He wasn't supposed to be alive.

Michael didn't understand how he had survived the fall, but he was aware enough of his body to know that he wouldn't survive much longer. Too many bones in his body had been shattered. There was most likely internal bleeding, and the cranial injury would kill him within a day or so if nothing else. He could feel his body shutting down around him, noting every failure of a critical system as though it were an item on a ship's log. It was easier than facing what had happened. That Teyla, his beautiful warrior Teyla, his Queen, had killed him.

He had fallen in an area of the city that had been shut off or shut down for some reason. Inhabited until recently but now shut down, perhaps for repairs later. Perhaps because they didn't have the energy to sustain it. He wasn't sure where it was and he didn't much care why; dying in privacy was favor enough. Michael's eyes scanned the ceiling, then closed. He should have done some things differently, but they had left him no choice.

You keep telling yourself that. He heard it in Sheppard's voice.

"You left me no choice," he muttered to an absent foe, one who didn't even care any longer now that he was supposedly dead. And, truthfully, dying, so it wouldn't matter even if Sheppard did find him soon. "You left me no choice!"

His voice echoed. So did the gasp that followed.

Michael blinked, struggling to sit up out of reflex and despite the pain it caused. Pain shooting up through his ribs, his legs, his head.

There was a small human child staring at him, dark hair, dark hair that stuck up in a familiar way. And yet his features were darker skinned, tanned and toned underneath with familiar yellows, not Sheppard's. The child couldn't have been more than ten or twelve years of age from what he remembered of human physiology. What was a child doing here? "What are you doing here?" he rasped. And why was the boy not running away from the Wraith? Obviously because he was dying, and even a child could see that. He was no threat to anyone. The thought was comforting for some reason he didn't want to look at too closely.

"I got lost."

It sounded like a lie. More likely the child had been exploring and wasn't supposed to be here. Footsteps followed the pronouncement, though, and after a moment the boy was joined by two others. A younger sister and brother, from the look of them.

Young lives. Michael wondered how much they would have to offer. Could he recover, even with this tiny energy? The reflexes of a thousand years of life, if not longer, forced his fingers to flex open. Then relax half-closed again as pain shot up his arm and he remembered. He had eliminated that from his biological makeup. He could no longer regenerate from a simple feeding even if he wanted to.

"You had better find your way back, then," Michael rasped. "Go on."

"You're hurt," said the girl. As though she wasn't sure what to do. As though she had been raised to help the injured and the helpless, and most likely she had. Humans were community animals that way. Herd animals. Prey, he had been raised to believe. Having witnessed Teyla in her fury he was no longer so convinced of that, but it didn't matter anymore. "You need help. We can go get help..."

"No!" he shouted, and both of the younger ones scurried behind the older. "No."

"Why?"

He'd forgotten the irritating tendency of children to ask perfectly unreasonable questions. They had done that when they were in his holding pens, too, asking questions that any adult would have known the answer to. He was tired. He didn't want to explain. "Because if they knew I was here, they would kill me." Never mind that he would be dead by the time they got back to have the chance. By the time the children got back to the city, to whatever adult had them in their charge, convinced that adult that a Wraith was lying injured in the deserted sections of the city even assuming they recognized him for what he was, and by the time said adult returned with a party of soldiers he would be dead. The pain was fading away already, and he had an idea of what that meant.

"Why would they do that?" the girl's voice floated to him out of somewhere beyond his vision. Had his vision narrowed in the last moment or two? Frightening thought, if there was anything he could do about it. He was unsettled anyway. "Why would they want to kill you?"

"Because..." He coughed. It hurt. He tasted fluids that should not be in his mouth. "Because I have done some very bad things. And..." Now Michael was just tired. "We have both done very bad things to each other, my people and the people of Atlantis."

"Why don't you just say you're sorry?"

More stupid questions. Any adult would have been able to explain. It wasn't that simple. It was never that simple, and even if he had said he was sorry he would never have been forgiven. Teyla would not have forgiven him, he knew that, by the end. Sheppard had wanted to kill him as soon as he had set eyes on him, before the experiment. Weir, Beckett... They'd never know, now.

"I think what I have done goes beyond sorry," Michael told them.

Shuffling occurred. The girl's voice was closer when it came next, and he heard someone move on his other side. Her hand closed around his fingers, tiny hand. Only enough to grasp the first two fingers of his left hand. "My Da says there's nothing makes things better like saying you're sorry. That sorry is the gateway to forgiveness and healing." And that was a quote, not her words, no child her age had words like that. Sophisticated ideas. But it was a good thing to teach a child, he guessed.

"Your Da is very wise," he told her.

"Mari, we should go," said the older boy, shuffling his feet off to one side. The youngest boy protested, the first time Michael had heard his voice.

"We can't leave him! That's ..." Not fair. Mean. Both of those phrases were tossed around, as were other ideas of what they could do with him. Make a stretcher. (Out of what?) Make a splint. (They didn't know how.) Get a doctor.

Michael laughed at that one, enough to make him cough again. "Talk to me, Mari," he rasped, smiling. It probably looked very terrifying to the human children. "Tell me about your brothers."

The younger children, at least, seemed to understand. The older brother fidgeted but said nothing more about leaving him or telling someone about him, and Mari clung to his fingers long and talked to the dusty air long after his chest had ceased to rattle. Refugees from a Wraith-struck camp, they knew what that meant. They didn't know what he had done or why he was there, or why he hadn't tried to feed on him, but he hadn't acted like the monsters her Da had said the Wraith were. They folded his arms over his chest and crept away through the glass he had shattered when he'd fallen, silent by mutual agreement once they arrived back in the inhabited sections of Atlantis, telling no one who or what they had found.

Go to the top! For you have reached the bottom.