"Iterations"
by Maisie (maisierita@comcast.net)
Pairing: Eh, none really.
Warning: R for language. Shep whumping.
Disclaimer: Not mine. :weep:
Acknowledgments: Thanks to sapphiresmuse for the beta, the title, and telling me it was okay to end it the way I did. :)
Summary: The first time they rescued him, they came with explosives and stunners and guns.

The first time they rescued him, they came with explosives and stunners and guns. They shot the two guards, blew up the door to his cell, and killed three more people on the way back to the Jumper. Stumbling with fatigue, John tripped over a bloody, contorted corpse, and everything went black as he hit the ground.

When he woke up, he was back in the dark, damp cell, chained to the wall again. He called out for McKay, for Teyla, for Ford, but when they didn't answer he figured they were dead. He hadn't had much hope of rescue -- it had been almost a week, after all -- but he lost the rest of it at that moment.
 

The second time they rescued him, they snuck into his cell in fake Rehan uniforms. John thought he was hallucinating. "I thought you were all dead," he said, but they just stared at him strangely and asked if he could walk.

"Really, Major," Rodney whispered as they ducked through the halls, "haven't you learned yet not to believe everything the evil mind-sucking aliens tell you?"

John tried to explain that the aliens hadn't told him anything; they hadn't ever said a word to him at all, but of course Rodney never really listened to him and wasn't about to start now, and Ford and Teyla were only concerned with getting back to the Jumper, which they did without meeting any more Rehan at all. But just when they were about to go through the wormhole, there was a blinding flash of light, after which everything went instantaneously and utterly black.

John woke up back in the cell again, still chained to the wall. He called again for McKay, Teyla and Ford, but this time when they didn't answer, he thought it was just barely possible they'd made it through the 'gate without him.
 

The third time, only McKay came. He snuck John out right under the guards' noses with a personal cloaking device, adapted, he said, from the stealth technology on the Jumpers.

But it was just a cloak, not a shield, and it didn't prevent them from tripping some sort of alarm and notifying the Rehan that their prize captive was escaping. A lucky shot hit Rodney in the back as they ran out of the building, and this time there was no doubt in John's mind whatsoever that McKay was dead. He fell to his knees next to the body and checked for a pulse anyway, just to be sure, but didn't know what to do next when he couldn't find one. He didn't even know where he was in relation to the 'gate, and he didn't have a weapon, and Rodney was dead, oh god, Rodney's dead.

It felt so wrong, so unacceptable, that when he woke up back in the black void of the cell, he was actually relieved, because maybe it hadn't really happened.
 

The fourth time, it was Teyla, and she was grim and silent, and told him yes, it had happened. Dr. McKay was dead; the Rehan had sent his body through the 'gate. She didn't speak at all after that, and wouldn't even look at John when he tried to tell her that Rodney had died bravely, a hero, but maybe that's because she could hear what he wasn't saying: What the hell were you thinking, sending Rodney by himself? Have you all gone completely crazy?

They made it outside, and Teyla looked around at the open courtyard with just a tinge of apprehension. She didn't have a cloak -- Rodney had had the only one, apparently -- but she had a lot of guns, and she gave John three: one for each hand, and an extra, plus multiple clips which John stored in the flak vest she gave him to put on over the remnants of his filthy, torn uniform.

When the Rehan showed up behind them, John shot and shot and shot at them, but more kept coming, from where John wasn't sure because up to that point he'd never seen more than three together at a time. Then Teyla went down with a gurgle beside him, and John went berserk, because Rodney was dead, and it wasn't right or fair that Teyla should die too. He used up all his ammunition in under a minute, and when one more Rehan came to subdue him, he attacked with his bare hands and bit deeply into the man's neck, right through the jugular.

When he woke up back in the cell, the taste of blood in his mouth, he threw up all over the floor. Since his hands were chained, he couldn't clean any of it up, so he just sat there and wept in a pool of his own vomit.
 

John was dreading the fifth rescue attempt, because it would be Ford, and Ford didn't have Rodney's brains or Teyla's cunning; all Ford had was enthusiasm and a healthy love for munitions, which wouldn't be enough.

But Ford blew up the door to the cell -- which John belatedly realized the Rehan must have replaced some time when he was unconscious, since Ford had blown it up during the first rescue attempt -- and then he blew up lots of other doors, too, plus he shot a lot of aliens, and they made it back to the Jumper okay.

But it turned out the Rehan loved munitions too, and they shot the Jumper right out of the sky. The pilot's console blew up in Markham's face and he slumped out of his chair, dead before his body hit the floor.

When John woke up back in the cell, alone again, he figured Ford must have died when the Jumper crashed, because the inertial dampeners in the back section had gone out when the Jumper had been hit. Of course, John couldn't remember the actual crash, but he knew it must have happened, because the controls had all been seriously fucked, and you couldn't actually fly a Jumper with just your mind, though he'd tried. But even though he remembered the Jumper hurtling towards the ground, and remembered Ford yelling behind him, he couldn't remember the impact.

Traumatic memory loss, he thought numbly, and that was okay with him, because he'd seen too many people die trying to rescue him, and it was just as well he couldn't remember seeing Ford die, too.
 

The sixth rescue attempt was the one that was really unsettling, because it was Rodney and Ford and Teyla again, and John was pretty sure they were all dead.

"What'd I tell you about listening to the evil mind-sucking aliens?" Rodney murmured as he cut through the chains again, but John was staring at him suspiciously because he'd seen him die; he'd checked his body for a pulse and there hadn't been any.

"Oh, spare me the vapid gawking, Major. We're not dead, but we will be if you don't get off the floor and start moving," Rodney said impatiently, and yeah, okay, that sounded like an alive Rodney, not a dead one, so even though he still was pretty suspicious, John went with them anyway.

They made it back to the Jumper without having to kill anyone, and made it through the 'gate, which John hadn't expected at all. Elizabeth gave him a big hug right there in the Jumper Bay, and even Bates gave him a smile. Then Carson took him to the infirmary and fussed over him for a while before admitting he was fine, just a little shell-shocked and malnourished. After that, Carson gave him a light sedative to help him relax, because John was too wired up from the rescue to sleep.

But it was just a huge fucking lie, John realized later, because he woke up right back in the fucking cell again, and the food on the floor was the leftovers from his last meal, and it hadn't even started to smell yet.
 

It was all in his head, he got that now, and it made him feel thick and stupid that he hadn't figured it out right away. But the delusions were so fucking realistic, even now that he knew they weren't real, he couldn't ever tell they were fake, not while they were happening, which meant every rescue could be real, and he only knew it wasn't when he woke up still chained to the wall.
 

Sometimes whole groups of Marines came for him, and sometimes it was his team, sometimes just a few people, and once it was even Elizabeth; sometimes the delusion lasted a few hours, and sometimes it lasted for days; sometimes they made it back to Atlantis, and sometimes everyone died before they got there, except it was never John who died. He did get shot a lot of times, but when he woke up, there were never any wounds.
 

He tried to figure out how much time was really passing, but the cell was always dark and the meals were always the same, and then he realized with a dull kind of horror that there was no guarantee his time in the cell wasn't a hallucination, too. He gave up after that, and just concentrated on enduring.
 

Once, long after he'd lost track of how many rescue attempts there had been, the team came for him and nobody got hurt except for Rodney, who twisted his ankle in the Jumper Bay and then bitched about it for days. Carson kept John in the infirmary overnight, but let him go in the morning, and John spent the next couple of weeks in and out of Kate Heightmeyer's office, trying to explain why he was acting so weird. "Perfectly reasonable," Kate said, "especially under the circumstances," and she took lots of notes.

But nobody really seemed to believe it was reasonable; they kept waiting for him to snap out of it, to stop jumping every time the lights went out, and though he did stop that eventually, he didn't tell them he still slept with the lights on.

After a month he was still flinching at shadows, though he hid it pretty well when other people were around, but he was also under constant, incredible stress because the delusions had never lasted this long before, and he was starting to freak out about it.

"Have we slept together?" he asked without preamble, bursting into Rodney's room late one night during the fifth week since the rescue. "Or was that one of the other times? I can't keep track any more."

Rodney looked at him warily. "No," he said cautiously, "we haven't slept together. We're both straight, Major."

"I know that," John said, falling backwards onto the bed. "But that didn't stop us last time. Except I guess that didn't really happen." He craned his head up a bit to peer at Rodney, ignoring the strain on his neck. "Did I sleep with Elizabeth or Teyla?"

Rodney blinked. "I have no idea. If you did, you didn't tell me about it."

"I thought I told you," John said wearily. "I'm sure I did. Except that probably never happened either." He jumped to his feet, waving his arm at everything and nothing. "See, that's the problem. I thought those things happened, but they didn't, so how am I supposed to know this is really happening? How am I supposed to know what's real?"

Rodney twisted his mouth in a not-quite frown. "Are you still going on about this? Because seriously, it's time to get over it. I know the Rehan screwed with your mind, but it was only three days, and you're home now. This is real, okay?"

"But you've said that before," John said, feeling utterly demented, "you've said it a hundred times and it's always lies!" He was screeching on the last word, but damn it, he was tired of the not-Rodneys and the not-Elizabeths and the not-Teylas, and he didn't have the first kind of clue what to do about it.

"Major-" Rodney said cautiously, up out of his chair and backing slowly toward the wall, "I think maybe you should calm down," but John was nowhere near calm, he was furious and confused and wild and just sick of it all, and he said so as he grabbed his knife out of his sheath.

Now it was Rodney's turn to screech, yelling into his headset that he needed some help here, and that Bates and Carson needed to get their asses down to his room ten minutes ago. "I'm not going to hurt you, Rodney," John said, "you're not real." Then he drew the knife across his own arm, deliberate and focused: one, two, three short, sharp slices. He watched the blood well up, thrusting it out for Rodney to see. "Is that real blood?" he asked fiercely. "Tell me how I'm supposed to know!" He gripped the knife tighter, but then Bates flew into the room and took the knife away in one swift motion, and by the time Carson got there, they'd pushed him down into the chair so Bates could keep an eye on him while Rodney carefully wrapped a bandage around the cuts.

"I don't know," Rodney said helplessly to Carson, "he just flipped out."

"We'll take care of you, Major," Carson said gently, and gave him some kind of shot. "You're just going to sleep for a little while now, okay? We'll straighten this all out in the morning."

"Will you still be here when I wake up?" John asked blurrily.

"Of course," Carson said. "Of course we'll be here."

But when John woke up, he was alone again in the pitch-black of the cell, and there weren't any cuts on his arm at all.

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