Fic: Dreaming I'm Alive (1/3)
Author: almostnever
Word count: ~21,000
Pairing: Pre-John/Rodney
Ratings/Warnings: SFW. May contain triggering content. ( Skip.) As in "Conversion," John is transformed into another lifeform against his will.
Contains: Specious, totally invented "science," though probably not much worse than the "Instinct" and "Conversion" episodes themselves.
Summary: When John is exposed to the Iratus retrovirus from "Conversion" again, the team bands to help. But there are some things John has to face alone.
Companion piece to Airmail.
Dreaming I'm Alive
#
Day eleven, and he woke up like every other day since he arrived on Uea. He turned his face into the dirt and rubbed his brow mindlessly against the cool, crumbling earth. He unwrapped his arms from around himself and began to shake himself free of his nest, emerging into the cool darkness of the cave.
The blanket of leaves and twigs fell away like a shed skin. He touched the rumpled mass with his armored, bifurcated blue hand. If only it were that easy.
Once out of his burrow, he stretched the net of leaves to cover the body-shaped depression in the dirt. He didn't know why he bothered; as far as he could tell, nothing on Uea was hunting for him. He was at the top of every food chain around here.
But the instincts were too strong to deny: finding this cave, digging the hole, assembling the leaf net, covering himself as he slept, hiding his bed in the morning... he felt compelled to do all of it, and he was done fighting those urges. He had bigger problems to worry about.
He gave himself his daily scan and took his daily samples, the routine rote and efficient by now.
Oh look. Still mutating. No kidding.
He stepped to the wall of his cave, the smoothest expanse with its ten hashmarks, and drew another line carefully with one claw.
Then he placed his hands to the rock, his claws finding purchase in tiny cracks and bumps in the surface. He set his taloned foot against the wall and pushed up. He climbed, picking his way up the wall and making the turn onto the ceiling, clinging upside-down.
Funny; he still got a head rush from doing this, just as if he were still human.
At the mouth of the cave, he extended his hands delicately, claws first, out into the light, and paused. His joints locked in place, taking the strain off his muscles. He waited, watching the sunlight crawl across the forest floor.
Eventually he felt satisfied that it was safe out there, and he picked his way out of the cave, from upside-down, then around the cave mouth, to vertically adhere to the cliff face.
From there, he scuttled up to just under the ridge at the top of the cliff, hiding himself in the shadow beneath it. He craned his neck. He wouldn't be surprised if one day, he twisted his neck and something changed again to let him swivel his head completely around. He had two claws now, instead of four fingers, and claws instead of toes; new orifices, different vision. Nothing could startle him now.
The view was the same as every other day. Murky atmosphere, his infrared sight showing him life thriving far past what he could otherwise make out in the fog. Trees. Green plants and grasses growing thickly close together, tangling with mosses and vines. From here he could just see the inviting glitter of the stream, bubbling with arsenic-tainted water.
He made the mistake of opening his mouth. The air tasted bad when he exposed his remaining soft, weak human tissues to the atmosphere. His spiracles processed it easily, though. He had no idea if his lungs had changed, or if he had new respiratory organs now, to go with the spiracles that had opened up in his face and on the back of his neck.
There was never any reason to open his mouth anyway. It was just a lingering human habit. He'd probably forget about it if he stayed this way a few more weeks.
He heard Eryia calling, and shut his eyes hard. His tenuous sense of himself gathered and coalesced, and his Iratus instincts began to lose their grip on him.
Climbing over the top of the cliff, he stood and brushed the dust and earth off himself, trying not to panic at the foreign sight and feel of his own body, more knobbed and horned than ever, a dark, sinister blue with a glossy chitinous sheen.
Eryia cooed to him as she neared, head swaying with the burden of the bag slung around the soft stalk of her neck. She made a graceful arc in the air, her long diaphanous body hovering near him, dozens of soft hollow limbs working to ride above the currents of the mists.
He swallowed and braved the taste of the air to say, "Thank you," aloud. Eryia didn't need to hear it, but he needed to say it.
She dipped her head, and he carefully lifted the bag off her, clutching it to him. "Thanks," he murmured again, pursed his lips carefully and blew a thin stream of breath along the top of Eryia's head. Eryia wriggled and danced in the air for a moment, and he felt warm tendrils of air from her in return, rushing softly from the tips of her forelimbs.
Eryia gave him a sense of Cloud now. Clear later, and rode the currents toward the heavy fogbank footing the trees below.
The bag held vials of the latest treatment. A tank of oxygen and a cannula, in case it worked and he couldn't breathe this atmosphere anymore. A bottle of water. A printed out set of instructions complete with a diagram showing him how to use the equipment. An assortment of autoinjectors and replacement needles.
Sure. They'd have to send a variety. Back on Atlantis, they didn't know anymore what his skin was like, whether it could still be punctured by the standard equipment.
A normal syringe might have worked as recently as yesterday, but he couldn't be sure that was still true. He flexed his hand and wrist, watching the tough scales fold and crease around the hard spikes.
He rested his other hand against his arm and pressed against the skin with a pointed claw. It penetrated, drawing a bead of dark blood. The tiny wound stayed open as long as he kept the claw there, but the moment he withdrew it, the hole closed up, healing over.
He touched his wet claw to the printout, leaving a streak of maroon on the paper. At least his blood was still red.
The printout was multiple pages, stapled together. Wide margins. That was thoughtful. They knew his claws would probably shred the outer edges of the paper. He picked it up gingerly and another couple of sheets slid out, unattached, handwritten.
The words looked dashed-off but still very legible, the letters small, blocky and distinct: Rodney's writing.
John,
Teyla's contact stayed hidden by the gate last time after dropping off the first bag. She said a giant flying animal picked it up and carried it away.
Maybe you've managed to charm the local fauna; I wouldn't put it past you. But obviously, we're SLIGHTLY concerned that these little care packages aren't making it to you.
You may not be able to manipulate a pen, but of course, I've thought of a way around that. In the bag is a lump of clay in a clear container. Knead it until its color changes from white to yellow. Squeeze it in one hand and hold it for ten seconds or so. Then put it back in the container.
Leave the container near the gate. I promise Risa won't be staying nearby this time, if you're staying away because you're shy. She'll come back after 12 hours to retrieve the clay.
The clay impression will tell us that you're receiving the packages. It'll also give Carson and Jennifer a metric to measure how far the mutation has progressed. I'll include the same clay in every package from now on and we'll hope that we see evidence of a reversal of the mutation from one impression to the next.
I really hope you can read this. In several senses. 1, I hope these packages are reaching you. 2, I hope you can still see the letters. Carson is worried that your altered eye structure might not perceive marks on paper. All right, that's just two senses, not several. The perils of writing in ink.
I don't want to stop writing. It'll be hours before Risa's due to take the package through the gate.
Teyla's big news is that Torren is saying complete sentences that other people can understand, not just her and Kanaan. I can't vouch for that. Supposedly he asked me to pick him up today, but it sounded like he said "butter knuckle" to me. To keep the peace with Teyla, though, I'm going to blame that on the vagaries of gate translation.
I'd give you news from Ronon but he's offworld again, harvesting more Iratus eggs. Woolsey keeps trying to get him to take Marines with him but he insists on lone-wolfing it. Granted we only have so much pheromone left over from your last retroviral adventure. We could only use it to camouflage the scent of one person at a time anyway, so Ronon would be going into the cave alone either way. But backup never hurts.
He says other people just slow him down. Probably true, but sometimes he could stand to go a little slower. That would sound a lot more convincing coming from you than from me, though, so you really need to get this package and take the drugs and get better and come back.
Rodney's signature ended the letter, same as his script, scrawled but readable. Teyla's followed in the geometric patterns of Athosian letters, and Ronon's in the flowing lines of Satedan writing.
John carefully laid the pages back into the bag. The new antiviral treatment Jennifer and Carson administered before he left Atlantis had kept him lucid all this time, but it didn't always keep him entirely human. He could lose himself in the slow, cold rhythms of his mutated body for days at a time.
Emotions were a physical phenomenon, after all, and his physiology was so different now that he felt abstract and foreign to himself most of the time. Not that he'd been all that in touch with his feelings before he went buggy, but even if he pushed them aside and ignored them as much as possible, he still had them.
It hurt to lose his numbness now. He missed his team, he missed his people, missed Atlantis. He was lonely, he was worried and scared. But the worst was becoming aware again, jarringly, of just how much his body horrified him now. Resting gently on the pages, that gnarled mess of blue scales and thorns, the twin claws: that was his hand. He shut his eyes hard, wincing.
It wasn't his hand. It was a glove. A costume. The whole thing was just a tight Halloween get-up he was wearing, and underneath it, he was still the same John Sheppard he'd been a month ago: a fading tan, a board-shorts-shaped reserve of pasty pinkish skin, freckles scattered here and there, a little too hairy everywhere. A mammal. A man.
He looked at himself again, dissociating for all he was worth. The scales, the blue-black sawtooth ridges all over his body, it was all just a funny monster suit.
And the new visual information, the heat map overlaying his vision: funny contact lenses. The same ones that made his eyes look slitted, and colored them a poisonous dark yellow. If he slid his human hand out of this stiff blue glove, he could pinch the lens right off his eye to reveal the normal hazel underneath, a round pupil, a blue sky and green trees and nothing infrared in sight.
John covered his face with his hands-- at least his palms didn't have any sharp parts-- and breathed. Through his spiracles, oh god. What expanded in his ribcage might not even be lungs anymore. What was beating too fast in his chest might not look anything like a human heart.
He'd been through so much in Pegasus. He'd been through this exact ordeal before. This couldn't be the thing that broke him, after all that.
But the mutation didn't progress this far, then. He couldn't be sure that this time he'd come back.
He lurched to his feet and grabbed up the bag and supplies. He carried it into his cave and set aside the clear container with its clay. The rest he hid in his sleep-hollow, covering it with the leaf-net.
His hands, his blue, alien goddamn claws, were too slow and clumsy right now to hold a needle, even a ruggedized autoinjector. He needed to hunt and eat before he could inject himself with the drugs.
First, he took out the clay and worked it between both hands until it went a flat gray-greenish-yellow color. He shifted it all to his right hand and squeezed. It was a bit bigger than a softball, and he could feel it hardening.
He couldn't help worrying that it would seal to the carapace covering his hands and cement his claw in place, but when he released it, the clay ball fell away easily. He placed it in the container and looked at it morbidly. His claws left nothing but jagged dents. No handprints or fingerprints; the claws were smooth everywhere they weren't sharp, ridges separating the flawless plates.
Raised cords had replaced the tendons of his wrists, and thicker cords ran along the backs of the hands. They grew a little more hard and prominent every day. Maybe he was growing an exoskeleton. Maybe his own bones were gradually dissolving inside him.
He couldn't think about that. He couldn't afford to be John Sheppard now, with his human fears and weaknesses. If he ever wanted to get back to himself, he'd have to give himself up for now, and survive as what he'd become.
He put his old life out of his mind and set off toward his current hunting ground at a fast clip, claws scraping through the layers of damp mulch covering the ground. He found a good spot and leapt up fifteen feet to dig in and cling to the thick, smooth trunk of the nearest tree. He waited until the limbs above him settled from the impact and began to make his way to the treetop, climbing up the sturdiest limb til he rose above the canopy of moss and leaves.
Everything in his experience and perception made him want to see the sky as blue. The faint overlay of red tinting it violet, saturating to burning scarlet where the sun hid behind the clouds...
But the anxiety was fading now. Of course the sky was red and violet. Of course his claws were indigo and his toes prehensile enough to wrap around the branch.
He held himself more still than he ever could have done as a human, and waited for prey.
It wasn't long before his lunch came tumbling along in a floating, bouncing swarm, hovering among the treetops.
He'd stopped on Uea at first mainly because of these creatures, small animals he thought of as bumblers. They moved like bumblebees among the treetops, oblong little guys, sort of the size and shape of pickles. They had a central body of mottled reddish-violet, with fleshy translucent tubes ringing their bodies, inflating and exhaling to haphazardly change their direction.
When he'd arrived on this world, John was so hungry that when he saw a lot of oblong, fleshy reddish-violet shapes in the trees, right away he skinned up and went after them with his claws. It didn't take him long to catch a few. They moved in giant groups, hundreds of them massing above one stand of trees before moving on to another.
Their spongy bodies had a weird texture and they tasted like old sushi, but they were edible, pretty substantial for their size, and boneless, with just four strips of cartilage that he had to eat around and spit out.
When he first got here, he feasted on them. They were slow and dumb, and it was almost startling how easy it was to catch them. But the more he watched the more he realized they were short-lived anyway, with about a ten-week lifespan, and they were classic prey animals: they spent all their time gathering food to reproduce as much and as quickly as possible. He still wasn't sure what they were eating, maybe tiny organisms that were too small for him to see among the mist.
The unpredictable way they tumbled through the air seemed to fool some of their predators. John was a new kind of predator, and their defenses couldn't save them from him.
John learned to recognize when a bumbler had already borne its young by the white traceries around its tubes, and started only eating those. He needed to make sure he didn't deplete the local population. He didn't know how long he'd be here.
He caught several now, skewering them with his claws. He'd found that if he grabbed them, they seemed to sort of collapse their bodies and squirt out of the crevices between his claws. He couldn't close his bug pincers together enough to hold them. But once pierced, they seemed helpless to escape.
Something else he'd had to learn through trial and error: how to kill them quickly, when it was hard to tell if they had a brain or a heart. Their nervous system and circulatory system both seemed a lot more diffuse and decentralized than the animals John was familiar with.
Eventually he found there was some kind of gelatinous blob he could only assume was a vital organ about a quarter of the way from the larger, more bulbous tip of the bumblers' bodies, and when he jabbed that with his claw, the bumblers seemed to die right away.
John swept both hands through the air, snagging several bumblers on his claws with each gesture, plucking them off and quickly giving each one the killing strike. It took about a dozen to adequately feed him, and too soon, the bumblers started to skedaddle away from his tree. He stretched to pursue them, his toe-claws clamping around the branch and sinking in to hold him while he swiped a last few out of the air.
He gathered them up and retreated to a stronger, broader limb to eat them, slitting them open with his claws and gutting out an orange squiggly part inside them that, he'd figured out eventually, was the only part of the bumblers that seemed to make him a little queasy. He ate the rest and made a pile of the leftover cartilage strips. He'd tried to find a use for those strips but so far, they were good for nothing.
Instinct still made him save the cartilage and guts, though. He wrapped it all in leaves and tucked the bundle into a pocket on the tac vest that was the only item of clothing still tough enough to wear on his Halloween costume body.
He swung down from the tree and ran low to the ground, hands and feet digging into the dirt with every loping step. He buried the cartilage strips an hour's run away from his hunting ground and his cave.
On the way back, John fished in the tac vest pocket for the scanner Rodney gave him, holding it carefully between his sharp claws. It wasn't easy to manipulate it with his altered hands, but he'd practiced, and Ancient technology was a lot more rugged than the Earth equivalents; even when he misjudged or slipped, his claw-tips didn't damage the screen.
He scouted the damp-dwelling plants of the underbrush, and the vines that used the trees to crawl up out of the perpetual fog.
Spotting a new vine, he plucked a leaf, a bud, and a bit of stem. He crushed each part in turn and smeared it across the sensor pad, cleaning the pad after each use with water from a plant with broad, saucer-shaped leaves that collected dew.
Even though the atmosphere on Uea seemed constantly foggy and humid, it didn't rain very often. At least, it hadn't rained during his days here, and he'd noticed a lot of adaptations among the plant and animal life geared toward drawing water to themselves, as if they were all in competition for it despite the fact that the air seemed to constantly brim over with moisture.
He himself seemed to need much less water than when he was human, just a couple of saucer-leaves full of water each day. Food, though, was more of a problem. A dozen bumblers made a meal, and he could get by on just that much every day, if he supplemented with another smaller meal of plants. The trick was finding edible ones.
He'd heard Rodney complain often enough about how confusing the Ancient language was, how the Ancients seemed to have completely, well, alien concepts of information and organization.
Before, John just nodded and waited for the geeks to work their magic, but here, there was no buffer between him and the failings of ten thousand year old technology from a lost civilization.
According to the scanner, the bud was "carmine" (it was actually white) and so was the stem (really green.) He tested the leaf and an Ancient word appeared. Below, the best-guess English translation was "exciting."
Exciting what? Exciting flavor? Was the plant literally exciting, would it raise his blood pressure or trigger arousal? He had to mark that one off in the scanner's dynamically generated database as another plant he couldn't risk eating.
Sometimes he could tell. A plant the scanner labeled as "approval" had been edible, and so was "beautiful." But he had no idea what to think about the seeds that came back as "melancholy." And then there were the Ancient words that were descriptive without being helpful, like "cloven" for a fruit that grew with a split down the middle, or "parchment" for the birch-like, fragrant bark of a slender young tree.
He foraged for another hour and didn't find much, increasingly frustrated, until he finally came across a bizarre plant with curved stems that ended in a swelling teardrop-shaped pod that yielded when he cautiously squeezed it. He burst the teardrop pod on the scanner pad, and along with a spatter of liquid out came an insect the size of a marble, unfolding its weirdly jointed legs.
John convulsed with disgust, swatting the thing off and probably crushing it in the process. He checked himself and the scanner repeatedly to make sure the bug wasn't clinging to him or the vital, treasured scanner.
He washed his claws in a couple of leaf-saucers of water. He drank a couple more and hurried back to his cave, giving up on more food for the day. He'd eaten enough bumblers to steady his hands, that was all that mattered.
John read the instructions, and as ordered, he set up the oxygen tank and water bottle nearby. He followed the diagram, and tried the injector. The first two needles broke on his tough, scaled-over skin, but the next size slid in without much resistance. He injected himself with the drug and watched the hole close up in the sleeve of his Halloween costume.
He read the letter from Rodney again, studying the signatures of his friends. Ronon. Teyla. Rodney. He scratched the characters of their names into the floor next to his nest, waiting for something to change.
Continued in part 2.
Word count: ~21,000
Pairing: Pre-John/Rodney
Ratings/Warnings: SFW. May contain triggering content. ( Skip.) As in "Conversion," John is transformed into another lifeform against his will.
Contains: Specious, totally invented "science," though probably not much worse than the "Instinct" and "Conversion" episodes themselves.
Summary: When John is exposed to the Iratus retrovirus from "Conversion" again, the team bands to help. But there are some things John has to face alone.
Companion piece to Airmail.
Dreaming I'm Alive
#
Day eleven, and he woke up like every other day since he arrived on Uea. He turned his face into the dirt and rubbed his brow mindlessly against the cool, crumbling earth. He unwrapped his arms from around himself and began to shake himself free of his nest, emerging into the cool darkness of the cave.
The blanket of leaves and twigs fell away like a shed skin. He touched the rumpled mass with his armored, bifurcated blue hand. If only it were that easy.
Once out of his burrow, he stretched the net of leaves to cover the body-shaped depression in the dirt. He didn't know why he bothered; as far as he could tell, nothing on Uea was hunting for him. He was at the top of every food chain around here.
But the instincts were too strong to deny: finding this cave, digging the hole, assembling the leaf net, covering himself as he slept, hiding his bed in the morning... he felt compelled to do all of it, and he was done fighting those urges. He had bigger problems to worry about.
He gave himself his daily scan and took his daily samples, the routine rote and efficient by now.
Oh look. Still mutating. No kidding.
He stepped to the wall of his cave, the smoothest expanse with its ten hashmarks, and drew another line carefully with one claw.
Then he placed his hands to the rock, his claws finding purchase in tiny cracks and bumps in the surface. He set his taloned foot against the wall and pushed up. He climbed, picking his way up the wall and making the turn onto the ceiling, clinging upside-down.
Funny; he still got a head rush from doing this, just as if he were still human.
At the mouth of the cave, he extended his hands delicately, claws first, out into the light, and paused. His joints locked in place, taking the strain off his muscles. He waited, watching the sunlight crawl across the forest floor.
Eventually he felt satisfied that it was safe out there, and he picked his way out of the cave, from upside-down, then around the cave mouth, to vertically adhere to the cliff face.
From there, he scuttled up to just under the ridge at the top of the cliff, hiding himself in the shadow beneath it. He craned his neck. He wouldn't be surprised if one day, he twisted his neck and something changed again to let him swivel his head completely around. He had two claws now, instead of four fingers, and claws instead of toes; new orifices, different vision. Nothing could startle him now.
The view was the same as every other day. Murky atmosphere, his infrared sight showing him life thriving far past what he could otherwise make out in the fog. Trees. Green plants and grasses growing thickly close together, tangling with mosses and vines. From here he could just see the inviting glitter of the stream, bubbling with arsenic-tainted water.
He made the mistake of opening his mouth. The air tasted bad when he exposed his remaining soft, weak human tissues to the atmosphere. His spiracles processed it easily, though. He had no idea if his lungs had changed, or if he had new respiratory organs now, to go with the spiracles that had opened up in his face and on the back of his neck.
There was never any reason to open his mouth anyway. It was just a lingering human habit. He'd probably forget about it if he stayed this way a few more weeks.
He heard Eryia calling, and shut his eyes hard. His tenuous sense of himself gathered and coalesced, and his Iratus instincts began to lose their grip on him.
Climbing over the top of the cliff, he stood and brushed the dust and earth off himself, trying not to panic at the foreign sight and feel of his own body, more knobbed and horned than ever, a dark, sinister blue with a glossy chitinous sheen.
Eryia cooed to him as she neared, head swaying with the burden of the bag slung around the soft stalk of her neck. She made a graceful arc in the air, her long diaphanous body hovering near him, dozens of soft hollow limbs working to ride above the currents of the mists.
He swallowed and braved the taste of the air to say, "Thank you," aloud. Eryia didn't need to hear it, but he needed to say it.
She dipped her head, and he carefully lifted the bag off her, clutching it to him. "Thanks," he murmured again, pursed his lips carefully and blew a thin stream of breath along the top of Eryia's head. Eryia wriggled and danced in the air for a moment, and he felt warm tendrils of air from her in return, rushing softly from the tips of her forelimbs.
Eryia gave him a sense of Cloud now. Clear later, and rode the currents toward the heavy fogbank footing the trees below.
The bag held vials of the latest treatment. A tank of oxygen and a cannula, in case it worked and he couldn't breathe this atmosphere anymore. A bottle of water. A printed out set of instructions complete with a diagram showing him how to use the equipment. An assortment of autoinjectors and replacement needles.
Sure. They'd have to send a variety. Back on Atlantis, they didn't know anymore what his skin was like, whether it could still be punctured by the standard equipment.
A normal syringe might have worked as recently as yesterday, but he couldn't be sure that was still true. He flexed his hand and wrist, watching the tough scales fold and crease around the hard spikes.
He rested his other hand against his arm and pressed against the skin with a pointed claw. It penetrated, drawing a bead of dark blood. The tiny wound stayed open as long as he kept the claw there, but the moment he withdrew it, the hole closed up, healing over.
He touched his wet claw to the printout, leaving a streak of maroon on the paper. At least his blood was still red.
The printout was multiple pages, stapled together. Wide margins. That was thoughtful. They knew his claws would probably shred the outer edges of the paper. He picked it up gingerly and another couple of sheets slid out, unattached, handwritten.
The words looked dashed-off but still very legible, the letters small, blocky and distinct: Rodney's writing.
John,
Teyla's contact stayed hidden by the gate last time after dropping off the first bag. She said a giant flying animal picked it up and carried it away.
Maybe you've managed to charm the local fauna; I wouldn't put it past you. But obviously, we're SLIGHTLY concerned that these little care packages aren't making it to you.
You may not be able to manipulate a pen, but of course, I've thought of a way around that. In the bag is a lump of clay in a clear container. Knead it until its color changes from white to yellow. Squeeze it in one hand and hold it for ten seconds or so. Then put it back in the container.
Leave the container near the gate. I promise Risa won't be staying nearby this time, if you're staying away because you're shy. She'll come back after 12 hours to retrieve the clay.
The clay impression will tell us that you're receiving the packages. It'll also give Carson and Jennifer a metric to measure how far the mutation has progressed. I'll include the same clay in every package from now on and we'll hope that we see evidence of a reversal of the mutation from one impression to the next.
I really hope you can read this. In several senses. 1, I hope these packages are reaching you. 2, I hope you can still see the letters. Carson is worried that your altered eye structure might not perceive marks on paper. All right, that's just two senses, not several. The perils of writing in ink.
I don't want to stop writing. It'll be hours before Risa's due to take the package through the gate.
Teyla's big news is that Torren is saying complete sentences that other people can understand, not just her and Kanaan. I can't vouch for that. Supposedly he asked me to pick him up today, but it sounded like he said "butter knuckle" to me. To keep the peace with Teyla, though, I'm going to blame that on the vagaries of gate translation.
I'd give you news from Ronon but he's offworld again, harvesting more Iratus eggs. Woolsey keeps trying to get him to take Marines with him but he insists on lone-wolfing it. Granted we only have so much pheromone left over from your last retroviral adventure. We could only use it to camouflage the scent of one person at a time anyway, so Ronon would be going into the cave alone either way. But backup never hurts.
He says other people just slow him down. Probably true, but sometimes he could stand to go a little slower. That would sound a lot more convincing coming from you than from me, though, so you really need to get this package and take the drugs and get better and come back.
Rodney's signature ended the letter, same as his script, scrawled but readable. Teyla's followed in the geometric patterns of Athosian letters, and Ronon's in the flowing lines of Satedan writing.
John carefully laid the pages back into the bag. The new antiviral treatment Jennifer and Carson administered before he left Atlantis had kept him lucid all this time, but it didn't always keep him entirely human. He could lose himself in the slow, cold rhythms of his mutated body for days at a time.
Emotions were a physical phenomenon, after all, and his physiology was so different now that he felt abstract and foreign to himself most of the time. Not that he'd been all that in touch with his feelings before he went buggy, but even if he pushed them aside and ignored them as much as possible, he still had them.
It hurt to lose his numbness now. He missed his team, he missed his people, missed Atlantis. He was lonely, he was worried and scared. But the worst was becoming aware again, jarringly, of just how much his body horrified him now. Resting gently on the pages, that gnarled mess of blue scales and thorns, the twin claws: that was his hand. He shut his eyes hard, wincing.
It wasn't his hand. It was a glove. A costume. The whole thing was just a tight Halloween get-up he was wearing, and underneath it, he was still the same John Sheppard he'd been a month ago: a fading tan, a board-shorts-shaped reserve of pasty pinkish skin, freckles scattered here and there, a little too hairy everywhere. A mammal. A man.
He looked at himself again, dissociating for all he was worth. The scales, the blue-black sawtooth ridges all over his body, it was all just a funny monster suit.
And the new visual information, the heat map overlaying his vision: funny contact lenses. The same ones that made his eyes look slitted, and colored them a poisonous dark yellow. If he slid his human hand out of this stiff blue glove, he could pinch the lens right off his eye to reveal the normal hazel underneath, a round pupil, a blue sky and green trees and nothing infrared in sight.
John covered his face with his hands-- at least his palms didn't have any sharp parts-- and breathed. Through his spiracles, oh god. What expanded in his ribcage might not even be lungs anymore. What was beating too fast in his chest might not look anything like a human heart.
He'd been through so much in Pegasus. He'd been through this exact ordeal before. This couldn't be the thing that broke him, after all that.
But the mutation didn't progress this far, then. He couldn't be sure that this time he'd come back.
He lurched to his feet and grabbed up the bag and supplies. He carried it into his cave and set aside the clear container with its clay. The rest he hid in his sleep-hollow, covering it with the leaf-net.
His hands, his blue, alien goddamn claws, were too slow and clumsy right now to hold a needle, even a ruggedized autoinjector. He needed to hunt and eat before he could inject himself with the drugs.
First, he took out the clay and worked it between both hands until it went a flat gray-greenish-yellow color. He shifted it all to his right hand and squeezed. It was a bit bigger than a softball, and he could feel it hardening.
He couldn't help worrying that it would seal to the carapace covering his hands and cement his claw in place, but when he released it, the clay ball fell away easily. He placed it in the container and looked at it morbidly. His claws left nothing but jagged dents. No handprints or fingerprints; the claws were smooth everywhere they weren't sharp, ridges separating the flawless plates.
Raised cords had replaced the tendons of his wrists, and thicker cords ran along the backs of the hands. They grew a little more hard and prominent every day. Maybe he was growing an exoskeleton. Maybe his own bones were gradually dissolving inside him.
He couldn't think about that. He couldn't afford to be John Sheppard now, with his human fears and weaknesses. If he ever wanted to get back to himself, he'd have to give himself up for now, and survive as what he'd become.
He put his old life out of his mind and set off toward his current hunting ground at a fast clip, claws scraping through the layers of damp mulch covering the ground. He found a good spot and leapt up fifteen feet to dig in and cling to the thick, smooth trunk of the nearest tree. He waited until the limbs above him settled from the impact and began to make his way to the treetop, climbing up the sturdiest limb til he rose above the canopy of moss and leaves.
Everything in his experience and perception made him want to see the sky as blue. The faint overlay of red tinting it violet, saturating to burning scarlet where the sun hid behind the clouds...
But the anxiety was fading now. Of course the sky was red and violet. Of course his claws were indigo and his toes prehensile enough to wrap around the branch.
He held himself more still than he ever could have done as a human, and waited for prey.
It wasn't long before his lunch came tumbling along in a floating, bouncing swarm, hovering among the treetops.
He'd stopped on Uea at first mainly because of these creatures, small animals he thought of as bumblers. They moved like bumblebees among the treetops, oblong little guys, sort of the size and shape of pickles. They had a central body of mottled reddish-violet, with fleshy translucent tubes ringing their bodies, inflating and exhaling to haphazardly change their direction.
When he'd arrived on this world, John was so hungry that when he saw a lot of oblong, fleshy reddish-violet shapes in the trees, right away he skinned up and went after them with his claws. It didn't take him long to catch a few. They moved in giant groups, hundreds of them massing above one stand of trees before moving on to another.
Their spongy bodies had a weird texture and they tasted like old sushi, but they were edible, pretty substantial for their size, and boneless, with just four strips of cartilage that he had to eat around and spit out.
When he first got here, he feasted on them. They were slow and dumb, and it was almost startling how easy it was to catch them. But the more he watched the more he realized they were short-lived anyway, with about a ten-week lifespan, and they were classic prey animals: they spent all their time gathering food to reproduce as much and as quickly as possible. He still wasn't sure what they were eating, maybe tiny organisms that were too small for him to see among the mist.
The unpredictable way they tumbled through the air seemed to fool some of their predators. John was a new kind of predator, and their defenses couldn't save them from him.
John learned to recognize when a bumbler had already borne its young by the white traceries around its tubes, and started only eating those. He needed to make sure he didn't deplete the local population. He didn't know how long he'd be here.
He caught several now, skewering them with his claws. He'd found that if he grabbed them, they seemed to sort of collapse their bodies and squirt out of the crevices between his claws. He couldn't close his bug pincers together enough to hold them. But once pierced, they seemed helpless to escape.
Something else he'd had to learn through trial and error: how to kill them quickly, when it was hard to tell if they had a brain or a heart. Their nervous system and circulatory system both seemed a lot more diffuse and decentralized than the animals John was familiar with.
Eventually he found there was some kind of gelatinous blob he could only assume was a vital organ about a quarter of the way from the larger, more bulbous tip of the bumblers' bodies, and when he jabbed that with his claw, the bumblers seemed to die right away.
John swept both hands through the air, snagging several bumblers on his claws with each gesture, plucking them off and quickly giving each one the killing strike. It took about a dozen to adequately feed him, and too soon, the bumblers started to skedaddle away from his tree. He stretched to pursue them, his toe-claws clamping around the branch and sinking in to hold him while he swiped a last few out of the air.
He gathered them up and retreated to a stronger, broader limb to eat them, slitting them open with his claws and gutting out an orange squiggly part inside them that, he'd figured out eventually, was the only part of the bumblers that seemed to make him a little queasy. He ate the rest and made a pile of the leftover cartilage strips. He'd tried to find a use for those strips but so far, they were good for nothing.
Instinct still made him save the cartilage and guts, though. He wrapped it all in leaves and tucked the bundle into a pocket on the tac vest that was the only item of clothing still tough enough to wear on his Halloween costume body.
He swung down from the tree and ran low to the ground, hands and feet digging into the dirt with every loping step. He buried the cartilage strips an hour's run away from his hunting ground and his cave.
On the way back, John fished in the tac vest pocket for the scanner Rodney gave him, holding it carefully between his sharp claws. It wasn't easy to manipulate it with his altered hands, but he'd practiced, and Ancient technology was a lot more rugged than the Earth equivalents; even when he misjudged or slipped, his claw-tips didn't damage the screen.
He scouted the damp-dwelling plants of the underbrush, and the vines that used the trees to crawl up out of the perpetual fog.
Spotting a new vine, he plucked a leaf, a bud, and a bit of stem. He crushed each part in turn and smeared it across the sensor pad, cleaning the pad after each use with water from a plant with broad, saucer-shaped leaves that collected dew.
Even though the atmosphere on Uea seemed constantly foggy and humid, it didn't rain very often. At least, it hadn't rained during his days here, and he'd noticed a lot of adaptations among the plant and animal life geared toward drawing water to themselves, as if they were all in competition for it despite the fact that the air seemed to constantly brim over with moisture.
He himself seemed to need much less water than when he was human, just a couple of saucer-leaves full of water each day. Food, though, was more of a problem. A dozen bumblers made a meal, and he could get by on just that much every day, if he supplemented with another smaller meal of plants. The trick was finding edible ones.
He'd heard Rodney complain often enough about how confusing the Ancient language was, how the Ancients seemed to have completely, well, alien concepts of information and organization.
Before, John just nodded and waited for the geeks to work their magic, but here, there was no buffer between him and the failings of ten thousand year old technology from a lost civilization.
According to the scanner, the bud was "carmine" (it was actually white) and so was the stem (really green.) He tested the leaf and an Ancient word appeared. Below, the best-guess English translation was "exciting."
Exciting what? Exciting flavor? Was the plant literally exciting, would it raise his blood pressure or trigger arousal? He had to mark that one off in the scanner's dynamically generated database as another plant he couldn't risk eating.
Sometimes he could tell. A plant the scanner labeled as "approval" had been edible, and so was "beautiful." But he had no idea what to think about the seeds that came back as "melancholy." And then there were the Ancient words that were descriptive without being helpful, like "cloven" for a fruit that grew with a split down the middle, or "parchment" for the birch-like, fragrant bark of a slender young tree.
He foraged for another hour and didn't find much, increasingly frustrated, until he finally came across a bizarre plant with curved stems that ended in a swelling teardrop-shaped pod that yielded when he cautiously squeezed it. He burst the teardrop pod on the scanner pad, and along with a spatter of liquid out came an insect the size of a marble, unfolding its weirdly jointed legs.
John convulsed with disgust, swatting the thing off and probably crushing it in the process. He checked himself and the scanner repeatedly to make sure the bug wasn't clinging to him or the vital, treasured scanner.
He washed his claws in a couple of leaf-saucers of water. He drank a couple more and hurried back to his cave, giving up on more food for the day. He'd eaten enough bumblers to steady his hands, that was all that mattered.
John read the instructions, and as ordered, he set up the oxygen tank and water bottle nearby. He followed the diagram, and tried the injector. The first two needles broke on his tough, scaled-over skin, but the next size slid in without much resistance. He injected himself with the drug and watched the hole close up in the sleeve of his Halloween costume.
He read the letter from Rodney again, studying the signatures of his friends. Ronon. Teyla. Rodney. He scratched the characters of their names into the floor next to his nest, waiting for something to change.
Continued in part 2.