Sequelae, by The Spike 2/3
Rodney nodded, pushing past John with the kind of alacrity he hadn’t felt move him since Atlantis. He got the door open something like a split second, it seemed before John was pushing past him into the garage. Rodney slammed the door after him, locked the deadbolt and stood there, ear to the door, shaking with adrenaline rush. In the garage beyond he could hear muted arrhythmic thumping and grunting, like John was throwing heavy objects, or more likely just himself against the walls. It made Rodney want to scream and cover his ears at the same time.
Instead he pushed away from the door and called Keller’s number and, in answer to her ‘Hello’, said: “You need to get over here right now. And bring tranquilizers.” - while at the same time typing into Google ‘restraints’ and ‘Nevada bondage’ and ‘overnight delivery’.
In the annoying way of doctors, Keller had questions, which ended inevitably with her saying she’d be there as soon as she could. Google proved less cooperative and although there were apparently a million places one could buy handcuffs and manacles (and stocks with optional fucking machine and pink leather doggy style spreader bars and something called an ‘anal hook’ that had Rodney both horrified and intrigued because the girls in the pictures definitely seemed to be enjoying themselves) - there was no way to know if these were just toys or if they would actually work to restrain a person with superhuman strength and a fair measure of feral ingenuity.
Probably better to find a 24 hour box store and get some ropes and tire chains and padlocks and why hadn’t he already done all of this? He should have raided the SGC armory for restraints and a zat the day John had shown up at his door.
Something crashed in the garage and Rodney jumped and swore. This was bad. This was very, very bad. It was suddenly obvious that if John wanted out of the garage it wasn’t going to take him that long to break down the wood and spring automatic door. And then what were they going to do?
He paced, anxious to frantic, stopping at the door to listen to the sounds of destruction and the slowly lengthening silences between.
Eventually the silence didn’t end and Rodney, still pressed against the door, tried: “John?” Nothing. “John? Sheppard?” Nothing. Nothing. He hung on, cursing Keller for not breaking enough speeding laws. Maybe he’d knocked himself out. Maybe he was lurking in wait, clinging to the ceiling like The Fly, waiting to drop down on Rodney and kill him. Sometimes he really hated his brain.
“John?” he tried again. There was no answer, but now he realized he could hear something, a sort of quiet rhythmic brushing sound. Hunh. It didn’t sound like it was coming from some door-adjacent ambush point.
And what was Keller doing? Jogging here? The brushing stopped for a moment and Rodney held his breath. Something scraped softly across the floor, then the brushing resumed.
“John?” he said again. He slipped the key into the lock. The sound was ridiculously loud in the quiet house. He waited but nothing changed. He turned the key in the lock.
“I’m, uh, I’m opening the door,” he said. Inanely. “If that’s a bad idea, tell me now.” Nothing. Or… maybe there was something, low and indistinct. Rodney really hoped that it wasn’t a warning to stay away because he’d already turned the knob, cracked the door.
“Okay, I’m coming in…” The big room was dark. Rodney felt for the switch, clicked it a few times, but nothing happened. The only illumination was the angled wash of light that fell in through the door behind him. Even so, he could see that John had trashed the place. Stuff had spilled from split and tumbled boxes - books, papers, clothes, and oddly shaped lumps he couldn’t identify littered the floor.
He couldn’t see John, but he could hear the soft, brushing sound from the far, dark corner of the room.
“John…” he said. There was a pause in the noise and then:
“Yeah.” It sounded gravelly and hollow, but not crazed. Relief prickled through him like cold water. Rodney took a step into the room, pushing some debris out of the way with his foot.
“Are you...? I mean, did you…?” He peered into the corner, his eyes adjusting. He thought he could see Sheppard’s head behind what looked like a pile of boxes, maybe about where the bedroll had been. The brushing noise started up again, Sheppard’s head moving in time. John didn’t answer but by then Rodney had advanced far enough into the room that he could actually see him in the dim light, sitting on the floor inside what looked like a little fort of boxes, holding one arm tight to his chest with the other, rocking a little. He looked up at the sound of Rodney’s approach.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” John said. His face was shadowed, but the pain was evident in his voice.
“Yeah, well,” Rodney said, he squinted at John, trying to see if there was blood, but he couldn’t tell. Still. “You hurt yourself.”
“Yeah,” John rasped, half mocking. “Well…”
Rodney considered snapping something back, but he was suddenly way too tired.
“I called Keller,” he said. “She’s on her way.” John just grunted. Rodney toed around in the debris field, looking for the work light he knew was in there somewhere. Paper crinkled under his feet. All his papers had been back here - his doctoral theses, pre-Pegasus submission papers, all meaningless now. He wasn’t even sure why he’d been dragging them around the world from one storage room to another. It seemed abruptly like a ludicrous thing to have done. He sighed.
“Fuck,” John said, abruptly. “Sorry. Sorry about-“
“Whuh?” Rodney asked.
“This,” John nodded in the general direction of the mess, then sucked air sharply through his teeth. “Everything. Sorry…”
“Oh. Okay,” Rodney said, absently, distracted by a sudden worry. “You’re not just quietly sitting there bleeding out, are you?” he asked. “Because I can’t tell in the dark. I mean you’re obviously in pain and--”
“Not bleeding out,” John said.
“Okay,” Rodney said. There was silence for a while. Nothing but the sound of John’s pained breathing and Rodney’s rustling through the papers. His foot found something heavy and he bent down to see what it was - the twisted corpse of the lawn mower.
“Hunh,” he said, shifting it a little toward John. “That’s kind of scary.”
“I’ll pay for everything I broke,” John said. “I’ll clean up the mess.” He made another pained sound. “Jesus. I shouldn’t have come here.”
“Honestly?” Rodney said. “In a weird way I’m kind of flattered.”
“You would be,” said John.
“Yes, yes,” Rodney said. “McKay has an enormous ego. Never gets old. The thing is…” His toe found the thing he’d been looking for. He kicked it a couple of times to make sure no scorpions had decided to nest in it, although frankly if he was a scorpion he’d be miles away from this place by now, and picked it up. “The thing is, you could have gone to Radek.”
“Radek has a wife now,” John said. He was back to rocking softly.
“Or Jennifer,” Rodney untangled the light’s cord from whatever it was tangled with and tried to remember where the wall socket was. Ah, right, just above the work bench. “You were on better terms with either of them.”
“Obviously I’m not thinking too clearly,” John said.
“No,” Rodney said, feeling around until he found the plug. “I think you’re thinking very clearly. I think you know, deep down, that you can trust-“ Brilliant fluorescent light flooded the room, half blinding him. John yelled like he’d been struck.
“Sorry, sorry…” Rodney mumbled, fumbling around for the plug. He yanked it out, feeling the sudden darkness like a wash of cool air.
“Christ,” John said. Rodney could hear him twisting around in the dark, gasping quietly every time he moved.
“Sorry,” Rodney said again. He crouched down, feeling for John, flustered enough to want to help in some way. “I didn’t know it would be so-“ His hand bumped into cotton and solid flesh. John yelped..
“Sorry!” he cried again, backing away fast enough to stumble back on his ass. John was making a horrible, choked sound now, somewhere between a sob and a wheeze. For a moment Rodney was so alarmed he froze but, Christ, he knew that awful sound.
“That’s not--” he yelled, well and truly outraged. “That isn’t funny!” John just laughed harder, interspersed with gasps of real pain.
“No, “John panted. “It really, ow, really is.” And okay, maybe it was a little funny, if you were the kind of person who liked the Three Stooges, which he most certainly was not, although John clearly was. Or maybe it was just post-traumatic hysteria, which admittedly he’d never seen John engage in or… who knew what it was. It felt strangely normal. Comforting, even, not that Rodney was planning to admit that.
It didn’t last long, or turn into out and out hysterics, just kind of petered out, with the occasional hiccup which Rodney could hear even when he went back into the kitchen to search for a dimmer light source. He came up with a red plastic flashlight and a handful of white emergency candles, which necessitated further searching for batteries and matches. By the time he’d located those, John had gone quiet again.
He stuck the candles into coffee cups with a little dripped wax and lit one to carry in with him. John looked up squinting as he got closer and Rodney could see that his face was bruised, his nose had bled and the blood had dried and flaked off his lips and chin. The changed eye reflected eerily golden-green like a cat’s.
“Jesus,” he said. “You look terrible.”
John snorted.
“You're not looking so hot yourself, McKay." Then they both heard the sound of tires on gravel.
Keller insisted on the bright work light after all, although she made Rodney go and fetch John’s sunglasses before they turned it on and hung it from the hook where the hose used to be. Keller cut away John’s sweatshirt and in the pitiless light Rodney could see the weird bulge where John’s shoulder had dislocated forward, all the places he was scraped and bruised, the blue, ridged patches crawling his forearms, spreading across the wings of his ribs and disappearing down toward his flat, hairy belly.
The scales were the least horrifying part.
He wondered if it had covered his body like this last time. Strangely he had no memories to compare it to. He’d managed to avoid seeing much back then - just glimpses through that Obi Wan Kenobi robe they’d fitted him with for the mission to get the eggs. He certainly hadn’t tried or wanted to see more. It seemed - inappropriate, really. Presumptuous. Overly intimate. Kate, of course, had accused him of rationalizing his fears - fear of illness, fear of the unknown, fear of violence. His xenophobia. Fears he still believed were not actually neurotic in his situation. Aliens had tried to kill him after all.
The quiet argument going on between John and Keller shook Rodney from his reminiscence. John was being his usual asininely cavalier self about the injuries. Keller insisted the shoulder needed a surgical reduction. John just shook his head.
“Super healing,” he said. “One of the few benefits. Just get it back in the socket and it’ll be fine.”
Keller hesitated, then turned to Rodney.
“I’ll need your help with this.”
“Oh no, no,” Rodney said, but he knew it was futile even before John said: “McKay…” in that expectant, proprietary tone he hadn’t missed at all.
It was just as awful as he’d anticipated, holding John’s hand and pulling bone through meat, while Keller guided the grotesque bulge with ungentle force. The unnatural feeling of it nearly made him puke and John made horrible strangled noises of agony until the ball suddenly slipped into the socket. Keller was quick with the gauze, mummifying John’s arm against his torso.
The bandages were as much a comfort to Rodney as to John, he suspected. Maybe more so as he sat back against the wall next to John, head down between his knees. He looked up when John asked how the cure was coming.
“It’s coming,” Keller said, noncommittally, and then, in response to the looks they both give her, added: “It’s complex stuff. And I’m not a geneticist. And, to be honest, the ideas Dr. Beckett was working with… You know, he took some shortcuts.”
“We know,” said Rodney. “It’s what you do in an emergency. Kind of like this is.” Keller just gave him one of her flat looks. Rodney wanted to shake her.
“This thing moves fast, Doc,” John said. “I don’t mind if you have to cut a corner or two.”
“Well, I do,” Keller said. “And not just for ethical reasons. From what you’ve described and what I’m reading, this isn’t progressing the way it did last time. It’s not like you’ve been re-infected with the same virus. This is more like a relapse, or long effect sequelae. Like… post-polio syndrome, or shingles, years after chicken pox. We don’t know what the progression is for this. Or whether the original serum will halt it.”
“But-“ Rodney started to say.
“But,” Keller cut him off firmly, turned to John. “I do have a few things that can alleviate some of your symptoms in the meantime. I can give you something to keep you lucid, for instance. Something for the itching, something that will hopefully regulate your metabolism a little better, something for the pain....”
“Sounds terrific,” John said, deadpan. “When do we start?”
At least the answer to that had been ‘right away’. Rodney was of course drafted for the heavy lifting. Clearing a path through the debris, he dragged the mattress and boxspring off the guestroom bed so John had something “decent”- Keller’s word.-- to sleep on. He found extra blankets (“Lots!” Keller said.) and helped get John onto the reconstituted bed.
While Keller did medical things, Rodney also brought in a ladder and changed the shattered light bulb, returning the room to normal and considerably less eerie lighting. Once he’d done that he came to a decision.
Keller was busy setting up an IV drip and John probably wasn’t sleeping, but he was possibly pretending to, under the shades. He had his head turned away.
“Are you going to be here for a while?” Rodney asked, quietly. “I have to get some things. Restraint… things,” he added in a low whisper. “Maybe an hour?” Keller just nodded.
He sped down the highway to the closest WalMart. It was actually fairly peaceful at this hour, giant and empty with its white light and muting sound baffles. He filled his cart with rope, chain, padlocks, a battery-powered lamp, duct tape and as an afterthought, peanut butter, grape jelly, bread, a box of power bars, mil. He half expected to be stopped as a potential serial killer at the cash, was mildly outraged that he wasn’t, and sped back home with his purchases.
Everything was as he’d left it, although Keller was removing the IV from John’s arm as he came in. John really seemed to be asleep this time.
“I gave him something to knock him out,” Keller said at the door, handing him a list of instructions to go with the box of pill bottles, bandages, tape and autoinject syringes. “He’s been minimizing his symptoms. I don’t think he’s slept in days. Or eaten.”
“How unlike him,” Rodney said, flatly.
“Well, keep an eye on him,” she said. “I really don’t like how he’s looking.”
“I have to work,” Rodney said. He’d already flaked out on two days and the first field test date for the jumper was coming up fast. Radek was probably on his twelfth mini-stroke of the week by now.
“You can’t leave him alone,” Keller said. “And I need to get into the lab and start synthesizing.”
“Fine, fine,” Rodney said. “I’ll figure something out.”
“I know you will,” Keller said. She patted his hand again, like he was some worried relative, and left.
Rodney looked at the instruction sheet and medication schedule. Next pills due in - he checked his watch - 15 minutes. He supposed he could let John sleep until then. But he found himself wandering into the garage anyway, sitting down in the chair he’d brought for Keller. Weariness washed over him like a slow wave and he yawned hugely. John stirred sleepily, his good hand flailing out as he stretched, brushing Rodney’s thigh.
“Hey,” he said, muzzily, patting Rodney’s leg with the back of his hand.
“Hey,” said Rodney. He was hyperaware of John’s hand, palm up, cool against his leg.
“You know what’s weird?” John said.
“What’s weird?” Rodney answered.
“I do trust you,” John said. “That’s what’s weird. Isn’t that weird?” Rodney had to swallow hard a couple of times and in the end he couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he just kind of rested his hand on John’s hand and squeezed it before letting it go. Or trying to. John’s grip was pretty strong, even as he was going under.
“It’s weird,” John said again. “But I think even when I didn’t, I always did.” He sounded stoned and young and pretty damn surprised.
Oddly, Rodney felt exactly the same way.
John slept deeply through the night, barely waking enough to swallow the pills Rodney brought him before sinking back into a heavy, drugged sleep. Rodney only managed a fitful hour or two of restless unconsciousness, head pillowed on his arms between his two alarm clocks, mind foggy and whirring from the day’s excitement.
He gave up on sleep after the second pill call, made himself some coffee and went back to fiddling with the gravitational stability problem. The problem being that despite the thousands of man-hours he and Radek had spent on relearning the math he’d produced while nearing ascension they’d never fully recreated all the proofs. And while their combined experience and brain power had come up with many practical applications of what were still really only theories, there were a few areas where neither of them had managed to really get a handle on the physics - the manipulation of gravitational “fields” being one of those areas.
It was, Rodney occasionally thought, like standing on the shoulders of giants only to find that they were at the back of a crowd of much taller giants with enormous hats and wild hair-dos that all but obscured the important action on stage. More prosaically it was a lot of grinding of unworkable math with the best possible result being that they would figure out enough of what they needed to kludge a practical workaround.
That’s how they’d gotten the system mostly working. It was the ‘mostly’ part that was giving them trouble.
The hyper window for a puddlejumper was so small as to require pinpoint accuracy, whereas what they had achieved was more like barn-door accuracy with the end result of crashing five out of every six simulated puddlejumpers into the metaphorical barn door of normal space, while the hyperspace window comically opened and shut 7 to 15 AUs to the left.
These days Rodney worked with either the edge of anxious panic that he was missing the point or the dull resignation that the problems were simply unsolvable.
There had been a time, of course, when he’d approached things much differently. When he’d had an unshakeable inner confidence that the answer was just at the edge of his reach. Of course there had been a drive to succeed back then; the unshakeable trust that he - that they could return to Atlantis and fix things. He wasn’t sure when that had stopped being something he believed.
It hadn’t been the day that John had left. He knew that because despite everything there was a long time after that that he simply didn’t believe that John wasn’t just off sulking, or that he was, but that it was only a temporary thing. That he’d be back and he would… they would… well, not ‘kiss and make-up’ obviously, but that this ugly thing between them wasn’t how it would be for the rest of their lives.
He supposed he’d known enough of John’s past that he should have known that John was the kind of person who could walk away. And that, despite the occasional foray into personal maturity, Rodney himself was the kind of person who would let him.
It all seemed like an incredible waste of time now. Like the lost years with Jeannie. What had any of that proved? He wondered if it had proved something to John, although he couldn’t imagine what. That he didn’t need Rodney? Outside of the realm of survival in Atlantis, that had been evident. To Rodney anyway. John didn’t need anyone - Atlantis and everybody in her needed him.
Except it was John who was lying in a drugged sleep in Rodney’s garage, helpless and willingly, or at least voluntarily, at Rodney’s… was ‘mercy’ too strong a word for it? The thought made him uneasy. He had never thought of himself as a merciful man. And what he was doing here didn’t feel like mercy. It felt like failure. It felt like dangerous flailing around with somebody’s life - something he had grown so very casual about in Atlantis. All those toys the Ancients left behind. Ascension machines and planetary death rays and nanites and all of it so available to him.
And now, here he was -- without the toys but still trying to fix the damage that they’d - that he’d done… He let his head drop forward into his hands.
The hyperspace window was ridiculously small. It had to be small because the power was limited. But the small size made the window unstable, which made it essential that the targeting be impeccable. You couldn’t increase the stability without increasing the power requirements. You couldn’t increase the power output because the source was already maximized. You couldn’t reduce the drain on the source without compromising the safety of the jumper. The only way to increase the stability was to make the targeting perfect. There was a way to do that, he knew there was a way because he’d already figured it out once, therefore and ergo, he could do it again because… because…
He felt the epiphany happening before he thought it. A slow, unstoppable slide of things aligning in his brain and it had been so long since he’d had this happen it literally took his breath away. It was so... He didn’t have words. Beautiful. Perfect. So fucking obvious he wanted to smack himself in the forehead for being such a blind idiot.
His hands didn’t even shake as he typed out the formulae, line after line and yes, yes, Radek was going to have to check his math on this but he didn’t care. He was right. He knew he was right. It was the first time in years he’d known anything so completely.
He sent the draft off to Radek’s email and then picked up the phone and called his home number. Radek answered on the third ring, sounding sleepy and irritated. Rodney almost laughed aloud.
“Check your email,” he said. “And call me back.” He hung up and rubbed his hands together. God, it felt so good to finally, finally be right again. Something beeped twice. For a second Rodney wondered when the hell he’d put something in the microwave. Then he remembered. He leaned across the island and grabbed the instruction paper. Two of the red pills at 3 am with water and food if he’ll take it.
Right, Rodney thought. Food. He could do food. He rifled through the white plastic grocery bags on his kitchen floor. Probably he should make something like soup, but he hadn’t bought soup. Why hadn’t he bought soup? Sick people needed soup and there was no time to go back now. He had to get back to the lab and Christ -
They could go back.
Sure, the SGC wasn’t going to let them go easily. It might be years. They might not want the original expedition members to go back at all, in fact, but Rodney had been around the US military and the IOA long enough to know that if something was big and shiny and even a little bit possible, someone was going to find a pressing reason to do it, no matter what the risk. And there was nothing bigger or shinier than a whole other galaxy full of Ancient technology.
Rodney couldn’t help rubbing his hands with the sheer glee of it. Pegasus! God, who knew, maybe even Atlantis was still achievable. The one area where he and his colleagues had actually had some success advancing Ancient tech was in their development of defensive and offensive capabilities against the human-form Replicators.
That had been in the early days of their retreat, when they were still unable to shake the terrifying thought that the Replicators were just waiting for the right moment to invade the Milky Way.
That threat, as far as they knew, had never materialized, but Rodney doubted the SGC and the DoD had stopped weapons development because of a little thing like that.
Oh God, they could go back! The alarm beeped another reminder and right, yes, pills and wait until he told John…
It stopped him cold.
He couldn’t tell John.
John had walked away -- from the Air Force, from the Stargate program, from everything - and he hadn’t just burned his bridges behind him, he’d taken off and nuked his bridges from orbit. The SGC was never letting John go back to Pegasus.
It was a cold thought, settling low in Rodney’s belly.
Of all the things they’d said to one another in the last few days, the one absolute truth that not even John could deny was this: John hadn’t come to Rodney for a cure.
Keller was not answering her phone at 3:27 in the morning but there was no way Rodney could not go into the lab right now so he left a message so vague as to be incomprehensible and went to see if John was awake..
He wasn’t, and no amount of gentle shaking and not so gentle poking resulted in so much as a grunt out of him. Whatever pills he had in him had knocked him cold. Rodney debated for all of thirty seconds before writing out a post-it note and sticking it to John’s bandaged chest. Then he put the cordless phone in John’s lax hand, made sure that nothing was imminently in danger of catching fire or shorting out and headed out on the highway.
By that time, Radek had called him three times from the road, firing questions like a P-90, and unable to comprehend why Rodney wasn’t already at the base, designing the new schematics they were going to need.
Rodney, who was busy working out the possible disasters that could befall John while he was away, couldn’t come up with any responses more elaborate than: “Don’t ask,” and “It’s complicated,” and “Jesus, what are you, National Enquirer? Can you please just put your attention into getting to the base and getting the specs out without having a cell-phone related accident?”
His own drive to Area 51 was no less attention-challenged and thank God there was no one else on the road because even he wasn’t able to pull stuff up on his laptop, talk on the phone, think about the miracle of hyperdrive technology, and still manage to limit the Volvo to a single lane all the way there.
His tragic death in a single car accident was fortunately avoided, however and Radek already had the coffee maker going when he arrived.
“You know I think you are right about the 16 point pod nozzles after all,” Radek said as Rodney walked onto the hangar floor. He was speaking from inside the guts of the half-disassembled drive engine, examining the baseball-sized burnished metal nozzle assembly.
“Me? Right about everything?” Rodney said, walking over and pulling out the crystal trays that controlled the drive servos. “That never happens.”
“One set of pod nozzles is hardly everything,” Radek said. He pulled a tiny screwdriver out of the tiny kit in his breast pocket, sat down on a housing panel and began taking it apart.
“Ah, and that’s why I’m the mastermind and you’re the henchman,” Rodney said, tugging at a bundle of braided, rainbow-coloured wiring, part of his original jury rigged interface, if he wasn’t mistaken. The bundle unfolded into a long cable and Rodney pulled his voltometer out of his pocket and started testing.
“Ahh,” Radek said. “I thought that was because you are evil.” Rodney turned to glare, but when he looked over his shoulder Radek was grinning at him. Rodney rolled his eyes, but it felt good.
“Yes, yes, it’s all very exciting,” he said, turning away so it wouldn’t show. “Although it might be more exciting if we stop congratulating ourselves and actually make it work.”
“As far as I remember,” Radek said. “You never had a problem doing both.”
Sixteen hours later, Rodney had to agree. They were nowhere near finished and the puddlejumper lay more in pieces than intact, but the lab floor was a hive of excited activity and punching the new data into the simulations gave them a probable accuracy rate of over 93% which really was close enough for them to seriously rock and roll.
Rodney rolled out from under the main engine housing and stood up. The room tilted under his feet and Radek caught his arm before he toppled over.
“Go home,” Radek said. “Get some sleep. We’ll try to survive without you for a few hours.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Rodney said, blinking to clear his vision. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept but it couldn’t have been that long ago.
“You’re right,” Radek said. “You’re in no shape to drive and I’m tired too. I’ll take you--”
“What? No!” Rodney said. “Of course I can drive.”
“Good,” said Radek. “Off you go.”
John was in the kitchen when Rodney stumbled in, late afternoon. The sense of well-being that had floated him home full of half formed thoughts of pod nozzles and gravitational pump relay modeling suddenly vanished, transmuting almost instantly into a cold, heavy lump of guilt.
“Oh,” Rodney said, taken aback. “Should you be up?”
John turned to him, eyes hidden behind shades, face expressionless and for a moment Rodney felt the alien looking out at him. Then John’s stomach rumbled loudly and the feeling passed - John was just John again, skinny and grizzled. He was shirtless and in daylight the bruises were dark and ugly, pooling out from under the bandages and chest hair. No beer gut or tattoos, though. Rodney couldn’t help staring.
“Got your note,” John said, startling him. “Wasn’t sure what a ‘lob emorgandy’ was but I figured it was important.”
“Lob…?” Rodney said, blankly. “Oh. Lab. Emergency.” His eyes had wandered. John’s forearms were covered with what looked like dried bluish mud dotted with thorny little barbs and nubs. The changed skin was finer around his ribs, scales overlapping, pearly but dull. Chitinous. It made Rodney’s gorge rise - not just the thing itself, the obvious wrongness of it, but because it evoked the kind of ugly pity he sometimes felt for street people picking through garbage cans. Much as he might have wished for some kind of payback for John, he knew he’d never wanted this.
“You okay?” John asked.
“Me?” Rodney said. “I’m not the one with… I mean… are you? That is… are you okay?”
John shrugged. Winced.
“Your phone rang a few times,” he said.
“Oh, I should probably…”
“Yeah.”
But the phone was back in its cradle, and getting to it would require squeezing by John and Rodney hesitated. John’s stomach rumbled again.
“Lunch?” Rodney asked.
“Frozen chicken?” John asked dubiously.
“Peanut butter sandwiches?” Rodney countered, pointing to the white plastic bags still not entirely unpacked from last night’s trip to the mega mart. John peered into the bags, extracted bread, peanut butter, chains, padlocks…
“Peanut butter and bondage, huh?” John said.
“Or…jelly,” Rodney said.
“Jelly it is,” John said, lifting out the jar of grape jelly.
Rodney made a pile of peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches and John got milk out of the fridge. For the first time in years Rodney wished he’d thought to buy something healthy - some grapes or a bag of salad or something. He used to eat all kinds of rabbit food, on Atlantis and offworld. Had even liked it. The phantom flavour of some alien stew or other chased itself across his palate, uncaught.
They sat across from one another on either side of the island, eating. The peanut butter was strange and sticky in Rodney’s mouth. Too sweet, too thick, impossible to swallow. He washed it down with milk that tasted too bland and realized he wasn’t hungry at all. He watched John eat instead, mesmerized by his own exhaustion and the mechanical way John ate - attention focused completely on the task of holding the sandwich together one handed and without a hint of enjoyment. He tried to remember if it was always that way.
John glanced up between bites, catching him in the act of staring.
“What?” he asked, eyes narrowing behind the dark lenses. Rodney shook his head, helplessly.
“What have you been doing with yourself?” he asked, surprising both of them. John shrugged, took another bite of sandwich.
“’Difference does it make?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Rodney said. “I thought we’d reached that point of civility last night.”
John looked at him, expression unreadable. Rodney wondered if he remembered admitting that he trusted Rodney. If he would admit remembering it if he did. Maybe the same questions were going through his head. Rodney felt like he’d spent a lifetime second-guessing John Sheppard. It had always been easier, in the end, than asking. But John seemed to have come to a different conclusion.
“Fair enough,” he said, putting his sandwich down on the plate. “Well, I flew for United for about a year, but apparently I wasn’t enough of a team player for them so they asked me to move on; spent another year flying corporate hacks from city to city. That didn’t work out too well either,” he gave a small, rueful laugh and Rodney wondered what he’d done and to whom, and missed being able to share it. “After that I headed north fhrough California, Oregon, Washington - flew water bombers in the summer, back country search and rescue in the winter. Lately I’ve been working my way around Alaska. Bush work mostly, tourists, hunters, supply runs. Whatever. It’s quiet.”
“Like Antarctica,” Rodney said.
“No,” John said. “Not like Antarctica.” He picked up his sandwich again, turned it around like he was looking for the last place he bit so he could stick to some pre-approved route around the crust.
“I’ve been at Area 51 the whole time,” Rodney volunteered.
“Yeah?” John said. He didn’t sound surprised though. Well it wasn’t really much of a surprise, Rodney guessed. What else was he going to do with himself? Teach?
“Yeah,” said Rodney. “I-“ There was no way he could finish that sentence. John no longer had the clearance to know anything about his life. The important parts anyway. John knew that, of course, and it bothered Rodney that he wasn’t even poking at the boundaries now.
“It’s what I’m best at,” Rodney said, lamely. It wasn’t a lie. There was nowhere else on Earth where he could do the work he was capable of doing.
“You seem to have adapted,” John said. And that was true too, except it wasn’t something he actually thought about any more. He’d probably felt the need to justify his lack of connection to place a handful of times in his younger days, but the truth was the where had never really mattered. He never found the weather anywhere particularly accommodating, he didn’t care what delights a city provided beyond edible food, comfortable shelter and high speed internet -- and he wasn’t in any way a fan of history. As long as the work was there, was real, everything else was a matter of mediating his discomforts. Sure, he’d hated Siberia more than say Toronto, but that was more because of the circumstances of his exile.
Antarctica had been just as bitterly cold and he hadn’t had much complaint about that except for the lack of decent toilets and showers. Area 51 was basically Antarctica with heat instead of cold and at least here he could leave the house without a snowsuit.
Only Atlantis had ever been different, or seemed different in his memory, even if he couldn’t quite remember how. He only remembered that time when the Ancients had sent them back to Earth, how much he’d longed to be back there. It had felt like a physical ache, like something out of childhood - what he’d realized at some point was what everyone else called ‘homesickness’.
He thought maybe he’d felt that way throughout the hearings too, but it was hard to remember anything but his anger and his bitterness and his fear. He certainly hadn’t felt anything of the kind lately.
Really, his time on Atlantis seemed more like a dream. One of those dreams where you’re a different person from your normal self but you know it’s you, somehow. That person had been willing, even eager sometimes to take insane risks, to head out into the great and uncomfortable unknown. He’d been so full of… something. Not anything as corny as ‘hope’ or ‘faith’, but he’d been the kind of person who thought about… the Future, in capital letters. Who’d wanted friends, a wife, children. Connection. Who’d expected to get them.
Now the future he envisioned, if he thought about it, was mostly a grim determined effort to keep going, succeeding and surpassing his immediate competition until there weren’t any more puzzles to be solved. Sure, he wouldn’t turn down a Nobel prize - fame and fortune, money and research labs, his own TV show - why not? But he was also pretty sure that declassification wouldn’t happen in his lifetime. All there was, all there ever would be was this - this house, this work, this life…
“You ever miss it?” John asked. He’d abandoned his sandwich, and his hands flat on the table on either side of his plate. The knuckles were rough, and dark with blue-gray callus. Rodney couldn’t take his eyes off them. He almost wanted to reach out and put his hands on top of them, feel them, because he knew the solidity wasn’t an illusion. John was really here and that meant…
The feeling was like a punch to the heart, it hurt that much. He wasn’t sure he could even breathe, let alone speak, but there was his voice, bland and just a little tight.
“Sure,” he was saying. Lying. “You know, like you do…” John’s reaction took him by surprise. He seemed to crumple somehow, scrubbing angrily at his hair with one hand.
“Jesus,” he said, sounding almost breathless. “I wish-“
The phone rang, cutting him off, his wish unspoken to Rodney’s great relief. Keller was on the other end of the line. She sounded tired but excited and she was on her way over.
She had the cure.
“I thought this was going to be a lot harder to synthesize,” Keller said, clipping together the white plastic pieces of some medical-looking contraption. “But once I got access to the Lantean synthesizing apparatus, it all came together like a dream.”
They were back in the garage. John was lying on the bed. The light was dim enough that he’d taken the shades off and Rodney was shocked to realize that sometime in the last few days his other eye had started to change. Why didn’t John ever mention these little details? Rodney, meanwhile, was busy installing the chain and padlock restraints -- ‘to be on the safe side’, Keller had said. The chains seemed distressingly puny around John’s wrists and ankles.
“That’s great,” John said, seemingly ignoring Rodney’s handiwork. “But is it going to work?”
“Well,” Keller said. “I’m actually cautiously optimistic. Carson himself speculated a bit on the direction possible long term sequelae would take and I think, given your current condition, he was on the right track. I used his original formula with the supply of iratus stem cells and tweaked it along those lines. It won’t be pleasant…”
“I don’t remember much from the first time around,” John said. “But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t pleasant then either.”
“It’s pretty hard on your human system,” Keller said. “But yes, I think it will work. Should work…” She frowned.
“What aren’t you telling us?” Rodney said.
“Nothing you don’t already know, Rodney,” she said. “Genetic engineering is not my field, and xenopharmacology is not my specialty. Carson’s notes are incomplete, and the iratus stem cell sample we’re using is, frankly, old. Now I think we’ve got it right, and if I could bring in somebody from the SGC who-“
“No!” they both said.
“Yes, yes, I know your objections,” she said. “I’m just saying, this is the best chance we have without bringing in actual experts, which is all the chance you’re allowing at this point. If it doesn’t work…”
“If it doesn’t work, we’ll try again,” John said, firmly. Keller glanced at Rodney, before clipping the last of the hoses into the device which Rodney could now see was some kind of intravenous infuser. It looked.. big.
“You ready?” Keller asked John.
“Yep,” he said without hesitation. Rodney himself would have liked a moment to breathe as he watched Keller slide a needle into the back of John’s hand and tape it down.
“I’m going to go… out…there,” he said, faintly getting to his feet.
“Actually,” said Keller. “I could use another pair of hands.”
“No, really,” said Rodney. “I’m not good with medical stuff.”
“McKay,” John said. “Stick around and help the nice lady who’s saving my life.”
“Nice doctor lady,” Keller corrected, grinning pointedly at John. John grinned back his acquiescence.
“Oh, that’s just typical,” Rodney groused, sitting back down on the floor by the wall. John had made an attempt to tidy the huge mess of papers, stacking things in rough piles against the opposite wall although he’d obviously been hampered by his one-armed state. Rodney picked up a stack and started to flip through it while Keller adjusted the drip of something on the infuser. There were four bags hanging from the rack - one large bag of clear fluid and three smaller bags of which one was clear, one clear but straw colored and one opaque and disturbingly pearly like cream-rinse conditioner. She had also hooked John up to an automated blood pressure machine that bleeped and sighed at regular intervals.
The papers in his lap were a jumble, Rodney realized. Letters, receipts, page after page of thesis materials in the cramped precise handwriting of his youth. It would take ages to put it all back in order. There were photos too. Pictures of himself accepting his undergraduate diploma in physics at Northeastern, accepting the Conant prize, looking skinny and disgruntled in his robes, scowling under thick, beetling brows. He tucked the photos away, not liking to look at his young, anxious self. The blood pressure cuff sighed and he looked up. John’s eyes were closed and he was looking peaky - pale and sweaty. The machine bleeped and John grimaced. Rodney was about to say something when Keller turned to him and said, in a low, calm voice:
“Hand me that basin, would you?” Rodney did and it was all so serene it came as a total surprise to him when John suddenly rolled over and threw up violently into it.
“It’s okay,” Keller said. “I thought that might happen.”
“Thanks for the advance warning!” Rodney squeaked. He’d leapt to his feet, pretty sure there had been splash. John hiccupped something that sounded like a laugh and threw up again. Keller handed Rodney the basin.
“Go empty this, rinse it out and bring it back,” she said, coolly. “He might throw up again. Consider yourself warned.”
“Oh my God,” Rodney said, nearly gagging, but did as he was told and later even managed to bring back a damp washcloth and some ice chips he’d made by hitting some ice cubes with a wrench.
The next hour redefined hell for him though. Not just other people, he thought. Other people throwing up into a bowl you had to carry through your own house, time after time, that was hell. But John eventually subsided into dry heaves and then just the occasional shudder. In due course he dropped off to sleep. Rodney must have done the same because the next thing he knew, Keller was shaking him awake from a dream in which he’d managed to harness some kind of giant naquadah powered snake and was trying to figure out where in the desert he could possibly want to go.
“Whuh?” he managed, gummily. The garage still smelled of vomit.
“He’s asleep,” she whispered. “The serum’s been fully infused and now I’ve got to make an appearance at the hospital. I’ll be back in a couple of hours to check up on him.”
“Wait,” Rodney said, feeling panic rise. “What if he throws up again.”
“I think you know what to do for that by now,” Keller said. “Anyway I think that was the worst of it. If anything does happen, you have my cell.”
“Happen like what?” Rodney asked, his stage whisper loud enough to get a look of disapproval. Without answering, she got up and left Rodney sitting there, rubbing at his face, trying to think of all the possible horrible emergencies that he wasn’t prepared for.
For a while he sat and watched John, carefully, as though he might erupt at any moment. John slept on peacefully and after a while Rodney got bored enough to go and retrieve his laptop and check his mail. Thirty seven messages from the lab; twelve from Radek’s personal address. He skimmed through it, spitting out answers to the more interesting questions, demanding clarification from the people who weren’t making any sense. Radek had a couple of good suggestions for recalibrating the red-shift sensor array and he followed up on those for a while but it all seemed weirdly distant and theoretical. Eventually he too dozed and didn’t wake again until Keller returned, bringing the scent of the desert in with her.
Even then, he didn’t head off to work but only staggered to his own bed and fell asleep on top of the covers with his shoes still on.
The ringing phone woke him. The sun was up and shining, nuclear-bright around the edges of his blackout curtains and he fumbled the receiver to his ear. It was Radek on the other end wanting to know if he was planning to come in some time this year as they had this small unimportant project to complete. Rodney muttered something scathing, hung up and staggered out to the kitchen where the smell of brewing coffee felt like a caress.
He poured himself a cup and rubbed his stubbled face. He poked his head into the garage. John was still asleep as far as he could tell. Keller sat at John’s bedside working on a laptop. She looked up at the sound of Rodney in the doorway.
He mimed and mouthed: “I’ve got to go” at her and she gave him a jaunty little wave. Right. A quick shower, shave and change and he was out the door, still not entirely sure he was awake.
Twenty hours later, he still wasn’t sure he was awake, but he and Radek were jumping up and down and pounding each other on the back and the entire lab was cheering. After that there was sweet, fizzy champagne in plastic cups and exhausted babbling and off key singing and it wasn’t until Rodney took a second to hit the washroom that he realized his phone was beeping at him.
The time on the message was several hours ago and Keller’s voice on his voice mail was tired and strained.
“Get your ass back here, McKay,” the message said. A stab of fear prickled through him like electricity. He grabbed his laptop and his keys and slipped out while Radek led the lab techs in another round of Lobachevsky..
He called Jennifer’s cell a bunch of times on the way home, but kept getting switched right to voice mail. He hated voice mail. What was the point of having a goddamn cell phone if you weren’t going to answer it in emergencies? He threw the phone down on the seat beside him, only picking it up after he’d pulled to a gravel-spraying stop in the driveway. He hit the redial once more as he stepped out into coolish night air that smelled of sagebrush and dust.
The door opened before the phone even connected, Jennifer standing, arms folded impatiently in the wedge of yellow light. A faint bass thumping drifted out into the night.
“What happened?” Rodney asked, anxiously. “And why don’t you answer your phone? And is that… music?”
“Colonel Sheppard seems to think so,” she said in that quirky deadpan way she used to tease him with. “And I knew it was you calling. If you weren’t coming, I didn’t want to hear your excuses.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Rodney said. “Well, I’m here now, so…”
“So,” she said, holding out her hand, palm up. “Key, please?”
“Key?”
“Is that McKay?” Sheppard’s voice came from somewhere in the back. He sounded… normal. Drawling.
“Is he…?” he asks, unable to wrap his head around the idea, but Jennifer was smiling.
“Come and see for yourself.” He followed her back inside, through the kitchen and to the garage where the music -- something with lots of guitars and a driving rhythm - was louder, although the sound quality was tinny and terrible.
John was sitting up on the bed, one wrist and both ankles dripping chains like Hell’s Angels’ jewelry and Rodney’s ancient boom-box at his feet. There were no bandages on his one free arm, only a mottle of old and faded looking bruises and his skin…
Rodney stared and turned back to gape at Jennifer.
“He’s cured?”
“He can actually hear you, Rodney,” she said, dryly.
“It’s true,” John said. “I can.” Rodney turned back to gape with equal slack-jawed amazement at John, who was actually smiling.
“What did that take?” Rodney said. “Ten minutes?”
“More like ten hours,” Jennifer said. “And he’s not cured yet… but, well on his way. The skin lesions have started to de-lichenify, pupils less sensitive to light, core temperature up to low-normal human range, metabolism coming back on line…”
“And now with forty percent fewer bug parts.” John grinned. Rodney couldn’t help grinning back. Then he frowned.
“What about the… crazy bug rage?” he asked. Jennifer looked slightly less certain.
“His brain chemistry isn’t quite normal, yet,” she said. “But his adrenaline and noradrenaline levels are falling hourly. Serotonin and dopamine are down. GABA is within acceptable ranges.”
“Which in English means?”
“Well, I’d say he’s as stable as… the average postal worker.”
“That’s your idea of reassuring?”
“The average postal worker can’t bend a lawn mower,” John said. Jennifer nodded, deadpan. Great, Rodney thought. They could take their act to Vegas. They’re here all week, ladies and gentlemen. Don’t forget to tip your waiter. But he found he was reassured. John looked tired, stubbled, bruised and blotchy, and… human.
“Give him the key to the padlocks, Rodney,” Keller said, and then to John: “And you: take a shower, have some more broth and dry toast and get some sleep.”
“No dancing?” John asked.
“Maybe tomorrow,” she said, smiling again. “I’m pretty beat.”
Rodney took a deep breath and fished the padlock key out of his breast pocket.
“You’re sure this is a good idea,” he asked Jennifer over his shoulder.
“Come a little closer, McKay,” Sheppard said. “You can tell for yourself how good an idea a shower is.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Rodney. “Thanks for the medical opinion.”
“I think it’s a good idea, Rodney,” she said. “Give him the key.”
He did. Sheppard made quick work of the shackles and stood, swaying a little. He rolled his shoulders, stretched his neck.
“Well, if you’ll excuse me,” he said, addressing them with mock formality. “Lady. Gentleman.” They moved to let him pass. Rodney did catch a whiff of him this time. Old sweat, sickness, unwashed male. Not Rodney’s favorite smell, but there wasn’t a hint of the strange alien tang.
God, maybe it was going to work.
He hadn’t even realized how much he’d been doubting, but the sudden hope made him almost giddy with relief.
Jennifer was watching him. Fondly, maybe.
“You need to eat something too,” she said. “And get some rest. It looks like you had a pretty exciting day yourself.” She gestured with her chin and Rodney looked down at his shirt, which he hadn’t noticed before was smudged with dust and machine oil, inky fingerprints across his belly, drying pit stains under the arms.
“Yeah,” he said. “It was…uh…”
“Classified?”
“Yeah,” he said. He looked down at the floor, suddenly utterly exhausted. Felt Jennifer’s small dry hand against his cheek, cool and comforting and suddenly he had his arms around her, chin tucked over her shoulder. It was awkward, one of her arms was trapped against her side by his embrace, but he couldn’t seem to help himself.
“Thank you,” he said into her hair. “Thank you. For coming here. For doing this. Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she whispered. stroking the back of his head gently while he pulled himself back together.
Eventually she said:
“I have to go, Rodney.” Rodney nodded and let her disentangle herself. Hello, awkward, he thought. But there was no judgment in her expression, just that same sad fondness as she turned and left him standing in the light.
Rodney closed the door and headed back inside. All he wanted to do was shower and crawl into bed, but John was apparently communing with the shower gods - Christ, was that… singing? Rodney decided that the only option here was denial. He slumped on the living room couch and turned the TV on.
The next thing he knew, it was bright, brainfrying day again and his back was seriously pissed with him. Also, someone was coming in the front door. Rodney jumped, his hand scrabbling on the floor by the sofa for what he eventually realized was a non-existent firearm. Annoyed he flailed, trying now to sit up, succeeding only in tangling himself in the blanket that someone, presumably John, had draped him in.
It was all for naught anyway, defense-wise. By that time the intruder was in the house and standing over him, clean-shaven and leather jacketed, brandishing plastic grocery bags.
“Morning,” John said. He held up the bags. “Got some breakfast.” Rodney grunted ambivalently. He was pretty sure those were apples in there. Maybe the square-sided shape of a quart of milk. Nothing remotely like donuts or Egg McMuffins. Vaguely he remembered thinking he should start eating more healthy type food. Must have been the exhaustion talking. He got to his feet and stopped dead, suddenly coming to full consciousness.
“You went outside,” he said. “Among people.”
“I was getting a little stir-crazy,” John said, and before Rodney could ask, added: “Ordinary human stir-crazy. You were dead to the world, so I decided to take the bike out, see how she was running.”
“In the middle of the night,” Rodney said. John shrugged.
“It was almost sun-up, actually,” he said.
“Where did you go?” Rodney asked.
“Oh, you know,” John said, faux-casually. He moved off into the kitchen, talking over his shoulder as he unpacked the plastic bag. “Down the road some. When I hit Vegas I got the idea to do a little grocery shopping. Man, that city never sleeps.”
Rodney had followed him into the kitchen. .John had found a big bowl somewhere and was piling into it apples, bananas, mangos, plums, red grapes as big as his thumb.
“You rode a hundred miles to buy fruit,” Rodney said.
“And back,” John said, his mouth quirking a little in his smooth face. “She makes good time.”
“And this was a good idea?” Rodney asked. John shrugged again, and picked up an apple.
“Hey,” he said. “You know what they say about an apple a day…” He examined the apple in question for a moment and then bit into it deeply, crunching away and looking disturbingly rapturous. Rodney shook his head. There was some old coffee left in the coffeemaker. He poured some into a cup and stuck it in the microwave.
“I need to get back to the lab,” he said. “Do you think you can manage not to ride to Chicago for pizza while I’m gone?”
“No promises,” John said. Then he yawned, fisting the small of his back. “Might nap first though.”
“Just, you know,” Rodney said. “Don’t overdo it.” John yawned again, making ‘I know, I know…’ gestures with his hand as he headed back into the garage.
“I’m serious, Sheppard,” Rodney called after him.
“Have fun at work, McKay,” John’s voice came from the garage door.
Nobody listens, Rodney thought, drinking the last of the terrible reheated coffee, but he couldn’t deny that he felt lighter inside because of it.
The next week passed in a surreal blur of unrelenting work to get the jumper ready for the now confirmed test date and coming home to the strange domesticity of John cooking; John tinkering with his bike; John sorting and repacking the mess in the garage, attempting to fix the lawn-mower and then, when that proved impossible, going on an online yard equipment buying spree . A John who was definitely better every day.
The bruises faded and were gone. The bluish crust of scales smoothed and faded too until none were visible, even when John peeled off his sweaty t-shirt en route to the shower. Last to change back were his eyes, but eventually even those reverted too and Rodney found himself looking across the table over his plate of steak, baked potato and salad at a John with two human eyes, bright and round-pupilled, with deep laugh-lines at the outside edges.
“What?” John asked.
“You look… good,” Rodney said. “Healthy.”
John nodded. “I feel pretty good,” he said, pushing his salad around with his fork. “I think… I think maybe I was sick for longer than I realized.”
“Yeah?” Rodney said. But he sort of knew what John meant. He’d felt something like that for years. Just a vague sense of malaise, a kind of inner discomfort he could never put his finger on but that never really went away. He was glad John was maybe free of it. Maybe now Jennifer could work on a cure for him too.
“Hey, listen,” John said. “Let me do something for you.”
“Like what?” Rodney asked, suspiciously.
“Come on,” John said, putting his fork down. “I’ll show you.”
Part 3