Doctor Carson Beckett sighed and looked down at his hands. His gloves were stained a familiar shade of red as he pulled them off. Carson had been involved in many surgeries back home . . . he’d even had a short stint working in the morgue – autopsies helped when your research went wrong, after all.

The problem was that Carson was not a gifted surgeon. He’d tried the emergency room during residency, but until the Atlantis mission, he’d been a researcher. Hell . . . he still was, at heart. It just happened that a lot of the injuries around here were due to the subject of his research – the Wraith.

Carson wasn’t supposed to have seen something like that . . . he wasn’t in trauma surgery . . . he wasn’t in a bloody New York City morgue like that stupid television show that everyone said he should like. This is why they compartmentalized medicine – so people who couldn’t stomach these kinds of things didn’t have to. When he agreed to work in a galaxy full of life-sucking blue aliens, he still hadn’t agreed to this. Because this was a cruelty that even the Wraith would never force on man. He could just imagine some Wraith Ma out there telling her son not to play with his food.

“Dr. Beckett?” A soft voice. Carson looked up to find Lieutenant Parker peeking in shyly at the door.

“Just a minute, lass,” Carson said, taking his time washing his hands. Parker was the last person he wanted to have to report to. Elizabeth would have been angry, upset, but he knew she could handle it. Ford would probably hit something and then blame Carson for it. But Parker . . . he didn’t know. She was delicate looking – blonde hair and blue eyes and a thin frame. She looked more like a stripper in her military uniform than like a soldier. He had no idea how she’d react.

But she had to know . . .

Carson sighed yet again and stepped through the door. Parker was the only one there, as the rest of her team had been cleared while Carson was still observing the surgery. Parker’s team never got into trouble. They were long time scientific research, all pleasant people, never complaining, unlike the Sheppard/McKay show. Even Kavanagh, despite how much everyone else seemed to complain about him, was always nice to the nursing staff.

Carson frowned at Parker – hair falling out of her ponytail, dark circles underneath her eyes, a harried look about her. “Have you had your post-mission?” He was stalling. He knew it.

“No.” She hopped up on one of the exam tables. “But you can do it while you’re telling me what the hell that bastard did to my CO.”

Carson wanted to put his face in his hands, but he found this to be impossible while shining a light in Parker’s eyes. “By the nature of the situation . . . I would assume that he was tortured.”

Parker wasn’t looking at him. And she wasn’t responding.

He kept going. “The cuts were all shallow – no organ or nerve damage, no major arteries cut. Our main concerns now are infection and blood loss. We’ve given him two transfusions already and will probably need more before he’s fully recovered. Luckily, none of the bacteria in this galaxy have even been exposed to penicillin, so we have a broad range of antibiotics at our disposal. I don’t anticipate complications from infection. Open your mouth.”

She complied, letting him look down her throat patiently. But when he was done, she said, “What else?”

“Bruises, all defensive, probably sustained when he was captured.”

“But that’s not all.”

“What makes you say that?”

“The look in your eyes.” She pushed away the stethoscope. “Regret.”

Carson sighed. “The cuts on the major’s back . . . they’re names. 62 names.”

Parker didn’t look angry. She didn’t look surprised, even. If he had to use one word to describe her as she slid of the exam bed and stalked towards the door, it would be ‘resigned.’

“Don’t give him anything. He needs to be awake as soon as possible.”

Carson let his protest die on his tongue. He hated to see his patients suffer, but even researchers knew the rules of triage.

The camp was a wash of motion. Men running and yelling and limping around, one-eyed, wounded. There was so much blood. Teyla had never seen so much blood before in her life. She’d seen this kind of panic – this kind of motion as villages fled the Wraith. But that was all sterile white beams of light, a low humming in the din of shouts and screams.

Even now, after seeing the Wraith and facing them so many times – she had not seen so much blood like this. A Wraith feeding was horrible – but at least it was quick.

Their guard nudged her with his gun, pushing her away from the hungry vacant look in the eyes of some of the men – staring at her across the muddied field. That, at least, was a look she recognized.

“Where are you taking us?” Dr. Weir demanded as another guard pushed her ahead. Teyla’s jaw tightened. It took all her willpower not to take this man’s gun and slam it into the back of his head. But, even if they escaped – where was the Stargate? Teyla could find her way in a thick forest with her eyes closed, but here . . . this world was truly foreign.

“You are to be tested . . .”

And then . . . explosions, explosions unlike the now-familiar bombs blasting in the distance. Teyla did not know this world, but she knew her own senses and they felt, down to the very core of her body, the shimmering metallic edge to these explosions, the mix of sound that identified them as extra-ordinary, like the sounds of a Wraith stunner or maybe of Major Sheppard firing his drone weapons with that determined look of glee on his face.

Teyla ducked, pulling Dr. Weir with her, pressing their faces into the rotting bloodied mud.

“Magi!” she heard shouts, rippling through the panicked crowd like another familiar sound . . . the shimmering squeal of the culling beams.

Then they were stumbling to their feet, pushed forward by the heavy hand of the guard. “Come. You are not safe here.”

Teyla wanted to resist being manhandled, but in truth, she had no idea where she would be safe in this strange world.

“What’s going on?!” Dr. Weir shouted above the din.

“The Magi have come. They must know that you are here . . .”

He shoved them into the nearest tent, motioning to Teyla with fear in his eyes. “Here, help me lift this.”

They moved a large grey box filled with ammunitions to the side. Beneath it was a door, thick metal indistinguishable from the mud that surrounded it.

“Get down in there and don’t come out until one of us comes for you.”

The guard shoved Dr. Weir down first, despite her protest to be told what was going on. Teyla did not need to be pushed. Whatever it was that put the tremor in this man’s voice, it was bad. She had never seen anything, not even the Wraith, that could destroy a world so thoroughly.

The hole was dank and dark, mud dripping and flowing over everything, stinking like a corpse the day after mourning. Dr. Weir clenched a hand to her mouth and slid down into a corner, not meeting Teyla’s eyes.

Teyla could stand, defensive and ready for whatever could cause all the muffled screaming above, but instead she crouched at Dr. Weir’s side, their fingers laced painfully together, mud caked between.

It was not long before the trap door opened and they found out what had made the guards so afraid.

Rodney hated having a bag over his head and being marched around with his hands tied behind his back. Who wouldn’t? But he felt singularly dedicated to his hate. He had delicate wrists, after all. Needed his hands . . . needed his eyes.

“You stupid . . . you stupid muscle-ly assholes! Where the hell are you taking me? I swear to god, if I trip and break an ankle . . . you’ll be . . . “

“Shut up,” Big Stupid #1 said.

“Look, I won’t be able to tell where we’re going anyways! It’s all forest and trees and paths to me! And if I do fall and hurt myself I’ll be less inclined to fix whatever it is the two of you are too stupid to fix. And then Kolya will be really mad and you’ll . . .just . . .”

“Stop.”

“No, I will not . . .” Rodney walked into something . . . something big and solid and really, really . . . “Ow! What the hell? Why didn’t you warn me?!”

Stupid #2 said, “He just did. Now move out of the way . . . I need to dial.”

To dial? To dial? They were moving him off planet?! To a different planet than John!

“Oh my god . . .” He was going to die. Well, before he had thought he was going to die. Before he was in a moderately huge state of panic . . . with John bleeding all over the fucking place and everything, but he was coping. He was proud of the fact that he was coping and now . . . and now . . . oh god, he was going to die. They were going to make him fix their whatever-the-fuck in a pile of radioactive sludge and he was going to get stung by alien bees and get an infection on the chafing on his wrists and then die a horrible, horrible death and no one would ever find him. They wouldn’t know the Gate address and they would never find him and John . . . John would be all alone in a cell somewhere bleeding and Rodney would never find him. Rodney’d be too dead to go find him and John . . . Kolya would . . . Kolya thought . . . oh, god . . . Kolya thought . . .

It was hard to tell with the whole dark bag-over-head thing, but Rodney was pretty sure he had passed out.