-.-. --- -. -. . -.-. - .. --- -. by Mad Maudlin (Wish Fulfillment challenge)
Title: -.-. --- -. -. . -.-. - .. --- -.
Author: mad_maudlin
Rating: PG
Characters: Team + Jennifer and Radek, but focus on John and Rodney.
Spoilers: Set vaguely in the last two seasons but no specific episode spoilers
Summary: An accident offworld leaves Rodney feeling disconnected from the world around him. Luckily John and his friends are there.
A/N: So jennytork wished for a gen fic in which Rodney lost a sense and John helped him. Ms. Tork, I hope this meets expectations. Apologies to people who know more about Morse code than Wikipedia teaches, as I've probably offended you greatly. Thanks to ceilidh and marginaliana for beta reading!
-.-. --- -. -. . -.-. - .. --- -.
by Mad Maudlin
Rodney didn't know what hit him, literally. One minute they were trying to flush some looters armed with suspiciously Genii-looking firearms from the ruins of an Ancient lab, and Teyla was covering for him while he ran for a pillar with a better firing position, and something went pop--!
And the next minute he was blind.
He didn't figure it out right away, though. Even geniuses have their moments. When the world fell dark and silent around him, his first guess was that he'd been transported somewhere, somehow-stepped on a hidden trigger, accidentally touched some gene-sensitive crystal, that sort of thing. Just because there had been no itch or flash like the transporters of Atlantis, or even the Daedalus, didn't mean it hadn't happened; and so his first step, after a moment or two of frozen hyperventilation, was to trying and figure out where he was.
The ground felt like the same smooth stone someone had used to pave a courtyard around the lab, right down to the weedy cracks and joints that spoke of long neglect. But how could there be weeds growing in any place so dark? It was a velvety blackness, so profound he couldn't see the hands in front of his face, and he couldn't believe the place ever saw the sun. Directly ahead, he found a stout pillar, its chipped flutes catching on his fingers. Again, just like the courtyard where they'd been fighting the looters. It was even warm to the touch, though Rodney's instincts said any place this dark and silent should also be cold in order to have a thematically appropriate trifecta; the stone was warm, and so was he. Hot, even, because they were holding this fight in the hottest part of the day with the sun beating down on his very sensitive skin, so he could practically feel it crisping.
No, wait, he could feel it; could feel the heat, and the abrupt drop in temperature when his hand passed into where the shadow of the pillar would be. Except there shouldn't be a shadow because there wasn't any light, unless, unless he-
"Hello?" he blurted out, because in the dark he could feel the heat and smell gunpowder and something was wrong.
Very, very wrong, because he could feel the buzz in his throat when he spoke but he couldn't hear.
"Oh no no no no no," and he couldn’t hear that either, even though he knew his mouth was shaping the words. That popping noise, had it been a ricochet or something? Had he been shot? He felt his face, then his ears, but there was no blood-and anyway, even with ruptured eardrums, he should be able to hear something, vague buzzing at least. This was silence as profound as the darkness. He swept his hands back over his head and felt something, something hard and cold, caught in his hair, except when he tried to pull on it the sudden stab of pain went deep into his head, starting in the back and shooting around to his temples like a cinch.
"Okay, bad idea, not doing that again." He couldn't say why he was even talking, because it only reminded him that this was very, very bad. Blind and deaf. Blind and deaf. And in the middle of a battlefield, he suddenly couldn't think of how many looters there had been or where John and Ronon had been relative to him or even where Teyla was now, because he was suddenly struck by the thought that if he moved, if he dared to move like this, he'd be a ridiculously easy target. He was still directly behind the pillar relative to the looters, must be, because nobody had shot him yet, but he had no idea where they were now. He couldn't be sure of anything beyond the limits of his hands, the pillar and the cracked flagstones and his P-90. Which was utterly useless if he couldn't see anything to shoot at, so he took his hand off the trigger and very carefully put the safety on.
Okay. "What next?" he asked himself. He was deaf, he was blind, he was in an unfamiliar place and alone-
A hand suddenly closed on his shoulder. Rodney immediately realized that a) obviously the looters had circled around and come to take him hostage, and b) the P-90 also made a pretty effective club. He swung out at where he vaguely guessed his assailant might be, and felt the satisfying thump of a direct hit reverberate up his arm. The courtyard, he thought, there was a nice open space in the courtyard, and so he let the gun drop and tried to run for it, feeling his way around the pillar and into the open space.
He'd run maybe five steps before he crashed headlong into another pillar; he felt those delicate fluted ridges bite into his face and tear the skin, but he pushed off and tried to keep going, only he was suddenly no longer sure which way was the open space and which way was the pillars, the steps, the crumbling walls. But he had to keep moving, so he staggered onward-straight into something that was not a pillar, because it was breathing, and tried to pin him in a pair of massive arms.
Rodney had never wished harder that he'd actually once paid attention to what Ronon did in his free time. He couldn't get his own arms up, so he resorted to kicking, stomping down on what he vaguely hoped was a foot before aiming higher, shins, knees, groin. And he could scream, throat burning even if he couldn't hear his own words, scream for help or at least to deafen everyone else as much as he was. But he couldn't stop his body from turning, couldn't stop Not-A-Pillar from twisting his arms back painfully and forcing him to his knees on the uneven stones. Rodney knew well enough to stop squirming, and he tried to blink the dust out of his eyes and think of what the hell he could possibly do now, here, alone in his personal dark. "There were reasons," he muttered to himself, "why Helen Keller was not a superhero."
Not-a-Pillar kept Rodney's arms held tight, but someone else-maybe the same one Rodney had clubbed with his rifle, he had no way to tell-put his hands on Rodney's shoulders again. Obviously there was talking, maybe dire threats and harsh questions, but it was lost on him; all he could do was blink dust out of his eyes and scan the area, as if something was going to light up, break through whatever had been done to him. It was logically absurd, of course, but Rodney was the kind of person who paced and compulsively refreshed his email inbox, too; he couldn't fight the feeling that if he just looked again, somewhere else, maybe he'd be able to see something, even if it meant staring straight into the sun.
(Which still hurt, for the record. At least he had one concrete way of orienting himself, for all the good that did him.)
Hands shook his shoulders, then grabbed his chin and held it firmly between gritty fingers; probably annoyed that Rodney wasn't paying him enough attention. "Look, this is pointless," Rodney blurted, "because at the moment I can't hear you or see you, so just…you know, do your worst."
The hand released his chin, but there was still someone in his face, close enough for Rodney to feel little puffs of moist breath in the dry air, smell sweat and blood. He tried not to look as pathetically helpless and afraid as he was, but when he felt a hand on his chest, a little too much like a Wraith, he jerked back practically out of reflex. The motion twisted his arms painfully, but Not-a-Pillar actually relaxed his grip instead of tightening it.
Then someone tugged on the thing in his hair again, and the pain that shot through his head was about triple its previous intensity. He wasn't sure if he screamed or not, but the tugging stopped, and a moment later Not-a-Pillar actually released his arms altogether. Not that Rodney could do anything useful-even with his eyes online he was hopeless at hand-to-hand. It was nice to feel his shoulders pop back into place, though. "Thanks," he mumbled.
He put up token resistance when someone grabbed his wrist, but there wasn't any of the alpha-male twisting or squeezing he expected. Instead, he felt nothing but a light tapping on the palm of his hand. He tried to make a fist against it, but Hands pried his fingers back and resumed the steady, syncopated tapping.
Wait, tapping?
Tap-tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap-tap. Tap, tap. Tap. Tap, tap-tap, tap. Tap-tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap…
"Morse code," he realized, "that's, that's Morse code…Sheppard?
Tap, tap-tap, tap. Dash-dot-dash-dash, letter Y for yes. Rodney almost fell over with relief.
In fact, it took him a moment to recognize that John was tapping out something new into Rodney's palm, and a moment longer to recognize what the code was, because his Morse code wasn't that good and John wasn't exactly a pro at using it . He couldn't figure out what UD was supposed to mean, until he realized, no, it was all one symbol, the question mark. "I don't know what happened," Rodney said, "I just, I heard this popping noise and all of a sudden I couldn't see anything, I couldn't, there's that thing on my head and I really don't think anyone should touch it again because that hurts."
There was a long pause, where John held Rodney's wrist but didn't tap anything out, and the awkwardness of the contact coupled with the need to know what was going on made him add, "We're going back, right? Because I think this is serious-" Someone pressed a dusty finger to his lips and he resisted the urge to bite it, instead jerking his head away. "Look, sorry, but I'm feeling a little insecure right now and I would really like to be kept informed, okay?"
He felt, inches away from his own face, John exhaling forcefully. There followed a long string of tapping, which he had to repeat three full times before Rodney got the gist of it. TEYLAGATE, John said. UWALKWUS.
"What about the looters?" Rodney demanded.
DEAD.
"Oh. Okay then."
Two pairs of hands helped him to his feet, "Which is not necessary, because I'm blind, I'm not paralyzed," and then there was a terrifying moment when John left and Rodney could only stand awkwardly with Ronon (not a pillar) gripping his shoulder firmly. He remembered explaining Morse to Ronon and Teyla about a dozen times, but obviously they'd never learned it, and while he valued the moral support that big heavy hand represented, there were too many things he wanted to know. "Sorry I, you know, kicked you," he told Ronon, and got a sort of a pat in response, which was on par with Ronon's usual level of verbal conversation and not enough.
Then John's hand reappeared, tapping now on the side of Rodney's wrist. OKGO?
"Yes, yes, of course I am, let's go."
-... .-. . .- -.-
On the way to the ruins the terrain had looked flat and dry, very Manitoba-ish, with knee-high grass that seemed designed to conceal various hummocks and gopher holes and at least one fly-ridden carcass that Rodney had nearly stepped in. But that made the walk back to the gate about a hundred times easier than it would've been in the hills and forests that characterized most of the worlds they visited. That didn't meant it was actually easy, because he was blind, and he had to fight the urge to shuffle along and feel out every step with his toes while John and Ronon kept pulling him forward by the elbows.
"Look, I'm going as fast as I can," he blurted at one point, when their five-legged race threatened to turn into a tug-o-war.
John slid his hand down to tap Rodney's wrist again. WONTFALL.
"Easy for you to say, you can see where you're going!"
WONTLETU
Rodney clenched his jaw and forced himself to take a few deep breaths. "I know that," he said. "I just…I would prefer to go slower, if we could."
They didn't stop dragging him along entirely, but the pace did drop considerably, and Rodney tried not to drag his feet quite so much in return. Still, by the time John tapped out GATE on the back of his hand, Rodney could tell that the air temperature had started to drop, and the angle of the sun (estimated by a crude method of squinting at the sky until it hurt the most) had lowered considerably. He could feel the ground shiver as the gate dialed, and then John and Ronon were guiding him up the three shallow, weed-eaten steps, and then the cold, static spark of the wormhole kissed his face.
Atlantis had climate control. Atlantis had heatless artificial lighting. Atlantis had level, well-behaved floors. More pressingly, Atlantis had people: lots and lots of people, and even if Rodney couldn't see them or hear them he could feel the pounding of their feet and the eddies they made in the air and just a faint brush on his sleeve and oh god it was like every ghost story in the world. He sensed someone coming up in front of him and had to brace himself to avoid flinching away from the latex hands that touched his face. KELLR, John tapped out, which he had already guessed and which didn't help alleviate the wild disorientation. "You spelled it wrong," he snapped, and almost got a gloved finger up his nose for his troubles.
HARD, John tapped.
"What's hard?" Rodney demanded, as Keller's hands moved efficiently to look into his ears.
CODE.
"Well, of course," Rodney huffed. "But I refuse to let you devolve into Netspeak here, it's demeaning."
2KEWL4U?
"I hate you."
They tried to make him ride a gurney to the infirmary, but that was absurd, because Rodney had at some point studied, repaired, or completely replaced every square inch of the central tower and he could find his way to the infirmary blind-yes, literally-if people would just stop getting in his way. And he told them all this, very loudly, while John kept that one hand loose on his wrist. There were a few false starts of bumping into people, but then Rodney got himself oriented and got a picture in his head and made it to the transporter without any further incident, hah, take that.
Of course, once inside the doors of the infirmary he walked straight into a metal pushcart at full speed, with enough force to knock it over completely. He landed on top of it, and over it; face bouncing off the floor while the edge of the cart planted itself deep under his ribs, knocking the wind out of him. He felt water seeping through his clothes-god, he hoped it was water-and puddling around his face, felt all manner of small objects skitter past his hands, impossible to identify, and everything suddenly stank like rubbing alcohol. And then there were the hands again, people grabbing on him and pulling on him and he had no idea which of them, if any, were Sheppard. He thrashed and squirmed and tried to simultaneously get to his own feet and bat the hands away. "Stop it," he gasped, as soon as he could again, "just stop it, I'm fine, I know, I don't need any help, thank you, just stop touching me!"
He had no idea if that sounded as close to hysterical as it felt, but the hands disappeared. All except for the one that got him by the back of his vest and pulled him to his feet like he weighed approximately the same as a kitten, which of course meant it was Ronon. "Thank you," he said, trying to keep his voice calm and level (and with the lack of auditory feedback he couldn't know if he succeeded or not). "That was…oh god, that wasn't urine samples, was it?"
The hand was back on his wrist, John's hand, he hoped. NO.
"Blood samples? Scalpels? Dirty syringes?"
UR OK.
"You sure?"
FOLLOWME.
Rodney was shaken enough to let John lead him again, and John, thankfully, knew him well enough to get him within arm's reach of the bed and let Rodney take over himself from there. CURTAIN was the last thing John tapped before letting Rodney go, and Rodney took a moment to feel his way around the space with his hands, confirming that, yes, there was the bed with the stiff scratchy sheets; and the blunt-edged plastic table; and the starchy curtain that really did go all the way around; and a pile of well-worn scrubs was waiting for him in the cubby under the table. He carefully started stripping off his wet, dirty clothes, arranging everything into a pile against the side of the table so he'd be able to find it later.
And after that, in the clean scrubs and sitting on the bed, he took another moment to take a few deep breaths. Large-scale public freak-outs, even the completely justified ones, were very bad. He needed to keep a calm outlook on this. So what if he was, for all practical purposes, completely incapacitated? So what if he was constantly surrounded by people who might at any moment reach out and grab him and who were, by and large, unable to communicate their intentions? So what if, outside the grabbing, he had no empirical evidence that those people or anything else beyond the reach of his hands was even real?
Which was a kind of screwed up way to think. But Rodney was kind of a screwed up person.
When he'd decided that his nerves were under as great a control as they were getting, he called out, "Okay, I'm, uh, decent," and felt the little breeze as the curtain was pushed back. Somebody who used floral shampoo stood directly in front of him, and somebody ripely sweaty climbed up onto the bed next to him, and took his hand.
OK? John tapped out.
"Well, obviously not," Rodney snapped. "But, um, I'm working on reducing the, you know, screaming part."
GASP.
"Still hate you, by the way."
Jennifer went slow and methodical, checking Rodney's eyes and ears again, cleaning the scrapes on his face and hands from his various collisions, and examining the device without actually touching it. John kept up a steady stream of updates like some kind of old-fashioned news ticker with calloused fingers. PUPILSOK. EARSOK. NEONBANDAIDSCOOL. WIRESBAD. CALLZELENKANOW. WHEREHURT?
"The thingy?" Rodney gestured with the hand John wasn't holding onto. "It doesn't hurt, not as long as nobody touches it. I didn't even feel it hit, it was just…somebody put the lights out."
TOUCH?
"God no!" he blurted.
IFUTOUCH
"You mean, where does it hurt if I touch it?" Y. "All along…here…on both sides." He traced the path of the headache above one ear. "Which I realize encompasses the auditory and visual cortices, so that's probably an explanation in and of itself, but that's not a solution…"
They took him to the scanner, and John shifted his grip to Rodney's elbows because, yes, walking across the infirmary holding hands did strain the boundaries of even their friendship. There was a long period where Rodney simply lay on the table, and those screwed-up thoughts about the boundaries of the real world started creeping in again, but then John's hand reappeared to inform him, ZELENKAHERE.
"Great," Rodney said. "Hi, Radek, please help me get this thing off."
And to Rodney's great surprise, another hand touched his arm, closer to his elbow, and started tapping with crisp clarity. I WILL TRY.
He found the irrational urge to recoil. "Wait, since when did you know Morse code?" The response was a flutter of fingers too long and rapid for Rodney to track, so he shook both hands off and sat up. "You know what, never mind. Just…don't touch the, the thing, just figure out what it does and how to fix it."
There was a long period while Radek studied the device, but to his credit, he barely touched Rodney at all; rather, he asked in Morse to TURN YOUR HEAD LEFT or HOLD STILL PLEASE. The fact that he could express complete, grammatical sentences in Morse code, complete with distinct word boundaries, was impressive, if slightly overshadowed by the fact that he had to repeat every one of them about twelve times in order for Rodney to keep up with the pace. "Were you a telegraph operator in a past life or something?" he asked at one point.
C, Radek replied.
"Si? Si? What, are we speaking Spanish now?"
HOLD STILL PLEASE.
"Fine."
After a while, Radek rested his fingers lightly on Rodney's arm, as if giving him fair warning to brace for the incoming message. DEVICE IS EMBEDDED IN YOUR SCALP VERY FIRMLY. IT EMITS FIELD THAT INTERFERS WITH ELECTRICAL ACTIVITY IN BRAIN. PAIN IS PERHAPS ANTI TAMPERING MEASURE. I CAN TRY TO DISCONNECT POWER SOURCE.
Rodney realized after a minute that Radek, and probably Jennifer, were waiting for his consent. "Well, then, do it!" he snapped. "The sooner I get rid of this thing, the better."
The next thing he knew was a blast of tremendous pain, and then nothing at all.
-... .-. . .- -.-
When Rodney awoke, there was a pleasant, muzzy period where he didn't remember what had happened to him, and the biggest complaint he had was that the infirmary bed was abusing his back, as usual, and his head hurt like hell. Eventually, of course, he remembered why he was in the infirmary at all, and the paranoid suspicion that he was alone in the universe hit him full-force, along with about a million questions about what the hell Radek had done to him. He sat up and felt around for the device very, very carefully; it was still there, but someone had gone to the trouble of wrapping it thoroughly in bandages to prevent even the slightest accidental agitation. Good. Very good. He was entirely behind that. Just the residual headache from that last blast might kill him.
He had a moment's notice, a breath of air across his face, before a hand landed on his arm. He did his best not to jump and squirm as somebody started tapping on his knuckles, heavy and slow, somebody with a familiar flowery shampoo smell. O K ?
"Yeah," he said. "Peachy. Best near-death experience I've had in years."
N
O
T
D
Y
I
"Yeah," he said, "okay, still, ow. What happened? And who is this, anyway?"
J E
N I
FE
R
Well, that explained the pace of the tapping; he could imagine her holding a cheat sheet in her free hand, looking up one letter at a time. "What happened to Sheppard and Zelenka?"
O
F F
W O
R
"Offworld, okay, why? Or not," he said, when he realized just how many letters that would take. "Just, um, let's stick to yes or no questions. Did they go back to the ruins?"
Y E S.
"Like, recently?"
N O
"Are they going to be back soon?"
I D O
N
' T
"Don't know, right." He sighed and leaned back, carefully, with no intention of jostling anything. "So, um. I'll just. Be here."
Jennifer squeezed his arm slightly, started to tap something but got as far as D O before apparently thinking better of it. Instead she just guided his hands to a cup of pills and a glass of water, squeezed his arm again, and left.
Being alone in the infirmary with nothing to do and no one to even attempt Morse code on him left Rodney fully exposed to the broadest range of his anxieties. What if they couldn't shut this thing off? What if it left permanent brain damage? They'd have to send him back to Earth for certain. He couldn't possibly work like this. He couldn't even teach like this, let alone do any reasonable research. He'd have to move in with Jeannie and learn to read Braille. There were definitely no peer-reviewed physics journals published in Braille. He was going to turn out to be the psychotic hermit everyone thought he was, living in Jeannie's guest bedroom (his imagination made it a dark and dreary place, with broken Venetian blinds and crumbling plaster instead of drywall), unable to publish or communicate except by telegraph. He'd spend all his time walking in circles making certain the walls hadn't moved while he wasn't touching them. He'd be too much of a basket case to even have a cat!
Thankfully he didn't get much further into this worst-case scenario before he detected the presence of other visitors. Well, actually, make that "before Ronon smacked him hard on the shoulder," because it couldn't be anyone but Ronon, though that didn't stop Rodney from jumping and yelping. "Jesus Christ, would you show a little consideration for the blind man here?"
On the other side of the bed, someone else took his hand and pressed it up their face. It was such an alarmingly intimate gesture that Rodney almost pulled away, but his hand was firmly caught, one finger tickled by eyelashes that fluttered down and up again, another brushing a long tendril of hair. "Teyla?" he guessed, more from deductive reasoning than any tactile recognition skills, and he could feel her smile under his palm before she let go. "Hi. Um, good to…feel you, I guess. Thanks for coming by."
He couldn't imagine what they could do here except provide silent companionship-the mental image of Teyla studying a Morse code chart was charming but unlikely. Then he felt something dropped into his lap. It was…well, he couldn't figure out quite what it was, except made of rough wood. It had bumps and knobs and ridges all over, and it was sort of cubical in shape, but that was about the limit of what he could tell even after he'd felt over every convoluted surface. "Um…thank you? I think? I don't…I need a hint on this one, okay?"
He felt one of them take the something from his hands. Then, he felt several somethings thump onto his legs. He reached out for them again, but Ronon held his hand up. When Teyla (he deduced) was finished dropping the somethings, she mixed them up, and only then was Rodney allowed to touch them. The same rough wood as the original something, but each piece was smaller, with complicated notches and dovetails carved out in places.
The answer hit him like a cartoon light bulb. "Is this a puzzle? It is, isn't it?" A big, blocky wooden puzzle that he was going to get so many splinters from. He found he didn't really care. "Um, thanks, you guys. Really. I…thanks." That was about as articulate as Sheppard, but they both squeezed an arm and he knew he'd gotten the point across.
Several splinters, one dropped piece and a brief tug-o-war later, they had finished the puzzle (well, Rodney had, but he admitted that Teyla and Ronon provided a certain degree of necessary assistance). A lunch tray appeared in the orbit of his hands, brought by one of the ghosts around him, and Jennifer had apparently arranged an all-finger food meal so Rodney wouldn't have to try to use a fork as a dowsing rod: he detected a sandwich, carrot sticks, one of the mysterious non- citrus stone fruits Lorne's team had brought back from M45-069, and manna in the form of Oreos, which he let Teyla share.
After lunch Ronon suggested arm wrestling, and idea Rodney wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole even if he hadn't still been sore from his manhandling the day before. But as it turned out, neither of them had heard of Thumb War yet, which Rodney found appalling. It was just violent enough to keep Ronon's interest, but after Rodney instituted a rule about exploiting pressure points, they were mostly on a level playing field-all that typing was good for something, as he dodged around Ronon's big paw, and, well, compared to Teyla's hands, Rodney's were huge.
In fact, he was fairly close to beating Teyla in one round when he felt a hand, narrower than Ronon's, on his other wrist. THUMWAR? John asked once he'd gotten Rodney's attention.
Rodney sniffed at him. "At least I can spell it right, thank you. Did you find anything?"
SECURITY, John said. CATCHRELEASE.
"Are you serious?" Rodney felt for the device again, verifying it was still securely swaddled in bandages. "I tripped some kind of ten-thousand-year-old burglar alarm?" Knowing it was a security system made the tamper-proofing more logical, and he supposed it was a pretty ingenious way to catch invaders, but seriously!
RADEKGOTINFO, John said. FIXINGIT.
"I certainly hope so." And god, Rodney had never been less happy to trust his health and safety to that man, not even when he'd been possessed by Cadman. "Any idea how long it'll take?"
DAYR2, John said, and Rodney's heart sank. TURNOFF CUTOUT AOK.
"It's the cutting it out part that worries me," Rodney muttered. Though, really, another day like this? Another two days? There weren't that many block puzzles in Atlantis-he hadn't even realized there was the one-and Thumb War really wasn't really going to last much longer, and when he ran out of activities his mind was going to right back to Jeannie's spare bedroom, pacing the walls. Or possibly worse. Could it get worse? If it could, he'd doubtless figure it out, since, well, genius. Two days was plenty of time.
GOHOME? John asked, but when Rodney started sputtering in horror he clarified, QRTRS.
"And just what am I going to do in my quarters?" Rodney asked, thinking of all the movies he couldn't watch, the emails he couldn't read, the laptops he couldn't operate.
TELLME, John said.
"Tell you what?"
WHAT2DO
Rodney would've folded his arms over his chest if that wouldn't have made the tapping unspeakably awkward. "Am I to understand that you're volunteering to entertain me in Morse code for the rest of the day?"
He could practically picture John's too-lazy grin as he tapped out, WHATRFRENDS4
"Not correct spelling, apparently," Rodney said, but in truth he was more warmed than he could say. "But, seriously, don't you have anything better to do?"
John tapped this one slowly to make sure Rodney got it on the first try. PAPERWORKWLORNE. SAVESELF. URMOREFUN.
Rodney snorted. "Well, in that case, my first order is to take a damn bath, Colonel. My nose still works perfectly well and you've got a distinct eau-de-offworld about you." John just smacked Rodney for that one, but half an hour later (and after one mild freak out when Rodney couldn't find the pile of clothes he'd left by his bedside table, because a nurse had decide to move them without informing him) John re-appeared smelling distinctly shower-fresh.
READY
"Are you kidding? I've been waiting here for at least fifteen minutes," Rodney said, or so he thought, though his mental timekeeping no longer seemed reliable when he couldn't check it against a clock. He let John guide him through the minefield of the infirmary, but once they hit the corridor he felt compelled to say, "You know, I can find my way back to my quarters from here without you dragging me all the way."
John promptly let go of Rodney's arm.
"Hey!" Rodney swallowed around the little surge of alarm that caused, because seriously, he was being a little codependent here and knew it, and it wasn't like John had actually ceased to exist. "Where are you going?"
John tapped out this message on Rodney's chest, probably walking backwards to do it. CLEARPATH.
"Oh. Um, thanks."
NOPROB
-... .-. . .- -.-
WE CAN SAFELY DISABLE POWER SOURCE, Zelenka tapped out patiently into Rodney's upturned palm. THEN DR KELLER REMOVES EMBEDDED WIRES. SENSES RETURN SLOWLY, BUT WITHIN 24 HOURS. ALL WILL BE WELL.
Rodney exhaled, but still asked, "You're totally sure? Because this is my brain we're talking about and I thought Jennifer said another one of those shocks could do permanent damage."
VERY SURE. BRAIN WILL FUNCTION AS WELL AS IT EVER DID.
"Sarcasm is not appreciated right now, Radek." On his other side, John elbowed him and tapped out, SAYTHANKU. "And John says thank you." John pinched him. "Ow! Well, you did!"
And he should, because it had been three days since they returned from the ruins with the schematics of the device. John hadn't spent every waking minute at Rodney's side or anything-Rodney was not yet that far gone-but he'd come by every morning to clear the way to the infirmary for Rodney's checkups and spent afternoons translating Rodney's email into fingertaps and spellchecking Rodney's touch-typed replies. He'd helped Rodney navigate the cafeteria at meal times, turning the problem of navigating his tray into a sort of Twenty Questions game. He'd given him edited highlights of the Thursday morning staff meeting, translated into his ridiculous Netspeak and highly editorialized (because Rodney was pretty sure official missives from the IOA did not normally use the word "ass" that much). He'd even located a case of K'Nex somewhere-Rodney had asked where but John refused to give up his sources-which resulted in a whole evening spent trying to build a model of the Millennium Falcon.
And granted, mixed in there was an entire morning's break when Radek's first attempt to shut off the device had left Rodney unconscious again, and a team night that turned into a strange, slightly beery version of Telephone when Teyla and Ronon claimed to have studied Morse (though really, Rodney suspected that Ronon just wanted the excuse to poke him and get away with it) and a couple other diversions, but still. John had put up with Rodney for three whole days, of his own free will. At this point they probably both owed Radek a firstborn child, or at least a couple of later ones.
He felt something smack him in the chest and barely managed to catch what turned out to be a bundle of scrubs. PREPNOW, John tapped onto Rodney's elbow. GENERAL ANES JIK. (He'd gotten remarkably good at the tapping over the last three days, but still couldn't be bothered to use word breaks or correct spelling most of the time.)
"Wait," Rodney blurted, and caught John's wrist before he slipped away. "Just…hold on a second, I want to say something." Three whole days of darkness and silence and sometimes feeling like his only connection with the rest of the world was the steady tapping of one or two thin fingers on his hand or wrist or shoulder. Three days of wiseass adulterations of the English language. Three days of companionship. It shouldn't have surprised him, really-in fact, it didn't-and that was kind of the point.
John, of course, immediately turned skittish on him, stepping out of Rodney's personal space until the only thing within reach was his hand and wrist. He tapped an awkward ? on the ball of Rodney's thumb, and yeah, Rodney kind of knew that this was going to be wasted, but it was rare enough that he recognized a moment like this in a timely manner and he wanted to make it count.
Except he wasn't quite sure what to say, and the longer he thought on it, the more twitchy John got. Because, yes, they were technically holding hands in the middle of the infirmary, but Rodney wasn't about to let John flit off and leave him talking to the curtains (not that he thought John would actually do it, but it was always a possibility and if he was going to the effort of doing the emotional thing then he wanted it to count).
It was about the point John started to actively squirm in place that Rodney got the idea. He stood up and took another step closer, adjusting his grip so it was more like they were shaking hands. But against the heel of John's palm, he tapped out, very slowly, THANKUSORRY.
(So word breaks were harder than he thought.)
John shook his hand, very slowly, and tapped another ? as he did.
IMABITCRAZY?
UTHINK?
Rodney scowled, and felt his face heating up. "Trying to show gratitude here, Colonel."
John pumped his hand again. DONTMENTION.
NOREALLY. UDIDNTHAVETO.
YEAHDID.
?
WHATRFRENDS4?
"Still hate you," Rodney announced, but he couldn't entirely avoid grinning while he did.
LOVEU2MKAY.
John gave one last shake of Rodney's hand before letting go, and the curtain around the bed fluttered past with a little gust of air.
Author: mad_maudlin
Rating: PG
Characters: Team + Jennifer and Radek, but focus on John and Rodney.
Spoilers: Set vaguely in the last two seasons but no specific episode spoilers
Summary: An accident offworld leaves Rodney feeling disconnected from the world around him. Luckily John and his friends are there.
A/N: So jennytork wished for a gen fic in which Rodney lost a sense and John helped him. Ms. Tork, I hope this meets expectations. Apologies to people who know more about Morse code than Wikipedia teaches, as I've probably offended you greatly. Thanks to ceilidh and marginaliana for beta reading!
-.-. --- -. -. . -.-. - .. --- -.
by Mad Maudlin
Rodney didn't know what hit him, literally. One minute they were trying to flush some looters armed with suspiciously Genii-looking firearms from the ruins of an Ancient lab, and Teyla was covering for him while he ran for a pillar with a better firing position, and something went pop--!
And the next minute he was blind.
He didn't figure it out right away, though. Even geniuses have their moments. When the world fell dark and silent around him, his first guess was that he'd been transported somewhere, somehow-stepped on a hidden trigger, accidentally touched some gene-sensitive crystal, that sort of thing. Just because there had been no itch or flash like the transporters of Atlantis, or even the Daedalus, didn't mean it hadn't happened; and so his first step, after a moment or two of frozen hyperventilation, was to trying and figure out where he was.
The ground felt like the same smooth stone someone had used to pave a courtyard around the lab, right down to the weedy cracks and joints that spoke of long neglect. But how could there be weeds growing in any place so dark? It was a velvety blackness, so profound he couldn't see the hands in front of his face, and he couldn't believe the place ever saw the sun. Directly ahead, he found a stout pillar, its chipped flutes catching on his fingers. Again, just like the courtyard where they'd been fighting the looters. It was even warm to the touch, though Rodney's instincts said any place this dark and silent should also be cold in order to have a thematically appropriate trifecta; the stone was warm, and so was he. Hot, even, because they were holding this fight in the hottest part of the day with the sun beating down on his very sensitive skin, so he could practically feel it crisping.
No, wait, he could feel it; could feel the heat, and the abrupt drop in temperature when his hand passed into where the shadow of the pillar would be. Except there shouldn't be a shadow because there wasn't any light, unless, unless he-
"Hello?" he blurted out, because in the dark he could feel the heat and smell gunpowder and something was wrong.
Very, very wrong, because he could feel the buzz in his throat when he spoke but he couldn't hear.
"Oh no no no no no," and he couldn’t hear that either, even though he knew his mouth was shaping the words. That popping noise, had it been a ricochet or something? Had he been shot? He felt his face, then his ears, but there was no blood-and anyway, even with ruptured eardrums, he should be able to hear something, vague buzzing at least. This was silence as profound as the darkness. He swept his hands back over his head and felt something, something hard and cold, caught in his hair, except when he tried to pull on it the sudden stab of pain went deep into his head, starting in the back and shooting around to his temples like a cinch.
"Okay, bad idea, not doing that again." He couldn't say why he was even talking, because it only reminded him that this was very, very bad. Blind and deaf. Blind and deaf. And in the middle of a battlefield, he suddenly couldn't think of how many looters there had been or where John and Ronon had been relative to him or even where Teyla was now, because he was suddenly struck by the thought that if he moved, if he dared to move like this, he'd be a ridiculously easy target. He was still directly behind the pillar relative to the looters, must be, because nobody had shot him yet, but he had no idea where they were now. He couldn't be sure of anything beyond the limits of his hands, the pillar and the cracked flagstones and his P-90. Which was utterly useless if he couldn't see anything to shoot at, so he took his hand off the trigger and very carefully put the safety on.
Okay. "What next?" he asked himself. He was deaf, he was blind, he was in an unfamiliar place and alone-
A hand suddenly closed on his shoulder. Rodney immediately realized that a) obviously the looters had circled around and come to take him hostage, and b) the P-90 also made a pretty effective club. He swung out at where he vaguely guessed his assailant might be, and felt the satisfying thump of a direct hit reverberate up his arm. The courtyard, he thought, there was a nice open space in the courtyard, and so he let the gun drop and tried to run for it, feeling his way around the pillar and into the open space.
He'd run maybe five steps before he crashed headlong into another pillar; he felt those delicate fluted ridges bite into his face and tear the skin, but he pushed off and tried to keep going, only he was suddenly no longer sure which way was the open space and which way was the pillars, the steps, the crumbling walls. But he had to keep moving, so he staggered onward-straight into something that was not a pillar, because it was breathing, and tried to pin him in a pair of massive arms.
Rodney had never wished harder that he'd actually once paid attention to what Ronon did in his free time. He couldn't get his own arms up, so he resorted to kicking, stomping down on what he vaguely hoped was a foot before aiming higher, shins, knees, groin. And he could scream, throat burning even if he couldn't hear his own words, scream for help or at least to deafen everyone else as much as he was. But he couldn't stop his body from turning, couldn't stop Not-A-Pillar from twisting his arms back painfully and forcing him to his knees on the uneven stones. Rodney knew well enough to stop squirming, and he tried to blink the dust out of his eyes and think of what the hell he could possibly do now, here, alone in his personal dark. "There were reasons," he muttered to himself, "why Helen Keller was not a superhero."
Not-a-Pillar kept Rodney's arms held tight, but someone else-maybe the same one Rodney had clubbed with his rifle, he had no way to tell-put his hands on Rodney's shoulders again. Obviously there was talking, maybe dire threats and harsh questions, but it was lost on him; all he could do was blink dust out of his eyes and scan the area, as if something was going to light up, break through whatever had been done to him. It was logically absurd, of course, but Rodney was the kind of person who paced and compulsively refreshed his email inbox, too; he couldn't fight the feeling that if he just looked again, somewhere else, maybe he'd be able to see something, even if it meant staring straight into the sun.
(Which still hurt, for the record. At least he had one concrete way of orienting himself, for all the good that did him.)
Hands shook his shoulders, then grabbed his chin and held it firmly between gritty fingers; probably annoyed that Rodney wasn't paying him enough attention. "Look, this is pointless," Rodney blurted, "because at the moment I can't hear you or see you, so just…you know, do your worst."
The hand released his chin, but there was still someone in his face, close enough for Rodney to feel little puffs of moist breath in the dry air, smell sweat and blood. He tried not to look as pathetically helpless and afraid as he was, but when he felt a hand on his chest, a little too much like a Wraith, he jerked back practically out of reflex. The motion twisted his arms painfully, but Not-a-Pillar actually relaxed his grip instead of tightening it.
Then someone tugged on the thing in his hair again, and the pain that shot through his head was about triple its previous intensity. He wasn't sure if he screamed or not, but the tugging stopped, and a moment later Not-a-Pillar actually released his arms altogether. Not that Rodney could do anything useful-even with his eyes online he was hopeless at hand-to-hand. It was nice to feel his shoulders pop back into place, though. "Thanks," he mumbled.
He put up token resistance when someone grabbed his wrist, but there wasn't any of the alpha-male twisting or squeezing he expected. Instead, he felt nothing but a light tapping on the palm of his hand. He tried to make a fist against it, but Hands pried his fingers back and resumed the steady, syncopated tapping.
Wait, tapping?
Tap-tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap-tap. Tap, tap. Tap. Tap, tap-tap, tap. Tap-tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap…
"Morse code," he realized, "that's, that's Morse code…Sheppard?
Tap, tap-tap, tap. Dash-dot-dash-dash, letter Y for yes. Rodney almost fell over with relief.
In fact, it took him a moment to recognize that John was tapping out something new into Rodney's palm, and a moment longer to recognize what the code was, because his Morse code wasn't that good and John wasn't exactly a pro at using it . He couldn't figure out what UD was supposed to mean, until he realized, no, it was all one symbol, the question mark. "I don't know what happened," Rodney said, "I just, I heard this popping noise and all of a sudden I couldn't see anything, I couldn't, there's that thing on my head and I really don't think anyone should touch it again because that hurts."
There was a long pause, where John held Rodney's wrist but didn't tap anything out, and the awkwardness of the contact coupled with the need to know what was going on made him add, "We're going back, right? Because I think this is serious-" Someone pressed a dusty finger to his lips and he resisted the urge to bite it, instead jerking his head away. "Look, sorry, but I'm feeling a little insecure right now and I would really like to be kept informed, okay?"
He felt, inches away from his own face, John exhaling forcefully. There followed a long string of tapping, which he had to repeat three full times before Rodney got the gist of it. TEYLAGATE, John said. UWALKWUS.
"What about the looters?" Rodney demanded.
DEAD.
"Oh. Okay then."
Two pairs of hands helped him to his feet, "Which is not necessary, because I'm blind, I'm not paralyzed," and then there was a terrifying moment when John left and Rodney could only stand awkwardly with Ronon (not a pillar) gripping his shoulder firmly. He remembered explaining Morse to Ronon and Teyla about a dozen times, but obviously they'd never learned it, and while he valued the moral support that big heavy hand represented, there were too many things he wanted to know. "Sorry I, you know, kicked you," he told Ronon, and got a sort of a pat in response, which was on par with Ronon's usual level of verbal conversation and not enough.
Then John's hand reappeared, tapping now on the side of Rodney's wrist. OKGO?
"Yes, yes, of course I am, let's go."
-... .-. . .- -.-
On the way to the ruins the terrain had looked flat and dry, very Manitoba-ish, with knee-high grass that seemed designed to conceal various hummocks and gopher holes and at least one fly-ridden carcass that Rodney had nearly stepped in. But that made the walk back to the gate about a hundred times easier than it would've been in the hills and forests that characterized most of the worlds they visited. That didn't meant it was actually easy, because he was blind, and he had to fight the urge to shuffle along and feel out every step with his toes while John and Ronon kept pulling him forward by the elbows.
"Look, I'm going as fast as I can," he blurted at one point, when their five-legged race threatened to turn into a tug-o-war.
John slid his hand down to tap Rodney's wrist again. WONTFALL.
"Easy for you to say, you can see where you're going!"
WONTLETU
Rodney clenched his jaw and forced himself to take a few deep breaths. "I know that," he said. "I just…I would prefer to go slower, if we could."
They didn't stop dragging him along entirely, but the pace did drop considerably, and Rodney tried not to drag his feet quite so much in return. Still, by the time John tapped out GATE on the back of his hand, Rodney could tell that the air temperature had started to drop, and the angle of the sun (estimated by a crude method of squinting at the sky until it hurt the most) had lowered considerably. He could feel the ground shiver as the gate dialed, and then John and Ronon were guiding him up the three shallow, weed-eaten steps, and then the cold, static spark of the wormhole kissed his face.
Atlantis had climate control. Atlantis had heatless artificial lighting. Atlantis had level, well-behaved floors. More pressingly, Atlantis had people: lots and lots of people, and even if Rodney couldn't see them or hear them he could feel the pounding of their feet and the eddies they made in the air and just a faint brush on his sleeve and oh god it was like every ghost story in the world. He sensed someone coming up in front of him and had to brace himself to avoid flinching away from the latex hands that touched his face. KELLR, John tapped out, which he had already guessed and which didn't help alleviate the wild disorientation. "You spelled it wrong," he snapped, and almost got a gloved finger up his nose for his troubles.
HARD, John tapped.
"What's hard?" Rodney demanded, as Keller's hands moved efficiently to look into his ears.
CODE.
"Well, of course," Rodney huffed. "But I refuse to let you devolve into Netspeak here, it's demeaning."
2KEWL4U?
"I hate you."
They tried to make him ride a gurney to the infirmary, but that was absurd, because Rodney had at some point studied, repaired, or completely replaced every square inch of the central tower and he could find his way to the infirmary blind-yes, literally-if people would just stop getting in his way. And he told them all this, very loudly, while John kept that one hand loose on his wrist. There were a few false starts of bumping into people, but then Rodney got himself oriented and got a picture in his head and made it to the transporter without any further incident, hah, take that.
Of course, once inside the doors of the infirmary he walked straight into a metal pushcart at full speed, with enough force to knock it over completely. He landed on top of it, and over it; face bouncing off the floor while the edge of the cart planted itself deep under his ribs, knocking the wind out of him. He felt water seeping through his clothes-god, he hoped it was water-and puddling around his face, felt all manner of small objects skitter past his hands, impossible to identify, and everything suddenly stank like rubbing alcohol. And then there were the hands again, people grabbing on him and pulling on him and he had no idea which of them, if any, were Sheppard. He thrashed and squirmed and tried to simultaneously get to his own feet and bat the hands away. "Stop it," he gasped, as soon as he could again, "just stop it, I'm fine, I know, I don't need any help, thank you, just stop touching me!"
He had no idea if that sounded as close to hysterical as it felt, but the hands disappeared. All except for the one that got him by the back of his vest and pulled him to his feet like he weighed approximately the same as a kitten, which of course meant it was Ronon. "Thank you," he said, trying to keep his voice calm and level (and with the lack of auditory feedback he couldn't know if he succeeded or not). "That was…oh god, that wasn't urine samples, was it?"
The hand was back on his wrist, John's hand, he hoped. NO.
"Blood samples? Scalpels? Dirty syringes?"
UR OK.
"You sure?"
FOLLOWME.
Rodney was shaken enough to let John lead him again, and John, thankfully, knew him well enough to get him within arm's reach of the bed and let Rodney take over himself from there. CURTAIN was the last thing John tapped before letting Rodney go, and Rodney took a moment to feel his way around the space with his hands, confirming that, yes, there was the bed with the stiff scratchy sheets; and the blunt-edged plastic table; and the starchy curtain that really did go all the way around; and a pile of well-worn scrubs was waiting for him in the cubby under the table. He carefully started stripping off his wet, dirty clothes, arranging everything into a pile against the side of the table so he'd be able to find it later.
And after that, in the clean scrubs and sitting on the bed, he took another moment to take a few deep breaths. Large-scale public freak-outs, even the completely justified ones, were very bad. He needed to keep a calm outlook on this. So what if he was, for all practical purposes, completely incapacitated? So what if he was constantly surrounded by people who might at any moment reach out and grab him and who were, by and large, unable to communicate their intentions? So what if, outside the grabbing, he had no empirical evidence that those people or anything else beyond the reach of his hands was even real?
Which was a kind of screwed up way to think. But Rodney was kind of a screwed up person.
When he'd decided that his nerves were under as great a control as they were getting, he called out, "Okay, I'm, uh, decent," and felt the little breeze as the curtain was pushed back. Somebody who used floral shampoo stood directly in front of him, and somebody ripely sweaty climbed up onto the bed next to him, and took his hand.
OK? John tapped out.
"Well, obviously not," Rodney snapped. "But, um, I'm working on reducing the, you know, screaming part."
GASP.
"Still hate you, by the way."
Jennifer went slow and methodical, checking Rodney's eyes and ears again, cleaning the scrapes on his face and hands from his various collisions, and examining the device without actually touching it. John kept up a steady stream of updates like some kind of old-fashioned news ticker with calloused fingers. PUPILSOK. EARSOK. NEONBANDAIDSCOOL. WIRESBAD. CALLZELENKANOW. WHEREHURT?
"The thingy?" Rodney gestured with the hand John wasn't holding onto. "It doesn't hurt, not as long as nobody touches it. I didn't even feel it hit, it was just…somebody put the lights out."
TOUCH?
"God no!" he blurted.
IFUTOUCH
"You mean, where does it hurt if I touch it?" Y. "All along…here…on both sides." He traced the path of the headache above one ear. "Which I realize encompasses the auditory and visual cortices, so that's probably an explanation in and of itself, but that's not a solution…"
They took him to the scanner, and John shifted his grip to Rodney's elbows because, yes, walking across the infirmary holding hands did strain the boundaries of even their friendship. There was a long period where Rodney simply lay on the table, and those screwed-up thoughts about the boundaries of the real world started creeping in again, but then John's hand reappeared to inform him, ZELENKAHERE.
"Great," Rodney said. "Hi, Radek, please help me get this thing off."
And to Rodney's great surprise, another hand touched his arm, closer to his elbow, and started tapping with crisp clarity. I WILL TRY.
He found the irrational urge to recoil. "Wait, since when did you know Morse code?" The response was a flutter of fingers too long and rapid for Rodney to track, so he shook both hands off and sat up. "You know what, never mind. Just…don't touch the, the thing, just figure out what it does and how to fix it."
There was a long period while Radek studied the device, but to his credit, he barely touched Rodney at all; rather, he asked in Morse to TURN YOUR HEAD LEFT or HOLD STILL PLEASE. The fact that he could express complete, grammatical sentences in Morse code, complete with distinct word boundaries, was impressive, if slightly overshadowed by the fact that he had to repeat every one of them about twelve times in order for Rodney to keep up with the pace. "Were you a telegraph operator in a past life or something?" he asked at one point.
C, Radek replied.
"Si? Si? What, are we speaking Spanish now?"
HOLD STILL PLEASE.
"Fine."
After a while, Radek rested his fingers lightly on Rodney's arm, as if giving him fair warning to brace for the incoming message. DEVICE IS EMBEDDED IN YOUR SCALP VERY FIRMLY. IT EMITS FIELD THAT INTERFERS WITH ELECTRICAL ACTIVITY IN BRAIN. PAIN IS PERHAPS ANTI TAMPERING MEASURE. I CAN TRY TO DISCONNECT POWER SOURCE.
Rodney realized after a minute that Radek, and probably Jennifer, were waiting for his consent. "Well, then, do it!" he snapped. "The sooner I get rid of this thing, the better."
The next thing he knew was a blast of tremendous pain, and then nothing at all.
-... .-. . .- -.-
When Rodney awoke, there was a pleasant, muzzy period where he didn't remember what had happened to him, and the biggest complaint he had was that the infirmary bed was abusing his back, as usual, and his head hurt like hell. Eventually, of course, he remembered why he was in the infirmary at all, and the paranoid suspicion that he was alone in the universe hit him full-force, along with about a million questions about what the hell Radek had done to him. He sat up and felt around for the device very, very carefully; it was still there, but someone had gone to the trouble of wrapping it thoroughly in bandages to prevent even the slightest accidental agitation. Good. Very good. He was entirely behind that. Just the residual headache from that last blast might kill him.
He had a moment's notice, a breath of air across his face, before a hand landed on his arm. He did his best not to jump and squirm as somebody started tapping on his knuckles, heavy and slow, somebody with a familiar flowery shampoo smell. O K ?
"Yeah," he said. "Peachy. Best near-death experience I've had in years."
N
O
T
D
Y
I
"Yeah," he said, "okay, still, ow. What happened? And who is this, anyway?"
J E
N I
FE
R
Well, that explained the pace of the tapping; he could imagine her holding a cheat sheet in her free hand, looking up one letter at a time. "What happened to Sheppard and Zelenka?"
O
F F
W O
R
"Offworld, okay, why? Or not," he said, when he realized just how many letters that would take. "Just, um, let's stick to yes or no questions. Did they go back to the ruins?"
Y E S.
"Like, recently?"
N O
"Are they going to be back soon?"
I D O
N
' T
"Don't know, right." He sighed and leaned back, carefully, with no intention of jostling anything. "So, um. I'll just. Be here."
Jennifer squeezed his arm slightly, started to tap something but got as far as D O before apparently thinking better of it. Instead she just guided his hands to a cup of pills and a glass of water, squeezed his arm again, and left.
Being alone in the infirmary with nothing to do and no one to even attempt Morse code on him left Rodney fully exposed to the broadest range of his anxieties. What if they couldn't shut this thing off? What if it left permanent brain damage? They'd have to send him back to Earth for certain. He couldn't possibly work like this. He couldn't even teach like this, let alone do any reasonable research. He'd have to move in with Jeannie and learn to read Braille. There were definitely no peer-reviewed physics journals published in Braille. He was going to turn out to be the psychotic hermit everyone thought he was, living in Jeannie's guest bedroom (his imagination made it a dark and dreary place, with broken Venetian blinds and crumbling plaster instead of drywall), unable to publish or communicate except by telegraph. He'd spend all his time walking in circles making certain the walls hadn't moved while he wasn't touching them. He'd be too much of a basket case to even have a cat!
Thankfully he didn't get much further into this worst-case scenario before he detected the presence of other visitors. Well, actually, make that "before Ronon smacked him hard on the shoulder," because it couldn't be anyone but Ronon, though that didn't stop Rodney from jumping and yelping. "Jesus Christ, would you show a little consideration for the blind man here?"
On the other side of the bed, someone else took his hand and pressed it up their face. It was such an alarmingly intimate gesture that Rodney almost pulled away, but his hand was firmly caught, one finger tickled by eyelashes that fluttered down and up again, another brushing a long tendril of hair. "Teyla?" he guessed, more from deductive reasoning than any tactile recognition skills, and he could feel her smile under his palm before she let go. "Hi. Um, good to…feel you, I guess. Thanks for coming by."
He couldn't imagine what they could do here except provide silent companionship-the mental image of Teyla studying a Morse code chart was charming but unlikely. Then he felt something dropped into his lap. It was…well, he couldn't figure out quite what it was, except made of rough wood. It had bumps and knobs and ridges all over, and it was sort of cubical in shape, but that was about the limit of what he could tell even after he'd felt over every convoluted surface. "Um…thank you? I think? I don't…I need a hint on this one, okay?"
He felt one of them take the something from his hands. Then, he felt several somethings thump onto his legs. He reached out for them again, but Ronon held his hand up. When Teyla (he deduced) was finished dropping the somethings, she mixed them up, and only then was Rodney allowed to touch them. The same rough wood as the original something, but each piece was smaller, with complicated notches and dovetails carved out in places.
The answer hit him like a cartoon light bulb. "Is this a puzzle? It is, isn't it?" A big, blocky wooden puzzle that he was going to get so many splinters from. He found he didn't really care. "Um, thanks, you guys. Really. I…thanks." That was about as articulate as Sheppard, but they both squeezed an arm and he knew he'd gotten the point across.
Several splinters, one dropped piece and a brief tug-o-war later, they had finished the puzzle (well, Rodney had, but he admitted that Teyla and Ronon provided a certain degree of necessary assistance). A lunch tray appeared in the orbit of his hands, brought by one of the ghosts around him, and Jennifer had apparently arranged an all-finger food meal so Rodney wouldn't have to try to use a fork as a dowsing rod: he detected a sandwich, carrot sticks, one of the mysterious non- citrus stone fruits Lorne's team had brought back from M45-069, and manna in the form of Oreos, which he let Teyla share.
After lunch Ronon suggested arm wrestling, and idea Rodney wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole even if he hadn't still been sore from his manhandling the day before. But as it turned out, neither of them had heard of Thumb War yet, which Rodney found appalling. It was just violent enough to keep Ronon's interest, but after Rodney instituted a rule about exploiting pressure points, they were mostly on a level playing field-all that typing was good for something, as he dodged around Ronon's big paw, and, well, compared to Teyla's hands, Rodney's were huge.
In fact, he was fairly close to beating Teyla in one round when he felt a hand, narrower than Ronon's, on his other wrist. THUMWAR? John asked once he'd gotten Rodney's attention.
Rodney sniffed at him. "At least I can spell it right, thank you. Did you find anything?"
SECURITY, John said. CATCHRELEASE.
"Are you serious?" Rodney felt for the device again, verifying it was still securely swaddled in bandages. "I tripped some kind of ten-thousand-year-old burglar alarm?" Knowing it was a security system made the tamper-proofing more logical, and he supposed it was a pretty ingenious way to catch invaders, but seriously!
RADEKGOTINFO, John said. FIXINGIT.
"I certainly hope so." And god, Rodney had never been less happy to trust his health and safety to that man, not even when he'd been possessed by Cadman. "Any idea how long it'll take?"
DAYR2, John said, and Rodney's heart sank. TURNOFF CUTOUT AOK.
"It's the cutting it out part that worries me," Rodney muttered. Though, really, another day like this? Another two days? There weren't that many block puzzles in Atlantis-he hadn't even realized there was the one-and Thumb War really wasn't really going to last much longer, and when he ran out of activities his mind was going to right back to Jeannie's spare bedroom, pacing the walls. Or possibly worse. Could it get worse? If it could, he'd doubtless figure it out, since, well, genius. Two days was plenty of time.
GOHOME? John asked, but when Rodney started sputtering in horror he clarified, QRTRS.
"And just what am I going to do in my quarters?" Rodney asked, thinking of all the movies he couldn't watch, the emails he couldn't read, the laptops he couldn't operate.
TELLME, John said.
"Tell you what?"
WHAT2DO
Rodney would've folded his arms over his chest if that wouldn't have made the tapping unspeakably awkward. "Am I to understand that you're volunteering to entertain me in Morse code for the rest of the day?"
He could practically picture John's too-lazy grin as he tapped out, WHATRFRENDS4
"Not correct spelling, apparently," Rodney said, but in truth he was more warmed than he could say. "But, seriously, don't you have anything better to do?"
John tapped this one slowly to make sure Rodney got it on the first try. PAPERWORKWLORNE. SAVESELF. URMOREFUN.
Rodney snorted. "Well, in that case, my first order is to take a damn bath, Colonel. My nose still works perfectly well and you've got a distinct eau-de-offworld about you." John just smacked Rodney for that one, but half an hour later (and after one mild freak out when Rodney couldn't find the pile of clothes he'd left by his bedside table, because a nurse had decide to move them without informing him) John re-appeared smelling distinctly shower-fresh.
READY
"Are you kidding? I've been waiting here for at least fifteen minutes," Rodney said, or so he thought, though his mental timekeeping no longer seemed reliable when he couldn't check it against a clock. He let John guide him through the minefield of the infirmary, but once they hit the corridor he felt compelled to say, "You know, I can find my way back to my quarters from here without you dragging me all the way."
John promptly let go of Rodney's arm.
"Hey!" Rodney swallowed around the little surge of alarm that caused, because seriously, he was being a little codependent here and knew it, and it wasn't like John had actually ceased to exist. "Where are you going?"
John tapped out this message on Rodney's chest, probably walking backwards to do it. CLEARPATH.
"Oh. Um, thanks."
NOPROB
-... .-. . .- -.-
WE CAN SAFELY DISABLE POWER SOURCE, Zelenka tapped out patiently into Rodney's upturned palm. THEN DR KELLER REMOVES EMBEDDED WIRES. SENSES RETURN SLOWLY, BUT WITHIN 24 HOURS. ALL WILL BE WELL.
Rodney exhaled, but still asked, "You're totally sure? Because this is my brain we're talking about and I thought Jennifer said another one of those shocks could do permanent damage."
VERY SURE. BRAIN WILL FUNCTION AS WELL AS IT EVER DID.
"Sarcasm is not appreciated right now, Radek." On his other side, John elbowed him and tapped out, SAYTHANKU. "And John says thank you." John pinched him. "Ow! Well, you did!"
And he should, because it had been three days since they returned from the ruins with the schematics of the device. John hadn't spent every waking minute at Rodney's side or anything-Rodney was not yet that far gone-but he'd come by every morning to clear the way to the infirmary for Rodney's checkups and spent afternoons translating Rodney's email into fingertaps and spellchecking Rodney's touch-typed replies. He'd helped Rodney navigate the cafeteria at meal times, turning the problem of navigating his tray into a sort of Twenty Questions game. He'd given him edited highlights of the Thursday morning staff meeting, translated into his ridiculous Netspeak and highly editorialized (because Rodney was pretty sure official missives from the IOA did not normally use the word "ass" that much). He'd even located a case of K'Nex somewhere-Rodney had asked where but John refused to give up his sources-which resulted in a whole evening spent trying to build a model of the Millennium Falcon.
And granted, mixed in there was an entire morning's break when Radek's first attempt to shut off the device had left Rodney unconscious again, and a team night that turned into a strange, slightly beery version of Telephone when Teyla and Ronon claimed to have studied Morse (though really, Rodney suspected that Ronon just wanted the excuse to poke him and get away with it) and a couple other diversions, but still. John had put up with Rodney for three whole days, of his own free will. At this point they probably both owed Radek a firstborn child, or at least a couple of later ones.
He felt something smack him in the chest and barely managed to catch what turned out to be a bundle of scrubs. PREPNOW, John tapped onto Rodney's elbow. GENERAL ANES JIK. (He'd gotten remarkably good at the tapping over the last three days, but still couldn't be bothered to use word breaks or correct spelling most of the time.)
"Wait," Rodney blurted, and caught John's wrist before he slipped away. "Just…hold on a second, I want to say something." Three whole days of darkness and silence and sometimes feeling like his only connection with the rest of the world was the steady tapping of one or two thin fingers on his hand or wrist or shoulder. Three days of wiseass adulterations of the English language. Three days of companionship. It shouldn't have surprised him, really-in fact, it didn't-and that was kind of the point.
John, of course, immediately turned skittish on him, stepping out of Rodney's personal space until the only thing within reach was his hand and wrist. He tapped an awkward ? on the ball of Rodney's thumb, and yeah, Rodney kind of knew that this was going to be wasted, but it was rare enough that he recognized a moment like this in a timely manner and he wanted to make it count.
Except he wasn't quite sure what to say, and the longer he thought on it, the more twitchy John got. Because, yes, they were technically holding hands in the middle of the infirmary, but Rodney wasn't about to let John flit off and leave him talking to the curtains (not that he thought John would actually do it, but it was always a possibility and if he was going to the effort of doing the emotional thing then he wanted it to count).
It was about the point John started to actively squirm in place that Rodney got the idea. He stood up and took another step closer, adjusting his grip so it was more like they were shaking hands. But against the heel of John's palm, he tapped out, very slowly, THANKUSORRY.
(So word breaks were harder than he thought.)
John shook his hand, very slowly, and tapped another ? as he did.
IMABITCRAZY?
UTHINK?
Rodney scowled, and felt his face heating up. "Trying to show gratitude here, Colonel."
John pumped his hand again. DONTMENTION.
NOREALLY. UDIDNTHAVETO.
YEAHDID.
?
WHATRFRENDS4?
"Still hate you," Rodney announced, but he couldn't entirely avoid grinning while he did.
LOVEU2MKAY.
John gave one last shake of Rodney's hand before letting go, and the curtain around the bed fluttered past with a little gust of air.