The Human Body VIII: Getting Under Your Skin, Part 4 (Sheppard/Beckett)
Title: The Human Body VIII: Getting Under Your Skin, Part 4
Author: smallwaldo
Rating: R
Pairing: Sheppard/Beckett
Words: 3283 (this part)
A/N: 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 in this chapter to make things scan between the two. This part beta'd by kyrdwyn. Thanks! :)
Summary: "He turned me into a [bug]! ... I got better."
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Carson wandered back to his quarters, hoping John and the rest would hurry home soon. Even though he knew both the adult Wraith and Ellia were dead, he couldn’t help but worry about them. For all they knew there was yet a third Wraith on the planet.
He turned up both the temperature and the pressure settings in his shower before climbing back out of the scrub shirt he’d kept on after his exam, and chucking his shoes and pants in the corner of the bathroom.
He turned his face into the spray letting the sting of the water blast away some of the melancholy and soreness. After a few minutes he turned and let the hot water massage his sore neck. He wasn’t surprised when he found himself really wishing that John were there to take care of that, but he shook it off knowing that John would be home soon enough and reminding himself that he needed to get back down to the infirmary to catalog the information he had managed to glean in this disastrous experiment.
He scrubbed the debris out of his hair and the dirt from his body, once again wishing that John were there to get his back. He let the water run over the sore and stiff muscles for a few more minutes until he could feel the heat and pressure do their job and he could roll his shoulders and bend over without wincing. He could even look in both directions as long as he didn’t have to turn too fast.
He turned off the water and quickly dried himself off before the steam was sucked up by the air recirculation system and the room cooled. His only clean uniform was his old tan one, so he pulled it on and grabbed his lab coat off the peg on the side of the closet and headed back to the infirmary.
Between the drugs and the shower he was moving much more smoothly when he came back in. He made it a point to show Carolyn, so she wouldn’t get on his case.
He was just about to start sorting through his field pack - disposing of broken items and restocking it - when he heard the announcement for a medical team to report to the gateroom.
He was aware that there were other teams out, but instinctively he knew it was John’s team. He grabbed the two nearest nurses and a gurney and ran to the gateroom.
When they got there, Ronon was helping Sheppard stand despite Sheppard’s protestations. “I’m fine. It was a momentary… thing. Let go of me!” He finally shook Ronon off.
Carson could see where John’s arm was still oozing blood. He checked his watch, it had been over an hour since he’d left John on that planet. He should have stopped bleeding long ago. He looked up to Ronon, “What happened?”
“He nearly passed out on the way back to the gate.”
Rodney was shaking one hand over and over again. “About face planted in the mud, it was almost entertaining. On the other hand,” he said holding his palm in Carson’s face. “I seem to have gotten a two by four stuck in my hand from that damn primitive shovel handle.”
Carson could see a small piece of wood sticking out of Rodney’s hand, but there wasn’t any visible blood. The wood seemed lodged in pretty well, but it certainly wasn’t life threatening. “Come down and have someone look at that, Rodney.” He turned back to where John was starting to waver a little again. “You,” he said sharply, “Up here.” He patted the gurney.
Ronon grabbed John’s arm and all but lifted him bodily onto the gurney. Carson grabbed a pressure bandage from the pack on the stretcher and wrapped it around John’s arm. John fell back against the gurney and rolled his eyes as the nurse strapped him in and began rolling him down the hall.
“This really isn’t necessary, Doc,” John complained to Carson.
“Yes it is, Colonel, you have a serious laceration and you’ve lost a lot of blood.” He couldn’t understand why the blood on John’s arm seemed fresh. He hadn’t thought it was bad at all when he’d gone. He’d also assumed that with all the medical gear he’d left in Zadek’s house that John would have had the sense to find something wash his arm off with and wrap it up in. He’d give him the lecture about that later.
Leslie was handing him betadine and a swab before he even had to ask for it. As much as he didn’t want to cause John the pain of using betadine to clean out a wound like that, he really didn’t have a choice since John had left it exposed to dirt, germs and god knows what else for so long.
“This might sting a little,” he warned.
At that moment someone pulled out Rodney’s splinter and he yelped. John glared at him. “I’m sure it will,” he said snidely, but he didn’t flinch or hiss or anything as Carson rubbed the sticky yellow stuff over his arm. He shrugged, it didn’t hurt. In fact he hardly felt it.
“I know you have a high threshold for pain, but this is…” Carson stopped suddenly and stared at John’s arm. The betadine was wiping away the blood, but it wasn’t uncovering a mark or a cut of any kind. “…gone…” Carson blinked; there had been a cut and scab there when he’d removed the pressure bandage. He knew there had been.
“What?” John asked, looking back from where he was watching Rodney kvetch about his splinter.
“The feeding mark, it’s completely healed.”
John’s eyes met Carson’s and they both scrambled for an answer other than the obvious.
Carson carefully, but thoroughly cleaned John’s arm looking carefully for any sign that there had just been a five-centimeter gash that had been bleeding profusely not more than a minute ago. He couldn’t find one.
His stomach sank. The retrovirus had led to Ellia’s death. He harbored enough guilt for that, but now that it appeared that John could very well be heading for the same fate he felt ill.
“This isn’t right,” Carson muttered. “How do you feel?”
John ran his finger over the place the cut had been. “Fine. It’s not sore or anything.”
Carson shook his head. “I’m going to need to run a few tests.” He patted John’s knee and went to collect a few things. He started with a syringe and drew blood. He had at least a hundred other tests he wanted to run, and he’d probably need a few dozen more vials of blood before this was over, but the first thing he had to do was verify that, in fact, John did have the Wraith retrovirus in his system.
Carson tied the tourniquet around John’s arm and gave him an apologetic smile before starting the draw. “I don’t understand how there can be absolutely no sign of an injury there now.”
“ Maybe the wound wasn’t that bad,” John suggested.
“Then where did all the blood come from?” Carson knew damn well that the cut had been significant. It wasn’t deep - the blood was bright red, not dark, deep arterial blood, but it had run down John’s arm and it looked to still be bleeding even as recently as in the gate room. There was only one obvious reason John would be showing signs of unnatural healing abilities.
“I don’t know maybe it just looked a lot worse than it was.”
“I don’t see any evidence of any cut at all.” Carson pulled another vial of blood. He once again examined the site of the original wound, then the site of the blood draw. There wasn’t the slightest sign that John’s skin had been broken in either place.
“That’s weird because it hurt like hell.” Carson made a face at John. It usually took getting hit by a Hive ship to get John to admit to pain. There had been a few times his team had dragged him down insisting that he was injured and John had honestly not even realized that he was sporting a new bruise or cut. He did have a high pain tolerance - Carson hadn’t just been stroking John’s ego when he said that - but this whole situation spoke to something else.
He turned John’s arm over for the umpteenth time. It didn’t make sense. No, it made sense - but only in the worst possible way. “You’re sure the skin was broken?” He knew the answer, but he needed to see if John would come up with another answer to blood on the outside of perfectly healed skin.
“I’m pretty sure; there was a lot of blood. Maybe it was hers.” John was studying his own arm with equal interest, as if the appendage were some kind of independent life form he’d never encountered before.
“It was definitely human.” Much as Carson wished that might have been the case, he knew it wasn’t.
At a loss, John took a new tack. “I don’t know. Maybe it was a nose-bleed.”
“Is that supposed to be a joke, Colonel?” Despite the fact that there was no one else around Carson called him by rank. He hoped that perhaps it would convey a little bit of how upset he was by this whole situation. He was completely unamused by John’s comment. He was attempting to come to grips with the fact that he was going to end up being responsible for the death of the one person who had made living in this floating deathtrap easier - even more or less enjoyable.
John realized he’d blown it and that Cason’s already mounting anxiety had only been exacerbated. “Believe me, this isn’t funny,” John capitulated. The whole situation was making him jittery though. After a day of trooping through the woods hunting Wraith and Wraithlettes, he should have wanted nothing more than a shower and hamburger and his bed. But he was feeling jumpy and hyper as he glanced back and forth between his now-whole arm and Carson.
Carson patted his arm affectionately, realizing that they were both feeling uneasy about the situation and that they both had their own ways of dealing with the stress. He gave John half a smile. “Give me half a day to run your blood work and analyze it with the data we already have. We’ll figure it out.” He wasn’t sure that it wasn’t a completely empty promise, but it was one he had to make.
“And until then?” John asked. He was starting to feel like he was caged in. He needed to move. If Carson told him that he had to lay in an infirmary bed while they poked and prodded him, he was going to go out of his mind.
“Well, you’re welcome to look over my shoulder.” It was a running joke. John was great in a crisis, Carson had learned. He had a high level of first aid training and he wasn’t afraid to use it. But for some reason, when he was purely a spectator among some kind of trauma or injury he became… girly. So now when Carson had some kind of gross anatomy or disgusting test to deal with he often invited John to look over his shoulder.
Usually John would just shudder and decline and walk away so that Carson could get on with his job. Tonight he threw Carson a curve. “That’s tempting, but....”
Carson smiled. “Just go about your day.”
John left then, his itchy feeling worse. Part of him wanted to stay and see what Carson came up with. The sooner they found the key to this little mystery of his, the sooner he could scratch this itch and collapse on the couch with Carson and a DVD and jokes about, “Hey remember when your drug almost turned me into a Wraith?”
~~~***~~~***~~~
Carson collected the blood tests he’d taken. He wished he’d know that John’s arm was going to heal so fast - he would have gotten pictures and skin scrapings and other samples. He wondered if it would be completely unethical - if it would come down to - seeing if the results would repeat. He didn’t relish the idea of cutting John just to see if he’d heal, but he couldn’t rule out that it might come down to that.
He brought the blood into lab and labeled the vials. He handed one to Leslie. “Run the usual panels on this - CBC, Chem 20, glucose level, what have you. Nothing abnormal is insignificant. I need you to run everything at least twice.”
Carson sat at his own station to look first hand at what was in John’s blood. He suspected that he knew. And he suspected he was going to be in for some very, very long days of trying to figure out how to get it back out again.
~~~***~~~***~~~
John left the infirmary feeling a little like he’d mainlined a case of Red Bull and then sat on a low voltage live wire. His skin was tingling everywhere. He was bouncing and he couldn’t seem to keep on a train of thought for more than a few seconds.
Ronon was coming towards him with Carson’s cases as John headed towards his quarters. “Hey, whatcha doin’?” he asked falling in step with the taller man.
Ronon just held up the cases with a ‘what do you think?’ look.
“Once you drop them off, you want to go for a run?” John couldn’t stand still. It occurred to him that after chasing both an adult and an adolescent Wraith through the woods that he really should be tired, but he supposed that the adrenaline from the chases and the oddness of his injury healing was making him a bit loopy.
Ronon looked him up and down before slamming the smaller of the two cases into John’s chest since he clearly didn’t intend to be useful on his own accord. “You want to run? Now?”
“Sure, it’s only…” John looked at his watch, “twenty-one hundred. That’s not late.”
Ronon studied him as they made their way to the infirmary and turned the cases over to the nearest nurse.
“Come on,” John badgered, bouncing on his toes.
“How’s your arm?” Ronon asked, noticing that there wasn’t a bandage where he expected one to be.
John held it up for Ronon’s inspection. “A lot better than we expected it to be. Which is… you know… odd. But I’m fine. And a little wound up, so lets run.”
Ronon grabbed his arm, twisting and turning it, looking for the feeding mark and then doing the same to the other. “She tried to feed on you. You were bleeding.”
“Yeah. Weird, huh?” was John’s only remark.
“What did Beckett say about that?” Ronon continued to look for signs of injury on John’s arms.
“He’s working on it.” He barely stopped himself from saying, so there goes my preferred way to work out this extra energy.
Ronon dropped John’s arms and decided that someone had to keep an eye on Sheppard while he was acting like this. “Let me go put my coat away.”
John followed Ronon to his quarters where they both dropped off their field gear. On their way up the catwalks, John grabbed a water bottle from the mess. And then proceeded to run rings around the runner.
~~~***~~~***~~~***~~~
Ronon had dropped out after six laps. They usually only did four, on a good day five. And Ronon always beat him. That night John had done eight.
John collapsed on the edge of his bed. His skin still tingled and he wondered if that was what an electric eel felt like as a charge built. He just wasn’t sure what kind of discharge he would have to have to make the feeling go away. He wasn’t as bouncy or nervously energetic, but he wasn’t sure how well he’d sleep, so he didn’t even try.
He wished anybody but Carson had to be the one to stay up and work this weirdness out. He suspected that he could have controlled the anxiousness that had him getting up for a glass of water he really didn’t want or checking to be sure he had put the safety on his nine mil six times or doing several sets of push-ups just to get the wiggles out, if Carson had been there with him.
He tried to read War and Peace, but the words seemed to split and double and move around on the page. He decided that maybe he was tired after all and stripped down and pulled the covers up over his head.
His dreams were split over and over again. At first he saw two creatures - Ellia and the Wraith. Then they split into Ellia, the girl who wanted to be human and Ellia the creature who wanted to eat him. Who had actually made a damned good attempt at eating him. Then there were four creatures, then sixteen, then sixty-four. Each one was too small for him to focus on when he tried to fight her off, but for something so small she was amazingly strong. He guessed it had to do with the way she kept splitting and multiplying.
Once he shook her off, he shot her and she stayed down. Amazingly.
Dream logic dictated that it made perfect sense for him to go back to Atlantis alone. Everyone else had gone back apparently, because they were all standing in the gateroom waiting for him to come back and announce that he’d killed her.
Oddly all he could think of when he saw them, was sticking his hand into each and everyone of their chests and sucking the life from them. He reached up to rub his hand through his hair - an old gesture of frustration and confusion - and found not short spiky hair that wouldn’t lay flat in the shower, but long thin hair that he could pull around to where he could see it. White.
He put his hands over his face and felt slits on his cheekbones and sharp, animal teeth.
John sat up, only years of military training keeping him from screaming. He breathed harshly and his hands flew up to check his hair and face. Normal, as far as he could tell. He ran to the bathroom, tripping over the blankets and sheets as he went, checking four different times that his hair was still black and short and his teeth were even and his cheeks weren’t split by something that always reminded him of gills.
He splashed his face with water a few times and scrubbed it dry with a towel, checking one more time that he was exactly who he’d always been.
He checked his arm. Still in one piece. He ran his fingers over the place that should have been held together with stitches or surgical glue and bandages and shook his head. It had been a weird day. No wonder he was having freaky dreams. He was tired. That was why he couldn’t see straight, though the double vision was starting to get annoying. He thought about going down to see if Carson was still working. He wanted to go drag him away from the slides and specimens and screens and curl up around him. Carson would keep the nightmares away. But he also knew that Carson wouldn’t rest until he knew why John’s arm had miraculously sealed itself.
John threw himself back on the bed and watched the moonlight shift across the ceiling. It looked like neither one of them would be sleeping that night.