A/N: Um. I was watching Tao of Rodney just before I thought of this, so its sort of episode related, but not really?

He knows the oxygen in the room is dangerously low, but he can hear the desperate sound of Rodney McKay, Smartest Man in Two Galaxies, working at what is doubtlessly a sensational speed, trying to save him. He feels light-headed with lack of air, bubbly with the knowledge that he's got the best support a guy could ask for, out here where the Wraith are trying to eat him- and all his planet, too.

'Clear blue skies,' he thinks with a smile, breath faint against his lip. He thinks about the glorious expanse, stretching above him, mirrored in the soft waves below, thinks about swimming in the clouds. Thinks about being the clouds, and the sky, and he is, oh, now he is.

It's all in his head, clear and sublime in its ultimate simplicity. Why he could fly in the clear blue skies, on razor wings, without wings at all, lifted in steel; thermodynamics, chemistry, mathematics, physics, every branch of reality in a glorious twining cocoon of webbing, stretching on and on and on and he can touch every point, long and thin but never brittle. He feels glorious and calm and free-

And he wrenches down to the ground, pulled by a single stifled syllable. 'No.'

He feels like curiosity, concentrated in this place that he just left. He can still see the imprint of heat his body left in the air, against the wall. He knows how long the oxygen left would've sustained him, versus how fast the carbon dioxide poisoning would have killed him. The same ratios if he'd been sleeping. If he'd been talking. If he'd been screaming. The thought of panic seems already far away.

He stretches outside the room, sinking into the thrumming currents of Atlantis. So much less sentient, now that he can see her. He feels like settling for a long sleep when the sound comes again. 'John.'

And again, while he lazily withdraws. 'He's not dead, he's not dead, he's not dead. Oh god, it's fine, everything's fine, get a hold of yourself.'

He looks, and suddenly that astounding, lazy, happy clarity he'd had is all mirrors and mud, because for all the chemical states that imply attraction, all the physical hormones that flood a body with lust, love can't be explained with parameters, despair has no rules. He knows everything about the world now, but nothing about people.

Rodney McKay is pressed against the door he never managed to open, sobbing in little badly-restrained noises (John thinks about the inevitability of rain), his thick arms covering his face. His tools are strewn on the other side of the corridor, the tablet's screen cracked and dark. John knows, simply and thoroughly, that the damage is purely cosmetic.

He knows the same can't be said for Rodney, because he can follow that string to its due course, where things on Atlantis get so suddenly, terribly quiet for a long, long time. He can follow it on and on, until everything is all right and the world doesn't end; not for anyone, not in the cataclysmic way they fear, though the universe never shifts in its need to have an infinity of petty devastation.

He hates seeing everything being 'all right in the greater scheme of things' because things are not all right for his team, for his family, and he hates the Ancients for rising with nothing to lose, with nothing left behind, because that's what's made them like this.

They're looking at the chemicals in people's brains, and at pretty patterns of genes like spots of light on the floor, and hearts pumping, lungs inflating, hormones and vitamins and oxygen rushing up and down tissue, and they're not seeing anything.

Rodney sobs and sobs and sobs and John descends because he isn't dead yet, and no important anyone of his is going to suffer as long as he can say otherwise.

What does he care about the laws of probability anyway?