Warm and Safe by Kriadydragon (Animal Challenge)
Title: Warm and Safe
Author: Kriadydragon
Rating: PG, Gen
Characters: John Sheppard, critter, Carson Beckett, Team
Spoilers: Common Ground. Not really any for Sunday since this takes place before, but it makes the story more interesting if you've seen the episode. If actually doesn't matter if you haven't.
Warnings: Kind of sad.
Synopsis: Sheppard makes a new friend.
Yep, another by lil' old me.
John Sheppard snapped awake and coughed raggedly when dust misted the air. He heard scraping above him amplified by his ears compensating for his eyes that were useless in the darkness. Between the scraping were voices, one deep, one gentle, one high-pitched and frantic.
John worked his swollen tongue in his mouth, smearing an almost hard coat of slime and sticky saliva over the membrane. “He-re. Heeee-reee!” His voice rasped like sandpaper duking it out in his throat. The scraping stopped.
“John?” Teyla's voice.
“T-Teyla! 'M heeere!”
The scraping resumed, frenetic. Small, sharp shards of rock pinged him on the head and dust trickled like water. Sheppard turned his face away covering his head with one shaky arm. The scraping was right above him and so close it tickled his ears. There was a crack, a clatter, then light spilled in a thin pillar down on John's head. It cut into his eyes like acid. He cried out snapping his head away with eyes squeezed shut. He was quite willing to remain that way and avoid further pain, but a touch on his arm pulled him away from the safety. He looked up, squinting, at a delicate hand that had squeezed through the crack, blocking most of the light. John reached up and grabbed it. He closed his pale fingers over the brown skin, and the brown fingers squeezed back.
“We are here, John.”
He smiled in relief, then frowned in consternation. Something seemed to shift at his side over his hip, pressing into it. He brushed it off as nothing important, probably just some mud that had tumbled down his collar.
Except that it was warm.
----------------------------
They grabbed John under the armpits and pulled him through, out of dank darkness into burning-bright daylight. They dragged him over the muddy ground onto the grass where they laid him out. John sucked in air until his lungs felt like they would pop, and he exhaled on a sharp cough. Then he started laughing.
“Colonel.” Teyla's mud-caked face hovered over him, blocking out the sun. “Colonel, are you all right?”
“I was buried alive and you dug me out, why wouldn't I be?”
The something that had been pressing against his side suddenly shifted. Small pin-pricks dug into his skin, skittering up his flank to burrow deep into the flesh over his heart. John jack-knifed and screamed. “What the freakin' hell! Son of a...!”
“Colonel?”
John clawed at his jacket then shirt, ripping open the one and pulling up the other revealing a palm-sized lump covered in tawny fur latched onto his chest. It was an iratus bug and wraith feeding all rolled into one. John gripped the little lump, pulling at it. The lump squeaked and clawed harder.
“Get it off me, get it off!”
“Colonel, John!” Teyla grabbed John's hand and arm, prying his fingers from the lump then pulling it away. “John, it is all right, it is not hurting you.”
“Like hell!”
“John, it is not, believe me. It as an infant Keedo. It is a fruit eater that only comes out at night.” She pushed at John's shoulder until he was lying flat on the ground, then pulled his shirt back down. She placed his hand lightly over the lump, shaping his fingers to cup the pulsating body. “Just wait. But please refrain from trying to crush it.”
John heaved heavy, panicked breaths, gritting his teeth against the burning of those little micro-claws puncturing his skin. After a moment, probably no more than a minute, the little claws retracted and the soft body squirmed curling into a tight ball. John winced when the tiny paws gripped his chest hairs, then he relaxed one muscle at a time, starting with his hand. Teyla patted it, giving him a calming smile.
“See? It is all right. Simply hold it in place, try not to remove it, and it will not use its claws. The infant Keedo spends the first month of its life clinging to its mother. It will move to the chest when it feels it is in danger.”
“Over the heart,” John said.
“Yes. It's mother must have died in the mudslide and it was looking for a place of warmth.”
Rodney and Ronon showed up so drenched in mud John didn't really see them until they were four feet away. Rodney, indignant, shook clumps of mud from his hands.
“Completely useless! I told you there were no other survivors or we would have picked them up on the HUD. The mud only took Sheppard.”
Ronon swiped mud from his face. “Never hurts to make sure, McKay. Some of those crevasses were pretty deep.”
Rodney snorted and looked down at John. “Why are holding your chest like that?” His eyes popped wide. “Did you hurt something? Did you get punctured by a rib again!”
“My ribs are fine. Bruised but fine.” John coughed. “It's... something else. Look, can I have a drink? My throat feels like it's trying to stick together.”
Ronon whipped out a canteen, even wiping off the top for John. The colonel lifting his head enough to swallow sucked him dry of his remaining energy. He collapsed back on the ground, too tired to even talk, and only vaguely aware of the high hum of an arriving jumper. He was loaded onto a stretcher into the rear compartment and let himself pass out into oblivion for the rest of the trip.
He awoke to being stabbed by tiny pins and the terrified squeal of something small and helpless. John snapped his eyes open and gasped.
“Carson!”
Beckett released the Keedo. “Sorry! Sorry Colonel. Didn't mean to be so rough but the little bugger's latched on tight and won't budge. I'll sedate the thing if it'll help.”
John lifted his head enough to look at the tawny fluff hitching a ride on his chest hairs, and felt the pull of a nasal cannula. The keedo looked a little like a weasel, but with bat ears, large eyes (even for a baby), and a stripe of fur like a mohawk running from head to tail-tip. He nudged the thing, then rubbed its head that was about the size of his thumbnail. It was soft, like velvet, and it moved its head into the caress.
Crap but it was small, its little flanks heaving, its skin molded tight to the delicate bones. John was surprised they hadn't crushed the thing.
It was also shaking and seeing it on a body that tiny was downright heartbreaking. When John coughed, his chest jerking, the thing squeaked in panic and clung tighter.
“Carson, can't you just work around it?” John asked.
“That's not exactly making my job any easier, colonel.”
“Come on, doc. Look at the size of this thing, and I doubt it's going anywhere so you don't have to worry about it crawling up your arm.”
Carson sighed. “Colonel, I didn't even want the bloody thing coming into my infirmary in the first place, but everyone was either too smitten with it or too yellow to remove it.”
John scratched the tiny cheek. “Have a heart, doc. The thing lost its mom. It's scared and just wants to be left alone to recuperate.”
Carson sighed again, heavy on the displeasure, and he narrowed his eyes. “Fine, I'll bloody well work around it.”
John smiled. “You're a good guy, doc. Anyone ever tell you that?”
Carson couldn't cling to his irritation at that.
Working around the keedo didn't seem all that much of a hassle, but John wasn't expecting Beckett to admit it. The rodent was too small and curled too tight to take up the entire area over his heart. Carson did chuckle lightly when the thing growled because his hand was resting against it as he listened to the heart beat. And as long as John held the creature in place, the Scottish physician and two nurses were able to roll him onto his side for a listen to his lungs. The verdict was mild pneumonia, possibly caused from inhaling all the dried mud, severe dehydration, and slight malnutrition. John had been buried for about a week with little water and no food.
John was surprised by that. He could have sworn it had been more like four weeks. The mud had shoved him into a rocky crevasse and sealed it, and yet somehow, from somewhere, he'd still been getting air. The team had gone back for a jumper and through the HUD they were able to locate him and dig him out. The digging part took two days since they wouldn't risk using C-4 to blow a hole.
And the entire time, John thought he'd been alone. It would have been nice to have been clued in other wise. He felt he'd kept it together pretty well for the most part, but he'd be kidding himself and everyone else if he didn't admit that he'd been scared stupid the majority of the time. Hearing only the sound of one's own harsh breathing made one painfully aware of the possibility of slowly suffocating to death, which in turn kept the heart beating loud and fast in constant panic. His 'keeping it together' had been nothing more than preventing himself from acting on that panic that would have had him digging his way free, only to collapse his little niche in the process.
John had never been so terrified in his life, not the countless times he'd been taken prisoner, not even when he was being fed on, because he'd had no enemy to steel himself against this time. His fear had been primal, instinctual, and lacking common sense - plain and simple terror over being buried alive. Yeah, good times indeed.
Yet he hadn't been the only one. As John saturated his starved lungs with oxygen from a mask, he watched the keedo's body twitch to the beat of his heart. The thing had probably been clueless to its true plight, focusing only on having found someplace warm and dark to curl against. It had to be nice being that oblivious.
It was also probably hungry. When one of Carson's nurses dropped by to check the monitors, John put in a request for some warm milk in a bag or the smallest bottle they could find. Word must have gotten around. Teyla was the one to solve the problem by using a bag of leather with the tip cut off enough for milk to drip out. She gave it to John, and he nudged the keedo's head, milk dropping onto his chest to go rolling down between his ribs.
“Take it, you little brat,” John rasped. The keedo's nose eventually twitched and its head turned in the direction of the bag until its mouth found the tip. For something so tiny, its suckled loud. John grinned tiredly. “There you go, kid.”
When John's fever was no longer burning him alive, they covered him with a gown, keedo included since it seemed to prefer being under something. The gown gave way to a scrub when the fever vanished completely. Then from scrubs to quarters when John's lungs cleared up. He made sure to wear a loose shirt and keep his hand over the keedo, holding it without crushing it to his ribs.
His instructions were to rest, and John wasn't going to argue them. For all the laying around he'd been doing since coming home, he still felt beat, sore, and light-headed. He spent most of his first two days of freedom stretched out on his bed, one ankle crossed over the other and his hand resting lightly over the lump beneath his shirt.
The sun was setting on the second day of his liberation from Carson's care, stretching weak light and sharp shadows across the floor. John kept his eyes half-lidded watching that light shift from golden to twilight blue, his room cooling. It would be time to head to the mess soon before his stomach started growling, which always made the keedo nervous. And Beckett would drop by with a tray if his spies didn't see John at one of the tables.
John furrowed his brow. Something was different, off. He wasn't quite sure what, just that there was something missing. John pressed his hand gently into the lump, and it hit him.
No rapid pulsations from the little body.
John nudged the keedo. Not even a squeak. He lifted his shirt up to his neck and poked at the thing. It rolled, limp and lifeless, onto its side.
John's heart stuttered. “No.” He gathered the body into his palm. No sudden pin-prick of tiny claws. He nudged the thing, rubbed it, shook it, pressed his finger into its small chest.
No breathing and no microscopic heart going two-hundred miles per second.
John's throat constricted until he could barely breathe. “Oh no.” He placed it back on his chest, over his heart, and reached for his radio.
-----------------------------------
Carson didn't need to perform an autopsy to know what had gone wrong. “The wee thing lost its mother too soon. Most animals don't survive that.”
John put the keedo in a small box, then he and his team went back to its home world to bury it, with Carson tagging along. Sheppard was barely recovered, still prone to sudden exhaustion, and even John wasn't going to deny it. Ronon dug the hole and John placed the box inside.
“There was really nothing I could have done?” John asked as Ronon smoothed out the dirt over the grave.
“Most likely not,” Beckett said, apologetic.
John swallowed back the lump lodged in his throat. He hadn't realized he'd even gotten attached to the thing. He'd mostly just pitied it, let it cling to him because it was small, helpless, and the right thing to do. Yet here he was, mourning it, missing the small weight of it on his ribs, the warmth of it against his skin, and watching it move every time his heart beat. It felt wrong - it was wrong - that something that tiny and new had to go when having just gotten here, after everything it had done to stay alive, and he had done to keep it around. There seemed no point to having even tried.
“At least it was warm and safe when it went,” said Carson. “I mean, if you have to go, then that's the way to go. No fear, no worry, no loneliness; just peace. I always say that if I go, I either want it to be quick or in my sleep, someplace familiar, around people I know.”
Everyone nodded in sage agreement. Beckett clasped a warm hand on John's shoulder. “You ready, lad?”
John nodded and followed the others back to the 'gate. He would dwell off and on about the what-he-could/should-have-dones, if it had been possible to do anything in the first place no matter what anyone said, but would never once regret having made the acquaintanceship in the first place.
The End
Note: This story was inspired by a true event. My brother and his wife had adopted a baby goat rejected by its mother, but the goat had been rejected too early and died after only a few days. My brother had been very heart broken about it.
Author: Kriadydragon
Rating: PG, Gen
Characters: John Sheppard, critter, Carson Beckett, Team
Spoilers: Common Ground. Not really any for Sunday since this takes place before, but it makes the story more interesting if you've seen the episode. If actually doesn't matter if you haven't.
Warnings: Kind of sad.
Synopsis: Sheppard makes a new friend.
Yep, another by lil' old me.
John Sheppard snapped awake and coughed raggedly when dust misted the air. He heard scraping above him amplified by his ears compensating for his eyes that were useless in the darkness. Between the scraping were voices, one deep, one gentle, one high-pitched and frantic.
John worked his swollen tongue in his mouth, smearing an almost hard coat of slime and sticky saliva over the membrane. “He-re. Heeee-reee!” His voice rasped like sandpaper duking it out in his throat. The scraping stopped.
“John?” Teyla's voice.
“T-Teyla! 'M heeere!”
The scraping resumed, frenetic. Small, sharp shards of rock pinged him on the head and dust trickled like water. Sheppard turned his face away covering his head with one shaky arm. The scraping was right above him and so close it tickled his ears. There was a crack, a clatter, then light spilled in a thin pillar down on John's head. It cut into his eyes like acid. He cried out snapping his head away with eyes squeezed shut. He was quite willing to remain that way and avoid further pain, but a touch on his arm pulled him away from the safety. He looked up, squinting, at a delicate hand that had squeezed through the crack, blocking most of the light. John reached up and grabbed it. He closed his pale fingers over the brown skin, and the brown fingers squeezed back.
“We are here, John.”
He smiled in relief, then frowned in consternation. Something seemed to shift at his side over his hip, pressing into it. He brushed it off as nothing important, probably just some mud that had tumbled down his collar.
Except that it was warm.
----------------------------
They grabbed John under the armpits and pulled him through, out of dank darkness into burning-bright daylight. They dragged him over the muddy ground onto the grass where they laid him out. John sucked in air until his lungs felt like they would pop, and he exhaled on a sharp cough. Then he started laughing.
“Colonel.” Teyla's mud-caked face hovered over him, blocking out the sun. “Colonel, are you all right?”
“I was buried alive and you dug me out, why wouldn't I be?”
The something that had been pressing against his side suddenly shifted. Small pin-pricks dug into his skin, skittering up his flank to burrow deep into the flesh over his heart. John jack-knifed and screamed. “What the freakin' hell! Son of a...!”
“Colonel?”
John clawed at his jacket then shirt, ripping open the one and pulling up the other revealing a palm-sized lump covered in tawny fur latched onto his chest. It was an iratus bug and wraith feeding all rolled into one. John gripped the little lump, pulling at it. The lump squeaked and clawed harder.
“Get it off me, get it off!”
“Colonel, John!” Teyla grabbed John's hand and arm, prying his fingers from the lump then pulling it away. “John, it is all right, it is not hurting you.”
“Like hell!”
“John, it is not, believe me. It as an infant Keedo. It is a fruit eater that only comes out at night.” She pushed at John's shoulder until he was lying flat on the ground, then pulled his shirt back down. She placed his hand lightly over the lump, shaping his fingers to cup the pulsating body. “Just wait. But please refrain from trying to crush it.”
John heaved heavy, panicked breaths, gritting his teeth against the burning of those little micro-claws puncturing his skin. After a moment, probably no more than a minute, the little claws retracted and the soft body squirmed curling into a tight ball. John winced when the tiny paws gripped his chest hairs, then he relaxed one muscle at a time, starting with his hand. Teyla patted it, giving him a calming smile.
“See? It is all right. Simply hold it in place, try not to remove it, and it will not use its claws. The infant Keedo spends the first month of its life clinging to its mother. It will move to the chest when it feels it is in danger.”
“Over the heart,” John said.
“Yes. It's mother must have died in the mudslide and it was looking for a place of warmth.”
Rodney and Ronon showed up so drenched in mud John didn't really see them until they were four feet away. Rodney, indignant, shook clumps of mud from his hands.
“Completely useless! I told you there were no other survivors or we would have picked them up on the HUD. The mud only took Sheppard.”
Ronon swiped mud from his face. “Never hurts to make sure, McKay. Some of those crevasses were pretty deep.”
Rodney snorted and looked down at John. “Why are holding your chest like that?” His eyes popped wide. “Did you hurt something? Did you get punctured by a rib again!”
“My ribs are fine. Bruised but fine.” John coughed. “It's... something else. Look, can I have a drink? My throat feels like it's trying to stick together.”
Ronon whipped out a canteen, even wiping off the top for John. The colonel lifting his head enough to swallow sucked him dry of his remaining energy. He collapsed back on the ground, too tired to even talk, and only vaguely aware of the high hum of an arriving jumper. He was loaded onto a stretcher into the rear compartment and let himself pass out into oblivion for the rest of the trip.
He awoke to being stabbed by tiny pins and the terrified squeal of something small and helpless. John snapped his eyes open and gasped.
“Carson!”
Beckett released the Keedo. “Sorry! Sorry Colonel. Didn't mean to be so rough but the little bugger's latched on tight and won't budge. I'll sedate the thing if it'll help.”
John lifted his head enough to look at the tawny fluff hitching a ride on his chest hairs, and felt the pull of a nasal cannula. The keedo looked a little like a weasel, but with bat ears, large eyes (even for a baby), and a stripe of fur like a mohawk running from head to tail-tip. He nudged the thing, then rubbed its head that was about the size of his thumbnail. It was soft, like velvet, and it moved its head into the caress.
Crap but it was small, its little flanks heaving, its skin molded tight to the delicate bones. John was surprised they hadn't crushed the thing.
It was also shaking and seeing it on a body that tiny was downright heartbreaking. When John coughed, his chest jerking, the thing squeaked in panic and clung tighter.
“Carson, can't you just work around it?” John asked.
“That's not exactly making my job any easier, colonel.”
“Come on, doc. Look at the size of this thing, and I doubt it's going anywhere so you don't have to worry about it crawling up your arm.”
Carson sighed. “Colonel, I didn't even want the bloody thing coming into my infirmary in the first place, but everyone was either too smitten with it or too yellow to remove it.”
John scratched the tiny cheek. “Have a heart, doc. The thing lost its mom. It's scared and just wants to be left alone to recuperate.”
Carson sighed again, heavy on the displeasure, and he narrowed his eyes. “Fine, I'll bloody well work around it.”
John smiled. “You're a good guy, doc. Anyone ever tell you that?”
Carson couldn't cling to his irritation at that.
Working around the keedo didn't seem all that much of a hassle, but John wasn't expecting Beckett to admit it. The rodent was too small and curled too tight to take up the entire area over his heart. Carson did chuckle lightly when the thing growled because his hand was resting against it as he listened to the heart beat. And as long as John held the creature in place, the Scottish physician and two nurses were able to roll him onto his side for a listen to his lungs. The verdict was mild pneumonia, possibly caused from inhaling all the dried mud, severe dehydration, and slight malnutrition. John had been buried for about a week with little water and no food.
John was surprised by that. He could have sworn it had been more like four weeks. The mud had shoved him into a rocky crevasse and sealed it, and yet somehow, from somewhere, he'd still been getting air. The team had gone back for a jumper and through the HUD they were able to locate him and dig him out. The digging part took two days since they wouldn't risk using C-4 to blow a hole.
And the entire time, John thought he'd been alone. It would have been nice to have been clued in other wise. He felt he'd kept it together pretty well for the most part, but he'd be kidding himself and everyone else if he didn't admit that he'd been scared stupid the majority of the time. Hearing only the sound of one's own harsh breathing made one painfully aware of the possibility of slowly suffocating to death, which in turn kept the heart beating loud and fast in constant panic. His 'keeping it together' had been nothing more than preventing himself from acting on that panic that would have had him digging his way free, only to collapse his little niche in the process.
John had never been so terrified in his life, not the countless times he'd been taken prisoner, not even when he was being fed on, because he'd had no enemy to steel himself against this time. His fear had been primal, instinctual, and lacking common sense - plain and simple terror over being buried alive. Yeah, good times indeed.
Yet he hadn't been the only one. As John saturated his starved lungs with oxygen from a mask, he watched the keedo's body twitch to the beat of his heart. The thing had probably been clueless to its true plight, focusing only on having found someplace warm and dark to curl against. It had to be nice being that oblivious.
It was also probably hungry. When one of Carson's nurses dropped by to check the monitors, John put in a request for some warm milk in a bag or the smallest bottle they could find. Word must have gotten around. Teyla was the one to solve the problem by using a bag of leather with the tip cut off enough for milk to drip out. She gave it to John, and he nudged the keedo's head, milk dropping onto his chest to go rolling down between his ribs.
“Take it, you little brat,” John rasped. The keedo's nose eventually twitched and its head turned in the direction of the bag until its mouth found the tip. For something so tiny, its suckled loud. John grinned tiredly. “There you go, kid.”
When John's fever was no longer burning him alive, they covered him with a gown, keedo included since it seemed to prefer being under something. The gown gave way to a scrub when the fever vanished completely. Then from scrubs to quarters when John's lungs cleared up. He made sure to wear a loose shirt and keep his hand over the keedo, holding it without crushing it to his ribs.
His instructions were to rest, and John wasn't going to argue them. For all the laying around he'd been doing since coming home, he still felt beat, sore, and light-headed. He spent most of his first two days of freedom stretched out on his bed, one ankle crossed over the other and his hand resting lightly over the lump beneath his shirt.
The sun was setting on the second day of his liberation from Carson's care, stretching weak light and sharp shadows across the floor. John kept his eyes half-lidded watching that light shift from golden to twilight blue, his room cooling. It would be time to head to the mess soon before his stomach started growling, which always made the keedo nervous. And Beckett would drop by with a tray if his spies didn't see John at one of the tables.
John furrowed his brow. Something was different, off. He wasn't quite sure what, just that there was something missing. John pressed his hand gently into the lump, and it hit him.
No rapid pulsations from the little body.
John nudged the keedo. Not even a squeak. He lifted his shirt up to his neck and poked at the thing. It rolled, limp and lifeless, onto its side.
John's heart stuttered. “No.” He gathered the body into his palm. No sudden pin-prick of tiny claws. He nudged the thing, rubbed it, shook it, pressed his finger into its small chest.
No breathing and no microscopic heart going two-hundred miles per second.
John's throat constricted until he could barely breathe. “Oh no.” He placed it back on his chest, over his heart, and reached for his radio.
-----------------------------------
Carson didn't need to perform an autopsy to know what had gone wrong. “The wee thing lost its mother too soon. Most animals don't survive that.”
John put the keedo in a small box, then he and his team went back to its home world to bury it, with Carson tagging along. Sheppard was barely recovered, still prone to sudden exhaustion, and even John wasn't going to deny it. Ronon dug the hole and John placed the box inside.
“There was really nothing I could have done?” John asked as Ronon smoothed out the dirt over the grave.
“Most likely not,” Beckett said, apologetic.
John swallowed back the lump lodged in his throat. He hadn't realized he'd even gotten attached to the thing. He'd mostly just pitied it, let it cling to him because it was small, helpless, and the right thing to do. Yet here he was, mourning it, missing the small weight of it on his ribs, the warmth of it against his skin, and watching it move every time his heart beat. It felt wrong - it was wrong - that something that tiny and new had to go when having just gotten here, after everything it had done to stay alive, and he had done to keep it around. There seemed no point to having even tried.
“At least it was warm and safe when it went,” said Carson. “I mean, if you have to go, then that's the way to go. No fear, no worry, no loneliness; just peace. I always say that if I go, I either want it to be quick or in my sleep, someplace familiar, around people I know.”
Everyone nodded in sage agreement. Beckett clasped a warm hand on John's shoulder. “You ready, lad?”
John nodded and followed the others back to the 'gate. He would dwell off and on about the what-he-could/should-have-dones, if it had been possible to do anything in the first place no matter what anyone said, but would never once regret having made the acquaintanceship in the first place.
The End
Note: This story was inspired by a true event. My brother and his wife had adopted a baby goat rejected by its mother, but the goat had been rejected too early and died after only a few days. My brother had been very heart broken about it.