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Fic: Long Road Home (3/3)
And continuing on from Part Two ...
X. Siege
After Rodney left, Teyla drank some of the soup, took another antibiotic pill and then fell asleep on the couch. John went outside and did some maintenance on the shed, repairing holes in the roof and cleaning out an old wasp's nest under the eaves.
Restlessness haunted him this afternoon. He couldn't seem to stick to one task. He left the roof half-patched and started polishing the chrome on the bike; then, with that half-done, he went and located the partially carved chess queen that he'd thrown at Rodney the other night, and worked on it for a little while, but his heart wasn't in it.
Damn it, he'd been -- not happy, really, but content. And now he wasn't. He couldn't stop thinking about Teyla leaving, going north to look for her brother. And he wanted to know why he was so anxious about Rodney, too. Even the heat felt ominous this afternoon, like something waiting, hovering. John looked to the southeast, where the storm clouds usually rolled in, but the sky was clear.
He went into the house, expecting Teyla to be asleep. Instead, she was lying on the couch with her head propped up, looking at one of John's books -- he glimpsed pictures of F14s. As soon as he came in, she scrambled hastily upright. "I am sorry! I have not meant to be lazy; I must repay you for all your kindness. I could make dinner, if you would like."
John sat down on the end of the couch. "Teyla, I don't know how many times I have to say it. You don't owe me a damn thing. It's been a hell of a long time since I had anyone but myself to cook for. I like it, all right? Right now, you're sick and you need to rest. And you're welcome to stay here as long as you like." He grinned crookedly. "Yesterday Rodney and I did some calling around for your brother, and I found a guy who might know him. So you at least need to stay until he gets back to us."
Teyla stared at him, her eyes wide and bright. "I cannot repay this," she said in a soft, tiny voice.
"There's nothing to repay." He couldn't explain it, even to himself -- how helping her had filled a place in him that had been dead and empty for a very long time.
"It has just been so long since..." She swallowed, pressing her hand against her mouth, and murmured something in Spanish. When she got control of herself, she said, "My mother died when I was young. When I was teenage grown, my father and Charin, my beloved grandmother who is not really of my blood, were both shot by the rebels. Since then, I have always been the one to take care of others. I had forgotten what it is like, to have someone take care of me."
Her gratitude made him uncomfortable, fidgety. "Well, maybe one of these days you'll get a chance to take care of me, huh? That's how it works, right?"
She smiled in a way that looked dangerously close to tears, so he got up quickly and limped into the kitchen. "Still got some of the soup left."
"I would like that."
He brought her soup and another glass of water, and first-aid supplies so that she could change the bandages on her feet. It was growing dim in the living room as the sun lowered behind the western hills. The restlessness was still with him; he found himself pacing, his bad leg dragging on the floor.
The sound of car tires crunching on the gravel in the yard made him jump.
"Is that Rodney?" Teyla asked, looking up hopefully.
"Too big." John lifted the blinds on the front window to peer out into the yard. He recognized the vehicle, a battered old Landcruiser that belonged to his neighbor down the hill.
The whole time he'd lived out here, he'd never gotten a single visitor. Now they were coming fast and thick. John grabbed his jacket from the chair by the door, touched the pocket to be sure the Beretta was still there. "Stay in here," he told Teyla, and stepped out onto the porch.
The sun was low, slanting in his eyes. The Landcruiser idled as he approached, and old man Caldwell leaned out the window. Caldwell was retired military, same as John, but of a different and harder generation; they'd butted heads at first, but over the past few months had come to an uneasy sort of mutual respect, though not actual friendliness. Sheppard couldn't imagine that he'd drive over five miles of rutted road just to pay a social call.
"Howdy," Caldwell said, killing the engine.
John raised an eyebrow. "Howdy."
"Since you got no phone, just thought I'd come up and warn you. Some of the boys in town have been asking around about you."
"Which ones?" But he thought he knew.
"Steve, Bob, Michael. That bunch." Caldwell's mouth twisted.
"You know what they want?"
"No. Just that they were trying to find out who you were, where you lived."
John's stomach crawled. "Thanks," he said, and meant it. "Thanks for the warning." He was genuinely touched.
Caldwell shrugged and started the engine again. "Folks round here look out for each other," he said. "But there's still a bad element, like everywhere. Steve and his bunch, they're trouble. Mixed up in some pretty dirty stuff, smuggling and the like."
"Yeah. I've heard."
"It's not my business. But if you've done something to get on their bad side, I'd lay low for a few days. Go see friends in the city. Take a road trip."
"Thanks. I'll think about it."
Caldwell raised a hand in a wave, and revved the engine. Gears clunked as the Landcruiser started the slow descent into the valley. The last rays of the setting sun painted its dust cloud pink and red.
John stared after it for a moment before going back into the house. He found Teyla hovering just inside the door, holding a heavy iron skillet like a weapon, and was touched all over again. She said nothing, but her eyes asked the question.
"Neighbor," John explained. "Wanted to warn me that Coyote Steve and his bunch have been asking about me in town. Guess my little excursion with Rodney yesterday wasn't as low-key as we'd hoped."
"You mean when you obtained medicine for me." Her brow furrowed, and then she limped as quickly as possible into the kitchen and set down the skillet. Back in the living room, she scooped up the bag of tablets on the table.
"Hey, what are you doing?"
"I am leaving, John. Where is my dress? I will give your clothing back to you."
"Hey, hey!" John grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her to look at him. "You're going nowhere -- not without me, anyway."
"I have brought danger to you, John, and perhaps to Rodney too. This is exactly what I did not want to happen."
"Teyla --" Damn it, how did he explain? "You're my friend and if they want you, they're going to have to go through me to get to you. Is that plain enough for you?"
She stared at him in amazement. Then her lips firmed into a hard line -- the face of the woman who had stabbed a would-be rapist and survived for days, barefoot, in the desert. "You are mistaken, John Sheppard," she said quietly. "They will have to go through me to get to you."
That tugged on a part of him that hadn't been touched in a long time. "Let's hope it doesn't come to that. Old man Caldwell suggested that I just get out of Dodge for a few days until the heat dies down. Doesn't sound like a bad idea to me."
"Out of Dodge?" she echoed.
"Figure of speech. Means leave town. And that wouldn't be a bad idea in any case. We can take the bike, go up north, look for your brother. Think you're up to a trip like that?"
"Wherever you are going, I will go," she said firmly.
"Yeah, that's great, but don't let me push you too hard and make you sick again, okay?" He went into the kitchen, and began filling a sack with the perishable and portable foods -- bread, apples, Twinkies.
"We are leaving now? You said that the road is not safe at night."
"It's not, but I've done it before -- we'll just take it slow and careful. I'd wait until tomorrow, but I want to warn Rodney tonight. There's no way to know how much these creeps know about his involvement in this. Then we'll just clear out of town for a little while, and come back once they stop looking for you." Looking over his shoulder, he saw her standing stoop-shouldered and forlorn in the doorway. It was obvious that she felt guilty, and he could guess why. "Listen, I do this kind of thing all the time -- drop what I'm doing at a moment's notice and take off on the bike for a few days. It's how I live. It's not a big deal to me." With the ease of practice, he put together a quick roadside cooking kit -- skillet and saucepan, knife, salt, a few utensils. Mindful of having an extra person along, he took two cups and two forks and spoons, rather than one as usual.
"May I help?" Teyla asked, following him to the door.
"Not really. Like I said, I've done this a lot; I've got it down to a science." He opened the door and stepped out into the warm dusk, already running down a mental checklist. As he'd told Teyla, he had done this so many times that it was second nature by now -- although not usually under threat of impending redneck rampage. He'd need to go upstairs and get a change of clothes and a toothbrush ... and need to remember to unplug all the appliances except the freezer. It was possible that Steve and his buddies would break in and rob the place, but he didn't have anything valuable in it. He'd come into town with nothing but the contents of his Harley saddlebags, and he didn't mind leaving the same way.
It would suck to have to fix the house if Steve and company trashed it, though. He knew it wasn't running away, but it certainly felt like it. If he'd had no one but himself to worry about, he'd probably have stayed. But there was Teyla, and he was worried about Rodney in town.
As John stowed the food in the saddlebags, Teyla called softly, "John."
"What?" The urgency in her voice worried him. She was standing on the porch in a pool of lamplight, looking out towards the dark hills and the distant glow of lights that marked the town.
But there was a nearer light: a flicker in the darkness, appearing and disappearing as the hills concealed and revealed it.
Headlights.
"Damn it," John whispered. He'd had no idea they'd be so fast.
Near as he could tell, they were about two or three miles out. Even with the road slowing them down, he and Teyla had ten or fifteen minutes before they'd be here, tops.
He started for the house at the closest thing he could manage to a run -- a fast, awkward trot. Teyla jumped back to let him by. "Could it be Rodney, maybe?" she asked.
"Doubt it." After all his warnings about driving the road in the dark, he really didn't think that even a desperate Rodney would try it. And it was possible that it was old man Caldwell coming back for some reason, but he wasn't going to bet his life on it.
"Teyla, I have a pair of boots by the back door. My feet are a lot bigger than yours, but with the bandages and everything, you should be able to wear them if you put on an extra pair of socks." He climbed the stairs three at a time with his good leg -- screw the toothbrush, but there was a shotgun in the bedroom. Rodney seemed to have pegged him as some kind of gun nut, and he wished that it was actually the case. All he had was the Beretta and an old twelve-gauge Mossberg that he kept around for shooting rattlesnakes and, if necessary, home defense. In the bedroom, he also grabbed a spare jacket for Teyla; despite the heat of the day, it could get cold in the hills at night.
"Can you shoot a gun?" he called down from the top of the stairs.
"Yes," she said simply.
He decided it was probably better not to ask where she'd learned. "Here; you take this one." He didn't know how good a shot she was, so it was probably better to give her the shotgun. Hitting anything in the dark with the pistol would be a trick. "Pump action, six round magazine. Here's the box of shells. You know how to load it?"
"I have used something similar before."
"Good enough." He had a box of ammo for the Beretta in the bike's saddlebags and another half-box in his pocket. They weren't exactly loaded for a siege. Hopefully, they wouldn't have to deal with anything like that, though. He was expecting some pissed-off and possibly drunk good ol' boys looking for a fight; with any luck, a few shots would chase them off. Abandoning the house was probably overkill, but he didn't want to risk getting trapped, because it sure as hell wasn't designed to repel invaders. There were three different doors, all of them flimsy enough that Teyla, in her present condition, could probably have knocked them off their hinges.
He put "remodel house for defensibility" on his mental to-do list for when they got back.
It was almost totally dark in the yard now, as Sheppard closed and locked the door. The only light was a blood-red slash of fading sunset. He could hear the approaching truck's engine, rising and falling as it labored up and down the hills. It was definitely not Rodney's light car, but the deep throaty roar of a V-8.
"What is your plan?" Teyla asked quietly, following him to the Harley with the shotgun held at her side.
"There's an old cow pasture up that way, and an old road -- really more of a dirt track -- that goes to it. Plan A is just to take the bike up there and wait'll they leave." He straddled it, waited until Teyla climbed on behind, and then kick-started the engine. "If they start looking for us or look like they're settling in for a while, Plan B is to go around them and get on the road, heading for town. Once we do that, we're home free, because over that sort of terrain, we can go a lot faster on the bike than they'll be able to manage on anything with four wheels."
As long as they stayed on the bike, he was confident they'd be fine. On foot, though -- no way. Neither one of them could run. It was one reason why he didn't want to be caught in the house, because if it came to hand-to-hand combat or having to outrun an opponent, he and Teyla were both at a severe disadvantage: him with his leg and gimpy arm, her with her feet in tatters.
"Do you think they will leave?" she asked as he peeled out of the yard, the bike sliding around on the gravel before straightening out on the rough road to the upper pasture.
"I hope so." He had to concentrate on driving, then. He hadn't done a lot of offroading on the bike, and his stronger right arm was forced to do most of the work, fighting the ruts that tried to snatch control from him. He could feel the places where his left arm had been broken -- not severe pain, but little twinges pricking at him every time he tried to wrench the front of the bike around.
He could tell that he wasn't going to make the upper pasture before the truck pulled into the yard, so he turned around at the first set of leaning fence posts, standing forlornly in the dusk with a few lonely strands of rusty barbed wire swinging between them. He killed the bike's headlamp, and then its engine. Hot metal pinged quietly as, a couple hundred yards below them, a pair of headlights washed across the darkened house.
Teyla leaned against his back, warm in the cooling evening air. She said, very softly, "I hope that Rodney is all right."
"Yeah, me too." Up until a couple of days ago, he would have been confident that Rodney was too self-interested to get involved with someone else's problems. But that was before Rodney had walked up to a drug dealer's house to buy antibiotics for Teyla. Now he wasn't so sure.
The truck idled in the front yard of the house. John and Teyla watched as Steve's gang roved around the dark structure. John winced at the distant, splintering crash of a door being kicked in. His hand tightened on his Beretta. God, he wanted to be down there, defending his property from those jerks.
But the house was just wood and paint. He could feel Teyla pressed against his back -- her warmth and the slow rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. He listened to voices below, and the sound of shattering glass as a window was broken, and he kept his breathing slow and controlled, matching it to Teyla's breaths. Just a house, just wood and paint. What mattered was on the motorcycle behind him ... what mattered was in town, and safe, he hoped.
Teyla suddenly sat upright. "Dogs," she whispered.
John's stomach clenched, and he squinted at the play of shadow and light beneath them. From up here, it was difficult to make out anything that was happening around the house, but Teyla was right. He saw one of Steve's gang cross in front of the headlights with two dogs on leashes. Flashlights sparked to life in the darkness, casting about.
John's mouth had gone dry. He'd been thinking of these guys as rednecks, but Steve, and probably some of his buddies as well, were used to making money through the difficult and dangerous work of guiding illegals across the border. They were comfortable in the desert, and familiar with the area.
His estimation of Teyla went up another few notches. She'd managed to avoid these people while injured and barefoot in a strange country.
Teyla's voice hissed urgently in his ear. "John, they are coming towards us."
It was impossible to tell if they were following the motorcycle's tracks, or if the dogs had caught a scent, or if Steve and his buddies had just located the old road and decided to see if their quarry were hiding down it. John watched them searching the area around the outbuildings, and then start up the road towards the upper pasture -- and the fugitives.
His heart beat faster and his senses heightened, becoming hyper-aware of everything around him -- the sound of the wind in the rocks, the smell of the Harley's dissipating exhaust, the feeling of Teyla's hand on his waist. He shifted his weight and the pain in his leg shivered up his nerve endings with a silvery flash.
For years, this had been his life, this wary dance of hunter and hunted. Sometimes he'd been the predator, other times the prey, and always, as now, his only goal had been to get out alive and protect the people in his care.
He might be able to get past them with a frontal assault, simply charging down the trail and trusting that their sense of self-preservation would make them get out of his way, but he hated to try it. Impact with a human body could easily throw the motorcycle off its wheels, and once it was down, they'd be pretty well screwed. Also, getting so close to armed enemies was a dangerous and desperate thing to do. The other option was to try to go around them, but that wasn't good either -- off-roading in the dark, over unfamiliar terrain.
Of the two options, though, the one that kept the most distance between them and their pursuers was probably the best. John tucked the Beretta back in his pocket.
"I'm going to take the bike down the hill," he told Teyla softly. "Hang on, and don't drop the shotgun."
He kicked the Harley to life. The sharp beam of the headlight illuminated two very startled-looking men, both armed and one holding a dog's leash. John wrenched the handlebars and took off down the side of the hill. He heard gunshots, but he was counting on being a moving, hard-to-hit target. The bike slid around wildly, bouncing off rocks with a series of bone-jarring impacts.
"John!" Teyla cried urgently. The headlight's beam flashed off a double strand of barbed wire -- they were heading straight toward it.
"Sonovabitch!" The abandoned ranch was crisscrossed with old barbed-wire fencing, so much a part of his landscape that he hadn't even thought about it. John braked hard, sending the bike spinning on its suddenly stationary tires. No, shit, don't flip -- He got control, pointing back up the hill with his heart battering his ribs. Wiping out on these rocks could easily be fatal for both of them.
"That was effing stupid," John muttered. From above them, he could hear shouts and running feet. "There are pieces of fencing all over this place. In the darkness, we won't be able to avoid them. Shoulda gone with a frontal assault."
"Now what?" Teyla asked softly, her heart fluttering against his spine.
"I don't know. Hang on."
He opened up the throttle and cruised alongside the broken fence, gritting his teeth as they bounded over rocks and crashed through a stand of brush. He'd meant to cut straight down the hill to the road, but now he was going to come out too high. He just wasn't sure how high ...
Much too high, he found, coming out of the brush and slewing onto the lower part of the road that led to the upper cow pasture. The house, the truck and the majority of Steve's boys still lay between him and escape.
Rather than turning and heading for the house, Sheppard shot straight across the road and took the bike behind the outbuildings. There was absolutely no way to be stealthy; all he could do was keep himself a moving target and try to get around them, get on the road.
"Shall I shoot at them?" Teyla gasped as the bike slid around the end of the largest outbuilding, bringing them in full view. A bullet pinged off the corrugated metal side of the shed, just above their heads.
"No. Don't waste bullets. Moving, hard to aim." He didn't have attention or breath to spare for answering questions. Gunning the engine, he raced around the backside of the house.
He was going to have to run for it. Circling the back of the house, he gained speed on the flatter land. He was good at dodging obstacles, although usually the obstacles weren't shooting at him. If he had enough speed, they'd be through in a few seconds and on the open road.
He came around the house and gave it all he had, running for the road. As he'd hoped, the men between him and freedom scattered when the Harley bore down on them. The truck was a large dark shape in his peripheral vision, pointed away from him -- what he didn't expect was for the driver to throw it in reverse and careen towards him. He threw all that he had into taking the bike in a sudden sharp turn, but the edge of the truck clipped him and suddenly he was airborne.
Fuck.
He lost Teyla, lost the bike, hit the ground with an impact like a blow from a sledgehammer and skidded several yards with his shoulders and arms taking most of the brunt. Thank God he'd been wearing a jacket. When he stopped moving, it took him a second or two to recover from the shock and pain. Then he rolled over quickly and found himself looking up the barrel of a shotgun, at the leering face of one of Steve's friends.
"I got the woman," another voice called. Pushing his head up, John saw Teyla half-sitting in the glare of the truck's headlights, with a shotgun in her face.
Typically, now that it was too late, his brain gave him a whole bunch of different scenarios that he should have tried: hide Teyla in the hills, and make a run at Steve's gang to lead them away; spend the time barricading the house rather than hiding, and try to hold them off; stay hidden rather than running or fighting, and pick them off from cover.
Hindsight was 20-20.
He tried to sit up; the shotgun shoved him back down. His forearms, chest and legs were stinging; he'd be picking out gravel for days. As far as he could tell without checking himself over, though, he hadn't been seriously hurt in the crash. He hoped Teyla hadn't.
Steve sauntered over to Teyla, toying with a snub-nosed little automatic pistol. He was moving a bit stiffly, and John hoped that when she'd stabbed him, she'd gotten him somewhere painful. "Hi, bitch," he said, and when she didn't answer, he switched to Spanish, rattling off something that John didn't understand. Teyla obviously didn't like it, though, because she stiffened and spit at him.
"You leave her the hell alone," John growled.
"I don't think you're calling the shots here, buddy." Steve approached him with a lanky, confident stride, and knelt on the gravel to thrust his gun into John's face. "We heard about you in town. Just a cripple living out by himself in the hills. Guess you thought you'd pick up some free Tex-Mex tail, huh?"
For once, John didn't have a smart-mouthed answer to that. He was staring, almost cross-eyed, at the gun.
It was Rodney's gun. He remembered it -- remembered showing Rodney how to correctly wear his holster when they'd first met. And while it was certainly possible that Steve might own a Heckler & Koch P2000, it wasn't the kind of gun that you normally saw in the hands of a guy like Steve, in a town like this one. Guys like Steve preferred more ostentatious firepower, the kind that barely fit in a holster and couldn't be concealed under a jacket. Quantity over quality.
"Where did you get that gun?" John demanded. He barely recognized his own voice.
Steve looked down at it as if he'd forgotten he was holding it. "Nice, ain't it? Little bit small, but powerful. Say one thing for the government -- they give their boys good guns."
"Where did you get it?"
Steve grinned, revealing his crooked teeth. "You know where I got it. That cop put up more of a fight than I expected, from all I'd heard about him. Tried to protect you two. I gave him a chance to walk away, you know that? All he had to do was abandon the two of you. And he wouldn't do it. Crazy."
John's fingers curled into fists in the dirt. And then he moved, with all the speed of a lifetime's training in how to kill people.
He grabbed the shotgun with one hand and the H&K with the other, wrenching both away from his head. He'd been goddamn special ops; he'd fought, and won, against men who'd spent their entire lives on the battlefield; why was he rolling over and letting a bunch of hill-country yahoos push him around? The H&K discharged harmlessly into the ground, and the other guy was so startled that he let go of the shotgun, which John swung around and clubbed into Steve's temple. Steve's fingers went limp on the H&K and John tore it from his hand.
The guy holding the gun on Teyla bellowed, "Don't move or I'll k--" But that was as far as he got before Sheppard shot him with the H&K. It was a nice gun, a little different than his Beretta, but not so different that the many hours he'd spent target practicing on beer cans and sagebrush, keeping his shooting reflexes sharp, hadn't paid off. The guy went down with a groan, clutching his gut, and John snapped off two quick shots at the other two that he could see with guns -- one he got in the arm, and the other lost a few fingers. He wasn't trying to make kill shots, but he didn't mind hurting them a lot.
The one who'd been holding the shotgun on John made a lunge for the weapon lying in the dirt. John tripped him with his good leg and then hit him in the throat. Hearing a scuffling sound, he saw out of the corner of his eye that Teyla had capably disabled another of their assailants.
"Son of a bitch!" Steve's weight knocked him down, but John was in his element now. He was starting to understand how to work within the limitations of his body, just as he'd done before when he was fighting while wounded -- and he'd done that a lot. Steve was obviously a brawler and knew nothing about the finer points of hand-to-hand combat. John dislocated his kneecap with a kick -- Steve screamed -- and overpowered him in seconds, twisting the bigger man's arm behind his back. He didn't stop at the point of resistance, but went ahead and dislocated it with a violent jerk. From the hideous meaty sound that it made, and Steve's hoarse scream, he'd probably torn some ligaments and the rotator cuff as well. It'd be a miracle if Steve ever used that arm again.
John rolled the coyote onto his back and pressed the H&K to his throat.
"You thought I was a cripple, right? You thought I'd be an easy target." John dug the muzzle of the gun into the flesh under Steve's chin. "I'm fucking special ops, you dumb redneck. I know a dozen ways to kill you with a spoon. I've taken out entire battalions of Taliban by myself." He was exaggerating shamelessly, but he could see from the terror in Steve's eyes that Steve was buying it. "Now we're even, right? You got one arm and one leg, the same as me. How're you doing?"
Steve made a tiny whimpering sound.
John glanced over at Teyla. She was holding a shotgun on the others. Nice going, he thought.
Swallowing against the pressure of the gun in his throat, Steve groaned, "If you let me go, I'll tell you where to find the fed."
John bore down on Steve's chest with his knee. "Thought you killed him."
"No -- no, he's alive, but he'll be dead soon, if you don't do something." Steve's eyes glittered. "Let me up, and I'll tell you."
John swore in a combination of disbelief and weak-kneed relief. "You're trying to make deals with me? You've got a gun in your neck and you're making deals?" He bit down hard on the moral part of him, the part that had once swore I will never do this again, and he ground his knee into Steve's gut, where Teyla had stabbed him. Steve screamed again. "Now you tell me where to find him, and he'd better goddamn be alive."
"Road -- off your road -- there's an abandoned road, used to be a ranch out there, years ago. Dumped him in a ditch by the road, buried him alive."
"Where?" John demanded, jamming the gun against Steve's adams' apple.
He choked. "Told you -- off your road, this side of the Caldwell place. About four miles down."
"He's alive?"
"For now," Steve gasped. "Didn't hurt him that bad."
John held the gun against Steve's chin for a moment longer, then sat back on his heels. His bad leg was crimped up under him, and he was afraid if he tried to stand up, he'd fall over.
"The first thing I'm gonna do the next time I'm in town is buy myself some heavy ordnance. You've seen what I can do when I'm unarmed, you'll love what I can do with a couple of assault rifles. You and your buddies ever come back here, you won't get within a couple hundred yards of the house. I'll pick you off with a rifle and scope. Blow your brains out before you know what hit you. Got it?"
Steve nodded wildly, scrambling backwards in the dirt with one leg dragging and one arm curled against his chest.
"If you're lying, and McKay's dead, I won't bother with the police. I'll just hunt you down and kill you myself. You got that?" When Steve didn't answer immediately, John fired in the ground at his feet.
"Yes! Yeah, I got it! You're crazy, you know that?"
"I've heard," John said, and he told Teyla, "Let them go."
Teyla stepped back, still holding the shotgun on them. John had never seen a bunch of guys get into a pickup truck that fast. One of Steve's buddies got an arm around him and hauled him into the back of the truck as it was already starting to move. They tore out of the driveway, leaving darkness in their wake.
"You let them go?" Teyla asked.
"I don't want to explain a bunch of bodies in the yard, do you? If we're lucky, the idiots will wipe out on an arroyo somewhere between here and town, at the speed they're going."
John limped over to the motorcycle and turned it upright. As far as he could tell, it hadn't been badly damaged in the crash. There was some superficial paint damage and denting; he'd have to spend some quality time on bodywork, later, but he liked that sort of thing.
"You hear what Steve said about Rodney?" he asked, straddling the bike.
"Yes." Teyla climbed on behind.
John had been serious when he'd told McKay that he didn't think the road was safe in the dark. He eased down a series of switchbacks, where steep ravines waited for the unwary, and navigated around car-swallowing potholes.
"Look," Teyla said softly, pointing. The motorcycle's headlight picked out a gleam of metal, off the road. John turned and steered that way. There was an old road here; he'd never really noticed it. He brought the bike to a halt beside Rodney's Lexus. Its front end was crumpled and the driver's door stood ajar.
"Damn it." There was a flashlight in the bike's saddlebag. With the Beretta in his other hand, John played the flashlight over the car. There was no blood on the seat or bullet holes in the windows.
Teyla limped after him, studying the ground. "As a child, I was quite good at following tracks," she said.
The sand showed up tracks well. Even John could see that some scuffling had taken place here. Teyla pointed silently away from the road, and John went that way, shining the light in front of them so that she could see the ground.
Teyla tracked in silence, except for an occasional instruction: "Left" or "Not that way." She paused for a moment where the rocks were splattered with a few drops of blood; John's teeth were clenched so hard that his jaw ached. In the ditch beside the road, Teyla stopped, and knelt, and began to dig with her bare hands.
John joined her, dragging away rocks with increasing urgency. His fingertips brushed the material of Rodney's pants leg, and the leg flinched away from him.
"He's still alive," John breathed.
"I am sure they intended to let nature kill him without doing the work themselves." Teyla's voice was grim. "It was done that way sometimes in my country too, or merely as a way to make an accused man confess."
Rodney was bloody and battered and nearly catatonic, but very much alive. They dragged him out of the hole in the rocks -- John on one side, Teyla on the other. He was shivering violently, and he fisted one bloody hand in John's shirt and the other in Teyla's sleeve. "Alive," he said, his voice breaking. "You're alive." Then he slumped on Teyla, and she staggered with a gasp as she took his full weight on her injured feet.
Taking Rodney's weight from her, John's teeth clenched again when he felt the wetness against his shoulder and realized that Rodney's hair was soaked with blood. "Hospital," he said. "But I don't know how the hell I can keep him on the motorcycle --"
"Rodney's car," Teyla said immediately.
Between the two of them, they manhandled him back to the car. Teyla slid in and John handed him in to her. The keys were still in the ignition, thankfully -- although he could remember how to hotwire a car, he was glad he didn't have to -- and the engine started on the third try. It ran with an unpleasant rattling sound, but it did run.
John looked over his shoulder into the backseat, where Teyla had Rodney's head in her lap and was picking gravel out of the scrapes on his face. "You could maybe take the motorcycle back --"
She shook her head and said in a tone that brooked no argument, "I will come with you."
It was a long drive in the dark. At some point Rodney woke up, and John heard Teyla trying to reassure him in the backseat. The sound of the soft voices made something uncoil inside him, tension easing out of him as he drove.
He parked next to the hospital's emergency room entrance. Rodney was wide awake now, and snappy with Teyla's attempts to help him out of the car. "Should I be moving? Shouldn't I get a gurney or something? I'm bleeding. Did I tell you they hit me with a rock?"
The emergency room was nearly deserted. They handed off Rodney to a nurse. "Do you need to see someone too?" she asked John.
He started to say no, but then the weight of everything crashed down on him, and he realized that there wasn't a single part of his body that didn't hurt, between bruises and strained muscles and the throbbing in his leg. "Yeah, probably a good idea."
Teyla began to follow, anxiously, as he started to walk away. Raising a hand to the nurse, John took a couple of steps back to her. "You'll be all right," he told her.
"But what if ..." She looked around nervously, and he realized it was the first time she'd been out in public since crossing the border. "What if they ask me who I am, where I came from?" she asked in a whisper. "What if they learn I do not belong here?"
"You do," John said simply. "You have every right to be here. You're just waiting for some friends. No one is going to make you show papers to do that." He squeezed her shoulder. "I'll be back soon, and so will Rodney."
He tried not to think about how forlorn she looked as he limped off.
Teyla tried to find a comfortable way of sitting on the hard plastic chair. Eventually she moved to a softer chair near the wall. For a while, she watched the people come and go with her heart in her mouth, but John was right: no one asked for her papers, and no one asked what she was doing there. She even saw patients come in who were dark-skinned and foreign, like her. She began to relax.
There was a pile of magazines by the chair. A couple of them were even in Spanish, and she noticed that the various health brochures on the table with the magazines were written in both English and Spanish. This struck her as a good opportunity to improve her English, so she took them and spread them out in her lap. She was reading about male cancers when John came back, slump-shouldered and weary, with a bandage on his face.
"Will you be well?" she asked him. He shrugged and nodded, and sank down into the chair next to hers. He raised an eyebrow at the reading material in her lap.
"Light reading?"
"I am learning English," Teyla said primly. She looked up to the door that John had come through. "How is Rodney?"
"Dunno. We weren't in the same room, although I could hear him complaining from all the way down the hall, so I assume he's going to be all right."
Teyla smiled at that. Still, they both watched the door until Rodney came through it, pale and bruised and arguing with an exasperated physician's assistant about how his hypoglycemia was not, in fact, all in his head, and he was going to pass out if they didn't feed him -- already done it once tonight -- and was this all the painkillers he got? Hadn't they seen his head? Didn't they need to keep him overnight for observation?
The woman closed the door and abandoned him in the waiting room. Rodney turned around and froze when he saw them waiting for him. It was very obvious that he hadn't expected them to still be there. Teyla wondered if he knew how clearly his face displayed his emotions -- surprise and hope and suspicion and relief and fear all chased each other across his expressive features.
They both got up without saying anything, and gathered him up and took him home.
XI. Home
Rodney woke up when his painkillers wore off. He hurt from his eyeballs down to the tips of his toes, and his brain felt like it was full of cotton wool.
He started to move, said "Ouch" and stayed with his face buried in a totally unfamiliar pillow. Then he started wondering where he was, because a lot of the previous night was a blur. He braced himself for the pain and raised his head, and very nearly panicked when he realized that he was lying in a strange bed. Then panic turned to full-blown terror when the lump under the blankets next to him rolled over and turned out to be -- Teyla?
He sat bolt upright, then moaned and clutched at his head. Looking around the room, he finally figured out where he was. He and Teyla were both in John's bed. And he was still fully clothed, aside from someone having removed his shoes. His clothes were gritty and crusted with dried blood and felt like they were sticking to him.
After finding his shoes and the painkillers the hospital had given him, he shuffled into the bathroom, took a few pills and splashed water in his face. It didn't help. He still looked liked hell and felt worse. Every time he closed his eyes, he could feel the rocks falling on his head. Buried alive. His worst nightmare.
"No good deed goes unpunished, huh?" he told his reflection in the mirror.
He shuffled out of the bathroom. Teyla had rolled over again, and her hair was spread out in a shimmering copper cloud over her pillow. He looked down at her for a minute, and hurt in a different kind of way. Then he slipped on his shoes, and slipped out the door.
The stairs were squeaky, so he tiptoed down. Sheppard, predictably, was asleep on the couch, a huddled ball in a rolled-up army blanket with just a few tufts of hair sticking out the top. Rodney stopped in the kitchen for a bagel because, hey, he'd earned it. He closed the front door softly behind him.
His car was parked in the front yard; the keys lay on the dash. He winced at the damage to the front end, but it started after a few tries and it stayed running, so he pulled away without looking back.
He told himself that it wasn't cowardly, leaving like this. It was just easier. He had a job waiting for him in DC, and it was time to stop hanging around in a one-horse town and get on with his life. Last night had been -- crazy, and scary, and he was through living that way.
It was a long, slow drive back to the motel, and his bruises made him aware of every bump in the road. After all that had happened the previous day, it was a little disconcerting when he pulled in sight of the Atlantic Motel, with its same weedy parking lot and malfunctioning neon sign. He did get a shock when he shoved on his motel room door and it swung easily open; he fumbled wildly for his sidearm before remembering a) Steve's gang had kicked the door in, and b) he didn't have his sidearm anymore. Yet another thing he'd get written up for, maybe even lose his job. But the CIA wouldn't care about that. All they wanted was his brains.
A folded piece of paper had been shoved under the door. He picked it up carefully and laughed, in an unhappy sort of way, when he read what was written on it. Well, no way was he going back out to John's place to deliver the message. They'd find out eventually anyway.
He took the time to shower -- carefully and painfully -- and to shave and change clothes, which was, in retrospect, possibly a mistake. He hadn't figured on John's bird-dog-like persistence. He was just shoving the last of his belongings in the trunk of the Lexus when the truck rattled and shuddered into the parking lot of the motel.
Crap, Rodney thought. Busted. He slammed the trunk lid and then looked up as John slid stiffly out of the truck and limped over to him. Teyla, in the passenger's seat, waved to him. He didn't wave back.
They just stood there for a minute, awkwardly. This was why he hated this sort of scene. Finally Sheppard said, "Oh!" and reached in his pocket. He handed Rodney a gun.
"Hey ... this is mine."
"Yeah. Took it off Steve last night." Sheppard lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug. "Guess you were right, by the way."
"About what?" he asked warily.
"Guess there was no point in you buying a truck, after all." A ghost of a grin tugged at Sheppard's mouth, but slid away when Rodney didn't smile back.
"Look, Sheppard," Rodney said quickly. "I don't do goodbyes, okay? Not good at them. And don't say you'll write because you won't." Before Sheppard could say anything, Rodney fumbled in his pocket and shoved the folded paper at him. "Since you're here, the motel office took a call for you. Teyla's brother? Remember him? I guess he got your message after all. He and his wife are hitching down from Abilene in the next few days."
The ghost of a smile was back. "Needle in a haystack, huh?"
Rodney shrugged a little.
"So where are you going, anyway?"
"DC. CIA sent me a letter, offered me a job making a hell of a lot of money to work in an air-conditioned lab with other smart people. I'd be a fool not to take them up on it."
"Making WMDs?" Sheppard asked quietly.
"Or whatever they want me to make. They sign the paychecks; they call the shots."
"Rodney, you hate working for them. You're here because you hate working for them."
Rodney hadn't ever told him that, and he hated people making assumptions about him, even if the assumptions were true. "Yeah, well, maybe I came to my senses and realized that there are worse things, okay? Like almost dying in a godforsaken sun-blasted wasteland."
Sheppard fidgeted, and looked down at his feet. "I'm sorry you got hurt. That's my fault, really --"
Oh hell, this was going about as well as he'd expected. "No it's not," he snapped. "It's just -- look -- I need to get out, okay? I can't stay here."
Sheppard raised his eyes in a way that was strangely diffident. "If you just need a place to go, you're welcome to stay with me and Teyla, for as long as you want. Don't jump into a job you hate; just stay with us and think about it before you decide. I'm sure the CIA will still want you in six months or a year if you change your mind."
It made him angry, how much he wanted to do exactly that. "We can't all turn our backs on the world," he said harshly.
"Yeah, well ..." Sheppard looked over his shoulder, at Teyla in the truck, and then back at Rodney. "Looks to me like none of us can."
Rodney's mouth twisted. "You can't keep taking in strays; you'll run out of room."
"I have a hundred and sixty acres, McKay; there's plenty of room."
He wanted to. God, he wanted to. And that was why he couldn't. Because it was time to be a grown-up, be responsible, stop playing around. "If you'll excuse me, I have a job to get to."
He got in the Lexus, slammed the door, started it up, and then realized that Sheppard was standing by the window. Reluctantly, he rolled it down. "I already said no."
"I know you did." Sheppard leaned on the edge of the window, and shoved a piece of paper at him. "Just wanted to give you my P.O. box number. Drop a line when you land somewhere, okay? Maybe I'll take the bike up and visit sometime."
Rodney couldn't help a snort of disbelief. "All the way to DC?"
"I drove the other way, didn't I? For a lot less." Sheppard stepped back quickly, and raised his hand in a wave, effectively ending the conversation.
Bastard just had to have the last word. Rodney wouldn't have let him get away with it, except that his throat was inexplicably refusing to cooperate. Instead, he put the car in gear and pulled out onto the highway.
The drive back to John's place was a very quiet one.
At one point, Teyla said, "He will not be happy, working for your government, will he?"
"No," John said, and added, "He's an adult, though. Can't keep him from doing what he wants to do."
"That is true." And they were silent for the rest of the drive.
The sunlight seemed oppressive, the house disturbingly quiet. It was already late afternoon. John tinkered with the truck a little bit, seeing if he could fix its idling problems, while Teyla sat on the porch and practiced carving on a bit of wood. She seemed less excited about seeing her brother again than John had expected -- happy, yes, but the subdued and sad tone of the day weighed her down.
"Shall I make dinner?" Teyla asked as dusk crept across the hills.
"Only if it doesn't cause you to relapse," John said from under the truck. "American men are perfectly capable of cooking, believe me."
"I know that, but I would like to --" She trailed off, and then scrambled up. Her voice was startled and thrilled. "Is that Rodney's car?"
John slid out from under the truck. "Guess so." He'd been aware of the approaching dust cloud for some time now, but he really hadn't wanted to get her hopes up ... or worry her. There were a lot of things that could make a dust cloud other than a silver Lexus, and he'd figured that it would take Rodney a little more time to change his m ind.
"Then I really must start dinner," Teyla said, and despite her injured feet, she practically raced off into the house.
John went ahead and put away his tools, waiting for the silver Lexus with the crumpled nose to pull into the yard.
"Flat tire," Rodney said immediately, as soon as he stepped out of the car and before anyone had a chance to ask.
John had managed to contain his grin, but it still showed in his eyes and voice, as he took an assessing look at Rodney's tires. "They all look round to me."
"Well, I changed it, obviously, genius. But considering that I only made it about five minutes out of town before getting a flat, I realized that the roads are clearly too bad to be driving anywhere this late in the evening."
The road to John's house was a whole lot worse than the road out of town, but contrary to belief, he really could contain his smart mouth sometimes. "Teyla's making dinner."
"Great! I'm starving." Grabbing a bag from the passenger's seat of the car, he started towards the house. Then he stopped. Looked back. The uncertainty was showing through the cracks. "Uh ... are you sure this is okay?"
"For God's sake, Rodney, of course it's okay. It's my house and I told you, you can stay here as long as you want."
Irritation flashed. "I didn't say I was going to stay."
"I know you didn't."
As they walked towards the house in the gathering dusk, Rodney said thoughtfully, "You know what this place needs? Other than a Starbucks, obviously. And air conditioning, and a stove that works."
John held the screen door for him; yellow light spilled out, striping the rocks. "No, Rodney, tell me: what else does it need?"
"You should get a cat. No, really, you should. They practically take care of themselves. I know this guy who has some kittens --"
The screen door slammed behind them, cutting off John's laughter in the warm Texas night.
~fin~
My only excuse for this story is that I'd been reading a magazine article about undocumented workers and the problems that they face, and this gave me an unshakeable mental image of Teyla trying to sneak across the Mexican border and Sheppard as this reclusive ex-military guy who hides her. Then I had to figure out how to work Rodney into the whole thing and ... it was pretty much all downhill from there.
The whole story is also available on one page at fanfiction.net. There are some other, related snippets available if you click on the "texas au" tag on this entry.
X. Siege
After Rodney left, Teyla drank some of the soup, took another antibiotic pill and then fell asleep on the couch. John went outside and did some maintenance on the shed, repairing holes in the roof and cleaning out an old wasp's nest under the eaves.
Restlessness haunted him this afternoon. He couldn't seem to stick to one task. He left the roof half-patched and started polishing the chrome on the bike; then, with that half-done, he went and located the partially carved chess queen that he'd thrown at Rodney the other night, and worked on it for a little while, but his heart wasn't in it.
Damn it, he'd been -- not happy, really, but content. And now he wasn't. He couldn't stop thinking about Teyla leaving, going north to look for her brother. And he wanted to know why he was so anxious about Rodney, too. Even the heat felt ominous this afternoon, like something waiting, hovering. John looked to the southeast, where the storm clouds usually rolled in, but the sky was clear.
He went into the house, expecting Teyla to be asleep. Instead, she was lying on the couch with her head propped up, looking at one of John's books -- he glimpsed pictures of F14s. As soon as he came in, she scrambled hastily upright. "I am sorry! I have not meant to be lazy; I must repay you for all your kindness. I could make dinner, if you would like."
John sat down on the end of the couch. "Teyla, I don't know how many times I have to say it. You don't owe me a damn thing. It's been a hell of a long time since I had anyone but myself to cook for. I like it, all right? Right now, you're sick and you need to rest. And you're welcome to stay here as long as you like." He grinned crookedly. "Yesterday Rodney and I did some calling around for your brother, and I found a guy who might know him. So you at least need to stay until he gets back to us."
Teyla stared at him, her eyes wide and bright. "I cannot repay this," she said in a soft, tiny voice.
"There's nothing to repay." He couldn't explain it, even to himself -- how helping her had filled a place in him that had been dead and empty for a very long time.
"It has just been so long since..." She swallowed, pressing her hand against her mouth, and murmured something in Spanish. When she got control of herself, she said, "My mother died when I was young. When I was teenage grown, my father and Charin, my beloved grandmother who is not really of my blood, were both shot by the rebels. Since then, I have always been the one to take care of others. I had forgotten what it is like, to have someone take care of me."
Her gratitude made him uncomfortable, fidgety. "Well, maybe one of these days you'll get a chance to take care of me, huh? That's how it works, right?"
She smiled in a way that looked dangerously close to tears, so he got up quickly and limped into the kitchen. "Still got some of the soup left."
"I would like that."
He brought her soup and another glass of water, and first-aid supplies so that she could change the bandages on her feet. It was growing dim in the living room as the sun lowered behind the western hills. The restlessness was still with him; he found himself pacing, his bad leg dragging on the floor.
The sound of car tires crunching on the gravel in the yard made him jump.
"Is that Rodney?" Teyla asked, looking up hopefully.
"Too big." John lifted the blinds on the front window to peer out into the yard. He recognized the vehicle, a battered old Landcruiser that belonged to his neighbor down the hill.
The whole time he'd lived out here, he'd never gotten a single visitor. Now they were coming fast and thick. John grabbed his jacket from the chair by the door, touched the pocket to be sure the Beretta was still there. "Stay in here," he told Teyla, and stepped out onto the porch.
The sun was low, slanting in his eyes. The Landcruiser idled as he approached, and old man Caldwell leaned out the window. Caldwell was retired military, same as John, but of a different and harder generation; they'd butted heads at first, but over the past few months had come to an uneasy sort of mutual respect, though not actual friendliness. Sheppard couldn't imagine that he'd drive over five miles of rutted road just to pay a social call.
"Howdy," Caldwell said, killing the engine.
John raised an eyebrow. "Howdy."
"Since you got no phone, just thought I'd come up and warn you. Some of the boys in town have been asking around about you."
"Which ones?" But he thought he knew.
"Steve, Bob, Michael. That bunch." Caldwell's mouth twisted.
"You know what they want?"
"No. Just that they were trying to find out who you were, where you lived."
John's stomach crawled. "Thanks," he said, and meant it. "Thanks for the warning." He was genuinely touched.
Caldwell shrugged and started the engine again. "Folks round here look out for each other," he said. "But there's still a bad element, like everywhere. Steve and his bunch, they're trouble. Mixed up in some pretty dirty stuff, smuggling and the like."
"Yeah. I've heard."
"It's not my business. But if you've done something to get on their bad side, I'd lay low for a few days. Go see friends in the city. Take a road trip."
"Thanks. I'll think about it."
Caldwell raised a hand in a wave, and revved the engine. Gears clunked as the Landcruiser started the slow descent into the valley. The last rays of the setting sun painted its dust cloud pink and red.
John stared after it for a moment before going back into the house. He found Teyla hovering just inside the door, holding a heavy iron skillet like a weapon, and was touched all over again. She said nothing, but her eyes asked the question.
"Neighbor," John explained. "Wanted to warn me that Coyote Steve and his bunch have been asking about me in town. Guess my little excursion with Rodney yesterday wasn't as low-key as we'd hoped."
"You mean when you obtained medicine for me." Her brow furrowed, and then she limped as quickly as possible into the kitchen and set down the skillet. Back in the living room, she scooped up the bag of tablets on the table.
"Hey, what are you doing?"
"I am leaving, John. Where is my dress? I will give your clothing back to you."
"Hey, hey!" John grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her to look at him. "You're going nowhere -- not without me, anyway."
"I have brought danger to you, John, and perhaps to Rodney too. This is exactly what I did not want to happen."
"Teyla --" Damn it, how did he explain? "You're my friend and if they want you, they're going to have to go through me to get to you. Is that plain enough for you?"
She stared at him in amazement. Then her lips firmed into a hard line -- the face of the woman who had stabbed a would-be rapist and survived for days, barefoot, in the desert. "You are mistaken, John Sheppard," she said quietly. "They will have to go through me to get to you."
That tugged on a part of him that hadn't been touched in a long time. "Let's hope it doesn't come to that. Old man Caldwell suggested that I just get out of Dodge for a few days until the heat dies down. Doesn't sound like a bad idea to me."
"Out of Dodge?" she echoed.
"Figure of speech. Means leave town. And that wouldn't be a bad idea in any case. We can take the bike, go up north, look for your brother. Think you're up to a trip like that?"
"Wherever you are going, I will go," she said firmly.
"Yeah, that's great, but don't let me push you too hard and make you sick again, okay?" He went into the kitchen, and began filling a sack with the perishable and portable foods -- bread, apples, Twinkies.
"We are leaving now? You said that the road is not safe at night."
"It's not, but I've done it before -- we'll just take it slow and careful. I'd wait until tomorrow, but I want to warn Rodney tonight. There's no way to know how much these creeps know about his involvement in this. Then we'll just clear out of town for a little while, and come back once they stop looking for you." Looking over his shoulder, he saw her standing stoop-shouldered and forlorn in the doorway. It was obvious that she felt guilty, and he could guess why. "Listen, I do this kind of thing all the time -- drop what I'm doing at a moment's notice and take off on the bike for a few days. It's how I live. It's not a big deal to me." With the ease of practice, he put together a quick roadside cooking kit -- skillet and saucepan, knife, salt, a few utensils. Mindful of having an extra person along, he took two cups and two forks and spoons, rather than one as usual.
"May I help?" Teyla asked, following him to the door.
"Not really. Like I said, I've done this a lot; I've got it down to a science." He opened the door and stepped out into the warm dusk, already running down a mental checklist. As he'd told Teyla, he had done this so many times that it was second nature by now -- although not usually under threat of impending redneck rampage. He'd need to go upstairs and get a change of clothes and a toothbrush ... and need to remember to unplug all the appliances except the freezer. It was possible that Steve and his buddies would break in and rob the place, but he didn't have anything valuable in it. He'd come into town with nothing but the contents of his Harley saddlebags, and he didn't mind leaving the same way.
It would suck to have to fix the house if Steve and company trashed it, though. He knew it wasn't running away, but it certainly felt like it. If he'd had no one but himself to worry about, he'd probably have stayed. But there was Teyla, and he was worried about Rodney in town.
As John stowed the food in the saddlebags, Teyla called softly, "John."
"What?" The urgency in her voice worried him. She was standing on the porch in a pool of lamplight, looking out towards the dark hills and the distant glow of lights that marked the town.
But there was a nearer light: a flicker in the darkness, appearing and disappearing as the hills concealed and revealed it.
Headlights.
"Damn it," John whispered. He'd had no idea they'd be so fast.
Near as he could tell, they were about two or three miles out. Even with the road slowing them down, he and Teyla had ten or fifteen minutes before they'd be here, tops.
He started for the house at the closest thing he could manage to a run -- a fast, awkward trot. Teyla jumped back to let him by. "Could it be Rodney, maybe?" she asked.
"Doubt it." After all his warnings about driving the road in the dark, he really didn't think that even a desperate Rodney would try it. And it was possible that it was old man Caldwell coming back for some reason, but he wasn't going to bet his life on it.
"Teyla, I have a pair of boots by the back door. My feet are a lot bigger than yours, but with the bandages and everything, you should be able to wear them if you put on an extra pair of socks." He climbed the stairs three at a time with his good leg -- screw the toothbrush, but there was a shotgun in the bedroom. Rodney seemed to have pegged him as some kind of gun nut, and he wished that it was actually the case. All he had was the Beretta and an old twelve-gauge Mossberg that he kept around for shooting rattlesnakes and, if necessary, home defense. In the bedroom, he also grabbed a spare jacket for Teyla; despite the heat of the day, it could get cold in the hills at night.
"Can you shoot a gun?" he called down from the top of the stairs.
"Yes," she said simply.
He decided it was probably better not to ask where she'd learned. "Here; you take this one." He didn't know how good a shot she was, so it was probably better to give her the shotgun. Hitting anything in the dark with the pistol would be a trick. "Pump action, six round magazine. Here's the box of shells. You know how to load it?"
"I have used something similar before."
"Good enough." He had a box of ammo for the Beretta in the bike's saddlebags and another half-box in his pocket. They weren't exactly loaded for a siege. Hopefully, they wouldn't have to deal with anything like that, though. He was expecting some pissed-off and possibly drunk good ol' boys looking for a fight; with any luck, a few shots would chase them off. Abandoning the house was probably overkill, but he didn't want to risk getting trapped, because it sure as hell wasn't designed to repel invaders. There were three different doors, all of them flimsy enough that Teyla, in her present condition, could probably have knocked them off their hinges.
He put "remodel house for defensibility" on his mental to-do list for when they got back.
It was almost totally dark in the yard now, as Sheppard closed and locked the door. The only light was a blood-red slash of fading sunset. He could hear the approaching truck's engine, rising and falling as it labored up and down the hills. It was definitely not Rodney's light car, but the deep throaty roar of a V-8.
"What is your plan?" Teyla asked quietly, following him to the Harley with the shotgun held at her side.
"There's an old cow pasture up that way, and an old road -- really more of a dirt track -- that goes to it. Plan A is just to take the bike up there and wait'll they leave." He straddled it, waited until Teyla climbed on behind, and then kick-started the engine. "If they start looking for us or look like they're settling in for a while, Plan B is to go around them and get on the road, heading for town. Once we do that, we're home free, because over that sort of terrain, we can go a lot faster on the bike than they'll be able to manage on anything with four wheels."
As long as they stayed on the bike, he was confident they'd be fine. On foot, though -- no way. Neither one of them could run. It was one reason why he didn't want to be caught in the house, because if it came to hand-to-hand combat or having to outrun an opponent, he and Teyla were both at a severe disadvantage: him with his leg and gimpy arm, her with her feet in tatters.
"Do you think they will leave?" she asked as he peeled out of the yard, the bike sliding around on the gravel before straightening out on the rough road to the upper pasture.
"I hope so." He had to concentrate on driving, then. He hadn't done a lot of offroading on the bike, and his stronger right arm was forced to do most of the work, fighting the ruts that tried to snatch control from him. He could feel the places where his left arm had been broken -- not severe pain, but little twinges pricking at him every time he tried to wrench the front of the bike around.
He could tell that he wasn't going to make the upper pasture before the truck pulled into the yard, so he turned around at the first set of leaning fence posts, standing forlornly in the dusk with a few lonely strands of rusty barbed wire swinging between them. He killed the bike's headlamp, and then its engine. Hot metal pinged quietly as, a couple hundred yards below them, a pair of headlights washed across the darkened house.
Teyla leaned against his back, warm in the cooling evening air. She said, very softly, "I hope that Rodney is all right."
"Yeah, me too." Up until a couple of days ago, he would have been confident that Rodney was too self-interested to get involved with someone else's problems. But that was before Rodney had walked up to a drug dealer's house to buy antibiotics for Teyla. Now he wasn't so sure.
The truck idled in the front yard of the house. John and Teyla watched as Steve's gang roved around the dark structure. John winced at the distant, splintering crash of a door being kicked in. His hand tightened on his Beretta. God, he wanted to be down there, defending his property from those jerks.
But the house was just wood and paint. He could feel Teyla pressed against his back -- her warmth and the slow rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. He listened to voices below, and the sound of shattering glass as a window was broken, and he kept his breathing slow and controlled, matching it to Teyla's breaths. Just a house, just wood and paint. What mattered was on the motorcycle behind him ... what mattered was in town, and safe, he hoped.
Teyla suddenly sat upright. "Dogs," she whispered.
John's stomach clenched, and he squinted at the play of shadow and light beneath them. From up here, it was difficult to make out anything that was happening around the house, but Teyla was right. He saw one of Steve's gang cross in front of the headlights with two dogs on leashes. Flashlights sparked to life in the darkness, casting about.
John's mouth had gone dry. He'd been thinking of these guys as rednecks, but Steve, and probably some of his buddies as well, were used to making money through the difficult and dangerous work of guiding illegals across the border. They were comfortable in the desert, and familiar with the area.
His estimation of Teyla went up another few notches. She'd managed to avoid these people while injured and barefoot in a strange country.
Teyla's voice hissed urgently in his ear. "John, they are coming towards us."
It was impossible to tell if they were following the motorcycle's tracks, or if the dogs had caught a scent, or if Steve and his buddies had just located the old road and decided to see if their quarry were hiding down it. John watched them searching the area around the outbuildings, and then start up the road towards the upper pasture -- and the fugitives.
His heart beat faster and his senses heightened, becoming hyper-aware of everything around him -- the sound of the wind in the rocks, the smell of the Harley's dissipating exhaust, the feeling of Teyla's hand on his waist. He shifted his weight and the pain in his leg shivered up his nerve endings with a silvery flash.
For years, this had been his life, this wary dance of hunter and hunted. Sometimes he'd been the predator, other times the prey, and always, as now, his only goal had been to get out alive and protect the people in his care.
He might be able to get past them with a frontal assault, simply charging down the trail and trusting that their sense of self-preservation would make them get out of his way, but he hated to try it. Impact with a human body could easily throw the motorcycle off its wheels, and once it was down, they'd be pretty well screwed. Also, getting so close to armed enemies was a dangerous and desperate thing to do. The other option was to try to go around them, but that wasn't good either -- off-roading in the dark, over unfamiliar terrain.
Of the two options, though, the one that kept the most distance between them and their pursuers was probably the best. John tucked the Beretta back in his pocket.
"I'm going to take the bike down the hill," he told Teyla softly. "Hang on, and don't drop the shotgun."
He kicked the Harley to life. The sharp beam of the headlight illuminated two very startled-looking men, both armed and one holding a dog's leash. John wrenched the handlebars and took off down the side of the hill. He heard gunshots, but he was counting on being a moving, hard-to-hit target. The bike slid around wildly, bouncing off rocks with a series of bone-jarring impacts.
"John!" Teyla cried urgently. The headlight's beam flashed off a double strand of barbed wire -- they were heading straight toward it.
"Sonovabitch!" The abandoned ranch was crisscrossed with old barbed-wire fencing, so much a part of his landscape that he hadn't even thought about it. John braked hard, sending the bike spinning on its suddenly stationary tires. No, shit, don't flip -- He got control, pointing back up the hill with his heart battering his ribs. Wiping out on these rocks could easily be fatal for both of them.
"That was effing stupid," John muttered. From above them, he could hear shouts and running feet. "There are pieces of fencing all over this place. In the darkness, we won't be able to avoid them. Shoulda gone with a frontal assault."
"Now what?" Teyla asked softly, her heart fluttering against his spine.
"I don't know. Hang on."
He opened up the throttle and cruised alongside the broken fence, gritting his teeth as they bounded over rocks and crashed through a stand of brush. He'd meant to cut straight down the hill to the road, but now he was going to come out too high. He just wasn't sure how high ...
Much too high, he found, coming out of the brush and slewing onto the lower part of the road that led to the upper cow pasture. The house, the truck and the majority of Steve's boys still lay between him and escape.
Rather than turning and heading for the house, Sheppard shot straight across the road and took the bike behind the outbuildings. There was absolutely no way to be stealthy; all he could do was keep himself a moving target and try to get around them, get on the road.
"Shall I shoot at them?" Teyla gasped as the bike slid around the end of the largest outbuilding, bringing them in full view. A bullet pinged off the corrugated metal side of the shed, just above their heads.
"No. Don't waste bullets. Moving, hard to aim." He didn't have attention or breath to spare for answering questions. Gunning the engine, he raced around the backside of the house.
He was going to have to run for it. Circling the back of the house, he gained speed on the flatter land. He was good at dodging obstacles, although usually the obstacles weren't shooting at him. If he had enough speed, they'd be through in a few seconds and on the open road.
He came around the house and gave it all he had, running for the road. As he'd hoped, the men between him and freedom scattered when the Harley bore down on them. The truck was a large dark shape in his peripheral vision, pointed away from him -- what he didn't expect was for the driver to throw it in reverse and careen towards him. He threw all that he had into taking the bike in a sudden sharp turn, but the edge of the truck clipped him and suddenly he was airborne.
Fuck.
He lost Teyla, lost the bike, hit the ground with an impact like a blow from a sledgehammer and skidded several yards with his shoulders and arms taking most of the brunt. Thank God he'd been wearing a jacket. When he stopped moving, it took him a second or two to recover from the shock and pain. Then he rolled over quickly and found himself looking up the barrel of a shotgun, at the leering face of one of Steve's friends.
"I got the woman," another voice called. Pushing his head up, John saw Teyla half-sitting in the glare of the truck's headlights, with a shotgun in her face.
Typically, now that it was too late, his brain gave him a whole bunch of different scenarios that he should have tried: hide Teyla in the hills, and make a run at Steve's gang to lead them away; spend the time barricading the house rather than hiding, and try to hold them off; stay hidden rather than running or fighting, and pick them off from cover.
Hindsight was 20-20.
He tried to sit up; the shotgun shoved him back down. His forearms, chest and legs were stinging; he'd be picking out gravel for days. As far as he could tell without checking himself over, though, he hadn't been seriously hurt in the crash. He hoped Teyla hadn't.
Steve sauntered over to Teyla, toying with a snub-nosed little automatic pistol. He was moving a bit stiffly, and John hoped that when she'd stabbed him, she'd gotten him somewhere painful. "Hi, bitch," he said, and when she didn't answer, he switched to Spanish, rattling off something that John didn't understand. Teyla obviously didn't like it, though, because she stiffened and spit at him.
"You leave her the hell alone," John growled.
"I don't think you're calling the shots here, buddy." Steve approached him with a lanky, confident stride, and knelt on the gravel to thrust his gun into John's face. "We heard about you in town. Just a cripple living out by himself in the hills. Guess you thought you'd pick up some free Tex-Mex tail, huh?"
For once, John didn't have a smart-mouthed answer to that. He was staring, almost cross-eyed, at the gun.
It was Rodney's gun. He remembered it -- remembered showing Rodney how to correctly wear his holster when they'd first met. And while it was certainly possible that Steve might own a Heckler & Koch P2000, it wasn't the kind of gun that you normally saw in the hands of a guy like Steve, in a town like this one. Guys like Steve preferred more ostentatious firepower, the kind that barely fit in a holster and couldn't be concealed under a jacket. Quantity over quality.
"Where did you get that gun?" John demanded. He barely recognized his own voice.
Steve looked down at it as if he'd forgotten he was holding it. "Nice, ain't it? Little bit small, but powerful. Say one thing for the government -- they give their boys good guns."
"Where did you get it?"
Steve grinned, revealing his crooked teeth. "You know where I got it. That cop put up more of a fight than I expected, from all I'd heard about him. Tried to protect you two. I gave him a chance to walk away, you know that? All he had to do was abandon the two of you. And he wouldn't do it. Crazy."
John's fingers curled into fists in the dirt. And then he moved, with all the speed of a lifetime's training in how to kill people.
He grabbed the shotgun with one hand and the H&K with the other, wrenching both away from his head. He'd been goddamn special ops; he'd fought, and won, against men who'd spent their entire lives on the battlefield; why was he rolling over and letting a bunch of hill-country yahoos push him around? The H&K discharged harmlessly into the ground, and the other guy was so startled that he let go of the shotgun, which John swung around and clubbed into Steve's temple. Steve's fingers went limp on the H&K and John tore it from his hand.
The guy holding the gun on Teyla bellowed, "Don't move or I'll k--" But that was as far as he got before Sheppard shot him with the H&K. It was a nice gun, a little different than his Beretta, but not so different that the many hours he'd spent target practicing on beer cans and sagebrush, keeping his shooting reflexes sharp, hadn't paid off. The guy went down with a groan, clutching his gut, and John snapped off two quick shots at the other two that he could see with guns -- one he got in the arm, and the other lost a few fingers. He wasn't trying to make kill shots, but he didn't mind hurting them a lot.
The one who'd been holding the shotgun on John made a lunge for the weapon lying in the dirt. John tripped him with his good leg and then hit him in the throat. Hearing a scuffling sound, he saw out of the corner of his eye that Teyla had capably disabled another of their assailants.
"Son of a bitch!" Steve's weight knocked him down, but John was in his element now. He was starting to understand how to work within the limitations of his body, just as he'd done before when he was fighting while wounded -- and he'd done that a lot. Steve was obviously a brawler and knew nothing about the finer points of hand-to-hand combat. John dislocated his kneecap with a kick -- Steve screamed -- and overpowered him in seconds, twisting the bigger man's arm behind his back. He didn't stop at the point of resistance, but went ahead and dislocated it with a violent jerk. From the hideous meaty sound that it made, and Steve's hoarse scream, he'd probably torn some ligaments and the rotator cuff as well. It'd be a miracle if Steve ever used that arm again.
John rolled the coyote onto his back and pressed the H&K to his throat.
"You thought I was a cripple, right? You thought I'd be an easy target." John dug the muzzle of the gun into the flesh under Steve's chin. "I'm fucking special ops, you dumb redneck. I know a dozen ways to kill you with a spoon. I've taken out entire battalions of Taliban by myself." He was exaggerating shamelessly, but he could see from the terror in Steve's eyes that Steve was buying it. "Now we're even, right? You got one arm and one leg, the same as me. How're you doing?"
Steve made a tiny whimpering sound.
John glanced over at Teyla. She was holding a shotgun on the others. Nice going, he thought.
Swallowing against the pressure of the gun in his throat, Steve groaned, "If you let me go, I'll tell you where to find the fed."
John bore down on Steve's chest with his knee. "Thought you killed him."
"No -- no, he's alive, but he'll be dead soon, if you don't do something." Steve's eyes glittered. "Let me up, and I'll tell you."
John swore in a combination of disbelief and weak-kneed relief. "You're trying to make deals with me? You've got a gun in your neck and you're making deals?" He bit down hard on the moral part of him, the part that had once swore I will never do this again, and he ground his knee into Steve's gut, where Teyla had stabbed him. Steve screamed again. "Now you tell me where to find him, and he'd better goddamn be alive."
"Road -- off your road -- there's an abandoned road, used to be a ranch out there, years ago. Dumped him in a ditch by the road, buried him alive."
"Where?" John demanded, jamming the gun against Steve's adams' apple.
He choked. "Told you -- off your road, this side of the Caldwell place. About four miles down."
"He's alive?"
"For now," Steve gasped. "Didn't hurt him that bad."
John held the gun against Steve's chin for a moment longer, then sat back on his heels. His bad leg was crimped up under him, and he was afraid if he tried to stand up, he'd fall over.
"The first thing I'm gonna do the next time I'm in town is buy myself some heavy ordnance. You've seen what I can do when I'm unarmed, you'll love what I can do with a couple of assault rifles. You and your buddies ever come back here, you won't get within a couple hundred yards of the house. I'll pick you off with a rifle and scope. Blow your brains out before you know what hit you. Got it?"
Steve nodded wildly, scrambling backwards in the dirt with one leg dragging and one arm curled against his chest.
"If you're lying, and McKay's dead, I won't bother with the police. I'll just hunt you down and kill you myself. You got that?" When Steve didn't answer immediately, John fired in the ground at his feet.
"Yes! Yeah, I got it! You're crazy, you know that?"
"I've heard," John said, and he told Teyla, "Let them go."
Teyla stepped back, still holding the shotgun on them. John had never seen a bunch of guys get into a pickup truck that fast. One of Steve's buddies got an arm around him and hauled him into the back of the truck as it was already starting to move. They tore out of the driveway, leaving darkness in their wake.
"You let them go?" Teyla asked.
"I don't want to explain a bunch of bodies in the yard, do you? If we're lucky, the idiots will wipe out on an arroyo somewhere between here and town, at the speed they're going."
John limped over to the motorcycle and turned it upright. As far as he could tell, it hadn't been badly damaged in the crash. There was some superficial paint damage and denting; he'd have to spend some quality time on bodywork, later, but he liked that sort of thing.
"You hear what Steve said about Rodney?" he asked, straddling the bike.
"Yes." Teyla climbed on behind.
John had been serious when he'd told McKay that he didn't think the road was safe in the dark. He eased down a series of switchbacks, where steep ravines waited for the unwary, and navigated around car-swallowing potholes.
"Look," Teyla said softly, pointing. The motorcycle's headlight picked out a gleam of metal, off the road. John turned and steered that way. There was an old road here; he'd never really noticed it. He brought the bike to a halt beside Rodney's Lexus. Its front end was crumpled and the driver's door stood ajar.
"Damn it." There was a flashlight in the bike's saddlebag. With the Beretta in his other hand, John played the flashlight over the car. There was no blood on the seat or bullet holes in the windows.
Teyla limped after him, studying the ground. "As a child, I was quite good at following tracks," she said.
The sand showed up tracks well. Even John could see that some scuffling had taken place here. Teyla pointed silently away from the road, and John went that way, shining the light in front of them so that she could see the ground.
Teyla tracked in silence, except for an occasional instruction: "Left" or "Not that way." She paused for a moment where the rocks were splattered with a few drops of blood; John's teeth were clenched so hard that his jaw ached. In the ditch beside the road, Teyla stopped, and knelt, and began to dig with her bare hands.
John joined her, dragging away rocks with increasing urgency. His fingertips brushed the material of Rodney's pants leg, and the leg flinched away from him.
"He's still alive," John breathed.
"I am sure they intended to let nature kill him without doing the work themselves." Teyla's voice was grim. "It was done that way sometimes in my country too, or merely as a way to make an accused man confess."
Rodney was bloody and battered and nearly catatonic, but very much alive. They dragged him out of the hole in the rocks -- John on one side, Teyla on the other. He was shivering violently, and he fisted one bloody hand in John's shirt and the other in Teyla's sleeve. "Alive," he said, his voice breaking. "You're alive." Then he slumped on Teyla, and she staggered with a gasp as she took his full weight on her injured feet.
Taking Rodney's weight from her, John's teeth clenched again when he felt the wetness against his shoulder and realized that Rodney's hair was soaked with blood. "Hospital," he said. "But I don't know how the hell I can keep him on the motorcycle --"
"Rodney's car," Teyla said immediately.
Between the two of them, they manhandled him back to the car. Teyla slid in and John handed him in to her. The keys were still in the ignition, thankfully -- although he could remember how to hotwire a car, he was glad he didn't have to -- and the engine started on the third try. It ran with an unpleasant rattling sound, but it did run.
John looked over his shoulder into the backseat, where Teyla had Rodney's head in her lap and was picking gravel out of the scrapes on his face. "You could maybe take the motorcycle back --"
She shook her head and said in a tone that brooked no argument, "I will come with you."
It was a long drive in the dark. At some point Rodney woke up, and John heard Teyla trying to reassure him in the backseat. The sound of the soft voices made something uncoil inside him, tension easing out of him as he drove.
He parked next to the hospital's emergency room entrance. Rodney was wide awake now, and snappy with Teyla's attempts to help him out of the car. "Should I be moving? Shouldn't I get a gurney or something? I'm bleeding. Did I tell you they hit me with a rock?"
The emergency room was nearly deserted. They handed off Rodney to a nurse. "Do you need to see someone too?" she asked John.
He started to say no, but then the weight of everything crashed down on him, and he realized that there wasn't a single part of his body that didn't hurt, between bruises and strained muscles and the throbbing in his leg. "Yeah, probably a good idea."
Teyla began to follow, anxiously, as he started to walk away. Raising a hand to the nurse, John took a couple of steps back to her. "You'll be all right," he told her.
"But what if ..." She looked around nervously, and he realized it was the first time she'd been out in public since crossing the border. "What if they ask me who I am, where I came from?" she asked in a whisper. "What if they learn I do not belong here?"
"You do," John said simply. "You have every right to be here. You're just waiting for some friends. No one is going to make you show papers to do that." He squeezed her shoulder. "I'll be back soon, and so will Rodney."
He tried not to think about how forlorn she looked as he limped off.
Teyla tried to find a comfortable way of sitting on the hard plastic chair. Eventually she moved to a softer chair near the wall. For a while, she watched the people come and go with her heart in her mouth, but John was right: no one asked for her papers, and no one asked what she was doing there. She even saw patients come in who were dark-skinned and foreign, like her. She began to relax.
There was a pile of magazines by the chair. A couple of them were even in Spanish, and she noticed that the various health brochures on the table with the magazines were written in both English and Spanish. This struck her as a good opportunity to improve her English, so she took them and spread them out in her lap. She was reading about male cancers when John came back, slump-shouldered and weary, with a bandage on his face.
"Will you be well?" she asked him. He shrugged and nodded, and sank down into the chair next to hers. He raised an eyebrow at the reading material in her lap.
"Light reading?"
"I am learning English," Teyla said primly. She looked up to the door that John had come through. "How is Rodney?"
"Dunno. We weren't in the same room, although I could hear him complaining from all the way down the hall, so I assume he's going to be all right."
Teyla smiled at that. Still, they both watched the door until Rodney came through it, pale and bruised and arguing with an exasperated physician's assistant about how his hypoglycemia was not, in fact, all in his head, and he was going to pass out if they didn't feed him -- already done it once tonight -- and was this all the painkillers he got? Hadn't they seen his head? Didn't they need to keep him overnight for observation?
The woman closed the door and abandoned him in the waiting room. Rodney turned around and froze when he saw them waiting for him. It was very obvious that he hadn't expected them to still be there. Teyla wondered if he knew how clearly his face displayed his emotions -- surprise and hope and suspicion and relief and fear all chased each other across his expressive features.
They both got up without saying anything, and gathered him up and took him home.
XI. Home
Rodney woke up when his painkillers wore off. He hurt from his eyeballs down to the tips of his toes, and his brain felt like it was full of cotton wool.
He started to move, said "Ouch" and stayed with his face buried in a totally unfamiliar pillow. Then he started wondering where he was, because a lot of the previous night was a blur. He braced himself for the pain and raised his head, and very nearly panicked when he realized that he was lying in a strange bed. Then panic turned to full-blown terror when the lump under the blankets next to him rolled over and turned out to be -- Teyla?
He sat bolt upright, then moaned and clutched at his head. Looking around the room, he finally figured out where he was. He and Teyla were both in John's bed. And he was still fully clothed, aside from someone having removed his shoes. His clothes were gritty and crusted with dried blood and felt like they were sticking to him.
After finding his shoes and the painkillers the hospital had given him, he shuffled into the bathroom, took a few pills and splashed water in his face. It didn't help. He still looked liked hell and felt worse. Every time he closed his eyes, he could feel the rocks falling on his head. Buried alive. His worst nightmare.
"No good deed goes unpunished, huh?" he told his reflection in the mirror.
He shuffled out of the bathroom. Teyla had rolled over again, and her hair was spread out in a shimmering copper cloud over her pillow. He looked down at her for a minute, and hurt in a different kind of way. Then he slipped on his shoes, and slipped out the door.
The stairs were squeaky, so he tiptoed down. Sheppard, predictably, was asleep on the couch, a huddled ball in a rolled-up army blanket with just a few tufts of hair sticking out the top. Rodney stopped in the kitchen for a bagel because, hey, he'd earned it. He closed the front door softly behind him.
His car was parked in the front yard; the keys lay on the dash. He winced at the damage to the front end, but it started after a few tries and it stayed running, so he pulled away without looking back.
He told himself that it wasn't cowardly, leaving like this. It was just easier. He had a job waiting for him in DC, and it was time to stop hanging around in a one-horse town and get on with his life. Last night had been -- crazy, and scary, and he was through living that way.
It was a long, slow drive back to the motel, and his bruises made him aware of every bump in the road. After all that had happened the previous day, it was a little disconcerting when he pulled in sight of the Atlantic Motel, with its same weedy parking lot and malfunctioning neon sign. He did get a shock when he shoved on his motel room door and it swung easily open; he fumbled wildly for his sidearm before remembering a) Steve's gang had kicked the door in, and b) he didn't have his sidearm anymore. Yet another thing he'd get written up for, maybe even lose his job. But the CIA wouldn't care about that. All they wanted was his brains.
A folded piece of paper had been shoved under the door. He picked it up carefully and laughed, in an unhappy sort of way, when he read what was written on it. Well, no way was he going back out to John's place to deliver the message. They'd find out eventually anyway.
He took the time to shower -- carefully and painfully -- and to shave and change clothes, which was, in retrospect, possibly a mistake. He hadn't figured on John's bird-dog-like persistence. He was just shoving the last of his belongings in the trunk of the Lexus when the truck rattled and shuddered into the parking lot of the motel.
Crap, Rodney thought. Busted. He slammed the trunk lid and then looked up as John slid stiffly out of the truck and limped over to him. Teyla, in the passenger's seat, waved to him. He didn't wave back.
They just stood there for a minute, awkwardly. This was why he hated this sort of scene. Finally Sheppard said, "Oh!" and reached in his pocket. He handed Rodney a gun.
"Hey ... this is mine."
"Yeah. Took it off Steve last night." Sheppard lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug. "Guess you were right, by the way."
"About what?" he asked warily.
"Guess there was no point in you buying a truck, after all." A ghost of a grin tugged at Sheppard's mouth, but slid away when Rodney didn't smile back.
"Look, Sheppard," Rodney said quickly. "I don't do goodbyes, okay? Not good at them. And don't say you'll write because you won't." Before Sheppard could say anything, Rodney fumbled in his pocket and shoved the folded paper at him. "Since you're here, the motel office took a call for you. Teyla's brother? Remember him? I guess he got your message after all. He and his wife are hitching down from Abilene in the next few days."
The ghost of a smile was back. "Needle in a haystack, huh?"
Rodney shrugged a little.
"So where are you going, anyway?"
"DC. CIA sent me a letter, offered me a job making a hell of a lot of money to work in an air-conditioned lab with other smart people. I'd be a fool not to take them up on it."
"Making WMDs?" Sheppard asked quietly.
"Or whatever they want me to make. They sign the paychecks; they call the shots."
"Rodney, you hate working for them. You're here because you hate working for them."
Rodney hadn't ever told him that, and he hated people making assumptions about him, even if the assumptions were true. "Yeah, well, maybe I came to my senses and realized that there are worse things, okay? Like almost dying in a godforsaken sun-blasted wasteland."
Sheppard fidgeted, and looked down at his feet. "I'm sorry you got hurt. That's my fault, really --"
Oh hell, this was going about as well as he'd expected. "No it's not," he snapped. "It's just -- look -- I need to get out, okay? I can't stay here."
Sheppard raised his eyes in a way that was strangely diffident. "If you just need a place to go, you're welcome to stay with me and Teyla, for as long as you want. Don't jump into a job you hate; just stay with us and think about it before you decide. I'm sure the CIA will still want you in six months or a year if you change your mind."
It made him angry, how much he wanted to do exactly that. "We can't all turn our backs on the world," he said harshly.
"Yeah, well ..." Sheppard looked over his shoulder, at Teyla in the truck, and then back at Rodney. "Looks to me like none of us can."
Rodney's mouth twisted. "You can't keep taking in strays; you'll run out of room."
"I have a hundred and sixty acres, McKay; there's plenty of room."
He wanted to. God, he wanted to. And that was why he couldn't. Because it was time to be a grown-up, be responsible, stop playing around. "If you'll excuse me, I have a job to get to."
He got in the Lexus, slammed the door, started it up, and then realized that Sheppard was standing by the window. Reluctantly, he rolled it down. "I already said no."
"I know you did." Sheppard leaned on the edge of the window, and shoved a piece of paper at him. "Just wanted to give you my P.O. box number. Drop a line when you land somewhere, okay? Maybe I'll take the bike up and visit sometime."
Rodney couldn't help a snort of disbelief. "All the way to DC?"
"I drove the other way, didn't I? For a lot less." Sheppard stepped back quickly, and raised his hand in a wave, effectively ending the conversation.
Bastard just had to have the last word. Rodney wouldn't have let him get away with it, except that his throat was inexplicably refusing to cooperate. Instead, he put the car in gear and pulled out onto the highway.
The drive back to John's place was a very quiet one.
At one point, Teyla said, "He will not be happy, working for your government, will he?"
"No," John said, and added, "He's an adult, though. Can't keep him from doing what he wants to do."
"That is true." And they were silent for the rest of the drive.
The sunlight seemed oppressive, the house disturbingly quiet. It was already late afternoon. John tinkered with the truck a little bit, seeing if he could fix its idling problems, while Teyla sat on the porch and practiced carving on a bit of wood. She seemed less excited about seeing her brother again than John had expected -- happy, yes, but the subdued and sad tone of the day weighed her down.
"Shall I make dinner?" Teyla asked as dusk crept across the hills.
"Only if it doesn't cause you to relapse," John said from under the truck. "American men are perfectly capable of cooking, believe me."
"I know that, but I would like to --" She trailed off, and then scrambled up. Her voice was startled and thrilled. "Is that Rodney's car?"
John slid out from under the truck. "Guess so." He'd been aware of the approaching dust cloud for some time now, but he really hadn't wanted to get her hopes up ... or worry her. There were a lot of things that could make a dust cloud other than a silver Lexus, and he'd figured that it would take Rodney a little more time to change his m ind.
"Then I really must start dinner," Teyla said, and despite her injured feet, she practically raced off into the house.
John went ahead and put away his tools, waiting for the silver Lexus with the crumpled nose to pull into the yard.
"Flat tire," Rodney said immediately, as soon as he stepped out of the car and before anyone had a chance to ask.
John had managed to contain his grin, but it still showed in his eyes and voice, as he took an assessing look at Rodney's tires. "They all look round to me."
"Well, I changed it, obviously, genius. But considering that I only made it about five minutes out of town before getting a flat, I realized that the roads are clearly too bad to be driving anywhere this late in the evening."
The road to John's house was a whole lot worse than the road out of town, but contrary to belief, he really could contain his smart mouth sometimes. "Teyla's making dinner."
"Great! I'm starving." Grabbing a bag from the passenger's seat of the car, he started towards the house. Then he stopped. Looked back. The uncertainty was showing through the cracks. "Uh ... are you sure this is okay?"
"For God's sake, Rodney, of course it's okay. It's my house and I told you, you can stay here as long as you want."
Irritation flashed. "I didn't say I was going to stay."
"I know you didn't."
As they walked towards the house in the gathering dusk, Rodney said thoughtfully, "You know what this place needs? Other than a Starbucks, obviously. And air conditioning, and a stove that works."
John held the screen door for him; yellow light spilled out, striping the rocks. "No, Rodney, tell me: what else does it need?"
"You should get a cat. No, really, you should. They practically take care of themselves. I know this guy who has some kittens --"
The screen door slammed behind them, cutting off John's laughter in the warm Texas night.
~fin~
My only excuse for this story is that I'd been reading a magazine article about undocumented workers and the problems that they face, and this gave me an unshakeable mental image of Teyla trying to sneak across the Mexican border and Sheppard as this reclusive ex-military guy who hides her. Then I had to figure out how to work Rodney into the whole thing and ... it was pretty much all downhill from there.
The whole story is also available on one page at fanfiction.net. There are some other, related snippets available if you click on the "texas au" tag on this entry.
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