Title: The Long Goodnight

Category: Missing Scene for the episode "The Long Goodbye"

Rating: PG

Disclaimer: None of them are mine. No money made, no infringement intended.

Notes: Thanks to Kam and Jennye for excellent beta-reading services. Any remaining mistakes are all mine.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Teyla, what's your situation?" Colonel Caldwell demanded into her ear.

Teyla pressed her radio as she rounded the corner into the busy infirmary. Between the doctors and the nurses and the security men and Major Lorne's team, there was barely room to maneuver the two patients at the center of the storm. She lagged behind, keeping out of the way.

"We have both Colonel Sheppard and Doctor Weir secure in the infirmary," she responded. "Doctor Weir is unconscious and Colonel Sheppard claims to be in control again."

"And just what does Doctor Beckett say about that?"

She caught Doctor Beckett's eye, then glanced inquiringly toward the colonel. Beckett just shrugged noncommittally. Then he was busy directing the medical team to place Doctor Weir on the first examination bed in the room.

"Doctor Beckett will need," she told Caldwell, "...additional time to determine if the alien being inside the colonel is really gone."

Colonel Caldwell breathed the sigh of an unhappy but resigned man. "Very well. Tell the doctor to take the time he needs. I'd like some certainty for a change. I'd also like you and the security detail to stay with Colonel Sheppard until Doctor Beckett clears him."

"Understood."

She stepped out of the way again as an empty gurney was rolled out of the room. Two nurses began to situate Doctor Weir properly on the bed as the medical team moved to transfer Sheppard to the other one. Teyla hugged a wall near the foot of the bed until the men had moved the colonel, still bound hand and foot, to sit on the bed. By the time they were done, two more nurses had already moved into their places.

"Hey, Doc," Sheppard asked as the younger nurse began deftly unlacing his boot, "how's Ronon?"

Sheppard's question made no sense. Teyla glanced at him, but his attention was on the nurse efficiently removing his boots.

"What's wrong with Ronon?" she asked.

"He should be fine," Beckett said, leaning over Doctor Weir to look into her eyes. "I was able to remove the bullet, but he lost some blood. And I'm giving him a course of antibiotics, to prevent infection, before we move him."

Bullet? Blood? What happened? "Ronon was shot?" she asked Beckett instead.

Beckett looked up at her, confused. "You didn't know?"

"No." Then she remembered the injury someone had reported during the search. A man down. It seemed so long ago now. Of all the men hunting Sheppard and Weir, who would have guessed that it would have been Ronon? "Who shot him?"

"It doesn't matter," Sheppard answered. "They're both dead."

She looked toward Doctor Weir, who still lay unconscious. Or, more correctly, where whoever was in control of her still lay unconscious. "Are they?"

"Yes," Sheppard insisted, "they are. And wanting revenge against dead people is what got us into this stupid mess."

At the reprimand in his tone, she looked back over at the colonel. He was pointedly watching her, ignoring the nurses connecting him by wires and cables to various pieces of medical equipment. Ignoring the fact that he was still bound hand and foot. Ignoring other nurses who were busy divesting him of what was left of his clothing. The absurdity of his situation didn't seem to bother him. In fact, the only thing that seemed to bother him right now was whether or not she got the point he was making.

She nodded slightly, taking a breath. She did get the point.

He acknowledged her silent agreement with a short nod. "You should check on Ronon," he told her. "Someone from the team should be there."

He was right again. She should check on Ronon. She wanted to check on Ronon. But after what she'd had to do - and nearly do - tonight, she wasn't about to leave before the job was finished. For certain. "Colonel Caldwell asked me to stay here."

"There's no need. I'm not going anywhere." To demonstrate his point, he held up his bound hands between them. "Besides, half the security force is in here."

She shook her head. "It would be a mistake to disobey Colonel Caldwell's orders in front of his people." She turned her attention back to Beckett. "You said that Ronon will be fine?" she clarified.

The doctor nodded. "Barring any complications."

"And you will keep us apprised of any changes?"

"Aye."

"Then I will check on him at the first suitable opportunity."

Sheppard leaned slightly to one side as the nurse finished cutting off his shirt. "So it's okay to tell me 'no' in front of my men, but not Caldwell?"

"Colonel Caldwell," she sat down on a vacant stool someone had shoved back against the wall between the two beds, "was not the one assaulting your men over the last few hours."

From the foot of the bed, there was the sound of an escaped chuckle. Major Lorne, who wasn't particularly bothering to hide his amusement, leaned languorously on the far wall. "She's got a point, sir."

Sheppard glared at his subordinate. "Don't you have somewhere to be?"

Lorne shrugged slightly. "Not really, sir. Not anymore."

"Well, try to find something. I hear there's a hell of a mess to clean up. Go make yourself useful."

Lorne smiled again. "Yes, sir." He pushed away from the wall, handing Teyla’s stunner to her. "You sure you'll be all right?"

She took the weapon. "We will be fine. Tell Colonel Caldwell that I will let him know as soon as Doctor Beckett is satisfied that both Doctor Weir and Colonel Sheppard are themselves again."

"Hey," Sheppard protested, "I'm right here, you know."

"Maybe you are, sir, and maybe you're not." Lorne collected his team to him with a glance. "Either way, you should keep in mind that the security team is a little edgy after all this." He nodded toward the handful of armed men standing at alert in the doorway and hovering tensely at various strategic points around the room. "I'd advise against making any sudden moves."

"I'm going to second that idea on general principal," Beckett said as he approached them. "I, for one, have seen more than enough sudden moves around here today.” He turned toward the man on the bed. “Colonel, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to insist that the restraints be kept on for now. Until we’re sure, you understand.”

Everyone turned to watch the colonel’s reaction to the idea. Watching for signs of agreement with the safety measure, as certainly Sheppard would feel. Or for signs of protest at the confinement, as certainly the alien inside him would feel.

“Hey,” he said, eyeing the crowd staring at him nervously, “I’m stuck here until everyone’s sure that I’m me. So do whatever you feel you need to.”

Doctor Beckett nodded. “Good. We’ll get through this as quickly as we can, Colonel.” He gestured Lorne forward. “Major, would you mind?”

”Not at all, Doc.”

Lorne stepped between Teyla and the bed, pulling out his knife and neatly slicing the ties around the colonel’s wrists and ankles. Even as he did so, the nurses had moved in again. Efficiently, they began securing their patient with the solid straps attached to the bed. Sheppard watched the action impassively, making none of the aforementioned sudden moves.

“Teyla,” Doctor Beckett stopped to ask quietly, “may I speak with you for a moment?"

She nodded, standing up from the stool. Lorne caught her eye as he passed her on his way out. She could sense his unspoken inquiry again as to whether she was sure he should leave. She smiled and nodded once. She was sure. But she was keeping the stunner just in case.

"How certain," Beckett asked her in a low voice as the moved away from the beds, "are you that he is Colonel Sheppard?"

"How certain are you?" she asked instead.

Beckett sighed. "I was afraid you'd say that."

"How is Doctor Weir?"

"Unfortunately, the EEG patterns indicate that Phoebus is still alive and well - in the loosest sense of the word - inside her."

"And Colonel Sheppard?"

"I'm not seeing the same patterns as in Elizabeth. But I didn't exactly get a chance to establish a base line for the entity inside Colonel Sheppard. So we'll just have to monitor him for a while and see if we can find any significant deviations. In the meantime, I was hoping you could talk to him a bit."

"Talk to him," she repeated.

"Talk to him. It seems to me that you know the colonel better than most. See if you can tell if it's really him."

She frowned. "Thalan has already proven he can fool me."

"For a while, perhaps," Beckett conceded. "But he slipped up. He might do so again. At the very least, it'll provide a distraction, a diversion, that may allow for something to show up on our monitors. We need to know for sure, and I think combining medical science with a little old-fashioned gut instinct will cover all our bases."

She didn't know what other base the doctor wanted to cover, but it was a sound suggestion. The trouble was, she really did not know if she could help answer the question. When Thalan wanted to, he had been a good liar. Not to mention that he had access to Sheppard's own talent for bluffing.

Nodding, she accepted the assignment anyway. "If you think it will help."

He laid a hand across her arm for just the briefest of moments. "Thank you, love. I appreciate the second opinion."

She smiled a reassurance she did not feel. Doctor Beckett's good nature had been taken advantage of today, so a certain amount of hesitation on his part was understandable. "I will do my best."

The nurses were just finished applying the small wired devices that were said to monitor the colonel's brain. Their multicolored wires trailed across the sheets to disappear behind the bed, carefully tucked out of the way. Teyla found the stool and tucked herself back out of the way as well.

"So, what now?" Sheppard asked as she sat.

"Now we wait, I guess." She slipped off her vest, setting the stunner on top of it in her lap. "How much do you remember?"

He shrugged, the gesture truncated as the bindings limited his movement. "Too much."

"Tell me about it," she suggested.

He eyed her warily. "Why?"

It was her turn to shrug. "Why not?"

His wariness turned to a frown. "You still don't believe me," he guessed. "Beckett sent you over to do a little recon."

She tucked a length of unruly hair back behind her shoulder. Behind his bed, a monitor began to beep steadily. "Would you blame him if he did?"

"Not really. But it's not going to do any good, you know. He knew everything I know."

"He did not know you."

He looked over at her oddly. "No," he said slowly, "he really didn't."

When he did not elaborate, she prompted him. "Then it cannot hurt to try. Why don't you start at the beginning?"

He did start at the beginning. In the lab, as Thalan was artificially awakened from his journey toward death. The colonel described the confusion of being subjugated within his own body. The helplessness of being unable to stop what was happening. Frustration, anger, impotence as Thalan began to use Sheppard's experience and skill against his own people. Against Doctor Weir. That frustration had quickly led to desperation to find some way - any way - to stop Thalan. It led to attempts to burrow into Thalan's psyche the same way he burrowed into Sheppard's.

The way, she remembered with disgust, that the Wraith had burrowed into her own mind on occasion.

"Ronon is gonna be pissed."

The odd statement startled her out of her own thoughts. "About being shot? Yes, he is."

He wrinkled his nose. "He's less fun than usual when he's pissed."

"Yes," she agreed, "he is."

"Thalan was not very nice about it."

She took the opening to find out what had actually happened. "Was it Thalan, then, who shot him?"

He shook his head. "Doesn't matter."

But she knew, by the very lack of a direct answer from him, who had really shot Ronon. If Sheppard could share the blame for it, rather than put it on Doctor Weir's conscience, he would.

"He did request medical assistance for Ronon, did he not?" she offered.

Sheppard nodded thoughtfully. "Yeah, I think that was my doing. Whatever he found inside my head, he knew that he'd have a helluva problem on his hands if he went after my team."

Her spine still tingled slightly from the stun setting on Ronon's weapon. She had been vaguely surprised to wake up alive after being shot by one of two soldiers trying to kill each other. Now she knew why. "Well, then, it seems that Ronon and I both owe you a debt of gratitude."

He made a dismissive grunt. "It wasn't enough. When you let the enemy discover what matters to you, you're screwed."

//He cares for you, more than you know.//

"He lied, you know."

His soft words - some real, some remembered - overlapped in her head. Somehow, they drowned out everything else going on around them in the infirmary. "Excuse me?"

"In the corridor," Sheppard repeated, "when she wanted you to kill me. He told you that I didn't believe you'd do it."

She hardly needed the reminder. The vivid memory of holding a gun to a friend's head does not simply disappear....

"He lied to you. I did believe you would do it," he insisted. "And he knew that."

//He cares for you, more than you know.//

"Was that all he lied about?" she asked.

"Huh?" He stared at her, uncomprehending. No doubt searching his memory of the encounter. And while those moments were crystal clear for her - and would probably remain so for the rest of her life - perhaps it had not made such an impact on him.

"Thalan was desperate," she said. "He said.... many things in order to save himself. Many things that weren't true, I'm sure."

And then he suddenly seemed to understand. His face went from confused to awkward and vaguely embarrassed. He cleared his throat and fumbled for a response. "Not... everything was -"

And screaming erupted from the next bed.

Teyla jumped, automatically grabbing the stunner as it tumbled out of her lap. The noise, the hideous bellowing, was coming from Doctor Weir. Suddenly awake, enraged, and with nothing to lose any more. Phoebus was furious. Almost incoherently, she began to threaten and revile her captors. She yelled and fumed and demanded.

"Oh, would you PIPE DOWN!!"

The outburst surprised everyone. The room, focused so intently on Doctor Weir, turned collectively to look over at Colonel Sheppard. Unlike everyone else, he wasn't looking at Doctor Weir. He simply stared at the dark ceiling above his bed, lying stiffly formal with both arms and legs still awkwardly restrained.

"Colonel!" Doctor Beckett protested.

Sheppard ignored him. He turned to face Weir. To face Phoebus. "I am so sick of listening to your whining and your excuses. It's time to go, Phoebus, go back to wherever the hell it is your people go when they die."

Teyla laid a calming hand on his shoulder. "Colonel, this is not helping."

But he ignored her too. "Seriously, Phoebus, you're keeping the living from getting a decent night's sleep, so would you just die already?"

She glared at him, her demeanor suddenly icy calm. "I would have regretted killing you along with him, Sheppard, before. But not any more."

"Oh, like you ever even had a chance."

"I had his life in my hands. Your life."

"No. She," he poked a thumb toward Teyla, "had my life in her hands. She accomplished what you failed to do, and all you did was take advantage of that. To mask your failure."

Weir jerked at the restraints. "I didn't fail! I was hampered by this... untrained body I was trapped in."

"So you're going to blame this on Doctor Weir? You're even more pathetic than I thought. No wonder he was getting the better of you."

She snorted. "Him?!? Thalan was captured long before I was! And in a superior body, too."

Sheppard's head cocked to one side. He grinned cheekily. "Thanks."

"Don't take it as a compliment, Sheppard. It's a fact of genetics and training. But you still wouldn't have beaten me if these... people... had not. Gotten. In." She got louder with each angry word. "THE. WAY!"

Her rage washed over the infirmary, but even focused as it was toward Sheppard, he never responded to it. "First Weir, then me, now the whole damn base. Is there anyone else you want to use as an excuse?"

Her arms tensed as they struggled against the straps holding her in place. Lines and numbers on the monitor beside her bed jumped. "You people don't know the first thing about fighting a war."

"I know about being a soldier. And for a while, I thought that's what you were trying to convince us you were."

"I am a soldier," she insisted. "I was doing what a soldier does -- fighting the enemy with my last breath. You can't take away from that," she arrogantly finished.

"I don't have to. You already did. Don't bother trying to convince us that this was about fighting the good fight. Or about defeating the enemy. Truth is, this whole thing was about you being a petty, arrogant, selfish fool who's afraid of the dark."

The monitor began beeping as she struggled vainly against all four restraints, wrists and ankles both. Doctor Beckett rushed to her side, taking both shoulders in his hands.

"Colonel Sheppard!" he managed to yell over the insistent beeping. "Please stop aggravating my patient!"

"She's not your patient, Doc. She's just a really loud ghost. That's probably all she was when she was alive, too."

"But Doctor Weir is my patient. And this is harming her more than Phoebus!"

The beeping stopped as Phoebus turned to glare at Sheppard. "You should listen to your doctor, Colonel. We wouldn't want to harm Doctor Weir, you know."

"Oh, I wouldn't worry about Elizabeth. She's stronger than you think. Plus, she's got something you don't."

"And what's that?"

"A reason to live. And people who care about making sure that she does." Sheppard struggled to shift far enough to his left side to face Phoebus better. "You're already dead, Phoebus. Let it go. Nothing can change that."

"I can change it. I'm still here." She smiled wickedly. "Long after he died, I'm still alive."

Sheppard scoffed. "You think that's a victory? You screwed up, Phoebus. He's dead, and your little game is finished. And now you're going to lie here in this room, tied down and half-sedated, until you die. And the only thing you'll be able to do is think about the fact that you're going to die."

"I'm a soldier. I have no fear of dying."

"A soldier is trained to deal with death in combat. But you have no combat left. You have nothing left. That's why you created this whole thing, this whole stupid cat-and-mouse game. It was all about having something to do with your last hours besides stare at your own death sentence. But now Thalan's dead, and so is any diversion that he brought."

"He was the enemy. I had to kill him before I die."

He ignored her protest. "No one is going to help you now, Phoebus. You want to hold on inside Doctor Weir? Fine, you do that. You hold on to this pathetic half-life, and you think hard about what's coming. Because death is coming for you, but not in combat or even in stasis. This time, you'll see it coming the entire way. And not a damn person is going to lift a finger to help you."

She stared at him, arms taught and face tight. No one moved.

"In fact," Sheppard pressed, "I'm going to sit here with a ringside seat and enjoy the hell out of your last gasp of life. So go ahead and get on with dying, would you? I haven’t got all night."

And then she suddenly seemed to be fighting to breathe. Her whole body went rigid. Every one of the medical people rushed to her, yelling things that Teyla didn't understand.

"Elizabeth!" Sheppard struggled against his own restraints. "Elizabeth?!"

The room erupted in a cacophony of noise. The yelling machines and the yelling doctors and the yelling nurses all vied for supremacy. Teyla couldn't see Doctor Weir between the bodies, and she couldn't follow what they were bellowing about.

Had Sheppard gone to far? Pushed the alien consciousness into harming Doctor Weir? After all this -- to have come so close -- and still lose one of them….

"Wait!" someone yelled over the chaos.

Doctor Beckett reached out to grab a departing nurse's shoulder. "Wait," he repeated.

Beckett's single word stopped everyone as efficiently as if a switch had been pulled. The monitor behind Doctor Weir had stopped beeping shrilly. The sudden silence was unnerving. But as Teyla -- along with the rest of the room -- watched, the wildly fluctuating line on the screen began to settle down. Within another minute, it had taken up the soothing sound of a regular rhythm.

"Everything's coming back down..." Beckett said slowly.

There was a groan. Doctor Beckett moved in to lean over Doctor Weir. "Elizabeth? Can you hear me?"

Another groan, a hissing breath sucked in. "Carson..."

He smiled broadly, laying a reassuring hand on her shoulder. "Aye. It's good to hear from you. It is you, isn't it?"

There was no response that Teyla could see or hear. But the doctor did not seem to be troubled by that as he patted her shoulder softly. He said something quietly to the nurse beside him, who disappeared into the other room. A second nurse took her place immediately.

"What's goin' on, Doc?"

"One moment, Colonel." Beckett studied Doctor Weir's monitor. "Let me just look at this..."

The moment was a long one. Teyla remained standing beside Sheppard, keeping out of the way. Doctor Weir, either asleep or unconscious, didn't move again. The frenzy of activity around her was gone as quickly as it had come.

"C'mon, you're killing us here," Sheppard protested again. "Is Phoebus gone?"

"I think so." Beckett turned toward them, a smile on his face. "It looks good so far."

Sheppard and Teyla both blew out breaths of relief at the same time. "That is good news, Carson," she said.

"That it is. We'll have to run some more tests, of course, to make sure." He turned away from them to look into Doctor Weir's eyes. "These two have a nasty habit of misrepresentin’ themselves."

The colonel laid back against his own pillows, closing his eyes in faux relaxation. "Take all the time you want, Doc."

Beckett accepted a report from the returning nurse, nodding his appreciation to her. "Teyla," he said as he skimmed through it, "I think you can remove Colonel Sheppard's restraints now." He glanced up at her. "I don't see any reason not to believe that he is who he says he is."

Teyla looked down at the colonel, who seemed suddenly interested in the conversation again. He held out his hands, palms upward, expectantly. He seemed to be himself again, that much was certain. Relatively certain, at least...

Sheppard cleared his throat pointedly. Both men were still watching her.

"I'm sure you're right, Carson," she conceded. Setting the stunner on a nearby tray, she moved closer to the colonel.

"Of course he is." Sheppard held his left hand out as she moved to work at the buckle of the strap.

"Your tactic was very dangerous," she told him.

The colonel shook his head. "Phoebus would've dragged it out. Made it worse on Elizabeth. Unless I could convince her to let go now."

"You mean convince her to die."

He shrugged. "She was dead already."

The buckle was slack enough that she could slide his hand out from the strap. He flexed the wrist and wiggled his fingers. She moved around the bed to work on the other buckle. "But now, her final moments were filled with bleak hopelessness, failure, and her own fear."

"Are you asking me to feel bad for her?" With his free hand, he adjusted the pillow behind his head. "She turned this city into a war zone. She kidnapped Doctor Weir, she attacked my men, and she shot a member of my team. So if she died with... unhappy thoughts... I can live with that."

As she freed his right hand, he pulled it out of the way. He rubbed his wrist with the other hand. Sitting up, he began to work to free his ankles.

"Now," he told her, "you can check on Ronon. Then get some sleep."

She smiled as she slid the now-unnecessary straps off the side of his bed. There were many things that a well-motivated alien imposter could fake, but Sheppard's uniquely stubborn concern for the people he cared about was not easily simulated. And would not have been easily replaced, if she had truly been forced to kill him in order to save Atlantis.

"Unless you still don't believe that I'm me....?"

She turned her attention from the dangling straps back to Sheppard. He was watching her carefully, frowning as he misinterpreted her lack of response as further hesitation. She really wasn't hesitating, was she?

No, she was sure she believed that he was John Sheppard.

Mostly.

"I will return in the morning," she told him instead. "Perhaps Doctor Weir will be up for visitors by then."

"That," he leaned back against the bed, adjusting the blanket. "was not exactly a ringing vote of confidence."

She gathered up her vest and the stunner. "It has been ... a trying day, John. Perhaps we can do better tomorrow."

He craned his neck to look out the door where distant daylight was just beginning to creep through the large windows of Atlantis and filter down into the hallways. "I think it is tomorrow."

She also turned to look at the approach of morning. "Maybe there is no hope, then."

"Or," he countered, making a show of fussing with the pillow behind him, "you could go get some sleep and then come back to let me take another shot at convincing you that I'm really me."

She smiled. "We could try that."

"Good. Now get out of here." He waved a hand to shoo her on her way. "Before I have to send McKay to check on Ronon."

She laughed as she turned to leave. That would almost be worthwhile... but she could not. Ronon had clearly been through enough tonight, and they did have McKay to thank for saving her from having to kill the colonel. Better to spare both of them each other.

"Teyla?"

She turned back toward him. "Yes?"

"You wouldn't have needed forgiveness. If you had done it, I mean, pulled the trigger. Not from me."

//He lied to you. I did believe you would do it.//

"Perhaps so," she conceded. Beckett had been right.... she did know her friend well enough to know what mattered to him more than his own life. "But that doesn't mean that I would have found any in myself."

Only silence followed her statement. Sheppard cleared his throat again. Smoothed the thin blanket on his bed. Glanced at the nurse walking past. Finally his gaze settled just past Teyla's left shoulder. "You'd have been fine. It was the right thing to do," he simply said.

"It was the right thing to do," she agreed. "But I would not have been fine. No one here," she added, "would have been fine."

Another uncomfortable silence. She smiled in sad understanding as he failed once again to find any way to respond to the implications of her assertion. To the idea that others shared that same stubborn concern for him that he had for them. To the suggestion that he was as irreplaceable to this mission as Doctor McKay or Doctor Weir.

So she let it go. Not everything needed to be said aloud. Despite Thalan's assertion, she did know more than he thought. And it was enough. "Good night, John."

He nodded, the gesture heavy with all the things that he lacked words to express. "Good night, Teyla," was all he said.

But she heard all the things he did not say. And she knew for certain this time that he was, indeed, John Sheppard.

~~~~~finis~~~~~

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