Rather long introductory A/N: This is a long work, broken into three main sections and then into chapters. It is completely written. Chapters will be posted frequently after they have received their final polishing. My eternal love and gratitude go to my Holy Trinity of betas: Pranksta, Klostes (Inkling) and Aslowhite. You have given me so much help and support, I can never adequately thank or repay you, although I will try.

After I had given this story a title, I Googled it. As it so happens, "The Known World" is also the title of a novel by Edward P. Jones. Jones's book, about freed black slave owners in the American South, is an astonishing work. I highly recommend it.

The Known World

Part 1: "Fine."

"We shall create among our people a brotherhood of like bodies, like thoughts and like deeds. In this we will find purity and peace."—New Kalian Constitution, folio 23, script 9.

Chapter One

Pistoule sits with his fingers in his mouth, mumbling around the digits, salivating all over his hands. On good days, he rocks back and forth and side to side. On bad days, he throws himself against the force shield and hangs there until the guard cuts the power and lets him fall to the floor.

John Sheppard wakes up to a freezing morning. Yesterday greeted him with the crackle of Pistoule suspended in the field, then the thunk of him hitting the floor. Today Pistoule, who lives in the cell next to John's, is chewing his fingers, talking nonsense. The air is so cold that a puddle of hoary frost has formed on the wall beside John's head, where his breath hit it as he slept. The frost has been there every morning for the past three months. Four months. He's forgotten how long it's been.

"How's the gourd, Sheppard?" A disciplinarian points to his head as he walks by John's cell and holds his stun weapon a little tighter. John's pretty sure that no one's forgotten the last time he tried to take down a disciplinarian, that no one ever will. He can't recall exactly what happened, but they treat him like he's such a badass, it doesn't matter.

At breakfast there's the usual phalanx of insects. One of the larger breeds, which resembles both a cricket and a cockroach, stands defiantly on the pitted wooden table. It waves its antennae at him but doesn't move away. John used to read the newspaper in the morning, way back when he was younger and living in a regular apartment with a more-or-less regular life. Now he watches the crickroaches, as he likes to call these things.

After he's eaten, John is let out in the fresh air for ten minutes. They do this twice a day, so he can see that the sun here rises and arcs across the sky, just as it does everywhere else.

On occasion, they stick Pistoule outside with him.

"So you can have a nice talk," says the disciplinarian, laughing, before he shuts the Play Yard door. That's what they call it: The Play Yard, as if the empty space, a rectangle of loose dirt and small stones confined within cinderblock walls, has swings and a slide and a sandbox, as well.

Although his next-cell neighbor doesn't interact with other people, John speaks to him anyway, as he would a pet.

"So. Pistoule," he tries to sound conversational. "How's things? Gotta girlfriend, yet?"

Pistoule doesn't respond, not that John thought he would. The brain-damaged man is rather shorter than John, and much, much thinner. His brown eyes appear large above sunken cheeks and below sparse, wispy brown hair. He is not an old man and, surprisingly, his teeth seem to be all there and his skin is still smooth, not yet withered by age or violence. When he gets excited, Pistoule laughs and cries and screams and tosses his body around. Surprising, then, that he doesn't look more beat up.

John can't help but feel sorry for Pistoule. What scares him is how often he feels like he wants to put his arms around the little guy and give him some real, human comfort.

In the time that John has been held here, he has seen a lot of really bad things happen to other people. A lot of really bad stuff has happened to him, as well. He's limping because of some of it. His memory's not so good. The distal portion of his right pinky is gone, but the skin flap that the doctor folded over the joint has healed with just a little pink scar running across it.

After standing in the dirt for a little while, John is brought back inside to his cell. There he sits all day, or paces, or works out doing handstands and pushups. He sings, although the prisoners nearby tell him to shut up. He talks to himself, reciting mundane stuff about the life that he's lived so far.

Today, John pretends that Teyla is sitting with him on his bed, her arms wrapped around her knees, while he talks about pizza delivery on Earth.

"You just call up…"

"Call up?"

"On the phone. You can order any kind of pizza you want—pepperoni…"

"Pepperoni?" she interrupts again.

"It's a spicy meat thing. Sort of like those tubular plants we ate on P9B-755, only instead of plant stuff inside, pepperoni has spicy meat. So, back to the pizza…" And he goes on and on like this, describing each ingredient to Teyla until he has exhausted every detail on the subject. If she's still there when he's done, he talks about something else, like TV shows or dog breeds. She is always patient and curious, just like the real Teyla.

In the late morning, three disciplinarians armed with stun rods show up outside of John's cell. One disengages the shield while the others stand with their weapons drawn.

"Come," says one.

"Why?" asks John, even though he already knows.

No one answers, but one man catches John's upper arm and pulls him out onto the latticed walkway beyond his cell. When John recoils, he is touched with a rod, twice. He falls to the lattice walkway, still conscious but unable to move.

The disciplinarian who stunned him leans down, grabs the prisoner by the ankle and drags him along.

In his cell, Pistoule bangs his bed around, rattles the thin metal frame against the wall and lets the legs of it scrape along the cement floor.

John knows where he's going and he knows what's going to happen to him there. When it's over, the machine will have done whatever it does, and John will have bought himself another day of life.

They promise him a few minutes with one of his team if he cooperates, so he tries being nice these days. They promised him a few minutes with Teyla or Rodney, even though he hasn't seen Rodney in long time. Ronon is dead, unless he found a way to survive a 500-foot free fall without a parachute. The jumper cracked open like an eggshell, and Ronon was gone.

While the machine works, John thinks about the shitload of trouble he got everyone into this time. Since she's such a good negotiator, Elizabeth ought to have sprung them by now. The Genii handed her a couple of nukes; surely she could swing Teyla's release, or McKay's.

The machine may have captured these ideas.

When the machine is done with him, John is led back to his cell. He is a little disoriented but otherwise fine. There is only one disciplinarian needed, for now. He holds John's elbow. John doesn't react to this.

Back in his cell with its shield reactivated, John sits on the bed and stares at the wall eight feet opposite him. Then, without even noticing he's doing it, he brings his hand to his mouth. He bites down lightly on the second finger of his left hand. Not enough to cause pain or break the skin. Just a little pressure to let him know that he still has the freedom to do this, if nothing else.

Pistoule mumbles in his sleep.

OoOoO

Because he was good and let the machine do what it wanted, Sheppard is allowed to see Teyla the next day. She stands on her side of the room, he stands on his. One of the shields separates them, so they can't touch.

"You okay?" he asks.

"I am fine," she replies. "They still have me working, cleaning floors." There isn't a mark on her, so he's happy about that.

They look at each other, letting several precious seconds tick by. Finally, Teyla breaks. She asks, "What are they doing to you?"

Sheppard wants to say "Nothing." He wants to say "Something terrible," but instead he says, "I don't know," which is as honest an answer as he can give. Sometimes he remembers just before the machine; sometimes he remembers right after. It's the in-between time that remains lost to him. Teyla looks at him strangely. He blinks to clear his head.

"There's a machine…" He doesn't know what they're doing, whether they're copying stuff or denuding his mind or putting things in there. He knows only that a minute or two with Teyla or Rodney, if they ever let John see him again, is the only thing standing between him and suicide.

Teyla says encouraging things but that don't penetrate. "What would you do if I were dead?" he asks.

Teyla doesn't reply. He'll take that as something of an answer.

"Have you seen McKay?" he asks. The other most important question.

With a head shake, Teyla looks at John with little darts of fear in her eyes. She is good at telegraphing, something at which he's much too obvious. "His illness is worse. He was taken to the infirmary days ago, and I have not seen him since then."

Teyla and McKay are friends, now. It took a long time for that to happen, but John is pleased that it finally did.

A black hole of failure opens up within John, dragging in Teyla and McKay and even the memory of Ronon. Hindsight is packed with would haves and should haves.

The Kalians presented a benign society. They showed McKay their inventions, agreed that the Wraith were a mutual enemy, and treated the team to spectacular stage shows celebrating inclusiveness and diversity. After the agreements were signed, once Atlantis was thought to be an ally of the first order, the team was shown the Kalians' rotting insides.

John thinks that he should have looked deeper sooner and knows that he ought to have kept his mouth shut once he had. Instead, he sent vague messages to Elizabeth that the Kalian security details intercepted. After that, it was all downhill.

"They're taking my sense of hope," he whispers, very sadly, very, very sadly.

John knows that if Teyla could, she would reach out and not just put her head to his in the Athosian way. She would wrap her arms around him and let him bury his face in her neck. She would kiss his forehead and stroke his hair. The shield makes her look a little wavy, makes the tears brimming in her eyes look like tiny tsunamis.

He feels ashamed to have said this, because he is supposed to be the bright beacon of hope for his team, even if he doesn't really feel that way.

The lights in the room go out. They disappear from each other. Visiting time is over.

OoOoO

John dated an emergency-room nurse for a while. She once got to talking about people who had tried to take their own lives and mentioned one person as having had "multiple failed suicide attempts," as if that poor soul were a triple loser.

John doesn't feel like a loser at all; he feels empowered. One of the other prisoners says that crickroaches have a little sack inside of their bodies that carries a mild poison.

"If you eat a sorlen of the loza bugs, you will die," he says. John asks what a "sorlen" is, and learns that it is about a hundred.

So John finds a box and starts collecting crickroaches, first from the place where he is sent to eat each morning, then from bathrooms and from hallways and from dark corners. He wraps the bugs in the remaining fabric scraps from his Atlantis uniform, slips them into his pocket, and then places them in the box after returning to his cell. Lozas are large insects, twice as big as regular black crickets and not nearly as charming. John knows that many insects on Earth have probisci, but he is willing to bet that most don't have actual tongues, and thinks that he will chat about this with Dr. Spiegel, the entomologist recently sent to Atlantis, when he gets back there.

He thinks this even as he collects the bugs with which he will try to kill himself.

Once he has caught a hundred loza bugs, crickroaches, John sits in his cell after everyone else has gone to sleep and consumes the insects one by one. Some of them are dead, others are still alive as he does this. They are extremely smelly.

By morning, John is comatose. Loza bugs aren't toxic to a relatively healthy individual, so John doesn't die, even though he gets plenty sick from them. The disciplinarians take him to the infirmary, where his stomach is pumped and he's given a counteragent. He lies insensate for several hours before waking up with a headache. McKay lies unconscious in the bed next to his. The physicist is ghostly pale and thin, as thin as Pistoule. His blue-tinged lips are slightly parted, allowing in whistling droughts of air, as if he were strangling. John calls McKay's name, but there's no response.

A doctor wanders over after a while.

"What's wrong with my friend?" asks John, motioning a restrained hand towards his teammate.

"Sick," the doctor replies.

"Is he going to be okay?"

The doctor glances at McKay, then back to John. "Look at him," he says. "What do you think?"

OoOoO

The doctor—or whatever he really is—unstraps Sheppard's restraints. A half-dozen disciplinarians stand around John's bed with stun rods ready to take him down if they have to. In the wake of his pathetic suicide attempt, which the Warden described as "amusing," John is not allowed to see either member of his team for the next ten days. He will have the machine twice as often, as well.

As he is being taken from his infirmary bed, John brushes by McKay, jostling him a little. The scientist wrinkles his forehead but is otherwise oblivious. The doctor sits nearby, filling out reports at a small rolling table.

"Some sort of wasting syndrome," he says, pointing to McKay. "We don't know the cause. A parasite, perhaps. Surely, you must have noticed his weight loss, his fatigue."

Surely, yes, but McKay hadn't mentioned his health and Sheppard hadn't pressed very hard.

"You look a little peaked, Rodney. Feeling okay?" he'd asked, as they'd stood with the shield between them in the visiting place.

"Peaked? Did you actually say 'peaked'?"

"Yeah, peaked. As in sick, tired." A pause. "So?"

"I'm sure you didn't mean 'peaked' as in 'pointy.' I'm fine. You?"

They spoke in whispers about finding a means of escape. The disciplinarians overheard and cut the lights, enveloping them in darkness. They also cut the audio, so McKay and Sheppard couldn't hear each other, either.

That had been quite early on, maybe four weeks into their captivity. Sheppard hasn't seen McKay since, although Teyla is allowed a few minutes with him whenever she has been suitably obedient.

The doctor checks McKay's vitals without looking at his patient. John thinks that when he and the surviving members of his team are together again, getting ready to nuke this place, he might slip in and extract the doctor. Then he'll take the doctor to Atlantis so that he can meet Carson and learn what being a doctor is really all about. John fantasizes about this and also about what he will say to the doctor just before he puts a bullet in his head.

OoOoO

A day after leaving the infirmary, John is brought to the machine for another session. He doesn't know what it's doing, if it is indeed doing anything at all. How would he remember if something were pulled from his mind by force? Or placed there?

This time, the machine makes John imagine that his hands look like those of a child, with short, innocent fingers. He even has the missing part of his pinky back.

After the machine, John expects to be led back to his cell, but the disciplinarian takes him to the Warden's office instead. This is unusual, but then everything seems unusual after the machine.

The Warden's office is in the same area of the prison as the machine, just down the hall, in fact.

The Warden is short and round, with soft, pale features, a miniature version of Truman Capote but without the lisp or the intelligence. John thinks this every time he sees the Warden. It never fails to make him smile.

John stands before the heavy, dark-wood desk, in the Warden's dingy masonry-block office, waiting for something to happen to him. He is lethargic from the machine and sways a little.

"Where is he?" asks the Warden, who leans back in his rolling chair, folding his small, white hands over his belly.

Sheppard says nothing because he doesn't know to whom the Warden is referring and, anyway, it's in his nature to refuse to answer.

The Warden unclasps his hands and waves to one of several disciplinarians in the room. A stun rod touches John's back. The weapon is not set very high, so he only flinches.

The Warden says, "He is gone and you know who took him."

"He is gone." Sheppard had been smiling at his Truman Capote joke. Now he smiles because something good has finally happened. Or he thinks that something good has happened. Coming out of the machine, John's ideas don't always connect to reality very well. One time he thought that Teyla was hiding something important from him, but when he saw her next she seemed okay and relaxed and completely pulled together.

"I don't know…" John begins, as a stun rod makes its point in the area of his left kidney. The machine has ground him down. The loza bugs didn't work out. How long will it take to die from a stun rod? John decides to find out.

TBC…