Rating: PG+
Characters: Sheppard, McKay
Synopsis: Atlantis is on the fritz and it may be Sheppard's fault. Too bad he isn't in his right mind to confirm it. For
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karri_kln1671 who wanted a sick Sheppard, fritzy Atlantis and Rodney at his wits end trying to figure out what's wrong. John and Rodney friendship. Plus John in restraints, yay!What Dreams
John stared at his image in the mirror. The image stared back with sunken eyes and pale cheeks. He lifted his hand to his bare chest, pressing it over his heart, and was amazed that it was still beating. The face in the mirror didn't look alive - he didn't feel alive, and could have sworn he'd be dead by now. He could see the faint shape of his ribs in the skin of his flanks and wondered how he could be losing weight – he was never hungry. Besides, the dead don't eat.
So the mirror was lying to him. Turning away, John staggered from the bathroom toward the bed, hiking his sweatpants higher up his waist only for them to slip back down and hang precariously from his hips.
“Sheppard! Open this damn door right now!”
Shivering, John slipped beneath the covers and pulled them up to his neck. He was too tired to listen to the voices today. He'd also learned his lesson the last four times he had listened – opening the door to bodies on the floor and blood on the walls, always bodies and blood: dried up, rotting and stinking.
“Sheppard! I know you can hear me!”
I can hear you, Rodney. Rodney always wanted in, except he never came in because he was a dried, skeletal husk just outside of John's room. He must have died trying to warn John, maybe had even been the last to die. John shivered again, but only because he was still cold. He'd gotten used to the bodies.
“McKay! He isn't going to answer. Just open the stupid door,” Ronon growled, although Ronon was dead, too.
“I'm trying! What ever fail-safe protocol thing this is, it's staying one step ahead of me. I'd have an easier time if Sheppard would just open the friggin' door already!”
John curled tighter, pulling the blanket over his head to muffle the voices. He was so tired, every limb leadened and every muscle about as solid as wet mud. He could hear his heart beating heavy and sluggish in his chest, and wished it would just stop already.
“I've got it! Go!”
“Sheppard!”
The blankets were yanked away to let the cold air dump onto his body and soak through his skin to his bones. A few twitches and a ripple of goosebumps across his flesh was all the reaction John's body could produce. He felt hot hands on his arms, back, chest and the uncomfortable pressure of two fingers against the skin of his neck. He knew he should have been startled, terrified, and he was, but he was just too tired to react.
“His pulse is thready,” said dead Keller. “His skin is like ice!”
“Sheppard!” dead Ronon called, squeezing his shoulder.
“What's wrong with him?” demanded dead Rodney.
“John?” dead Teyla.
All dead, all vivid memories that only existed in dreams. The blanket returned blocking out most of the chill. Then the hands spread over his body, lifting him from one soft surface to another, and he didn't care. Let them take him, do what they will with him – hopefully make him just as dead as the others. He deserved it.
They were dead because of him, because he'd failed. He'd killed them, all of them. He'd killed all of Atlantis.
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Rodney was going to kill Atlantis. Possibly kill Sheppard, too, if he were the one behind all of this. Since Rodney couldn't be sure, he let his anger settle on the city, doubled if it was the city making Sheppard sick.
Getting Sheppard to the infirmary was the same slow going as trying to get to the colonel's quarters, but with the added bonus of urgency bringing Rodney's frantic efforts to open the doors to a crawl. It was a two-part battle – bypass the codes keeping the doors shut, then bypassing the codes that would shut the doors after three minutes. The problem was that Rodney didn't have time for the second, not with Ronon breathing down his neck and the thought of Sheppard's slow heart-rate ticking at the back of his mind.
“Get a move on it, McKay,” Ronon growled. Rodney didn't waste precious thinking seconds to come up with a scathing retort. He typed fast until he could feel his fingers start to cramp, racing invisible signals with no way of knowing if he was ahead until the door opened.
The door opened. Rodney yanked the connectors and hurried to the next barrier.
“Dr. McKay?” Keller called. “You need to hurry. Colonel Sheppard's temperature is dropping.”
Rodney gritted his teeth until his jaw ached. Did they seriously think his current speed wasn't as fast as he was able to go? Were they honestly under the impression that he had no clue as to how bad the situation was? Once again ignoring them to the best of his ability, Rodney narrowed his existence down to him, the tablet, and the emergency protocol that had Atlantis in a lock-down that was twice as bad as a quarantine – this one not letting anyone go, ill or hale and healthy.
The next door proved less recalcitrant than the last, which was a dollop of luck since the infirmary was just down the hall on the other side. Once open, Rodney lurched to the side to avoid getting run over by the gurney and the med team. He wasn't needed for the infirmary doors that had already been programmed to stay open.
Rodney followed at a trot behind the medics. The moment they were in the infirmary, the team converged on Sheppard like jackals on a carcass, attaching wires, I.V.s and pulling an electric blanket up to his chest. The beep on the monitor was nerve-gratingly slow and Sheppard's face was perfect white turning his dark brown hair to obsidian black. He looked thinner, which he would considering he'd been holed up in his room for four days. But even before the lock-down Sheppard hadn't been showing much of an appetite, either eating light or skipping meals all together.
Crap, Rodney had been kidding when he'd said they'd probably find Sheppard nothing but skin and bones. Granted, this wasn't emaciation, but that didn't make it any less disturbing.
Sheppard hadn't answered his comm when they'd called, except once, to tell Rodney to stop talking to him because he thought Rodney was dead.
The heart monitor stuttered as though Sheppard's heart had tripped. Suddenly, abruptly, John's heart-rate skyrocketed turning the steady beeps into one continuous fluttering shrill. Sheppard jackknifed upright with head back and spine arched, screaming at the top of his lungs as his hands flailed.
“Nooooooooo! I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry...!” over and over and over again. It took the entire med team plus Ronon to pin John to the bed and hold him as Keller injected a needle full of sedative into the IV port.
Sheppard's body stilled and his heart-rate settled to normal resting rhythms. The silence that surrounded them was so sudden it felt thick, tainted only by the hear monitor, Sheppard's heaving breaths billowing his chest, and his continuing whispered litany of “I'm sorry.”
Rodney could see John's head from where he stood, so could see the tears pouring down the pilot's colorless face and the full-body trembling. But it was when Keller had the nurses wrap soft restraints around Sheppard's slender wrists that Rodney, suddenly nauseas, turned and bolted from the infirmary.
---------------------------------
“Where do we stand?” Carter certainly knew how to cut to the chase, which was good as Rodney was in no mood for their third staff meeting of the day: an impromptu conference spawned into being by Sheppard's turn for the worst possibly coinciding with the activation of the uber-quarantine protocols. The last anyone had seen of Sheppard, before the quarantine, had been after dinner, when –- looking pale and exhausted -- he'd told his team that he was turning in early. The very next morning, every door on Atlantis refused to open, the 'gate stayed quiet no matter how many times they dialed, and the city's shield was up.
As to which came first – the quarantine or Sheppard's bad health – was the million dollar question.
Rodney gave himself a two-fingered massage between the eyes. He was in desperate need of another cup of coffee, currently denied to him thanks to Keller's “intervention.” She was quite convinced that she had yet to see Rodney without a cup in his hand, and would prefer not to have to treat him for hypertension.
The woman was a tyrant – an obnoxious, perky tyrant.
“We managed to get every vital door open,” Rodney said. “Labs, chair room, control room, infirmary and quarters. The 'gate and shield, on the other hand, being a hell of a lot larger than a door, are going to take more time. How much time, I can't say. Right now we're trying to kill two birds with one stone. We have people working on trying to get all systems restored and people working on each system one at a time. It all comes down to a matter of who gets finished first.”
“Have you determined the cause, yet?” Sam asked.
Rodney shook his head. “No. So far, we've been unable to locate the source. Considering if the source is, in fact, digital or mechanical and not, oh, say, more organic in nature.” He moved his gaze to Keller sitting across from him on the other side of the conference room between Lorne and Ronon. The longer this lock-down continued with no glitch, virus, or line of miswritten code to show for it, the more Rodney leaned toward Sheppard's health being the culprit.
Keller's face flickered with unease before settling into professional stoicism. “So far, Colonel Sheppard's blood-work has come back clean of any bacteria or virus. However, seven days ago he was given a hallucinogen for that ceremony – the one that,” she furrowed her brow at Ronon, “did what again?”
Ronon, who always managed to seem tense even when sprawled loose-limb all over a chair, replied with a dark look. “It's supposed to open a person up, make them more vulnerable and honest. Get 'em to express deepest wishes, hurts, fears – stuff like that. The Geffins won't talk to new-comers unless their leader or who ever in the group takes the drug so they can decide whether or not to trust 'em.”
“I ran tests from the samples the Geffins provided before Sheppard had taken it,” continued Keller. “The drug is harmless, non-addictive, but did have one teeny-tiny setback in that it can be slow to metabolize. The bigger the recipient of the drug, the slower it leaves the body. The Geffins warned us it might take a while for the colonel to metabolize it.”
“The tallest Geffin is five-foot,” Ronon tossed in.
Keller nodded. “So I wasn't surprised to find some of the chemical still in John's blood. I just don't think it's enough to cause... what ever it is that's happening to him. All I can figure is that, with the Colonel not being from this galaxy, let alone that planet, it's affecting him differently. He might be going through withdrawal.”
McKay frowned. So much for the it's-all-Sheppard's-fault theory. However, he couldn't shake the feeling that Sheppard's current state and the quarantine were somehow related, and he was a man who preferred settling on the simplest explanations. The timing was just too perfect and there were still protocols neither him nor Zelenka could place a purpose to. For all they knew, there were quarantines for every ailment from addictions to mild allergic reactions.
Although if that were true, then they should have become expert at bypassing all quarantine codes by now. It was just a theory, a dumb theory but better than no theory at all.
Sam leaned forward pressing her palms into the table. “All right, then. We keep working. The hows and whys aren't important. Getting the city to function and helping Colonel Sheppard is. Rodney, I want the 'gate up and running next in case we have to evacuate for any reason. Dr. Keller, I want a progress report on Sheppard's status if there's any change, any change at all, no matter how small. Dismissed.”
Everyone stood and began to disperse. Rodney clapped Zelenka on the shoulder before the Czek could join the flowing throng. “Get started on the 'gate console, I need to talk to Keller.” He then bolted from his seat, Zelenka stammering an “Oh, okay,” behind him, and walked side by side with Keller en route to the infirmary.
“I have a request -”
Keller scowled. “No coffee.”
“What? No, no... although you have no idea what the lack of caffeine is doing to me...”
“Preventing your heart from exploding.”
Rodney balked. “Caffeine can do that?”
Keller gave him a cherubic smirk. “I'm being metaphorical, McKay. Now what's your request – besides stimulants?”
“I want you to hook John up to an EEG.” When Keller opened her mouth to talk, Rodney raised his hand and stopped her before so much as a consonant could be formed. “I know, you don't think his current condition has anything to do with Atlantis going hair-wire. However, I think it prudent that we cover all the bases, just to play it safe. We could be looking at something entirely new, here – something that does have to do with Sheppard's health issues. You said it yourself – in so many words, of course – that you can't explain why this is happening to him.”
“I also said that it could be nothing more than a body reacting to an alien chemical resulting in a rather vicious withdrawal.” She gave Rodney a thoughtful look. “You weren't there when Sheppard was given the drug.”
It was an innocent enough statement according to the equally innocent expression on Keller's face. Yet Rodney still stiffened in indignation as though he were being accused.
“I was busy. Couldn't come. Had stuff to do,” he replied tersely. “It was a trade agreement, I wasn't needed.” Most of the missions had been trade agreements as of late, on backwards planets without so much as a single pillar decorated in Ancient writing or blip of an energy reading. Sheppard could poke, prod and cajole all he wanted but Rodney wasn't going to waste valuable time where he wasn't needed.
Not that there had been any deterring Sheppard from his poking, prodding and cajoling. The man was obsessively team oriented.
Keller raised both eyebrows. “Oh, okay. That's fine. I was just going to say it wasn't easy on him. I had to be there... well, not there there. I was there afterwards when he came out of that temple. He was pretty pale and agitated but otherwise seemed find – healthy, I mean.”
Rodney nodded rigidly. He recalled seeing Sheppard at dinner that same day. The Colonel had still been pale and twitchy, as well as a little too enthusiastic when Rodney had arrived, as though he hadn't seen Rodney for weeks. Sheppard had been insistent that Rodney join him for a movie or game of chess, but there'd still been repairs to make and things to recalibrate, and Rodney had just wanted to get it all over with.
That had been eight days ago.
On entering the infirmary, Rodney slowed and swallowed. Sheppard looked small underneath the pile of blankets, pale and tense, but at least his breathing was normal. Keller moved quickly to the beside to check the monitors. Satisfied, she waved Rodney over.
“He should remain sedated for another hour, so if we're going to do this, now's the time.”
Rodney nodded, hesitated a moment, then set up his laptop as Keller placed the sticky pads of the electrodes to John's forehead. Rodney's gaze kept darting too and from Sheppard, just waiting for Sheppard to burst to life in another delirious fit while pulling against the restraints. Just thinking about it made Rodney's stomach churn. It hadn't so much as been the fit that had bothered Rodney, but the look of terror on Sheppard's face and the utter soul-sinking despair in his voice. Rodney had never seen the pilot like that – not when being fed on by an iratus bug, not even when being fed on by a Wraith. It had just been so... raw.
“What is it we're looking for?” Keller asked.
Rodney typed fast. His mind was crowded with other places that he could be and other individual systems needing to be tackled, leaving him partially distracted. “Anything out of the ordinary.”
Keller coughed a laugh. “Define out of the ordinary?”
“Anything the brain is doing that a normal, sleeping brain wouldn't do,” Rodney replied testily. “You're the doctor. You're the one who knows what to look for.”
“Jeez, sorry. Just trying to clarify, here.” She started placing items on the tray by the bed – two syringes, blood pressure cuff, and more wires and sticky pads. She then drew blood from Sheppard's arm. “I need to drop this off at the lab to make sure they get an early start on it. I'll be right back.”
Keller wandered off leaving Rodney alone with a still comatose Sheppard. He set up the scanner last used to determine Ascension readiness – just in case.
“You'd better not be trying to check out on us, Colonel,” Rodney muttered. “Or I'll get Ronon to Ascend after you and kick your ass.” His hand brushed across the cool skin of Sheppard's forehead when he adjust the device. Sheppard shivered, his chest heaving when he sucked in a deep breath. The heart monitor picked up speed, making Rodney still and his own heart double-time it.
“Sh-Sheppard?”
Sheppard's head rolled back and forth as his eyes flickered open, rolling around in his skull until finally settling on McKay.
Rodney smiled tremulously, swallowing to moisten his suddenly dry throat. “H-hey Sheppard. It's about time you woke up, Beauty-sleep is highly over-rate -”
John's eyes rounded so wide Rodney could see every blood-shot vein in the whites. He began to struggle, breathing fast as the monitor shrilled about the escalating heart-rate.
Every muscle in Rodney's body pulled rock solid, his own heart skipping beats in rising panic. “Sheppard? Sheppard, is something wrong?” He reached out slowly with a shaking hand as he'd always seen Keller do whenever Sheppard was agitated.
When his hand pressed against Sheppard's shoulder, Sheppard screamed. Startled, Rodney lurched back and yelped when he slammed into something solid and electric that sent pins and needles up his spine.
“What the hell!” He whipped around, slamming his hand into a surface that sparked blue with each blow, Sheppard still screaming bloody-murder behind him. Alarms screamed and half the infirmary came running only to repel back when they hit the shield.
“Rodney, what the hell!” Keller shouted, rubbing her shoulder that had struck the shield first. “What is this!”
“I don't know!”
“Turn it off!”
“I – I can't, I don't know where it came from. Sheppard started screaming, this popped up and he won't stop screaming!”
Keller jabbed a stiff finger in the direction of the table. “The second syringe! Tap it and inject it into the I.V. port, now!”
Rodney grabbed the syringe, turned and froze when his eyes locked with Sheppard's stare of abject horror as though Rodney were a wraith about to feed. The colonel was thrashing, arms tensing and pulling against the restraints until the entire bed rattled.
“McKay!” Keller yelled. Rodney flinched and fumbled with the syringe until finally sliding it into the port and injecting it. Seconds stretched as the medicine took effect, first quieting the screams, then sending Sheppard back into unconsciousness. The last look in Sheppard's eyes before they closed was child-like fear.
Panting, heart racing, Rodney dropped the syringe and whipped back around. “Get me the hell out of here!”
Keller slapped her palm into the shield and yelped when it sparked. “How? Where the hell did this come from?”
“I don't know!” Rodney grabbed his scanner from beside his laptop on the rolling table and waved it before the forcefield. “I don't even know where the hell it's coming from. Get Zelenka in here, now!”
Keller nodded curtly, backing up a few steps and activating her comm. “Control, this is Keller, we have a situation...”
The scanner didn't tell Rodney anything except that the shield was indeed a shield and that it was indeed coming from Atlantis, just not anywhere specific. Zelenka arrived at a run five minutes later, with Sam, Ronon and Teyla trailing close behind.
“Rodney, what did you do?” Radek admonished, dropping his equipment on the nearest bed.
Rodney fumed. “What did I do? What the hell do you mean what did I do! The whole damn city is on a quarantine rampage and yet you still manage to assume that the newest development is my fault, I -”
“Rodney. Rodney. Rodney! Be bitchy later. Tell me what happened.”
Rodney gestured sharply in Sheppard's direction. “He freaked and a shield popped up, that's what happened. I -” Realizing what he'd just said, Rodney spun around to his computer already having taken readings of Sheppard's brain waves, and scrolled back over the last few minutes. With a crow of triumph, he stabbed his finger at the screen.
“I knew it! Sheppard's brain did go hyperactive the moment the shield went up. There is a connection, I was right!”
“Which helps us very little,” said Radek as he connected wires to the crystals of the nearest panel, which happened to be on the other side of the neighboring bed.
“Especially if it's Atlantis affecting Sheppard rather than the other way around,” added Keller. Ronon and Teyla stood uselessly off to the side, Ronon scowling and Teyla so worried that she seemed to be on the verge of tears, both hands resting on her protruding belly as though trying to garner reassurance from her womb. Rodney turned away to hide his grimace. That was all they needed – a pregnant and hormonal woman bursting into tears and possibly inducing labor.
That wasn't exactly fair, Rodney knew, but he was stressed, panicking, and when stressed and panicked he was entitled to the occasional tactless sexism as long as he didn't express that sexism out loud. Pregnant or not, Teyla could and would still kick his ass.
“Rodney,” Radek said, breaking Rodney from his rambling thoughts. “How is your breathing? The oxygen, is it good?”
Rodney rolled his eyes in ever increasing annoyance. “We already determined that the confinement shields allow for passage on a molecular level, which means no wanting for oxygen.”
“Unless this particular shield was designed to contain chemical spills, which means no passage on a molecular level, and that includes oxygen.”
Sagging, Rodney closed his eyes and whimpered out a sigh. “You know, sometimes I prefer it when we don't cover all the bases... out loud.”
“Would you rather I placate you with lies than prepare you for the worst?”
“Considering that there isn't much I can do on my end? Then yes, lie away.”
Zelenka gave him a pathetically reassuring smile. “Then you are probably right. The oxygen will pass in and out just fine.”
“And you have oxygen with you if it doesn't,” said Keller. “Enough to last the day for both you and Sheppard.”
Rodney smiled tightly. “Better... kind of.” Then he had another thought that made his heart nose-dive into his stomach. “Food. That doesn't solve the food issue and I'm going to need food. I only had breakfast!”
“Relax,” Radek said, typing quickly. “We'll have you out of there. And you have a Power bar.”
“I do not -!” Rodney slapped his pockets until coming up with two chocolate Power bars in his jacket. “Oh, I do. But they won't last.”
“They never do,” Radek mumbled.
“Hey! Shield, not wall. I can still hear you.”
Zelenka grinned smugly. “With nothing you can do about it.” Then he sobered, pouring all concentration into his current task. Rodney was left with nothing to do but pace back and forth in the small confines around Sheppard's bed. He pointed at Sheppard on his third half-circuit.
“This is all your fault, I know it.”
On his fourth circuit, he picked up the second syringe Keller had left on the table only to set it back down. He then looked the monitors over, reading numbers and patterns that meant nothing to him. It only managed to pass three minutes. He finally relented to sitting on the edge of John's bed and maintain his sanity with a game of Chess against his laptop.
“Rodney?”
Rodney startled, hitting the key at the wrong time and moving his knight to the wrong square, effectively opening the board to put his king in check. He pinned Zelenka with a glare.
“What?”
Zelenka, indifferent, pointed back over his shoulder. “I am having no luck. I do not think this shield is part of any of the immediate systems in the infirmary but, perhaps, something larger. There is that control station not far from here, the one you thought dealt with the plumbing.”
“Hey, I didn't hear you making any suggestions on what it might be,” Rodney snapped.
Radek pushed his glasses further up his nose. “But I did suggest we not jump to any conclusions. Perhaps there is something more to that control room, so I'm going to check it out.”
“And if there isn't?” Rodney said, feeling a little extra edgy and claustrophobic.
Zelenka gave a helpless shrug. “If bad comes to more bad, we can always do a city-wide shut-down and reboot the system.”
Edgy climbed another notch, becoming agitation. “Which I keep saying is not a good idea.”
“Again, if bad comes to more bad. I have people searching the database for directions and schematics. We will figure this out, Rodney. I promise.” With a reassuring smile, Zelenka went to unplug his equipment and take the diagnostics elsewhere, leaving Rodney relatively alone. Ronon and Teyla had left, most likely chased off by Keller to get something to eat, and Keller was no where in sight.
Rodney patted John's foot under the blanket. “Looks like it's just you and me, pal.”
Thankfully, Sheppard didn't stir.
TBC...
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 09:04 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 03:06 am (UTC)From:Anyway, don't mean to be nitpicky on my first comment (I've read and really enjoyed all your other work without commenting--sorry), but that's literally the only thing that bugged me in this. On to part 2!!
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Date: 2008-04-13 05:07 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 05:09 am (UTC)From: