Lost and Found

[anyanka_eg]

Title: Lost and Found
Author: Anyanka_eg
Rating: PG
Pairing: McShep
Summary: He was pretty sure it would never have made a list of things he'd ever find floating above the planet.

“Colonel, are you coming?”

He didn't want to because this was never going to be good. As soon as he saw it, drifting on its slow arc over the city, he'd known that this wasn't going to have a happy ending. It wasn't what he'd expected to find when when he'd taken his team up in a cloaked jumper to investigate the blip that had suddenly appeared on Atlantis' sensors. In fact, he was pretty sure it would never have made a list of things he'd ever find floating above the planet.

A jumper, for god's sake, floating in lazy spin round the planet. He'd half expected to hear Blue Danube as he'd cautiously piloted his own craft towards it but there had been nothing. No lights, no greeting hail, no life signs and he'd felt an itching creep of dread along his spine. The occupants of the jumper were either long gone or very dead and, call him a pessimist, but he was fairly certain it was the latter.

It was obvious that the jumper hadn't just appeared in orbit above the city, rather that the cloak had failed and Atlantis' sensors were suddenly able to see it. He knew there were ways of hiding a jumper even from Atlantis herself but he didn't think anyone abandoning a jumper in space would do it, especially when rescue would come from the planet below. And surely even a damaged jumper would be worth the salvage?

“Seriously colonel, we need to do this now.”

He moved forward, his EVA suit cumbersome and sweaty even in the cold of space. It would have been easier to bring the Ancient craft back to Atlantis, to explore it in the comfort of things like oxygen and gravity, but there was no way he was going to expose the city to whatever was in the jumper. So they'd stretched the shield round both craft and introduced an atmosphere but no one was going any where without a suit because, hey, pathogens.

He moved cautiously inside, his pistol drawn because there might have been no atmosphere in there but you never knew in the Pegasus galaxy. Nothing launched itself at him and nothing skittered away from the beam of his flashlight but he was still uneasy. There was something pricking at his mind, some memory squirming its way into his consciousness, and it made all the muscles in his shoulders bunch with tension.

In the middle of the rear compartment, between the benches, two bodies lay tangled together on the floor, their limbs entwined like lovers in an embrace. They were covered in the same thick frost that dusted every other surface in jumper and crunched under his feet as he moved. He inched forward, sweeping the beam of his flashlight around the small space, almost certain now that it was safe to allow his team to enter the craft.

“Oh, Jesus!”

Or his team would follow him in and peer over his shoulder despite his orders. He fought the urge to roll his eyes because it was a useless gesture inside the suit and it gave him a headache if he did it every time he wanted to. He turned the flashlight on to the faces of bodies as he stepped closer and his heart stopped in chest. He knew them.

And then it fell into place; the memory that had been pushing at his mind, the feeling that there was something he should know, suddenly all made sense. They'd been here all the time, no more than one hundred and fifty miles from the city they had both called home.

“Is that...Is it them?”

There was awe, and maybe just a little bit of fear, in his scientist's voice and he totally got that because, hell, this was John Sheppard and Rodney McKay. Their pictures graced the halls of the city, their city, and everyone posted to Atlantis knew them. They all knew how, after the final battle for Atlantis, Sheppard had returned victorious to the city only to find McKay had been killed in an explosion. They knew how he'd taken his friend's body from the morgue, laid it in the jumper he'd flown against the Wraith and vanished into the sky. They knew he never returned.

And now they knew why.

Sheppard had cloaked his jumper, turned off the life support and laid down to die next McKay. His head was pillowed on McKay's shoulder, his fingers were entwined with the other man's and their joined hands were pulled close to his lips. On Sheppard's cheek, frozen for over fifty years, was a shiny track of tears.

He'd always thought that the chaos following the battle had been the reason no one was sent after Colonel Sheppard when he left, now he thought maybe the survivors had known these two were meant to be together. Maybe in those early days of the city, when any relationship between the two would have cost the Colonel his career, a few of the inhabitants had known that there was something more than friendship there. Maybe they had known that Sheppard couldn't live in an Atlantis that didn't have McKay.

Looking down at the two bodies, the man who was the ninth person to sit in Sheppard's chair, made his choice. There would be those who wanted their bodies brought back, those who wanted to give them a hero's burial, but this was their tomb, this was where they belonged. They had been together, here in the frozen jumper, for longer than they had when they were alive and he wasn't going to change that.

After fixing the cloak and sealing the jumper, all official reports of the incident would show nothing more than a minor malfunction of Atlantis' sensors. A few would know the truth but most of the people who came and went in the city would never know that when they looked up, wishing on some distant star, that closer to home Sheppard and McKay were still watching over the city they had died protecting.