Fic: Compensation (NC-17)
Title: Compensation
Author: SGAtlantisLight
Characters: McKay, Sheppard, Beckett, Zelenka, Weir, Kavanaugh, Lorne, Cadman, Parrish, Brown
Relationships: McKay/Sheppard, Zelenka/Beckett, Lorne/Cadman, Parrish/Brown
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Het sex, genetic technobabble
Spoilers: None
Summary: Part 33 of the Broken Series
Disclaimer: The characters, the setting, etc. are NOT mine, even if I wish they were.
He had stopped playing after running through Cascades and A Picture of Her Face, two other Joplin numbers he'd learned when his piano teacher discovered his love of the composer's style. He'd joined them on the couch, kicking off his shoes and lying sideways across it, Laura in his arms, his white-socked feet propped into David Parrish's lap, where one of Katie's hands traced the curves of his toes and heel and arch lazily as they sat tangled together.
"We should go somewhere more private," Laura said.
"In time," her lover answered. "We really don't need to rush things."
She rolled her eyes. "If it had been left up to you, you'd still be spending the nights with only your right hand as company!"
He glared at her, but there wasn't much heat in it. "Oversharing, Laura."
She snorted. "Ethan, we're talking about watching each other and you're worried about oversharing?"
"Hey, I'm not the voyeur-slash-exhibitionist in this relationship."
"Speaking of oversharing," David said, "I'm curious why you don't call him Marcus."
"Ex-boyfriend," Laura answered. "Besides, I think Ethan's sexier."
"It's dorky," Lorne said.
"Sexy," she shot back.
"Dorky and about two centuries out of date."
"Katie, David," Laura said, turning to the other two, "what do you say-- sexy or dorky?"
"Sexy," Katie answered at the same time that David answered, "Dorky."
Laura stuck her tongue out at David. "Okay, Katie and I'll call him Ethan and you go on calling him Marcus."
"Well, it was the name I married him under," David answered with a grin.
"Oh, please don't bring that up again!" Lorne begged.
"Say," Laura said, "I never did tell you how hilarious you were last night."
"Thank you. I did a semester of Dramatic Arts before my parents talked some sense into me," David answered.
"Really? We should so get a drama group together. Washington said they found a theatre the last time out. We could use the entertainment."
"What would we do?" Katie asked. "We'd have to order scripts."
"I think I might have The Importance of Being Earnest and some Shakespeare," David said.
"What's this 'we,' kemosabe?" Lorne said. "No way am I getting up on stage, especially if you're doing Shakespeare."
"There are some great fight scenes," Laura pointed out.
"Nope. Not going to happen. Bad enough I went and married David here. My manly image would never recover if I started prancing across the stage in tights, fight scenes or no."
The other three laughed.
"So..." Laura said, "some place more private?"
"God, how did I get involved with such a perv?" Lorne asked the universe at large.
Laura grabbed his sweatshirt front and pulled him up to kiss him. He didn't seem to mind in the least.
***
John dropped the Magnetix pyramid and it shattered on the floor, balls and coloured rods spinning off in all directions, as he reached for Deyn. Carson practically vaulted the table to get to his charge, sending trays scattering. Radek attempted the more normal route around the table, stepped on a couple of balls and went down hard. Elizabeth merely stood, shocked and blanching.
Rodney yelled as he saw John reach for the device still clutched in Deyn's hand. "Wait, don't!"
John froze and realised Rodney's concern. He stopped Carson before the doctor could touch the boy, and then grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair, thrusting his hands into the cloth to insulate him. He grasped the device and wrenched it free.
Deyn's screaming died and he went completely limp. Carson cradled the boy's head in his lap, checking vitals as he activated his headset, calling for a medical team. A trickle of blood ran from Deyn's nose, bright red against unnaturally white skin.
John glanced down at the device and saw symbols scrolling across its surface. He didn't read very much Ancient, but there was one word he thought he recognised. "Rodney, tell me what this says."
His husband dropped beside him and studied the characters, sucking in his breath. "No fucking way!"
"Rodney, what does it say?"
Rodney met his eyes. "It says, 'Wraith DNA detected. Telepathic link severed.'"
Just then, Kavanaugh dashed through the doorway, eyes wild and desperate, and ran to the knot of personnel surrounding them, pushing people aside carelessly, until he got to the boy's side where he dropped to the floor and, with a warning glare at Carson, gathered Deyn into his arms. "I'm here," he murmured. "I'm here. It's okay... it's going to be okay..."
***
As David curled up behind Katie, Laura slipped her hand inside her friend's hand. Katie smiled at her in an exhausted, sated way.
"Wow," Laura said, having no other words.
"Told you it was okay," Katie said.
David chuckled and slipped his arm around his lover, and closed slender and talented fingers over the two women's hands. He looked over at his teammate, who was staring at him in awe. He raised his eyebrows in silent question.
"Goddamn, Dave," Lorne said, voice full of wonder. "I thought I was good with my hands and mouth, but you... Damn!"
"Compensation," the other man answered.
Major Lorne was David Parrish's team leader; he had seen much of his medical record and knew Parrish had been badly injured in a car wreck when he was twelve. But the record merely indicated that the doctors had rebuilt his shattered pelvis and, other than some pain during wet weather, it hadn't affected the botanist's mobility. The other damage hadn't been germane to Parrish's job performance and wasn't part of the record Lorne had access to.
Then Laura had come from one of her late night girl talks with Katie and asked him if he knew, when they had gotten the two botanists together, that Parrish couldn't.
"Couldn't?" he'd asked.
She'd rolled her eyes. "Apparently not," she'd said and then mentioned the accident, but wouldn't elaborate.
Lorne had pulled up Parrish's record and re-read. He'd thought about the sort of accident that left a boy's pelvis shattered and about the soft tissue damage that would imply. He considered the delicate network of tiny blood vessels involved in preparing him for his favourite private activity. He thought about the impossibility of repairing all those connections.
And for the next week, whenever he looked at David Parrish, all he could think about was that Parrish couldn't. It made him uncomfortable to know something so intimate. It made him pity David for what he was missing. It made him angry at a universe that could leave such a great guy in such a state.
And then David and Katie had sat Laura and him down and told them it was okay, really. There had been options involving things with hand pumps and surgical implantations and so on, but David had decided that until he had a lover who wanted it, he wasn't concerned. Katie was okay with what they had now.
Laura had been unconvinced. Lorne had told her, and them, that it was really none of his business anyway.
And somehow, because David and Katie knew Laura was a bit of a voyeur and would be comfortable watching and being watched, they'd suggested this. It had taken a couple of months of reassurances and coaxing. And then, dear Lord, he and Laura already had been done in and boneless from their own exertions, watching with something fast-approaching religious awe as David's fingers and mouth had reduced Katie to a screaming, writhing, sustained climax for a second and then a third time. As Katie still laid in wordless stupefaction, David had sat up, grasped his still-soft member with one hand while pinching his nipples with the other and with a couple of quick jerks brought himself to climax, semen spilling over his hand and onto his legs.
It was still horribly unfair that Parrish couldn't, but 'compensation' didn't begin to describe what they'd just seen.
"I don't suppose you could give me some pointers," Lorne asked, only half-joking.
"Oo!" Laura squeaked. "That would involve more of this, wouldn't it? I'd go for that any day."
***
They had sat in silence-- guilt, fear, recriminations, uncertainty, worry, and a thousand other emotions passing silently among them.
Radek had paced, wringing his hands, and John had thought about the pictures of Radek's family he'd seen and specifically of Vilem, Radek's middle child-- fair-haired and with a charming smile and his father's pale blue eyes. If it weren't for the eyes, Deyn could be mistaken for a member of the Zelenka family. The family Radek missed terribly.
He'd seen pictures of Carson's family gatherings, with cousins gathered into his lap, joyous and laughing.
He'd seen the pictures of children Elizabeth sponsored through Children International and knew she wrote each and every one of them, even when Atlantis had been cut off from Earth.
He thought about the Afghani orphanage not far from where he'd been stationed and how the children would surround the American military men and beg for gum and attention. He remembered the dark-eyed Walid, quick to smile, who spoke no English beyond the words "gum" and "kite." It was the second word that had drawn John to the boy and he'd spent as much time as he dared in silent contemplation of the joys of kite-flying with Walid at his side.
Only Rodney seemed disconnected from children, but Deyn had gotten to him, too.
He thought about how starved they all were for the laughter of children, how vulnerable they were.
He tried to think about how a child could get past so many defenses that an adult couldn't, what Deyn had seen and heard, how dangerous Deyn could be. He tried. But his mind rebelled at the thought. Deyn was a child-- innocent, smiling, helpless, charming, curious... unnaturally intelligent, mysterious, silent.
He couldn't be. He couldn't.
Carson stepped out of the infirmary and sat down heavily.
"So how is he?" John asked, feeling torn in two by equal parts worry about the boy and fear of him.
"Physically, he seems to be fine. But he's in some sort of catatonic state."
"Kavanaugh?" Rodney asked.
"We've got him sedated. I don't know what to make of him, but his sudden awakening exactly coincides with Deyn's picking up that device and being hurt by it. I had Bates check the time stamps on the security recordings. There's some sort of connection between the two. If this child is some sort of... wraith spy..."
"Was the device right?" John asked.
Carson considered them and sighed. "Human DNA is around 96% identical to wraith DNA. Teyla with her unusual heritage sits at just under 97% similarity. Deyn... Deyn is over 98%."
Radek started swearing in Czech.
"So, he might, in fact, be a threat," John concluded.
"He also has the ATA gene."
"Some sort of... hybrid, like Teyla?" Rodney speculated.
"There's one more thing," Carson said. "It will take time for me to run a complete analysis, but so far as I can tell, his genetic code is clean."
"I don't understand," Elizabeth said.
"Let me explain. Each of us carries a large number of mutations. For most of us, those mutations are to non-essential segments of our DNA or to areas with high duplication so the correct sequences compensate for the error. One example, on average, a person carries the genes for six fatal inherited diseases. It's just that most of them are so incredibly rare, that the odds of us having children with another carrier are quite slim. Some," he nodded to Radek, "aren't so lucky."
"Okay, so you're saying we all have very... messy DNA?" Elizabeth asked.
Carson nodded. "Except for Deyn. All those copying errors and mutations that we pass on from generation to generation, they aren't there in his code."
"So, he's a clone," John said.
Carson shook his head. "A clone still has all the mutations of the one he's cloned from. Usually a few more, actually, because even Asgard cloning technology isn't perfect and errors creep in. No, he's just... perfect. A perfect human being. It's as if someone sat down to create a human being from scratch, mixing in some wraith and Ancient genes. This boy wasn't conceived by human parents. He was built."
They all stood and stared at each other until Radek asked the question in all their minds. "But, built by whom and for what purpose?"
And suddenly, John was very, very afraid.
Author: SGAtlantisLight
Characters: McKay, Sheppard, Beckett, Zelenka, Weir, Kavanaugh, Lorne, Cadman, Parrish, Brown
Relationships: McKay/Sheppard, Zelenka/Beckett, Lorne/Cadman, Parrish/Brown
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Het sex, genetic technobabble
Spoilers: None
Summary: Part 33 of the Broken Series
Disclaimer: The characters, the setting, etc. are NOT mine, even if I wish they were.
He had stopped playing after running through Cascades and A Picture of Her Face, two other Joplin numbers he'd learned when his piano teacher discovered his love of the composer's style. He'd joined them on the couch, kicking off his shoes and lying sideways across it, Laura in his arms, his white-socked feet propped into David Parrish's lap, where one of Katie's hands traced the curves of his toes and heel and arch lazily as they sat tangled together.
"We should go somewhere more private," Laura said.
"In time," her lover answered. "We really don't need to rush things."
She rolled her eyes. "If it had been left up to you, you'd still be spending the nights with only your right hand as company!"
He glared at her, but there wasn't much heat in it. "Oversharing, Laura."
She snorted. "Ethan, we're talking about watching each other and you're worried about oversharing?"
"Hey, I'm not the voyeur-slash-exhibitionist in this relationship."
"Speaking of oversharing," David said, "I'm curious why you don't call him Marcus."
"Ex-boyfriend," Laura answered. "Besides, I think Ethan's sexier."
"It's dorky," Lorne said.
"Sexy," she shot back.
"Dorky and about two centuries out of date."
"Katie, David," Laura said, turning to the other two, "what do you say-- sexy or dorky?"
"Sexy," Katie answered at the same time that David answered, "Dorky."
Laura stuck her tongue out at David. "Okay, Katie and I'll call him Ethan and you go on calling him Marcus."
"Well, it was the name I married him under," David answered with a grin.
"Oh, please don't bring that up again!" Lorne begged.
"Say," Laura said, "I never did tell you how hilarious you were last night."
"Thank you. I did a semester of Dramatic Arts before my parents talked some sense into me," David answered.
"Really? We should so get a drama group together. Washington said they found a theatre the last time out. We could use the entertainment."
"What would we do?" Katie asked. "We'd have to order scripts."
"I think I might have The Importance of Being Earnest and some Shakespeare," David said.
"What's this 'we,' kemosabe?" Lorne said. "No way am I getting up on stage, especially if you're doing Shakespeare."
"There are some great fight scenes," Laura pointed out.
"Nope. Not going to happen. Bad enough I went and married David here. My manly image would never recover if I started prancing across the stage in tights, fight scenes or no."
The other three laughed.
"So..." Laura said, "some place more private?"
"God, how did I get involved with such a perv?" Lorne asked the universe at large.
Laura grabbed his sweatshirt front and pulled him up to kiss him. He didn't seem to mind in the least.
***
John dropped the Magnetix pyramid and it shattered on the floor, balls and coloured rods spinning off in all directions, as he reached for Deyn. Carson practically vaulted the table to get to his charge, sending trays scattering. Radek attempted the more normal route around the table, stepped on a couple of balls and went down hard. Elizabeth merely stood, shocked and blanching.
Rodney yelled as he saw John reach for the device still clutched in Deyn's hand. "Wait, don't!"
John froze and realised Rodney's concern. He stopped Carson before the doctor could touch the boy, and then grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair, thrusting his hands into the cloth to insulate him. He grasped the device and wrenched it free.
Deyn's screaming died and he went completely limp. Carson cradled the boy's head in his lap, checking vitals as he activated his headset, calling for a medical team. A trickle of blood ran from Deyn's nose, bright red against unnaturally white skin.
John glanced down at the device and saw symbols scrolling across its surface. He didn't read very much Ancient, but there was one word he thought he recognised. "Rodney, tell me what this says."
His husband dropped beside him and studied the characters, sucking in his breath. "No fucking way!"
"Rodney, what does it say?"
Rodney met his eyes. "It says, 'Wraith DNA detected. Telepathic link severed.'"
Just then, Kavanaugh dashed through the doorway, eyes wild and desperate, and ran to the knot of personnel surrounding them, pushing people aside carelessly, until he got to the boy's side where he dropped to the floor and, with a warning glare at Carson, gathered Deyn into his arms. "I'm here," he murmured. "I'm here. It's okay... it's going to be okay..."
***
As David curled up behind Katie, Laura slipped her hand inside her friend's hand. Katie smiled at her in an exhausted, sated way.
"Wow," Laura said, having no other words.
"Told you it was okay," Katie said.
David chuckled and slipped his arm around his lover, and closed slender and talented fingers over the two women's hands. He looked over at his teammate, who was staring at him in awe. He raised his eyebrows in silent question.
"Goddamn, Dave," Lorne said, voice full of wonder. "I thought I was good with my hands and mouth, but you... Damn!"
"Compensation," the other man answered.
Major Lorne was David Parrish's team leader; he had seen much of his medical record and knew Parrish had been badly injured in a car wreck when he was twelve. But the record merely indicated that the doctors had rebuilt his shattered pelvis and, other than some pain during wet weather, it hadn't affected the botanist's mobility. The other damage hadn't been germane to Parrish's job performance and wasn't part of the record Lorne had access to.
Then Laura had come from one of her late night girl talks with Katie and asked him if he knew, when they had gotten the two botanists together, that Parrish couldn't.
"Couldn't?" he'd asked.
She'd rolled her eyes. "Apparently not," she'd said and then mentioned the accident, but wouldn't elaborate.
Lorne had pulled up Parrish's record and re-read. He'd thought about the sort of accident that left a boy's pelvis shattered and about the soft tissue damage that would imply. He considered the delicate network of tiny blood vessels involved in preparing him for his favourite private activity. He thought about the impossibility of repairing all those connections.
And for the next week, whenever he looked at David Parrish, all he could think about was that Parrish couldn't. It made him uncomfortable to know something so intimate. It made him pity David for what he was missing. It made him angry at a universe that could leave such a great guy in such a state.
And then David and Katie had sat Laura and him down and told them it was okay, really. There had been options involving things with hand pumps and surgical implantations and so on, but David had decided that until he had a lover who wanted it, he wasn't concerned. Katie was okay with what they had now.
Laura had been unconvinced. Lorne had told her, and them, that it was really none of his business anyway.
And somehow, because David and Katie knew Laura was a bit of a voyeur and would be comfortable watching and being watched, they'd suggested this. It had taken a couple of months of reassurances and coaxing. And then, dear Lord, he and Laura already had been done in and boneless from their own exertions, watching with something fast-approaching religious awe as David's fingers and mouth had reduced Katie to a screaming, writhing, sustained climax for a second and then a third time. As Katie still laid in wordless stupefaction, David had sat up, grasped his still-soft member with one hand while pinching his nipples with the other and with a couple of quick jerks brought himself to climax, semen spilling over his hand and onto his legs.
It was still horribly unfair that Parrish couldn't, but 'compensation' didn't begin to describe what they'd just seen.
"I don't suppose you could give me some pointers," Lorne asked, only half-joking.
"Oo!" Laura squeaked. "That would involve more of this, wouldn't it? I'd go for that any day."
***
They had sat in silence-- guilt, fear, recriminations, uncertainty, worry, and a thousand other emotions passing silently among them.
Radek had paced, wringing his hands, and John had thought about the pictures of Radek's family he'd seen and specifically of Vilem, Radek's middle child-- fair-haired and with a charming smile and his father's pale blue eyes. If it weren't for the eyes, Deyn could be mistaken for a member of the Zelenka family. The family Radek missed terribly.
He'd seen pictures of Carson's family gatherings, with cousins gathered into his lap, joyous and laughing.
He'd seen the pictures of children Elizabeth sponsored through Children International and knew she wrote each and every one of them, even when Atlantis had been cut off from Earth.
He thought about the Afghani orphanage not far from where he'd been stationed and how the children would surround the American military men and beg for gum and attention. He remembered the dark-eyed Walid, quick to smile, who spoke no English beyond the words "gum" and "kite." It was the second word that had drawn John to the boy and he'd spent as much time as he dared in silent contemplation of the joys of kite-flying with Walid at his side.
Only Rodney seemed disconnected from children, but Deyn had gotten to him, too.
He thought about how starved they all were for the laughter of children, how vulnerable they were.
He tried to think about how a child could get past so many defenses that an adult couldn't, what Deyn had seen and heard, how dangerous Deyn could be. He tried. But his mind rebelled at the thought. Deyn was a child-- innocent, smiling, helpless, charming, curious... unnaturally intelligent, mysterious, silent.
He couldn't be. He couldn't.
Carson stepped out of the infirmary and sat down heavily.
"So how is he?" John asked, feeling torn in two by equal parts worry about the boy and fear of him.
"Physically, he seems to be fine. But he's in some sort of catatonic state."
"Kavanaugh?" Rodney asked.
"We've got him sedated. I don't know what to make of him, but his sudden awakening exactly coincides with Deyn's picking up that device and being hurt by it. I had Bates check the time stamps on the security recordings. There's some sort of connection between the two. If this child is some sort of... wraith spy..."
"Was the device right?" John asked.
Carson considered them and sighed. "Human DNA is around 96% identical to wraith DNA. Teyla with her unusual heritage sits at just under 97% similarity. Deyn... Deyn is over 98%."
Radek started swearing in Czech.
"So, he might, in fact, be a threat," John concluded.
"He also has the ATA gene."
"Some sort of... hybrid, like Teyla?" Rodney speculated.
"There's one more thing," Carson said. "It will take time for me to run a complete analysis, but so far as I can tell, his genetic code is clean."
"I don't understand," Elizabeth said.
"Let me explain. Each of us carries a large number of mutations. For most of us, those mutations are to non-essential segments of our DNA or to areas with high duplication so the correct sequences compensate for the error. One example, on average, a person carries the genes for six fatal inherited diseases. It's just that most of them are so incredibly rare, that the odds of us having children with another carrier are quite slim. Some," he nodded to Radek, "aren't so lucky."
"Okay, so you're saying we all have very... messy DNA?" Elizabeth asked.
Carson nodded. "Except for Deyn. All those copying errors and mutations that we pass on from generation to generation, they aren't there in his code."
"So, he's a clone," John said.
Carson shook his head. "A clone still has all the mutations of the one he's cloned from. Usually a few more, actually, because even Asgard cloning technology isn't perfect and errors creep in. No, he's just... perfect. A perfect human being. It's as if someone sat down to create a human being from scratch, mixing in some wraith and Ancient genes. This boy wasn't conceived by human parents. He was built."
They all stood and stared at each other until Radek asked the question in all their minds. "But, built by whom and for what purpose?"
And suddenly, John was very, very afraid.