The Human Body VIII: Getting Under Your Skin, Part 1
Title: The Human Body VIII: Getting Under Your Skin, Part 1
Author: smallwaldo
Rating: R
Pairing: Sheppard/Beckett
Words: 2145 (this part)
A/N: This is the NaNo Nightmare I've plagued a few of you with as I was writing. The actual beta work was done by victoriaely and ladykoori. Being that it's a NaNo project, this is a long sucker. I figured I'd start posting it and one of two things would happen. Either a.) You all will remind me to really actually get this thing out to the public or b.) I'll discover that, seriously, no one wants to read 50,000 words of this nonsense. This is both the "Instinct" and "Conversion" chapter of the series. They theoretically run one to the next, but if you actually watch the end of one and then the beginning of another... not so much. I ended up having to do some *serious* tap dancing later to make things scan between the two.
Summary: "He turned me into a [bug]! ... I got better."
Weeks later, as he was still cleaning up the aftermath, Carson realized that it was his own enthusiasm that had bitten him in the ass. Or more accurately, had bitten John in the arm.
~~~***~~~***~~~
Carson rolled his eyes and shook his head. John was practically doing the splits over the edge of the diagnostic table. Carson had never seen him so much as straddle a chair before, so he was confident in his conclusion that John was trying to get his attention. He wanted to go over and slap his knee and tell him to sit right and stop distracting him, but John was already going a mile a minute about a ‘civilized’ Wraith child and a drug that allowed the Wraith to eat fish and chips like everyone else.
He shook his head clear of thoughts of the highly suggestive way John was sitting and tuned in closer to what Elizabeth was saying.
“Is such a thing even possible?”
Carson pondered for a second, before explaining that their knowledge of Wraith physiology and how it was that human ‘life essence’ could provide them with energy was still pretty sketchy.
After the disaster on Hoff he’d autopsied the Wraith that had died as a result of his drug. He’d been prepared for almost anything from insectoid physiology to icthyoid anatomy to something completely alien. He hadn’t expected to find a heart in the center of the chest, surrounded by two lungs that sat above a completely normal digestive system. Stomach, liver, intestines… Of course there were differences between Wrath and human anatomy, but it was more the difference between a human and a dog’s body. The parts were arranged slightly differently, they were a bit smaller than a human’s… but they were all there. He’d found atrophy in the smooth muscles of the intestines, but he’d attributed it to the drug that had ultimately paralyzed the diaphragm and heart, leading to the Wraith’s death. Now he wondered if those organs weren’t just larger versions of the human appendix - necessary at one point, but now a hanger-on from earlier evolutionary states.
What if they really ate? What if there was a way of supplying whatever ‘life-essence’ they sucked from people in a pill or injection? Had this man in his quaint little village found the answers to the bane of the Pegasus Galaxy’s population? Would the Wraith welcome a change in their diet? Or was people-cum-food too much a part of their culture.
His head spun. He wasn’t even sure which question needed to be answered first.
He sighed. “Right now our best guess is that the Wraith evolved from the Iratus bugs,” he started to explain.
John made a face. “Like the one that attached itself to my neck a year ago?”
Carson gave him an apologetic shrug, “That’s right.”
“I hate those bugs,” John muttered with vehemence.
“Trust me, I know,” Carson said, trying to get back to his original point and trying to move John off his recently-developed entomophobia. He hadn’t decided if the full-blown fear of bugs was as real and universal as John made it seem or if he was just having one over on people so that he didn’t have to deal with how very close he’d actually been to dying on the floor of that Jumper last year. But it seemed sometimes like John took it to the nth degree. He’d gone so far as to leave the room one evening when Carson had been doing some research on local parasites found on the mainland and the diseases they carry. Carson had called him a wuss and John had stuck up his middle finger on the way out the door, but after that, Carson had learned not to push John on the subject, and not to do research with graphic pictures on the laptop while John was around.
“We speculated that they began to evolve into the Wraith when they began to take on the characteristics of the humans they were feeding on.” He paused waiting for John to make the ‘wow, talk about a case of you really are what you eat’ comment that had gone around his department meeting when they’d originally come to the conclusion. John seemed to be still stuck on the discussion of the Iratus bugs, so he pressed on. “There are many aspects of human physiology that are quite useful. Bipedal motion, opposable thumbs, large brain capacity… But the human digestive system serves no purpose in the adult Wraith. So why have one at all?” Carson’s brain raced ahead of him. That was why the Wraith he’d autopsied had atrophied intestines.
Elizabeth picked up on his thoughts, filling in the idea that they ate food as children and then ‘grew into’ sucking lives. It occurred to him briefly to wonder if Wraith culture included some kind of rite of passage when a child claimed it’s first human meal, in the way many ancient cultures on Earth had celebrated a male child’s first hunt.
“So it’s a teenage thing. Pimples, rebellion, life sucking…” John added, making a face.
He was glad when Elizabeth grinned, because he couldn’t help grinning himself. John was such an eight-year-old sometimes, but since he could really be quite funny sometimes they let it go. In fact, it was just one of the many things that Carson loved about the man. He sobered up as he remembered what the purpose of the discussion was. “Something like that. The question is what causes it? If it’s due to some chemical deficiency like a diabetic’s inability to process sugar then it’s possible it may be addressed with some kind of drug.”
Elizabeth seemed to like the idea. Before he knew what he was doing, Carson found himself saying, “I’d like to go to the planet to check into it.” He blinked a few times. He wasn’t sure he’d ever volunteered to leave Atlantis before. He never shirked his responsibilities and he went through the gate whenever it was required, but he usually asked that samples and patients be brought to him whenever possible. But he knew, as all good scientists did, that a true case study meant studying the environment of the subject as well as the specific test results. He’d have to go there.
Perversely, Elizabeth, for once, suggested he stay in Atlantis and have the drug brought to him.
“It’s not just the drug I’m interested in,” he explained. “This young Wraith could be very important to our research.”
“What research?” John asked warily.
Carson cringed. He wasn’t really ready to talk to John about this yet. He wasn’t sure what exactly John would think of it. Carson wouldn’t be at all surprised if John took the ‘the only good Wraith was a dead Wraith’ stance and he really didn’t even want to start the debate until he was sure he had a compound that worked. Until there was actually something to argue about. And until today, until John had come in and sweet-talked him into volunteering to go off world, he’d been sure that debate could have comfortably put off for a year or more.
But this girl changed everything. A potential willing subject? If not for the actual ‘human’ trial, at least a source of living cells for cultures. And if this Zadek fellow was already on the path to the Wraith version of insulin? He looked at John earnestly. “We’re working on a retrovirus that would alter Wraith DNA. Essentially stripping out the Iratus bug elements of their genetic code and leaving only the human aspects behind.”
Carson knew he was talking fast and not necessarily explaining the technical terms, but John’s face clearly showed that understood what Carson was saying. And he didn’t seem to like it. “A drug that turns Wraith into humans?” The tone of John’s voice suggested that he didn’t want to share a genome with a creature who’d previously tried to feed on him.
“Effectively yes, but so far we haven’t had much success, partly because we lack the living tissue and blood samples we need to test it.” He was having trouble meeting John’s eyes, but at the same time, he knew this was too good an opportunity to pass up.
Elizabeth was asking John if he thought the girl would be willing to give the samples he needed. John was just making non-committal faces.
“Look, I realize we can’t bring her back to Atlantis.” Obviously if this girl was all Wraith, her telepathy would broadcast the fact that Atlantis lived to any hive ships in the area. He knew that. “But I can take the retrovirus and the equipment necessary for the analysis to the planet. A few days with a cooperative test subject could be worth months of theoretical research.” John did not look convinced. It had never mattered to Carson before that John was military, but he was starting to see how the mindset of ‘destroy the enemy at all costs’ could be a wedge between them in this issue. Carson remained steadfast in his belief that this was the best answer to the Wraith problem, so he appealed to a higher court. “Elizabeth, I don’t have to tell you how important this could be for us.”
He waited for her response. She turned to John, “Is she dangerous?”
“She’s a Wraith!” John shot back.
Carson didn’t like the ‘touche’ look Elizabeth shot at him, as if she was challenging him to challenge John. They hadn’t kept their relationship a total secret, and he was reasonably sure Elizabeth had picked up on the subtle clues and heard a few of the unsubtle rumors. It irked him that she was playing them off each other.
He was saved from having to either say that or get dragged into it when John added, “Although, I have to admit…she does seem a little different.”
Elizabeth sighed. “You think he’ll be safe working in close proximity with her?”
“I saw her stand next to a man she considers her father and hug him. If she really wanted to feed on us, she wouldn’t have let me leave in the first place.”
After a very pregnant moment where Elizabeth was clearly weighing her options, she said to Carson, “Pack up what you need.”
~~~***~~~***~~~
John followed Carson into his office and leaned on the wall while Carson exchanged his lab coat for his field jacket.
“De-wraithing drugs?” he asked after a while.
Carson looked up from the laptop he was disconnecting from the mainframe. “If we’re lucky.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” John sat on the edge of the sofa nearest Carson’s desk, close but not touching him.
“I wasn’t sure what you’d think,” Carson said studiously staring at the cable he was coiling and tucking into his laptop bag. “And until we actually had something to argue over, I didn’t want to have an argument.”
“Why would I want to argue about this?”
Carson finally turned to face him. “Are you actually going to tell me that you’ve had any other opinion besides, ‘the only good Wraith is a dead Wraith?’”
“Well, until five minutes ago I thought my only options were alive and trying to eat me or dead. In that case, yes, I vote for dead. But you think you can really make them into humans?” John grabbed Carson’s hand and pulled him close. “I’ve never seen you do anything other than completely defend the work you’ve been doing. Even on Hoff when you realized the unintended consequences of that vaccine you helped them with, you stood one hundred percent behind getting it right before using it. Why are you so ambiguous now?”
Carson sighed. “Because I don’t know how I feel about it. Subjectively, of course I want to be rid of the Wraith threat. But objectively, scientifically, sometimes I wonder if it’s not a little bit of playing God. Determining that we’re better than they are… It’s a little bit of an ethically grey area. Imagine if the cows suddenly found a way to make us into cows to end the slaughter.”
John shrugged. “Personally… I guess I’d rather be a cow than be dead.”
Carson nodded. “That’s what I keep telling myself. But sometimes I just get a bad feeling about this. It seems like a peaceful solution for coexistence, but I doubt they’ll see it that way.”
John stood and put his hand on Carson’s shoulder. “Look, I wish we could put a great big table in the gate room and negotiate a peace with the Wraith, but we both know that’s not going to happen. It’s them or us. You’re giving us a third option.”
Carson nodded. “Keep reminding me of that, alright?”
John squeezed Carson’s shoulder. “Let’s go meet a Wraith who would be overjoyed if you could make her human.”