It was 9/11 all over again.

He hadn't been there. He'd been stationed at Fort Bragg when the planes hit the Towers, but his lover at the time had been there and the whole day he'd been distracted and hadn't been able to tell anyone why. That was the hardest part. Not being able to tell anyone why.

It was like that now, too.

A part of him wondered if it had been like this for Mike (and only now did the irony strike him), trapped in the Towers. Probably not. They had gone down within an hour, and a lot of people had been safely evacuated, including Mike. Who would spend the next eight years or so living in that moment, with Lorne helpless to pull him out, and that was what had eventually pulled them apart. But that had been years ago. And the only reason he was thinking of that was because of the destruction around them.

And now McKay was moving around, at least he thought it was McKay, he would have to move to sit up enough to tell. He didn't want to move. He was pretty damn sure his leg was broken.

"Oh god..."

Yep. That was McKay.

"Calm down." Lorne tried to make his voice sound reasonable and all he could think was that he wished Sheppard were here. Somehow Sheppard managed to keep the scientist under a modicum of control. "Where are you?"

"Where am... where do you think I am? I'm trapped here under this pile of ... oh god. Oh god, oh god..."

"Calm down!"

The scientist subsided into whimpering, crawling out into Lorne's point of view and slowly standing when he realized there was enough room to do so. The Major felt a brief moment of guilt and sympathy; if McKay really had been stuck in one of the coffin-like pockets in the hallway instead of in the apparently better shielded room, no wonder he had been panicking.

"Are you okay?" the scientist asked, before turning to the computers and fussing with them. Trying to get a signal, Lorne guessed. Some kind of information. Anything. "No signal... no signal..."

Lorne closed his eyes. He wondered where Sheppard is, purely out of concern for his team leader, he told himself. Nothing else. Nothing to do with anything. The bile in the back of his throat was from the pain in his leg, he told himself. As long as the team's all right, the rest doesn't matter. Deal with it later.

"Still no signal. There's too much interference."

He shifted, tried to move and fell back with a groan as pain brought the bile up an inch further and brought the sweat to his forehead. "I'm pretty sure my leg's broken."

"I think I'm remarkably fine..." McKay, of course, didn't pay attention.

And Lorne was getting more frustrated. And upset. "Well, isn't that wonderful?! That brings me great comfort, thank you!"

He didn't want to hear about how McKay was remarkably find. He wanted to know that the rest of the team was all right. That he hadn't led his men into a trap. That (John) Sheppard and the rest of them were okay.

He wanted to get out of here and kick Michael's alien ass for this. For taking Teyla, terrorizing her, terrorizing his people.

He wanted McKay to stop fidgeting. Especially when said fidgeting resulted in a miniature landslide straight on top of him. "Hey!"

"Sorry!"

Lorne closed his eyes, took a breath, and tried not to think of where the hell Sheppard was (if he was even alive) and how the rest of them were doing. And tried not to think about how long or wide the gap between those two thoughts was, or why.

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