It burned in him, less like fire and more like ice. Sometime in the future ... sometime, there would be ... had been, a poet who said "I think I know enough of hate to know that for destruction ice is also great, and would suffice." He could feel time loosening: unraveling like the basket some people thousands of years from now would say comprised the night sky, the tapestry of time. Hate could undo everything ... break it apart, denature it, destroy it. Hate was the future - it flashed red before his eyes in shots of projectile weapons, piles of bodies, the gaping maw of a pale-skinned warrior, a Wraith. And he saw it in his own soul, a blackness that wove itself like a worm through all the goodness within him. He tried to hang onto the forces of love ... his love for her, as he felt the destruction rise up, like a cancer, spreading. He focused on all that was good in the world, focused on its beauty, even as he felt the darkness invading, entering him in a wave pulsating out from his chest ... the heart ... the solar plexus ... the soul. But they weren't there yet ... they were so close, but not yet ready to leave the petty substance of these corpses and all the worry associated with them behind. He was not yet ready to release his burden, so he sought to preserve it ...

... Those eyes were no longer cold. They were deep blue, transformed from their usual grey as they stared at him. Even from this distance he could see them - focus on them and read what was being asked of him. He was no longer looking into the cold superiority of the man under whose command he was just placed against his will, the man he was almost looking forward to tormenting in his own lackadaisical way, just another incarnation of the father who had forgotten to love because the army had left that part out of the manual ... someone else to question because you couldn't look into the eyes of someone you were expected to abandon for some vague concept of territoriality or military might and say 'Yes, Sir! I will let them die, because you say so, Sir!' This man ... this no-longer-superior with clouded pleading eyes and fine white hair and wrinkled lips twisted by artificial aging, was still asking him to kill and to leave a man behind, but he was most of all asking for compassion. So he pulled the trigger and felt the hate welling up within him, because this was not how he should be allowed to find compassion. It was more tragic even than Romeo and Juliet ending their lives with a kiss, that he should respect this man who lived and breathed and maybe had a family or kids and an entire life with its trials and dilemmas, just like his own ... that he should respect him and treasure his happiness only at the apex of his suffering. And he watched the man crumble and took small solace in the relief on his face ... the gleam in his eye as the light behind it winked out ...

... It shone in the sunlight, untrustworthy and unnatural, too bright against the pale blue of the sky. It was like inspiration, brilliant yet hesitant, with that spark of terror and doubt imbedded in its very creation. He was enraptured, frozen in fear. He'd grown up with supply planes and helicopters and all sorts of winged contraptions flying around him, doing the necessary tasks to keep a base operational. He knew that a helicopter worked much like a bumblebee, creating convection currents to keep it aloft, allowing it to hover. He knew the principles of lift in those broad silver wings stretched before him: how the air flowing over the top of the wings took longer than that flowing over the bottom ... he knew the statistics on propeller plane mortality ... but he was not going to recall them. He no longer wanted a life governed by order and numbers: how many minutes he could find to study yet another advanced course in time between chess matches, how much the government spent for the cost of a statistical life, the likelihood of any given activity being more dangerous than driving a car, which was his standard of risk. These numbers had no beauty. They lost their beauty with meaning. A death toll ceased to be a prime, a multiple of sixteen, a palindrome, odd, even, real, the second you saw it as individual people shipped home in plain pine boxes, number of families that grieved, number of friends, brothers, lovers, lost. So he wiped his sweaty palms on the faded material of his jeans and took a deep breath, feeling the burn of sun-warmed metal as he slid into the pilot's seat, suddenly feeling an unexpected, yet completely natural confidence descend upon him. He touched the controls and he was cradling the future in his hands with the sweat-caked leather and the slightly cracked dials. He held controls to Black Hawks and Hueys and Cobras and things he did not even know of in this not-quite-now when he took those controls, and he found that the weight of destiny was lifted only by the joy of the wind gusting cool against his cheek and the sky wrapping him in its embrace, and the knowledge of what it was to be the eagle soaring above all the world, in control and free to survey all around. And suddenly, there in the grassy savannah, he longed for home.

He came back to the pain like coming home after an adventure in a foreign land, or after a war. Things were different somehow, muted, and yet all the more intense because they mattered less ... the incongruence. Pain was reality. Life was suffering. He had always known this, but it was all the more apparent now, stark in contrast to the reality of flying, a stabbing in his temple, an ache in his joints, in the bones he'd once broken in his arm ... how? It was all a blur. And the gashes and the bruises and the twists and sprains and breaks, all the past layered onto the present. But the biggest wound was his heart, where there were traces of an invisible hand, not the hand of a Wraith, perhaps, but a wound of darkness, a heart locked up and rotten like those pictures of lungs they show in anti-smoking campaigns ... a heart that wished so much for compassion.

He looked up into a white sky, patterned in clouds of geometrical forms, bolts and paneling and points of nearly seamless welding. And then there were eyes.

She had eyes like the stormy sea, clouds boiling down to the horizon to meet the crash of towering waves, a patchwork of shades of grey like shadows on the forest floor - like the times when they stood out on the balcony with her in his arms, watching bolts of lightning leap down to kiss the angry sea and soothe away its worries. These were not the eyes that he was expecting, but neither were they wrong. Despite their dull tones, these eyes were vivid - more present, even.

"You look beautiful" he smiled.

"John, it's me, Elizabeth."

"I know." He squeezed her hand, trying to find a smile somewhere in the sea of pain. He found that he could do it ... for her ... or for someone else ... someone he had loved. But he, John Sheppard, had never loved anyone that desperately. It was not his gift to love. Hadn't Elizabeth basically told him that he was a gene with a personality attached? There were theorists who said that people were gene's way of reproducing, not the other way around.

She appeared to take in the confused look on his face and sighed. "How are you feeling"

He took inventory: he felt weak. His entire body felt wrong somehow, like it was an awkward cloak, draped over something much greater, magnificent even. He'd spent his entire life trying to be strong - that's what the military was, wasn't it? It was strength. It was control. And in that, it was freedom. But suddenly he knew without a doubt that he was weak, not immune to the tides of fortune. His form was so limited ... so fragile ... so transient that each breath was, in truth, a miracle.

And judging by the concerned knit in Elizabeth's brow, he was running short on them. Breaths, that was. The room spun just slightly, a slow inevitable rotation, like he was actually feeling himself fly through space as the planet rotated on its axis. There was so much speed in what they perceived as stillness, that he wondered why he was so obsessed with speed, with flying. Why had he never wondered that before?

"What's wrong" he asked, quietly, his lips parched and his throat dry.

"You have some ..." Her voice wavered, choked. It sounded odd on her. "I should let Carson explain it."

He shook his head. He didn't want the clinical definition with all its associated side-stepping and medical-babble.

"You have some sort of shadow ... secondary presence in your brain." Well that explained it. That explained the strange visions ... the sleepwalking ... the feeling of being cracked open and violated.

"Oh. Everyone else is okay though" He was almost positive they were. He vaguely remembered Parker and Teyla dragging Ford and Simpson back into the jumper gratefully. That bastard Kavanagh had been shot, but he supposed the guy deserved it.

Elizabeth nodded. "Simpson and Bulter are up and about, trying to walk it off. The Lieutenants got sent to their quarters. Kavanagh's got a bed on the other side of the room." She pressed a precautionary hand on his shoulder. "Don't try to sit up. He's far enough away that he won't be able to torment you with his whining."

"Thank god."

She hadn't removed her hand, and now she was giving his shoulder a squeeze. "Rodney left in a flash of genius. He'll figure this out."

He nodded, not believing it for a second, but smiling to reassure her. She looked strangely fragile, not the strong commanding presence he was used to.

He looked up at her, traced the long line of her neck up to her delicate chin and the small point of her nose, looking so strange from this angle, as his vision blurred and she rotated with him, flying across the void on surface of this fragile planet. In truth, she didn't look beautiful like this ... but he wanted her to be. Something in him ... something deep down, knew what it was to love, and it ached for it, ripped raw like a wound - even worse than any wound he'd ever felt.

She stared above him, at what, he did not know. Maybe she knew why ... maybe she knew what it was to love and be loved. Maybe she had the answers ... she looked like she could, once upon a time, or maybe now. But the quiet fear of her voice shattered his dream like glass, like a bullet zipping through the air into unsuspecting flesh, like vengeance. "I never should have let you go out there." The guilt was disgusting, piercing. It did not become her.

"Hey, I seem to remember being the one begging you to let me go. Give me some credit, will you" He laughed half-heartedly, though he was sincere in one thing: it was not her fault. What did they say about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?

She smiled, and it was radiant. Sometimes all it took was a little deathbed humor to give hope. "Okay, so you're pig-headed and overzealous."

"Hey" He didn't marshal much of a protest.

"But it's my job to keep you from hurting yourself." She was serious again. And he didn't like it. It wasn't supposed to be like this. There was supposed to be light and laughter, because that's what kept the darkness at bay.

"Hey, everyone's safe, and I'm no worse off than if I had stayed here. You have absolutely no reason to feel guilty. Except for calling a dying man pig-headed." He smiled reassuringly.

"That's not funny, John."

"I know. But ..."

John was cut off by what he could only describe as a loud squawking coming from the other side of the room. "Make way ... coming through ... what are you people doing anyway. Brilliant scientist with a solution here. Step aside for the Answer Man." McKay. Great, just what he needed. Not that he didn't like the guy ... on a certain level, possibly the same one that enjoyed contradicting teachers in math class, or tying people's shoelaces together when they weren't looking. It was more that McKay was most probably the worst person to have around when you had a headache. If the nasal whine didn't do you in, the sniping would. It just took too much brain power to even keep up with McKay's insults, and his head didn't feel as though it was running on a surplus of brainyness at the moment ... not at all.

"Rodney." Elizabeth said it like she might be feeling a headache coming on too. He bet hers wasn't at the 'someone driving a jackhammer through your skull' level quite yet, though. He winced. "I hope you have some good news."

McKay's face appeared above him, looking all the more smug from this angle. "As a matter of fact, I do. You see, the thing is, we've been looking in the wrong place - looking for things that could contain some sort of consciousness ... assuming that the major stepped into something dangerous. But he didn't at all. We're assuming that this wasn't supposed to happen."

John frowned. Someone besides the Wraith and the Genii and all the other enemies he'd managed to make for himself was out to get him? Great. "So you're saying that all this pain and puking and seeing visions is someone's idea of a good time? Because ... I'm really not enjoying it, McKay."

McKay rolled his eyes. "Of course not, Major. What do you know about Oma Desala" Rodney could switch gears in a heartbeat. John sighed. He was sure this all was very direct and totally sensical in that 'vastly superior' brain of his.

"Um ... she's a Buddhist goddess right? A protector of some sort." His headache was getting worse. He had to close his eyes; the light was so bright, and the pain even brighter, more focused.

McKay made a sound like the buzzer in game shows when someone misses an answer and then did a horrible impression of Alex Trebek. "I'm sorry, that answer is incorrect. Better luck next time. According to the infinitely helpful, but nearly-psychotically-quiet Dr. Lin, there is no Oma Desala in Buddhist cannon. In fact, most Buddhists don't even worship gods or goddesses. They're some sort of representational something-or-other that people who study that kind of thing care about. Anyhow. They question is, how come you think she's a Buddhist goddess, if the only people who have ever heard about her are some people on the planet Kheb a galaxy away and those who saw Her Glowyness herself as an ascended being, ala Daniel Jackson? Oh yeah, and the rest of SG-1."

That couldn't be true. What did McKay know about religion, anyhow? You said the word God when you stubbed your toe and it'd set him off on a ten-minute atheistic rant. "But I saw her. I mean, I saw a statue of her. In Los Angeles ... I was sick and nothing was working. My roommate suggested I go to this temple and ask for a healing or some bullshit like that." But it wasn't bullshit, not really. "Or at least I thought it was bullshit at the time. So I went to this temple and ... I don't know why but I was compelled to go into this room and there was this statue and ..." A wave a pain washed through him. Whoever ... whatever it was that kept messing with his head wanted this information. He could not let them win. He could not submit and just become whatever they wanted him to be. He had to resist ... that much he had known nearly his entire life. He was not a pawn, but sometimes he was a rook or a knight or maybe even a king.

He gasped, not even able to hold in the whimper. When he opened his eyes he found that he was looking into two very concerned faces. Elizabeth had returned her grip on his shoulder and he looked down to find that he was grasping Rodney's hand, but the scientist was quick to remove it and shake it out, but without his usual verbose and insistent complaint. "I think whatever this thing ... person is, thinks that information is important."

Rodney nodded. "Let me guess ... you were somehow miraculously healed and then ... and then you ran away"

John shook his head, which proved to be a ridiculously stupid idea. Rodney winced in sympathy and Elizabeth heaved a sigh, not looking at him again, though he could see tears glinting at the corner of her eye. "No, actually. I ran away and got gradually better as a result." Even after all he'd seen ... all he'd survived, he could not believe in miracles.

"Why" Of course, Rodney McKay would never in the history of the multiverse understand why someone would drop out of CalTech at sixteen to actually experience life, see the world. But when he had been like that ... before, he never would have understood either.

"I released my burden." That was all he could say.

Rodney and Elizabeth shared a tense glance.

"What"

"I told you that bitch was involved with this" McKay snapped. Elizabeth just looked away, annoyed but not even bothering to correct his language.

"Huh"

"Oma Desala ... Ancient. Speaks in riddles and intervenes in human minutiae at all the wrong times. She's messing with you. She can't do anything direct without screwing with the so-called rules of these ascended idiots, so she's been nudging your life along in all these tiny ways. From the healing to the running away to the strange reversal about sending a scientific expedition a week ago to ..."

"To the first time I flew." He knew what McKay meant ... the strange sense of calm ... the voice that the back of his head, the presence he sometimes felt was watching him, the thing that made him sure that he was doing the right thing when he made those tough decisions he didn't want to have to make.

"Really? And of course, the strange obsession with getting this jumper repaired. Which brings me to my main point, which is that you 'downloaded' this consciousness from the jumper. Ford said something about a software problem when you passed out while flying. I was thinking ... what if this person was flying when they died, but the jumper retained some of that energy afterwards ... you've just picked up on the 'after image' if you will." McKay had that same damn grin on his face he did every single time he thought he said something brilliant, which was almost constantly.

Elizabeth scowled. "So, this means that we have to ..."

"Try to get it back out into another jumper." McKay seemed to be moderating the 'talking down' because it was his boss, but still wasn't completely managing to contain it. "Get Beckett over here so we can get him to the Jumper Bay."

"I can walk." He hadn't made it two inches off the mattress before he felt two sets of hands pushing him back down.

"No, you can't." Two voices responded in unison.

And he heard a rich Scottish brogue"What's that stubborn bloody bastard done to himself now" And then a third tired face appeared above him. "Good to see you awake, lad."

McKay turned and ordered the doctor. "We need him moved to the Jumper Bay."

"May I ask why"

"I found an answer. Now let's go. Put some hustle into that. Chop chop." John closed his eyes against the whining. Kavanagh was on the other side of the room, but he had his own annoying scientist to deal with. At least he was the Answer Man. John smiled, even as a part of him doubted that even McKay would be able to fix this problem. If it was fated by some pseudo-deity glowypeople, then they were just pawns ... if the Ancients, with all the power they seemed to posses, wanted this to happen, it would.

Before he knew it, he was moving, and he kept his eyes closed most of the time just to keep the nausea at bay. A part of him wanted to sink back into the comforting darkness of sleep, away from the pain. But to sleep meant to dream.

"How come you never told me you had a degree in mathematics? That could have been useful, you know" McKay complained from beside the moving gurney.

"Useful, but still none of your goddamn business. Besides, I don't do applied math anymore."

The gurney jostled and he hissed in pain. McKay squeezed his shoulder.

"Why not"

"Bad for the blood-pressure." McKay rolled his eyes, not knowing how close to the truth it was. John didn't want to end up a neurotic babbling nerd like the astrophysicist. He didn't want to be able to calculate the probability that he was going to die. He didn't want to think about the exact amount of force momentum and acceleration as he made a Black Hawk dive and swoop - he just wanted to see the land gliding noiselessly past, feel the hum of the machine around him, become part of the wind and sky, without needing to describe them, pin them down. He had done the neurotic nerd thing, done it enough to know that with a drive like his, it would certainly kill him. He had released his burden.

So sometimes he just felt sorry for McKay. Sometimes he just wanted to grip him by the shoulder and say, 'Rodney, relax. Stop moving before you give yourself a heart attack. Stop moving before you miss everything important in life.' Sometimes he just wanted to kidnap the scientist, put a bag over his head and fly him off to some alien planet with a beautiful teal ocean and something approaching palm trees and teach him the art of the surf and the laws of the sea and the beauty in 'just being' - without a purpose, only living for the love of it. He had a sneaking suspicion that Rodney would be the best friend he would ever have if he just got him away from all the stress he was always putting himself under. But John knew it wasn't sustainable though ... not with so much suffering around him. He couldn't just live for himself ... not with an enemy like the Wraith out there. General O'Neill was right: it was about more than him, or more than Rodney. He just hoped that they took care of the Wraith problem before the guy had a nervous breakdown. John'd been down that road and he wasn't particularly looking forward to watching it on replay.

Then the gurney stopped and he opened his eyes. He was inside one of the jumpers, and McKay and Beckett were standing on either side of him, hands out. "Ready" The doctor asked.

He wasn't ready. He would never be ready, but he nodded. It took almost all his concentration to not pass out when they pulled him into a sitting position, and a few minutes just to pant through the nausea and the pain. He was seeing lines across his vision now, like the reception on a television set when the antenna's down. Maybe whatever consciousness he'd picked up didn't have twenty-ten vision like he did. Nothing matched.

"You okay" Beckett asked a minute later.

He nodded, looking into their concerned faces, wanting to say something reassuring, but knowing that this was something necessary. There was no stopping it, of that he felt confident - too confident. So he settled into the pilot's seat with a wince, as ready as he would ever be to try a plan that would not work.

"Hey, McKay" he choked. He didn't want to say goodbye, even if he didn't know when he'd get another chance to say all the things he wanted to say ... he might never get a chance to tell McKay that he respected him, that he wanted him to learn to relax before he killed himself, but that could wait. "You want to open the box. You just have to get two people who love each other to touch the lid."

"Oh, is that all" McKay rolled his eyes. And then suddenly, he turned serious. "Major, if this doesn't work ..."

John just ignored him and gripped the controls. He wasn't ready to say goodbye. There was too much left to live for. There was something beyond the pain that descended upon him now, cracking his consciousness in two, diving through every memory directly to where he wanted to go. He must have been screaming. Or maybe not, because he had no mouth, no limbs, no body, no breath. He was pain and he was memories, but nothing more. When it came down to it, wasn't that all anybody was? All that mattered? No, there was something more ... something remembered from another life, not his own.

"I'm sorry, Major" someone said. They said it like it was the end of the world. But it wasn't. It was just another happening in a series of happenings ... and somewhere in all that, there was meaning.