In the City of Seven Walls

 

Author: NA32

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis

Pairing(s): John Sheppard/Rodney McKay

Warnings: non-con

Spoilers: none

Summary: A gilded cage is still a cage.

 

Nominated Category:

Best Hurt/Comfort Fic

&

Best Slave Fic: Acted TV & Movies - Slash

---

 

The Market The Haralim Moa Submission Quotidian The Rule of Three Women Bell Confection Jesses Arcana Falter The Whip Numb

 

My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi.

Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou has doves' eyes.

Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green.

The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir.

 

The Market

 

"Just tell me they're not going to make us into eunuchs," McKay whispered.

 

Sheppard didn't lift his head, but his gaze slid toward McKay. He mouthed, 'Don't talk,' but it was already too late. The biggest guard's whip snapped out, laying another stripe over McKay's back. They were already kneeling on in the dirt and the blow made McKay fall forward onto his hands.

 

"Silence!"

 

McKay screamed just once, just enough to satisfy the guard.

 

The slave factor in charge of their group grunted, stopping the guard before he could swing the lash again. No use marking up the merchandise too much.

 

Sheppard curled his fingers into tight fists, resisting the urge to leap up and wrap his chains around the guard's neck and strangle him. Ronon had already been clubbed into unconsciousness for losing his temper. He didn't know where Ronon was now – he had been dragged off like so much offal – anymore than he knew where Teyla had been taken after she was sold. She could be on another world by now, taken through the stargate again, while Ronon's body rotted in a pit.

 

Sold.

 

He couldn't really accept the idea these people thought they could make him and his team into slaves, but it was happening.

 

They'd walked right into it. Rather, they'd walked through the stargate right into an ambush, been stunned and dropped before they even had time to look around, and woke stripped of everything, even their clothes, and in chains. Several brutal lessons later, they'd been loaded into a cart and brought through the stargate to market like so many cabbages. They didn't even know the gate address of this world. The slave trade in Pegasus flourished underground, the markets springing up on deserted worlds according to some whispered schedule, before disappearing again to reappear months later somewhere else. There were always buyers, worlds where the Wraith had culled and laborers were needed or skilled workers or breeders to re-establish the population, and the remaining powers weren't too picky how they obtained the people they needed.

 

They were already three days overdue to check in, but Sheppard worried that any rescue would walk into the same roach trap his team had. If they didn't, they would have no chance of tracking them through the stargates. The slavers knew what they were doing.

 

Meanwhile, all he could do was stay quiet and hope he and Rodney were kept together until one of them could think of some way to escape.

 

He gritted his teeth while two more potential buyers looked at both of them. One fingered a raw red welt on his shoulder, sending a spike of pain through him.

 

"New or just incorrigible?"

 

"Both," the factor replied.

 

"They're old to be cut."

 

Sheppard hid a flinch.

 

"No use as breeding stock then," the factor replied.

 

Sheppard knew he did not want to be put out to stud, fathering kids who would be raised in slavery, but if the alternative was being gelded ...

 

"Too much trouble," the man said and moved on.

 

"They are," McKay hissed. "Oh, God, they are."

 

Sheppard knew the guard was watching, just waiting for him to answer McKay. He already had a feel for the way the bastard thought: this guard enjoyed making them suffer and set up opportunities to punish them for transgressions. The factor didn't care enough to stop him, unless it appeared it would cost him. The guard was letting McKay get away with talking this time to tempt Sheppard into doing the same. Then it would be the lash again.

 

Instead of answering, Sheppard shifted on his knees until his bare calf brushed against McKay's. He didn't know what he could say anyway.

 

The market, what Sheppard had glimpsed from the cart before they were off-loaded, had the feel of a feedlot crossed with a traveling carnival. Most of the slaves were in temporary pens, but a few sellers had tents and displayed the goods where buyers could examine them closely.

 

A line of sweat trickled down his back, stinging the welts. He tried to shut everything out but the feel of the sun burning his shoulders and the back of his bowed head, the feel of McKay's hairy leg against his own, and the sound of him breathing.

 

The soft swish of skirts almost made him look up when they paused in front of him. He managed to keep his eyes down, taking in the sandaled feet peeking from beneath a turquoise skirt before him. Gold rings glinted on neat toes with nails painted a deep cobalt blue.

 

"Hara?" the factor asked, sounding smarmy and uncertain at the same time. The guard echoed him, rusty and slow, forcing respect into his voice. "Hara."

 

Sheppard held still as the woman walked around him, so close the silk skirt wisped against his elbow once.

 

A hand, also be-ringed, and painted with patterns, lifted Sheppard's chin, so that he blinked into the sun-backed silhouette of this potential purchaser. As his eyes cleared, he saw liquid black eyes outlined in red, an elegant roman nose and lips stained burgundy. Her fingers balanced his chin, shifting once to assess the roughness of his beard.

 

"This one," she said.

 

"Hara, these are untrained slaves – " the factor protested.

 

"And unbroken," she interrupted. "I have need of such."

 

"Very well," the factor said. "The price – "

 

Another woman, rounder and shorter than the first, stepped forward, green skirts whispering as she moved. She shoved a bag of coins into the factor's hands. When he opened his mouth to say something else, one of the four armed men accompanying the women, obviously bodyguards, shook his head and grinned ferally. The factor subsided.

 

Sheppard's new – Jesus! – owner lifted her hand, bringing his chin up further. "Up," she said, addressing him for the first time.

 

Taking a chance, he tipped his head toward McKay and said – begged, "Please."

 

McKay still had his head down. His hands were clenched on his thighs. The pink flush of a sunburn colored the back of his neck and his otherwise pale shoulders. Where the whip marks didn't line the skin in angry, infected-looking red.

 

She – Sheppard thought Hara must be a title – paused. Sheppard saw her gaze take in the way his leg pressed against McKay's.

 

"This one, too," she declared. "The price is enough for both of them."

 

Sheppard grabbed McKay's arm and drew him unsteadily to his feet as he rose himself.

 

Their chains clinked as they followed the woman and her retinue through the market to the stargate and through the wormhole into a busy , seemingly pre-industrial city of sienna and rose stone. Pale dust coated their bare feet and ankles. Sheppard limped next to Rodney, taking quick looks around. The stargate here opened on a plaza surrounded by market stalls. It reminded him of a souk, the air filled with calls from merchants, the bleating of animals, music, and bells from the towers of the palace that dominated the city. The people wore colorful, loose robes and had dark hair. A depressing number of them were followed by barefoot slaves who obviously weren't native. A thousand smells warred and mixed in the air, manure and spices and sweat, dust, wool, smoke, perfume, rotting fruit and fresh flowers, one second sickening, the next vibrant with life as the wind shifted.

 

Their path took them to the high, red, fortress walls of the palace that dominated the city and inside, voices calling that the Haralim returned, gates and doors opening before them.

 

---

The Haralim

The palace existed within a fortress, massive and meant to repel even the Wraith. Within the palace existed the Seven-Walled City. As the fortress and the palace belonged to the Rale, the Seven-Walled City belonged to the Haralim, his sister and first wife.

 

It swallowed them.

 

At first it meant nothing to McKay that they belonged to the Haralim herself. To Sheppard it just meant their escape would be that much harder. But they tried at the first opportunity. They tried and failed. They made it past five of the walls before they were caught, which impressed the guards who caught them enough to give them an extra beating.

 

The Haralim was waiting when they were dragged back, bruised and dirty, manacled again after only a day free of the heavy bonds.

 

McKay wanted to yell at her, to shout that they weren't slaves, no one could do this to them, that he had to get back to Atlantis and find a way to save the city and then, hey, maybe the entire Pegasus galaxy when he had five free minutes to devote to beating the Wraith. He wanted to kill the bastards that bloodied Sheppard's mouth when they were caught, used a club on his ribs, wanted to threaten vile and grandiloquent revenge on the Haralim and all the Selketi. Self-preservation squeezed his throat shut on any words and he was horrified to realize he'd already absorbed the first lesson of their slavery.

 

He would be silent rather than risk the whip.

 

Sheppard hadn't accepted it yet. While the guards pushed them both to their knees on the cool tile before the Haralim, Sheppard slurred irreverent, smart-alec remarks.

 

"Bow," one of the guards demanded. A heavy hand on the back of McKay's head forced him down until his face was mashed against the floor. The blue tile was cool and almost soothing against his nose and cheek. He wished he could stay there and not look up, but he heard Sheppard curse and another scuffle, punctuated with the thunk of chains hitting flesh.

 

He had to turn his head and look.

 

Four guards had Sheppard pinned face down to the floor. One of them crouched with a knee on Sheppard's back. Sheppard was still fighting, bucking against them with more desperation than technique, and McKay realized that he just couldn't stop. For Sheppard, if he stopped fighting, it would be giving in; he wouldn't be Sheppard after that.

 

His gaze caught Sheppard's good eye – the other was swollen shut – for an endless interval. He could see so much. Sheppard didn't expect McKay to fight – didn't want him to – this wasn't about escape now, it was a fight to keep something whole inside him.

 

It terrified McKay, because he thought it would get Sheppard killed.

 

He managed to kick at his own guard and throw himself against the legs of one of the men holding Sheppard down. He didn't stop to think about it. He just did it, knowing as well as Sheppard did that it only a gesture.

 

He did it anyway.

 

He kept fighting, trying with awkward blows to pull even one of them off Sheppard.

 

Somewhere in the struggle, Sheppard flipped over. McKay's elbow smashed into a guard's nose, making him cry out. Sheppard managed to use his chains as weapons.

 

It wasn't enough.

 

The bright, leaf-shape of spear point came to rest against the base of Sheppard's throat. Sheppard went still other than the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed in hard pants. McKay froze as the blade just split Sheppard's skin, staring in stomach-heaving fright at the trickle of red that oozed down the side of Sheppard's neck. He was practically limp as two guards pulled him away.

 

"Hara, we should make examples of them," the guard holding the spear to Sheppard's throat said.

 

"No."

 

She wore green silk and gold bracelets covered her forearms. They rang against each other as she approached.

 

"Hara – "

 

"Untrained," she said. She touched Sheppard's shoulder with one sandaled toe-tip. "Any other owner would have you whipped bloody and raw in the center courtyard for running. For the guards you killed, you would be killed, too."

 

Sheppard lifted his head, forcing the spear point deeper. "Don't let me stop you."

 

"Don't – Sheppard, don't, it's not worth it," McKay whispered. "Fuck live free or die."

 

Sheppard gave him a sidelong look that managed to say, 'Yes, it is,' despite the damage to his face.

 

The Haralim crouched in a pool of skirt next to Sheppard's head. Her fingers were darker than his skin. She trailed them over his brow, then his cheekbone, and down to his jaw, which she grasped cruelly.

 

"Still, I bought you for a purpose you have yet to serve and serve it you will."

 

She looked up and nodded to another slave, older and wrinkled, dressed in loose cotton trousers and a vest. A fringe of gray hair circled the man's balding skull.

 

"Tei'ayas, bring me the medicinals."

 

McKay caught his breath, suddenly apprehensive. It wasn't the word or the way she said it: it was Tei'ayas' reaction, the flinch in the older man's brown eyes. He hurried away, his bare feet slapping on the tiles.

 

The Haralim released Sheppard's chin and traced a fingertip over his split lips.

 

"You must be punished."

 

"Great," Sheppard said and his voice cracked a little high.

 

The Haralim smiled.

 

Tei'ayas returned with a inlaid wooden box. He presented it to the Haralim on both hands, sinking down on his knees before her.

 

She opened it with a key brought from among the necklaces around her neck and drew out a vial of amber liquid. The light from a high window gleamed through contents the color of honey.

 

Even the guards looked sick.

 

"Hold him still," she told the guards. She opened the vial, knelt again, and brought it to Sheppard's stubbornly closed lips. "This is called moa. It is a poison."

 

"Poison!" McKay sputtered and received another blow to the side of his head.

 

The Haralim eyed him sidelong. "In sufficient doses. This will not kill you."

 

"What will it do?" McKay demanded so that Sheppard wouldn't have to open his mouth.

 

She smiled. "Punish him." She dug the fingers of her other hand into the hinge of Sheppard's jaw. "Drink it. It will leave you unmarked."

 

"Don't – " McKay said as the Haralim added, "Or I will take the noisy one back to the market and sell him."

 

Sheppard open his mouth and drank. The movement of his Adam's apple made the spear point still at his throat dig in again.

 

The Haralim rose.

 

"Take them back to their room and lock them in," she commanded before walking away. "Remove the chains. They won't be necessary."

 

"Vai, Hara," the guards chorused.

 

McKay got to his feet on his own, but Sheppard stumbled and sank back to his knees. One of the biggest guards, bigger than Ronon, bigger than Teal'c back at the SGC, slung Sheppard over his shoulder, carrying him like a sack of grain.

 

As McKay staggered into the room – cell, McKay thought – thanks to a hard push, the big guard dropped Sheppard's limp body onto the single bed. "Give him water," the guard said in a voice too low for anyone else to hear as he passed McKay. He unlocked the manacles from Sheppard's wrists and ankles, taking them with him, while his even less talkative partner removed McKay's chains.

 

The door shut with the heavy clunk, followed by the clunk and click of the lock turning. It was a plain room, with nothing but the bed, a window set high on one wall, some sort of chemical lamps, glass balls holding faintly glowing blue gel, and a washroom beyond an open doorway offset behind a carved wooden screen. Stone walls, tiled floor, and the bed, which at least had blankets.

 

McKay rubbed his wrists nervously.

 

"Not exactly home sweet home."

 

Sheppard, lying in a sprawl on the bed, groaned.

 

McKay made it over to the bed and crouched there. Sheppard was already sweating, glassy-eyed and pale. He groaned again

 

"Colonel?"

 

Sheppard flinched and clutched his hands over his ears.

 

McKay reached for his shoulder. When his fingers brushed Sheppard's skin, he convulsed, crying out.

 

McKay snatched his hand back. "I'm sorry, what, what is it doing to you?" Sheppard's skin had been burning like a man with a deadly fever.

 

Sheppard didn't manage to answer. He curled into a fetal ball and began rocking.

 

McKay remembered the guard's advice. He ducked into the washroom and found it had running water and even a drinking glass. He filled it and came back to Sheppard on the bed. Sheppard drank the water with a little coaxing. Then McKay perched on the edge of the bed as near to him as he could without touching, where Sheppard could see him, and waited.

 

Sheppard wasn't speaking, just breathing in gusting inhalations and exhalations through his nose, his jaw clenched. McKay figured he had to be hurting bad. Sheppard usually joked through anything, even getting shot, until he passed out.

 

Except Sheppard never passed out. He began screaming.

 

---

Moa

The hard, high, animal whine at the back of his throat belonged to him, even when Sheppard couldn't scream anymore. It rode every agonizing breath as the rest of his reality whited out, the pain so pure it overwhelmed everything, consumed his body, his thoughts, even his name. Nothing else was real.

 

An endless time later, he started to hear himself. He couldn't stop the sound. Every nerve in his body felt exposed, frozen and seared, flaring messages to his already overloaded brain. The first flood lasted beyond any enduring, beyond sanity, so pure he thought he'd die and welcomed the escape.

 

Noise hurt, touch, light, the water someone trickled past his lips, it was all acid on raw nerves, third degree burns over his entire body, barbed knives turning into bone, too many Gs crushing him internally.

 

He gasped for air and twisted mindlessly, trying to claw out of his own skin, barely registering that hands held him down sometimes and braced him later as he heaved bile and blood past his already raw throat. It was worse than coming back from the retrovirus, worse than anything ever. He wanted to black-out and he couldn't, even hours later when he hung in Rodney's arms, muscles still randomly twitching and seizing, like he'd been hit by a taser over and over.

 

The pain slowly retreated after that, but he felt afraid to move, afraid it would explode out of his muscles and bones again. He was cold and sweating at the same time, too miserably weak to shift if he'd wanted to and he didn't, Rodney's bulk and warmth were a comforting anchor.

 

He let the warmth settle into him, let it slide him into the respite of sleep gratefully.

 

McKay's voice woke him, rising and half-panicked, as his body was jostled and carelessly jerked upright. "Leave him alone!"

 

Sheppard cracked open his eyelids, braced for the light to shove a needle into his brain. He felt like he'd been beaten with Teyla's sticks, only distant and disconnected. His head was muzzy and the morning light was too bright, but didn't produce the agony he anticipated.

 

"Hey! Stop it, stop – "

 

The sound of a blow on flesh made Sheppard turn his head too fast, nearly sending him to his knees. A big hand locked on his biceps yanked him back up. He blinked, trying to see through the flaring halo around McKay's head, the guard that had just – what, backhanded him? – back lit by a window full of light. McKay had his hand to his mouth, his jaw set, glaring at the guard.

 

Sheppard swayed and the guard – the other guard, there were two of them, he finally figured out – actually steadied him. After a second, the world stopped tilting and his vision cleared.

 

"Bastard," McKay growled. Just like every time, there was a look in his eyes, like he just couldn't comprehend why anyone used violence – against him – when they could use their brains.

 

"Hey, don't – " Sheppard tried to say as McKay snatched at the first guard's arm. He was in no shape to get between the guy and McKay. His voice failed on the second word, too raw and worn to even sound like himself, but it drew McKay's attention.

 

"Colonel, are you – "

 

The big guard planted a hand against McKay's chest and shoved him back.

 

"The Haralim has commanded his presence. Be silent."

 

Sheppard almost laughed. Silence was not one of McKay's skills. But he saw the way McKay pressed his lips together. McKay's gaze met his. He could read the panic and worry there like a book he'd memorized. His voice was still AWOL, so he gave a little shrug accompanied by open hands, a 'what can you do?' gesture.

 

"You stay here."

 

McKay still looked mutinous, but backed away until his legs hit the rumpled bed. He sat down, still glaring.

 

Sheppard stumbled as his guard pulled him out of the room, still looking back at McKay, trying to tell him to just go along quietly until Sheppard could think of something to get them out of this. Even if his first plan hadn't worked out.

 

His escort stayed close on both sides as they walked. The one holding his arm offered an unobtrusive bit of support Sheppard was grateful for until his knees stopped threatening to buckle. He tried to keep track of the twists and turns of the halls they walked through, but his head kept going airy and out-of-focus. All he got was a blur of brilliant colors and intricate patterns interspersed with grilled over windows and stretches of golden-brown stone.

 

---

Submission

She was waiting in a green-shaded room. He couldn't suppress a shiver, seeing her stretched languorously over a lounge. The room felt like an aquarium, green and yellow tiles under his feet, tiny mosaic tiles on the walls in a random ripple of blue shading into green, lighter and lighter by layers toward the ceiling. One side of the room opened in a series of arches onto a colonnade and a lush garden. Curtains of nearly transparent gauze stirred with every passing movement or breath of air.

 

She wasn't alone. A dozen women were draped on couches and pillows and rugs strewn around the room, their murmuring like the lap of waves. He longed for the real thing, the sea salt tang of Atlantis' waters rocking his city on the ocean's cradle. Selket smelled of dust and sand and spice.

 

Some of the women looked up, their dark eyes sharp and speculative, watching as Sheppard was frog-marched into the Haralim's presence. Their voices rose like birds', speaking a language he didn't recognize, one that owed little to the trade tongue of stargate travelers. Insular, like this place and these people. It was lilting and liquid and Sheppard suspected it would be difficult to learn.

 

He didn't plan on being around long enough to try.

 

The hand still on his arm urged him down without being brutal about it. He went down to his knees because it was easier than fighting when he had the strength of an anorexic mosquito. He wanted to sneak a look and see the guard to his side. Just to mark him as a someone who had a little decency, even in the circumstances.

 

A child, a girl he thought, knelt beside the Haralim's lounge. Smooth dark hair fell down her back, over a white gauze shift, the ends tickling the soles of her bare feet. Her bare feet, the soles paler than the burnished darkness of her skin, and Sheppard had to swallow hard, because he'd already got it: bare feet equaled slave on Selket.

 

The Haralim wore gold-embroidered, green silk slippers with sharp toes. All the women wore skirts that showed their feet. Their shod feet. He swallowed again, thinking it probably started with just making it harder for a slave to run, but was a cultural thing now. His mind replayed the old Earth saying, barefoot and pregnant, because wasn't that the same thing, too?

 

The cool tiles made his knees ache. He tried not to think about being naked, on display, before all these women and that little girl. It wasn't like bodies were bad or even that he had any choice. Not like he was looking his best either, since he still felt achy and nauseous and had spent the night screaming and sweating. Psych games. Nudity in the company of those clothed resulted in a feeling of vulnerability. Just as deliberate as the bare feet and he couldn't let it get to him.

 

The Haralim sat up a little, tucking her feet to the side. Bracelets slid down her arms.

 

"So, you see, you survived the moa." She had a deep, rich voice that made even trade tongue sound lyrical. A voice like a red wine.

 

He started to answer, then pressed his mouth shut. Her lips curved into a smile. "Are you a quick learner?" she asked. "Have you learned your lesson?"

 

"Sure," he rasped out, wincing at the roughness of his voice and the hot sandpaper tightening in his throat.

 

The Haralim snapped a manicured hand at the little girl. "Bint, water," she commanded. The child obediently trotted to the side of the room, retrieving a tray with a pitcher and glasses. Water condensed on the side of the blue glass. The little girl set the tray neatly on the low table next to the lounge. With concentrated care, she poured water into one of the glasses. She brought the glass to Sheppard and offered it tentatively.

 

He took it, moving slowly, not looking at the child or anything but the glass. It was damp and slick under his fingertips. He wanted to gulp down the contents desperately, suddenly so thirsty he couldn't even swallow.

 

"Drink," the Haralim told him.

 

Sheppard struggled between doing what he wanted to do and refusing because she'd commanded it, just on principle. He could smell the water, feel the condensation soaking into his skin. His mouth felt like it had been stuffed full of paper, his lips so dry they would split if he spoke.

 

"Drink it," the Haralim said, her tone gone steely. The girl shivered.

 

Sheppard lifted the glass and drank, forcing himself to sip slowly. He let the first mouthful just rest in his mouth for a breath, before swallowing. The cool water soothed his dry tongue and painful throat, feeling so good he wanted to moan. His eyes fell shut as he savored each sip until the glass was empty. He opened his eyes again as he licked a stray drop from his lip.

 

The Haralim was watching him. So were several of the other women, so predatory he nearly flinched. He hid the reaction by handing the glass back to the little girl along with a smile for a thank you.

 

"Enough," the Haralim said suddenly. She turned her attention to the whispering women. "All of you. Out." She pointed to a door at the other end of the room. "Go."

 

Laughter and giggling and knowing looks were the response as the women, gauze and linen sliding over smooth arms and legs, gathered themselves and drifted out of the room. Some paused to survey John once more before going, whispering to each other as they passed out the door, their voices rising and falling away as they went.

 

"Bint," the Haralim said. "Go into the garden. At ninth bell, you may go help in the kitchens."

 

The girl returned the glass to its tray and trotted out to the colonnade, disappearing past a vine-covered column.

 

Only the two guards remained.

 

The Haralim rose and paced over to Sheppard. He lifted his face and met her eyes.

 

"Proud, so very proud, aren't you?" she said.

 

"Not really."

 

"Yes," she insisted and trailed one finger over his neck, unerringly finding the scar where the Iratus bug had fed on him and left the nerves dead, but somehow more sensitive everywhere around it. Sheppard shuddered at the sensation. "A soldier and a fighter, I think, yes?"

 

He didn't answer.

 

She smiled anyway and bent closer. "You survived the moa. I'm sure you think that you could survive it again. But would you want to if you knew you would have to endure it every night? Every night."

 

Her lips were stained with something almost purple, he noticed. They had a perfect bow to them, just the kind of mouth he always noticed, the kind he liked to kiss. Her eyes weren't really black. There were tiny amber spokes near the pupil. She was so close he could count the fine horizontal lines etched under her eyes, the crow's feet concealed beneath a line of kohl. She smelled something like orange blossoms, only a heavier scent, heady, with an undertone of musk.

 

The guard on his left made a small, involuntary sound. Sheppard tried to breathe steadily. He didn't want to give away how much that did frighten him. The pain had been beyond endurance. One dose and he'd wanted to die while it was at its worst. If he knew it was coming back again and again and again without end...Even now his muscles twitched and flinched at the prospect.

 

"In time you would die," she said. He felt her breath close upon his cheek.

 

"Maybe," he admitted. He'd probably want to.

 

"And your...friend?"

 

Sheppard felt his expression freeze, but he knew his eyes gave him away. McKay? McKay couldn't – he swallowed – he couldn't let McKay go through that. Not once, not ever, and what had he done when he asked this woman to take them both? She knew it, she knew it all, had read it in just a touch back in the market.

 

"What is he?" the Haralim asked.

 

"A scientist," he answered. "He's a scientist."

 

"A scientist?" she said thoughtfully. "A scholar?"

 

Sheppard nodded once.

 

"Shall I put him to work in the library?" She leaned closer. "Shall I keep him close?"

 

Sheppard didn't have a clue what to say, how to divert her from McKay. Jesus, he'd fucked up. He'd underestimated this place and this woman drastically. He swallowed. "I – "

 

"If you ever try to escape again, the scholar will be dosed with moa every day until you are captured; if you take him with you, then he will suffer for every day that passes for each of you before you are recaptured."

 

Sheppard closed his eyes. Oh, God. The memory of the moa was still too clear, of his own screaming, he could barely imagine enduring it again himself. He couldn't let McKay be subjected to it. Not even once, once was too much, not when he knew...He swallowed, his throat dry again. No escape plan was foolproof. A chance he could take for himself, but not for McKay.

 

"I understand."

 

There was a ringing in his head, a bell tolling. He couldn't think of any way out of this.

 

The Haralim brushed her fingers over his eyelids and Sheppard shivered. "Sh," she murmured. "We are not so cruel."

 

Sheppard couldn't answer. Her fingers were tracing along his temples.

 

"Open your eyes."

 

He obeyed.

 

"Good," she said softly. "You will have your scholar and I will have you." She stepped back, still smiling, pleased at winning. "I have looked for just such a one as you for a very long time."

 

Sheppard didn't know what else to do, so he bowed his head. He couldn't look into her eyes any longer. Her heard her chuckle and then her hand was in his hair, petting him. The first wave of despair crested over him and he floundered, shaking under her touch.

 

"What are you called?" the Haralim asked. "You and your scholar."

 

He licked his lip, then replied, "John Sheppard, Lieutenant Colonel, USAF. Doctor Rodney McKay, PhD."

 

"Those names are too long," the Haralim declared. "Slaves have only one name."

 

"Sheppard," he whispered. He could at least keep their names. Somehow keeping their surnames would keep it all at a distance. "I'm Sheppard. He's, he's McKay."

 

She laughed.

 

"No. You are John. Nothing more."

 

His breath caught. God, she saw through him, she seemed to know everything he was thinking. Her hand swept through is hair again, soothing and horrible at the same time.

 

"Who are you?" she asked.

 

"John."

 

Her fingers came to rest on his neck, on the knob of his spine.

 

"Freka. Take him to the baths, have him washed, then make sure he is fed, before turning him over to the trainers."

 

"Vai, Hara."

 

Freka, John filed away. Freka was the one who had helped hold him up.

 

The Haralim pressed her fingers down, against John's skin. "Please us," she said, "and you will be returned to your Ro'ney."

 

"Yes," he made himself promise. Us. Please us. She hadn't spoken of herself in plural before. Had she? What did it mean?

 

"Vai, Hara," Freka growled, cuffing John's head lightly.

 

"Yes, Hara," John repeated.

 

"Go," she told them. "Take him away."

 

John's legs were half-asleep. He staggered as Freka and the other guard pulled him to his feet. He felt numb and off-balance, dazed and cold with fear of what 'training' would entail. As he stumbled between the two men, the Haralim called out casually, "Seif, you will make sure that the other one, Ro'ney, is fed and understands his cooperation is guarantee for John's well-being and return."

 

"Vai, Hara."

 

Outside the green room, Freka said, "The Haralim has not chosen a bedroom slave before; you are honored."

 

John laughed. "Yeah, honored."

 

"Please her and the Rale and your life can be good here, outlander," Seif offered. He gave John's other arm a little shake, sending John reeling into Freka, who was a head taller and caught him easily. "Fail and there is always the moa."

 

"Seif!"

 

"If you value the other outlander, you will remember," Seif said. He sounded pleased by the prospect. "No one escapes the Seven Walls."

 

~*~

 

Four bells past midnight, the perfume of dew and a thousand tiny night-blooming cho flowers scenting the air under the indigo dark, a harsh voice woke him. "Ro'ney. Up!"

 

Rodney fumbled and lit a lamp, pouring in too much catalyst, so that the light flared sudden and too bright. It made him blink stupidly.

 

Two blurred figures in the doorway resolved into familiarity and Rodney gasped. Freka's hand locked round John Sheppard's elbow, holding and steadying him. Rodney scrambled to his feet, swamped by a confused riot of relief, anger, worry and delight. The tiles were cold under his feet and a scatter of forgotten parchments rustled, sliding from atop the bed to the floor.

 

"You'll probably want to clean him up," Freka said and then left John swaying in the middle of the room.

 

Rodney approached John the way he would have a wounded animal.

 

"Sheppard?" he said in a low voice. John flinched. "John," he tried again and this time got a response, a shudder that ran through John's body and the stained, ripped silks shrouding it. Rodney could smell the mingled scents of perfume, blood and sex from where he stood. He kept his movements slow, taking in the changes, absorbing everything.

 

The tips of John's hair were dyed scarlet. He was leaner than before, somehow looking smoothed and polished under the scratches and welts Rodney glimpsed wherever the silks were thin or rent. His lips were red, a smear of rouge spread from one corner, mingling into the dark line of a tear track drawn down from the kohl around his eyes. Those eyes were black, pupils blown from whatever drug still coursed through him, making his limbs tremble and his breath hitch in and out too fast.

 

"John," he said softly and ventured a touch, his hand on John's arm, slick silk under his palm and skin burning feverish hot. "Oh God."

 

Something must have got through the drug. John turned his head, his blind gaze finally finding Rodney.

 

"Oh God," he repeated as John slid down to his knees in a movement too graceful to be anything other than practiced.

 

Rodney dropped down too, kneeling, and caught John's shoulders before he could fold into a bow. "No, no, no," he repeated and, "Don't," and tried to find Sheppard somewhere in this painted stranger's face. Afraid, sick with it, for he found no recognition there.

 

He felt his heartbeat in his throat, his knees protesting bare skin against unforgiving tile, his back tensed into an ache running from the base of his skull to his coccyx. He felt John tremble under his hands. It required a patience he had not understood he possessed not to shake John, but he feared the result might break more than the brittle silence.

 

Between two breaths, as a bird sang its greeting to the sun, the muscle and bone beneath his hands tensed into rigidity then relaxed. The gray, secret light that ran before the dawn reminded Rodney that five bells would ring soon. John panted harshly, pulling his arms around himself, all the while with his head bowed.

 

"McKay," he rasped out. It was the first time Rodney had heard any name for himself beyond Ro'ney in six months.

 

"Yeah, me," he managed to say.

 

"McKay," John repeated. "You're all right?"

 

Rodney bit back the bitter words. He wasn't and could never be all right in this place after six months wondering and worrying, he was a slave here, but he could see that truth would not help. He'd suffered two lashings since arriving in the city for speaking when silence would have kept him safe. He could hold his tongue now. Desperate to know more than Freka and Seif would tell him, he had learned to listen carefully and, now, he heard clearly the desperation in John's tone; John needed him to be all right.

 

"I'm better off than you," he said acerbically. "Think we could get off the floor now? I've got better ways of spending my time and you need to wash up."

 

John looked at him, eyebrows drawing together in an expression Rodney recognized, equal parts amusement and irritation. His mouth lifted at one corner, a pale ghost of John's smirk, but welcome, so very welcome in this place, in the dawning day. "Really?" he drawled. "Saving the city?"

 

"You're kidding, right?" Rodney exclaimed. John's arms were still wrapped around his torso. "You are. This city? Please." He decided the best way to deal with John was to ignore everything John didn't want to address. "Come on." He rose, with one hand pressed to the small of his back, and offered John his hand.

 

John hesitated before taking Rodney's hand, his palm smooth, and Rodney saw his wrist raw, seeping blood between a crust of scabs. God, God, he thought and kept that too to himself, holding the hand in his carefully, drawing John to his feet, ignoring the short cry that John couldn't stifle, out of kindness.

 

So too, he did not address the bruises revealed in the bath, upon the pale skin of John's hips, the scratches scored down John's back, or the reddened mark of sharp teeth over the knob of his spine. John looked away and would not meet his eyes when Rodney offered a warmed, wet washcloth only to still, staring, at the dried blood that had run down between John's legs. He helped John sink down into the bath and stumbled from the room, biting his lip.

 

He dressed quickly, anger bleeding through into jerky movement and a button torn from his shirt and left on the floor amid loose parchment, and left through the main room and out into the corridor, his feet silent on the floor as he made his way to the kitchens.

 

Tein, the cook, was already there, broad face flushed and shining from the ovens' heat, the muscles in her forearms flexing as she worked the dough before her. A dozen other cooks stood at the sturdy tables, doing the same. The scent of baking bread filled the room. "Ro'ney," she greeted him. "Come to steal an early meal?" She smiled; she found his appetite pleasing and his insults rolled off her without pricking her temper. The eiff coiled around her neck trilled in response to the movement of her throat. Rodney suppressed a grimace.

 

He had grown used to them, but the first time he saw one of the legless insects drawn out of a gilded wicker ball, he'd shuddered and nearly thrown up. The eiff were harmless pets, though, and even useful. The crystals they produced were mashed into a sweet paste that when boiled down was as smooth as sugar syrup, only eiff syrup made you sleep. The raw crystals were a mild soporific and the refined forms had the interesting effect of suppressing emotion attached to memory. Rodney still didn't like the eiff, but he didn't yelp and run for the door when he saw one, either. Not even Tein's, which had been in her family for three generations, and grown to a python-like length.

 

"No," he said swiftly. "I mean, yes, something, but Tein-ve, I need some of the salve you brought me...before." The head cook had pressed a small, earthenware pot into his hands after Macha had him lashed for handling the Ancient devices in the Rale's collection, before Macha realized Rodney could activate many of them. To leave no marks, Tein had whispered.

 

Tein's gaze sharpened, examining him, uncombed, unshaven, unharmed. "Ro'ney-ve? You have not been – "

 

"My friend, Freka brought him back," Rodney blurted.

 

Tein's eyes widened. "The Haralim's chosen?"

 

"Ointment, antibiotic, bandages, the salve," Rodney said. He swallowed. "Something...for pain."

 

Tein lifted her hands away from the dough before her and gestured one of the other cooks to take her place. A cloud of flour flew from her hands as she slapped them against her apron, hanging in the air of the kitchen.

 

She caught another cook by the shoulder. "Jehmen, fix a tray for Ro'ney-ve and a second for...."

 

"John," Rodney said.

 

Tein nodded, while Jehmen hurried away. Rodney followed Tein to a cupboard near the chill boxes, taking the tray she handed him and holding it as Tein brought out the items he needed for John. Finally, she added a pot of refined eiff syrup. He looked at it doubtfully. “Eiff?”

 

"A spoonful in tea," she directed him, "to let him sleep. No more, Ro'ney-ve."

 

Rodney accepted the little pot, gave a jerky nod and hurried out of the kitchens. eiff was the Selketi would for ease. John might need it. In the corridor, he passed a guard and slipped to the side, dipping his head.

 

John remained slumped in the water when Rodney returned, cheek resting against the tub's edge, eyes closed. Rodney looked at him, at the knob of a narrow wrist balanced on one bent, bony knee, long fingers trailing into the water. He walked quietly and set the tray with Tein's tinctures and ointments down.

 

"I'm back," he announced. John's eyes blinked open and his gaze followed Rodney, painfully bright. Rodney found the soap and brought it to the tub, and then he busied himself finding towels. "While you've been...Well. Whatever. I have been engaged in cataloging the contents of an Ancient database."

 

"Cool," John croaked.

 

"It's damaged, some of the data is corrupted, but I've been making some progress," Rodney explained. He paused then brought the towels to sit beside the tub. He tested the water. It had begun to cool. "Here, let me – " At least the city had hot and cold running water. He used a carved lever and added more hot water to the tub. John shifted and moaned softly.

 

Rodney tested the water again. "Better?"

 

John nodded. His eyes were almost closed, the shadow of his lashes an irregular flutter over his cheeks. "Just sit there, okay?" Rodney said. He picked up the washcloth John had abandoned, wetted it and began wiping the kohl and rouge from John's face. John swallowed hard and went still. "Is this – "

 

"Anything," John said, his voice empty as the blank expression Rodney's washcloth was revealing. "It doesn't matter."

 

It matters, Rodney wanted to insist.

 

"Just tell me what to do," John continued, "and I'll do it."

 

"You're worse at taking orders than I am," Rodney said. "Really, Colonel, don't try to fool me. It's a wonder you made it to your current rank – "

 

"Of slave," John snapped. He looked angry and, then, in an eye blink, just tired. Rodney paused, horrified and angry himself.

 

"You're not a slave unless you accept it," he replied.

 

John didn't answer.

 

Rodney finished washing his face silently and, because John made no move to do anything himself, continued washing his back and then his chest, his arms and his hands. The painted patterns on his palms barely faded with the application of soap. Rodney had begun to learn some of the Selket written language. He recognized glyphs worked into the patterns, if not all the nuances of their meanings. He traced one absently with a fingertip, trying to remember if it meant 'life' or 'breath'.

 

John shivered and pulled his hand away.

 

"Sorry," Rodney apologized. Embarrassment burned through him for the way he had let himself become distracted and had been touching John, when every touch and every painted line had to be reminders.

 

"The trainers and handlers have something that removes it," John said, curling his hand closed. "So they can paint something new. It wears off in a few days, anyway."

 

He handed John the washcloth. "Maybe you'd better do this."

 

"Yeah."

 

Rodney hurried out of the washroom, his face hot, and then stared at the single bed. The sheet and duvet were tangled, half on the floor. Five bells were ringing and a soft rose light threw filigreed shadow over one corner. One bed. He already knew from Freka that everyone had assumed he and John were lovers when they arrived, but he didn't know what John thought.

 

Soft footsteps and the slightest clatter of china came from the end of the room concealed by the corner it turned. Rodney peered around and discovered Jehmen and one of the servers laying out a meal for two on the low table in the middle of the room. The dishes were all covered. The server hurried out while Jehmen fiddled with a brazier, lighting it and setting a silver-chased tea urn.

 

Jehmen was stalling, looking around, waiting to glimpse John, Rodney realized.

 

"If you're done, leave," he snapped.

 

Jehmen rose and gave him an insolent look. Rodney glared back. "You're just a slave," Jehmen muttered.

 

Rodney looked pointedly at Jehmen's bare feet. "Try showing the courtesy you'd want yourself," he said.

 

With an affronted flounce, Jehmen left.

 

Rodney turned back and quietly made the bed.

 

A soft curse from the washroom brought him back there. John was wrapped in one of the towels, one hand on the wall, bracing himself. His arm was shaking. His head didn't lift when Rodney slid his shoulder under John's arm and half-carried him to the bench where he had left the tray of medicaments.

 

"Thanks," John whispered.

 

Rodney nodded. He opened the pot with the ointment Tein had provided and dabbed some of blue-ish, sour-smelling contents onto John's raw wrist. "Carson would salivate over this stuff," he said. "It seems to kill any infection and even has some anti-viral qualities." John sucked in a harsh breath. Rodney gentled his fingers. "Damn it," he whispered. He followed the antiseptic with the salve. "This stuff is amazing. It doesn't help the pain, but there are no scars – "

 

"Yeah," John said, his voice rough, "the trainers had that, too."

 

"Oh."

 

Rodney finished with John's wrist and dealt with the other one, wrapping both in gauzy bandages, then moved around to treat the deep scratches on his back. The muscles under John's skin shifted under Rodney's hands. He waited until a little of the tension had released then squeezed John's shoulder once.

 

"So, are you here for good or is this just a ...prove the leverage is still alive visit?" Rodney asked while he worked. He pushed the towel away and calmly rubbed liniment into the bruises blooming under John's skin. Fingers didn't leave marks like that unless that had been the intention. Rodney knew John didn't bruise easily.

 

"I...don't know." John's knuckles turned white.

 

"I kept asking."

 

John winced and flinched through the rest of Rodney's ministrations. Neither of them spoke of the damage he tended.

 

"Look," Rodney said afterward, nervous and awkward, "there's food in the outer room. And tea." He touched the bottle of eiff syrup. "If you need something to sleep."

 

John shuddered and shook his head. "No. No, no more drugs." His voice cracked and Rodney jerked his gaze up from the bottle to John's face. It was too open, too desperate. He wanted to look away and he wanted to tell John he would take care of him and things would be okay. He couldn't do any of those things.

 

He could wrap an arm around John's waist, ignore how suddenly aware he was of John's skin, clean and still moist, and help him out of the washroom to the bed. John crawled between the sheets and curled onto his side, his back to Rodney. Rodney wanted to linger and just watch him a little longer, but the lengthening shadows on the floor told him sixth bell approached.

 

"I have to get to the library," he said at last.

 

John's shoulders stiffened. "Okay," he whispered.

 

"I want – I wish I didn't, but Macha is – "

 

"It's okay."

 

It wasn't, but Rodney couldn't change anything. If he displeased Macha or anyone, they could take John away from him again. He retreated to the washroom to prepare for the day, and, afterward, ate swiftly: paratha with spiced oil, tea, a sweet fruit like peaches diced and mixed in the Selket version of yogurt. A generous portion of that and several other dishes remained. He hoped John would avail himself of it.

 

As sixth bell rang through the city, Rodney walked back into the inner part of the room, to the side of the bed John faced. John's eyes were closed. He knelt and pressed his forehead to John's, closing his own eyes. When he opened them and pulled back, John was staring at him. He could see the darker rim of green ringing the irises and the golden brown around John's pupils. He was so close he could see the tiny lines that framed John's eyes, graven by years of laughter and squinting against the sun, and even a few ghostly freckles on the bridge of John's nose.

 

"I haven't given up, so you can't," Rodney stated. "You'll come up with some half-witted plan to get us out of here and I'll figure out how to make it work and we'll find Ronon and Teyla – "

 

"We'll never find them," John said. His gaze went dull. "And no one will ever find us."

 

Rodney gaped at him, the food he'd had earlier rising up his throat until his mouth flooded with bile. He swallowed convulsively. "No."

 

John nodded.

 

"You can't know – "

 

"Ronon's probably dead. You saw what happened to him," John whispered. The memory seemed seared into him, so that he saw it again, and not Rodney. "He doesn't know how to quit."

 

Rodney swallowed again. "Teyla?"

 

"I don't know...She could have been sold to someone worse."

 

"Worse than this?" Rodney demanded.

 

John swallowed hard, his throat working, and his voice, when he spoke, was almost too soft to hear. "There's worse. In training. Dullah showed me...I think. I don't remember...the drugs mess everything up...Just. I remember that."

 

"Training?"

 

John shut his eyes.

 

"Fuck them, we'll find a way out," Rodney swore.

 

"I don't know," John replied without opening his eyes. "I don't know, Rodney."

 

~*~

 

 

---

Quotidian

They didn't talk in the morning. Rodney displayed a delicacy that John hadn't expected and didn't press for anything beyond what John offered. Rodney poured tea into two cups. John folded his legs and sat upon the floor before the low table and shared the simple fare before them, the sun warm between his shoulder blades.

 

From that morning, if John did not share the Haralim's bed, he slept in Rodney's rooms, returning there no matter how late. John's clothing, gauze, silk, and leather – costumes, he thought of them – stayed a black-and-red lacquered wardrobe that appeared one day without explanation. When Rodney woke, John rose with him and ate, letting his friend's voice wash over him, familiar and comforting, and tried to respond the way he would have before, and drowsed when Rodney had gone, through somnolent hours until the sun's zenith. In the afternoons he went to the handlers, to Lisha, to be prepared, dressed and painted for the Haralim. After that, he went either to the Haralim's rooms to wait or to kneel at her feet like another pet wherever she held court for the day.

 

Those were the worst days, in many ways, when he both relied on and had to fight the careful conditioning Dullah and Lisha had subjected him to for three drugged months. To remain still and expressionless, without betraying either the humiliation and contempt he felt for the Haralim's court of twittering ladies or, worse, his traitorous body's reaction to simply being in her presence.

 

He was ever aware of her. Rich scent seemed to smoke from her pores and fill his every breath, while manicured nails sharp as razors often played with his hair or delicately stroked the tip of an ear, until he shivered and his breath hitched despite himself. Dullah and the trainers had been thorough. Heat rushed through him at the very thought of her and the thousand and nine variations of the ways he might please her, the endless ways she might please herself with him. He would close his eyes and she would laugh and that too resonated through his flesh, so that he shuddered with each peal and turned his face blindly into her her hand. Then he would kiss her fingers and taste her skin and his own blood. Only when he was trembling with need would she abandon her game.

 

There were other games. The Haralim might spend a day on a single game of roes, calling on a guard or Hara Besma to take the third side. The golden glyphs on the pyramidal dies seemed to burn his skin with the lingering warmth of her hands. He concentrated on remembering that a clever game pleased her as well.

 

All his concentration, all his poise, all his self, washed away in a rush of desire when the Rale joined his sister-wife.

 

Walls of heavy stone radiated the chill of the desert nights through the drowsy afternoons, while the Haralim's household occupied itself. Besma sat close enough to speak softly with the Haralim. Bint knelt between the two women, holding up an elaborately decorated gold coffer that held the Haralim's favorite sugared confectures. John knelt on the Haralim's other side, leaning his cheek against the carved arm of her chair. The Haralim's fingers rested lightly, absently, on the bare nape of his neck. He let his eyes half-close.

 

Boots on stone snapped his attention to the doors at the end of the salon. He looked without moving, a trick that served him well in this place, though he had perfected it as a rebellious teenager enduring his father's lectures. Two guards opened the doors with deep bows as the Rale strode in, followed by the Haralim's guard commander, Idris, his own bodyguards, and Tulem, his aide-de-camp. The soft voices of the ladies disappeared.

 

"Enough," the Rale told Tulem.

 

"Vai, Rae."

 

"Go, visit your wives."

 

"Ah, I know who it is who wants to visit his wives," Tulem laughed and then left, while the Rale crossed the room to stand before the Haralim.

 

He stopped so close John could have reached forward and touched one red leather boot. John locked his fingers into the gold manacles on his wists instead. He drew in the scent the Rale brought with him: pale rose-red dirt dusted over the boots, dry winds, and something that was indefinably outside, that was freedom.

 

"Djemet, my husband," the Haralim greeted him. The hand that had rested on John's neck rose, beckoning the Rale closer. The rings upon her fingers, gold and jeweled, ruby, jade, amber and amethyst, glittered; the colors swam before John's eyes until he remembered to breathe.

 

"Sister," the Rale returned her greeting. He took the hand she offered him and kissed her palm and then the inside of her wrist. She sighed under a breath that came quicker. "You are well?"

 

"Very well," the Haralim replied. She stroked John's hair. Her voice was smoky, filled with a secret pleasure. John shivered at her tone, so hungry and full of promise. They might send him away and spend their night alone or they might play with him until the sun burned over the horizon again. He didn't even know which he wished for anymore. He hated the way he responded to both of them, even if it made it easier in some ways. The Haralim must have felt that faint quiver, for her fingers stroked over his nape absently, the way she might have soothed a cat. John didn't let himself push into the touch, but he wanted to.

 

"My beautiful Zuleika." The Rale leaned forward and down, and fitted his lips to the Haralim's, kissing her, mouth open, with no care to the presence of anyone else in the room. He braced one hand on the chair arm next to John's face. John could count the dark hairs on the back of the Rale's hand, see the small, pale scar on one knuckle, the carved signet on his smallest finger, a ripple in the nail of his index finger as though it had been smashed once and never grown smooth and straight again. The urge to lean just an inch closer and set his lips to the back of that hand made John's heart beat too fast.

 

He wanted to squeeze his thighs together, but training kept him still. Training kept him aching and swollen with too much sensation just from being so close to them both.

 

John squeezed his eyes shut. A rougher than normal thumb rubbed over his cheekbone and he snapped them open. The Rale smiled at him. John gazed into his eyes, feeling like he was floating in a warm haze, thought fragmenting with each stroke of the thumb on his face. Sensation shrank to that point of contact and the hazel eyes holding his. He could hear himself panting and helplessly shifted his hips, seeking some relief, only to whimper as the thin, loose silk of his pants slipped over the head of his erection, too light and smooth to provide the friction he craved.

 

"It has been two cycles." The words weren't for John, were addressed to the Haralim, but John still listened and watched through his eyelashes. He was so attuned to the Haralim, he knew without having heard it spoken before: she had conceived. He bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted his own blood. Two months gone and the Rale had been been in Hunet three months.

 

The Rale's hand dropped onto John's shoulder, hard and hot through the silk John wore. He shuddered. "Send them all away, Zuleika," the Rale said. "All but your Chosen." His hand smoothed up to cup John's jaw and lift his face. John blinked at him, dizzy and half sick with too many swirling emotions.

 

The Haralim clapped. "All of you! Go!"

 

Hara Besma gathered her shawl and rose. She smiled at Idris as she swished past him, pausing the disentangle a silver tassel from the braid on his sleeve. Rings flashed on dark fingers that lingered a moment longer than necessary on Idris' arm. The other ladies and their servants disappeared ahead of her. Only Idris and the bodyguards remained, all well trained to watch without seeing.

 

The Rale ran his thumb over John's lips. John forgot everything but staring up and that softest pressure upon his lower lip. Again, the seductive caress traced his mouth, syrup slow. John's lips parted and the Rale smiled. The trainer's lessons moved him to respond reflexively, to want, and he did, heat uncurling deep in his groin.

 

"Bint," the Haralim said, dragging John's attention back to the room with the sea-green tiles, the guards, and the girl who knelt on the other side of the Haralim's chair, making him feel dizzy and sick. He'd forgotten Bint was present. Even so, even so, training held; he gave nothing away, flicking his tongue against the pad of the Rale's thumb as he slid his gaze to the side. "Fetch me the jade box," the Haralim instructed, so that John's breath caught, "then take yourself to the kitchens. Instruct Cook to prepare my husband's favorites and send them to my private rooms. You may stay in the kitchens or the gardens and you may tell Cook to give you a sweet."

 

"Vai, Hara." She bowed low, forehead to the floor, before the Rale. "Rae."

 

"Obey the Haralim," he said when she remained bent before him, then added, "Pretty child," as Bint sped gracefully from the room. In the months John had dwelled within the city, Bint had grown inches, coming into a coltish grace that promised to become aching beauty. His stomach twisted at the Rale's comment.

 

"Peta's child," the Haralim replied, a thread of steel underlying her tone. "Djemet...."

 

His fingers were still warm against John's cheek. John turned his face into them, pressing closer, hoping to distract him. "I would not dally with a slave of your Household, Zuleika," the Rale murmured pleasantly. He patted John's cheek. "Without your permission."

 

One of the guards smothered a cough; John's face went hot with humiliation.

 

"I have missed you, Djemet," the Haralim said. Lustrous dark eyes considered John and the Rale. "I give you leave to use my Chosen."

 

Later, there would be the jade box, the cup and the dranzi, the carved ivory toys, the slick oils and supple leather restraints John had come to expect. Later, the drug would make even pain sublime and he would be lost, while the guards watched, and the Rale made the child the Haralim carried his by taking John. Until then, the Rale stood with his booted feet on either side of John's bent knees and there was his hand, pressing against John's neck.

 

John brought his hands up to the Rale's hips and slowly began unfastening his belt. His hands were steady.

 

Later, he loved them both, thrilled and joyous to please them, and he did not care that his body betrayed him over and over again.

 

His skin still hummed when the Haralim dismissed him from her bed. The sheets still caressed him and the drift of cool night air from the window, even the tiles smooth beneath his feet. He bit back a whimper of need sparked just by the weight of the silks he drew back on. He could barely remember his name when the Rale chuckled. He wanted to crawl back in the bed between them, to drown in sleek skin and knowing hands.

 

He swayed with each step, too much sensation flooding his senses, aching need building everywhere. The corridor outside the Haralim's rooms stretched infinitely, the mosaics brilliant by lamplight, the colors sending spikes and waves of pleasure through him. The reds and the golds slipped and wrapped around him, the greens were still and wet, the blues hurt. He stumbled against the wall and rubbed his palm over it, feeling the colors lick at his skin. Each tiny piece of tile kissed him. It was too much, too much dranzi, and he couldn't think clearly enough to find his way anywhere. He was going to press against the wall and rub and rub until he came.

 

"Damned to the Wraith," someone said, pulling John around by his shoulder. John blinked at an almost familiar face. Freka. "What are you – ? Dranzi. Come on then, Dullah will know what to do for you."

 

John moaned and closed his eyes. Freka's voice ran all over him like a brush of fur. He wanted to twist himself into it. He wanted...Dullah? No, he thought hazily. Not the trainers. "Rodney," he made himself say.

 

Freka laughed and John shivered, wishing he wouldn't do that, wouldn't speak, wouldn't put that guiding hand on his shoulder, because it all aroused him and he was afraid they wouldn't reach Rodney's quarters before he was ready to beg Freka or anyone to help him come. Just enough of the edge had worn from the drug that he could hate that more than he'd ever hated anything. He was miserable and hard when Freka led him inside the L-shaped room Rodney shared with him.

 

Rodney was bent over the low table, slowly feeding strips of parchment covered with his distinctive script, intricate equations that must have taken hours to work, into the tea brazier. Acrid smoke stung at the back of John's throat. Rodney's shoulders were rounded, his head lowered, and all his attention bent to the work he was destroying. John went across the room and sank down beside him. He couldn't stop himself from leaning in, resting his face against the Rodney's back. Body heat soaked through Rodney's shirt into his cheek. He pushed back and forth like a cat and hummed.

 

Rodney jerked and turned. "Jesus, you're late this time. What are you – " John stared at him, bereft of contact again, uncertain what Rodney saw, unable to summon any words. He plucked at a tassel on the pillow under his knees. The silver thread that made it scratched against the pads of his fingers. Rodney swallowed. "Again?"

 

The bruises and the aches were winning through the dranzi. John knew he would hurt the next day. It was still strong enough to make him gasp when Rodney touched his face just below his eye. He nodded. "Please," he whispered, unsure what he was asking for. "Please, Rodney."

 

"John," Rodney protested. "It's the drug."

 

John's breath hitched.

 

"Make it me again."

 

Rodney took John's hand, turned it over, and traced his finger over the pattern Lisha had painted there. John's eyes fell half-shut. He wouldn't touch himself. It didn't matter; Rodney's fingers on his palm were as exquisite as a mouth, sizzling his nerves into overload. He shuddered and came in a hard pulse that was as much pain as pleasure.

 

Rodney kept hold of his hand, squeezing it, as John folded over and rested his forehead in the hollow between Rodney's neck and shoulder. His breath whistled out in a whimper and Rodney pulled him closer. John twitched. The last dose of dranzi was already fading and instead of feeling good, Rodney's fingers hurt when they brushed against the bite marks on his shoulder blades. He couldn't stop himself shaking, gasping wet, helpless sounds against Rodney's neck as he tried to crawl in closer to Rodney, to some kind of anchor. Words kept escaping him, incoherent and half-sobbed. Don't want to, can't, shouldn't feel like that, anything, anything, why...why with him?

 

"Dranzi makes everything feel good," Rodney murmured.

 

John squeezed his eyes shut. The dranzi always came later.

 

"It's still rape," Rodney said quietly.

 

John shook his head, unwilling to even look at Rodney or explain that most of the time all it took was a word, a look, a casual touch to arouse him and make him want sex with the Haralim, that just being in the room with the Rale made him swell into readiness. Rodney closed his hand over John's nape, just the way the Rale did, and a wild shudder of heat flashed through him. He clutched at Rodney and mouthed his neck, licking at the taut tendon desperately. He was hard again and rocked himself into Rodney's hip mindlessly, until he remembered he was supposed to please his partner and wriggled his hand between them. Rodney froze under his attention. John tentatively stroked, but Rodney wasn't hard. John stilled, then tore himself away from Rodney. Panic whited out everything else.

 

He came to shoved in the corner between the wardrobe and the garden window, curled into a fetal ball, hiding his face in his hands. Light seeped through his fingers, incandescent white and yellow and orange pouring through skin and flesh. His breath sawed in and out fast and shallow and his muscles quivered, stiff and too tense. He was rocking himself, scraping his back against the wall and bumping his shoulder against the wardrobe's side.

 

His eyes shut again, he let his hands fall away, stopping his motion with his back against the wall and his head resting there. A hot stripe of sunlight fell over his foot. When it moved up to his ankle, he made himself open his eyes.

 

Rodney sat on the floor, just far enough away he couldn't touch. A bruise marred his cheek bone. Red, just darkening into purple and green. John guessed he'd put it there and felt sick enough to close his eyes again while he fought down a wave of nausea.

 

"Back with me?" Rodney said when John opened his eyes the second time.

 

John licked his lips and then nodded.

 

The light haloed Rodney. Every eyelash, every seam on the white cotton shirt he wore, including a triangular tear over his chest, the stubble on his cheeks, the intense blue of his eyes...John saw it all. Rodney's throat worked.

 

"Please don't do that again."

 

"I'll go back to the training barracks," John said, dull and flat. There wasn't enough eiff syrup in the city to make this stop hurting.

 

"What?" Rodney frowned. "Are you – You're an idiot. Don't scare me like this again, okay? You freaked out, you've been out of it for hours. Jesus, John. I didn't know if you were having a drug flashback or if that bastard gave you an overdose. I was scared to even touch you."

 

"I'm sorry." He didn't know what else to say, so he repeated it. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

 

Rodney stared at him intently.

 

"God, John it isn't your fault."

 

It was. It was, John thought, it was, because he wanted it. They'd trained him to want it, but the underlying inclination had to have been there. Like a flaw this place had magnified until it was splitting him open and all he could see were the secrets he'd locked inside himself.

 

"Listen to me," Rodney said. He spoke slowly, not like he was talking to a stupid child, but like he needed John to hear him and believe him. "Can I say no?"

 

John gazed back at him, horrified. "Of course, you can say no."

 

"I didn't even have to say no, did I?" Rodney waved at him, while his mouth twisted to the side. "That's why you're trying to fuse your spine into the wall."

 

John waited, guessing Rodney had more to say and was rewarded by Rodney's decisive nod. "Whatever you want, whatever it feels like, John, good or bad: can you say no?"

 

John couldn't answer.

 

Rodney stood up with a sigh and rubbed the small of his back. "I'm too old to sit around on cold floors all night. Ouch." He extended his hand to John. "Come on. Hot water awaits us. And, frankly, you smell like a Turkish whorehouse."

 

"What do you know about Turkish whorehouses?" John asked, struggling to act normally again. Rodney snorted a little huff of air out and wiggled his fingers. John took his hand and let himself be drawn to his feet. It galled to admit, but he was too old to spend the night on a cold floor, either, and he hurt enough wish for a painkiller.

 

"I'm a man of surprising facets," Rodney said. He tugged on John's hand.

 

John would have let go, but Rodney didn't and led him into the washroom.

 

Steam rose from the water Rodney started filling the tub. He watched it, watched the precious water tumble from the water spouts, until Rodney squeezed his hand, and then looked up. Rodney looked concerned again.

 

"No," John said, answering Rodney's question belatedly.

 

Rodney nodded. John began undressing, grimacing when his pants stuck to his groin and not appreciating Rodney's chuckle. Rodney's question stayed in the back of his mind through the rest of the day, until he repeated the answer and found some comfort in it.

 

---

The Rule of Three Women

Kitchen gossip was the best.

 

Rodney was convinced of this.

 

Mid-meal he took with Macha and Piele and the other librarians at a wooden trestle table cleared of parchments and scrolls, slates, crystals, discs and pile after pile of books, some with spines wider than his hand from heel to fingertip, some no thicker than three slips of tissue. The Rale's library contained every variety of information storage known to Pegasus, gathered from more worlds than Rodney had visited. He still missed his laptop.

 

Macha talked.

 

"Adif. Oh, Adif, they called him the Lion's Claw," Macha told them all enthusiastically. The rest of the librarians listened, along with Rodney. Macha flicked one of her many gray braids back over her shoulder and leaned forward. The silver bracelets on her wrists clinked against the tabletop. Macha was something of a historian and loved to talk. Her favorite subject was the Rales and their wives. "He united our planet."

 

Read subjugated the secondary continent with brutal dispatch, Rodney thought. Adif sounded like a three way cross between Ivan the Terrible, Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. After nine centuries, he had assumed mythic proportions for the Selketi.

 

"Adif murdered his sister's husband and their sons," one of the other librarians muttered when Macha was busy, later. "Then he married her."

 

So it was a tradition, the Rale marrying his sisters. Kept it all in the family and if a sister-wife was not faithful, any child was still a descendant of Adif. No competition from rival branches of the family on Selket. Their family tree had no pesky branches, just a smooth trunk with all the limbs lopped off. If a Rale had any brothers, they were put to death once an heir was sired. It was still rather like a lion taking over a pride on the veldt, but the Selketi had no problem with it.

 

Piele, Rodney's scribe, twitched when Macha talked about the succession wars before Adif. Rodney didn't blame him, but he wondered what it was like wherever Piele came from. He didn't ask, as there was something wrong with Piele's vocal cords that kept him quieter than Rodney – and Rodney had learned silence. He was afraid to ask whether the Selketi did the damage or if Piele was born this way. Piele was like Rodney: a luxury item, not Selketi, taken from some other world. A cold, dark world, probably, for he was pale, gray-eyed and miserable on all but the coolest days, his spidersilk hair matted to his skull with perspiration.

 

Rodney tried to remember to be kind to Piele, who was even more alone than he was, and huddled over his work, and stayed in the shadows, flinching from everything.

 

Rodney at least had John some of the time.

 

"Keder Rale is living on borrowed time."

 

Two of the librarians were talking in low voices, pretending to catalogue the scrolls Piele transcribed from Rodney's dictation, really gossiping. Instead of television, the Selketi had palace gossip. Maybe it was different outside Seven Walls, outside the fortress surrounding the Haralim's palace, outside in the city or the countryside or on Hune, the second continent. There was no way to know. Slaves weren't allowed to wander. Rodney stayed bent over the console displaying the parts of the database he had managed to access. The Ancient words scrolled down a hologram screen while the nib of Piele's pen scratched over parchment; the contrast made Rodney's head ache. Rodney paused the display while he tried to make sense of what he was reading and then half his attention was again caught by the murmur of voices. Every snatch of information was something that might be the key to surviving. His fingers went still on console as he realized he had stopped thinking escape and substituted survive.

 

"The Haralim is with child."

 

The Rale's brother wasn't the only one on borrowed time. John wouldn't talk about what happened in the Haralim's bedroom, but his body was easy to read. Rodney knew she wasn't the only one using John. He just didn't know what that meant. Was John safer or in more danger? Was the Rale complicit in the Haralim's plans? What would happen when a new heir was born?

 

Rodney pinched the bridge of his nose, breathing through the panic he felt crawling up his throat. Piele coughed and Rodney opened his eyes, noticing how he was squinting over his work.

 

"Add to your lamp," Rodney told him, because this part of the library was kept dim to facilitate reading the half-powered hologram screen. The generator, hidden behind a folding silk screen painted with a scene from one of Adif's battles, hummed in the background. The Selket kept their technology hidden. At first, Rodney thought they were hiding from the Wraith, but it was aesthetics: the Selketi considered technology a necessary ugliness and preferred the 'old ways'. The richer the Selketi, the more tasteful their abode, the less obvious technology appeared. Piele obediently added another drop of catalyst to the lamp globe, sparking a brighter reaction from the chemicals inside.

 

"The Rale," Macha said reverently over another mid-meal. "Our Rale." They had all been the Rale, since Adif Rale. This one was Djemet. "Djemet, son of Hamat, son of Fazel, son of Raben, son of Barat," Macha recited to Rodney, on and on, all the way back to Maríd, son of Adif and Harat, his sister. "Wishes to learn all the secrets of the Ancestors. You are privileged to serve him." Rodney nodded and ate another piece of meat from the bowl before him. "Fortunate," Macha repeated, "he is not like Hamat Rale."

 

Rodney heard about Hamat Rale in the kitchens.

 

Rodney preferred the kitchens, on the nights John was gone, and sitting on a stool, eating with the cooks and the servers. He preferred their honesty and sly jokes to the librarians' departmental bickering and the wrong-headed scholars he itched to lambaste for their sheer stupidity. He would have, but he didn't relish the prospect of another whipping, nor helping anyone who was part of this place.

 

"I was a washer when Hamat was Rale," Tein explains him. Her head came to Rodney's shoulders, dark hair streaked gray and chopped brutally short. It didn't matter because Rodney was usually seated, listening to her as she bustled and bossed around the kitchen. She had a faint lilt to her voice. The only other Selketi Rodney had heard sound the same was Freka, who it turned out was Hunese. "We used to work all night to get the bloodstains and other filth from the sheets and rugs." She stopped setting out spices on the board before her and rolled her eyes. "And that wasn't as bad as the seamstresses' job, trying to repair or make new clothes for his 'favorites' over night."

 

"I think you make this stuff up," Jehmen commented, passing behind Tein to snatch a pot of some ground-up green paste used in a marinade. He batted long, black lashes at Rodney and swished his narrow hips as he returned to the trays where he was assisting another cook prepare meat for the next day's meal. "She wants to scare you because you're an offworlder."

 

"You are an impertinent, ungrateful wretch, Jehmen Dar," Tein commented.

 

"But so pretty at it," Jehmen laughed and twirled dramatically.

 

"You won't be so pretty if I set you to washing pots with Sosa's crew for a month."

 

The undercook working with Jehmen cuffed the back of his head lightly and Rodney had to look away, reminded of John suddenly. He stared at the wall of gas-fired ovens until he had shoved the memories of other times down ruthlessly. "Are the gages working?" he asked, pretending that had been the reason to stare so long.

 

"They are," Tein replied. "We haven't lost a loaf of bread since you repaired the ovens."

 

"That's good," Rodney said and everyone ignored the uneven sound of his voice.

 

"Before Djemet the Ralimas ruled," Tein told him as a distraction.

 

"The Ralimas?"

 

"Hamat's widows."

 

"One of them was the Rale's mother?"

 

Tein nodded. "Mihri. Such green eyes she had." She gave Rodney a considering look. "She was an offworlder, like you and your friend."

 

"A slave?" Rodney asked. These were the things he needed to know. Was there any way out of slavery on Selket? Any way John and he might be freed from the Haralim's household?

 

"Until Hamat made her his second wife after Jazan." Jazan was Hamat's Haralim according to Macha's lectures. Zuleika was her daughter, so Djemet was her half-brother. Djemet was two years younger than his first sister-wife, a couple of years older than his half-siblings Zoyan and Keder – their mother was Galina. Rodney bit his lip. It was worse than memorizing Biblical begats, but all the intricacies of Seven Walls politics lay squarely within the bounds of who was related and how. Mihri might have risen from slave to wife to tripartite ruler, yet none of that had let her leave Selket or even the City of Seven Walls. The Rale wasn't going to marry John even if the Haralim produced a son. Or free him, unless it was something like freeing John's head from his neck. If that happened...There wouldn't be any point to getting up or translating the database or finding a way out for himself. John meant more than any of the things Rodney had once considered important. Rodney wouldn't kill himself if John died; he just wouldn't really live, he'd discovered how much a part of him John was during the months when they'd been separated.

 

"But even that was not enough for Mihri," Tein added. "Not for Mihri, not for Jazan, not for Galina." She had told the story before. The words were smooth like river stones, tumbled against each other until all the edges had been washed away. She picked up a fillet knife, the slim blade a flash of silver. Sharp. Up, down, up, down. "They killed him in his own bed. They tied him down and used his own knives, the ones he liked to use on them."

 

It made Rodney shudder. He did his best to hide it. Pinched his lips together and looked scornful. There were mornings when John flinched wildly from his touch, but there had never been any cuts, no whiplashes scribed into John's back or anything that looked deliberately sadistic. He looked down at the table, staring as Tein set the fillet knife back on the butcher table. Tein's eyes were small and dark, raisins in a broad pudding face, and they saw too much, had from the first night when she showed up in his room after the servers brought back the third meal he couldn't keep down because of the pain in his back from a whipping. Her mouth pinched then, too.

 

Her hands flew up, fingers splayed like splatter as she finished the tale, the other cooks chorusing with her: "The ceiling was red with blood."

 

The kitchen staff all laughed as Tein grumbled over trying to clean the ceiling afterward, but Rodney knew she was warning him. Rales had died. So had their wives and those loyal to them. Luxury items were always disposable.

 

His next free hour, Rodney padded through unfamiliar corridors to the training barracks and asked for Dullah. "Teach me," he asked. The last time he saw the slave trainer, he was half-unconscious from a whipping. His memories weren't fond, which Dullah could guess, so the request startled him. Rodney stuffed down the satisfaction he felt at that. He wanted to know how to prepare John for the Haralim, to save him at least from one set of strangers' hands. Needed to know what they did to John so that he could help him fight it or at least live with it.

 

He would never learn all the tricks and skills the trainers had, but after a month of spending all his free time watching and listening to one of them – Lisha, the one who took care of John – Rodney learned enough to take over that task.

 

"I can do that," he said to John on a morning when the bells rang the hours while the dawn was still colorless and dim and the winter sun would not throw its pale lemon light through their window until late. He brought out a tray with pots and jars and brushes meant for the task. John stared and finally licked his lower lip nervously. "You won't have to go back to the barracks this way. Lisha showed me what to do. It's not like it's rocket science, John, don't look at me like that, like it's weird – because I know it's weird, but I thought this would be better."

 

"Yeah," John replied softly. "I – It's – Thanks."

 

Rodney tried to talk the first time, but it was too awkward and everything he said trailed away, smothered in John's silence, in the awful way he was still and compliant as the slaves in the barracks.

 

Rodney slipped out of the library at mid-meal and ate in the kitchens. The food was better anyway and he just didn't think he could listen to Macha sing the Rale's praises one more time. With his typical luck, the kitchen was filled with servers, all teenage girls, all twittering and cooing over the romance of it, that the Rale and the Haralim were in love, that Djemet never slept with anyone but Zuleika, that they were having a baby. One of them said, "I hope the baby has the Rale's eyes." Rodney choked on a chunk of fruit and ended spitting it on the floor, horrified and angry and humiliated.

 

No one said anything, so once his embarrassment had faded – by lunch of the next day – Rodney went back to the kitchens.

 

Tein tried to teach Rodney to carve vegetables into tiny flowers and fish meant to float on the top of soup. After three days of mutilating root vegetables, Rodney set his knife down and grimaced. "I've never been much of an artist," he mumbled.

 

Tein glanced at his unrecognizable efforts and snorted. She scooped up the bowl and dumped the contents into a pot. "You'll be eating it," she said. Next, she put another bowl in front of him and a basket of tubers. "Peel."

 

"Now that I can do."

 

Late that night, Tein did feed him the stew made from the less attractive leavings of the meal prepared for the Haralim and her coterie. Rodney imagined John eating the carved fish that Tein showed him, detailed down to the scales and fins. He bit into a pale orange chunk, crisp as water chestnut and sighed. John wouldn't be eating at the table. He would be kneeling beside the Haralim's chair and whatever he had would come from her hand. That thought made the stew go stale and unpalatable. John was here, unable to escape, because he wouldn't risk Rodney's life again. He was trapped and Rodney knew it was slowly eroding the things John thought made him who he was.

 

"Keep a bowl of this aside for John," he asked Tein. She nodded. "Thanks."

 

After the servers had brought back all the dishes, mostly empty – Tein noted which were not – she sat down opposite Rodney at the butcher table with a pot of lavender-colored tea and two warmed cups, pouring for one for him and then for herself. Only a faint dip to her shoulders, a slight down turn to her mouth, gave away her exhaustion. She opened the cage she kept her eiff in and let it coil, trilling, around her arm, feeding it fresh moa leaves absently from a shallow bowl. Eiff ate nothing but moa. Little pots of it were everywhere in the city, except in the room Rodney shared with John. Even the scent of the leaves, distinct as fresh basil and feathers, made John sweat and pale.

 

"Hamat was mad," she confided. The undercooks were lethargically directing the apprentices in the clean up of the day's dishes and the preparation for the morning. In a palace the size of the City of Seven Walls, the kitchens were never empty, never quite still; there was always work. "No one was safe from him."

 

Rodney turned the cup in his hand, watching the liquid swirl in it. He had noticed only recently that Coriolis force sent things spinning counter-clockwise on Selket and only then thought how everything turned clockwise on Atlantis. The memory had been a painful jab, the way every memory of Atlantis seemed to be now. He had begun to believe he wouldn't ever see his city again. The possibility even existed that Atlantis was gone, victim of some catastrophe in his and John's absence.

 

A book on property law had revealed his and John's position. Most slaves belonged to the Haralim or the Rale's households, and were passed on with the title, but they'd been bought offworld and belonged to Zuleika. Only she could sell them or give them away and if she died without an heir they would be freed. Not that that had happened in the history of Selket; the Rale dynasty had endured unbroken since Adif. He'd tell John about it later since it was all academic. Zuleika Rale was young and vital and with child.

 

He glanced up.

 

Tein traced a pattern over her forearm and Rodney's gaze sharpened, seeing the faintest lines of old scars carved into her flesh. "Do you know why they killed him?"

 

"Not from here, remember?" Rodney snapped, still staring with mesmerized horror at the scars. Taking into account Selket's slightly longer than Earth normal year, the date of Hamat Rale's death and Tein's present age, she could only have been twelve or thirteen...He knew there were girls who had sex that young on Earth and historically had been married and even pregnant, but it still made something lurch in him, some voice in his head yell wrong wrong wrong and that wasn't even taking into account that what Hamat had done had left scars. Physical scars.

 

"He instructed Jazan to bring Zuleika to his rooms that night."

 

Zuleika, Rodney thought through a numb haze. The Haralim. Hamat's daughter, who would have been nine then.

 

"God damn it," he muttered.

 

Tein nodded and waved Sosa, the older man in charge of the dishwashing crew, over. "Tell Ro'ney-ve about Hamat's guards."

 

Sosa grinned, exposing remarkably white teeth. "That's a good story."

 

"Try to keep it short, I'm feeling a little nauseated here," Rodney said.

 

Tein's mouth curled up in a half-smile on one side. Sosa leaned over the table, his reddened hands splayed on it. Behind him sounded the chink and ring of dishes moving from soapy water to rinse and then to racks once they were dried."Bijah Hidal was Hamat's Vizier. While the wives dealt with Hamat, Bijah had every guard loyal to Hamat killed." The kitchens were humid with steam and Sosa's teeth gleamed in a face shiny and red with sweat. "The morning the Rule of Three Women began, there were a thousand heads on the ramparts of the Fortress. They say he did it for Galina, because Hamat would have killed him and her if they were caught in an affair."

 

Rodney sucked in a breath. He'd seen the ivory gleam of the skulls still there as he and John walked into the Fortress behind the Haralim that first day. Serving girls might giggle and sigh over the romance of it all, but they sighed over tales of a Haralim's Chosen giving himself into slavery to stay with his lover and Rodney knew the sad truth of that tale. He did not care to be reminded that most folktales ended in some sort of tragedy, not when he was caught in one. He had never believed in happily ever after.

 

He bid Tein and Sosa both good night and accepted the covered pot of soup and another with bread to take back to his rooms for John. It was hours later before John returned, but he ate after he bathed and before he crawled into bed with Rodney. Rodney didn't roll over to face him but quietly told him the things he had learned during the day. He was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, at the moonlight shadows etched in blue on black. Sometime while he spoke, John's fingers wrapped lightly around his wrist and stayed there. His breath was damp and warm on Rodney's shoulder when he muttered, "Christ," at the description of Hamat's death and its reasons.

 

"Is he like that?" Rodney asked. In the dark, not looking at John, he could ask.

 

The fingers around his wrist tightened. "No." A hoarse, unamused chuckle followed and puffs of breath against Rodney’s bare skin. "He's pissed."

 

"What?"

 

John paused and sighed. "That I'm necessary."

 

"For how long?"

 

John's shrug rippled through the bed and they both pretended to sleep. Rodney watched the shadows slide across the ceiling, until the sharp edges dissolved in the dull grays of dawn. It was harder and harder to imagine life outside the Seven Walls. It still hurt when Rodney made himself remember he and John weren't the people this place was shaping them into being. Worse when he started seeing the ways they were becoming part of this life and less and less the men who had served Atlantis. Talking about the past didn't help either of them now: they were left with only two things to believe, either Atlantis couldn't find them or they had been written off. John accepted the latter. He'd always considered himself expendable. And Rodney was still and always pessimistic enough to believe the former. Neither offered them hope or comfort.

 

He used a quiet moment, while Macha was lecturing one of the other librarians about leaving lamps on and wasting chemicals, to poke through some of the newer books until he found one with what he wanted and took it back to the room with the Ancient console and database. He paged through The Rharalimat while Piele fetched parchment, reading between the lines with the dry recitations of dates and deaths. The Ralimas ruled for eighteen years after Hamat's death; Djemet was twenty-five when he assumed power. The book didn't say how that came about, but Rodney wasn't really surprised to read that the Ralimas all died on the same date or that Bijah Hidal, unofficially exiled to Hunet during their reign, succumbed to a 'fever' the next day. He merely wondered if Bijah's ceiling was red.

 

John joined him in the kitchen that night, along with the Haralim's other favorite slave. When he did talk, John sometimes mentioned the little girl. He liked children – unlike Rodney – and had befriended Bint with that easy charm Rodney remembered from as far back as Antarctica. Bint wasn’t terribly annoying, Rodney had to admit. For a child.

 

They'd both come from the Haralim's receiving rooms and were still in embroidered and spangled finery. The bells at John's ankles chimed and semi-precious beads gleamed with color in the net of gold covering Bint's dark hair.

 

"You're early," Rodney commented.

 

"The Haralim retired early," John said.

 

Bint flashed a white smile up at him, her slim hand still held in John's. "We played roes all afternoon and I won." John smiled back down at her.

 

"What did you win?" Tein asked, carefully drying her hands before resting one on Bint's head.

 

"My choice of desserts," Bint answered with satisfaction.

 

"After you've eaten your real meal," Tein said.

 

Rodney watched Bint pout a little and didn't blame her. He'd always considered that dessert should come first, too. Why not eat the best part when you were hungriest and would enjoy it most?

 

John jumped as Jehmen swished by him, looking at him in a prissy, wide-eyed way that had Rodney grinning despite himself. "Did he just pinch me?" John whispered.

 

"Probably."

 

"The Haralim has good taste, even if the eiff is too big for its cage," Jehmen said wickedly.

 

John's mouth dropped open while Tein and several others within hearing sniggered. Rodney threw a lime-colored turnip thing at Jehmen's head. It hit with a thunk. John was still looking confused and shocked. Rodney patted his arm. "He just meant you're a little on the old side – "

 

"I'm not old."

 

"Older than most bed – " Rodney stopped, then deliberately said the most distracting thing he could think of: "Anyway, he wasn't commenting on your trouser snake."

 

John blinked at him then burst out laughing. Bint climbed up on the stool next to Rodney and John leaned against the table in the old, boneless way.

 

"Here," Tein said, setting down plates in front of the three of them. Rodney noticed several dishes he simply refused to eat placed in front of John.

 

"That's marinated eyeballs," he pointed out in the spirit of friendship and not experiencing John spitting one out and onto him.

 

John nudged the dish over to Bint. "Here, I'm sure they're good for you," he said with a smile. The smile didn't fool Bint. She pushed the dish right back at John.

 

"Even a ten-year-old girl isn't going to fall for that," Rodney chuckled. John leaned into him, nudging his shoulder into Rodney's, warm and solidly there and at ease. In Atlantis, Rodney might have shrugged John away, irritated and impatient with the infringement on his personal space, but not here, not now.

 

Tein brought out a selection of desserts, all fit for the Haralim herself, and let Bint choose which she wanted while prattling about whatever gossip she had heard. It was surprisingly interesting stuff, things John never mentioned, but then people didn't see Bint or ignored her: they all watched John.

 

"Tulem Nabil has divorced his first wife."

 

John ate some of the whipped, creamy thing that smelled of spices and possibly citrus. Rodney concentrated on Tein's version of baklava, created for him from his descriptions. Tein's version was better than the real thing, honey-sweet and rich, the pastry paper-thin and made from nut flour, the color like a wheat field in the last hour of the sunlight. "Tulem's the Rale's secretary," John mentioned when he had swallowed.

 

Bint dived into her dessert and went on talking between mouthfuls. "She was sleeping with Hara Lilin, but that's not why he's put her out," she said. "She helped her brother embezzle Tulem's money! He's had to sell his grandfather's estate in Babhun to pay his taxes and her bride-price."

 

"God, some things are universal," Rodney muttered and felt John's shoulders jerk as he laughed hard enough he had to set his spoon down with a clink against his half-empty dish.

 

"Rae Kimal broke his leg and three ribs trying to climb the seventh wall," Bint told them, grinning with glee. "He was drunk, of course."

 

"Of course," John murmured dryly.

 

"And I saw Hara Besma meet with Commander Idris in the Blue Garden again." Bint finished her dessert and looked hopefully at Rodney's. "They're having an affair." He pulled the plate closer and glared. With a sigh, John pushed his over to her. She dove into it enthusiastically.

 

"That child is going to have a stomach ache tonight," Tein observed.

 

"Not our problem," Rodney replied, setting his hand on John's arm. Tein chortled and two of the serving girls, who had been mooning discreetly over John from the other end of the kitchen, giggled.

 

“You can look, but don’t touch,” Jehmen told them. "Right?" He hoisted himself onto a counter and regarded John and Rodney with the cocked head and bright eyes of a crow watching a worm.

 

Rodney ignored him and savored another bite of dessert. For one blissful instant, with John beside him, he felt almost happy.

 

Bint's voice interrupted that.

 

" – Seif cornered me in the Long Hall yesterday. He stuck his hand up my shift." Bint stopped and looked around the kitchen. Everyone was staring. Tein's fingers closed convulsively over her forearms, over her faded scars. Jehmen's mouth had fallen open. Sosa stood with a plate dripping suds onto the stone floor in his hands. Beside Rodney, John didn't even breathe.

 

"Seif," Tein repeated.

 

Rodney felt sick. Seif was one of the guards that had 'handled' John and him from the first day and beat the hell out of them both after their escape attempt. He'd enjoyed it, too. It had been obvious in his expression. Luckily, he usually worked with Freka, who kept him in line.

 

"I'll kill him," John said softly.

 

Tein held her hand up. "No, you will not."

 

Two of the serving girls were at the table now, ignoring Rodney and John, fierce in their own way, sweeping Bint away with them, full of soft chatter and softer questions; before they were done, they would know everything Seif had done or said.

 

Tein was already busy at the butcher table. It looked suspiciously like she was making candy. Rodney watched in disbelief. Candy? She was making candy when they had just found out that one of the guards, a Selketi they couldn’t touch, was molesting Bint? Beside him, John was quivering with anger and that frightened Rodney, too. This was the man he knew in Atlantis, the one with a ruthless streak under the charm and an insane loyalty to those he called his own, but if John did anything to Seif...Rodney shuddered at the probable consequences.

 

Tein stopped in the middle of her task and fetched a bottle from her medicaments cabinet. The bottle was yellow glass and the contents were murky and colorless as she poured a spoonful into the candy mix. John went still next to him.

 

"You won't eat these," Tein instructed Rodney as she finished preparing the sweets. "They're Seif's favorite, I've heard."

 

Five days later Seif was dead.

 

Kemahet, Macha mentioned, was a common medicine used to induce abortions. A droplet was enough and there was no taste to it. Some people thought the Haralim lost her first child due to a plot by Keder, that she was given the drug. Of course, that tale was not true; the Haralim's first child was born and buried only days before the end of the Rharalimat. Other stories said Jazan murdered her daughter's first born – whether to maintain the Ralimas' rule or to hide that it was deformed. Whatever the truth of that, no one spoke it and no one spoke Seif's name again, either.

 

Rodney didn't look at Tein the same way after that, but he still took his meals in the kitchens when he could.

 

 

---

Bell

The cup, like the liquor, was kept in the jade coffer.

 

The cup held two sips. Dranzi never tasted the same twice, it tasted like nothingness. The liquor was thick as honey, cold in John's mouth, even when he warmed it in his hand before drinking. The cup was glazed white, the liquor was peridot green. It smelled of mint. John had grown familiar with it during his training. He hated it. His body loved it.

 

The glyph inside the cup was 'submit'.

 

John did, with as much grace as he could muster. To kneel with supple grace, and wait in perfect stillness, was the first lesson and the last that Dullah had drilled into him. He'd never been good at waiting. Too impatient. He'd always wanted to fly, to follow his thoughts, to leave the dull ground behind. Flight was all in the moment for him and eventually he'd learned to accept the moment he lived in now. He listened to the bells, until the sound was a still emptiness in his mind, and he was in it. Otherwise, he would have fought or run from what he knew the night would hold.

 

He'd been Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard of Atlantis and Earth, once, but now he wasn't. Now he simply was the Haralim's Chosen, and no more. The fear that he could never be anything else again shuddered through him every time he realized he didn't need the cup any longer.

 

The Haralim lifted the silk away from him and he followed its hem with his gaze, the dazzle of a gilt charm reflecting the long gold light of the afternoon. Black traceries of shadow lay over the floor, cast by the intricately decorated grills over the windows. The floor itself was a mosaic, a single Selketi word: desire. John knelt in its center.

 

She let the silk fall in a pool of red. "Come."

 

"Vai, Hara." Even the words were scribed into him now, part of his breath and bone beside whatever Rodney had written on his flesh, the patterns Rodney traced as if they could ward John against hurt.

 

John followed her to the bed, in the bedroom redolent of incense.

 

The Rale was there, half hidden in the shadows, darker than John, paler than the Haralim, sprawled in a heavy, claw-footed chair.

 

John sank to his knees again and pressed his forehead to the rug covering the floor. He shuddered once, feeling his whole body flush with want, with the need to please. This was what he was in this place: the Haralim's gift to her husband-brother. He could barely breathe as he listened to the clink of the rings Djemet always stripped off before touching him. This was what Rodney couldn't save him from, from himself, from this terrible want.

 

Words dissolved on his tongue. The taste of nothingness, the sound of bells, every caress learned in the time between cup and cup, such was all that was left in the hollow where he used to be. He forgot himself as Djemet drew him to the bed.

 

He was opened and burned, crying out face-down, bruised and forced even as he offered no resistance. That was what the Rale wanted. A hand at the back of his neck, harsh, pressed him down into the sheets that bunched in John's fists. Always this first. He gave into it, lost himself in the rhythm, the sensations. Filled, taken, pinned under the other man's weight, fucked breathless and gasping between spikes of pain and brighter pleasure when the Rale raised his hips and thrust over and over again, chest hot against John's back.

 

He could come from just that now; it left him humiliated and hungry, desperate for more and more.

 

"Mine," Djemet growled into John's neck, all hot breath and teeth, harsh and breathless in the moment before he jerked and climaxed.

 

Djemet and Zuleika tangled together in the aftermath, Zuleika laughing and whispering obscenities and endearments in her husband's ear, "He is yours and what he gives me is yours," while John lay spent amid soiled sheets the color of forests, watching bared skin through hazed eyes, sinuous contortions, hearing murmurs not meant for him, while the hours passed, before Zuleika brought out the jade coffer and they turned their attention back to him.

 

Djemet was lean and long as his sister, younger, child of an offworld slave according to what Rodney had told him. When John's mind wasn't hazed with drugs, he could study the other man, notice things like a puckered red scar running up the inside of his thigh to his balls. It looked ugly and must have been painful. It looked like the reason Zuleika had needed a bed slave, one that shared Djemet's, rare among the Selketi, coloring.

 

There were secrets inside secrets in the Seven Walled City. That scar was a secret John kept. He hadn't described it to Rodney or what he thought it meant. He thought Rodney had figured out enough from the timing, though. John curled onto his side and watched them make love, until their voices rose in completion. He thought of plots and heirs, assassins and cuckoos. The Rale needed an heir and Zuleika meant to give him one.

 

Then there was the cup, smooth porcelain held to his lips, the scent of mint bringing him to erection before he swallowed. They both touched him, hands sure and possessive, bringing him to the brink, making him beg, breaking him to their pleasure. They smiled and kissed, they teased him to desperation, while dusk dyed the room blue and turquoise, and they bore him down on the bed, laughing. He ached and twisted, shaking, helpless, needing, and they bound him with silken cords wrapped around the golden manacles, around his ankles, his knees, his thighs, until he was spread wide, stretched and displayed and taken beyond himself.

 

Every shiver, every shudder, and the bells chimed, giving him away; his body rang to each touch.

 

The Haralim sank onto him and John bucked upward, wild, while the Rale twisted three fingers deep inside him, making him gasp. Sparks burned through his nerves, lighted behind his eyes, and his muscles drew taut. Zuleika ground down, her hands flattened over his chest, sharp nails drawing John's blood, tightening internal muscles around him, her white teeth flashing. He curled his hands, bound high over his head, into fists, pushing up into her heat, down onto the Rale's merciless fingers, rhythm lost, out of control. Stared into the Rale's black-fringed eyes – hazel eyes, his eyes – watching his own reflection in them as he came.

 

They treated him like a pet afterward. Djemet untied him, then ignored him, while Zuleika sprawled across the bed, her fingers over her rounding belly, her head upon Djemet's thigh, long black hair a tangled curtain across his groin. Djemet stroked a finger over her throat and she murmured to him in Selketi, words that belonged only between them.

 

John slid from the bed, trying to exit discreetly. He knew they were done with him for the night. His legs buckled under him and he clutched for support as he went down, pulling at one of the sheets inadvertently. Djemet looked up from stroking his hand through Zuleika's tangled, sweaty hair.

 

John knew he wasn't supposed to see this, to understand this. His breath caught, then Djemet gestured for him to go.

 

He bowed his head, gathered the silk pants and the veil, and backed out of the bedroom, his limbs still trembling.

 

---

Confection

An insistent drum pattern repeated beneath everything else, the deepest beats echoing into the palace's floors, the highest like the crack of bones. Melodies coiled around the steady slap of hands, braided through the whistle of horns, adorned with the chime of cymbals and a shushing rhythm from something like a maraca. John's nerves twanged to the sound of the strings and he flinched sometimes, when the hybrid sitar-bagpipe wailed like a skinned cat.

 

He could ignore the music. It was harder to ignore the conversations. He'd learned Selketi during his training and couldn't tune them out. The dining hall was a creation of deceptive artifice. The walls were decorated with a mosaic portrayal of the Ancestor Zuleika was named after — repulsing the Wraith from Selket with balls of blue fire around her hands — no knowing if she had been ascended or just had some nifty weapons. That wasn't the room's little trick. He'd been in rooms that allowed you to hear a conversation at one end uncannily clearly at the other through a fluke of construction; the Haralim's hall surpassed that. Hidden controls in the arm of her chair changed baffles in the ceiling and let her listen in to whichever table she chose.

 

“— putting in new vines along the south slope."

 

"That will mean opening another warehouse in Benara, unless you mean to ship directly to the markets — "

 

It went on and on for hours and most of what anyone was saying was excruciatingly boring. The servers swayed among the low tables with studied grace, bare feet sure on the floor, trays never wavering as they knelt, no matter what liberties the Selketi gathered to partake of the Haralim's entertainment took with them. They were very generous with the wine, but they would be. The Haralim was gathering intelligence and wanted to loose her guests' tongues.

 

"The prices are better in Hunet."

 

"But the shipping costs for fresh produce are prohibitive and the intercontinental tariff takes another bite out of the profit margin."

 

John occupied himself locating and identifying which diners the Haralim was listening to and found these easily enough: two scions of the merchantry, heavy heads bent toward each other, and a rae considering investing a substantial chunk of household monies with them.

 

The musicians behind the carved, wooden screen at the far end of the hall were probably weary after hours of performing. John was exhausted just from kneeling by the Haralim's chair all evening, keeping his back straight and his face expressionless. His knees and thighs and even his neck all ached. He was thirsty.

 

"Not as bad as with the offworld products," one of the merchants aid. "Have you seen the textiles Rae Ghisla brought through the gate, though?"

 

"The filmy stuff?" the rae replied. "I can't imagine what use it could be — "

 

"It's tougher than leather, has to be cut with acid."

 

On the other side of the Haralim's chair, Bint knelt too, but she'd tipped over until her head rested against the arm of the Haralim's chair, and a surreptitious glance proved that her eyes were closed, too. Lucky Bint. John couldn't sleep while essentially on display, even if the Haralim would have tolerated that behavior from him. For an instant, he thought she was stroking Bint's hair, then noticed her fingers on the baffle controls. The acoustics changed and suddenly the words from another table were clearly audible.

 

"Is that Hara Lalin? Paint me surprised she received an invitation."

 

"Isn't her uncle the minister of ports?"

 

Two women speaking and John identified them by the way they were staring at Hara Lalin. Lalin, who was as beautiful a woman as John had ever seen, was oblivious, busily flirting with her table companions, a white-haired scholar-poet and a young army captain. Both appeared enchanted with her, but she had the talent to appear just as enchanted with them.

 

"Tulem's seated with the Rale, though, and his wife isn't here at all. None of the Madras are."

 

"Not like the Bijals."

 

"Hara Besma should be more discreet."

 

"It's isn't Besma who should be discreet, it's Idris. His family is a cadet branch of the Madras."

 

John switched his attention to a nearer table, studying the interaction between Besma and Idris. Bint was right, they were involved; it showed in every glance and aborted touch, in the way she leaned toward him. Idris was better at maintaining a poker face.

 

The music wavered into higher dissonant notes that floated over the stream of sound. He wondered if this was the group that had played for the Haralim before, when Rodney had been an utter idiot and let her see he had talents beyond the library. He wondered when this evening would be over. The sheer boredom was killing him. He didn't care who was sleeping with whose wife or how many new vineyards could be planted in the foothills of the Lalo Mountains, nor who was in disgrace or who, like Besma, had the Haralim or the Rale's favor. No one spoke to him; no one even saw him as anything more than a pet, something that couldn't be expected or encouraged to think. The only attention paid to John here meant hot eyes and straying hands; such attention he could do without.

 

" — Rae Keder."

 

"It's been over a hundred years, hasn't it? Since they used the ambo in the city center?"

 

"They've even cleaned out the sewers under Adif's Square. I think the Rale means to use it; why else bring Keder back from Hunet?"

 

The Haralim drummed her jewel-decorated nails on the chair arm. She didn't like the topic the latest victims of her eavesdropping were sharing.

 

"Do you think Keder knows?"

 

"He had to know when the Rale came to Hunet."

 

"Why else would anyone want to go to Hunet?" the younger man laughed.

 

The Haralim brushed her hand over her waist. The draperies of silk wrapped round her hid the thickening evidence of her pregnancy. John fought the impulse to stare at her hand. That was...He stared at the mosaic on the wall, that showed the Wraith burning in a blue flame.

 

Fingers brushed over his shoulder. He looked up.

 

"Your Ro'ney pleases my husband," she said. Her mouth curled into a smile. What pleased Djemet generally pleased her. Pregnancy was softening her features, even her temper, but nothing softened Zuleika's eyes.

 

John wanted to snap, You mean your Rodney. You own us both, after all. He didn't. Don't make waves, fly under the radar when you can, smile and lie and swallow all the bitterness; that's what he told himself. That's how he got by. He didn't speak at all, because she hadn't told him that he could. She stroked his cheek, then offered him one of the sweet, sugar-powdered pieces of fruit Hara Besma brought her regularly. He took it delicately, closing his teeth on the candy, and his lips over her fingertips sensually. He chewed and swallowed and tried to hide how little he liked that particular confection.

 

She could read him, though.

 

"Perhaps I shall give the rest to Bint."

 

John caught his breath and nodded minutely, thankfully. He really didn't like the confections, but Bint adored them. The fruit, grown on the second continent, reminded him of a dried pear, but faintly sour. It had made Rodney's lips swell and gave him red hives the one time he tried it. John had sat up all night, listening to Rodney breathe, afraid of all the things he couldn't do if Rodney stopped.

 

The Haralim clapped her hands together. Once.

 

The music stopped, the conversations, even the clink of flatware on china. All eyes were on her. Even the Rale, who sat at his own end of the table, watched Zuleika. Down the table, Hara Besma stilled with a blown-glass goblet in her ringed hand, dark gaze flickering toward Idris briefly. Light through the wine cast a red stain over the tabletop.

 

"A demonstration," the Haralim announced. "A marvel of the Ancestors brought to us, a gift of my husband." She gestured to one of the side-doors. The gold-embroidered silk of her green sleeve slid back from her wrist, catching at last on bracelets she wore, gold too, glittering by lamp light, bright and smooth against tea-colored skin. She snapped her fingers.

 

The Selketi used metal taps on the heels and toes of their shoes. They clacked sharply against the marble floors. The four guards who wheeled the piece of Ancient machinery into the middle of the room made enough noise to cover the low voices of those watching. Enough to cover the scuff of bare feet as Rodney followed them in.

 

John thought he could feel the Rale watching him.

 

Someone had dressed Rodney all in blue-green, fine stuff, and his hands and feet were painted; not the patterns John wore, but Selketi glyphs that identified him as a belonging of the Haralim. Despite everything, he held his head up and stared back at those watching him. His lips were pressed together, thinned bleak, one corner of his mouth sliding down, and a frown crossed his features when he finally saw John.

 

John kept his own face blank.

 

"Ro'ney," the Haralim said. "Show my guests this wonder."

 

Rodney huffed out a breath. John could read his lips as he muttered under his breath, 'Wonder, hah. It's a tourist's guide book.' He could even hear the sarcastic inflection in his head.

 

The device had the typical look of most Ancient technology: a bronze-gray alloy, angular, corners smoothed, all twisted, long lines. A single opal-pale half-sphere dominated the center of a triangle that stood waist high. Crystal keys were arranged on each side. Rodney's fingers played over the keys, as deft as they'd been while working on a damaged jumper or any of Atlantis' systems. It made John blink hard. Sometimes it was hard to believe in Atlantis, that it hadn't been a dream, that he'd hadn't always been here, yet it still seemed more real than his memories of Earth.

 

Light spun up and expanded from the half-sphere, filling most of the room. Stars and planets and stargates turned above them. In the center of the room, a projection of an Ancient formed as Rodney pressed another key. Slim and smiling, dressed in the ubiquitous white and beige they'd favored, she gestured to a green world and a stargate, the open wormhole glowing pale blue, the ripples of light chasing themselves across the walls of the dinner hall. Even the holograph of the stargate made John ache; it had been so long since he stepped through one, since the Haralim purchased Rodney and himself and brought them from the slave market, on whatever world that had been, to Selket. The woman in the holograph began speaking in Ancient and John suddenly understood Rodney's remark. The Ancestors' marvel was a holographic tour guide selling a sightseeing tour through the Pegasus galaxy, pre-Wraith. Six days, sixteen stargates, and an overnight stay in the beautiful city of –

 

Then the holograph displayed Atlantis and John had to close his eyes, his breath hitching audibly, because he wanted to go home.

 

Atlantis.

 

How could he have forgotten it, any of it?

 

Whatever joy Rodney had taken from making the holographic displays work was stripped away from his face too, when John looked. He looked stricken, staring at the holographic vision of their city turning in the air above. An impatient cough from somewhere in the room startled him into motion again. He tapped another key sequence and the display switched to another city, another planet, a place like cobwebs woven between trees ancient and skyscraper high. He cycled the display through a dozen other worlds, vistas of a great natural wonders and cities that had long ago been destroyed by the Wraith. Gate addresses that John and Rodney would have both been lobbying to visit in another time, even knowing they'd likely find no more than ruins.

 

The display blinked out and John couldn't look at Rodney anymore. He bowed his head. It was no use. There was no escape and no rescue, no one alive to carry the truth of what had happened to them back to Atlantis. He'd thought...But it was more expedient to write them off as a loss. Rodney was certainly someone Atlantis needed, but John knew how it worked, and two Earth humans and two Pegasus natives were an acceptable loss, compared to the sort of search it would have taken to find them. Elizabeth would have pushed for an effort, but she was a realist, too. Sooner or later, she'd had put through a report in the weekly databurst that SGA-1 were MIA. By now, life had gone without them.

 

John felt lightheaded and brittle, as though his limbs were made of papier mâché, and he was hollowed out inside. He was never going to see Atlantis again. There was no escape. All this time, he'd been fooling himself, telling himself he was biding his time, looking for the loophole, the perfect chance...and that was the trap. He'd fallen for it, just the way he could not guess how many others had. John ached. That was where Rodney belonged, not playing court magician to bored, semi-literate alien aristocrats. Right now, Rodney was in the Rale's favor, but how long could that last? He'd adapted amazingly well, but it was all wrong, seeing him muffle his intelligence and even the arrogance that could be so damn irritating. John had made his choice to keep Rodney safe when the Haralim threatened them both, but they weren't really safe, it was security on sufferance. How long would that sufferance last once she had what she wanted from him? He'd be an awkward reminder; hell, a dangerous loose end, once the heir was born. He thought she might be, in her own way, almost fond of him, but that wouldn't stop her doing what she considered necessary. What would happen to Rodney then? He'd had no problem with possibly dying in an escape attempt himself, but risking Rodney had been different, he thought. He should have offered Rodney the choice, instead of accepting the Haralim's devil's bargain. He'd failed Rodney without even realizing it. No matter the danger, he should have been working on an escape plan, he should have focused on that, not just survival.

 

He let out his breath. The last hologram flickered out, the Haralim's hand tightened on John's shoulder. The dinner went on, while John watched. He'd been in other hopeless situations. He'd got out. Or Rodney had saved them. The key was never giving up, never giving in to the despair. He'd been wallowing in it for months now, too stunned and shocked at his situation, or flat-out drugged stupid, to think clearly. Even with the Wraith bearing down on Atlantis, even with the Wraith beaming into the city, he hadn't felt like this. This was a hole so deep he couldn't find the sky or any light to find his way out. And the worst moments were the ones when he found it bearable, when he knew he'd begun to accept it. He had to fight that, despite the weight pulling him down, or he would drown here, in incense and pleasure and easy forgetfulness.

 

The Selketi went offworld, they used their gate for trade, there had to be a way to escape. He couldn't give up yet. He owed it to Rodney, who was still trying, even more than to himself.

 

He couldn't allow himself to think about what would happen if they did escape, either: of what he would leave behind, Zuleika's hand on her belly.

 

Rae Kimal staggered to his feet and lifted his goblet. "To the Haralim and an heir!"

 

John flinched. The heir, the baby, God, his...Only not, except genetically. The Haralim's child would be raised Selketi, raised to rule or marry and never question the rules which meant power for a few and slavery for others. A Rale, not a Sheppard. Thinking about it made things twist inside his chest. Could he make some difference if he stayed? Providing the Rale didn't have him disposed of? And if he did, if he gave up on escape, what about Rodney? He had a responsibility, damn it, that he couldn't disregard for a possibility.

 

He didn't fool himself that if they managed an escape there would be any chance of returning and taking the child. If that was even something he wanted or thought would be wise. What would be he do with a baby? Pawn it off on an Athosian family and visit when he could or send it back to Earth to be fostered out or adopted? If Earth hadn't succumbed to the Ori or some other threat between the last news from there and now. Atlantis hadn't been a place for children even when the Ancients built it; for all its wonders, they'd never found a nursery, a school or playground. Wherever the Ancients had raised their children, it hadn't been in the city. Liking kids wasn't the same as being competent to raise them.

 

"Vai, vai, vai," the other guests shouted, stamping their feet in a clatter that served as applause. Each of them poured a mouthful of wine onto their plates then drank deeply. Half-way across the room, Rae Keder poured the entire contents of his goblet away, red splashing over the edges of his plate. No one acknowledged his gesture, though many noted it.

 

A soft whisper from someone caught John's attention. "I'd take the poison, if it were me. The Rale will behead him if he doesn't."

 

That was what every other brother superseded by an heir had done for the last four generations. Unless someone had done them the kindness without waiting for a decision. It left a bitter taste in John's mouth, wondering how the Rales and their wives, generation after generation, had second sons with the knowledge – the intention – that they die when the next Rale's heir was born.

 

Keder was no better than Djemet, but he wasn't just taking the easy way out, either. He wasn't bowing to the inevitable. John watched him, surreptitiously, the rest of the evening. Both their fates were suspended, time trickling away from a nine month hourglass. He felt sick, all his instincts rebelling, when he considered allying himself with Keder and what it would involve. There were only a few things John could offer in exchange for Keder's aid, after all. Access and betrayal.

 

The music began again at some unseen prompt. Rodney followed the guards out of the dining hall, casting one last look at John. John caught his breath. He didn't really believe they could escape, but he couldn't tell Rodney that. The Haralim stroked his cheek. John leaned into her touch without thought, then clenched his fingers around red silk. There had to be something that was still his choice.

 

Keder, then, no matter how risky it would be.

 

---

Jesses

A puddle of silk like a pool of blood.

 

Rodney set the lamp on the low table, next to the copper bowl holding oil and flower petals. The perfume permeated the room. The copper glowed warm, beaten by hand into its shallow shape. It was the only warmth in the room, where the windows gathered the morning light inside and transformed it into blue shadows as the afternoon wound into dusk.

 

He pressed his hand to his back once, feeling the ache of bending over Ancient texts and equipment in the Rale's library hour after hour. Macha wanted more. The Rale wanted more. More toys, bits of Ancient tech made to work again. More translations of the text, data that was so far beyond the Selketi's present technology that their language didn't contain even terms for what Rodney was finding. The irony was killing him. Atlantis had had this in the database, too, but they'd never deciphered the Ancients' filing system enough to find it among the glut of information. But this database was so damaged, he'd decided to concentrate on what wasn't corrupted and found weapons development and physics, the mathematics of the universe as the Ancients had understood it. As he was beginning to understand it. The irony was going to kill him; yes, because it was so utterly useless to him now.

 

He wasn't willing to give this to the Selketi. He'd become a poet, translating ZPM physics and mathematics into Selketi passion poetry, the secrets of nearly limitless power encoded into odes and sonnets and limericks dirty enough to make Catullus blush. Piele didn't read Ancient, none of them did, not enough to understand the lies he was feeding them. And in the mornings he painted the secrets of the Ancients onto the flesh of their descendant, engraving them into his memory.

 

He didn't know if John paid enough attention to the decorations to recognize equations hidden within the patterns. John pulled himself so far inside to endure that Rodney questioned whether he ever looked at himself anymore.

 

His eyes burned. It was so futile.

 

"Damn it," he said out loud.

 

Now this.

 

He picked up the cool silk from the floor and folded it in half and then again and again, his hands moving without conscious thought, and finally laid it aside, helpless to delay or deny any longer.

 

Their room was an ell-shape. Though they had no doors, the turn hid the bed from where Rodney stood.

He lit a second lamp, opening the lid of the bowl holding the inert gel and activating it with a drop of catalyst from the bottle of lighter that nestled in a niche at its base, then carried it around the corner. He had found the lamps fascinating when they first arrived. The gel glowed until the chemicals were exhausted or a second catalyst was added, stopping the reaction. The bottle of stopper sat next to the lighter catalyst. The lamps themselves were works of art, hand-blown glass, tinted and stained, each one different.

 

The Selketi forwent so much technology it was easy to believe they weren't sophisticated, but the lamps and the library gave the lie to that, as did the stunner fields that guarded the palace walls and the weapons meant to defend the fortress that surrounded the city.

 

John sat on the floor, his head tilted back against the wall, his arms resting on his bent knees, hands dangling loose. Gold glinted at his wrists.

 

He turned his head just enough to watch Rodney hang the lamp from a hook high on the wall, but he didn't speak.

 

Rodney joined him just as silently, sinking down to sit beside him, shoulder to shoulder. He wanted to ask if it was bad this time, but John never wanted to answer, so he didn't. He could judge by the way John breathed, steady and slow, the half-lowered eyelids, the open hands, that it wasn't the worst. Either that or John didn't care anymore. Rodney didn't know how to deal with that, if it was true.

 

The kohl smeared around John's eyes left him looking bruised. Rodney wanted to wash it away, wash everything away, the smell of incense and sex clinging to John's skin, the memory of all of this, or the memory of who they were. Forgetting made it more bearable. He thought of the eiff syrup. It was more tempting every day.

 

He wanted to forget what it meant when John stood in the garden, his head tipped up, eyes on the wide, wide sky.

 

A soft shuff of sound – bare feet – from the other end of the room accompanied the scents of a tray full of food arriving. John opened his eyes.

 

A shiver ran through John, exhaustion and the chill floor taking their toll. He drew his knee to his chest and grasped one foot. The bells at his ankle chimed, once, and he silenced them with his hand. He slipped the rings off his toes, then the belled anklet. Then the other foot. Like the silk, John left the ornaments where he dropped them. The wrist manacles clanged against each other.

 

They were only decorative. John could take them off any time.

 

He pushed up and walked away from Rodney into the bathing room. The sound of water served as a counterpoint as Rodney gathered the pieces of gold up and returned them to their place. He walked back to the front part of the room, found a pillow and set it on the rug, sitting down before the low table, the copper bowl, the lamp, the tray filled with dishes of succulent delicacies. Tein always sent them the best the kitchens could offer, but he didn't have much appetite. He never did when John wouldn't talk at all.

 

John joined him as he was lifting the lid from a chafing dish. He bent and inhaled – meat and spices – his hand, still painted, resting on the bare nape of Rodney's neck, just over the knob at the top of his spine. When he exhaled, his breath gusted over Rodney's temple. Rodney bowed his head just a little and John didn't lift his hand away. He settled himself next to Rodney, so close their knees and thighs pressed against each other.

 

The lamp threw a single pool of light in the otherwise dark room. It lit Rodney's hands as he poured sweet tea into handleless cups. A wisp of steam diffused from the surface of the tea. It smelled like nothing from anywhere Rodney remembered.

 

John accepted the cup with an tiny grimace and sipped. A single trickle of water slid from his damp hair down to his collarbone. Rodney watched it slip down past a reddening bruise from a mouth too large to be the Haralim's. He wished the bastard would just leave John alone, now that they had what they had wanted from him. She was pregnant; did they have to go on using him?

 

John's breathing hitched, but then he looked away, eyelashes lowered, everything but the pulse at his neck hidden behind the studied mask of serenity the trainers had taught him. His hand fell away from Rodney's neck.

 

It felt cold without the warm weight of it there.

 

Rodney drank his tea.

 

He wanted to say: This isn't who you are.

 

He was afraid it was. He just didn't want to be the man who took advantage of that.

 

On the days when their duties left them free, Rodney read from scrolls Macha let him take from the library or scrawled formulae on thick paper cadged from Piele, using brushes and ink meant to paint John's hands and feet. John sat with him, mostly silent, one hand always in contact. That dependence scared Rodney. He'd never been the one taking care of someone before, never fooled himself he would be any good at it.

 

He never asked John not to touch him, but he never reciprocated any of John's wordless overtures. He kept his touches resolutely platonic, locking up the desire that he'd never guessed he could feel toward another man. It was the situation, their utter isolation among aliens, it was the drugs, the knowledge of what John did with the Haralim and the Rale, it was frustration and physical need — it wasn't Rodney. It wasn't John; he told himself that. It hadn't been once. He couldn't let himself believe in John's consent.

 

Once a day, John danced. At first, the guards had come and watched, and later Dullah and Lisha had peered through the screen at the doorway. Even later, the other slaves came and even the women that made up the Haralim's court. Hara Besma. Hara Zoyan. Hara Lalin. All any of them saw were the slow, graceful movements, the open hands and closed eyes.

 

They saw John dance.

 

Rodney saw Teyla and her sticks, her still poise and fluid control, a meditation in flesh and bone, a shadow that matched each movement of each ghostly kata.

 

John danced to remember.

 

Rodney watched and grieved for their dead teammates, for the past that felt farther and farther away from them every day. He missed his life, the pressure and the wonder. He'd become a performing monkey, making Ancient junk light up to entertain the Selketi. The glimpse of Atlantis had left him depressed and weary, the way watching John's slow motion katas did.

 

John picked at the meal in front of them. He didn't touch Rodney again, but his gaze was sharper than usual. “Rodney,” he said once, but then nothing before, looking down at his painted hands instead, frowning at the fading patterns, maybe seeing the equations hidden within them.

 

~*~

 

The bed they shared every night was wide, so soft their weight brought their bodies together when they slept. The calls of the night birds in the garden aviary beyond the open windows held the silence at bay when Rodney woke with John tangled around him, pressing against him, hard and too still to be asleep. John was waiting for Rodney's reaction.

 

This was different. He didn't think this was dranzi. That wore off swiftly, every time John has returned still dosed. And if it was conditioning that had taught John to want this...The want was still real. He turned toward John, held his face with his hands, found his mouth with his.

 

The kiss was lush and heated and slow. Soft, almost dry, lips pressed chastely against his, then John opened his mouth eagerly. There was a hot, swollen split inside his lower lip that Rodney licked carefully until John moaned. John's tongue did things that had Rodney wanting so much he couldn't breathe, couldn't help wondering how John learned to kiss and kiss and kiss, until he remembered with a jolt. Trained. He started to pull away.

 

John's hands slipped away from his back and his side. He was so perfectly pliant, yielding even to rejection like a willow, that Rodney wanted to hurt him. The impulse came and went before he could act, before it could be translated into the physical, but it left Rodney feeling tainted by his own thoughts.

 

The darkness hid John's expression. There was only a glisten of light reflecting from his open eyes.

 

Rodney started to disentangle them, meaning to leave the bed. His chest hurt. John's leg was hooked behind his knee and suddenly tightened. John's hands cupped his face, one sliding around to the back of his neck again, pulling him back, pulling him down.

 

John kissed him desperately, urgently, like it was the last kiss he would ever know, bruising Rodney's lips, stealing his air, taking what he needed without an ounce of submission. This kiss wasn't studied, wasn't skilled, but it was all John. He didn't let go until Rodney responded, until they were moving together and lost in each other and Rodney couldn't think of anything that mattered except John: John's mouth and his painted hands and his long body writhing beneath him.

 

Like flying.

 

Until morning.

 

He dozed afterward, half-sprawled over John, and didn't really wake when John left the bed. He snapped awake without warning later, sweltering under a blanket that had been pulled up over his shoulders. He rolled onto his back and blinked stupidly at the barely visible outlines of the room. He'd had sex with John. His muscles were all still pleasantly limp; all the tension he normally carried absent for once. Rodney thought it had been good. It had been for him. John not being still in the bed might mean it hadn't been — for him. That was an appalling thought. He shouldn't have gone along with it. A panicked litany of regret and worry began cycling through his brain. What if John regretted it? What if John hadn't been consenting, if it had been the damned conditioning kicking in, and now he hated Rodney for taking advantage? Rodney scrubbed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes. He had to find John and talk to him, try to undo whatever damage he'd done last night.

 

He unpeeled the soiled sheets that were twisted around him and sat up. Another bleary blink and he identified the shadow at the window.

 

John.

 

He leaned against the stone sill and stared out the window, arms folded over his chest, already dressed. It looked like he'd been awake for hours.

 

Rodney opened his mouth. He didn't know what to say. He snapped it shut when John twisted and looked at him with narrowed eyes. It was a look he hadn't seen on John's face in too long, but Rodney had never wanted it leveled at him. He took an involuntary step back.

 

John frowned at him, then his mouth quirked up at one corner. "It's a little late for me to freak out now, Rodney."

 

"Oh, you never know, under the circumstances, it's never too late. And if you don't feel like it, I'm always willing to step up and panic for both us," Rodney blurted. He fumbled the sheet around him in a fit of ridiculous modesty and slowly approached John.

 

John unfolded his arms and rolled his shoulders. This close, the faint lines around his eyes gave away the tension he was hiding otherwise. "Rodney."

 

"I'm so — "

 

"That was me."

 

Rodney stared at him. John looked back without flinching. "You're straight," Rodney said.

 

"I've learned some new tricks." His expression hardened briefly into bitterness. "And turned them."

 

"John — "

 

"There was something." He held up his hand. "Before here."

 

Rodney waited, but that seemed to be all John was going to say, which considering it was John, had been a lot. Really, though, he didn't want to have this conversation, either, so that was good. "Yeah," he said. Because there was, there always was, the thing between them that neither of them would ever push, because there was just so much to lose. "Okay." The things that had seemed insurmountable meant nothing anymore.

 

John smiled and cuffed Rodney's shoulder lightly. "So, do you have a plan?" The feel of that casual brush of his hand over Rodney's bare skin lingered.

 

"What?" Rodney huffed, spinning and following him as John made his way to the front room. The sheet dragged and tangled around his feet.

 

"A plan, a strategy, a genius idea to get us to the gate and out of here," John said. "We've been here too damn long. Face it, no one's getting us out of here. We're going to have to do it ourselves."

 

"No," Rodney told him, feeling tired and hopeless. They didn't even have their IDCs anymore. No radios. They couldn't just dial Atlantis and run through the event horizon to safety. They would have to try to get to some neutral planet where they could disappear before any pursuit followed them through.

 

John turned and just looked at him. Rodney held one hand up. "John, do you really think I wouldn't have told you?"

 

"Sometimes you need a little push — "

 

"Believe me, seeing you — I have enough push for a orbital fucking rocket; I just don't have any ideas." He swallowed, hating the disappointment that flashed across John's face, before the calm mask descended again. "I'm sorry."

 

"It's okay," John said. He rubbed his hand over his wrist, where the manacles rested when he wore them. "Really."

 

"Really?" His voice cracked on the first syllable. He didn't see how John could say that, but he wanted to believe.

 

John nodded. "I've got a plan. I just, kind of, hoped you'd have a better idea." He faked a smile; Rodney saw through it. John hadn't wanted to go with whatever plan he had. That was beyond not good and right into stomach-emptying fear, because a plan that John Sheppard considered risky was usually Rodney's definition of suicide. "But this will probably work. Unless it gets us both killed."

 

"Oh, so…like all your plans." He tried to make it sound like a joke.

 

"I really don't want to get you killed," John said seriously.

 

Rodney took a chance and touched his arm. "Good. I feel the same way." He let his fingers stay. "About you, that is, too. I don't want you to get me killed, of course, but also, not with the you getting you killed thing." He swallowed. "In case you didn't know."

 

"Jesus, Rodney," John said, his voice gone rough and uneven. "I know."

 

Rodney ran his hand up John's arm, matching it with his other, resting them on his shoulders. The sheet slid down to puddle around his feet. John's hands mirrored his, closing on his shoulders lightly. For a moment he considered kissing him, but John was already dipping his head until they were touching foreheads. They stood quietly and Rodney closed his eyes, absorbing the way their breath mingled, letting go of something, if only of his doubts that John knew what he was doing. If John didn't, it wouldn't make much difference, because John didn't back down. Nothing was any more bearable, but nothing could make this place that.

 

His stomach chose that moment to grumble audibly and he could hear the smile curl through John's voice when he asked, without shifting, "You want to raid the kitchens?"

 

Rodney sighed. His eyes snapped open when John began chuckling. "What?" he demanded. He didn't think being hungry was that funny.

 

John was still touching foreheads with him, but looking down. "Pants first, then food, okay?" John choked out, still chuckling.

 

"Bath first," Rodney grumbled, trying to maintain some dignity, suddenly aware that he was sticky and itchy, as well as naked. He left the sheet where it lay and stalked back to the washroom. John trailed after him into the bedroom, coming to stop before Rodney reached the next doorway.

 

John was lounging on the remade bed when Rodney came out fifteen minutes later. They dropped the old sheets in the laundry rooms and then slipped into the kitchens without speaking much. Armed with hard rolls and fruit that wouldn't put Rodney into an allergic reaction, they dodged patrolling guards on the way back to their rooms, and ate there.

 

Mouth full of bread, Rodney mumbled, "So what's your plan?"

 

"You're not going to like it." John sat down the piece of fruit he'd been holding and told him. He was right. Rodney didn't like it.

 

---

Arcana

They were in the Blue Garden, where Idris met with Besma, where John came to do his katas some afternoons, shaded by the broad leaves of the cho trees. The blue stones were set into the garden's wall, in a mosaic that mimicked rippling water under the dappled, flickering shade. John came there whenever he could, for the breath of memory it evoked, so different from arid Selket, for the illusion of an ocean.

 

Keder might have come to watch him as others had, before the others had grown bored and left to entertain themselves elsewhere. He might have. John hoped not.

 

When John came to a stand-still and turned his gaze to the empty sky, Keder stepped from one of the arched doorways. The click of a heel on stone made John turn, though he'd been aware of his watcher throughout his practice. Teyla would not have approved, but each movement after that, each extension and turn, dip and sway, had been a performance. He knelt with slow, deliberate grace. Keder approached as closely as Djemet or Zuleika would and touched him with the same sense of entitlement. Heavy, heady scent rose from the embroidered cloth that brushed John's cheek. The toes of Keder's boots were capped in chased silver.

 

Keder was silent long enough that John worried about a knife to the throat, imagined his blood soaking dark into the moss: the Haralim's Chosen sprawled in the garden, dead. If Keder thought no farther than to spite his brother and sister....

 

"What would you give to walk through the Ancestor's Ring?" He fingered John's hair as he spoke. John stilled, not even breathing. The urge to jerk away actually made him happy. The training helped him keep his hands open upon his thighs, palms up. It didn't make him react to Keder the way he did to Zuleika and Djemet. And Rodney. At least he still had that much control; when he arched his neck, pressing up into Keder's hand, it was an act of calculation. Each breath must be an invitation and a seduction. Dullah's lesson as he arranged John's body in the proper line of the forty-fourth kneeling form repeated in his mind.

 

The gurgle of a small fountain, where dusty-colored birds came to drink and bath, obscured their voices.

 

“What would you give?” Keder asked. His hand still rested on John's head. It slipped down to cup his jaw as John turned enough to look him in the eyes.

 

“Why don't you ask what would I do?” he asked.

 

Keder smiled.

 

John twisted just enough to display the line of his neck, stretching, and looked up, eyes half-lidded. Keder's sharp-drawn breath was all he needed to know that Dullah would have been pleased by the effect. He licked his lower lip.

 

"Would you kill my brother?" Keder asked. His hand tightened on John's jaw. His eyes were dark where Djemet's were lighter. Djemet was always rough at first, too, as though it proved something. John didn't flinch.

 

"I want to go through the Ring, not die," John murmured.

 

"Kemahet," Keder said.

 

John shuddered.

 

"I know the cook keeps it, I know your scholar frequents the kitchens, as I know why Zuleika chose you."

 

~*~

 

"So you did it?" Rodney asked as John slid into the bed beside him. He kept his back turned. John pressed his face against Rodney's back. His hair was still wet from the bath. The wet tickle was a contrast to the damp heat of John's breath against his skin. John slipped closer, wordless again, his hand coming to rest on Rodney's hip. Tremors shuddered through that hand. A harshly in-drawn breath made Rodney start to roll over.

 

John curled tighter into his back. Rodney could feel the shaking spread through him.

 

"I did it," John whispered.

 

He bolted off the bed and back into the washroom. Rodney stayed where he was, staring at the moon shadows on the wall, listening to the sounds of John vomiting and then the rush of water as he drew another bath.

 

~*~

 

John would draw too much attention in the kitchens, Rodney insisted.

 

"Then we'll use that," John insisted, so that three nights later when he faltered into their rooms, silks shredded and skin bruised, Rodney didn't hustle him into the washroom, but caught his elbow and guided him to the kitchens. John sucked in a pained breath when Rodney's arm around his waist slipped and pressed into his flank. The ankle bells sounded with every step on the cold floor and once one of Idris' patrols stopped at the end of a hall and watched them silently. The guards didn't stop them however and they arrived in the kitchens after two more turns and a staircase.

 

Everyone gasped and fluttered around John. Jehmen stared, eyes wide and dark, suddenly seeing the other side of the easy life he aspired to live.

 

Tein went straight to the medicaments cabinet and opened it with her key. Rodney followed and stood at her shoulder, cataloging everything on the shelves, tiny bottles and pots and one he recognized: clear glass and murky contents.

 

Sosa brought a warm, wet rag and dabbed at the blood trickling from John's split lip. John leaned away without ever lifting his gaze from the tiled floor. When he swayed, Jehmen jumped forward to catch his arm and steady him. John jerked at the unexpected touch, lurching back against a table, his elbow hitting a pot. The pot slid off and hit the floor, the lid coming off in a clatter and pale green sauce splattering over dark brown-and-red-patterned tiles. Spots of it flew up and stained Jehmen and and Sosa's trousers.

 

Tein turned, as distracted as the others, while John twitched away from hands reaching for him and others bent to clean the mess, and Rodney snatched the full bottle of kemahet. It went into a pocket even as he dodged the sauce on the floor and went to John. "Sorry, so sorry," Rodney murmured. Maybe Sosa or Tein thought he meant the scene. He didn't. His apology was for John, because he knew how much John hated this, being on display, being weak or out of control in front of anyone. If the kitchens had ever been really empty he might have tried his hand at picking the cabinet's lock, but instead John had been required to make a spectacle of himself. It had worked. But John wouldn't look up.

 

Tein gave him the salve that stopped scarring and another one, along with a vial of eiff. "Let him sleep, if he is not required by the Haralim," she said.

 

Rodney slipped his arm back around John and guided him out. "I could have done it myself," he hissed into John's ear.

 

John stiffened. "Yeah, but this way no one will ever suspect you – Tein-ve and everyone was right there. They'd testify that you couldn't have taken anything if they were asked. Even under torture. They'd believe it." His voice is so soft Rodney can barely hear the roughness. The Haralim wasn't touching him anymore, but the Rale was, taking out frustrations that could never be spoken of out loud on John's flesh, sometimes every night.

 

"My nerves are shot, just shot to shreds," Rodney complained. "Did you knock that pot on the floor deliberately? Because a little warning might have been nice. I nearly died of cardiac arrest." He went on complaining and John relaxed little by little, letting Rodney pull him closer, even winding his arm around Rodney's waist too.

 

~*~

 

Bint wasn't the only child in the palace, but she was the only one John saw regularly. He tended to indulge her so much as he could. The Haralim treated her as something between servant and family and he'd slowly gathered Bint was the only child of the wet nurse who had cared for Zuleika and the Rale during their childhoods.

 

The musicians were behind the screen, a trio with drums, a stringed instrument and a syrinx. A woman accompanied them them with voice and castanets. John listened as she sang of a hunter who went out with his companion, describing all that he saw, from the mountains to the sky and all the animals, saying that in each he saw beauty that reminded him of his beloved, and so he could slay nothing. In typical Selketi fashion, the hunter's companion slew him with knife from behind, leaving him for the plains predators to feast on, while returning to wed the hunter's beloved.

 

Playing roes with Bint and the Haralim took more effort than he had anticipated. Three-sided chess with an element of chance that could and did overthrow the cleverest strategies was how he described it to Rodney, but there were subtleties to it, reflections of Selketi attitudes, that the comparison didn't convey. The dice were four-sided, offering a player three choices with each roll, but each choice meant the other players could duplicate that move if they wished. It was a game of denial and shifting alliances. At first, Bint had regularly allied with the Haralim to beat John, but he'd become much better, applying insights from his training, bending and flowing around the mental attacks symbolized on the roes' board, letting Bint's offense rush forward until she was over-extended.

 

Watching the Haralim play taught him just how subtle she could be. All of her strategies contained layer on layer, knots and traps, tricks and feints.

 

She was ruthless as well.

 

"My hara, my family is in need of your influence."

 

Hara Besma had succeeded in separating the Haralim from the rest of the ladies and paid no attention to John, Bint, or even Freka, who was playing with them while keeping a gentle eye on the Haralim. There was always a guard in any public room with the Haralim now. John rubbed his thumb over the die, studying the disposition of his pieces and his opponents' on the board. Bint bounced impatiently but didn't speak – silence was part of roes. Freka's mouth turned up in an indulgent smile even as he scanned the room diligently.

 

"My influence?" the Haralim asked.

 

"Secretary Nabil's new taxes will ruin our business in Babhun."

 

"The ministration of the exchequer is not mine to command," the Haralim replied. "My husband – "

 

"Yes, the Rale," Besma said. "If you would persuade him to instruct Nabil to excuse the Bijal's interests this year...we would be very grateful." John slid his gaze toward them, watching Besma turn a heavy, jewel-encrusted bracelet on her wrist. Cabochon rubies the size of his thumb caught the light, reflecting it onto the gold, tinting it pink. Besma's fingernail caught in the bracelet's catch and it opened.She closed it around the Haralim's wrist an instant after. "A gift, my hara."

 

John tossed the die into the center of the board, hoping it would land on a triangle of green jade rather than the black or white. Like Freka, he was distracted. Half his attention was always on the Haralim.

 

Besma's hands clenched on her skirts as the Haralim removed the heavy bracelet and locked it back around her wrist. "I cannot accept a gift your family cannot afford," the Haralim said.

 

"There's nothing you will do?" Besma asked, so low no one else would hear. Two slaves and a guard did not count, of course. Nevertheless, Freka was watching her intently. Besma's knuckles had turned white.

 

Bint drummed her fingers. The die had landed on Freka's black triangle, which gave him the choice of three different sorts of moves represented by the glyphs displayed. Then John and Bint would have the opportunity to execute the same move as Freka.

 

"There is nothing I can do," the Haralim stated.

 

Besma bowed her head. "So be it."

 

Freka picked up a piece on the board and moved carelessly. John followed, taking two of Bint's pieces and one of Freka's. Bint made a small noise of frustration, finding no piece of hers left that could perform the move Freka had chosen. The Haralim laughed, then stroked Bint's head.

 

Besma's eyes narrowed before she bowed and backed away. John flicked a look at Freka, who was still watching her. He wasn't the only one who thought Idris' lover was angrier than she'd let herself show.

 

~*~

 

They were cutting it close again. John didn't have morning duties, but he needed Rodney's help preparing if he didn't want to resort to the handlers and Rodney had to be in the library before Macha arrived. John went quiet when they began the prep, drawing into himself, and Rodney wanted to put that off as long as he could.

 

He didn't care if he was late. Not when John was spread across their bed, filigreed shadows traced over his limbs, given over to Rodney like a gift. The Haralim and the Rale didn't see him like this: wide-eyed and soft-mouthed, languid with pleasure while he let Rodney touch him until they were both content. They would never see John panting and twisting into Rodney's hands or his mouth because he wanted to be there. Whatever words they wrested from him were lies. They had only the pretense, no matter how much dranzi they used on him.

 

"Just let me," Rodney murmured from where he knelt between John's legs.

 

"You don't have to," John said. He said it every time, as though he'd forgotten that anything in bed could be about his need.

 

He stoked his palm along John's calf, down to his ankle and the vulnerable jut of bone so close under paper-fine skin. There was no prickle of hair on John's legs, none left on his chest or arms or face. Lisha had shown him the thick yellow paste that they applied to anywhere they didn't want hair, and warned that if left on long enough, it burned the skin to an angry red. The hair didn't come back for months – if ever. A pale band had been impressed in the skin just over his ankle from the belled fetters John always wore for the Haralim, like the indentation left by a ring. Rodney's fingers found it and he smiled at the way John sighed, his toes flexing with pleasure.

 

"No one's forcing me," he added and left the rest of it unspoken. He traced his hand back up, urging John to part his legs farther. John craned his head and watched as Rodney touched the dark hair at his groin. "I'm glad they left you this."

 

John laughed breathlessly, letting his head fall back, all long, lean lines, "Yeah." He shifted and Rodney watched, fascinated, as his cock thickened and flushed with no more than the stroke of his finger along the shaft. "Jesus."

 

He'd never given cocksucking more than the cursory thought that he liked it done to him. He liked doing it too. Watching John lick his lips reminded him of how it felt when they were stretched around his cock, the way John smiled at him afterward. John's blowjobs left him wrung out and floating, yet he liked giving them to John even more than getting them. He didn't have thirty-seven techniques, but John didn't seem to care. It was something that wasn't part of John's duty to the Haralim or the Rale; no one gave John what Rodney did and that held its own secret satisfaction. John came apart for him like Rodney was the one with all the expertise. It sent a thrill through Rodney every time that ended with him jacking himself and coming right after John.

 

John made a tiny noise. The tip of his cock was wet. Rodney bent forward and took the head in his mouth. The muscles under his hands twitched, but John held still. A soft, hitching sound caught at the back of his throat and that made Rodney take him deeper. He tried one of the tricks John used on him and then did it again when John's hips came off the bed.

 

The morning sun, heavy at the horizon, turned the west wall apricot and salmon. John was all ivory and shadow, except the glint of the navel ring. The sixth bell rang through the palace. John murmured desperate nonsense and pulsed in Rodney's mouth. He came with his eyes open, transparent and unguarded. Rodney swallowed and concentrated on not touching himself, not coming just from the picture John made.

 

"I should – "

 

John had already hooked a leg around Rodney's and pulled him down, rolling until Rodney was the one on his back. He straddled Rodney's hips, dipped his head and breathed hot and moist on one nipple, until Rodney forgot about Macha's temper.

 

"Oh," Rodney murmured when John finally stopped teasing.

 

John slithered down the bed, dislodging the top sheet to the floor with a whisper, and took Rodney's cock in his mouth, using all those things he'd been taught and wringing Rodney's orgasm from him.

 

~*~

 

He'd never focused on the katas Teyla wanted him to practice while they were in Atlantis. He'd gone through the motions without absorbing what she meant him to learn. He'd thought she could teach him to fight the way she and Ronon did, but that wasn't the way of it. Teyla taught him the forms, but he had to learn himself, something he hadn't been willing to do then.

 

Standing still in the Blue Garden, he drew in a single breath, smiling in his mind, hearing her: "Breathe, John. Breathe." The air smelled of water. He inhaled using his abdomen, until his lungs were filled, imagining he could sense the rush of oxygen reaching his head, then spiraling out to his arms and legs, then exhaled through his mouth, pushing all the tension out with it Teyla had made a sound as she exhaled that reminded him of Monica Seles and made him laugh and annoyed her. Even now he expelled the air silently. That worked for him until the kata became more forceful. Then maintaining control and expelling the air from his diaphragm meant making some noise.

He concentrated on his breathing until it filled his mind, exhaling pain and resentment and worry along with carbon dioxide, until he felt energized and centered. If he listened, he could hear the fountains, the spill of water over stone, and the distant cries from the aviary. The water sounds became the lap of the waves against the west pier's supports, endless and rhythmic as the beat of a world's heart.

 

Dullah and Lisha and the courtesans of the Fifth House of Flowers had given him no choice but to learn his body, to know the play of muscle and tendon, bone and skin, balance and motion, from fingertip to toe. The drugs they fed him sometimes made it impossible to think beyond the now of his body, of sensation, and their lessons had taken him far beyond what he'd thought of as sex. Duty to the haralim went beyond bed work. He was always 'on' in her presence or the Rale's, always performing.

 

This was easier now he wasn't always dosed up on dranzi or some of the other drugs they'd used during training, the psychotropics and hypnotics. At least dranzi didn't have any lingering side effects. Or none that he was aware of, he admitted. It seemed to metabolize fast and flush out faster if he drank enough water and kept moving. But he couldn't do katas while it buzzed through his veins, couldn't concentrate without something outside to ground him.

 

In some part of him, he'd thought he would learn to do what they wanted of him and hold onto himself, dissociated from his body and without pleasure. Dullah had broken him of that misapprehension early on. Each day in the training barracks and the flower houses began with exercises that centered the self in flesh. The courtesans made every movement a meditation, their entire lives lived as art, their bodies the perfected into living prayers. They didn't move through life, they danced and John had to learn that dance. They were repeated and repeated until they were graven in muscle memory. It was strangely like learning to fly. He'd always had an awareness, a natural talent that made whatever he flew part of himself, wings or rotors, that had translated into the intuitive and reflexive skill set the jumpers called for, and the only way he could think of the training he had received was learning to fly his body.

 

The Selketi didn't call them katas, didn't associate them with any fighting style, but John realized they did have something in common with all that Teyla had tried to show him.

 

He had a far better memory than most. Not eidetic, but close enough if he was paying attention and he had paid attention to Teyla – he just hadn't understood at the time. He remembered every word, every tiny shift of Teyla's body as she'd demonstrated each exercise and pattern. He had began doing the katas again once Dullah let him move in with Rodney, when he had private moments, to release some of the anger simmering through him. Head strikes, chest strikes, groin...picturing the slave factor, one of the guards, Dullah, even the Haralim. It burned off some of the energy he'd spent doing things in Atlantis. After a while, though, he found himself doing them to calm himself, to recover his control, to honor Teyla for offering to teach him at all.

 

To remember her.

 

To remember himself as he'd been.

 

The katas came smoothly now, like water flowing, the Selketi exercises mingling with the unarmed combat he'd learned in the military and with Teyla's art. He had found the spirit in it now. He liked to go fast, liked things he could be good at immediately, but there was nothing for him but patience in the palace, and the lessons sank bone-deep in mind and body.

 

He wished he could tell her, that though she wasn't here, she was still saving his life.

 

Stripped to a pair of loose cotton pants, he moved in sun and shadow, sinking deep inside himself. The green moss the Selketi kept manicured and watered like a lawn, even in the dry as dust climate, gave under the soles of his feet. It was all balance. Speed, but beginning so slowly that the whip-quick movements at the end didn't feel any faster than the beginning and his breath barely picked up. The shifting blue walls of the garden became the shifting blue waters of Atlantis, the flicker of the morning light through the cho leaves gave way in memory to the training room. His hands were open, but he summoned the memory of the sticks: mass, momentum, inertia, the crack and the jar that vibrated through fingers and wrists up the bones of his arms. Foot work, he remembered, and he centered himself the way Teyla had told him, "Become your body not just your arms."

 

Fast and slow, quicksilver, push and give way, practicing until each movement was perfect, until it was a dance partnered with gravity and endurance, and the sky was pale and blue and he was almost, oh, almost flying in it again. When he slowed and slowed and slowed until he was still and cooled down and earthbound, his mind was clear and his body hummed, completely and utterly his.

 

There was something ironic in spending so many years in the military, with its PT, and then training with Teyla and Ronon, going on missions, yet finding himself in the best shape of his life while living as a bed slave to an alien. Rodney got the joke, at least, the same joke that traced physics equations on John's skin and whispered zero point poetry while they fucked.

 

Not as ironic as figuring out that he wanted it, liked it, all of it, with Rodney. Or that if they did succeed in escaping he would have to give it up. He didn't believe they could go back and be who they were. Rodney really was brilliant: he would find a way to function again, but John knew himself and the situation. He was compromised, damaged, and whatever place he'd held had already been filled. No one would want him back in Atlantis, not when they understood how much he had been changed. Rodney, though, Rodney would still be able to find a place, make a new one if nothing else. He belonged in Atlantis even more than John had.

 

Getting Rodney back to Atlantis, no matter what happened to him afterward, would be his last act as Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard.

 

~*~

 

Rodney rationed himself. He didn't leave the library every day to watch John in the Blue Garden. Twice every small moon he allowed himself the indulgence. This day the serenity he usually experienced watching John practice felt tainted. The tiny weight of the kemahet in his pocket couldn't be ignored.

 

There was a cold knot in his belly. Nothing could undo it.

 

Not the slow dance of movement engraved in air, though John's calm sometimes seeped into Rodney's body, synching his breathing with John's when he watched. Not the texts he'd found days before detailing the basic scientific philosophy of the Ancients. He'd always known he could understand their science if he could grasp how they thought and now he had a Rosetta stone.

 

Not with the kemahet in his pocket. Failure, betrayal, even bad luck, and they would both die.

 

He stood just inside the arched doorway into the garden, in the shade, where he always came to watch. There was nothing untoward in his presence. Nothing for the always watching eyes of the palace to remark upon. Rodney's heart still stuttered in his chest, too fast, too uneven, like he'd been mainlining speed again, like it would beat its way out of him.

 

The stone behind him was cool through his shirt and vest and the tiles were damp where water had seeped from the moss. He could feel the moisture in the air through his skin, so different than anywhere else in the palace.

 

John moved in a spiral, every movement spinning off a perfect still point, like solar systems and galaxies, cometary orbits, and all eyes turned to him, to that center of gravity. Some days Rodney thought that John would spin until he was pure energy. If he ever danced the perfect kata he would ascend.

 

But he couldn't. John couldn't ascend any more than he could escape, not while invisible chains bound him to the material and the physical world, the world of physics, Rodney's world, Rodney.

 

The guilt soured his soul some days.

 

The tap of a shoe on stone alerted him to another presence, perfumed, warm and female.

 

Rodney turned and recognized her. The dark eyes were very like the Haralim's, the dark hair and tea-stained skin typical of all the Selketi, but her mouth was like her brother's, pursed and discontent.

 

"Hara," he murmured, bowing his head and stepping back as she passed, so close the silk of her robes brushed him, and she took his place to watch John. Zoyan didn't acknowledge him or dismiss him, so Rodney stayed. The fall of her sleeve slid over his hand and slender fingers locked trap-tight around his hand.

 

"Give it to me," she murmured.

 

He fumbled and passed the vial of poison over.

 

She watched in silence, though her lips parted more than once, until John slowed, all the energy he'd seemed to fling out to the corners of the garden pulling back into him, until he stood still, looking into the sky. Then she left in a shimmer of turquoise silk, only her scent, heavy as musk and roses, lingering in the doorway.

 

Rodney waited until she had gone, then entered the garden, gathering up the discarded bits of John's clothing and handing him a thin robe to wear to the baths.

 

John inhaled when Rodney leaned close and his nostrils flared, drawing in Zoyan's perfume.

 

"No turning back now," Rodney murmured.

 

John caught his hands and laced their fingers together.

 

~*~

 

John ignored the way the librarians and scribes watched him as he padded through the labyrinthine stacks. He didn't have to ask his way, because he could feel it under his skin, the almost siren call of Ancient tech. It filled an emptiness in him he hadn't been aware of until then.

 

He recognized Piele from the slave barracks, when he'd slept among the other slaves, before he'd been moved in with Rodney.

 

Around the corner of a case holding scrolls sealed with red wax, he found Rodney perched on a three-legged stool, bent too close to a flickering screen. He was reading out the dimly illuminated text to Piele, who inked it onto parchment in something that had to be shorthand. No one could transcribe as fast as Rodney talked. The alcove with the wall that contained the database was screened and shadowy, probably to help Rodney read without the glare of reflected light. John felt a little spurt of sympathy for Piele, working in the dark.

 

Rodney flicked a glance at him. "Here, touch this," he said and placed John's hand on one of the activation pads. The screen flared brighter then reverted. "So it does work, there just isn't enough power."

 

"You're going to go blind." He kept his hand in Rodney's, turning it until they were palm to palm.

 

"No, but I am going to have a paralyzing headache and my spine is never going to be the same." Rodney pulled his hand loose and slipped his finger along a crystal face. The text on the screen obligingly scrolled down. Without looking away, he asked, "Why are you here?"

 

John settled down to the floor and leaned against Rodney's leg. "He went offworld this morning."

 

Rodney didn't ask who he meant.

 

He let his head rest against Rodney's thigh. Vaguely, he realized it was the same position he took with the Haralim. He closed his eyes, not caring.

 

"John?"

 

"He wouldn't let her go through the Ring," he answered, keeping his voice soft enough even Piele wouldn't hear. "Because of the heir."

 

"And what? She sent you to me...?"

 

"She was sick this morning, and then she started crying after he left, before throwing things."

 

Rodney began petting him. "Sounds like fun."

 

"There was glass all over the floor and Bint cut up her feet. She told us both to get out before we got blood all over everything."

 

The petting stopped and John pushed his head up into Rodney's hand. "Don't stop."

 

"Are you okay?"

 

"Fine." He opened his eyes and looked up into Rodney's worried gaze. "I'm fine."

 

Rodney studied him before accepting that. "So what does he go offworld for?"

 

John shrugged. "Trade, politics, buying slaves, buying this kind of thing." He gestured at the database that was all that survived of an Ancient outpost that had predated the fortress and the palace of Seven Walls, along with the Selketi nation-state, by millennia. There were other pieces of technology, most of it small and human portable, scattered on the shelves around them.

 

"Yes, yes, he collects," Rodney said. His mouth turned down. "Too bad he can't tell something working from a piece of dead junk."

 

John didn't care and closed his eyes again. He let himself relax and drift while Rodney dictated to Piele. He was content.

 

---

Falter

John fetched a pitcher of chilled juice and crystal glasses. Hours stretched behind and before him, caught in the thick and lingering heat of the afternoon. The Haralim's temper had snapped once, banishing the musicians, banishing most of the women as well, claiming their noise gave her a headache. A petulant frown still distorted her features. John tried to be as unobtrusive as possible. He'd taken off the ankle bells and wrapped chains around his ankles in their place after midday.

 

The Rale had returned from the trading mission ahead of schedule, which had pleased her for a few hours, but even he seemed cowed by her temper. Now he was spending his day in her rooms, going over expenses with Tulem Nabil. Morning had been spent consulting between the three of them, allocating taxes paid into the exchequer to maintenance on the fortress, funds for the guards and the army, and payments to Baratha for the battery packs that the stunners used. Zuleika had listened to the reports from those in charge of the palace's workings. Faces that are familiar now: Dullah, Tein, Idris, Tei'ayas, Ghelet of housekeeping, Fasan the senior gardener, Macha, Laska the city water engineer.

 

John's eyes had glazed somewhere between the need for forty barrels of soap for the palace laundry and Fasan's request for flowering plants from Hunet for the aviary. He'd only kept himself from yawning by converting Selketi small and long moons into Lantean time periods and then Earth weeks and months.

 

He knelt and offered the tray to Zuleika first. She gestured carelessly and Hara Besma poured for them both. John rose and took the tray to the Rale and Tulem, silently sinking down to the side of the table where they had papers spread. The Rale poured for himself and Tulem, then gestured John away. John went, vaguely disappointed that his presence hadn't been acknowledged. When he realized he was putting something extra into his walk, nausea had him tasting bile at the back of his throat. His fingers trembled, light flashing off the gold on his nails, as he set the tray down on a sideboard.

 

"John," she called.

 

He schooled his face into a smile and returned to her side. "Vai, hara," he murmured.

 

She leaned forward and caught one finger under his chin, tipping his face up. "Open," she commanded. Obediently, he parted his lips and accepted the candied fruit she proffered next. She watched him, a faint cruel twist to her lips, as he held it in his mouth the sour-acrid-sweet taste burning his tongue. Then she laughed. "Swallow it, John, and I won't make you eat anymore."

 

The Rale glanced up from his work. John made himself swallow, the fruit a hard knot in his throat that threatened to choke him. Besma made an odd noise, but Zuleika laughed again. "He hates these." She picked up another from the box open before her and ate it, white teeth slicing the piece in two, chewing and savoring each half, then licking the dusting of sugar off her fingers.

 

"Then stop wasting them on him," the Rale called with a small snort.

 

"I like watching him try to pretend."

 

"Barbarian," Besma observed, watching John with a curious expression.

 

Zuleika snapped her fingers. "Bint. Bint." She scooped a handful of the candies out and placed them in Bint's hands. "She loves them."

 

Bint had already tucked one candy into her cheek and smiled. "Thank you, hara."

 

Zuleika smiled back and picked one more candy from the box, then shoved it toward Bint. "Take them all, little one. Too many disagree with me lately." She patted her rounded stomach with pleasure. The bad mood of the morning and last week had apparently dissolved. Relieved, John relaxed a little. Bint grinned and began gorging herself on the favored treat.

 

A sound of surprise and excitement slipped from Zuleika. John realized with a jolt of shock that she was feeling the baby move. Her hand twitched in reaction to a kick from inside.

 

John sat back a little, suddenly feeling lightheaded. Stupid, stupid, he thought. He hadn't let himself believe the child inside was real, until this moment, and the smile that softened Djemet Rale's features as he looked at Zuleika hurt him. Everything hurt. He could justify Zuleika's death: she'd bought them, kept them prisoner. But the baby inside her...It was Selketi law that would make any slave of Zuleika's the property of any child who survived her.

 

The nauseated feeling came back. He was swallowing it when Bint jerked forward, her arm sweeping the confection box to the floor. The crystal glasses tumbled to the floor as she fell across the low table. One shattered and the other tumbled and rolled. She heaved, blood-laced vomit spewing onto the lacquered surface, while her arms and legs twitched wildly.

 

Zuleika and Besma jerked back, alarm and disgust coloring their exclamations. Besma pulled up her skirts. Zuleika pushed herself back in her chair, lifting her feet. "Bint?" she exclaimed and then, "Idris, in here now!"

 

The table turned over with Bint half sprawled over it, hands and feet beating with bruising force against anything she could reach. Scarlet spilled between her lips. John pulled her off the table and onto her side. Gasping, drowning sounds escaped her as she convulsed. He'd thought she'd bitten her tongue at first but there was too much blood for that, blood everywhere. She was bleeding from her eyes and nose, the hot spatter soaking through his pants. He was trying to clear her airway when she stiffened and thrashed a final time. Life drained from still warm flesh under his hands; he could feel it slip away.

 

Helpless, he pulled the body up into his arms and curled over her, shaking from the shock of how fast it had been. Strands of her long, black hair caught in the manacles on his wrists.

 

John looked up despite himself at the sound of someone else retching. Zuleika had fallen from her chair, doubled over and crouched on the floor. He glimpsed Besma's face, the flicker of apprehension and triumph there and wondered how Keder had got to her. She'd poisoned the candied fruit – just like Tein-ve had poisoned the candies meant for Seif. It occurred to him that he'd eaten one too.

 

The Rale pushed Besma away and knelt beside Zuleika. His gaze took in everything: Besma, Tulem, John, Bint. The candies on the floor, the spilled pool of blood and vomit. "Zuleika?" he murmured.

 

Idris and five guards stepped cautiously into the hall. The Rale gestured. "Good, get in here."

 

"Djemet," Zulieka gasped.

 

"What – ?" one of the younger guards blurted. Freka hushed him and took a place just behind Idris.

 

Zuleika levered herself up enough to glare at Besma. She spat and then hissed, "Traitor."

 

The Rale turned a narrowed-eyed look to Besma, who stumbled back. "No, no," she said. She faced Idris, plaintive and wild. Her lips quivered and she held out one hand toward the guard captain.

 

"Poisoned," Zuleika panted. "Duplicitous whore."

 

"Arrest her," the Rale commanded.

 

Besma glanced around wildly. "You're wrong. Hara, I wouldn't – " She backed another step away. The heel of her shoe clacked against tile.

 

"Liar!" Zuleika screamed.

 

Besma spun on her heel and bolted toward the doorway into the gardens. John wondered where she thought she could run. Unless she had help waiting, there was no escape from the city or the fortress surrounding it. The guards hesitated a breath, before Idris gestured to them to pursue her. Zuleika dropped her head and choked again. John lowered Bint's limp body to the floor. His stomach cramped. The sharp scent of vomit and blood made it worse.

 

The guards weren't moving fast enough for the Rale. He surged to his feet and crossed the room in swift strides to catch Besma's shoulder and swing her around. When she tried to break free, he backhanded her before shoving her into the arms of the guards.

 

The room settled into something close to silence.

 

Zuleika crouched on hands and knees, retching onto an exquisite rug, her back arched and taut. Long hair tangled and fell into the blood-tinged bile coming up.

 

Besma hung between two guards, dull-eyed, her lower lip swelling, blood dribbling down her chin. Djemet's rings, that he always took off to touch Zuleika and John, had split her lip open.

 

On the floor, the delicately carved box with the confections sat, broken and gaping, the rest of the candied fruit spilling onto the tiles. A piece sat just beyond Bint's still hand. John couldn't look away, couldn't clear her gagging cries from his mind, couldn't stop seeing her heels drum on the rug Zuleika was presently staining. A cloying, metallic taste filled his mouth and he had to bend over and spit convulsively.

 

Djemet stood before Besma. His face had set into an emotionless mask, but he fairly vibrated with rage.

 

"Idris," he snapped.

 

"Rae," the head of the guard replied. John's gaze flicked to his hands, which flexed on the hilt of a knife.

 

Zuleika gagged again and John snapped his head toward her. She was holding herself up with one hand now, while the other pressed against the swell of the child inside her. He moved, meaning to go to her, but Djemet's hand shot up. "Hold."

 

John stilled. Then he broke and said, "You have doctors. She needs help."

 

"Be silent," Idris snarled at him.

 

Djemet narrowed his eyes. His gaze focused on one of the guards crowded into the doorway. "You. Go. Return with the palace physician. Now!"

 

The guard turned and ran.

 

Zuleika gagged and moaned, then cried out, "Ancestors, Djemet...help me."

 

Djemet flinched and turned toward her for a moment, "Endure a moment more," he told her. His expression went harsh as he looked back at Besma. "You did not plan this by yourself. Who is part of this plot?"

 

"No one," Besma snapped. Her chin came up and glared at Zuleika. "You would destroy my clan and she would do nothing to stop you."

 

Djemet laughed without a hint of humor. "You haven't the will to do this on your own. Do not lie to me."

 

"You'll never know."

 

Djemet raised his hand and Besma spat at him. He hit her again, this time with intent and purpose, and only the guards kept Besma on her feet. "Was it my brother?" he demanded. "Tell me!"

 

John stared and swallowed. Besma wouldn't hold out long. She wasn't trained to withstand interrogation. If Djemet's arm grew tired, he could order the use of moa. That would break her. Maybe even the threat would. He still remembered the acid-fire purity of the agony the drug inflicted. It made him shudder. Moa would break anyone. When Besma's will gave away, she would give away everything.

 

Everyone.

 

Bint was dead.

 

Rodney would die.

 

He would too, in all probability, not that it mattered.

 

He turned his head and looked at Zuleika again. She might die yet. If she didn't, she might still miscarry the child.

 

Zuleika had slumped down and was curled on her side, panting. "Djemet," she whimpered.

 

Djemet spared her a glance, then looked at John. "Go to her."

 

John scrambled over to her immediately. He felt twitchy and uncoordinated, but he shifted Zuleika as gently as possible away from the mess, snagged a velvet-covered pillow from the low chaise where Besma had been seated, and tucked it under her cheek. His head spun when he got to his feet, but he ignored it and retrieved the pitcher of water and another glass. He snatched a silk shawl from the back of Zuleika's chair, wet a corner and used it to wipe her face before offering her a sip of water.

 

Concentrating on Zuleika was better than looking up or listening as the Rale questioned Besma. He could block out the sound of fists meeting flesh, but not the snap of bone and her scream.

 

Zuleika curled up and sobbed, whispering something that made John frown, not understanding. "Not again, not again, oh, please, Ancestors, don't take this one away from me." She pulled her legs up and whimpered and he got it. She thought she was miscarrying.

 

He didn't know. Maybe she was. The best he could do was steady her, stroke her shoulder, and wait for the physician. It seemed to take forever as the Rale methodically broke Besma with nothing more than his hands.

 

If the Haralim died, her slaves would be freed.

 

John didn't know what he wanted any longer. Not this, he thought, not this way.

 

"Keder! It was Keder!" Besma wailed. "You were supposed to still be away to Baratha!"

 

"Who provided the poison?"

 

John looked up despite himself, his hand stilling on Zuleika's hair where he had been stroking it. Djemet stood very still. The guards had let Besma fall down to her knees, but still held her arms raised up. Her head lolled.

 

This was it. This was the moment Besma would say his name. He squeezed his eyes shut and waited.

 

"Tei'ayas."

 

He snapped his eyes open in surprise. Why would she protect them at this point? Why – Tei'ayas was utterly loyal to the Haralim. It made no sense, unless Besma believed it. She must believe it, she wasn't clever or strong or loyal enough to be lying now. But it still made no sense to accuse Tei'ayas.

 

Djemet turned toward Idris. "Take her away and prepare to arrest my brother and the slave Tei'ayas. I will execute them all at dawn."

 

"Rae."

 

"They have attempted the murder of my Haralim and my child – my heir," Djemet said. "The punishment is death." He looked at Zuleika. "If she dies..." His voice hardened. "It will be death by moa."

 

"Take her away," he ordered again.

 

Idris pointed to two of the guards. "You and you. Freka, go with them."

 

Once they were gone, only Idris and two men at the doors remained, besides Djemet, John, Tulem and Zuleika. Djemet had his back to Idris, his attention on Zuleika again. "I will have the physician flayed, and that fool I sent for him, if they do not arrive soon," Djemet snarled. "Tulem, go, find out what takes so long."

 

Two long steps ahead of Idris, Djemet's focus had settled solely on Zuleika.

 

The Rale didn't hear Idris slide the ceremonial scimitar from the sheath at his back, nor Tulem's soft gasp, as the curving blade began its descent. John would never know why he yelled a warning. Maybe it was Stockholm syndrome or maybe it was just distaste for seeing a man stabbed in the back. Possibly it was a swift calculation that Idris wouldn't leave anyone else in the room alive after killing the Rale. He yelled, "Behind you!" though, as Idris brought the scimitar down in a movement meant to cleave through the Rale's spine.

 

Djemet spun and ducked and would still have been impaled as Idris lunged forward, if Tulem hadn't moved at the same moment, throwing himself between them. The scimitar sank deep into Tulem, ripping open his abdomen as Idris jerked it free, making him scream.

 

"Kill her!" Idris shouted at the remaining guards standing at the door. "Kill both of them!"

 

Tulem crumpled to the floor, clutching at his stomach helplessly as his life blood flooded out, eyes wide. His cries lost strength, but didn't stop, and the reek of bowel filled the room. Djemet used the moment it took Idris to free his blade to draw out two long knives and parry the next slashing blow with one, metal edges shrieking against each other.

 

John didn't pay anymore attention to that fight. The two guards were coming for Zuleika and himself. He drew in a deep breath, the way he did when he began a kata, and rose to his feet. No weapons, but he still had the wetted shawl in one hand. He whipped it forward as the first guard drew near, tangling silk around the blade of the sword and startling him, so that he had a fraction of a second to step within reach while the guard tried to free his sword.

 

A strike to the groin and then John spun away, grasping the guard's wrist and using his momentum to pull him around, leading with the scimitar, using its weight along with his own and the off-balance guard's, instead of trying to the wrest it away. They came around and the edge, though blunted by the silk still caught on it, smashed into the second guard's ribs. The end of the blade sliced through the silk and into flesh, making him cry out and stagger back.

 

John flowed in closer to the first guard, managed another strike, this time to the neck, weaker than he should have been, wished for boots to stomp with, and snapped his fist into the man's face, before ducking a return blow and tripping him. There was tremble in John's muscles that wasn't right, slowing him down and distracting him. His movements stuttered and the breath of separation cost as one of his opponents recovered enough to strike back. The shock of a bed slave knowing how to fight and how to fight without weapons was wearing off, though it had slowed both guards and was still confusing them. They were more used to using stunners than blades, as well; they didn't know how to fight him, had expected him to hold still while they executed him. He could have run, but Zuleika was still on the floor.

 

The guard he'd managed to use the scimitar on hadn't been disabled. John caught a glimpse of him as he moved in closer to the first man. He'd lost the element of surprise and needed to finish this.

 

Teyla would have faulted his technique, but not his results. The last blow he used was one he'd learned from Ronon, quick and dirty and meant to kill a more powerful physical opponent, like a Wraith. He didn't think, just moved, and struck. The first guard went down. One down, one to go, he thought.

 

"John!"

 

Her voice.

 

"Down!"

 

He flung himself to the floor in a controlled roll as a knife flipped through the air and buried itself in the back of the second guard, who was much closer than he'd realized. John scrambled to his feet as the man groped at his back, hand feeling futilely at the hilt of the knife buried there. John snatched up the sword of the man he'd killed and swung it, cleaving through the arm that tried to block the blow, hitting bone before the blade scraped free. The weight and momentum of the scimitar startled John, but he recovered control and hacked at his opponent again, this time slashing the edge across the man's throat.

 

Zuleika was on her knees, swaying, and he realized she thrown the knife.

 

He stumbled back, realized that he'd killed both of them, and looked for another threat, for Idris.

 

Idris was on the floor, face down in a pool of his own blood. Djemet stood over him, a knife, wet and red, in each hand. Tulem still lay on the floor, dying slowing, crying. John blinked at him, glanced around for any other threats, then let the scimitar fall to the floor with a ringing clatter, before dropping to his knees and vomiting up a gush of blood.

 

~*~

 

John was still curling over, choking up more bile and blood, as Freka rushed in, dragging the physician by the arm, with Tei'ayas trotting behind them.

 

Djemet walked across the blood-splattered tiles to the wide-eyed physician, knives still in hand.

 

"Save them or die with them," he told the man, gestured Freka to stand aside, and whipped the edge of one blade across Tei'ayas' throat before anyone even guessed his intent.

 

John blinked, then doubled over again as the poison began its work once more. The physician was hurrying to Zuleika's side. He didn't register anything else, just shivered and concentrated on breathing, until Freka pulled him up and urged him to drink something. "Here. Malof says it is an antidote. You must drink."

 

He gulped the thick fluid down without protest, watching past Freka's shoulder as Malof spoke with Zuleika and touched her rounded belly. More guards poured into the room, some of them carrying a litter. Six men carried the Haralim out of the room, followed by Malof and a squad of hard-eyed guards carrying stunners.

 

Freka gripped John's shoulder.

 

"You did well," he said.

 

John swallowed hard, trying to keep the antidote dose down. Aside from the cramping nausea, he felt cold and his limbs ached. A raw cut on his arm, that he didn't remember getting, still bled sluggishly.

 

"Come on," Freka said. He pulled John to his feet. "Unless you want to wait for a litter."

 

John locked his knees.

 

"Just get me back to Rodney."

 

~*~

 

Either the antidote worked or he hadn't ingested enough to kill him, because he stopped vomiting after Freka left him in their rooms. He didn't realize Freka had left again until he came back with Rodney and Tein. Then Tein forced more of whatever foul stuff Malof had provided down him and Rodney cursed quietly while pulling him into a tub of hot water, holding onto him, both of them still dressed, until the ice in John's marrow melted away.

 

"Kemahet," Tein murmured.

 

"What?" Rodney demanded, jerking upright, sloshing water over the edge of the tub and then catching John back up against his chest when he started slide down into the water. "What happened?"

 

"The Hara Besma poisoned the Haralim," Freka said from the doorway. Shock marked his face and more than a few of the stains on his uniform were from John. "I'm to guard you tonight. The Rale's orders."

 

Rodney's arms tensed around him. "Oh." There were a wealth of reasons to guard them against an attempt, the one unspoken though was the possibility the Haralim would miscarry her child. They would need John until there was an heir.

 

"Bint's dead," John tried to say. It came out as a half-audible rasp, his throat seizing up, raw and burning, and left him gasping.

 

"Bint," Rodney repeated.

 

"Bint, Tulem, Idris, Gahan, Rafnan, Tei'ayas," Freka recited.

 

John tried to figure who Gahan and Rafnan were. Freka's expression went blank. He added, "The two guards you killed."

 

"You killed someone?" Rodney asked. Then he sighed. "No, don't answer me. Don't talk."

 

John nodded and leaned back against Rodney, the tight cramps in his muscles slowly loosening while Freka relayed what had happened.

 

"Enough," Tein said. "Time to get out of there."

 

He felt like his body had turned to water as Freka and Rodney levered him out of the tub, peeled him out of the wet pants and jewelry, then toweled him off, while Tein cleaned and bandaged his arm. He was asleep before they put him to bed.

 

Moonlight traced the wall when he woke with a jolt. Rodney's arm was heavy over his waist, one leg tangled between his, a soft snore stirring the hair at John's nape. His throat ached as he swallowed. He held still until he couldn't bear it any longer, watching the shadows slide across the walls, monotone dim. Rodney woke with a grunt when John shifted uncomfortably. The silence between them stretched until it frayed and came apart, the way John felt like he might come apart.

 

"I fucked it up," he whispered. He couldn't have said it to Rodney's face.

 

"Because you aren't the kind of guy who can stand by and watch a helpless, pregnant woman hacked up?" Rodney said. "Yeah, that's fucking up."

 

"We'd be free."

 

"You'd be dead."

 

John didn't argue. The same thought had occurred to him at the time. Idris turning on the Rale had likely not been part of anyone's plan – or it was a deeper plot than John could fathom. No one could have predicted he'd fight two guards to save Zuleika. Whatever the plan had been, whoever had stood to gain, they hadn't anticipated what he'd done. He'd had no intention of doing it.

 

"Tulem stepped in front of Idris. He just did it," he said. "He had more guts than I ever thou–" He choked and began laughing hysterically.

 

"I don't want to know why that was funny, do I?" Rodney asked when John's laughter had tapered off.

 

"No, you really don't."

 

Rodney trailed his fingers over John's bandaged arm. "You think they'll question Keder before he's killed?"

 

"Probably. Maybe. The Rale didn't question Tei'ayas."

 

"Nothing we can do, is there?" Rodney sounded distant, philosophical.

 

"No."

 

"I shouldn't be glad they're alive."

 

John turned over and studied Rodney's face. "Are you?"

 

Rodney tipped his head, considering, then nodded. "I am."

 

"Why?"

 

A huffed out breath was his only answer. It was easier to rest his head against Rodney's shoulder and slide back into sleep than ask again, particularly when he was half afraid of any answer.

 

 

---

The Whip

 

Every world that has life has death. Every world that has death has carrion and carrion eaters. Selket had hapek. Dirty-white fliers that were more mammalian than avian, completely deaf but with a sense of smell that rivaled a bloodhound's and the keen eyesight of a raptor. Their two-meter membranous wings sweated a volatile liquid that made those wings into magnificent cooling vanes, letting the hapek brave the blazing heat of the midday desert.

 

Their shadows wheeled over the central plaza where four heads rotted on poles set at the corners of the ambo.

 

The back of Rodney's neck was burning, while sweat trickled everywhere under his blue-and-white finery. The stones under his bare feet were painfully hot. He curled his fingers into his palms and endured without shifting too much. The last thing he wanted was to draw any attention. He was lucky to be up on one of the platforms, tucked among the rest of the Haralim's household, there to watch and be seen and not in chains waiting for his execution.

 

Selketi filled the plaza. All of them watching the two prisoners displayed on the ambo. They murmured and moved restlessly, shoulder to shoulder, waiting.

 

Besma and Keder were broken figures, chained in place, still in the tatters of what they'd worn when arrested. Keder twitched and mewled, probably in too much pain from a dose of moa to even know where he was.

 

The Haralim had been carried to the plaza in a palanquin, green-tasseled and gilded, piled with silk-covered cushions. She remained reclining beneath its shade, swathed in cloth-of-gold. The Rale had walked before it, green robes flowing, face fierce, his head uncovered to the sun. John had walked behind the palanquin and then knelt beside it, hidden beneath veil upon veil of half-translucent, red moire silk and ropes of seed pearls, even his gold-painted face hidden beneath one swathe of fabric. Behind, a second palanquin carried Hara Zoyan, in silver and satin and polished platinum, her features an expressionless mask, her back ruthlessly straight.

 

Half the nobles of Selketi, haras and raes, clad in their own glittering wealth, their palms painted the blue of honor and loyalty, walked in lines behind and took their places below the level where the Haralim and the Rale came to a stop. Guards armed and armored, carrying hand stunners and pulse rifles of the same design found throughout Pegasus, flanked them. More were stationed at all the plaza's entrances.

 

At the far end of the plaza from the ambo where Keder and Besma were displayed, two square towers of rose-red stone flanked the silvery curve of the stargate. Soldiers watched from the towers, from fortifications just beyond the energy back-splash zone, and at the DHD. The armor on their shoulders and arms, the spikes at the tops of their rounded helmets, all glittered in the glaring sunlight, while the pennants and flags of green and blue hung limp in the breathless air.

 

Rodney squinted against the glare and watched the pale crescent of Ildiza, the small moon, that waxed and waned from full to dark every five days, seem to balance upon one of the red fortress's crenelated towers. Lower on the horizon, Tahmur, the great moon, sulked, half hidden by the Lalo Mountains. Perspiration trickled down Rodney's temple. The Rale's voice was a liquid ripple of sound that he did not let himself understand, each pause greeted with an heated roar from the gathered Selketi.

 

Drummers began a funerary beat and the crowd quieted. Rodney looked despite himself.

 

The Rale unsheathed a jewel-encrusted scimitar, water-marked steel gleaming mirror-sharp, a spike of painful light that was quenched as a hapek soared over the ambo.

 

The scimitar descended.

 

The blow severed Keder Rale's neck half way through, blood spattering in a crimson arc to splash over the Haralim's slippered feet. The fountain of blood swiftly subsided as Keder's heart stuttered and failed. The crowd howled as the Rale levered his blade loose and struck a second time, successfully severing his brother's head from the body.

 

Rodney could smell the hot scent of it on the air.

 

The Rale flicked the scimitar in a sharp move meant to throw the blood from the blade. Because he was watching, Rodney saw John's minute flinch as a spatter of it hit the veil over his face. Hara Zoyan appeared unmoved as droplets of it settled on her pale robes.

 

The crowd quieted again as the Rale stepped past Keder's body and stopped before Besma. Besma had been kneeling with her back bent, her head bowed. Her hands were manacled before her in functional black iron attached to heavy chains. She straightened though as the Rale's shadow fell over her, first her back, then her neck, looking up proudly, tangled black hair fallen over her shoulders and sticking to her cheeks. The damage to her face was ugly, uglier than anyone anticipated, swelling and bruises overlaid with raw cuts. Only one eye opened enough to see out of but she stared up at the Rale without flinching.

 

She did not beg for her life or mercy.

 

No one offered either.

 

It took three blows to behead her, striking from the side, and Rodney closed his eyes before the end.

 

High in the towers of the fortress, a bell tolled to the same rhythm as the drums. It would ring through the day and into dusk, until the last trace of the sun had extinguished itself below the mountains and the harmonics shivered through bone and stone, resounded in memory ever after.

 

~*~

 

The purple sheets were smooth under his cheek. He still had a fold clenched between his fingers and slowly released his grip. Djemet was draped over him, sweating chest glued against John's back. He resisted the urge to try shrugging him off and concentrated on the small things: the fine weave of the cloth that wasn't silk but a little like a polished cotton, the bed hangings that were tied back with black braided cords, the faint brush of cooler air over his sweating skin. Light from the lamps, glass shades tinted like jewels, that hung from the ceiling on chains colored the room, haloed through the canopy over the bed. Every night the bedchamber was different, the room changed to the Haralim's whim; tonight it was all silver-threaded violet and indigo.

 

She hadn't joined them in the bed this time, but watched from a chaise piled with pillows, looking weary. She was due in less than a great moon and uncomfortable all the time. Malof the physician had decreed she rest in bed through the rest of the pregnancy after the poisoning. She'd ignored that to attend the execution of Keder and Besma, but otherwise obeyed. She asked no more of John than foot and back rubs, fetching and carrying, company when she would send all others out of her rooms. Djemet was the one who used him each night now; Djemet hadn't touched Zuleika since the attempted assassinations.

 

Her eyes were half-closed, the lids painted with shadows that no palace physician could not erase. She watched them together, by turns amused and resentful. But John never forgot she was there. Tonight, she seemed entertained, even indulgent.

 

Djemet rolled off him and John let out a breath of relief, despite the instant of discomfort that accompanied their bodies disengaging. One hand came to rest on the small of his back and stayed there. It felt almost affectionate, something he didn't let himself think about. He wanted to ask, but couldn't, why Djemet persisted in using him rather than Hara Zoyan, if he wanted sex so much and Zuleika couldn't provide it. He'd thought that Djemet fucked him to take back whatever he lost when Zuleika used John and now it seemed different. But questions weren't his purview.

 

A bell tolled the hour much later, when breath came evenly once more and sleep had come and gone. A shift from the other body in the bed woke John.

 

"What does this say?" Djemet wondered. His hand trailed up John's back, tracing the designs Rodney had painted there, curving and curling over the patterns, until John shivered. "This is the writing of the Ancestors." His palm cupped John's shoulder.

 

"I've never asked," he said, distracted by Djemet's hand. God, warm and callused and so utterly sure, that touch; there was something magnetic about the absolute confidence that Djemet radiated.

 

"Ro'ney is a very interesting man."

 

That jolted him out of the warm haze of just lying there. John rolled over, hiding how much even hearing Rodney's name from the Rale alarmed him. The Rale, not Djemet. He had to remember who they were to him and not succumb to the false sense of intimacy the bedchamber fostered. He was here to keep Rodney safe. Rodney was safest if the Rale and the Haralim forgot he even existed and left him doing translations in the library.

 

"Ro'ney is also mine," Zuleika snapped. She shifted uncomfortably, pushing herself up against the pillows with a small huff.

 

Djemet leaned over and straddled John, chest against his chest, and he had to feel the half-panicked race of John's heart. Eyes on Zuleika, he kissed John, who cooperated; he even looped his arm around the back of Djemet's neck and sighed into his mouth, wanting to distract him from thoughts about Rodney. Djemet was still gazing at Zuleika through his eyelashes. John didn't know what to think. Djemet had never kissed him before. But the proper response had been drilled into him and he touched his lips to the corner of Djemet's mouth softly, alert to every nuance of his reaction.

 

That reaction was another kiss, surprisingly gentle and languid, before Djemet pulled away and sat up. "You let me have John, when it pleases me," he said. "Why not Ro'ney?"

 

His palm rested flat against John's chest. John blinked up at the bed canopy, at the twisting patterns of silver thread running through twilight-colored silk, the way it moved slowly, in the barely stirring air, like the flank of some sleeping animal. He couldn't protest. He couldn't cry out and say no. There was nothing he could do. He tried to remember where he'd seen that shade of purple before but couldn't wrest his thoughts out of the room. Instead, he concentrated on breathing in and out and on stroking his fingers along Djemet's arm.

 

"You want him?" Zuleika asked in disbelief.

 

Djemet laughed, low and amused. "I want to take him offworld with me. He reads and speaks the Ancestors' words. He has a touch with their works. Such skills are too rare to waste merely in my library."

 

John's fingers stilled on Djemet's forearm. Then he ran them down the inside to his wrist, tracing the pattern called Three Silver Leaves over the pulse point. Offworld. If Rodney went offworld, he would have a chance at escape.

 

And John would be alone.

 

Desperately, he twisted on the bed and began touching Djemet with every practiced skill he had to call on, beginning with the fifty-third submission, Petals Falling, and unfolding into the Seventh Note and the Second Song of Hands, before calculation gave away to instinct. He set his palms against Djemet's thighs, aware of hard muscle and rough hair distantly, clutching in the way that always pleased, as though he would push the other man away, but couldn't. Catering to Djemet's desires always held that element of uncertainty. Resistance excited him, but too much made him brutal. John didn't enjoy the bruising and aches that lasted for days afterward on those occasions, and even less the guilt and pity he'd see in Rodney's eyes, so he worked at being exactly what Djemet wanted – even when Djemet didn't know what that was – taking him deep immediately.

 

Survival, he told himself, even as he licked a line up the underside of Djemet's cock and a harsh groan made him harden too. The thrill of pleasure he took from wringing that sound from the other man, though, from making him want until he was mindless with it, couldn't be dismissed as just survival if he was honest. He didn't want to think anymore or feel the fear and denial and wild hope tangling within him and sex was the best escape. Training and practice let him slide away into his mind, into no mind, and just let his body take over.

 

When he'd finished, he rested his face against Djemet's thigh with his eyes closed. The purple sheets were stained where he'd rubbed himself against them shamelessly, coming while he swallowed everything like he could never get enough.

 

Breathless and slightly hoarse, Djemet patted John's head and asked, "What would please you?" Offering a pet a treat and as poisonous for John to speak and accept such without caution as it had been for Bint.

 

"To please you," John replied dutifully. "To please you both." He closed his eyes, relishing the absent caresses.

 

He'd disliked being touched once. He could remember that, but he craved it now. And this was good, no matter how much he denied it and hated himself for enjoying it. He couldn't say no, but he was afraid that if he could, he wouldn't.

 

"You aren't that empty-headed, John," Zuleika said, jolting him out of a new round of self-loathing.

 

He turned his head to where she was. "Hara? I have failed some – " That thought made him feel sick again. Pleasing Zuleika was his life now: it kept him with Rodney and Rodney safe. He was never taking another chance like the one with Keder. He'd felt the blood soak hot through the veil over his face and sworn it would never be Rodney on the ambo. If the Rale took Rodney offworld, though, that would be different. If Rodney was gone...He didn't know what he would do then. Something reckless and suicidal, a voice very like Rodney's said in his mind, but maybe...nothing.

 

He rolled away from Djemet's hand and off the bed, down onto his knees, prostrating himself before the Haralim.

 

"Enough," Zuleika said, impatience bleeding into irritation.

 

"You please us," Djemet murmured, drawing John's attention back to him. "Who were you before? Where did you and Ro'ney come from?"

 

John didn't move or speak.

 

Breathe in and out, in to the center and then pull everything from fingers and toes and exhale it, and stay calm. He no longer remembered whether Teyla taught him that or Dullah. He waited for whatever punishment not answering would bring.

 

"Enough, Djemet," Zuleika said. "John, go."

 

He rose and found his clothes, taking them with him into the anteroom to dress. Her voice carried beyond the doorway.

 

"I will consider lending you Ro'ney, but you will not take him anywhere until this child is born."

 

~*~

 

"Hold still, damn it," Rodney snapped. If John didn't stop fidgeting, he was going to smudge a line. Then they'd have to remove the entire design, start over, and he'd either miss mid-meal or be late getting back to the library. At least this was a touch up job and not decorating him from scratch. That took far more time and meant John didn't get to visit the Blue Garden to practice his katas.

 

"I'm just trying to see what you're writing," John said. He stopped moving.

 

"You've never cared before." He finished one hand and John obligingly extended his other. "Thank you. Now stop distracting me. I want to finish this and get something to eat. If you didn't insist on dancing around every day, ending up sweating like a race horse at the end of the Kentucky Derby, we could go back to doing this in the mornings."

 

"You don't have to do it," John said. "I can go to the flower house and one of the handlers will do it."

 

"Like I'd let you do that." Rodney rolled his eyes.

 

"So what is that? What does it say?"

 

Rodney looked up and saw that John was actually looking at the delicate, stylized characters Rodney was spiraling up his arm from his palm. Amber flecks in his eyes seemed to hold the light and warm it. He looked interested, engaged, instead of distant. That was different. He'd come back from the Haralim's rooms in strange mood the night before, too.

 

"I – "

 

"Rodney?"

 

A gold-nailed hand closed around his, steadying the fine-bristled brush. He knew John was unaware of the sensuous way his thumb rubbed over the back of his hand. John hadn't touched before, but he did now, as naturally as he breathed.

 

He caught his breath. "Oh, well, it's, uhm, poetry."

 

"Poetry." John's smile made up for any embarrassment. "Okay." The teasing note in his voice was so long missing Rodney tried to memorize it. "Is it yours?"

 

"Yes," he said, feeling the hot burn of a blush color his face.

 

"Wow," John murmured and brushed his lips against Rodney's cheek, soft and so light as to be almost, ridiculously, shy. The smile that followed seemed equally amused and delighted, if Rodney ignored the sadness that always lurked behind John's expressions. Bright enough to make anyone stop and stare. Something else to memorize. The seasons had changed and the late morning light filled the room heavy as honey, heated on bare skin. He told himself the warm feeling in his chest came from the day's rising temperature and not John's unexpected demonstration of affection.

 

"Don't flatter yourself," Rodney told him, pretending the flutter in his chest wasn't there, that he wouldn't write poetry just to describe the way John looked, the line of his arm extended to be painted, the subtle curve of muscle and bone, or just to tell him and make him smile like that again.

 

John cocked his head and grinned. "Oh, I wouldn't."

 

"There's a long history of coding mathematical formulas in poetry. I'm doing the same with zero point energy theory. It's a memorization device, one none of these idiots will ever decipher, I'll wager." He dabbed his brush into the pot then finished the line devoted to John's neck, adding bitterly, "Genius being wasted here. No one appreciates any of the discoveries I've made in the last two months and no one ever will. Not here."

 

"Maybe not," John said.

 

He looked up. "What?"

 

"Not here, but they would somewhere else, right?" John didn't say Atlantis. Neither of them ever said that name. As long as they never mentioned it, no one would ever try to question them about it. Silence on where they came from was a lesson they'd learned before their capture. Both of them were frightened of what might happen if the Selketi were ever to learn they were Lantean and not just learned in the Ancestor's letters. Much of the danger had passed, by now everything in Atlantis must have been changed, but, at first, between them they had known a dangerous amount about the city and its security. Between them, they'd had everything needed to take Atlantis down, even the destruct codes and the genetics.

 

"Hmn, but that's just a pipe dream, right?" He set the brush aside and stroked his palm over John's cheek, checking for the rasp of beard that would mean it was time to use the hair-killing paste again. "Why did you ask about the designs?"

 

"Because they're words this time and before they were Selketi glyphs," John replied. He held his head still while Rodney blurred bronze-dusted shadow over his eyelids. "The Rale asked what they meant."

 

"Ah." Rodney wiped his fingers on a piece of cloth. "I'll provide a translation for you."

 

"He wants you to translate for him offworld."

 

His hands stopped moving, the cotton cloth still between his fingers. Fingers that closed tightly on it. Tight as the breath in his chest, until he remembered to breathe again.

 

"Offworld."

 

"He asked the Haralim to 'lend' you to him," John said. His face was blank when Rodney looked up, everything hidden beneath the painted mask, expressionless as his words had been.

 

"Me?" The squeak of his own voice startled him.

 

"Vai."

 

"Oh, that's good. There's a good chance we could – "

 

"You could," John interrupted. "Not me."

 

"What?" Rodney stared at him. "No. Oh, no."

 

"The Haralim would never let me go, too."

 

"Well, I'm not going without you."

 

A spark of anger heated John's voice. "Yes. You'll go with him. She'll tell him yes, for one thing, and you won't have a choice."

 

Rodney didn't care. He wasn't going without John beside him.

 

"Not without you," he insisted.

 

"Yes, without me," John snapped at him. "Fuck, just go, Rodney, and the first chance you have, you run for the stargate and dial the Alpha Site. Dial Belkan or M7G-677 or even Menara. There's a half dozen worlds where you're known and they won't let the Selketi grab you back."

 

Rodney folded his arms over his chest and looked stubborn.

 

"Don't be an idiot!"

 

"Me? Me be an idiot? You're the idiot, you're the one she'll punish – maybe you don't remember the moa – " Rodney stopped. "You remember," he said flatly.

 

John picked up one of the little pots, the jade green one, and turned it in his fingers, but Rodney caught the shudder that ran through him at the reminder.

 

"It's the best chance either of us will have. You can come back after me with back-up." He set the pot back down carefully.

 

"I don't care," Rodney stated as flatly and definitively as was possible. He wasn't leaving John behind. Period. Pegasus had scared him and scarred him and hammered him into a different shape, a different man, than the one who stepped through the stargate the first time. He understood, in his blood and bones, that you don't leave anyone behind. He couldn't, not and live with himself. He could lie, he could keep silent, he could give up the brilliant beauty of science and prostrate himself before the Haralim, but he couldn't leave John alone. He wasn't going to argue about it.

 

"Rodney..."

 

He turned his face away and picked up the last pot, taking off the lid.

 

"This discussion is over."

 

~*~

 

It began with the bells. They rang from the towers of the palace first, echoed off red stone walls, then from the greater heights of the fortress and its surrounding city, hour after hour, a clamor and clang that didn't stop for five days after the birth of Dalal Rale. Banners of blue and green were unfolded from the fortress' battlements, horns and drums sounded through the streets, and every tavern and noble house celebrated.

 

The Selketi didn't seem to care much that Dalal wasn't a son.

 

Rodney was unbearably relieved. A daughter bought them time.

 

John didn't feel the same, it became clear. To him, Dalal wasn't just a key closing the lock on their prison, she was that lock being melted shut forever. His misery and guilt were quiet, never articulated beyond a distance he maintained between himself and Rodney. Nothing Rodney did could keep him from silently punishing himself, and without realizing it, Rodney.

 

If it had been possible, Rodney suspected John would have moved himself back to the slave barracks. But, though John denied himself touching Rodney, he wasn't able to detach himself that much, probably because he still felt responsible for Rodney's safety.

 

They didn't discuss the possibility of Rodney going offworld with the Rale again, though it was part of the problem.

 

It came to a head the day before the ceremony formally acknowledging Dalal as a Rale. They'd barely spoken in weeks, though Rodney still prepared John each day. But he didn't see him in the library any longer, didn't lead him through back corridors to the kitchens to eat with the cooks and laugh, didn't touch him in the night and could not make John meet his eyes. Three weeks passed before he even learned John was training a small contingent of guards in unarmed combat. Guards meant to serve Dalal Rale the rest of either their or her life: if they failed to keep the baby alive, they could not look forward to surviving the wrath of the Haralim and the Rale. Otherwise they could expect to die in harness or protecting her.

 

Doing something besides entertaining their owner should have made John happier, but it didn't, any more than the discoveries Rodney made in the partial database did him.

 

"What the hell are you doing?"

 

Rodney's focus shifted from his reflection in the mirror to John, posed still and apparently shocked, in the doorway. If he hadn't been concentrating the flash of red over his shoulder would have alerted him to John's presence sooner. But he'd been intent, carefully outlining a new pattern over his own features after applying the kohl and rouge to eyes and lips. Stylized numbers wept from the corners of his eyes, down his cheekbones and up his temples. It was an interesting effect, but not successful. Not good enough to use on John.

 

"What do you think?" he snapped. He slapped the brush he'd been using down, picked up a pot of cleanser and slathered the green-smelling goop over his face. Of course it irritated his skin. He was going to be pink and raw feeling for days. That was better than sporting a bad design, however.

 

"Playing some fucking game," John said, cold and angry. He turned and stalked back into the main room, feet slapping against the tiles.

 

Bastard, Rodney mouthed to the mirror.

 

"That's right!" he shouted, abruptly furious too. "That's exactly it! You've found me out!"

 

No answer and he began to wonder if John had simply walked out entirely. He didn't actually care if John had left, but he wasn't going to waste his voice yelling if he had, so he peered into the next room. John was pulling clothes from the wardrobe. Not the simple cotton pants and shirt he'd worn to train with the new guards. Silks and gauze, glittering and fine, tossed and tangled on the quilted bed coverlet.

 

"You'll need a bath before you put any of that on," he said.

 

John gave him a filthy look. "That's what I was going to get when I walked in and found you – " He gestured at Rodney's face.

 

"You really are a complete moron, aren't you?" Rodney told him. He went back into the wash room and snatched up a cotton cloth, swiping it over the glistening goop on his face carelessly. "You think – Do you really think I was doing this for fun?"

 

John had followed him back as far as the doorway. A frown creased his features, the unhappiness they lived with every day out in the open, mixed with perplexity now.

 

Rodney finished wiping his face, then splashed water on it and carefully washed the last traces of the cleanser away.

 

"Obviously, everything I've done in my life was meant to let me become the pawn of alien slavers just so I could paint my face like an Egyptian drag queen," he sneered. "I get off on it."

 

"Rodney..." John sounded tightly reined in and tired. Rodney didn't care.

 

"Fuck you, John. Painting you with a new design every week means coming up with something and I'm not an artist, it isn't easy. This is the only face I have to practice on, because you sure as hell aren't going to sit still for it." He slung the fouled towel into the hamper. "Now clean up so I can make you pretty for our owner."

 

John stared at him, blank-faced, then stripped and headed for the tub. "Better come up with something better than you had going," he said as he sank down into the hot water that always filled it. It sloshed over the lip of the tub and onto the floor. Rodney glared and threw another towel down, imagining one of them slipping on the wet tile and breaking his neck. "Tomorrow's the Ceremony of Acknowledgment."

 

"Is that what's making you such an extra special idiot?"

 

John sank under the water and didn't answer, even after he resurfaced, hair soaked to his head, eyelashes matted into little spikes.

 

"John."

 

"She made me hold it – the baby today," John said, looking away, while water ran from his hair down his face.

 

Rodney had begun reordering the paints and brushes, getting them in the order he would use them on John in preparation. He stared down at his hands, fingers still on the shafts of the fine brushes. Pale, sturdy hands, gone softer since coming here. The hairs on his wrists and arms looked darker in contrast. The gardens were the only access to the sun he had and he didn't get out in them often, working his days in the dim library. The bristles on the brushes were still darker than his hair though, almost sable – not that there were sable on Selket – fine and pliable. He fantasized about using them on John sometimes. Or John, using them on him, the delicate, almost tickling touch a pleasurable torture. But it was only a fantasy.

 

The baby, unfortunately, was not fantasy, was very real, and not something either of them wanted to think or talk about.

 

Dalal.

 

"Why?" Rodney demanded. Was the Haralim trying to torture John? He imagined the scene, though, despite himself. John liked holding babies, he'd seen it on more than one world, seen him smile goofily down at squinched up red faces, completely oblivious to the way he was winning over whichever pre-industrial natives they were treating with that time. It was difficult to imagine John with kids of his own, though, difficult enough that Rodney frowned, wondering if John even wanted children.

 

Dalal would never be John's child. Not his to raise or call his own. She might never know who sired her, or care if she did, and would call the Rale her father. Not John, and that was another pain that was never going to go away.

 

"Showing her to the guards," John answered quietly. "They start tomorrow." He tipped his head back against the edge of the tub, eyes closed, and went on, voice flat, "No more training them after today. It's back to the way it was. Before."

 

Back to stud duty, Rodney translated. No wonder John's temper was raw.

 

Still with his eyes closed, John added, "After the Ceremony of Acknowledgment, the Rale is going offworld. Trade mission. He's going to ask her to let him take you along."

 

"Tell her to say no," he said.

 

"Like she listens to me?" John murmured.

 

"Well, she ought to," Rodney blurted out. "You did save her life. That should count for something, especially considering the circumstances."

 

"Yeah. Funny."

 

"Hilarious," Rodney agreed. He glanced at John again and wondered if he hadn't been trying to pick a fight, push Rodney into wanting to get away from him, so he'd take the chance to go offworld with the Rale. The chance to escape. It made his mouth go dry. "Come on, get out of there before you turn into a prune."

 

He took a chance and set his hand on John's arm as he came out of the tub. Water slick skin and muscle that tightened under his touch briefly, before John relaxed and leaned into the touch almost hungrily, though he didn't look at Rodney.

 

~*~

 

"No," Rodney said again. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest, knowing he looked mulish.

 

The Rale frowned at him. From where he knelt beside the Haralim's chair, John glared with silent fury.

 

"I go where John goes and John goes where I go and I'm not going anywhere or doing anything without him there too," he stated. He heard the creak and rustle of the guards at the doors shifting, restless and ready to move if his intransigence went beyond words. Despite his determination, Rodney's heart was beating too fast and sweat ran down his back. Slaves didn't say no. No one told the Rale no on Selket. He didn't know why he thought he would get away with this, but he couldn't go along. He couldn't bow his head one more time, walk through the stargate, not facing the options of escaping without John or coming back. He didn't think he could make himself come back through the stargate to Selket if he ever got off.

 

He'd rather die.

 

"I'd forgotten this one came with your Chosen," the Rale said to the Haralim. He rose from his seat and paced around Rodney, predatory and patient. He stopped behind Rodney.

 

Rodney kept his eyes on the tapestries hanging behind the thrones. A lion-like animal with zigzag gold stripes standing over a fallen antelope, scarlet pooling beneath its kill. Tahmur and Ildiza full and silver in an indigo sky behind it, the towered silhouette of the city itself forming the black background, and the iridescent blue of the Great Veil shading half the sky behind that, obscuring the the night sky's stars. Tiny seed pearls had been sewn into the tapestry to form the heraldic beast's fangs. The colors were brilliant, rich as jewels, finer than anything Rodney had seen, even on Earth.

 

"Has he been so intractable?" The Rale's voice is silky, almost amused, and Rodney imagined he could feel the heat of his breath on the back of his neck. Like that lion-thing, ready to snap his neck. "Always?"

 

In the periphery of his vision, he saw the Haralim's hand stroke over John's head, fingers tangling through his dark hair, golden nails sharpened like razors promising pain if he even twitched. It occurred to him with silent horror that John may have had another reason to want Rodney to obey. She knew exactly how to make John obey, after all: just a threat to Rodney. How likely was it that she knew to reverse that threat to compel his own obedience? He'd do anything to forestall seeing John dosed with moa again.

 

Go through the stargate...and come back. He'd rather die, but not if it cost John that torture again.

 

"Yes," the Haralim. "At first. They killed two guards trying to escape after I purchased them."

 

John's face was completely empty. Rodney concentrated on breathing evenly.

 

"I hadn't realized it was these two," the Rale said. He clamped a hand onto Rodney's shoulder. "You shouldn't have kept them if they were dangerous."

 

The Haralim smiled at Rodney. "They aren't dangerous to me, Djemet." He hated the cold curve of her lips, the knowing arrogance in her dark eyes that said she knew them and controlled them. Effortlessly. "Ro'ney is stubborn. I believe Dullah has had him flogged once or twice. Nothing else was necessary."

 

"Perhaps he has forgotten the lesson," the Rale said. He dug his fingers into Rodney's shoulder. Hard. "He is a slave. Disobedience is punishable by death."

 

"Perhaps." She cocked her head, still smiling, still toying with John's hair. "Or there is the moa."

 

John sucked in a harsh breath, loud in the otherwise quiet room. One of the guards coughed. Rodney bit back a whimper, wishing he'd just listened to John and gone along with it, or that he'd found some lethal little Ancient toy among the detritus of ages that the Rale had collected, something he could turn on and use to kill him. He figured he'd finally opened his mouth once to often. God, he wasn't going to be killed by a piece of malfunctioning equipment or a lemon or a Wraith. This sonovabitch with the same eyes as John was going to cut his throat and when he did, John was going to lose it.

 

He hated himself as much as he hated the Rale right then.

 

"Death," the Rale insisted.

 

"No," the Haralim snapped, leaning forward. Her hand was clenched in John's hair, holding his head back, but that wouldn't stop him. "They are mine, Djemet. I decide."

 

The hand on his shoulder lifted and a soft chuckle sounded in his ear. "You said you would share."

 

She looked at him narrow-eyed, then laughed. "You enjoy this." She let go of John and gestured to the guards. "Take him," she said, pointing at Rodney. Then she addressed him. "You have presumed above your station, Ro'ney. I take into account that you are not Selketi. I am merciful."

 

The dark, liquid sound of her voice didn't reassure Rodney, but he didn't move as two guards stationed themselves beside him, their hands locking on his arms. He gone soft, softer than he'd been before Atlantis, over the last year, and forgotten everything Teyla and John had shown him about fighting. He didn't have a chance of fighting them.

 

Merciful. Sure.

 

"Ro'ney," she said. "The whip or the moa?"

 

He knew how bad a whipping would be, yet he'd endured it twice before. His mouth was dry, but he bowed his head and answered:

 

"The whip."

 

~*~

 

Heat on the back of his neck and a prickling that ran down the backs of his arms made John swallow hard. The punishment of a slave didn't merit performance on the ambo in the central plaza of the city. They were in a courtyard of the palace. Yet the sun felt as merciless as it had at the execution. The heat shimmered off the red stone walls that stretched toward the square of blue sky above them. There was no shade for anyone.

 

Rodney was stripped to the waist. Each of his wrists was tied to a wide, shoulder-height horizontal cross-piece of a T-shaped rack. The leather strips that had been doused with water and left to dry brutally tight. Trickles of blood meandered along the underside of his arms while the pale skin of his back was rapidly reddening.

 

On the stones before the rack, exactly where Rodney could see, the whip lay coiled. It had been there when the guards brought him to the rack and secured him in place.

 

They'd brought in Dullah to whip him. There would be no mercy from the slave master, but Dullah knew his work. He wouldn't do any inadvertent damage. Just the deliberate lashes.

 

John slitted his eyes against the glare. He saw Dullah, squat, scar-faced Dullah, give him a measuring glance where he stood beside the Haralim.

 

The Rale lounged next to her. He was bareheaded. Dullah bowed to him, then the Haralim. He frowned a little at John, disapproving of his posture, since he was standing less than step to the side and behind the Haralim. Insufficient. John didn't care. He watched Rodney, who had his head bowed.

 

Other slaves and members of the Haralim's household watched from shadowed doorways and the deep-set windows that looked inward on this courtyard. But the courtyard itself was virtually empty, only two guards at each doorway, Rodney at the center, Dullah, the Rale, the Haralim and John in the open.

 

John shifted deliberately, breaking the silent stillness with a chime of ankle bells. He wanted Rodney to know he was there.

 

Dullah stripped his outer shirt off, folded it and set it neatly on a plain bench sitting next to the doorway he'd entered from. Next, he smoothed his iron-gray hair back over his skull with both hands then knotted the tail in a neat, quick movement that kept it off his face. Finally, he walked to the center of the courtyard, stopping in front of the rack. He bent and picked up the whip by the handle, leaving it to uncoil as he straightened, the end still lying innocuous as a snake on the stone.

 

He said nothing as he circled Rodney and paced to the required distance. John thought the stone there was worn smoother than the others.

 

"For pride, one lash," Dullah intoned. He drew the whip back and snapped the length through the air with a crack.

 

Zuleika's hand closed and tightened around John's wrist as the lash hit Rodney's back. The whip snap made him jolt, but it was the sound of it hitting flesh, of Rodney's choked cry that broke his control. He was moving without being aware of it, and only her hold stopped him from doing something that would result in both of them dying.

 

"For defiance, one lash."

 

Crack.

 

John flinched.

 

The muscles in Rodney's back tightened and rippled and he jerked against the ties holding him in place. Blood dripped from his wrists to the ground. The harsh sound of his breath filled the courtyard along with the slither of braided leather over stone, as Dullah drew the length of the whip back again. Two welts ran diagonally over Rodney's back in a perfect X.

 

"For disobedience."

 

Crack.

 

Rodney let out a high, breathless sob and John pressed his eyes closed. He was shaking, fighting every instinct that told him to rush across the sun-steeped space and put himself between Rodney and the punishment. Zuleika's fingers locked around his wrist, anchoring him, reminding him, holding him in place, because it could be worse. He could make it worse.

 

Eight lashes total. Zuleika had bargained Djemet down. She'd touched John's cheek once, before giving him over to anything Djemet wanted for the night, while Rodney was held somewhere, waiting. "Eight lashes," Zuleika said in the morning, her sharp nails at Djemet's throat. "He is mine and I do not want a crippled slave. I will go to Baratha and I will take my slaves with me."

 

Djemet had held still, only his throat working as he swallowed. "Vai," he had said at last.

 

John had pretended to still be asleep.

 

Eight lashes.

 

He knew Rodney had suffered more than that sometime while he was in the training barracks. But he hadn't seen it. He hadn't known about it until he was smoothing his hands over Rodney's broad back and felt the phantom scars, the invisible lines of thickened tissue just under his skin. He'd counted them in the dark, by touch: fifteen stripes for disobedience.

 

He hated.

 

Crack.

 

Rodney screamed.

 

John prayed Tein-ve would be waiting when it was over, with eiff and the rest of her magic drugs. He prayed for it to be over.

 

The whip came down and down and down and down.

 

---

Numb

John held his breath until the Rale left, then held still until Dullah walked out of the courtyard. Zuleika finally released his wrist. He still didn't move, just watched Rodney, watched blood run from the eight raw stripes across his back and down his arms. Rodney was sobbing with pain.

 

"Go," Zuleika said.

 

He bolted into the courtyard.

 

"Rodney," he said as he reached him. Rodney's face was screwed up, flushed red and wet with tears, his eyes shut against the pain. "Here, this will help," he added and fumbled out a lavender glass bottle Jehmen had slipped to him at breakfast. 'Eiff,' Jehmen whispered, 'Tein sent it.' He twisted the top off and held it to Rodney's lips. "Just drink this. It'll help."

 

Rodney choked and a dribble of the syrup ran down his chin, but swallowed most of it. John tucked the bottle into the small pocket on the inside of the decorative vest he wore and began trying to work the leather bindings on Rodney's wrist off. It was swollen so tight the circulation to Rodney's hands had been partially cut off and his fingers were swollen like sausages.

 

John cursed under his breath, wishing for his combat knife, lost almost two years before when they were taken captive, or any of Ronon's hidden blades. Anything sharp enough to sever the leather his fingers couldn't dig under. He didn't have anything and he was ready to chew the damned things off. Rodney kept making these breathless, gurgling sobs that ripped John apart just to hear. One of his fingernails ripped as he dug at the leather desperately, leaving a shred of gold caught against the blood soaked binding.

 

A hand closed on his shoulder and pulled him away. John protested, without thinking, ready to fight. "Hey, no – "

 

"John, move," Freka said, moving into the space John had occupied. A knife gleamed in his big hands. "Hold him." He slid the tip beneath the leather and carefully severed the leather, angling the edge away from Rodney's skin.

 

John ducked around the crossbar and got his shoulder under Rodney's arm, taking a portion of Rodney's weight, as Freka finished cutting. He had to face Rodney to do it, and slip one arm around his waist from the front, to avoid touching his back. It still ripped a hoarse scream from Rodney's throat.

 

Freka cut Rodney's other wrist free with a small, frustrated grunt, muttering, "This was badly done. Dullah's orders, though."

 

John braced himself under the rest of Rodney's weight, then Freka closed one big hand on Rodney's other arm and lifted him. For now, all he could see or think about was Rodney, but somewhere inside he marked Freka's words. Dullah, damn him. He'd deliberately made this worse than it had needed to be. The whip hadn't needed to slice through Rodney's skin to satisfy the punishment, either; leaving welts would have been sufficient.

 

"Tein-ve is waiting in you quarters," Freka told John. "I'll help you get him there."

 

John nodded gratefully and walked Rodney backwards, away from the whipping post and the dark stains on the ground.

 

"Don't pass out on me, buddy," he whispered, leaning his face close to Rodney's, ignoring the tears and snot and the blood trickling from where Rodney had bitten his lips during the flogging. He figured he would have looked and sounded just as bad. God help Dullah if John ever had the chance to make him pay. "I'm going to get you fixed up."

 

Between them, Freka and he maneuvered Rodney down the dim, narrow corridors that the servants used to service the palace. The sound of Freka's boots echoed off the stone walls and they had to angle their progress where the halls closed in too tight for three men abreast.

 

Tein took in the situation with one sharp look as they reached the rooms and carefully let Rodney down to lie prone on the bed. Feverish heat simmered off his body and his sobs were reduced to whimpers. John knelt by the edge of the bed and wiped at Rodney's face with his fingers. Everywhere he wanted to touch: Rodney's neck or his shoulders or even his arms, seemed too close to a wound.

 

"Freka, get me a bowl of warm water," Tein ordered as she fussed through the bandages and jars laid out on a tray on the nightstand. The guard obeyed without protest. "We'll have to clean him up first," she told John. She frowned at Rodney's wrists, where the flesh had swollen closed over the raw places. "This was done to purpose." A disapproving sound followed that statement.

 

Rodney's breathing had settled into an even rhythm. John held his palm against his hot, damp cheek and murmured, "Rodney? It's over. Just hold on."

 

Tein touched his shoulder, making him jerk. She handed him a dampened cloth that smelled of a native Selket antiseptic. Harsher even than the infirmary smells he'd once known too well. "Did you give him the eiff?"

 

John nodded.

 

"Then he'll not hear you and that's a kindness," she said briskly. "It isn't over for him. This will pain him until it heals." She wrung out another cloth. "Start cleaning his wrists while I do his back. It's best if we do this before he needs another dose. I'll show you what to do."

 

"Tein-ve, I must return to my duties," Freka said, setting down a large pot filled with steaming water.

 

"Yes, go, this will take some time," she replied.

 

"John."

 

John looked up from dabbing at the painful damage to Rodney's left wrist. He knew he needed to pull the wounds open enough to clean where the leather had cut into raw flesh, but he didn't have the stomach for it. Freka looked at him compassionately.

 

"The Haralim will expect you to return to her soon."

 

"I can't leave Rodney like this," John protested.

 

Tein slapped the side of his head. "You'll do him no good if you earn a punishment too, fancy. You'll give him another dose of eiff and go."

 

John gritted his teeth and nodded, knowing he had no choice.

 

~*~

 

Leaving Rodney drugged asleep, salve and bandages covering his back, grated on John. Kneeling next to the Haralim's chair through the afternoon and into evening cost every ounce of self-control he'd ever learned.

 

He'd forgotten to do anything about his hands and kept worrying at the ripped fingernail with his thumb, bothered out of proportion by the small mar it presented in his appearance. He sensed the Rale's gaze on him more than once, but kept his head bowed, eyes down.

 

A select group of nobles arrived to dine at the Haralim's table. Hara Lalin came on the arm of her poet-scholar, providing more support to the old man than vice versa, her exotic hair dressed in intricate braids and studded with jeweled pins. With Tulem's death, Lalin was returned to favor greater than she'd enjoyed previously. She had a clever wit that obviously entertained the Haralim and the Rale.

 

Silent servants brought the evening meal in on golden trays, platters and bowls full of steaming or sizzling dishes, followed by frothy mixtures of fruit and yogurt in cups of crystal sugar decorated with tiny flowers. John was grateful the Haralim didn't offer him any. The fruit that had been the Haralim's favorite did not appear.

 

Every bout of laughter from the guests at the single, long table used for the smaller gathering jolted John. In unconscious mimicry of Rodney, he bit the inside of his lip until it bled.

 

A single flute player sat in one corner of the room, filling the air with melancholy sound, the arrhythmic Selketi music familiar enough finally that John could pick out motifs and themes. The musician was playing love songs, but in the tune of classical tragedies. The Haralim and the Rale spoke against this background of the proposed trip to Baratha and delaying it, the costs of shipping grain from Hunet to Selket and whether to leave it to private concerns or nationalize the entire shipping industry. If they thought of what had been done to Rodney at all, it was only as an inconvenience, since he wouldn't be fit for gate travel for weeks.

 

“Baratha?” Lalin asked. Her face was alight with interest. She leaned forward to address the Haralim. “You're going there?”

 

“When my slave has recovered enough to be useful again,” the Haralim said.

 

John flicked his thumb against his torn nail and swallowed, trying not to think about Rodney and the way his body had jerked with every lash. It was his fault. He should have ordered Rodney to obey the Rale and go or found a way to make the punishment for defiance less severe.

 

“I've never been offworld,” Lalin said. “I confess to being envious.”

 

“Baratha will never compare to even the worst place on Selket,” the Rale told her.

 

Lalin laughed. “So I am sure, but I am a creature of great curiosity.” Her gaze rested on John for an instant. “My grandmother was a woman from offworld. I grew up with her tales of Aht'os. My grandfather always said there were great treasures to be found on other worlds, if one was brave enough to go through the Ancestor's Ring and bring them back. I suppose that is what I would hope to do.” She looked at John again meaningfully.

 

John didn't acknowledge her interest. He paid no attention to the dancers who swirled around the room after the meal's remnants were removed, either. He endured, concentrating on breathing steadily and not breaking posture, when he longed to bolt out of the dining room and back to their quarters to check on Rodney.

 

Eventually the guests withdrew and only the musician and John remained in the room in addition to the Rale and the Haralim, who lingered over glasses of wine. The guards were dismissed to wait outside the room.

 

After hours of sitting consciously still, every muscle in John's body ached like he'd been beaten. Almost worse than that, he had to take a piss soon.

 

“Have you chosen a new commander for your household guard?” the Rale asked.

 

“Mohet Umard.”

 

John didn't think he'd ever encountered any guard named that. He hoped the man wouldn't turn out to be as much of a bastard as Idris had been. Some of the guards gave him suspicious looks and jostled him in the halls since he'd killed those two during the coup attempt. Not the men he'd helped train in hand-to-hand techniques, who were part of the contingent that guarded Dalal, but the older ones. Except Freka. Aside from Rodney, Freka was the closest thing John had to a friend in the palace.

 

“Hmn,” the Rale said. He set his half empty glass down and rose. “Enough business.”

 

The change in his voice sent a shudder through John.

 

“Pleasure then?” the Haralim asked, her voice gone smoky and inviting.

 

“Come here, John,” the Rale commanded.

 

John started to stand.

 

“No. On your knees.” The hot, thick arousal in his voice along with the command told John it would be a bad night.

 

He obeyed.

 

~*~

 

The hapek were ripping the skin from his back. Face down and helpless, Rodney felt their presence loom over him, movement and shadow, and sudden, merciless agony piercing through the sear of the sun. He tried to get away but he couldn't. Sharp agony tore through his arms – they'd sliced away his hands, he'd felt the cauterizing pain at his wrists and now he could feel nothing beyond them. He couldn't make his eyes open, either, time slipped, black gaps falling out of his thoughts repeatedly, though he could hear the creatures' rasping chatter every time he came around. He screamed then, kept screaming, because he was burning and he was nothing without his hands, without fingers – fingers to write to fight touch pull a trigger take a piss hold a brush feed himself type touch – and the hapek were tearing through his back again like he was some poor Prometheus, only he'd bleed and die – He bucked and arched and screamed over and over again, until his voice went hoarse. "Go away, get away, get off me! Get off, get off! Noooooo!"

 

~*~

 

Rodney came around sometimes when John was dressing his back or wrists. The sounds that tore out of him then left John shaking and sick to his own stomach. He could handle the ugly wounds, the pus-stained bandages and the smell of infection, but not feeling he was making it worse.

 

He'd fumble for the bottle of eiff and get as much of a dose down Rodney's throat as he could, his own hands shaking hard enough to spill half on the sheets, then wait until it took effect to finish. It put Rodney to sleep so fast he'd quizzed Tein when he went to her for another bottle.

 

Turning it over in his hand, he frowned and asked, "How addictive is this stuff? I should start weaning him off it as soon as possible, right?"

 

He thought Rodney had put drops of it in the tea he fed him some nights, after the dranzi wore off and John began to hurt too much to even sleep.

 

Tein frowned back. "Eiff isn't addictive."

 

"It's a painkiller," John said. Every damn painkiller he'd ever heard of was addictive.

 

"It numbs the mind."

 

He really had no idea what the hell that meant, but the next time Rodney woke up enough to eat a little broth, John tried not giving him quite so much. But the fever from the damned infection came back and Rodney's delirious flailing began tearing open the scabs on his back. John's determination broke when the whimpers turned to rasping shouts and incoherent begging.

 

~*~

 

They were too heavy, too big, pushing him down into the raw rasp of the bed of sand that gave under him. He curled his hands – his hands, his hands – into fists, fingers stiff and aching, skin too tight and cried out over and over, clenched his fingers on the wrinkled sheets–

 

John was holding him down, his voice rough and worn, "God, Rodney, stop, stop fighting, stop, I have to clean the damn wounds, you've got an infection and a fever–"

 

Fever, no, he was burning, on fire, they were shoving lit matches under his skin, acid, fire ants, bees, biting, stinging, and he couldn't breathe, gasped, gulped for air, something trickled into his mouth–liquid, cool and sweet and good. He swallowed, swallowed, swallowed it all eagerly, let it quench the fire, let it seep between him and the pain, and he could lick his parched lips and taste it: eiff.

 

Eiff washed away the pain, dissolving away even the memory of it, the memory of everything, of the voice murmuring to him to sleep, until he did.

 

~*~

 

Six hundred sixty-eight days since he'd sat in a chair, John calculated idly, distracting himself. He'd grown used to cool, smooth tile. He was sitting Indian-fashion, beside the Haralim's seat. She was listening to reports from the household. Everyone but the guard commander, who was expected after midday meal. Tein had come and gone, so had the gardener and Malof. Malof had been instructed to check Rodney's recovery so that the trip to Baratha could be scheduled. Now she was reading reports and dictating notes and instructions. Twenty thousand forty bells. Twenty-four thousand forty-eight hours. Terran hours. Twenty-three thousand two hundred forty-six point four Atlantean hours.

 

Rodney had been aware enough to listen to John before he left. He'd placed a tray with water and fruit on the nightstand, along with a bottle of eiff. Rodney's mouth had been pursed against the pain in his back and his wrists were still bandaged, but he'd croaked out John's name and listened, awareness visible in his eyes. The worry in John's chest had loosened faintly, seeing the blue no longer glassy and blind with fever. Underneath the bandages, Rodney's back had looked better too, the red of infection fading and the whip stripes finally scabbing over.

 

"Hey," he'd said. "Good to have you back."

 

"Not so good here," Rodney had rasped. He'd shifted uncomfortably, then grimaced in obvious pain again. "Oh, Jesus."

 

John had stroked sweaty hair off McKay's forehead. Rodney whimpered against the pillow. "Yeah, I know it's bad."

 

"Give me something," Rodney begged.

 

John picked up the bottle of eiff and measured out a dose. "Open wide," he said and made a buzzy, airplane noise, trying to make Rodney laugh.

 

"Fucker," Rodney muttered, then opened his mouth for the spoon.

 

John snorted, a sound he never made around anyone else, and put the spoon and bottle on the nightstand. "Look, I can't hang around all day – duty calls – but this stuff will knock you out pretty quick. If you wake up while I'm gone, there's water and fruit on the tray, a chamber pot next to the bed, and you can take another dose. A spoonful knocks you out for about five bells."

 

A shuddering, indrawn breath had been his only reply. "Okay," he'd said. "I have to go." He touched a finger to Rodney's ankle, soaking in the warmth of his skin, pleased that it wasn't so feverish any longer.

 

"Go," Rodney said with a grunt. "Wouldn't want you ending up here too."

 

John rubbed a circle on Rodney's ankle bone. He didn't say he'd rather it had been him than Rodney at the whipping post. Rodney knew that and wishing didn't undo what had happened.

 

"Okay," he said again, awkwardly, and slipped out of the room, running down servants' corridors and arriving at the Haralim's rooms breathless and flushed, prostrating himself before her immediately.

 

"Come," was all she'd said and led John to the household clerks' room, where she'd begun listening to reports on the state of the palace. Nuret, a woman in her late twenties in slave whites, moved in and out of the room, bringing her various reports and relayed orders while a rail-thin scribe kept a copy. John held onto the hope that the Haralim would let him go at mid meal and not require him again until evening.

 

Nuret slipped in one the side doors and waited patiently until the Haralim waved at her to speak. "Mohet Umard is waiting, hara."

 

The Haralim fingered the sheaf of papers in her hands. Her long nails were painted turquoise and rattled against the heavy parchment. "Let me finish this, then send him in," she said with a sigh. She began reading again, ignoring Nuret's, "Vai, hara," and setting aside each page as she finished.

 

"Kasha should not cost that much," she declared when she set down the last paper. "Find another supplier and bring me the prices." Her eyes narrowed. She pointed at one of the guards. "You. Have someone bring me Hara Lalin."

 

"Vai, hara."

 

"And send in Umard."

 

John watched the new guard commander stride in, boot hills clacking forcefully against the tiles and then ventured a look at the Haralim, wondering how she'd take to the man. Umard stood almost a head taller than John and had the build of a professional football player – a defensive lineman. His nose was broader and flatter than most Selketi and had probably been broken at least once. A sharp, black gaze took in everyone in the room and lingered on John for an instant before he bowed to the Haralim.

 

"Hara."

 

John paid only half his attention to the low-voiced interview between the Haralim and Umard. No one would bother to ask his opinion of the man. He fetched a tray with hot tea and sweet biscuits at one point, detouring around Umard. He wasn't sure, but he thought the man took a step backward that made John brush against his arm. John swayed to the side without jiggling the tray in his hands and marked Umard as someone to steer clear of.

 

The Haralim absently gave John one of the biscuits and John felt Umard's eyes on him as he ate it.

 

His interest was diverted by Dalal's arrival. Her wet nurse brought her in and presented her to the Haralim for inspection. Seeing the clever Haralim smile at her daughter, murmuring in a dialect John didn't know while holding her, riveted him.

 

Dalal wrapped a tiny but strong hand around one of her mother's necklaces and pulled. The necklace broke, sending lapis beads tumbling down into the Haralim's lap and onto the floor. She laughed.

 

"No, no, no," she said, plucking a bead from one plump fist before Dalal could bring it to her mouth. "That is not for eating.

 

"I'm so sorry," the wet nurse murmured. She reached to take Dalal back.

 

"Just help clean up," the Haralim said. She nodded to Umard. "Go. Introduce yourself to your men."

 

He bowed and backed from the room. "Vai, hara. Blessings on your name and house."

 

She boosted Dalal higher in her arms and stood, sending the rest of the beads tumbling to the floor and strolled to the room's window, turning Dalal so they could both look outside. John watched for a second then set to helping the wet nurse, Raki, and Nuret gather up the deep blue beads. He absently tucked one that had cracked inside his vest's pocket.

 

By the window, Zuleika continued to murmur to Dalal, who laughed in delight at something she saw. John felt a weird flutter in his chest. She wasn't really his; she would grow up as the daughter of the Rale, not a pleasure slave. But she still meant something to him. Something more than just another pretty child. More than the Haralim's heir, who might own him one day.

 

That thought chilled him thoroughly. No matter how long he was here, he would never be satisfied with this life. He wasn't a slave. He didn't accept it. For now he would go with it and pretend, because Rodney worried too much about him, but he wasn't the person the Selketi wanted to make him.

 

Raki settled herself next him, plump and content with her world. "I'm lucky," she said.

 

John slanted a disbelieving glance her way.

 

"Well, I am," Raki told him. She wasn't a beauty, just pleasant and more than little plump, in her early twenties and already soft under the jaw before she'd lost the round cheeks of childhood. Her brown eyes reflected puzzlement when she met John's gaze. "You're the Chosen. Don't you realize how lucky you are?"

 

"No," John said, thinking he didn't consider living in a cage lucky at all.

 

"But...you're the Haralim's Chosen."

 

He opened his mouth to tell how much he didn't want to be and stopped. It would do no good. Wouldn't convince Raki, certainly, who had lived all her life as part of Selketi society and saw nothing wrong with slavery. Let Raki, let everyone, think he had accepted this. Otherwise there might never be a chance to get away.

 

Morning slipped into afternoon, mid meal was served, and John was allowed a short break that he used to sprint back to Rodney, checking on him and visiting the washroom before returning, bolting down a piece of fruit and paratha along the way.

 

Hara Lalin arrived at a midday third bell, after Raki took Dalal back to the nursery, and the Haralim retired to the Green Receiving Room. Other women were there, gossiping and amusing themselves with games. Lalin stood out among them, taller and fairer than most, with her striking blond-bronze hair dressed in ribbons of pale green.

 

"Hara," she said, with the open-handed gesture that meant respect and greeting and 'look, no knives' among the Selketi. There were blue glyphs painted on her palms. Joy and Loyalty. John recognized them. It was a Selketi tradition that had become rare, the painting of the palms or the face. Most only went to the effort for traditional occasions.

 

The Haralim gestured her to the closest seat. "Sit." She took in Lalin's appearance with a flicker of her dark eyes, then nodded to John. "Water from my pitcher," she instructed.

 

John poured a tall crystal tumbler full of clear, iced water and set it before Lalin. It was an honor to drink the same water as the Haralim. Of course, it was a risk too, and a test. Lalin picked up the tumbler and drank deep. John topped off the tumbler's contents. The Haralim appeared satisfied.

 

"I want you to do something for me," she told Lalin.

 

"I shall do my utmost," Lalin replied. Curiosity lit her features and she leaned forward.

 

"Find for me the prices for wholesale kasha by the bushel in the city, and Gemed Port, and the mills. Do this without tying your inquiries to the fortress."

 

Lalin's brows drew together, then she nodded decisively. "You suspect someone in the palace of an agreement with the sellers to inflate the price and return a percentage to their own profit."

 

"Kickbacks," John murmured before he thought. He ducked his head. "Apologies, hara," he said quickly.

 

The Haralim looked at him for a drawn out moment. "Clever," she murmured and returned her attention to Lalin. "Yes, I suspect, but to audit all of the palace procurements would disturb my household for great moons. I want this settled before we leave for Baratha."

 

"It will be my great pleasure to serve, hara," Lalin said with apparent sincerity. She sipped the water again and then nodded toward John and asked, "May I have leave to address him?"

 

John looked up at the Haralim. He was used to being in some sense invisible: not his body, but his mind. Lalin wasn't asking to taking him to her bed, she wanted to talk to him. That was different enough to make his heart speed. He felt hot and embarrassed; sweat dampened the back of his neck.

 

"If you please," the Haralim said.

 

"Tell me about your world," Lalin asked him.

 

John licked his lips nervously.

 

"My world," he repeated. He licked his lower lip again. Atlantis or Earth? He shouldn't say anything about either, but it wanted to come bubbling out, all the memories and familiar pieces of the life he'd known before. He and Rodney carefully never spoke of any of the things they missed: the experiences and culture that only they shared on Selket. They didn't talk about Atlantis and never about Earth. "I hadn't lived on the planet of my birth for years before..."

 

"You've been to more than one world beyond the Ancestors' ring?" Lalin prompted him.

 

"Vai, hara," he admitted. That was easier.

 

"Tell me of them. Tell me how many."

 

John frowned and calculated. "Two hundred four worlds. M47-031 was the last my team visited, where we were ambushed."

 

"Ambushed," Lalin repeated.

 

"Stunners," he said, "as we stepped through the ga – ring." He hadn't let himself think back to that moment in a long time because it led to thinking if-only and what-if and helplessness. "I don't think I saw more than glimpse of some trees and a slice of sky." He remembered falling, his body already numb, the sky the color of a robin's egg and cloudless, the arc of the empty stargate bisecting it.

 

"Tell me about some world you did see."

 

He flicked his eyes toward the Haralim, checking her mood, before speaking and tried to pick and choose what he said, because he knew that she would remember every word. She saw and heard everything and made the most of it. "There was Hoff. We went there to trade for...to trade. They're gone now, the Wraith culled Hoff five years ago. They were pretty advanced, had electricity and basic physics, no electron microscopes, supercomputers or anything like the Ancients, sorry, what we called the Ancestors, but...It was a good world, except for the coal fuel pollution." John snapped his mouth shut. He'd revealed too much about Atlantis and Earth, just by the comparisons he drew. "Very green compared to Selket, a completely different climate, pine trees, I don't even know if you have pine trees here, with long needles instead of leaves...?"

 

"Go on, John," the Haralim said.

 

He cleared his throat and continued, describing the buildings, the clothes the Hoffans had worn, the motorized vehicles that stank of kerosene and ran so loud Beckett had muttered about issuing ear protection. Lalin leaned forward with her chin supported on her hand, asking to hear more whenever John faltered to a stop, listening in fascination, until John's voice had gone hoarse and the Haralim called a halt.

 

John felt grateful and weirdly empty.

 

~*~

 

Sitting up and walking pulled the stripes on his back, making Rodney gag, but he managed it the fourth day because he desperately wanted to use the bathroom instead of the chamber pot. Using that involved contortions nearly as painful as getting on his feet and then he was left with the stench next to his bed until John returned.

 

He managed it and when he'd staggered back to the bed, rewarded himself with a generous dose of the eiff John had left on the nightstand.

 

The pain had washed away, the sweet relief as pleasurable as any drug high he'd ever tried out, including Demerol and the morphine sulphate Beckett had given him when he was shot in the ass, and he'd begun the soft slide into sleep when someone strode into the room. He had his head turned to the side on the pillow and had been watching dust motes hang in the sunlight splashed over the floor tiles. The golden specks had been slowly, slowly, slowly settling in the still afternoon air, drifting down as drowsy as Rodney felt, then suddenly they were swirling and flying, pushed by the rush of air before the person entering the room. His second clue was the snap-clack of shoes on the floor and then a shadow falling across the floor, ending with a vision of slate blue robes.

 

Rodney blinked at the sudden interruption of his sight line.

 

"Get up."

 

No, that didn't make any sense. He didn't need to and he remembered, getting up hurt. He wasn't going to do that unless he had to.

 

"Get up, you lazy, pus-filled fart," a woman's voice shouted in Rodney's ear. He jerked away from the noise, felt a vague jolt of pain through the haze of eiff, and found himself staring at Macha. Her long, iron-gray hair was dressed in braids again, loops of them knotted and coiled and looping over her shoulders. He tried to follow the turns and twists and felt his eyes cross.

 

"Lar Macha," he said. Rather, he tried to say, but his lips and tongue didn't work and it came out as a slurred, "Lrrmsha." He didn't care much. He wanted to go to sleep. His body was floating down through the bedding, dissolving atom by atom, he thought. Phasing. That was the concept. He was phasing through the bed. Pleasure at remembering made him smile at Macha.

 

Macha frowned back and shook his shoulder. Rodney barely felt it, though his head bobbled. "Hnn," he managed.

 

"You slug," she snapped at him. "You have work in the library – "

 

Rodney let his eyes close.

 

"Wake up," she went on. "If your work is not done on time tomorrow, you'll find those eight lashes were only the beginning. San pot motta bhen ken."

 

Rodney translated the word into English in his head: Stupid, fat, dumb ass fucker. Or something like that. Macha was using Hunese slang and her mainland accent mangled it. He giggled to himself. Maybe she'd said 'sen po mhot tu keen'. Keep fucking my fat ass.

 

The smack of a hand slapping his face just made him giggle harder, because it didn't even hurt and wasn't that wonderful? Eiff was the greatest stuff ever.

 

"Lar Macha."

 

Oh, that was John, drawling out her honorific like a curse. Rodney twisted around – his back should have been screaming, maybe it was, but he didn't feel it – and waggled his fingers at John, who stood in the doorway, so pretty and dangerous, like a leopard yawning and watching from a tree limb, red mouth and glittering gold on black. He didn't move and Rodney thought in a distant part of his mind that John had always been most frightening when he was still and silent.

 

Macha back away from the bed. "Chosen," she said. "He is expected to finish a five of translations by tomorrow. Or he will be punished."

 

John bowed his head, all ironic acknowledgment and only stepped out of the way of her exit at the last second.

 

Rodney waggled his fingers at John again. "Heay, thin 'm wass'ed," he mumbled, letting his eyelids fall shut at the same time.

 

The bed dipped as John sat down next to him. Cool fingers traced over Rodney's cheek, then his eyebrow out to his temple. It felt very far away, like someone else was being touched and he was hearing it described on the radio. "You took another dose?"

 

"...ad t'ge up," Rodney sighed. "Hurt." He found that word and made it clear.

 

John's hand moved and stroked over Rodney's head down to his nape, where he rubbed gently. "Yeah. I guess it's a good thing you finally made me learn to read and write Ancient, isn't it?"

 

"Mnnn..."

 

"I'll take care of your work in the library, okay? Don't worry about it."

 

Rodney sank down into the lovely bed of welcoming sleep and didn't.

 

~*~

 

He didn't have much that wasn't shiny or silky or transparent, but John didn't quite dare wear any of Rodney's blues or whites. Instead, he pulled on the black gauze pants and the indigo shirt with the silver stitching and kept to the narrow, older corridors on the way to the library. He'd always been good at moving silently and bare feet did have some benefits. He slipped past Macha and the other librarians into the database room without attracting any notice.

 

Piele jumped like a grasshopper when John touched his shoulder. His pale eyes widened as he took in John. "Oh," he murmured and his expression seemed to dim. "I thought Ro'ney-ve had come."

 

"Have you ever known Rodney to be quiet?" John asked, smiling.

 

Piele's mouth twitched into a reluctant smile. "He talks back too much."

 

John smiled back. "He always has." His smile faded as he pictured exactly what talking back had resulted in this time. Part of him hoped Rodney had learned the lesson, because he never wanted to see him hurt like that again, but most of John hoped Rodney hadn't. Because he didn't want to know Rodney was broken. He'd talked back at Macha, though, John told himself, even if he had been so doped up he didn't know what he was saying.

 

"Did Ro'ney-ve send you to bring me to him?" Piele asked. "I have pages I have copied, but I can't translate the Ancestors' words. I've learned some, but...Ro'ney-ve doesn't just read their words, he understands what they speak of and I am lost." He gestured to the Ancient console. "And I have not the magic of it, either."

 

John brushed his hand over the console and watched it light. It was weak, but he could sense an answering thrum in his own nerves, answering the almost-aware systems that sensed him as someone almost Ancient at a cellular level. Piele drew in a quick, surprised breath.

 

"Oh."

 

"Show me and I'll do Rodney's work, okay?" John said. "Just until he's better."

 

Piele looked skeptical. "Pardon me, Chosen, but this is the work of the Ancestors, and you are not a scholar."

 

John carefully kept his expression amiable. "Were you a scribe before you came here?"

 

"I was an apprentice when my people sold me," Piele replied. "Too weak to work the fields or hunt bynock and the winters were getting harder." He pressed his lips together. "At least I will not be put out on the ice here, so long as I do my work."

 

John thought of Raki. Piele hadn't said it, but John knew: he thought he was lucky too. So many values of luck and fortune, of survival and relative comfort. In Pegasus, luck was always to escape the Wraith, but after that: a full belly, a roof and bed, were more than many had. Many would be more than content in a slave's life on Selket, where the Wraith came seldom and in few numbers. People mostly preferred safety to freedom.

 

He said, "Rodney made me learn."

 

Piele hesitated, then drew a pile of papers to him and handed them to John. He gathered blank parchment and ink before him and picked up a pen. "This will take time."

 

"The Haralim gave me the afternoon," John told him, looking at the first page and the dissonant but familiar blocks of Ancient script. He shrugged and offered Piele a lopsided smile. If he stayed in their rooms, all he could do was check under Rodney's bandages again; reassuring himself that, yes, the wounds were beginning to heal, the redness of infection finally had begun to fade, and the fever had burned itself out. That and watch Rodney sleep off the latest dose of painkiller. He'd never been particularly patient and the stillness and near silence offered too much time for self-reflection. Taking care of Rodney's work, keeping Macha mollified, was better. "What else am I going to do?"

 

"Would you go back to your world if you could?" Piele asked.

 

John thought about Teyla and Ronon, the jumpers, the city humming around and through him, Elizabeth, Earth, Atlantis, the summer he was fourteen and his father was stationed at Beale Air Force Base, where the heat made the sleek birds on the runways seem to shiver alive, the shimmer of the event horizon as he stepped through it, night on Athos seen through NGVs, the fries served in the Atlantis mess, target practice at the gun range on South Pier, the offal and ammonia scent of a hive ship...Debriefings, exams, 'don't ask, don't tell', Caldwell, Landry, veteran's hospitals, of finding out half his team was still presumed as dead as he and Rodney must be, and the eyes, always the eyes that would look at him and see and know...Of standing on a balcony, with the sea wind fresh in his face and the stargate spinning.

 

Choice. No. He'd be able to say no. Rodney was the only one he could say no to here and the only one he didn't want to say no to. He forgot sometimes and he didn't want to forget. Ever. He still wanted to fly. He still wanted the stars. He wanted to go and find what was on the other side of the next stargate. Compared to freedom, there was nothing, not even Dalal, that would hold him.

 

He wanted to fight the Wraith or even the Ori. Do something that mattered.

 

He didn't answer.

 

The question wasn't whether he would go home. He knew there would be bad waiting with the good. He knew that.

 

It wasn't whether he'd go back, it was whether he would go.

 

And he would.

 

~*~

 

He woke slowly, the drug easing him into consciousness, half-dreaming and still relaxed. The dip of the bed on one side gave away John's presence. The air sifting through the windows felt hot and dry on his bare back, on still tender skin. Selketi summer and the heat lingered late, hours after the long dusks that seemed to hover, while the sun loitered in the bleached-out sky, drawing out the days. He floated for a while, not thinking, sweat springing from his pores. The eiff cushioned everything, softened the sheets under him, cooled the oppressive night, put a cotton-candy filter between everything bad and his thoughts.

 

Rodney became vaguely aware that John was speaking after a time and wondered, because even his eyelids were too heavy to lift, who he was talking too. The words dissolved into a hoarse blur that he could imagine stroking over him like John's hands. His skin prickled pleasantly. He had only to make a sound or roll over and John would drift his fingertips over his body.

 

But he was too far away to move, the eiff slipping between him and desire and emotion. It was a thick glass wall between Rodney and existence, thicker with every day, every dose. The glass became rippled, distortion building until everything beyond was blurred. Not important.

 

At first, John had brought him each dose, and Rodney had been shocked by how bleak he looked, in those too bright, sharp, agonizing windows between the drug's embrace. After the bandages cames off, Rodney went to Tein himself and John watched him pour the measure into his tea each night and then each morning without saying anything. He wasn't there in the afternoons, when Rodney began letting himself have a dose early, when his hands began shaking and his muscles cramped. He didn't need to know about that. Rodney wasn't good at handling pain, he never had been, but every time he let any hint of it slip, John looked so devastated he couldn't stand it. If he took enough eiff, he didn't need to pretend he didn't hurt. He knew taking more was a bad idea, but it worked.

 

Rodney didn't know if John's efforts to act like things were normal helped or made it worse. He went along with him, anyway.

 

"She's talking now," John said. His hands were deft with practice as he removed Rodney's bandages and inspected his back. Two weeks of constant practice had taught him exactly how to do it without making Rodney hurt more than necessary, something Rodney appreciated.

 

"Who?" Rodney asked. He always ended up clutching at the sheets, tensed and waiting for the pain, though it wasn't bad any longer. His wrists hurt more, since he couldn't stop himself moving his hands unless he was actually restrained or unconscious. But he expected it to hurt and braced himself each time. He had no idea who John was talking about. John talked through every bandage change, trying to distract Rodney, and most of the time he didn't listen to anything more than the sound. Content meant nothing.

 

John's hands went still for a breath.

 

"Dalal."

 

Rodney felt sick. "Oh." Dalal. John was getting too attached. It scared the hell out of Rodney. So many things scared him, but John relaying slave gossip seemed worse than almost any of them. It was John losing himself in this place. John had a child here that he was entirely too interested in talking about lately. He swallowed back the nausea and tried to pay attention.

 

"Raki says she's smart. I suppose she'd say that, she's not Dalal's mother or anything, but taking care of her the same, and most mothers think their kid is brilliant and beautiful, right?" John went on.

 

"I wouldn't know."

 

When had the sheets become so damn scratchy? It felt like his skin was raw where they touched. That added to his general, usual level of irritation. It was probably someone in the laundries, some lazy slattern, not doing their job and rinsing all the soap out. He'd end up with a rash. He squirmed uncomfortably. He was sweating too; the room had become so damn hot. John said something and he realized he'd lost track again. He made himself lie still and made an inquiring, 'well, go on' sound to cover himself.

 

"Gefel in procurements was arrested for taking kickbacks on kasha today," John added.

 

"Kasha's the grain they make flour out of here," Rodney said. He said it even though he knew it was pointless, even though he knew John knew that just like he did. He could care less about kasha. Why was John torturing him with this stupid gossip? He didn't want to hear any of it. He didn't care about any of it and he didn't want to listen while John made it clear he'd finally surrendered to being the Haralim's pet. If John was just going to go on and on about all the meaningless minutiae of life in the palace, Rodney was going to take his dose of eiff early and get some sleep.

 

"Yes, Rodney," John drawled. Rodney imagined him rolling his eyes. John had begun dabbing salve on his back, so he couldn't see him, but he knew that tone of voice. The way John was touching him felt good and bad at the same time. Almost like John wanted him.

 

"It's just...the guy didn't think to cook the books enough to cover his tracks? Idiot." The palace used vast amounts of flour. Just the paratha baked every day would be impressive. Gefel, whoever he was, had probably been pocketing a tidy sum. Of course, now he'd be stood up at a whipping post. Possibly. Theft had many different punishments on Selket, geared to the severity of the crime. Gefel had stolen from the Haralim's household. He'd be lucky if he wasn't stripped not only of whatever he owned but of his freedom. He might be barefoot very soon.

 

John stroked his palms over Rodney's shoulders, smoothing the salve in even on unmarked skin. "Hara Zoyan's been sent to Hunet. I'm not sure, but Hara Lalin might be angling to become wife number three." He glided his hands down Rodney's arms, gentle massage morphing into caresses, his long finger curving rounds biceps, teasing the softer skin of the inner arm, then moving down before starting back up, the heel of his hands offering pressure while his fingertips touched feather light. It should have felt wonderful. It irritated him instead. Rodney shrugged, trying to make John quit.

 

"Who gives a fuck?" he snapped.

 

John lifted his hands away. "Me for one. It's my ass he's using whenever the Haralim isn't in the mood." His voice was light, self-mocking, refusing to become annoyed at Rodney. Which annoyed Rodney all the more.

 

Rodney rolled on to his side and then sat up. The achy, sick feeling in his stomach was getting worse. He pushed himself up onto his feet. Maybe moving would help. He'd been trapped in these rooms for so long it was making him crazy. "You haven't seemed to mind much lately." He didn't look at John as he said it, knew it was unforgivable, but the words just spilled out. John had sounded so...settled in and fucking comfortable with their existence here. He'd almost been joking about something that had ripped him up to begin with and that wasn't acceptable.

 

"Where's my eiff?" Rodney demanded.

 

"On the nightstand." John pointed.

 

"Oh."

 

John was frowning at him. "Do you really think you need it?"

 

Rodney began pacing, ignoring the pull over his shoulders. He needed to move and get rid of the damned itch crawling under his skin. He felt ready to explode. "Jesus, I need – "

 

"I always knew you were an asshole, Rodney," John said mildly, "you don't need to work so hard at reminding me. If you want a blowjob all you have to do is ask."

 

"If I want a – !" the words burst out. The worst part was that he didn't. He hadn't had an erection, hadn't felt a stirring of interest below the waist since the whipping. He spun around on his heel, nearly losing his balance and pointed a finger at John, who sat on the edge of the bed looking entirely too calm, despite the exhausted shadows under his eyes. "You really are a whore." Christ, his head was going to blow off, pieces of his brain splatter all over if he had to look at him one more moment. "Get out," he hissed. "I don't want a blowjob, I don't want you to touch me, I don't want to look at you."

 

John's face went blank. He stood with a strange, slow grace. "McKay – "

 

"I'm the one that was whipped. Whipped! As in blood running down my back, my wrists – what if I'd lost my hands?" Rodney yelled, his voice rising and rising uncontrollably. He waved his hands at John. "I can't believe you want me to lie here in screaming, unbearable pain. Why not just kill me? But no, really, sex with the wounded man will make it all better!" He stopped to catch his breath and heard what he'd just said. "Okay, okay, I know, I do know, you aren't trying to kill me, you don't want me to be in pain, but right now, I just don't want to even look at you, so could you just...go."

 

John hesitated for only an instant, then dipped his head in assent. He'd stepped back when Rodney began shouting. Rodney couldn't read what he was thinking or feeling. He'd put on the distanced expression he wore outside their rooms, the one he showed everyone else. He was even moving the way he did in public, slinky and sinfully graceful, gliding across the floor, as though it was his default setting now. He'd present himself the way he'd been trained to: seductive and silently obedient.

 

Rodney watched him walk into the next room and swallowed the saliva and bile in his mouth. When that didn't work, he stumbled into the washroom and threw up. "Shit, shit, shit," he repeated between heaves. His back burned now, the partially healed skin pulling as he bent over.

 

They were never getting away from this place and John was going to be trapped between who Rodney kept trying to keep him as and this shadow person the Selketi had shaped him into. All Rodney could do was hurt him, it felt like.

 

He staggered to his feet, splashed water on his face, and went back into the bedroom. His head was pounding, making his eyes blur. He shivered with a sudden chill, despite or because of the sweat springing out all over his skin. He didn't want to think about any of it. Was he really doing John any favors, keeping him from forgetting who he'd been? Was he doing himself any favors dreaming about escape? He felt sick all over again when he contemplated trying to fit in again in Atlantis.

 

It would be even worse for John and John was smart enough to know it.

 

The bottle of eiff almost slipped from his shaking hands as he measured out a generous dose. He set it back down with fanatical care.

 

The soothing numbness spread through him immediately. Psychological, he knew. The drug hadn't had time to absorb into his system, but his mind knew relief was there.

 

He walked carefully to the corner that separated the bedroom portion of their rooms from the rest.

 

John was on the lounge, curled on his side. Even bent in a half-fetal position, his feet hung over the edge. It looked supremely uncomfortable. John's back was to Rodney. The tension in the line of his shoulders and spine gave away his wakefulness.

 

Damn it.

 

"You look ridiculous," Rodney said. "Just come back here."

 

He didn't wait to see if John would come or not. The eiff had begun seeping through him, and he felt heavy and floaty at the same time. Being angry was just so much effort. He shouldn't have shouted at John. He wouldn't have if he'd just taken some of the drug a little earlier. It would have steadied him. He needed to remember that.

 

His eyes were closed and his mind still circling, but slowing, when John joined him in the bed. The mattress gave and they ended up together in the center, but John kept his hands to himself. He knew John was still awake, could feel it in the wary rigidity of the body next to his, and finally mumbled, "Go to sleep."

 

~*~

 

No time to slip inside the Blue Garden and practice his katas anymore. It had been uncomfortable since the coup attempt. Before when he was watched, John knew they didn't see him or the truth in his practice. Now the eyes he felt were weighing exactly how dangerous he might really be. The Blue Garden was too public. There were always at least one guard watching, either to protect him or protect someone from him.

 

He missed the cho trees and the rippling shadows.

 

Rodney's words kept repeating in his head, distracting him.

 

Whore.

 

Rodney had always had a nasty tongue, but that hadn't been something John anticipated. He couldn't get it out of his head. All this time Rodney had been the one telling him he wasn't, that this didn't change who he really was.

 

He felt frighteningly adrift without that support. He wasn't ready to give up, but it felt like Rodney was telling him to. He could rationalize that Rodney wasn't himself and hadn't meant it, but it ate at his confidence.

 

Instead of doing katas, he took the backstairs that threaded through the oldest parts of the palace, narrow stone spirals barely wider than his shoulders, so old the stone itself had worn until it cupped his feet, then cut through the armory courtyard, carefully avoiding looking at the whipping post, and past the guard barracks' kitchen. From there, he could vault over the low wall around the bird coops and enter the library through a back door. Macha never knew he'd been there and Piele would never betray Rodney to her.

 

Macha didn't really care if she saw Rodney every day or any day, as long as she had new scrolls of translated Ancestors' wisdom to add to her library each small moon.

 

It was starting to wear on John, though. He spent most of his evenings and nights with the Haralim and the Rale. Mornings when he would have slept and exercised, he spent doing Rodney's work for the last three weeks. Sometimes, he catnapped in the afternoons, but never long enough before he had to be ready again.

 

He glimpsed the new guard commander, but didn't think about it. Umard probably had business in the armory. He kept seeing him around, but the entire palace was Umard's business. A small, paranoid instinct whispered that Umard was following hm, but he couldn't trust his instincts any more, they were fucked. Everybody looked at him, everyone watched.

 

~*~

 

He could feel Piele's gaze on him when he finally went back to work in the library three weeks after. He knew others looked at him too: there went the slave that had to be whipped. Piele wasn't looking for that, not for the scars or if he was broken. Piele was looking for the enthusiasm Rodney had had for their task.

 

But that had been before.

 

Maybe he was broken. He did the work set before him without trolling through the corrupted database, exclaiming and cursing and dashing his hands in the air when he found something new, something they would have given their eye teeth to uncover in Atlantis, where there was just so much, and so much of it still encrypted and protected, that it sometimes felt like they couldn't find the trees for all the brush clogging the forest. There wasn't any point. Every revelation was futile. Knowledge that couldn't be passed on might as well have never been discovered at all.

 

He read and translated for Piele, picking the files almost at random.

 

By the end of the day he was jittery and sick to his stomach again. He wanted to go back to the safety and comfort of their room.

 

"Ro'ney-ve," Piele said, "in the third paragraph here, does it really mean – "

 

"What?" Rodney snapped at him. "What? You're barely literate enough to write in the worthless squiggles they call an alphabet here, and you're questioning what your precious, wonderful Ancestors wrote?"

 

"But this doesn't make any sense," Piele protested.

 

Rodney slapped his hand down on the console. "Just be a good little slave and write down what I say. It's not like anyone in this hellhole has enough brains to even grasp the most basic concepts they were talking about."

 

Piele stared at him.

 

God, he just wanted to go lie down and take something before his head fell off. He pulled in shaking, unsteady breath and clenched his hands. "Look, it doesn't matter if it's right or wrong. It just doesn't matter."

 

"Very well," Piele said, ducking away from Rodney and gathering up all the papers they'd worked on during the day.

 

Rodney bumped carelessly against the table where Piele worked, sending the stack of parchments meant for Macha sliding across it. He blinked at them, thinking something was odd.

 

It bothered Rodney all the way back to the room he shared with John. He realized what it was as he stepped inside. Piele hadn't put the work he'd done in that stack meant for Macha. Dusk filled the room with blue shadows and John was on the lounge, legs bent and a handful of parchments balanced on his knees. A single lamp glowed on the low table beside the lounge, the cool chemical light catching on the gold armlet coiled around John's biceps. Rodney knew he'd been translating some things Piele managed to copy, but suddenly he saw the truth: Piele was going to bring everything they'd done today to John to check. Like Rodney hadn't been deciphering Ancient when John was flying supply runs at McMurdo.

 

It was intolerable. John was taking the only thing that gave Rodney any value in this pit away, the only thing that had kept him sane, and it didn't matter in the least that a half-bell before, Rodney had declared that none of it meant anything and he didn't care if he'd got it wrong.

 

John looked up and Rodney attacked. He didn't want John to see the sweat and twitchiness that came from really wanting his next dose. John was going to say something soon; Rodney had noticed the way he was watching each time he poured a measure from his bottle. Then he was going to tell Rodney he had to stop. It was easier to go on the offensive and distract John. He knew just what to say to hurt, too.

 

"I suppose you're screwing that lying little backstabber too," he declared.

 

"I'm not 'screwing' anyone," John replied. He set the parchments down and got to his feet, watching Rodney with the same caution he afforded everyone here.

 

Rodney snorted loudly and deliberately and went for the throat. "Right and you don't like it anyway, do you? You don't start breathing fast or get hard when I'm painting you up for a night in the sheets with the Haralim and the Rale. Nobody gives a blowjob like you do unless they like it."

 

John stood still, watching him, emotions flickering so fast over his face Rodney couldn't read them all, except the first and last: betrayal and pain.

 

Watching him slink out of the room, carefully making a circuit that kept him beyond arm's length of Rodney, should have felt like winning. Instead, Rodney finished his day on his knees, vomiting again, sick and too weak to get up for some stretch of eternity, and when he did, he couldn't find his eiff. If John had been there, he would have accused him of taking and hiding it, but John was still gone.

 

Rodney spat and washed out his mouth, then headed for the kitchens. Tein-ve would have what he needed.

 

~*~

 

He slept under a cho tree and woke feeling like he'd been fed on by a Wraith. Everything ached and he was cold. Dampness from the moss had soaked through his thin excuse for clothing during the night. John could imagine how Ronon would have laughed at him and almost smiled, until the old stab of pain hit again. Ronon was dead. So was Teyla. All he had left was Rodney.

 

The night before he'd wanted to kill him.

 

His temper had been only a breath, only one more word, from snapping. Getting out had been the only option.

 

The walls were too high to see the horizon, but the sky had begun to pale where the sun would rise, the nearer stars fading before that growing brilliance. The shimmering sheet of fluctuating brightness that obscured a quarter of the sky caught his eyes and John squinted. He'd never really paid attention to the sky on Selket. Traveling through the stargates meant that there was never time to learn a planet's stars; for that matter, they had seldom stayed overnight on uninhabited planets where they would have camped and when they did, they had slept in the jumpers.

 

That wasn't aurora borealis. For an instant it seemed almost fluorescent. Rodney probably knew what it was.

 

John clenched his hands. He wouldn't ask. The last week every time he tried to talk to Rodney everything went sour. Rodney said he didn't even want to look at him and John had begun to believe it. Rodney obviously blamed him for what had happened. The sick feeling it left in his gut came from believing that.

 

Maybe he could have argued, fought back, said something to Rodney if he hadn't been so exhausted.

 

He pushed himself to his feet, listening to the morning bells, and stretched. He tried to center himself and warm up, run through one of the simplest katas meant to keep muscles supple, but kept missing the stances, forgetting a step and frustrating himself because he couldn't concentrate. He settled at last on just breathing the way Teyla had taught him, the touch of first light rose-brilliant though his closed eyelids.

 

A stop in the kitchens garnered him breakfast, warmer and fresher than anything the servants would bring to even the Haralim. Some of the undercooks looked askance at John's damp, moss-stained clothes, but they'd seen him in worse, so he ignored them.

 

"Eat more," Tein told him, pushing another bowl of sweetened, boiled kasha in front of John. "You are too thin." If Rodney had been there, John would have joked about keeping his girlish figure and Rodney would have called him an anorexic fourteen year old girl and stolen half his meal, claiming he needed it to fuel his brain. Or he would have before. Rodney didn't have much appetite anymore or much interest in whether John took care of himself or not. The kasha tasted like wood shavings suddenly. He set down his spoon, pushed away the bowl, and got to his feet. The day had barely begun and already he was tired.

 

Tein stopped him on his way out. "You should take a tray to Ro'ney-ve," she said.

 

John felt the muscle along his jaw twitch when he clenched his teeth together. "I don't think so. He can get his own."

 

Tein rested her hand on John's arm. He held still and waited for her to speak again. Instead, she pressed something into his hand. John closed his fingers around the bottle. He contemplated it handing it back, telling her to take it to Rodney herself, or to make Rodney come to her. He considered dumping it once he'd left the kitchen. He wanted to throw it at the wall or possibly at Rodney's head.

 

"He asked for more last night. It took me some time to cook it down," Tein said.

 

Rodney must have gone to her after he left, he realized. He hadn't just gone to bed or even taken a dose. Rodney had gone out. But he hadn't come looking for John.

 

"He is in pain," Tein said.

 

"He is a pain," John told her, unsure if he was joking or not. The bottle of eiff warmed in his hand. "I'll give it to him." He hesitated, wanting to ask why Rodney would still need it so much when he seemed nearly healed. He wasn't stupid. He'd noticed the mood swings, the itchiness and nausea Rodney tried to hide when he hadn't had a dose in too long. Classic signs of addiction. But maybe it wasn't physical addiction. Maybe Rodney just wanted to escape from where he was and the eiff offered that. The other possibility was that Rodney really just couldn't stand John any longer, was sick of propping him up and telling him wasn't...what he was. He started to ask, but the bells sounding reminded him he needed to prepare himself for his day with the Haralim.

 

He forced a smile for Tein, turned, and headed, reluctantly, for their quarters. Maybe if he was really lucky, Rodney would have already left for the library when he arrived.

 

The designs on his hands and feet were fading. He traced them with his fingers after he bathed. Tried to imagine kneeling and letting Rodney trace his brushes over his skin. The first time Rodney had done that John had almost shaken apart. Each stroke of the bristles and paint over his skin had been a caress. Rodney had learned to do that for him. It had been a promise, a gift, that made John love the marks that he'd despised before. It had been everything Rodney and he would never say in words.

 

Everything Rodney no longer felt because John had failed him. This was his punishment and he deserved it. Just give in, go with it, be a slave, forget Atlantis, forget who he was, give up the sky. Give up Rodney. Give up on him.

 

Give up.

 

Let go.

 

A shudder ran through John. He had to stop and lean against a wall, press his forehead to cool tile, hit by a wave of vertigo. He found a fragile hold on his composure and pushed himself away from the wall. He blinked as he glimpsed Umard at the end of the corridor. Then the guard commander walked on. John reluctantly forced himself to keep going and walked the rest of the way to the Haralim's rooms. The bells at his ankles sounded with every step; he couldn't keep them quiet.

 

Tomorrow, he would go to the flower house. Lisha would remove Rodney's marks and apply a new design. One that meant only that he belonged to the Haralim. Even before, even in the training barracks, he'd held onto the thought of Rodney and getting back to him. If that was gone...

 

It didn't mean anything, he told himself. It didn't mean anything that he wouldn't have Rodney's designs painted on his hands and feet again. It never had. He'd never really belonged to Rodney and it was sick and screwed up to want to.

 

He couldn't hide it completely, the sense of being in freefall. A shiver kept running through him and the bells gave him away. The Haralim frowned at him and John flinched and closed his eyes. She only pulled him closer and urged him to rest his cheek against her thigh with a firm hand on his neck. John kept his eyes closed, confused again as the world turned upside down. Rodney hated him and the Haralim was kind. He didn't understand or know what to do any longer.

 

He slept all night in her bed, waking once to the Rale slowly stoking his back, telling him to stay when John started to withdraw. He gave in to the warmth and comfort of bodies that didn't reject him and sank back into confused dreams of soaring over a rippling ocean that became the silvery-blue event horizon of a endless wormhole.

 

~*~

 

John didn't stop sleeping in the same bed as Rodney. Not quite. He just wasn't ever there when Rodney was. They both grew very good at pretending Rodney was asleep when they couldn't avoid each other. If Rodney took an extra dose, he was, and the chime of ankle bells would ring through his dazed dreams. A few mornings, he woke to the warmth of another body, to John's hand on his arm or an ankle hooked over his, their bodies familiarly fitted together in sleep, but those times always ended once John woke and let go, pulling himself away without any words.

 

He did his work in the library, translating, and his back healed completely. He'd scarred this time, despite Tein's salve. Infection. He tried to not think about it, couldn't see it without a mirror anyway, didn't allow himself to wonder what John saw.

 

He began to understand why eiff meant forgetting in Selketi. It wasn't just the pain of the whipping it let him forget.

 

Nothing hurt. It didn't mean anything. The information in the database was fascinating, but it didn't matter. Nothing did.

 

"Don't do that again," John said once, sitting on the lounge, apropos of nothing, as Rodney walked by.

 

Rodney stopped and stared at him. "What?" John barely spoke lately, at least to him, and he was surprised. He hadn't even realized that until that moment. It bothered him, but he knew it wouldn't bother him long.

 

John shrugged and looked away, eyes lowered. "Tell the Rale no."

 

"Hunh."

 

He wouldn't. It didn't seem so important anymore, defying the Rale, staying with John instead of being separated. Nothing was. John watched him across the table, intent, and Rodney couldn't meet his eyes. It made something twist inside him, the look on John's thin face, the way something in his gaze seemed to become sadder when he looked at Rodney.

 

"Okay," John said. "Okay, Rodney." Nothing else. He left not much later and didn't come back to sleep at all.

 

To Be Continued.