Rodney McKay snorted, not as quietly as he would have liked, and set the heels of his hands on his chair to each side of his hips.

       "Running out already?" Sheppard drawled in the general vicinity of Rodney's right ear. "A little rude, isn't it?"

       "I don't see why I should be dragged along to this story time to begin with," Rodney grumbled.

       "Team activity, McKay," Sheppard said. "We're a team. We do stuff together. I have another football game... "

       "Yes, well, why didn't you -- "

       "Teach me your dance," Miko deepened her voice for the fisherman, "and I will give back your feather-robe."

       "Dance?" Rodney said, startled. "That's a new euphemism."

       "It's not a euphemism," Sheppard contradicted him. "At least, if it is, it's been one for as long as the kiss in Sleeping Beauty or the woodsman in Little Red Riding-Hood."

      "Huh," said Rodney, and paid closer attention to his subordinate's tale.

       "'Please,' the heavenly maiden sobbed. 'I promise I will dance for you, but I will die if I remain weighted to the ground for more than a moment longer.'

       "'I am ashamed,' the fisherman said. 'Here, receive it again.'

       "And so he gave the feather-robe back to the heavenly maiden, and she flung it over her shoulders and began to dance the Suruga dances, her feet twinkling above the earth. These are the dances that honor the moon, and the fisherman committed them all to memory.

       "But at last the maiden came to her dance, the dance of the full-moon-night, and as she danced it, she rose higher and higher into the sky, until she was gone. And the fisherman thanked her, and thanked the moon, and taught her dances to others, that we might honor the maiden and the moon. Happily and joyously."

       Most of the Tellurians who had come to the scheduled "evening stories in the dining hall" clapped politely. The Athosians drummed their flat hands on their thighs, presumably also in appreciation. Miko blushed furiously and ran back to her seat.

       "Well, that didn't go where I expected it to," Rodney remarked.

       "It was the story of how a dance came to your people." Teyla, on Sheppard's other side, blinked. "Where should it have gone?"

      "Not my people," Rodney said automatically. "Her people."

       "There are many different peoples living on our planet," Ford half-turned to explain. "McKay is from a cold plain in the north, and she is from islands full of mountains."

       "I was born in Vancouver and grew up in Kingston. Neither of those places fall under the definition of plain."

      "What are they, then?" Teyla asked. The next person to click their headset into the public address system had started a winding, dry tale that was possibly about an accountant, or maybe about a secretary, and most of the people in the dining hall were having their own whispered conversations.

       "The place where I was born has mountains coming right down to the ocean. Across the ocean from -- " what was her name, he'd just known it -- "Meiko's islands, which also have mountains coming right down to the sea. But different mountains. Our mountains are very pointy. Our prairies are not. The rest is kind of bumpy. I grew up on the shores of a freshwater sea in the bumpy parts."

      "Kind of bumpy?" Sheppard asked. His face twitched.

      "It's. from. a. song."

       "I'm also from an island full of mountains," Carson offered across Rodney, trying to defuse tension. "We have some stories rather like Miko's, but in ours the man who steals the feathers or sealskin cloak demands to marry the maiden who owns it."

       Teyla blinked. "What is 'seel'?"

      "A seal is an animal that swims in the cold ocean," Carson said.

       "It has flippers instead of feet," Ford said, "and they balance balls on their nose."

       "Those are sea lions," Sheppard said. "A seal has a round face." He shrugged. "There are stories about shapeshifters who turn into women in most of Earth's cultures; in many of them, someone's trying or succeeding to marry or sleep with them."

      "I'm surprised Miko's story was about a bird-woman," Carson agreed. "I'd expect a story starring a fisherman to be about some sort of sea creature therianthrope."

      "Maybe it's because they swim better over there," Sheppard offered.

       "Japanese swimmers are better?" Ford blinked.

       "Most Scottish fishermen, traditionally at least, can't swim," Carson explained. "They feel that if a storm takes you, or the boat founders in the cold northern seas, a swimmer will only drown the later, and drowning's a terrible ugly way to die."

       Teyla nodded gravely. "Your people are the Scottish?"

      "The Scots," Carson smiled. "Many of the Americans and Canadians are descended from Scots who left for wider lands, such as Rodney here -- Mackay is a common surname with a long history among my people."

       "Many of them are," Rodney said, "but we get the name from James McKay, who left Boston when your stupid law -- " here he shifted his gaze to Sheppard -- "made it no longer safe for him, and I don't know where he got it from. Maybe he just liked the name." He paused for a moment. "It probably made it easier for his son to pass, though."

       "Man," Ford eventually said. "You really don't look it."

       "Reproduction takes half the alleles from each parent," Carson explained, all too obviously relieved to fall back on his specialty, "and so, three or four generations down the line, it would be very possible for an organism to bear few or none of the genetic markers from any given great-grandparent."

       "I do not understand," Teyla said. "What do you mean by 'pass'?"

      "Um," Sheppard said. "There was... that is... you see... "

      "It's a result of really, really, really idiotic Earth -- Tellurian idiocy," Rodney corrected himself. "Ford will explain it to you."

       "Later," Ford said hastily, obviously not overenthused about trying to convey the side-effects of half a millennium of dysfunctional ethnic relations to someone who was still getting used to the idea of multiple cultures to a planet.

       "Are there any other planets with heterogeneous peoples?" Sheppard asked.

      "Oh, sure, there are several in the Milky Way," Ford told him. "Mostly their Stargates are in the middle of one culture's territory, though, so it takes SGC a while to find out. Especially on ones like the planet with three inhabited continents, none of which knew about each other."

      The boring story finally ended (to very little applause; most of which was undoubtedly due either to a deep commitment to proper decorum or to relief at its having finished), and a small blonde woman hopped up. Rodney vaguely thought she was one of the Doublemint Twins who had ambushed him the first day in Atlantis and harangued him about imposed linguae francae, static variant forms, aspirate/fricative phoneme pairs, and autotranslation with fuzzy logic governing connotational selection, chasing him through the hallways until he finally gathered that they were trying to explain the steps of reasoning that had led them to deduce that the Atlantean Stargate was working differently from the ones in the Milky Way, and thus that they should bring as much to the attention of someone accustomed to dealing with physical, verifiable data.

       Teyla recognized her as one of the scholars-of-tongues with the same name (the Athosians were not minded to instruct others as to how best to run their families, but she could not help but think that both unimaginative and awkward) who had asked the Athosians to tell them everything they knew about Ring-speech, why they spoke it among themselves, its relation to the invocations of the Ancestors, and whether or not they felt that their version was substantially different from that being spoken by the Earth-born.

       "In the open ocean," the linguist began, "the water is bluer than the sky on a cloudless day and clearer than the purest crystal; if all the towers of Atlantis were set one on top of the other, the highest point would still not break the surface. There are great forests of seaweed with their blossoms and flowers, and fish swim through their branches as birds fly between the branches of trees on the land.

       "At the bottom of the deepest part of it, in a city all made of coral, the shared skeleton of tiny creatures, and of amber, the Sea-King lived with his aged and respected mother, who alone has the right to wear twelve great shellfish on her fish-tail, and with his six daughters, each more beautiful than the last, and each of whom has a fish-tail rather than feet."

      "Oh, hey," Sheppard said, "it's the original."

       "What's the difference?" Ford asked.

       "You did not just say that," Rodney told him, shocked out of his developing funk as the linguist began describing the age-fifteen surface visit. "I know the difference, and I have less than no interest in fairy tales."

      "What is the difference?" Teyla asked.

      "This one is better," Sheppard told her, "but much less cheerful."

      "It is a sad story, then?"

       "It's a sea story," Carson said. "All sea stories are sad."

       "Carson," Rodney demanded, barrelling into the surprisingly full infirmary, "what's this about you stealing my lab monkeys?"

       "I haven't been stealing anything," Carson snorted, "and if you're not bringing me a new medical emergency, it can wait."

       "I was volunteering, anyway," Sergeant Markham said.

      "Oh. You're stealing Kavanagh's lab monkey. That's workable."

       "It will be all right, then?" Jinto asked Teyla hopefully. "Doctor McKay would not be making such a fuss over a little thing if it would not be all right?"

      "I am informed that such a procedure is routine on their homeworld," Teyla told him as Carson and Markham disappeared into one of the private areas.

       "What's going on?" Rodney asked, setting down his laptop and looking from his teammate to the boy to Sergeant Stackhouse, leaning against the wall.

       "Halling had a bad case of sore throat," Stackhouse began.

      "His quinsy returned," Teyla explained. "We have very little reed-pith liquor left, and his head for it has grown every time that he has used it to numb the needle."

       "Doctor Beckett told my father that if it kept coming back as it did," Jinto said, "that it would be best now to take a sharp knife and cut a part of his throat out."

       "Hey, I had both my tonsils out when I was younger than you are," Stackhouse said. "They'd gotten so large I was having trouble breathing at night. The worst thing that happened was that I got very tired of eating soup over the next week. And if Beckett didn't think it was perfectly safe, he wouldn't be letting Markham practice on him."

       Jinto looked slightly reassured. Teyla bent her forehead to touch his.

       "What does Halling need a chemical engineering assistant for?" Rodney wondered.

       "Oh, no, he's been cross-training as an anesthesiologist," Stackhouse explained.

       "An anesthesiologist?"

       "Apparently most of the Ancient anesthetic-delivery means are ATA-activated, and we can always use another one or two of them anyway."

       "I know that, but anesthesiology, and before that chemical engineering, and before that oceanography -- he's worse than my cousin Meg."

       "Your cousin Meg?" Teyla asked.

      "She was the one who kept changing her mind what she wanted to do with her life -- first she was going to be a palaeontologist, then a marine biologist, then a molecular biologist, then a medical doctor, then she ran off and joined the Mounties, and last I heard she was in CSIS, although that was before Antarctica and for all I know she's wasting her brain as a cultural anthropologist or something these days."

       "Some people take a while to find out what they're good at," Stackhouse offered.

      "No, no, she did very well at all of them -- well, she walked out of the medical program when they stopped administering the Hippocratic Oath to graduates, which is a perfect exemplar of Grand Romantic Gestures That Don't Actually Mean Anything. It's not as if she couldn't have sworn it herself in front of a notary public."

       "What oath is that?" Jinto asked.

       "It's traditionally sworn by medics," Stackhouse explained.

       "They promise to, uh," Rodney snapped his fingers twice, "duly respect the people who taught them medicine; not take on students who don't agree with medical ethics; treat people to try to make them better and not just for the sake of poking at them; not kill patients -- at least, not for the sake of pleasing anyone; not give a pessary to induce abortion -- which is just plain sense, considering the part where it doesn't work and the part where if it looks as if it did work it's an unexpected side effect of half killing her -- not do things that ought only to be done by experts if there's any chance of getting an expert to do them, not take advantage of their position, not blab any secrets they may happen to hear, and otherwise act like decent medics and decent people."

      "You seem to know a lot about it," Stackhouse said.

       "I had relatives I hadn't spoken to in years calling me up to lecture me about Meg's bad decisions as if I actually cared. There was a time when I could have sworn the thing myself in my sleep."

       "Would not such a vow," Teyla said slowly, "prohibit the... gene therapy?" She pronounced the English words carefully, her accent still turning the g into djy.

       "Of course not," Rodney told her disgustedly. "For one thing, it makes our lives better -- not to mention the part where I'd be, oh, dead without it -- and anyway, I thought I was the one with the horrible sense of timing." Really. The boy was looking downright green. Wait, wasn't this the laptop where he'd been -- he set the computer down over near Jinto and opened it, fingers flying over the keys. "The timing on the subtitles's still a little off in a few scenes, but the gist of it should be clear. Moving your finger across here moves the little arrow on the screen; tapping this clicks; click when the arrow is inside this little box shape with the sideways triangle and parallel pipes to play or pause the video; if you break the laptop, I will find you, and I will wreak painful and hideous vengeance. Uh. A unicorn is a fantastic animal that only exists in stories and looks like a horse with a horn on its head."

      "A unicorn," Stackhouse clarified, "is a fantastic beast that looks like a deer with one long straight horn instead of antlers and long hair growing from the spine on its neck. Video is pictures moving to sound. I can explain references, if you're busy."

      "He explains references well," Teyla agreed. "He explained the 'Hail Mary' to me."

       "What is that?" Jinto asked, trying to look at the computer screen and Teyla at the same time.

      "It is the name of a prayer to the Ancestor Mary," Teyla told him, "and a term for a situation where one must have succeeded due to her intervention."

      "Who have you been studying with?" Rodney demanded of Stackhouse.

      "Anthro and Linguistics."

       "Figures," Rodney muttered. He clicked "play" and left the infirmary as America sang tinnily, "When the last eagle flies..."

       Scarred skin is strongest. Teyla had known the proverb since she was old enough to walk; known, too, that it referred not only to the skin of one's body but to hearts and minds and perhaps to peoples, and thus to her.

       It was not as if she had had scars otherwise. Minor cuts healed quickly and readily, torn flesh being replaced by whole and healthy skin; more serious ones sealed themselves with scar tissue, but it was soon enough replaced by unbroken brown skin. Teyla's aunts smiled and said how like her father she was going to be; the elders nodded as she ran by and remarked to each other how clearly the Ancestors had favored Teyla and Tagan, how obviously they were destined for a special duty among their people.

       And in truth, it was -- it was --

       "They told you," Teyla said, looking around the room at her comrades, "what I was."

       "What you have," Aiden Ford corrected her. "We already knew what you are."

       "You're Teyla," Major Sheppard echoed his subordinate. "You're our -- you're our -- you're ours." He spread his hands helplessly.

       "They told us," Doctor McKay agreed, "nice information to have, solves a minor mystery or two, does nothing for our current problem. Is that all you wanted? I mean, I'm sure I'd be interested at some other time... "

       "You do not fear me."

       "Whatever for?" Major Sheppard asked.

       "If anything, you ought to be scared of -- nevermind."

       "The people with weapons of mass destruction?" Aiden Ford finished his Canadian teammate's thought. "Seriously, Teyla, only in that 'scarily gorgeous woman who can totally kick my ass' sort of way."

       "You are... " Teyla's eyes misted over.

       "Is this a group hug moment? Because I really, really suck at those. Um. Not that I wouldn't be happy to -- hey! What are you, Major, twelve?"

       Aiden laughed, and Teyla managed a wobbly smile before the weight of her new burden dragged her back down.

       "I am just -- I do not know -- my life is a lie."

       "It is not," the Major said. "And even if it was, lies lived long enough grow their own kind of truth -- uh -- maybe you should be talking to Sora about this."

       Teyla flinched, shaking her head; she had seen the warmth in Sora's eyes turn to hatred once before, and she did not think she could bear it a second time, not now, not when the ashes of the ancient flame were only beginning to reveal a few still-glowing embers.

       "Everything's the same, really, isn't it?" Aiden Ford asked. "It's just that there's that more now, but it doesn't change things as much as you think maybe it should..."

       "And yet it does," Teyla said. "I have always held my... talents... as gifts from the Ancestors, but now that I find out that it is Wraith blood that gives my strength and my healing and my sensing... "

       "Well, if the Ancients created the Wraith, it's indirectly from them, isn't it?" Doctor McKay pointed out.

       "Healing is an Ancient thing," Major Sheppard agreed. "Their bodies replaced every cell at ages when they were old enough to know better -- what is that from? -- if not as ferociously as the Wraith do -- "

       "McLendon's Syndrome," Doctor McKay told him, "which you should know perfectly well, you were quoting from it the other day, and they only had to worry about invading Rodents. Of unusual size."

       "The Ancients had healing powers," Aiden Ford said, "but you're saying they healed themselves without using them? Or healed faster?"

       "Well, you can't grow back missing limbs -- I wonder if the Wraith do? -- "

       "Oh, there's a cheerful thought."

       "And I've never known anyone to regenerate a functional eye if the lens was destroyed, but I have Ancient blood and when I had my appendix out it only took it about a year to grow back."

       The other two Tellurians stared at him.

       "What? How long does it normally take?"

       "How am I supposed to lead my life," Teyla asked, "knowing that my forefathers were -- were bred to be of use, as if they were rabbits?"

       "Well, mostly you don't think about it, it doesn't come up in day-to-day interaction." Doctor McKay flushed a deep, brilliant red. "Back me up here, Ford?"

       "...oh. Yeah. You really don't, even when you're thinking about, um. Unfairness. History is history, and now is now, and people are people."

       Teyla blinked. She vaguely remembered Aiden Ford's stammering, confused explanation of some sort of cultural madness that had seized the Columbians long before Doctor Weir or Major Sheppard had been born, but she didn't quite -- "But is not that mere use, if use can be mere, rather than breeding?"

       "Hey! My great-great-great-grandmother Leesy walked from Kentucky to Ontario because she wanted her sister to be born free, the way that her mother-aunt hadn't had the courage to do for her!"

       Major Sheppard blinked. "Your family remembered that part?"

       "Hoo-ee, no wonder they could pass." Aiden Ford sat down on the end of Teyla's bed and added "But I have to agree with Major Sheppard; it doesn't seem the sort of thing you'd tell the kids."

       "It's my family. We'd kind of have found out anyway." Doctor McKay's eyes darted wildly from one side of the room to another, perhaps only now realizing what he had revealed. "And anyway, we kind of wanted to remember so as to remind ourselves not to grow up to be assholes."

       Major Sheppard cocked his head quizzically.

       "Well, not that kind of asshole -- anyway. Teyla."

       She stared helplessly at him, jerked out of the warmth her comrades' byplay had lulled her into.

       "If you're, uh, remembering Wraith stuff in your dreams, or whatever, you want to think twice and three times about using that in your daily life unless you really, really understand it; most of the problems in this world are caused by people using tech they don't really know how to handle. Uh. And if you make a list of, of things that you do that Wraith don't, you can say it over to yourself when you think you're losing yourself."

       "A list of things?"

       "You know. Things like Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty, Clarke's laws, the Canadian national anthem, science fair projects, school riots, why the Fourth Doctor was the best, the Oath of Hippocrates, the tribble episode, Sierra On-Line games, the Scout Promise... "

       "You were a boy scout?" Major Sheppard asked.

       "Wolf cub. My parents thought it would build character and instill useful virtues. Please."

       "I was a boy scout," Aiden Ford commented. "I loved camping. My grandparents used to leave the city and take me up to one of the national forests for a week or two in the camping seasons, as well as scouting trips."

       "Oh, and I suppose you made it to... "

       "Eagle."

       "Oh, hey, congratulations," Major Sheppard told him. "I missed out on all that."

       "What's that one again?" Doctor McKay asked.

       "The highest one," the Major told him.

       "That must be an achievement," Teyla said politely, deciding to ask Doctor McKay whether the oath he had mentioned were the same as the medicine-oath he had once spoken of at some other time. "So, then, I should remember for myself the trades I have made, and the recitatives I have recounted, and the tuttle root soup I have cooked, and sparring with bantoi?"

       "Uh, yeah, if that's what helps you remember who you are. And, well, us, if you think it'll help."

       "It shall," Teyla told him, for if she was sure of little enough else, when even the marrow of her bones was not truly hers, she was sure of this.

       "So, uh, we're good, then?" Major Sheppard asked, shifting as nervously as Doctor McKay.

       "We are well. Thank you for sparing the time to speak with me."

       "I'm sorry we sort of made it all about us instead of about you," Aiden Ford apologized.

       "No, do not be; it was what I needed," Teyla told him, because it had been. This at least had not changed: this often-infuriating habit of her comrades' was the more dear because it was exactly what they would do on any other occasion.

       "My uncle told me once," Major Sheppard said uncomfortably, "that anyone who didn't have scars on their soul was shallow or sheltered. Uh. And anyone in your position wouldn't be able to be sheltered anyway." He ducked his head and walked out of her room, one shoulder twitching slightly.

       "My mother gave me a book once," Aiden Ford said suddenly. "I read it, because it was from her, although the hero was a girl and I wasn't that interested in girl heroes then -- anyway, I forgot most of it, but I remember this one bit where these three witches are giving the hero presents to help her save the day and one of them says 'I give you your faults.' And the hero is all confused, because she doesn't want her faults, but the witch says that that's her present." He rose to his feet. "And I think that's what did save the day in the end."

       "I remember that book," Doctor McKay said, "and her faults were what got her to the point where she realized that sociopathic sentiences don't get love, so they can't plan properly for it or against it, and THAT'S what she used to save the day." He shrugged. "Not a bad message, even with the book's complete and utter inability to tell a fourth-dimensional construct from a fifth-dimensional vector."

       "Not a bad message at all," Aiden Ford agreed. "That's kind of what it all comes down to in the end, isn't it?" He smiled at Teyla and left the room.

       "Well, if you want to reduce matters to a squushy unpredictable mess," Doctor McKay told Teyla's door. He turned back to her. "Recalling people you care about helps, too. Oh, and! We learn when we're little that ontogeny isn't destiny. What's encoded in your genes might make a difference to your life, but it doesn't necessarily matter; what matters is what you do with it. You can ignore it or use it for bad things or use it for good things: just be sure -- really sure, right down to the bone -- which is which."

       He flushed pome-red again, flapped a hand at Teyla, and hurried out of her room.

       Teyla dropped prone onto her bed and stared at the weaving of its coverlet.

       Scarred skin is strongest, the Athosian proverb ran, and followed it up with Wear your scars with pride, drawing strength from them.

       She could not display this proudly, not now; perhaps it had cut too deep even to scar yet.

       And yet -- a hope had kindled that someday she could wear this wound with pride, among the Atlanteans at least if not among her own people.

       There might even be a way that she could use this -- this susceptibility to nightmares for good.

       Somehow.

       Someway.

       She would draw strength from these her second scars.

       "I'm no Albert Einstein but I'm not that dumb / I know lust no matter what planet it's from -- "

       "Cadman, would you stop it?"

       "What's your problem, McKay?" Cadman stepped in front of him, stopped, and glared. "Can't a girl enjoy a little music?"

       "Sing. Something. Else." Rodney ducked around her and kept going. If she wouldn't, with any luck he could get far enough ahead that he wouldn't have to hear it.

       "Aw, what's the matter?" Cadman whined. "Does it offend your 'delicate sensibilities'?"

      "As a matter of fact, it does!" Rodney snapped. "It was barely tolerable in the context of its parody. Without that, it's sleazy, it's degrading, it glorifies roofies -- you're a girl. Why should I have to explain this to you?"

      "You did not just say that to me."

       Rodney stalked on. Nine more meters and he'd be at the transporter. Eight.

       "EARTH GIRLS! EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY! EARTH GIRLS!"

       "While I have heard worse," Sergeant Kaur observed, turning into the hallway from a cross-corridor, "I feel obliged to suggest that you may perhaps be making a mistake."

       "Easy?" Teyla asked from beside her. "Does that not mean 'easy'?"

       Rodney knew Kaur in a general sort of way, of course. She'd been one of the Canadians first year, which put them in enough of a minority to have some sense of solidarity; she'd also been in the military forces, and almost as soon as "the military" became "first-wave military" and thus "the 'I eagerly anticipate the day when I will be obliged to be cut to pieces in the command staff's service' brigade," she'd been Dr. Singh's widow and thus a source of guilty awkwardness that left him feeling vaguely angry.

       Right now, though, she and Teyla were his new favorite people.

       "If you have free time," Teyla went on, "I find myself able to spar with you now."

       Cadman blinked. "Did I just jump the waiting list?"

       "Are you really going to question your fortune, ma'am?"

       "When you put it that way," Cadman grinned, and strode to the transporter. "I'll see you later, McKay."

       Kaur nodded to him as she followed the lieutenant.

       Teyla stopped in front of him. She lifted her hands for a moment, then shrugged, dropped them, and smiled before following the other two women to the transporter. Rodney recognized that smile; that was the one Teyla wore when it was time to continue the diplomacy by other means and she had a moment between, the one that implied more and sharper and far cleaner teeth than any Wraith had.

       He wasn't quite sure how Cadman had managed to piss Teyla off, but for a moment he nearly felt sorry for her.

      Then he thought of just how bad it had gotten over the last three weeks.

       No, he didn't feel sorry for Lieutenant Cadman at all.

       "Is it just me," Sheppard asked, "or have the last few planets all looked like deserted Hammer Horror sets?"

       "It's not just you," Rodney said. The current village was wooden, in poor repair, and bore a huge graffito on the nearest wall to the Stargate: WATER GONE BAD. WENT TO GREEN MOUNTAIN. "We've already done vampires slash werewolves and maybe Frankenstein, witches, and ghosts."

       "Mummies?" Sheppard offered.

      "No, those are in the Milky Way. How far away did you say Green Mountain was?"

       "Day and a half walking," Ronon said.

      "And you're sure about the weird wind drafts?"

      "The people here said that the mountain winds had brought down several Wraith darts. The puddlejumpers may be better armored against winds..."

       "The Bergenholms don't cancel everything," Sheppard said. "Besides, Zelenka will kill us if we wreck a jumper for anything less than a dire emergency."

       "Not to the death," Rodney said. "To the pain."

       "Have you decided on a campsite yet?" Teyla asked as she came back from the Stargate, canteens swinging from both shoulders.

       "This house will do," Sheppard decided.

       "What's Frankenstein?" Ronon asked as they made up bedrolls on the wooden floor.

       "It's a story about a man who builds another man from pieces of humans," Sheppard said.

       "We haven't had one of those," Ronon pointed out.

       "He uses a machine to share his consciousness with his creation," Teyla said.

       "That was only in Young Frankenstein," Rodney contradicted. "The point is, Dr. Frankenstein jumps ahead into trying to create life without thinking about what he's going to do with it once he's got it, and when he does, it can't fit in anywhere and is neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring, until it goes on a destructive rampage because nobody will treat it -- I mean him, the creature -- like a person."

       "Oh," Ronon said. "Like what Beckett was trying to do with the medicine that would work like Retrovirus."

       "It didn't work like retrovirus," Rodney said, bemused. "It was a retrovirus. Virus, meaning virus, and retro, meaning it, um, works backwards from normal viruses."

       "Works backwards from normal viruses," Sheppard repeated.

       "Is there a medical license hanging on the wall next to my diplomas? Do I look like a fount of medical knowledge?"

       "Retrovirus," Ronon said, "is the name of the spell the Wraith Queen used to take on a human form in the tale of Yonec and the Wraith Queen."

       "That's how you learned it?" Teyla asked, finally getting the fire in the porcelain furnace to light. "My people tell that she used a spell of blood."

       "A gene-modifying retrovirus carries -- you'd probably call it essence of blood," Rodney said. "Who's Yonec?"

       Teyla and Ronon both tried to explain at once.

       "So, millennia ago," Rodney summed up, "some people called Yonec and Imogen are supposed to have somehow made their sun and the stars around it poisonous to Wraith, and the Wraith couldn't get close enough to their solar system to destroy it. Obviously these people's descendants would make excellent allies, if it weren't for the fact that nobody actually knows their address, and they probably don't exist. And there's some story about him and a Wraith Queen."

       "It is much like the story about the siren, the Sea-King's daughter," Teyla said, "and a little like your picture-movie about the last unicorn."

       Rodney blinked.

       Sheppard blinked.

       "With a Wraith Queen?" Rodney blurted.

       "She came to spy on him and to destroy his works," Ronon said, "and she ate people and hid the bodies."

       "She worked her way to become Yonec's assistant," Teyla said, "and she saw his rage as fierce as wildfire, and his stubbornness like the roots of an oak, and his heart as strong and deeply buried as the bones of the earth, and his thoughts as swift as the wind from the sun, striking sparks against each other as the lightning." Her eyes drifted fondly towards Rodney for a moment.

       "Huh? What? Why are you looking at me?"

       "No matter," Teyla told him. "And she saw the joy on his face when the queen Imogen at last laid her hands in Yonec's; and for one reason or another, she did not kill him when she disabled the arcane devices, but went to the topmost tower and spread herself upon the air."

       "It took them about a day and a half to fix them, they say," Ronon added.

       "Dianora di'Certando," the Lieutenant Colonel said with utter surety. "This story of yours is the bastard love child of The Little Mermaid and Tigana."

       "Wait," Rodney said, "did you just say there's supposed to be an Ascended Wraith Queen flying around the galaxy?"

       Everyone looked at each other.

       "Dinner," Teyla said firmly. One had all sorts of strange thoughts on an empty stomach.

      Dinner went... tensely. Nobody actually jumped at shadows, but it was frighteningly obvious that they were all on edge.

       "Someone should tell a funny story or something," Sheppard finally announced. "Something with a happy ending."

       "There's the story of Torrin Kane," Ronon offered.

       "Who?"

       "It's from Sateda."

       Everyone else settled down and paid attention.

       "Torrin Kane was the younger son of a hart-tamer, up in the backcountry. The real backcountry. His mother died when he was young, and so his father raised him and his brother, taught them to catch and tame harts, and to spend themselves in tamed hinds rather than let themselves be led around by urges."

       "...to what?" Sheppard asked very slowly.

      "It was the high backcountry, where they used to go for months on end without seeing other humans," Ronon shrugged. "That kind of thing happened back in those days."

       "'That kind of thing''s been known to happen on Earth as well," Rodney managed, "but most of us have the decency to warn people before launching into a merry tale of bestiality!"

       Teyla started shaking.

      "Okay," Ronon said. "In this story, now and then, somebody fucks something that isn't a person, by accident or on purpose."

       "How do you manage to do something like that by accident?"

       "Well, there was the waxwork, and... it makes more sense in order. So they used to take their strings of harts down to the high plateaus and sell them, to people who wanted to improve the intelligence of their herd."

       "You are not going there," Rodney said firmly. "I am making a preemptive announcement right now. This story is not going to imply anything of the sort."

       Teyla began to curl around herself, rocking back and forth.

       "And then one day their father was thrown and trampled by one of his new stags -- "

      "Let me guess. He was trying to have sex with it at the time."

      " -- so after his sons cut its throat on his pyre and lit it, the older brother claimed most of his herd, and Torrin set off with a few of his favorite hinds."

       "Oh my God, is there any part of this story that isn't about inappropriate elk love?"

       "Now, Rodney, they might have been favorites because they were smooth rides," Sheppard drawled.

      "I'll bet they were," Rodney muttered.

       "Torrin rode down into the plateaux, farther than he had ever been; there were no hart-buyers at that time of year, but he was attacked by a pack of wild hruknor. His hinds kicked and bugled and saved his life, although his best-loved of them all was badly bitten."

       "Best-loved of them all. Ronon, are you listening to yourself?"

       "He made camp and tended her wounds, and she changed under his hands into a beautiful woman."

       "She WHAT?"

      "It's supposed to be romantic," Ronon said blankly. "That was where they first used the love theme in the opera."

       "You -- you -- you had an OPERA about bestiality? Even for opera, that's ridiculous; if someone was screwing an animal and it turned into a person, wouldn't he be worried that she might, oh, tell someone?"

       "You really don't have stories like this."

       "I heard a story about a guy who was banging an inflatable sheep," Sheppard offered. "His dick swelled up and turned green and fell off."

       "Thank you, Lieutenant Colonel," Rodney snapped. "What was the point of that enlightening tale?"

       Ronon shrugged, shoulders massive against the moonlight. "Don't fuck inflatable sheep?"

       Teyla fell over sideways, pounding on the floor with one fist.

       "Teyla!" all three men said.

      "Th-the story," Teyla choked. "Your f-faces..."

       "But I hadn't even gotten to the funny part yet," Ronon said.

       "I think you should leave off here for now," Sheppard told him, fighting a battle with laughter himself.

       "You like opera?" Rodney said.

       Ronon nodded. "I wanted to be an opera prime-singer when I was small, but my voice wasn't good enough to justify the operation. That or a mounted cowherd."

       The more Rodney tried to parse the first sentence, the more it seemed to be leading to places that he really, really didn't want to go. At least the idea of being a cowboy -- if a cowboy riding an elk rather than a horse -- made some sort of sense.

       "I used to go when I had leave, though. Once I saw Vashok Rhenn in Marr's The Lone Rider With The Golden Gun."

       "Uh... that's very nice." Rodney blinked rapidly a few times. "Nile likes opera; you should ask her if she has any recordings she'd recommend to you."

       "Nile?"

       "Nile Kaur?" Sheppard said. "I didn't know you were on a first-name basis."

       "He is seeing her," Teyla wheezed, managing to uncurl herself, albeit in a direction near-perpendicular to her sleeping bag.

       "I'm her rebound relationship," Rodney announced proudly, because after the mess with Katie Brown and Cadman he'd been sort of hesitant, and also because Nile's I-can-kick-anyone-to-death-who-thinks-I'm-not-a-fit-part-of-the-Atlantis-military thing was actually pretty hot in a daunting sort of way. "She's using me to practice dating again."

       "And you're, what, using her for sex?" Sheppard asked.

       "Sergeant Kaur has pledged her honor not to lie with any man she is not married to," Teyla said.

       "I've fought her. She doesn't lose too quickly," Ronon pronounced.

       "I'm using her to practice dating without pressure," Rodney said. "Besides, it's sort of nice to come home to someone and banter or sit around doing Nothing with them, as we please. She already knows I'm a jerk, so I don't have to pretend I'm not."

       Sheppard turned his back on Rodney and began getting into his sleeping bag.

       "Was it something I said?"

       Teyla had only meant to rest on the balcony for a short while that afternoon, but somehow the resting had turned into lying down, and then she had fallen asleep. The sun was setting behind Atlantis, and she nearly got up when she realized that Doctor McKay and Sergeant Kaur were sitting on the balcony below and on the other side of the tower bight from her. At the moment she was concealed, but if she sat up, they would see her; and they appeared to have wished privacy. Sergeant Kaur was taking off her turban, shaking the folds out of it as she went.

      Rodney sat very quietly behind her. He didn't have much use for -- well, for a lot of the stuff Nile found important, but she mostly rolled her eyes at him when he let his tongue run. Besides, he wasn't quite sure why they were sitting on the floor of the balcony; if they stayed there for long, he was quite sure his legs would cramp. On the other hand, he had never once seen her without a turban -- well, except for that mission the first year where she had come back with the cloth pinned into a sort of head-shroud, and that was still made out of turban, so...

       There was another turban under the first one, and she snapped the cloth of the first one up and down before reaching to untie the second. Under that, her hair was wound around her head and held in place by one of the wooden combs she kept in her room; Nile pulled it out and began slowly combing her hair, shaking her head a little and letting it fall to pool on the spare jacket she'd spread out to sit on.

       "May I?" Rodney asked suddenly. Atlantis was large enough that they got something of an ocean breeze at nightfall, although it was mild enough, especially at the central tower; Nile couldn't possibly see what it was doing to her hair in the back.

       After a moment, she handed the comb to him. "Put any hair that comes loose in the plastic bin."

       "With the rest of the hair?" he said, peering at the burgeoning rat's nest in the unsealed container.

       "I'll burn it eventually."

       Rodney looked at the comb once to verify its design before running it through her long, long hair.

       It had been a long time since he'd had hair long enough to require more than a quick going-over of the head, and longer still since he'd been pressed into service brushing Jeanie's hair; his fingers seemed to quickly remember the rhythm of it, though, slowing down as tangles first encountered the comb, on occasion teasing them apart with his fingers. The light slowly bled away from the sky, and the breeze died down, and the rhythm of the combing seemed hypnotic.

       "I'm sorry the crystals were gone," Nile said after a while.

       "I'm getting used to it," Rodney told her. Annoying as it had been to discover that the last people to leave the small Ancient building on P4X-Generic-Uneventful-Mission had cleaned it out with a thoroughness that put Marines to shame, it wasn't as if they were short of spare crystals or the building had seemed to do anything interesting.

       Besides, there'd been a small market on the planet, and the locals had both been interested in assorted bowls and invented something resembling money.

       "I got you something," he said, very quietly, and fished another wooden comb out of his pocket. "I think this is very nearly the same kind you have... "

      Nile took it and brought it up to her face, peering at it. "It will do," she told him. "Thank you."

       Without the breeze filling his nose with salt, he could smell traces of whatever she used for shampoo; her hair slid through the comb like water, like wet silk.

       "I'm done," he whispered at last, scraping the last hairs from the comb off his fingers into the sides of the plastic bin and sealing its lid.

       "I'm grateful," Nile whispered, gathering her hair in both hands, twisting it about her head, shoving the comb he'd bought her deep into it, flat against her skull. She lifted the cloth of her inner turban out of her lap, shook it out once more, and began to wind it around her head.

       "Amrit asked me out again," she continued quietly, in a more normal tone of voice. "I'm going to start dating him seriously."

       "Oh," Rodney said. "Uh... does that mean you're breaking up with me?"

      He couldn't see her roll her eyes, but he was sure that she did it then. "Yes, Rodney. It does." She tied off the last layer of the underturban, and shook out the cloth of the full one. "I felt you should be the first person to know."

       "Yes, yes, of course," he said. "I was expecting this. Well, not this this, but something. Eventually. You know. You want all that stuff."

       She laughed, low and gentle. "I've known a lot of men who speak politely and act disrespectfully; you never bother with respect or tact if it would save time to do without it, and I've never seen you be less than a gentleman."

       "I'm an insensitive jerk," Rodney said, clambering to his feet. "Ask anyone."

       "So you are," Nile Kaur agreed, tying the last of her dark blue turban in place. "The fact remains."

       She picked up the hair bin, rose, turned, and slowly took her old comb out of his hand.

       "I am grateful," she repeated, her hand brushing his, and then turned and left the balcony.

       Rodney stared out at the ocean under starlight.

       "The depressing thing," he eventually told it, "is that that's probably the most amicable breakup I've ever had. I do not approve of this biological clock business."

       He turned and went in, and Teyla finally, finally, sprang to her feet and herself went back into the warmth inside.

       "I... um... you're all right?" Rodney asked. He turned the air circulation in the central tower another notch higher, sucking any lingering modified pheromones out and away from himself.

       "Yes," Teyla said. "He did not renew his suit of marriage; aside from sending me on errands, he lost interest in me once he set foot in Atlantis."

       "Are you all right?" Elizabeth asked him.

       "I'm angry, I feel stupid, I can't believe I knew what that was and fell for it anyway, and I'm viciously strangling the urge to do something humiliating to Ronon. Also, I think we should throw Lucius in the brig until the serum wears off, and then use the potion on him and see how he likes it."

       "Rodney."

       "What? He says nobody got hurt. Therefore, he won't get hurt. Besides, Drain Processing Three needs to be physically knocked back into true again."

       "We're better than that," Teyla told him.

       "Speak for yourself," Rodney muttered. "Seriously, Elizabeth, you never answered my question."

       "'Angry and stupid' covers it, I think," she sighed.

       "If it's -- I don't know -- he spent a lot of time with you -- look, if you want to talk to someone, I can try to listen. I'm not very good at it, but at least I've been there."

      "I'm going to schedule us all appointments with Dr. Heightmeyer."

       "And that's the other thing I meant to bring up before this happened -- something's wrong with Heightmeyer. She was doing her job the first year, but since then it's been -- she's been -- acting just a little off in counseling sessions, and now it's outright off."

       "If I had followed the advice she gave me last," Teyla agreed, "it would have made matters worse."

       Elizabeth stared at them. "What are you accusing Kate of?"

       "We're not accusing -- look, we don't make Carson prescribe for himself when he's in no shape to. We quietly requested a second psychiatrist months ago, just so they could check up on each other." Rodney's voice dropped. "I think Heightmeyer needs help."

       "Without telling me?!"

       "You were busy!"

       "After we deal with Lucius," Elizabeth promised... them or herself, it wasn't quite clear.

       "I have a few ideas for that," Rodney muttered.

       Teyla pulled him down into a forehead-touch.

       "Right address," Rodney muttered, "apparent bandit camp... no apparent bandits."

       "No Kolya, either," Sheppard grumbled.

       "It was only a rumor that he had spoken with the bandits operating here," Teyla pointed out.

       "Something there," Ronon rumbled.

       Rodney and Teyla followed his gaze to a particular patch of woods, while Sheppard watched their rear.

       A grubby and heavily pregnant blonde, blood spattered down the front of her dress, waddled out of the underbrush. "They've been culled," she told AR-1 in a raw voice. "If you were hoping to deal, you're out of luck."

       "You're here," Ronon pointed out.

       Teyla laid a hand on his arm. "Mina?" she called. "Mina Armik?"

       "Who...?" Mina said.

       "It is Teyla Emmagan, of Athos," Teyla reminded her. "We last met several years ago. I have spoken with your husband five days ago, and he is still searching for you."

       Mina began to laugh, an ugly sound, and Ronon hastily moved to support her.

       "The bandits were culled, you say?" Sheppard asked.

       "Wilk took me out of the camp for a bit of private... " Mina's voice trailed off. "The Wraith came, and we hid. When they left, Wilk was stalking around cursing, and he didn't notice... he didn't expect, when I put my hand around him... "

       "Is he alive?"

       "No. Oh, no." The blonde's mouth curved up in a small, private smile. "Not at all."

       "You should come back with us," Rodney's mouth said before he could properly think it over. "You ought to be looked over in a proper infirmary, and the Athosians have a startlingly sane attitude towards children."

       "It... " Mina blinked, and then shook her head. "You don't know my Nahyat."

       "Let us look you over, anyway," Sheppard said. "And you'll probably want to get cleaned up, regardless."

       "Clean..." Mina said softly. "I'd almost forgotten 'clean.'"

       Ronon took one look at the walk back to the Stargate (uphill, through rocky ground) and picked Mina up. She gave a little shriek, and then froze.

       "It's all right," Teyla reassured her, walking beside Ronon as he matched his strides to hers. "Truly, it will be all right."

       "This part will," Rodney agreed. "But the rest... "

      "I knew Nahyat would never stop looking for me," Mina said. "He will love my child for my sake, too. You will see."

       "He will mean to," Rodney agreed. "Will he be able to? If the child doesn't resemble you? Suppose you have more children, will he be able to treat them all equally? Will you? Will you be able to look at your son or daughter without remembering how you got them?"

      "McKay!"

       "It's a valid question, Colonel!" Rodney dialed Atlantis with jerky, angry movements. "They're at least as much responsibility as a cat, right?"

       Sheppard quietly called the gate technician, not bothering to answer Rodney's question. It wasn't as if there could be an answer, anyway.

       "What will you do when the child grows up," Rodney said softly as they passed up to the gate, "and takes to snapping his fingers like the man whose touch's memory you despise?"

       "You stupid, arrogant man," Mina Armik hissed at him as soon as they were through the Stargate. "What do you know about what it was like? What do you know about me and Nahyat? What do you know about anything?"

       "I know what it was like to see my mother cringe from me on bad days!"

       Rodney's voice had rung on the last phrase, and every eye in the gateroom (including those of their fearless leader, the guard detail, and Chuck-not-named-Charles at the gate) darted to him and stayed there until finally the new ob/gyn and all three of Atlantis' female nurses bustled in with a floating pallet and took charge of their latest refugee, the matronly Gubina lifting her from Ronon's arms to the gurney with a ferocious glare.

       AR-1 trailed after them to the infirmary.

       After the team had gone through their post-mission checkups and been shooed out so that the medical staff could concentrate on: --their patient; --various and sundry research; Rodney found himself a balcony and sat, watching the waves surge in to crash against Atlantis' sea-level walls, reflecting that the normal wave action was affected by the presence of large landmass A but without the undersurface shallows that would retard the bottom of the waveform w and cause it to topple forward at a rate o that was doubtless well-documented by oceanographers, instead remaining constant unless it caught on some submerged portion of Atlantis...

       After some time, he became conscious that his teammates had joined him. Teyla was squatting next to him, Sheppard leaning against the balcony rails, and Ronon was reclining between them and the balcony door, combining guard duty and rest-snatching with elegant efficiency.

       "I suppose you want answers," Rodney finally said.

       Sheppard shrugged.

       "None of us are much inclined to speak," Teyla said quietly, "of ourselves, or of our pasts."

       Rodney nodded.

       "But you draw your strength from words," Teyla went on. "It heals you to tell your pain to another, or you would not have attended Doctor Heightmeyer so long and so assiduously."

       "We're here," Ronon rumbled. "If... anything. If nothing."

       Rodney looked out at the sea, and thought.

       It would be a relief to be able to share at least a part of it with someone.

       "I always knew my parents' wedding was six months before my birthday," he began.

       "Months?" Ronon wondered,

       "A human pregnancy usually lasts for around nine of them," Sheppard murmured. Rodney wondered whether Sheppard had been hanging around Anthro and Linguistics -- and really, everyone knew that he was Sciences' touchstone, even though he could undoubtedly have used some advice on how not to open mouth and insert foot, Rodney did enough of that himself for any one team --

       "Mom was engaged to Dad when she was vacationing in some little seaside town. The sort that's still half fishing village and the other half gone quaint tourist shops -- anyway, she ran into this guy, and she couldn't say no to him, she was sure he was drugging her somehow. So she married Dad and ran -- she was so paranoid when I was growing up. She pushed Dad to look for another opening because Vancouver was such a busy seaport.

       "And Jeanie was... Jeanie, she takes after both sides of the family, she was never any trouble -- at least, not like me, I was always trouble. Even the trouble she might have been, they knew to look for because they'd already been through it with me. And then she goes off to become Suzy Homemaker, completely out of the blue."

       "Maybe that's why," Teyla said.

       "Your parents told you all this?" Ronon demanded.

       "Of course not. Jeanie and I found out anyway, we might have been expected to. It's pure luck I take after Mom instead of being dark and craggy-faced."

       "Your father... " Ronon began.

       "He meant well," Rodney acknowledged. "They both meant well. But they knew, and I knew, and every time something happened, I'd wonder if it was because -- bad or good, they always overcompensated, you don't want to know about their idea of appropriate recreational activities for the children... and every now and then she'd remember and I'd know, and I can't believe they named me after Dad's father as well as Mother's, in the context it's a dreadfully sick joke... "

       "So what is your middle name, Rodney McKay?" Sheppard asked.

      "Never. Mind. And anyway, it kept getting worse as I got older and more obstreperous. I haven't talked to either of them in years, even before I was involved with the Stargate Program."

       "You said 'dark and craggy,'" Teyla began, hesitant. "Did the man you speak of return?"

      "Yes." He made a face of deep disgust. "He'd known Mom was pregnant, didn't I say? He said he'd collect me when I was weaned -- Mom bottlefed both of us, actually, I don't know how that'd confuse the issue -- and pay her for her trouble, and she ran."

       "As the Great Gryphos-bird did in the story," Ronon remarked.

       "This is my life here, not some caveman's story. Besides, if anyone here's part bird, it's Sheppard."

      "Thank you," Sheppard said dryly.

       "Anyway, I was at MIT when he bumped into me and demanded whether I was my mother's son, born in nineteen sixty-eight, and I gave as much away before I could decide how to answer him. He was staying there with his whole clan or tribe or whatever, and they all greeted me like the return of the prodigal son -- he was angry and, and incredulous that Mom had taken me away, can you believe it? As if the money he'd been planning to pay her would have made everything all right, and he was... as bad as Lucius, he really didn't see how anything he'd done was wrong, and I couldn't even blow up his car because he didn't have one..."

       "This is why you were so insistent on englamoring Lucius," Teyla observed. "I believe that you succeeded in some measure."

      "Oh, I know I did -- I just, really I didn't mean to catch anyone else in it, honestly."

      "I forgave you already," Sheppard drawled.

       "Anyway, they fêted me royally -- at least, as royally as their extremely limited resources could afford -- they answered my questions -- I get my bee sting allergy from them, of all the unwanted inheritances -- and they expected me to, to just throw over all my studies and my degrees and everything I'd worked for and be grateful for the chance to go vagabonding all over the Atlantic seaboard with them!"

       Ronon snorted. "Didn't know you at all, did they?"

       "Obviously not, that's the point."

       "Were they Romany?" Sheppard asked.

       "Nothing so formal -- I think most of them were descended from Lapps or something, and the rest were mostly Inuit or Scots."

       "Don't they want to be called something else these days? I think 'Lapp' is no more respectable than 'Eskimo'..."

       "Very possibly, but they don't live in Canada, so I wouldn't know. Ask Anthro and Linguistics, that's what they're there for. I'm sure the ones in Scandinavia are saner than those weirdoes, too. Anyway, they wanted to tie me up or something for my own good when I laughed in their faces at their offer, and some woman who'd been divorced from a fisherman ran interference for me when I got out of there. Some of them would show up now and then until I left for the West Coast... after I called Security the first time, they mostly followed me around at a distance with big puppy-dog eyes."

       "And you, of course, are immune to puppy-eyes," Teyla observed.

       "If I hadn't been before, I would be after that," Rodney snorted. "But really, it's not a big deal. It doesn't have anything to do with physics or engineering -- and I was allergic to lemons anyway, that's from my mother's dad, just one more reason to have immediate anaphylaxis treatments on me -- and really, I barely ever think about it, maybe a little more now that I'm living next to an ocean. Or with the whole Lucius thing."

       "Or when Lieutenant Cadman sings the song about the Asgard," Teyla put in.

       "Song about the Asgard?" Sheppard asked, bemused. "There are songs about Asgard?"

       "It is a song of the poet Julie, who sang of the harvest festival maiden who opened fire upon the celebrants and of the values your culture places upon fair hair. She does not name the Asgard, but she clearly describes one as 'slick as a slug,'" Teyla pronounced the English words carefully, "'with a shaking baked complexion and eyes like a bug.'"

       Rodney and Sheppard both burst out laughing.

       "That's not an Asgard," Rodney managed. "They just happen to look like them -- they're not real -- "

       "The alien in the song is actually a, uh, night terror," Sheppard said. "They take that shape, sometimes. Um. If you aren't sleeping right or something."

       "The Wraithspawned of Pain," Ronon identified. "They come in dreams to torment the accursed and the unlucky, looking like overgrown unborn."

       "Must be a human thing," Sheppard said. "On Earth, they used to think it was the uncanny folk tormenting humans for their amusement -- those are, uh, sort of like the fay on P5Q-114, only not -- and these days, some of them still think it must be aliens experimenting on them, only I've never met anyone who actually did."

       "It made it easy for Loki, though," Rodney pointed out. "He was a renegade Asgard who really was experimenting on humans -- not those kinds of experiments, of course -- and any reports from the people he returned were dismissed as 'more of the same.'"

       "I have never heard of such a thing," Teyla said blankly. "Even the Wraith who took my forebears looked like a Wraith."

       "It's probably genetic," Sheppard said. "Nobody in my hometown ever experienced such a thing, either."

       "But truly," Teyla said, turning Rodney McKay's shoulders with her hands so that she might lean her forehead against his, "your... getting... is of as little import as you would give it. Such matters should have no more weight than that needed to ensure one bears no child from one's own blood brother or the like."

       "Well, much as I intend to pass on my genes someday, I haven't got anyone pregnant yet," Rodney said, "and even if he got around beyond all expectations, one generation of close crossing only puts children at marginally more risk of inheriting unwanted recessives, and that's if there are any in there. Get Carson to explain it if you don't believe me. McKays marry our cousins all the time -- we're so weird no one else would have us, I don't know where Jeanie found hers, it'll probably end as badly as Meg's parents did -- and my parents managed just fine. Well, biologically, Jeanie's parents, and she didn't get the allergies or the hypoglycaemia."

       "My mom was the first new blood in Dad's family for generations," Sheppard unexpectedly offered.

       "My mother's blood father was Genii," Teyla said. "My grandmother went with him at their planting festival, and he sent my mother a plate cup when my grandmother informed him of her birth; it was left behind when we fled Athos. He turned out to have been a Kolya."

       "Teyla pwns all," Ronon solemnly observed, and they left the balcony laughing.

       Teyla sat on the end of the long wooden pier, staring out at the grey seas under alien clouds.

       It had seemed so simple the day before; a quick boating trip out to the islands, to look at the ruins of the Ancestors there. They hadn't even considered sending some sort of guard along; the locals were friendly, the anti-Wraith defense facility on the mainland had no secrets that Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard did not feel confident of deciphering himself, Ronon had been invited to make one of a traditional hunting party -- to be carried out on hartback, with hounds to scent and chase the quarry -- and she herself had been moving about in the town, laying the foundations for a trading agreement.

       Doctor McKay, who had seldom been bested as a seer-of-disaster, had gone off as cheerfully as he had ever left them, pausing with one foot on the boat's side to hand his laptop over to Colonel Sheppard "just in case. Boats, water, accidents happen..."

       Boats. Water. Accidents happen.

       They said, afterwards, that such squalls were known to blow up out of nowhere, although usually earlier in the season. They said that the seas were cold enough, in these days, that even with a vest of inflated bladders none cast into the water might live long enough to reach even one of the islands. They said that, having heard the boat's report of its own sinking over the wireless, that it were best to hold the funerals at once, and get on with the business of somehow surviving.

       "Never a sea but lines its deeps," a clear soprano rose from the meeting-house, "with the bones of our lovèd dead."

       Not a one of them could bear to join the mourners within, though, for their customary -- customary! -- sea-funeral. They had all gravitated, instead, to stare disbelieving at the sea; Teyla was no stranger to loss sudden as a thunderbolt, but always before it had come from the skies. There had been no Wraith culling beams at this time, and she had almost come to believe that whatever fate threw in their paths, she and Colonel Sheppard and Rodney McKay (and perhaps, indeed, Ronon) would win through with no more than minor or healing injuries. That they were charmed with perhaps some of the fading wizardry of the Ancestors, who had been great if not wise with it. That no matter how they lost, they might at last pick themselves up and go on.

       Ronon, certainly, could be no stranger to loss either, had lived it and with it as closely as any lover. Of them all, perhaps he was dealing with this best because he had never truly believed in it from the first, and Teyla could not bear that he should have been right.

       And Colonel Sheppard -- and John -- no matter what their galaxy had thrown at him, what he had lived through, here and before, he had only ever learned to give up forever on his own behalf. How much could he lose before all that was left was a shell, that walked and talked and flirted and died long after he did?

       Teyla sat on the end of the pier, and Ronon paced its length with an inscrutable face, and John sat on the shore with his head in his hands, all three of them pretending that neither Teyla nor Ronon could see him bleeding. Rodney McKay had never promised anything that he was not sure of delivering, and seldom anything that he did not in fact produce; nor had he done so in this instance, and there was no true reason why they should feel deceived and betrayed.

       "All sea stories are sad," Carson Beckett had told her when she had not lived a tenday in the Silver City on the Sea. She thought she understood why, now.

       And that brought to mind, as well as his kind voice explaining the stories the Tellurians told, the samplings he had demanded only a few sevendays ago; perhaps he might have some of the seed still in stasis, that she might fulfill the Responsibility for Doc-- Rodney and do him one last service.

       She was staring at the waves breaking and crashing in -- Rodney had once tried to explain to her why waves fell forward onto shores as they did not onto the walls of Atlantis, and she had smiled and nodded and feigned comprehension -- trying not to pin too many hopes on an unrealized possibility, despite the fact that a child of Rodney McKay would almost certainly keep Ronon from possibly now choosing to move on again, despite the fact that such an extension of his duty might be the thing that could bring John Sheppard back to living rather than floating, no longer utterly derelict as long as something of his comrade's bloodline survived -- when she saw it.

       It was some sort of animal, with grey mottled skin or fur, and it moved sleekly and cleanly through the water. There was something odd about its head.

       "What sort of animal is that?" Teyla wondered.

       Ronon stopped next to her and squinted at the animal, which was drawing nearer and nearer to them. "It's got some cloth in its mouth." He drew his gun and sighted.

       "Ronon!" Teyla knocked his gun up. The shot went wild.

      The animal loosed the cloth from its mouth and incredibly, impossibly, shifted, its face paling, the hair atop its head going browner, lifting pale forepaws to its mouth --

       "What do you think you're DOING, you bloodthirsty maniac?" Rodney bellowed through cupped hands, somehow treading water. "Do you -- aah! Cold! Changing!"

       And he melted into the animal again, taking his -- jacket? -- into his jaws once more and heading for the ladder at the side of the pier.

       Teyla and Ronon stared at each other for an incredulous moment before running for the ladder themselves, Ronon shucking his leather coat as he went, Teyla screaming "JOHN!" at a pitch and volume she had not reached since her teens and her labor.

       Ronon toed his boots off and went down the ladder, Teyla hastily adding her vest and jacket to the pile of clothes at its top.

       John Sheppard came pounding along the pier, seemingly uncertain as to whether he should be aiming his gun or himself stripping.

       "Put that away," Teyla managed before her throat swelled beyond the ability or desire to speak. Mutely, she pointed at the sea below.

      "It's a seal," the Colonel said, watching the -- seel -- swim up to Ronon at water level. "And it's got -- "

       He cut himself off, his face white, as Ronon took Doctor McKay's jacket, still within its tac vest, and threw it over his shoulder.

       And then the seal shifted once more, taking Ronon's hand with an oddly blurry one before their larger teammate pulled him naked out of the water by it and hoisted him over his other shoulder.

       "Cold!" Rodney stuttered, his naked skin blue-tinged, clutching Ronon awkwardly with shaking arms. "C-c-cold-d--c-col-d-d-c-c-col -- "

      "Rodney," John said in a tone Teyla had never, ever heard from him before.

       Ronon climbed the ladder as fast as he might, swinging his passenger off onto the pier to be met with enveloping coat and jackets and Teyla and John using their vests to pat any parts of him they could reach dry.

       "T-th-that's a b-bit -- " Rodney began, teeth chattering -- "never mind, you have about a million years to stop doing that, cold, cold, my arms... " He tried to grab one of the vests from Teyla, but it slipped right out of his trembling fingers, now linked together by white webs of skin.

       "In!" Teyla said at once. "The guesthouse is just there, we must get you inside where the fire is -- "

       "What's with your hands?" Ronon asked as he and Sheppard half-carried Rodney back down the pier towards the land, leaving Teyla to trot behind them and carry Ronon's boots and gun.

       She noticed the same webs between the toes of the scientist's bare feet, trembling with every step he took.

       "I -- they reset to this, this is the way they were when I was born -- ! If this latest stunt has undone my perfectly good ATA gene therapy," Rodney managed, sounding more like himself, "I shall be extremely put out. And I'm tired of nearly drowning, have I mentioned that? This is what, the third time? Not even counting what would have happened if the other Elizabeth hadn't done her Sam Beckett impression? I have had it. I am done. No. More. Drowning."

      They lumbered into the guesthouse, Teyla plastering herself to his back, trying to help lock warmth in.

       The old guesthouse-keeper looked up and then dropped her tatting, staring at Rodney.

       "I -- I couldn't save them," he told her, gesturing with his webbed hands. "I tried, but I couldn't -- the cold -- "

       The old woman stalked up and tapped the web between his forefinger and middle finger with one long, bony finger of her own.

       "You'll be one of the delphin-folk, then," she said matter-of-factly. "There's a fire going in the stove in your room, and there'll be hot fish chowder, if you eat soup."

       "I eat soup," Rodney said automatically, and then fell silent as he was bustled into the room he shared with Ronon, vigorously toweled off with the bumpy linens that did that duty at the guesthouse, wrapped in felt and knit blankets, settled into a nest of more blankets and the mattress off his bed in front of the potbellied cast-iron stove that served the room as a heater, and had mugs of fish chowder and something that was almost but not quite entirely unlike coffee shoved into his hands.

       "Rodney," John repeated at last, looking as if he wanted to touch foreheads with the man and didn't know how.

       Teyla showed him as soon as Rodney had drunk some of his hot fish chowder, and then Ronon dropped behind him and grabbed him into a one-armed hug.

       Sheppard put a hand on Rodney's blanket-covered foot, apparently reassuring himself that his teammate was in fact there. "Explanations," he said firmly.

      "Do you really need them?" Rodney said plaintively.

       His teammates looked at him.

       "I told you about my... progenitor, a couple weeks ago. What I didn't tell you -- because it's ridiculously unbelievable if you haven't seen it, and I didn't want to clutter the issue -- is that he's... well, what Carson's ancestors would have called a selkie-man, or something. He turns into a seal. His whole tribe or whatever turn into seals. Well, some of them appeared to be seals that turned into humans. I don't think they're actually descended from seal seals, though. At least I hope not. Ew."

       "Beckett's ancestors?" Ronon asked.

      "It seems that all over the west coast of Scotland," Rodney explained disgustedly, "there are stories about seals turning into humans and getting ravished by human men or seducing human women, as the case may be. I don't know what the gay ones do. I was busy enough getting questions answered and being taught how to control what they call the Musk-breath -- there's a way to step up or cut down the amount of pheromones they, I, emit from the mouth, but I never managed to actually do it until that one time just after Lucius zonked us. Which is a shame, because I can think of several grant reviews and a supervisor or two that could really have used just a touch of it."

       "Doctor McKay!" Teyla gasped.

       "What? Lucius' potion intoxicated us as well as making us eager to please him. This just sort of leaves someone... mellow and suggestible and interested, as long as I didn't tell anyone to do anything unsuitable they only would if they would have anyway."

       "What was with the cleaning, then?" Ronon asked.

       "He told me he'd really, really like it if I was my usual irritating self," Sheppard said. "I thought telling everyone I was going to clean his room would be funny at the time."

       "So you did not take the potion," Teyla said.

       "Do you think I wanted to have this conversation with Elizabeth?! She'd probably think she needed to notify half Atlantis, Caldwell, and the SGC, and then there'd be people poking and prying into half my family history and I may not get along with most of them but they haven't actually done anything to deserve having the Americans set on them, not to mention that the Trust would probably want to dissect me for parts, and if there's one thing I learned since I was old enough to think it's that I must never, never tell anyone... "

       "Or they'd 'take you away and dissect you like a frog,'" Sheppard quoted slowly. "Once you're in the habit of keeping secrets, it's hard to break."

       "Thank you for that priceless mental image."

       "Hey, I try."

       "You knew, then, that you were... " Teyla began.

      "Oh, salt water triggers an involuntary transformation until I learned to control it," Rodney said. "They never took us to the beach in B. C. that I can remember myself; I learned to swim in a chlorinated pool. I fell in off a dock once that I recall, and nearly drowned because I couldn't move my flippers for the clothes. Dad pulled me out by the parka and I turned back into me with my clothes all anyhow, and who knows where my socks and shoes sank to. That was a couple months before we moved."

       "Where does the rest of you go?" Ronon wondered.

       "Subspace."

       "Why don't your clothes go there?"

       "Presumably, because they're not actually part of my body. I've never had a problem with food I was digesting, probably because of enzymes. I have no idea how any implants made it through or didn't, and won't until we go back and get checked out."

       "If you knew you could transform," Sheppard demanded, "why didn't you do it before? You nearly died, several times, and... "

       "Had you forgotten to take your sealskin with you?" Teyla asked, remembering Doctor Beckett's explanation of a story about feather-robes.

       "I -- what -- that's a MYTH. The belief that skin-changing involves actual skin is all over, but it's an example of... of... of primitive totemism. It doesn't need to. Some of the... more hybrid, I guess, of his clan needed DNA samples for an exemplary pattern, but they were usually little things -- they were actually reasonably impressed I didn't -- "

       "So why didn't you metamorphose earlier?" Sheppard repeated.

       "Look, a seal is designed to dive deeper, hold its breath longer, and keep warm in colder water than a human. It still breathes air and lives at the top of the ocean. At the bottom of the ocean, a seal might take a little longer to drown or be smashed into pudding than a human being. Wow, a longer, more painful death! Goody! On the other hand, if I, say, fall off Atlantis, I'd need to get out of my clothes before I changed, and almost certainly would lose most if not all of them. I don't know how I managed to hang onto my jacket and vest through all that -- I have a scanner in there, I have my epipens in there, who knows if they'll actually work now but we don't have so many we can afford to throw them out for every little thing -- oh, my jaws are tired." Rodney put his mugs down to massage his cheek muscles for a moment.

       Sheppard and Ronon were nodding by the end of this speech. Teyla started to, and then blinked.

       "I heard that when Colonel Sheppard and Doctor Zelenka rescued you from the bottom of the sea, you had been waiting in a jumper filling with water. Why, when there was nothing more you could do, did you not become seal to wait the time out in more comfort?"

       "I -- " Rodney stopped. Blinked at her. Picked up the mugs. "That makes sense. That would have worked. I could have changed back at the last moment... I didn't think of it. I can't believe I didn't think of it. It must have been the hypoxia. Or the hypothermia. Or hypoglycaemia. Something."

       "Colonel Carter didn't suggest it?" Sheppard asked.

       "My hallucination of Sam Carter, although my hallucination and therefore unable to know anything I didn't know, also was my hallucination of Sam Carter and therefore behaved as I would have expected her to behave. She doesn't know about..." Rodney flapped a hand, nearly sending not-coffee all over his and Teyla's laps. "...this. So she wouldn't have brought it up, because I wouldn't have told her."

       "Who does know?" Ronon said.

       "My mother. My father. My... progenitor, and all his people. My cousin Meg. You three."

       "We are honored," Teyla said.

       "Your cousin?" Sheppard asked.

       "She'd studied marine biology, she'd studied medicine, she could keep a secret, and I needed to see what I could do. First I didn't know anything, and then I wasn't about to rely on a resource as obviously biased as the selkies."

       "What is 'selkie'?" Teyla asked.

       "It's Scots or something for 'seal.'"

       "The Scots do not speak English?"

       "Well, these days, most of them do. Ask Anthro and Linguistics. Or Carson, for that matter, he likes talking about his people, most people do."

       "Maybe you should hallucinate your cousin next time," Ronon said.

       "Oh, no. Meg would not be of any comfort to me. Meg's like, like a glacier, or like the Lonely Mountain on that last moon we visited -- gorgeous and scary as all get out. Icily regular and splendidly null. I'd yell at her and she'd look superior at me and I wouldn't get anything done. It was hard enough going through nineteen hundred tests, some of them really rather painful..."

       "Wait, your sister doesn't know?" Sheppard said. "You didn't tell her, even now?"

       "Before... we were arguing, a lot, and I liked knowing something she didn't. Then we weren't talking. Then we had enough else to talk about that it never came up. Like I said before, I don't think about it much, it's not as if it comes up in my day-to-day life. Well. After I met the others and reported on them to Meg, she said she thought that if I lived on the ocean I might start falling into biorhythms more like a seal. But I spent years living way inland, so unless I have been recently..."

       "Would you have a mating season and go into heat?" Ronon asked.

       "Heat -- Ronon, where did you get that idea?"

       "There are these stories Carlatti and Alvarez write... "

       "Ronon. I don't know whether anyone explained this to you before, but life does not work like furry porn. Seriously. It doesn't."

       "I don't know whether to be impressed or appalled that you know who writes it," Sheppard commented.

       "We help with the automated backups of the Atlantean-generated data," Rodney commented. "We had to make an entire virtual machine just for the porn, although Pellegrom insists on transferring a few directories and the fiendish level of difficulty she encrypts them with herself. I think anything with an American military theme is one of them."

       "Not asking!"

       "No... seals don't, exactly. About midway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice, the guys go lay claim to and fight over beachfront property, and the female seals head for the beaches to have their babies and then have some sex with the guy watching over their camping spot before heading back out to sea once the kids can swim. They don't fight over mates or anything."

       "You have been a little worse about insisting on your way or the highway in the labs about then," Sheppard said thoughtfully, "but last year it was right after the mess with Cadman, and this year it was right after the Lucius affair, and anyone who noticed thought it was you reasserting your boundaries or whatever Heightmeyer called it. Not that most people did."

      "Say it's allergies," Ronon suggested. "Nobody here questions allergies."

       "My people have peanut allergies," Teyla told him.

       "So you can turn yourself into a seal -- but not your clothes," Sheppard summed up, "and sometimes, maybe only at certain times of the year, you can pull off the Jedi mind trick."

      Rodney nodded, finishing off his not-coffee. "Seriously, some of the lamest powers ever. Teyla has more useful powers. Ronon has more useful powers, and his don't even count as powers."

      "They saved your life," Sheppard pointed out.

       "You scared us," Ronon said.

      "You will get better," Teyla agreed, "and thoroughly warmed, and then I will kill you for frightening us so. No. First I will make you fulfill the Responsibility with me, so that I do not have to ask Doctor Beckett for your frozen seed. Then I will kill you. Would your children also transform into seals, do you think?"

      "Teyla. I'm, uh, flattered, and I've always meant to pass on my genes, but, um -- this probably isn't the best place to discuss it."

       "Why not?" Ronon asked.

       "Because I don't want to hear it," Sheppard said. "Besides, I get first shot at killing him."

       "I'm really feeling the love here," Rodney said.

       His teammates smiled at him.

      "Will you be able to fire a gun with your hands?" Ronon asked.

       "Oh, I'll get Carson to cut them apart again. At least I won't have to fake an ID this time, or rely on an acquaintance of Meg she could overawe, or something. It's not as if we're short of anesthetic these days."

       "Won't he ask?" Sheppard pointed out. "What will you tell him?"

       "The truth, of course," Rodney shrugged. "There was Ancient technology on the planet. Yes, I activated some of it."

       "Then you fell in the water," Teyla said.

       "Then I fell in the water," Rodney agreed. "And lost most of my clothes. It was cold."

       "First me, then Teyla, now you," Sheppard said. "This team is full of hidden genetic heritages."

       "Everyone in my hometown had excellent teeth," Ronon offered.

       "That's far more likely due to the local water supply than the local gene pool," Rodney snorted. "Did it taste fluoridated?"

       "I don't know, what does fluoride taste like?"

       Sheppard tried to explain, nearly leaning over Rodney as he gestured. Ronon made noises from behind him, and Teyla lifted the corner of the outermost blanket and wrapped it around herself as well, sharing her warmth.

       His team.

       His family.

       And he'd managed not to have to tell them the other thing.