Before the Whales Come Crashing Down by linziday (1st Quarterly Ficathon)

[linziday]

Title: Before the Whales Come Crashing Down

Author: linziday

Rating: PG13

Word count: about 2,200

Warnings: Mild language, traumatic hallucinations

Spoilers: Up to the second half of season 2.

Summary: One person. Awake five days. And this time it's not Rodney.

Prompt: Written for
padawan_aneiki , who wanted bonding between two characters, Shep whump, and team luv. Hope I got it all!  (With great thanks to beta wildcat88 !)


It always started out so promising.

Be our friends! Let’s trade! Together we will vanquish the Wraith!

But first, a ceremony.

“That’s it,” Rodney declared. “Next time, we’re asking right up front, ‘Hello. Do you require visitor participation in any potentially fatal rites or rituals? Yes? Next world!’”

On his back, head lolling over the edge of the alien bed and eyes unfocused at the ceiling, Sheppard made a noise that sounded suspiciously like “pffft.”

Rodney rolled his eyes. “Okay, you? You don’t get a vote, Colonel Take-One-For-The-Team.”

“‘M fine,” Sheppard slurred. “Jus’ sleepy.”

“Of course you’re ‘sleepy’! You’ve been awake for almost 120 hours. You’re clinically exhausted and barreling straight toward collapse.”

“Pfft,” Sheppard said again.

Rodney refused to dignify that with an answer.

Instead, he watched Sheppard’s right eye twitch and his hands tremble. And not for the first time in almost five days, Rodney cursed the peace-loving Kalin, their near-naquadah and Sheppard’s blasted hero complex.

With their world repeatedly ravaged by the Wraith, the Kalin valued harmony and tranquility above all else. They abhorred hostility, were repulsed by violence. Aggression, they believed, was an instinct - a base instinct - that could be denied, and so they traded only with societies that proved they had the strength and will to overcome any natural compulsion.

Sleep was about as natural a compulsion as you could get.

One person. Awake five days. Or no deal.

They called it The Endurance.

Rodney had assumed he’d be the one. Of course he’d be the one. No one else was used to sleep deprivation like he was. (Oh, joy.) But the Kalin wanted their leader.

And Sheppard wasn’t exactly known for relinquishing the position.

“I am the v’ry model of a m’dern m’jor g’neral,” Sheppard began singing to himself from the bed. “I’ve information veget. . . vegetab. . . veggie. Veggie. Funny word. Funnnny. Woooord. Woooord. Woooord.”

Rodney sighed and let his head thump back against the wall.

The Endurance was a test, not torture, so the Kalin set Sheppard up in a comfortable spare dwelling and let the team rotate time with him. The elders dropped by at random intervals to make sure Sheppard stayed awake. He was not allowed to leave the dwelling.

Rodney had taken the first watch - 24 hours of bored Sheppard made only slightly less bored by a lengthy debate over the best Batman villain, a heated prime/not prime duel, and a rousing game of tic-tac-toe that ended when Sheppard accused Rodney of cheating. Rodney figured that Sheppard - fighting a day-without-sleep headache - just wanted an excuse to end the game. (Also, always tagging the middle square first was a strategic advantage… NOT cheating.)

Teyla took second watch. When she emerged from the dwelling, she refused to say exactly how Sheppard spent her shift.

“I believe he is not fully himself and would be greatly embarrassed if his words and actions became widely known,” Teyla said. Though, with an amused glint in her eye, she added that she never realized the colonel enjoyed singing.

Ronon didn’t have a problem telling them what Sheppard said and did on day three. Mostly because he didn’t say much or do anything.

“Looked at the wall for a while,” Ronon said, filling a bowl with stew to bring to Sheppard for dinner. “Used a couple of Earth curse words when I told him the Kalin didn’t have pizza. Then he went back to the wall.”

The next morning, Sheppard forgot why he was there and demanded to be released. It took Ronon, then Teyla, then Rodney to convince him to stay.

Headache. Loopiness. Staring. Irritability. Irrationality. Memory lapse. Rodney knew better than anyone what would come next.

It’s why he’d volunteered for the last shift.

“You owe me, Colonel,” Rodney said, watching Sheppard stare at the ceiling. “Next overnight mission, you take my watch. And the mission after that. And possibly all the overnight missions ever, because the video I didn’t take of you singing Gilbert and Sullivan would have been worth all the kona coffee and dark chocolate in the city.”

Sheppard’s eyes were unfocused but tracking something on the ceiling. His head gently rocked from side to side to keep whatever it was in view. “Pr’tty,” he murmured.

Rodney frowned. “What do you see?”

Sheppard murmured again but Rodney couldn’t catch any actual words.

“Lights? Spots? Tiny whales with really sharp teeth? What?” Rodney asked, glancing up at the ceiling even though he knew there was nothing there but plain brown stone.

“Mm, pr’tty lights,” Sheppard said dazedly. A small smile played on his lips.

Then he screamed and launched himself off the bed so fast that Rodney thanked God he’d had the foresight to sit blocking the door.

“Sheppard! Sheppard! John!” Rodney called as Sheppard panicked, wildly palming the stone walls in a desperate search for escape. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

Sheppard found a corner and shoved into it, plastering his back against the wall. He was wild-eyed and breathing fast, and staring up at the ceiling as if something terrible was about to plunge down from above.

Rodney held up his hands, placating, and crept toward Sheppard. When he was halfway across the room, the dwelling door opened behind him.

“Trader McKay?”

Rodney swung his head, keeping track of Sheppard out of the corner of his eye. One of the Kalin elders stood in the doorway with Teyla and Ronon.

“We heard Trader Sheppard’s yell from the village square,” the elder said. “Is he -”

“Is he what? All right? No! He’s hallucinating,” Rodney spat. He gestured at the elder. “Teyla, Ronon, get him out of here. I’ve got this. Sheppard wouldn’t want. . . just no one else needs to see this.”

With a low growl, Ronon immediately hustled the elder back and away. Teyla paused in the doorway, her voice quiet and concerned when she said, “Rodney, if you need -”

“I know,” Rodney said softly. The flash of anger was gone. Now there was only worry.

He turned back to Sheppard, trusting Ronon and Teyla to keep everyone away, to take care of things out there while he took care of things in here.

He heard the door shut behind him before he took another step.

“Hey, Sheppard,” Rodney said, working to keep his voice steady, normal, as he moved slowly forward. “Hey. They’re gone.”

Sheppard made a desperate sound in the back of his throat.

“The people! I mean the people are gone. Whatever you’re seeing, it’s still. . . well, not there exactly because you’re hallucinating, but you’re seeing something. I won’t tell you you’re not. It’s there.” Rodney thought about what he’d just said. “Uh. In your head. It’s there but in your head.”

God. He sucked at this. Maybe he should call Ronon and Teyla back -

“Rodney? Rodney? Rodneyrodneyrodney - ” Sheppard’s panicked voice rose a notch     as he shrank back from the invisible something.

Crossing the distance between them, Rodney fell to his knees and put his hands on Sheppard’s shoulders, trying to connect, trying to ground him. “What are you seeing now? C’mon, John, work with me here so I can help. Not the pretty lights anymore, so what? Wraith? Evil clowns? Bugs?” Sheppard made a low, strangled sound and Rodney seized on it. “Bugs? You’re seeing bugs.”

Sheppard swallowed hard and struggled to speak. “Iratus.”

“Okay,” Rodney said with relief. “That’s good. Well, not good but. . . so now I know what you’re seeing.” Then he realized what Sheppard was seeing. “Oh, crap.”

“Yeah,” Sheppard said and recoiled as if something had dropped down nearby. “Lemme out of here.”

The moment Sheppard stepped outside the dwelling The Endurance would end in failure. Sheppard would have gone through all of this for nothing. “I can’t,” Rodney told him.

“Then make ’em go away.”

“I can’t do that either.”

“Rodney!” Sheppard wailed.

“I can’t!” Rodney shouted back. “They’re in your head. It’s not like I can lay cover fire!”

Sheppard’s eyes flicked to the door and Rodney felt his muscles tense, ready to bolt.

“Look,” Rodney said hurriedly, “I can’t let you leave and I can’t make them go away, but I know what’ll help.”

“No, you don’t,” Sheppard gritted out between clenched teeth. “You don’t know this.”

Actually. He really kind of did.

“When I asked you about tiny whales with sharp teeth I wasn’t kidding. In grad school I went five days without sleep and I saw them swimming all over the physics lab,” Rodney told him. “They were funny at first. Then they started shredding me. A thousand creatures with needle-sharp teeth eating their way up my arms, chewing through skin and bones, devouring me inch by inch by-”

Sheppard shuddered violently and gagged.

“Sorry, sorry!” Rodney said. He thought about stopping there. He’d never told anyone. . . hadn’t planned on telling his team ever. What he’d already said was embarrassing enough. He could gloss over the rest of the story.

Then he thought about the swarm of iratus bugs above Sheppard’s head.

“I, uh, huddled under a lab table and screamed,” Rodney continued, looking down at the floor. “It was Saturday and I was the only one in that wing of the building, probably the only one on campus. It may be hard to believe, but I didn’t have a lot of friends in college. No one was looking for me. No one. . . would. I screamed so long I lost my voice. Eventually I passed out from fear or exhaustion or both. I woke up Monday morning just as everyone was coming in. I pretended I’d gotten there early.”

He looked up and found Sheppard looking at him. His eyes were bloodshot and sunken, lined with dark shadows, but they were on him and not the iratus bugs above.

“You’re not that good a liar,” Sheppard said, sounding suspicious and incredulous and a little bit sad for 20-year-old Rodney.

“No one cared if I’d really gotten there early or if I’d slept in the lab all weekend or passed out from an exhaustion-induced hallucination. And no one was going to. So next time - ”

“Next time?” Sheppard fairly choked on the words.

“I thought I had the key to. . . well, something that took a lot longer than expected. Five days without sleep and like clockwork: tiny whales, sharp teeth. I refused to acknowledge them. Just kept working.”

“And?”

“I lasted about ten minutes.”

Sheppard snorted.

“So,” Rodney continued, taking his hands off Sheppard’s shoulders, “the time after that -”

“Jesus, didn’t you ever sleep in college?”

“This was a project after college,” Rodney said and dismissed the question with a wave of his hand. He shifted to sit cross-legged on the on the floor. “Took six days instead of five but they came back. I tried to talk to them.”

“Talk,” Sheppard said in a way that clearly questioned his sanity. “And what did the itty bitty imaginary whales say, Rodney?”

Rodney rolled his eyes. “That you’re an ass. Do you want to hear the rest of this or not?”

“Fine.”

“So anyway, that didn’t work either. The time after that -”

Sheppard yawned and leaned his head back against the wall. “How many times were there, exactly?”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen,” Sheppard repeated.

“Wait.” Rodney did a quick mental recount. “No, eighteen.”

“Is there anything I can do to stop you from detailing times four through eighteen?”

“No,” Rodney said. He leaned back on his hands. “So the next time. . . .”

It took Rodney almost an hour to tell the whole story, how he tried reasoning with the whales during the whirlwind phase of a project at MIT, how he fled straight into a snowstorm in Russia, how he stole some sleeping pills from Carson’s makeshift infirmary in Antarctica rather than explain the situation.

“The thing is,” Rodney said, glancing at his watch, “I haven’t had to deal with the whales since then. Not since we got to Atlantis. Which is funny if you think about it because I’ve got more work here than any of the others combined. Maintaining a 10,000-year-old floating city is a 24-hour-a-day job, not to mention fighting the Wraith and keeping you from killing yourself every chance you get.”

“Pfft,” Sheppard said. His eyes drifted closed.

“Oh good, we’re pre-verbal again. Nice.”

Sheppard cracked his eyes open. Not much, but enough to glare at him. Enough to prove he was still awake.

“But even though it seems like I never sleep in Atlantis, I really do,” Rodney continued, “mostly because of you. You and Teyla and Ronon. You guys always, um, catch me before the whales come.”

Sheppard’s glare vanished.

“I always thought, though,” Rodney plowed on, “that if the whales did come back you guys could make them go away. Because I figured all it would take it someone to talk me down, distract me for a while. I just, you know, never had anyone around for me before.”

Rodney’s watch beeped softly. He heard the dwelling door open.

“The Endurance ends. We would be honored by your trade,” an elder said behind him just as Sheppard’s eyes fluttered shut in front of him.

“Me neither, buddy,” Sheppard said. And then he slept.