I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
-William Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

They don’t scream when they die. They just sort of make this little smacking snap, like the lollypop song. If he closes his eyes he can imagine that he’s three years old again, playing with a roll of bubble wrap.

This world is like nothing he’s ever seen before – rolling hills of violently blue grass, twisted ruins covered in orange moss, or perhaps non-ruins, because who knows how these things really live. It’s like Whoville three-d and if he had the sort of imagination that was confined to children’s rhymes instead of big scary things about to kill him, he might expect the cat in the hat or a very stoned turtle to come walking around the bend at any moment. But they don’t.

No, there’s only one form of life here in this barren blue land – the Daffodils. Well, they’re not really daffodils, because daffodils don’t bounce along weightlessly twittering amongst themselves. Daffodils don’t give off electric shocks, sparkling like lightning to the touch. And daffodils definitely do not make off with people’s friends and team leaders to do lord knows what to them.

Rodney picks up the pace, even more worried now. Teyla has already gone back to the Gate, and Ronon is (hopefully) staying like the good dog he most certainly is not for Rodney, because Rodney can’t protect him and look for Sheppard at the same time, and he’s the only one that can work the Life Signs Detector.

“Sheppard!” Rodney demands over his radio. It’s been long – too long. And Rodney can’t . . . he can’t stand to be here on this strange world, prowling like the predator he knows he’s not, because he’s not a commando and he’s not a warrior and he’s not trained to stay calm, but he’s the only one who can do this.

There’s no answer. He wasn’t really expecting any, but that doesn’t stop him from talking. “Damnit, Sheppard! What is it? They mistook that hair of yours for grass? They want to stick themselves down the barrel of your gun? I don’t care how many daisy chains you’ve made just . . . just answer me.”

There’s nothing but the screeching, scratching hum of the flowers, ominous and building like a bad suspense scene in a scary movie.

Grass rustles and Rodney doesn’t think about Jaws and the second Jurassic Park and Signs and all the stupid movies where some monster jumps out of a sea of waving something but he gives a manful shriek anyway.

Suddenly there’s a pack . . . a horde . . . a bouquet? of them standing there, facing him, weaving side to side menacingly, making that strange buzzing whistle that fills the too blue hillsides. The hills are alive with the sound of music. The grass seems to the very same tune as they bob, circling. He imagines that their eyes would be curious . . . predatory. Except they don’t have eyes.

“There, there now, nice little Daisies . . . er . . . I mean, Daffodils. Nice Daffodils. I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m just looking for my friend. You know, John Sheppard? Tall, dark hair, windswept, rakish, kind of looks like a walking Gap catalogue? I don’t supposed you’ve heard of it. Ridiculously priced clothing, stupid commercials . . .”

The flowers step closer, closing in like wolves on the hunt. “Oh fuck it,” Rodney says as he lifts up his Life Signs Detector and he swears, LSD has never been a more appropriate name for something. He wields it like his sanity, like a sword, the medical scanning detachment waving over each identical face in turn.

Pop, pop, pop, pop . . . the blossoms explode in a nice line, like champagne bottles sounding off. Ding dong, the Witch is Dead.

They don’t scream, but they bleed. It’s red as the red red rose, redder than Rodney’s blood or Sheppard’s or anyone’s as it splatters over him. Splish, splash, like Jackson fucking Pollock lost in Wonderland.

Rodney cradles the LSD to his chest, hurrying himself into a run. The grass is still waving menacingly to the invisible hum, sounding off from all around him. He doesn’t know how many there are, only that display screen is a pulsing white, too many lifesigns to even hope to pick out him and Ronon and John in the mass of things that are living, breathing, capable of taking hostages and causing pain and wanting and needing and . . . fuck, if he were a flower, where would he take a cocky flyboy with a bad case of alien-babe-magnet?

He can’t believe he just asked himself that.

There are no paths on this world, but the grass parts for him as he stomps through it. He imagines that it’s cowering, but there’s no way to know.

The whistling twitter is louder now, like the scratch of a bow on the violin, high e grating, grating, grating his nerves to dust. He must be getting closer, though there’s nothing in this sea of blue rolling hills but the twisted maze of orange ruins buried in seas of grass and the Stargate in the distance, punching out a ring of sky, still inactivated. Maybe these strange colors have played tricks on his mind and it’s further than it looks. Or maybe Teyla didn’t make it.

And then, above the hum, he hears it – the sound that he should have heard instead of the short pop and the sudden stop - a blinding, pain-filled scream.

“Oh my god! Sheppard!” Rodney shouts, running wildly toward the sound. The grass can’t move away fast enough, and its sharp blades are cutting his skin, leaving a trail of purple behind.

He’s heard Sheppard in pain before. He heard him when he had that Wraith bug attached to his neck, when he was turning back into a human and Beckett had him strapped down to the bed to keep him from scratching himself raw. Both times Sheppard yelled, shouted, loud and gruff and still strong.

This scream is more a tortured whimper, torn involuntarily from his throat like rape and genocide and all the things that are supposed to be bad in this world rolled up in one.

He’s never heard anyone scream like that before, but there’s something deep down, something breaking, shattering within him that knows that it’s a sound he never wants to hear again. Oh, god. What are they doing to him?

He’s so panicked that when he gets there he pretty much falls into it. A ditch, hidden beneath layers of grass that have folded over to cover the orange ruins, a sort of stooped hut, a sweat lodge, a place of ritual sacrifice, strange humming like drums, loud and alien.

It smells of mold and dust and strangely . . . cinnamon. And John Sheppard is in the middle of it all, clothes a tattered mass at his side, curled up into a fetal ball, whimpering. The flowers are lined in a circle around him. Twenty, thirty of them, each taking turns to shuffled forward on green leafy stems and brush their golden heads down the length of Sheppard’s body.

Electricity sparks, leaving its cackle in the atmosphere, but not its smell. Nothing can overwhelm the harsh-warm smell of the mold, the stink of sweat and fear and pain.

Rodney holds the LSD out bravely as they turn to face him like he were the sun, their only warmth. Rodney thinks about his childhood, about Alice in Wonderland.

You can learn a lot of things from the flowers, for especially in the month of June.

Except he can’t learn anything from these. They move and they speak but they don’t scream and who the hell knows what they want from Sheppard – if they are feeding or playing or torturing or singing or doing some flowery thing that all plants secretly plot only to be hindered by their speed?

“Let him go,” he says. “What do you want?” he demands. “Why?” he chokes, looking down at where Sheppard is shaking, convulsing.

“Rodney . . .” his voice is weak, lanced with too much pain.

“Get away from him!” Rodney shrieks, not caring at all that he’s talking to flowers.

He states at them. They stare at him, though he’s not sure if they even see.

And then they turn back, and one bows its head toward Sheppard’s pale back, electricity jumping, causing him to arch his spine and cry out and Rodney cannot take this.

This if for hay fever, he thinks.

Pop.

This is for losing me my date with Katie Brown.

Pop.

This is for Valentines Day.

Pop.

This is for all those poor women in Colombia who pick you can chop you up for packaging.

Pop.

And this is for John Sheppard.

Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.

Pop.

It’s like a bad action movie, with Rodney panting out his vengeance, soaked in enemy blood in the middle of a field of corpses ready to rot to mulch.

Sheppard groans, making weak little struggling motions, trying to stand and falling back down like a newborn calf.

Rodney is at his side in an instant. “Colonel? Are you okay? Wait, stupid question. Of course you’re not okay. But can you get up?”

Rodney runs his fingers over Sheppard’s chest and back, trying to feel for hard places or sensitive areas that might signify breaks or internal damage, but he finds none. There’s nothing but red welts rising up all over Sheppard’s pale skin, his gasping breaths and his squinted eyes and his quiet entreaty. “Get me out of here, Rodney.”

Rodney nods, though Sheppard is facing away from him. Rodney pats his back awkwardly before stripping off his own jacket and pulling it around Sheppard’s shaking shoulders as his breathing settles.

“Seriously, Colonel, can you stand?”

Sheppard nods but reaches out for support, moving slowly, barely conscious. He leans almost entirely on Rodney, but puts one foot in from of the other, breath warm against Rodney’s neck. Rodney pulls him closer, glad that he’s alive.

But they need to get out of here now. They need to make it back because otherwise . . . otherwise. Well, he has no idea what. Are flowers vengeful? Do they want Sheppard bad enough to attack en mass? Will the EM field put out by the LSD be enough to keep them at bay if they do?

Rodney pulls Sheppard up through the sharp blades of grass that cover the little sacrificial hut, shielding him with his body, and then they weave their way across fields of startling blue, hearing the singing of the daffodils following them, grass rustling as they run and stumble and oh god, there’s whole fields of them, closing in, a great mob of yellow rushing in from all sides.

“No,” Sheppard whimpers, barely conscious now, a dead weight dragging Rodney down, but he keeps running, keeps moving, because he knows that the universe is sick, sick, fucking sick, if it thinks it can kill him by electric flowers. And he is not prepared to admit there is any sort of higher power around to have that sort of fucked up sense of humor.

He’s Rodney McKay and he’s better than that and . . . “Ow!”

He faceplants himself right into something empty and solid and barely even rippling against the blue horizon. Not a clearing – the Puddle Jumper.

Open, open, open, Rodney thinks, and blessedly, it does, though through Rodney’s terror or Sheppard’s, he’s not sure.

Then the hatch is closing and the yellow swarming mass is trying to break in side and Rodney dumps Sheppard in an unceremonious heap on the floor, waving the LSD at them and feeling the splatter-pop of their blood exploding in the ever-narrowing gap that is the Puddle Jumper door.

And just like that – click, door shut, saved.

Sheppard groans from the floor, picking at Rodney’s jacket, and Rodney helps him up onto one of the side benches. “God, what did they do to you?”

“It hurt,” Sheppard whispers reaching for the emergency blanket that Rodney’s already wrapping around him.

“Why were they doing it?”

“I don’t know, Rodney. They’re plants,” Sheppard says, a little of the normal sarcasm slipping back into his tone even though his face is pale and his eyes are clenched shut.

Thank god. Rodney squeezes Sheppard’s arm and heads for the controls. “I have to . . . I need to find Ronon and Teyla.”

Oh god. They’re probably doing the same thing to them. It was bad enough having to see Sheppard like that. Rodney can’t even picture sweet, beautiful Teyla curled up and screaming, Ronon trying to be big and brave and warrior-like even though he’s still so young and in so much pain.

He gulps, in the air and flying and there’s nothing but a sea of blue, orange lines tracing beneath the surface like veins and yellow dots moving in the vast sea, spreading out and meandering like all those stupid squishy-science models of Daisy World and living planets and sprawling, growing, grotesque diversity. Screaming, screaming, screaming, outside the orderly calm of the Puddle Jumper and its smooth trajectories and it’s stiff geometric lines. No motivation, no murderous maniacal shrubbery, no pain, just calm.

But out there . . . there’s no way he can find Ronon and Teyla in the midst of it all. They HUD just shows a field of white, with Ronon and Teyla the needles in this homicidal haystack.

“The jumpers don’t have biometric sensors,” Rodney says to himself. “There’s no way I can . . . and I can’t see them and they’re not where they’re supposed to be and . . .”

“Calm down, Rodney,” comes a hoarse whisper from the back, though Sheppard doesn’t seem to be attempting to stand. “Maybe we can scan for something else . . . like the metal of their P-90s?”

Sheppard’s always full of crazy outside-the-box solutions (which almost always involve guns), but Rodney’s sure he doesn’t know the full impact of his own statement.

Yes, yes, yes. The scanners can’t find pieces so small as Teyla and Ronon’s weapons, not when the soil itself is probably rich with iron and copper and all sorts of elements. But it doesn’t matter, because after a low fly-by with the more-powerful long-range sensors turned on, Teyla and Ronon will be the only lifesigns.

Rodney looks over at Sheppard then, nothing more than a tuft of wild hair sticking up from beneath the emergency blanket, too weak to even come out here for his favored pastime of backseat driving.

Rodney doesn’t hear the pop, pop, pop of the fields of yellow falling, blue grass bowing down to cushion them like the silk at the bottom of a casket, ineffectual shielding against worms and rot and decay. What he does hear is Sheppard screaming and screaming and screaming, the pain echoing in his head, even with the man himself now silent, possibly even already sleeping and exhausted sleep.

Rodney lands in a sea of purple, the blood of the daffodils scattered like rain over everything. Teyla crawls out of one of the strange orange ruins near the DHD, covered only by the red stains smeared over her like tribal body paint, ready for a ritual of her own.

She’s beautiful, esthetic perfection in rounded breasts and wide hips and a breathless relieved smile. Then Ronon limps up towards them, hard muscle and wild hair and a gruff “Nice saving the day, McKay” to offer.

They might as well be Adam and Eve, the worlds first gardeners, standing against the sunset in their awkwardly human perfection, overlooking these blue hills like this, grass lifeless-still and silent.

“I’m not sure they wanted to kill me,” Sheppard will later say from his swaddling white clothes, the beat of his heart monitor ferociously loud behind him. “How are we supposed to know what they could possibly want?”