Icelus
4/5
Beckett was out of surgery and on the way to
his office when Rodney limped into the infirmary. Beckett explained
willingly and without unnecessary medical terms what he had
done and what had made surgery necessary, even though a valve
in Sheppard’s head was something Rodney still had troubles
grasping.
“Will there be …” he trailed
off, not quite daring to voice the question that had been in
his mind ever since Beckett had first mentioned brain surgery.
There was just too much that could have gone wrong. One false
move, one inattentive nurse and Sheppard could be …
“Don’t assume worst-case-scenario,
Rodney. The haematoma was slowly accumulating after the skull-fracture
occurred, that means that the pressure on the major’s
brain hasn’t been the same the whole time he was missing.
You found him just in time to prevent the worst. The ancient
medical devices did their part to ensure a clean, safe surgery.”
Beckett smiled. “He’ll throw a fit when he finds
out we had to shave a part of his head, but there won’t
be any kind of brain damage.”
Rodney shakily reached for the bed behind him
and sat down. “Oh, thank god.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, collecting
himself, trying to bring up his rapidly crumbling walls. “When
can I see him?” he asked when he opened his eyes again,
glad that his voice had taken on its usual impatient tone.
Beckett ran a hand up and down his lower arm,
pondering. “With the ZPM powering the infirmary properly,
we could initialise the medical equipment that had been dormant
so far. There was no handbook on how to use ancient medical
technology, but from what I gleaned from the interface, it should
--”
“Whoa, wait, hold on.” Rodney’s
gaze snapped up. “Are you telling me that you connected
with the city?”
Beckett blushed and ducked his head.
“Carson?”
“Not with the city, no. With the infirmary.
”
“How?”
He saw Beckett shudder as the other man remembered.
“Not voluntarily at first. It was as if the infirmary
was sensing that we couldn’t handle the amount of injured
by ourselves. It connected when I was scanning a critical patient.”
Watching Beckett reminisce made the hair on Rodney’s arms
stand on edge. “There was this blinding flash of …
of knowledge, suddenly, of which devices to use to
speed up the recovery, to help patients we would have lost otherwise.”
“So, like the control-chair?”
“No, not like that at all. The chair is
abrupt and frankly quite scary. This was different. More like
someone taking your hand and putting the required tool in them.”
There was more Beckett didn’t mention.
Rodney had the distinct feeling that he was just getting a sugar-coated
version of the actual happenings. Scientific curiosity got the
better of him: “Has anybody else been able to connect
with the infirmary?”
Beckett shook his head. “Just me. I didn’t
let anybody else try.”
“Proprietary much?”
The other man sighed. “Protective much.
My gene is natural and already the connection nearly had me
blacking out.”
Rodney drew his eyebrows together, confused.
“Why?”
“Dilution. The city has to make a much
greater effort to connect with those of us with a weaker gene.
It’s causing quite a strong reaction in the body of the
person it’s trying to connect with.”
“What kind of reaction?”
Beckett looked away, busying himself with straightening
some wrapped syringes on a nearby table. “It’s not
important.”
“If it wasn’t important you’d
let others try as well, so what’s happening?”
“I told you it’s not important.
It’s just between me and the infirmary, which means it’s
all voodoo to you anyway, so --”
“Carson.” Evasive Beckett was never
a good sign, and Rodney was momentarily distracted from watching
the ICU over Beckett’s shoulder. “What happens when
you connect with the infirmary?”
Beckett turned away from him fully, his gaze
locked on the ICU. The shoulders under the white lab-coat drooped
slightly. “Imagine a long hot needle driven straight through
your skull into your brain.” He breathed out, hands clenching
the table until his knuckles went white. “Imagine all
your muscles seizing up in the most painful spasms you’ll
ever experience.”
Rodney’s mind went blank for a moment,
trying to cope with what he’d just been told. “But
why didn’t we notice that when you sat in the control
chair?”
Flashing a wry grin in his direction, Beckett
said: “Why do you think I didn’t want to get in
it?”
“Oh.” Rodney couldn’t think
of a better answer. “So how do you …”
“It gets better with practice. And the
infirmary is a much gentler connector than the chair.”
Beckett turned toward the ICU, nodding to Dr.
Biro who was checking the vital signs and adjusting the IV.
“To come back to your initial question, it shouldn’t
take more than a week for him to heal fully, now that the medical
devices are all working. You should be able to visit him once
he’s stable.”
And Beckett was clever, very clever. Bringing
up the major’s recovery was sure to stop all other thoughts,
all other questions regarding Beckett and the infirmary. Bringing
it up made sure Rodney didn’t ask any more questions because
his brain was preoccupied with the how and the why and the when
and why not right now of the majors recovery. He recognised
the ruse but let it go, didn’t want to argue now.
“How about we have a look at your feet
now?” Another distraction.
“Hm?” His feet were the last thing
he had thought about when he came here.
Beckett crouched in front of him, removing the
heavy boots from Rodney’s feet. He sucked in a sharp breath
when he examined the soles. “You should have come earlier.”
Rodney waved a hand distractedly. “More
important things.”
“He’s safe now, Rodney. Time to
get back to your old, hypochondriac self.”
He just stared at Beckett as if the other man
had lost his mind, the joke lost on him.
Beckett rose, moving with a tired calm to retrieve
bandages and antiseptic. “Since I didn’t manage
to: who told you about the Major, anyway?” he asked when
he motioned for Rodney to turn on the bed and rest his legs
in an elevated position.
“Hm?” The question seemed inane,
but Rodney answered for the sake of politeness. “Elizabeth.”
“How was she?” Beckett asked seemingly
casual while cleaning the cuts on Rodney’s feet.
“Fine,” he answered, not really
caring about small-talk any longer. His gaze was glued to the
prone figure in the ICU.
“Rodney.”
His attention wandered back to Beckett. “What?”
“I want to know how she was. How she looked
like.”
Disbelief and ire bubbled up, triggering a well-oiled
reaction. “Good heavens, Carson, if you want to propose
to her do it yourself and don’t make me your Cyrano. Makes
my teeth ache.”
Pain lanced through him when the antiseptic
touched a deep cut. He inhaled sharply. That had almost felt
like a retribution.
“Are you completely daft, man?”
Beckett’s eyes were narrow and incredulous.
“Why? Hit too close to home? I can send
her to your door next time she comes to me. I really don’t
want to deal with her now anyway.” He couldn’t contain
the smug, self-satisfied grin from spreading over his face.
Beckett breathed deeply. In a way that reminded
Rodney uncomfortably of their last argument. “You incredibly
stupid, egotistic arse,” Beckett finally ground out.
Rodney blinked. He had never heard Beckett swear
in earnest before. Never this personal, this deliberately degrading
at any rate. “What?”
Beckett finished cleaning the cuts and reached
for the bandages. His every movement oozed anger. “I only
released Dr. Weir from this infirmary yesterday. She is on active
duty against my express warning and she’s not reporting
back to me about her status and I have simply been too busy
to check up on her. So when I’m asking how she is, I’m
not joking.”
The steel was back in Beckett’s eyes and
Rodney felt the distinct urge to cross his arms in front of
him to shield the hostility.
“She looked pale, okay? And tired. I didn’t
really look for more, given …” He stopped, his attention
snared by a movement in the ICU.
“Given what?”
Rodney looked back to the major where a nurse
was currently changing bandages. God, he looked so damn small
in that bed. Too slim under the covers, too --
“Given what, Rodney?” Beckett’s
voice was insistent, allowed no lapse on Rodney’s part.
Rodney breathed out, refusing for it to sound
like a sigh. “We had an argument.”
“You what?”
“An argument. Are you deaf?”
Beckett bandaged his feet with calm professionalism,
not letting any of his anger slip into the task at hand. His
voice - the eerie upper-class English enunciation again - was
an entirely different matter, however. “Are you aware
that I had Elizabeth in for a perforated ulcer until yesterday?”
Well. That had been nothing short of spectacular. He was sure
that the entire city would be talking about the heated argument
he’d had with Beckett. That the doctor had more or less
manhandled him through the corridors and into his room didn’t
help matters of secrecy much.
At the moment, though, Rodney couldn’t
have cared less.
Yes, he knew he should feel sorry for Elizabeth,
and in a way, he did, after all, he was angry with her, but
not heartless. But didn’t Beckett understand that Rodney
had a right to his anger? The betrayal, a betrayal Carson had
been part of, still stung. The fact that Elizabeth had let the
major go still was an open wound. The fact that she’d
written the eulogy two days after the major’s disappearance
and had exiled him from Atlantis without even listening to his
side was a handful of salt in that wound.
He had a right to be angry with her. Angry with
anyone. Angry with himself.
If only, a small part of his mind insisted,
because it kept him on his feet.
And then there was the matter of those dreams.
He believed in prophetic dreams as much as he believed in the
Easter bunny. So there had to be more to them. But what? Was
there even the remote chance that the city was responsible for
that strange connection?
Rodney shifted on his bed, feet carefully propped
up. The room was almost dark and the low hum of the city around
him, a city that was now alive and thriving on the fully charged
ZPM, should have been soothing. However, it did nothing to soothe
him tonight. It gnawed at him, the knowledge that he didn’t
know exactly what had happened.
His mind went from newly functioning systems
to Beckett and his connection with the infirmary and immediately
wondered of the major had ever felt any pain when he sat down
in the control chair. But thinking back on their first meeting,
on that look of stunned wonder, Rodney knew that John Sheppard
had never had the same problems Beckett had faced. The city
seemed to know him and to welcome him. And, god, was it ever
irritating. The military man simply had to wave his hand where
the scientist had to work long and hard to make the equipment
respond to him, and even then, it never seemed to do what it
was supposed to quite willingly. In fact, the city sometimes
acted like a spoiled child, only wanting its favourite toy and
nothing else.
When the blip of Sheppard’s jumper on
the external sensors had gone out, Rodney had been sure he’d
heard something like a wail of pain in the claxon of the alarms.
Even fully powered, the city’s systems
had been cumbersome, the shield only integrating reluctantly.
Like a child, petulant without its toy. Like a lover, bereft
of what was most dear to him.
Now that Sheppard was back, he’d heard
people talk about how much energy was being re-routed to the
infirmary. Again, Atlantis slowed down for John Sheppard. Waited
with baited breath. Tried its best to un-break the toy. To mend
the lover.
Rodney had noticed changes in his own quarters
as well. They were warmer, the shower more gentle, the connection
between his laptop and the consoles faster. It almost felt as
if Atlantis was grateful.
But this entire line of thinking was absurd.
Wasn’t it?
Was it possible at all that Atlantis had tried
to connect Sheppard with him because it sensed that the major
was still alive, but out of reach and without a radio? But why
hadn’t it tried to contact someone else? Why not simply
stick a rescue operation demand on the main screen in the control
room? Or on every single screen in the damn city, for that matter?
With the ZPM fully charged and the city coming more and more
to life, it should have been easy.
Thoughts racing behind his forehead, he reached
for a glass of water on a table next to his bed. The monitor
of his laptop went into screensaver mode, a row of equation
running from top to the bottom of the screen, melting, dissolving
then coming up again. His hand froze halfway when realisation
hit.
The city had tried to tell them. In fact, it
had tried hard. Only by that time, he’d already been awake
for four days and had thought it an overload in one of the computer
consoles and had - in a long and complicated operation - shut
the section of the mainframe creating the strange images on
every screen in the city down.
A headache began to spread from the back of
his head to the front when he realised that that had been the
city’s first attempt at a cry for help on Sheppard’s
behalf.
He didn’t know if it had tried to contact
anyone else in another way. If it had, no one had understood
it or considered it off enough to come see him about it.
And the dreams of falling and stumbling and
burning had started after the misguided attempt of fixing the
city.
However, the idea of Atlantis somehow planting
what was happening to Sheppard into Rodney’s brain was
too remote to be even considered a possibility. Why him, for
example? And how had it managed to reach him on the mainland,
hundreds of kilometres away from the city? And once again, and
most importantly: why him?
Because you were the first. You have the
gene of the one that is dear to us. Because you never believed.
The city’s reasons were clear and Rodney
remembered now. Remembered Beckett telling him that he had refined
the gene therapy after the personal shield incident. But was
his gene really that different from the others? Did it connect
him to Sheppard? The thought alone was as frightening as it
was fascinating.
But it all boiled down to that one thing again:
Sheppard. He couldn’t even think without having him pop
up at every niche and corner. And as long as he thought and
none of his questions were answered, he’d never get any
of the sleep Beckett insisted he got.
Earlier, in the halls, when Beckett had dragged
him along, he’d heard the awed voices of a group of military
men and scientists, talking about what a miracle it was that
the major was still alive and that he was truly a hero. Hero.
Rodney had felt the need to punch every single one of them.
A kamikaze act didn’t equal courage or intelligence or
heroism. It was nothing but an unnecessary sacrifice, a waste
of a good man, of knowledge, of potential, of… a friend.
Damn Sheppard for that, too. Rodney had been
perfectly fine without friends. He hadn’t wanted any.
Didn’t want to belong, didn’t want the feeling of
someone looking out for him or being there for him. And yet
here he was. Caring because Sheppard had cared. Holding on to
that unlikely friendship for dear life.
He’d never wanted it. Yet he had never
wanted anything more than that.
He was tired of all this. Tired of worrying,
of his thoughts racing, of caring, of being awake. And whose
fault was that? Who had prompted all of this?
Sheppard. Always Sheppard.
Damn him.
Rodney pushed his feet off the bed and winced
when he stood. But determination won. Enough was enough. He’d
end this. Now.
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