Disclaimer: MGM's on top of the mountain.

Spoilers: The Shrine

Description: A Tag for the incredible episode The Shrine. The human mind's a dark place, with all kinds of spaces to get yourself lost. McKay struggles with the remnants of his ordeal; Keller is, as ever, there for him.

A/N: Well, I kind of HAD to write something for this one, didn't I? I was fascinated and overjoyed by McKay's and Keller's interactions in this episode. I hope that this new glimpse into their chemistry better informs the way I write them, including in this story.

It might not be what you'd expect from me -- or maybe it is -- but these kind of just write themselves, so it is what it is, I guess. I do hope you enjoy it, and if you'd be so kind, leave a review and let me know what you think. Thanks a lot!

Magic

I got shackles on my wrists

Soon I’ll slip em’ and be gone

Chain me in a box in the river

and I’ll rise singin’ this song

Trust none of what you hear

and less of what you see

This is what will be

This is what will be…

McKay took a hard look in the mirror.

The white bandage on his forehead had just the smallest of stains in the middle. The wound had opened up slightly when Keller was changing the dressing, but it hadn’t been bad. Still, it was an eerie reminder that a hole had been drilled in his cranium.

He looked tired, and not like himself.. That wasn’t so surprising, given what he’d been through. But there was nonetheless something unsettling about his reflection, like the person staring back wasn’t actually him. That’s how it had felt when his mind was slipping toward oblivion.

As he was turning away, intent on lying down to sleep, he was startled out of the corner of his eye not to see his reflection turn with him.

He whipped his head back to look at the mirror. His reflection, not mimicking his own movements in any way, snarled at him, a look of mocking and contempt in its eyes.

“What – what the – ”

The reflection, with its sneering grin, looked just the part of the voice McKay had heard in his head during his ordeal. The voice had taunted him, tortured him as his intellect ebbed away, and here it was now embodied in his mirror image.

“Did you think it would be that easy?” his reflection asked.

McKay shut his eyes, shuddering.

“Not happening not happening not happening, this isn’t happening, imagination, it’s your imagination,” he rambled, his voice trembling.

The reflection laughed softly.

“’Fraid not, Rodney,” it said, the voice replicating McKay’s exactly.

“Shut up!” McKay shouted, rapping himself in the head with the heel of his hand. “Shut up, shut up!”

Something flashed in the reflection’s eyes, like fire out of a bottomless chasm, and there was in its comportment the promise of harm, amply possessed by history’s greatest villains. McKay stared back at him, shaking as if caught in the throes of hypothermia.

“I’m dreaming,” he whispered desperately. “Just a dream. You’re not real.”

“I’m as real as the hole in your head,” the reflection said, “and so long as you live, you won’t be rid of me.”

McKay turned away from the mirror, ducking his head and moving swiftly out of the bathroom. But as soon as he passed through the doorway back into his room, his reflection was there again, standing before him in corporeal form now.

“Where you going, Rodney?” it asked, each word dripping with malice.

The scientist’s body clenched with terror and he rushed past the reflection, hurrying from his quarters out into the corridor, looking both ways, but finding each end shrouded in darkness.

“Not real, it’s not real. It’s not real!” he shouted, his voice reverberating. “It’s not real!”

“Oh, but it is,” the reflection whispered in his ear, appearing behind him.

McKay frantically shoved it aside, then took off in a run down the corridor, his breaths coming in shallow spurts, the darkness enveloping him and cackling at him in just the same way as it had when it seized and ravaged his mental faculties in the weeks prior.

“Help! Help!” he screamed, his voice hoarse and raw and terrified. “John! John! Jennifer! Help! Help me!”

The reflection appeared again a few meters in front of him, and in his efforts to pull up short, McKay tripped over his own feet and fell to the ground, cracking his head on the floor. He turned over onto his back in a daze, his sightline splitting in half so that there were two ceilings above him.

Everything took on a reddish hue, as if this putrid instant were a revelation delivered by the fallen angels, cast down to pursue him at the fringes of his mind.

He clumsily lifted his hand with an eye toward defending himself when the reflection circled around and came into view above him. Utter fear wracked his body, as he tried and failed to wake from this dream.

But what if this wasn’t a dream at all, but rather his mind’s manifestation of the dementia which gripped him? What if his salvation had been no more than his heart’s mirage?

“Please,” McKay whimpered, his own voice sounding pitiful to his ears. “Just stop. Please, please stop.”

The reflection looked down on him with a wicked grin it owed to the purest evil. It tilted its head a little bit, grunting.

“It doesn’t take much to strip you bare, does it?”

To his credit, McKay kept its gaze, even as he shook.

“Hey, you wanna see a trick?” the reflection asked, reaching up to its forehead and peeling back its white bandage.

Unlike McKay’s wound, the tissue around the reflection’s wasn’t stitched back together, still a gaping hole. And before it fully registered with McKay just how disgusting a sight it was, something began to dig a path up through the hole, forcing its way out of the reflection’s skull.

When the head of the thing emerged, the reflection took hold of it with its thumb and pointer finger and used it to yank the parasite the rest of the way out. It held up the writhing creature, glancing down at McKay with demonic eyes.

“Look, Rodney,” it said, its lips curving up in a terrible grin. “Magic.”

As the reflection leaned down, parasite outstretched and twisting, McKay scrambled backwards, but couldn’t move, for with its free hand the reflection grabbed his ankle, reeling the scientist in.

“Stop!” McKay screamed, so, so loud and heard by no one. “Help! Help! Please!”

The parasite burrowed under McKay’s bandage, and he let loose a gut-wrenching scream.

“Rodney,” a different voice whispered.

It was angelic, imploring.

“Rodney. Rodney…”

OooooooooooooooooooooooooooO

McKay spilled off the bed as his eyes shot open, first knocking over the tray table and scattering its contents, then toppling the unused heart monitor off to the side, and where he fell, something metal dug into his hip.

He took stock with wild eyes, desperately scanning for some sign of his doppelganger or the parasite, and the moment he felt a pair of hands on him, he violently shoved them and tried to scamper away, before backing into a wall and shutting his eyes, bringing his hands up in a defensive posture.

“Stop, stop, stop!” he growled, still lost to his trance.

He could feel the hands on his arms again, and he desperately tried to shake them off, to no avail. They were small, but resolved.

“Rodney, calm down,” the voice implored him, compassionate and pacific, nothing like the callow spewing he’d been shrinking away from. “It’s okay; it’s all right.”

McKay, though still breathless and petrified and confused, seemed at last to realize that the voice speaking to him now was incongruous with the one which had assaulted him, and that this wasn’t the dark corridor where he’d been besieged, but somewhere else entirely, somewhere familiar and safe, and that voice, it was…

He slowly dropped his arms. Or rather, he let them be pulled away from his face.

He swallowed painfully and took a long, ragged breath, still shaking, and he flinched for just an instant when he looked into Keller’s eyes, his brain several steps behind his sight.

“Wh – I… what’s going on?” he asked, the mildest of tremors in his voice.

She tried to smile, but it was a lot closer to a frown.

“It’s okay, Rodney,” she said gently, keeping her loose grip on his forearms, one leg folded awkwardly under her as she half-crouched, half-sat on the floor in front of him. “You’re all right. Catch your breath.”

McKay shook his head vehemently, his face creased in utter distress, his breaths still coming out in pants, as he looked all around him, not yet convinced that his eyes and ears weren’t deceiving him. What if it was another trick? More torment from the voice, showing him Keller before taking her away again.

“I – I was – ” His own voice broke. “I thought I was…”

“What?” she asked, just louder than a whisper.

When he didn’t respond after some seconds, she dared to let one of her hands venture up to his face, forcing eye contact with a tilt of his chin.

He looked so scared and confounded, and yet lucid enough to appear humiliated.

“I thought I was gone again,” he said quietly.

She frowned, brushing her thumb along his cheekbone.

“What do you mean?”

He shuddered again, casting his eyes down in embarrassment.

“I just… the voice, the one who…” He trailed off, shaking his head despairingly. “He was chasing me. I thought… I thought maybe I hadn’t – that you hadn’t – that the shrine wasn’t real, that – I don’t know, I just thought I was trapped.”

He shook his head again, , suddenly prying his arm free from Keller’s grasp.

“I yelled, for John, and you, but there was no one there. He was trying to – he was – he was – ”

Keller forcibly took hold of his arm again, her other hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, hey. It’s all right, Rodney, okay? You were dreaming,” she said, forcing a bright smile to try to reassure him. “That wasn’t real. It did work. You’re going to be fine.”

He nodded after a moment.

“I promise. I’m really here, and you’re really home – ” She glanced around them, then looked back at him, this time with a genuine smile “ – and you really made an awful big mess.”

McKay looked at her for a time, as if to gauge her sincerity, or wonder if Keller – the real Keller – would say that. When he decided that she was sincere, or that she would say that, he let out a small laugh with one of his breaths, managing a meager, timid smile of his own.

“I… I did, didn’t I?” he muttered, letting out the same laugh again.

She nodded fondly.

“Yeah. And I’ll be expecting you to clean it up too.”

The smile faded from McKay’s face after that, his visage turning dour again.

Dour, but not afraid.

She was about to say something when he spoke.

“I just…” He exhaled sardonically. “God, you go to all that trouble to save me, and here I am acting like a psychopath… or a child… or a… psychopathic child.”

“I don’t run into too many of those.”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t know Jeannie when she was nine,” he joked weakly.

She laughed at that, charitably or genuinely or maybe a little of both, and took hold of his hands, rubbing the backs of them.

“Something awful happened to you, Rodney.” She shook her head, trying to imagine it, then looked into his eyes, intent on making him listen. “It’s okay if you have a couple nightmares, or… worry about things. It doesn’t make you crazy.”

“Pathetic then?” he supplied helpfully.

She looked on him with mock sternness.

“You know, sometimes I think you say these awful things about yourself just to make me contradict you,” she said.

McKay smiled, shrugging.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t figure it out. Are you gonna stop saying nice things about me now?”

Keller sighed, putting her chin in her hand, as if giving the matter considerable thought.

McKay watched her, and he couldn’t help thinking that the most remarkable thing his genius and his memories afforded him was the knowledge that he’d never seen another human being who made the mundane so beautiful, and an appreciation of that fact.

“I’ll play it by ear,” she said, grinning slyly as she squared her feet into a proper crouch, taking both his hands again. “Now, up we go.”

McKay obliged her, pulling himself up to his feet with her assistance, waiting a moment for her to stabilize him with one hand on his stomach and the other on his back.

“You good?”

He nodded, letting her guide him back to the bed, and with a long sigh, he sat down on the edge. His hand came up to scratch the back of his neck as he lowered his head a moment, that earlier look of embarrassment returning.

“Uh… listen, I don’t really, um… well…”

Keller smiled sympathetically, and she didn’t make him say it.

“Why don’t you just lie down, and see what happens?” she suggested.

McKay let out an irenic breath, then gave an affirmative nod, apparently not surprised that she’d read between the lines so easily. And he was tired. Exhausted still, actually. He supposed that was just what happened when someone drilled a hole in your head.

He drew back the sheet, awkwardly swinging his legs up onto the bed, before flattening out on his back. Once his head was on the pillow, she pulled the sheet up for him to about mid-chest, then affectionately smoothed out the wrinkles.

He was quite taken by that.

She smiled down at him.

“Now,” she said, with gentle accusation, “you need to get some sleep.”

McKay nodded obediently, but noted, “I can’t promise what will happen to your state of the art equipment when I wake up, though.”

Keller shook her head dismissively.

“I’m not worried about it.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because, you’re going to have good dreams from now on,” she said, grabbing a chair from near the foot of the bed, sliding it up so that it was closer to the head.

McKay smiled curiously.

“And how do you know that? You have a Chippewa Dreamcatcher under here?” he asked, making a show of checking beneath the bed.

She shook her head again coyly. When it seemed like she’d said all she would, he closed his eyes, folding his hands over his chest and breathing deeply.

But she drew a sleepy smile from him when she leaned back in her chair and said, “Magic.”

FIN