him was able to think clearly in a place like this. Worried about what he might figure out, what he might achieve.
And yet.
No one escaped, no one ever truly became free of the horror that this prison was.
Even now, the nameless man could feel his mind bending and adapting to this place despite all his efforts to remain unbowed.
Of everything, of all the betrayals he had endured, it was this one that was the most terrible.
-
Rising military scientist, brilliantly leading the human race into a new era of galactical technology. That was how they talked about him, despite his numerous personality flaws, for all was forgiven in the face of what he could do, and had done, for them.
Then one day, just one day, just one hour in that one day had led it all stumbling and crashing down the rabbit hole.
‘Conspiring with enemies of homeworld security.’ That had been the falsified, confidential accusation.
‘Aiding and abetting terrorists in the creation of weapons of mass destruction.’ That was what the SGC had told officials, in their sealed report.
He never got a trial.
He hadn’t known, hadn't realized the extent of his mistake in being honest at the time, after that god-awful-one-hour meeting.
He had, quite obliviously, gone home, gone to his high-end apartment, full of state-of-the-art technology, unsettled and still furious with SGC for what they’d told him, still burning with all the answers, the denial and refusal he had sent spinning and cutting their way.
He had been full of sparking neurons, of electric ideas and simmering, ticking-time-bomb resentment.
Then, three hours later, a SWAT team had assaulted the penthouse, had dragged him from his seven computers and his fifth coffee with too little cream and far too much sugar, and dragged him, kicking, screaming and sedated, all the way into hell.
-
The prisoner jumped, eyes wide, staring out at the masked interrogator who had just arrived outside his barred cell door.
'Dear me, Doctor.' The voice was high and cruel, mocking the prisoner with fragments of a destroyed life.
'You really aren't looking so good.'
The prisoner stayed frozen, arms loosely curled around his knees, eyes unblinking.
'Not ready to talk yet?' The man tutted, moving forward, hands trailing the bars with deliberate intent.
'Such a terrible pity. We used to hear about you, even all the way out here, you know. We all heard about what you did, about who you helped. And you know what?'
He leant forward, and the prisoner knew he was spitting, even through the hood.
'It was ...disgusting, it was fucking sick what you did, and we are all gonna just keep on punishing you for the rest of your godforsaken life. No one, not one godamned soul is gonna stop us. Do you even know how many men, women, how many children died that night?'
Tears prickled at the prisoner's eyes and he gasped out, finally moving.
'It wasn't - I didn't, no ... no.'
The man's voice rose an octave.
'Oh, that's right, I'm so sorry. It wasn't you. Didn't get that memo.'
His voice dropped to a whisper.
'They're coming for you soon, you know. It's almost playtime.'
The prisoner curled tighter, eyes dropping.
The interrogator smirked beneath his hood and walked away, leaving the man to stew in his own fear.
-
The prisoner had a number, for there were no longer any names, no more titles or accolades. That much he did know, that much he had managed to figure out, and it was a constant piece of knowledge, a good, steady companion within this madhouse.
The filing systems they had introduced for the prisoners, that was what did this to them, reduced each of them to pure strings of words, numbers, murders, statistics, pictures and conspiracies, webs of ones and zeroes defined only by the information that was known and subsequently offered, whether it be of their own free will or dragged from screaming, gasping, torn lips.
The prisoners were not human beings any more, oh no, they were files, encoded and filthy, just waiting to be hacked and cracked and crumbled into a million pieces of code to be picked up and examined, then swept up and deposited in a vault of countless others just like them.
The man shivered, wrapping his arms around himself, careful not to close his eyes, for fear they would see him, and drag him out, out into the tunnel to be pummelled by the water that hit like a million beatings of blunt instruments once bloody fucking more.
The sound of boots had become a siren, a blasting, shuddering beacon of suffering and cruelty rending its way through already broken trains of thought, a herald of strange faces grinning down at him in nightmarish joy as he writhed and begged.
He heard them now, clanging down the floors and his thoughts scared easily these days, skittering away to the corners of his mind, taking cover from reality to leave only the husk of him, only the pleading, insane animal they expected him to be.
Then all of a horrifying sudden, something changed.
With a deep and resounding clang, the lights shut off.
In the complete darkness, the nameless man raised his head slowly, panic lurking in his clenched hands, relief swamping his swollen eyes as of their own accord, they took this opportunity, this rare, rare time, to finally rest.
He wanted to stay awake, wanted to figure out this new game, this new tactic, but the sick, nauseating dog lurking in the pit of his mind reared its ugly and blessed head.
He had not slept in so long, and the overwhelming instinct, that utterly basic, primal need overwhelmed him, sending him crashing straight down into unconsciousness.
He didn’t know whether it was moments or hours later, but he was jolted awake, still wrapped in the blessed protection of darkness, to the sharp and merciless hail of gunfire.
-
Under the cover of pelting rain, with the aid of newly developed stealth technology, the helicopters had approached undetected, cutting their way through the stormy sky with glistening blades.
Black-clad men, masked and armed to the teeth had slid easily down wire lines, were fluidly moving across the roof of the complex, guns held tight, green lasers sweeping back and forth across the barren landscape.
The intruders’ bullets whirred through the night, felling the guards with deadly and indiscriminate accuracy as they sprinted across the slippery roof in tight, deadly formation.
The guards, despite being expertly trained and highly experienced, had never stood a chance, dying with their eyes bulging in shock, hands still vainly groping for triggers.
As the intruders reached the hub of the roof-top entrance, one man and one woman moved forward through the gracefully shifting configuration, swiftly and efficiently applying plastic explosives around the thick metal door that loomed over them.
Within moments, the door was a twisted and smoking hulk on the floor, and the group was inside, sprinting down the stairwell, night-vision goggles already well in place; the self-sufficient generators that provided electricity to the complex were already disabled, swiftly dealt with just prior to the primary assault.
The last man to enter the complex also happened to be the man leading the operation.
Highly intelligent, both feared and respected by his men, he had been chosen for this mission precisely because of his tendency to impulsive and adaptive behaviour.
He turned, feline and graceful, cool gaze sweeping the roof.
This was a rare mission for him; a complex and large-scale operation. Being deep undercover at the SGC afforded him little freedom for such movement and endeavours.
But for this, they had pulled him in, created a certifiable and legitimate reason for his absence, because for this, they had needed him leading his team.
They, being the people he worked for, had only managed to gain the most basic of information on the inside workings and layout of the complex. They did not tolerate failure, most especially not when it came to that which they truly desired.
And the man they were breaking out tonight was such a one.
The leader checked that his sentries were in position and guarding their escape route with the most advantageous positions. This was a snatch and grab by a small, crack team. They could not afford delays.
John Sheppard grinned wolfishly, teeth glimmering in the darkness, and turned easily, a decidedly unmilitary swagger in his step, and disappeared down into the darkness.
-
Despite the fact that the people guarding this place had grown lax and had become far too reliant upon absolute secrecy to guard them, and were nowhere near prepared for a professional infiltration, the assault got messy, and it got messy fast.
Their route to the target’s cell and the man’s number, this was the information they had, and they used it to the greatest degree possible, moving swiftly and avoiding all unnecessary encounters with the hostile guards.
Regardless, by the time they neared the man’s cell, manoeuvring their way through the deliberately labyrinthine complex, the situation had become nothing less than a bloodbath.
In the confined hallways and stairwells, with sharp corners and intersections, close combat violent and messy, and the body count was rising rapidly.
Sheppard frequently checked and counted his team - a natural instinct - and nodded sharply when one of them was severely injured and the two closest grabbed him, supporting him without hesitation.
No man left behind.
The corridors glowed a nightmarish green through the night-vision goggles, and the smell of old blood and industrial cleaning fluids crackled through the looming hallways.
Sheppard and his team moved fast, hard and fast, all defensive wedges and deadly points, ignoring the men and women huddled miserably in the cells they ran past.
Sheppard fought hard when they encountered resistance, ducking the swipe of a knife and violently slamming the guard’s wrist against the wall, and, feeling the bones snap and grind beneath the skin, Sheppard allowed the violent killing joy he kept so tightly under wraps to take over, grabbing the knife as it fell and twisting beneath the screaming guard’s arm, gripping his neck tightly from behind and slicing the knife through the jugular in one smooth motion, the spray of blood splattering up across his face.
Facing backward, he took a single moment to examine the rest of his team, engaged in similar struggles at the crossroad of corridors they had reached, satisfied as each was dispatching their enemies with brutal efficiency.
Then unyielding, ruthless momentum propelled him forward once more, and he dispatched three more guards, shattering collarbones with swift jabs, twisting a man’s neck, slamming another against a wall and crushing his larynx, his own hard breathing mingling with the man’s dying exhalation, eyes glittering behind the night-vision goggles.
All around him, violence reigned, professional and deadly, but animalistic still, with bodies left where they lay, blood pooling in slippery hazards with which, he noted with a detached irony, they would have to take care on the way out.
They dealt with the cell doors of the target the same way as they had with the one on the rooftop. Small, shaped charges were placed and within moments, there was no longer any barrier between them and their prey.
It was Sheppard himself, face splattered with blood, who strode forward through the smoking remains of the target’s cell door.
He shoved his night-vision goggles up onto his forehead, unclipped a flashlight from behind his back on his vest, and brought it up to shine on the man standing with his back against the furthest wall, hands pressing back into the surface as if it were holding him upright.
Come to think of it, it probably was.
As the light skittered across the room, it illuminated walls covered with flaky scrawlings the dark, rusty colour of old blood.
Sheppard’s eyebrows rose slightly as he took it all in, noted the complex equations, the swirling spirals and interlinked words and symbols, arrows pointing through squares and lines, creating a morbid spiderweb of images that stretched out across the entire cell.
Sheppard signalled Cadman, standing behind him fresh from demolishing the cell doors, and she flicked open a slim digital camera, swiftly taking pictures of the walls, the flashes causing the man in the cell to jerk, hands curling, head tilted down, glaring out at them, at the dark figures moving forward through the smoke.
Good. Sheppard thought. The man isn’t completely broken.
Swiftly, he assessed the damage that was obvious to the naked eye.
Dark, heavy bruising circled up around the ankles, wrists and neck, with purpling and yellow stripes across his torso that were indicative of older beatings. He couldn’t assess internal injuries without a more lengthy examination.
There were blackening circular burns at strategic points, far too perfect to be from to anything other than electrodes. Redness and blisters around the ears were suggestive of waterboarding that used boiling water. Judging from the awkward stance, genital torture was also likely possibility.
Sheppard’s lips twisted in disgust momentarily, and then he stepped forward, one hand stretched outward, carefully not pointing the flashlight straight at the man’s face.
The man’s eyes were wide and aware, glowering at him from under long lashes with the burning look of a wounded animal. He licked his lips, mouth working soundlessly for a moment before he spoke, and when he did his voice rasped painfully, as if it had never been used it for anything but screaming.
‘What … no, no, no. Who-who are...?’
Sheppard, always cold, always emotionless, careful to never connect to any people encountered on missions, felt the man’s eyes slice through him
like daggers, as if this tortured, half-insane man saw straight through the carefully constructed layers of his persona.
With the adrenaline and aggression of fighting only just subsiding and his paranoia in full swing from being on such a reckless mission, Sheppard felt simultaneously like shooting the man point blank and shoving him up against a wall.
Instead, Sheppard smiled easily, charmingly, and tilted his chin up arrogantly.
‘We,’ he gestured easily with one arm, ‘are here to rescue you, Special Agent Rodney McKay.’ He drawled the words, curling the fingers of his outstretched hand, as if to say come here, come to me.
Then he spoke the three simple words, code words, embedded with inalienable directives.
‘Trinity take wing.’
-
RodneyMcKayMcKayMcKayRod-Rod-neyRodneyMcKayRodney. Special Agent.
The names slunk through his mind like an indolent bolt of lightening.
Not a number, no, not at all, not anymore.
Rodney swallowed, nodded, and looked at the ground, the light from the flashlight a painful reminder of maddened wakeful hours.
Sleeper. Sleeper awaken. The old, ingrained impulse shot through his brain, and he replied with the three appropriate words.
‘Pegasus will soar.’
Warily, Rodney painfully lifted a hand to the man's outstretched one and felt the him take it, thoughtlessly caressing the bruises around Rodney's wrist with soft fingers.
He frowned, feeling the damaged skin pull, and chanced a glance upward. This man, he was all sharp edges, cold eyes and cruel smiles, and yet somehow he seemed more human, more real than anyone he had encountered since waking up in this place.
The man stared back at him, and his face flickered unreadably. Rodney, unable to stop, reached out with his other hand, as if through water, as if waking from a drowning dream, and felt the hard beating of the man’s heartbeat through his chest.
Real. True, living, breathing evidence that the world outside existed.
For a moment, neither moved.
Behind the man, the other dark figures stayed still, guns up and pointing down the hall, waiting patiently.
Then the strange, dark man, he grinned, teeth gleaming, and moved like a snake, roughly tightening his hold on Rodney’s wrist, sending starbursts of white hot pain shooting up his arm, and pulled him close, so close his teeth grazed Rodney's ear.
'We have a new mission for you Rodney McKay.' He hissed, lips distracting, grip harsh.
Then he led Rodney out of the cell, handed him off to the waiting team, and Rodney was so, so, so dizzy; the pain swallowing up any and all rational thoughts as he was rushed back through corridors, through wastelands of blood and bodies, and eventually, finally, his consciousness swirled and turned to black.
The last thing Rodney remembered of that night was gazing down upon a squat, sprawling structure and hearing the whump whump of his soul as he flew up, up and out of the land of living numbers and human beasts.
-
Sheppard, for his part, rode in the helicopter cargo bay across from the unconscious man, and didn’t take his eyes off McKay until he delivered him to the directed drop point.
-