Neery (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} neery) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} artword,@ 2006-02-19 20:07:00 |
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| Entry tags: | 002 - watch and listen, art: covers, artist: tinnny, author: neery, fandom: stargate: atlantis, pairing: john/rodney |
Author: Neery
Artist: tinnny
Title: Not A Threat (but not exactly human, either)- Part 2artword Challenge: 002A
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sheppard/McKay preslash
Summary: Rodney turns into a Wraith.
He doesn’t leave his quarters for the next week, except for occasional visit to the infirmary. John keeps him company a lot of the time, playing chess, reading, or (grudgingly) writing reports. Radek doesn’t ever visit, but Rodney knows from the regular progress reports that that’s because he’s spending all his time in the lab, trying to figure out the Ancient device in addition to doing not only his own work, but Rodney’s, too.
Elizabeth comes over once, but he can tell that she’s uncomfortable, and suspects that she can tell that he’s unhappy with her for the way she’s handling this, too. It’s a supremely unpleasant half hour, and they’re both glad when it’s over. After that, she stays away.
Everyone else is avoiding him. There are days when Rodney wants to rail against the unfairness of it all - they’re his friends, his team, shouldn’t they stick this out with him? He didn’t ask for this!
He spends a lot of the time catching up on lost sleep, making up for years of living on five hours a night, often less. Somehow, the constant sleeping seems to make the tiredness worse, though - sometimes he can barely muster the energy to get out of bed in the mornings. He suspects it’s the lack of goals. He’s slowly going stir-crazy holed up inside his room, with nothing really worthwhile to do. If John wasn’t there… well, he doesn’t even want to think about that.
On the fifth day, he starts to get hungry. It takes him a while to place the feeling, which is nothing at all like the gnawing emptiness in his stomach he felt as a human, but no less unpleasant.
John is sprawled over his bed again, reading a physics journal he stole from Rodney, lean and tousled and brazenly pretty, so it’s not like the growing urge to touch him is really all that surprising. Until the third time Rodney finds himself starting to reach out almost without conscious decision, and suddenly realizes that it’s not so much John who draws him, it’s the warm aura of light that surrounds him. It seems to have gotten brighter, calling him to touch, to taste.
He makes John take him to the infirmary. Carson is unsettlingly at a loss - they don’t know all that much about the Wraith’s feeding cycle, but they’re pretty sure that the Wraith can go for months without a meal, so it’s pretty strange for the hunger to start so soon. Carson takes blood samples and prods and pokes him with uncomfortable instruments for almost an hour, but Rodney is pretty sure that he’s just blindly attempting anything that might tell them what the fuck is wrong with his body in a kind of trial-and-error voodoo, without any real clue what to do.
When the blood test results finally arrive, they’re even worse than he could have imagined.
“I’m sorry, Rodney,” Carson says gently. “I don’t know what exactly is causing it, but maybe the device was never meant to effect a long-term change. Your body seems to be using up much more energy than a normal Wraith’s. If you don’t feed soon…”
He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. Rodney knows, has feared from the start that it would come to this: Starvation or a bullet.
Carson gives him a week.
ohn is quiet all the way back to his quarters, his face hard and inscrutable, but when the door slides closed behind them, he turns and punches it, hard. “Fuck!” Rodney winces at the sound of bones crashing against unyielding metal. “Hey, don’t do that,” he says lamely, taking John’s hand and examining it. The knuckles look sore and bruised, already starting to swell, but John doesn’t even wince when he probes them gently. His whole body is vibrating with angry tension, and Rodney feels the sharp crackle of living energy against his fingertips, so alluring that he has to let go quickly before the temptation becomes overwhelming.
“You should probably get that checked out,” Rodney says, feeling completely helpless - there’s a reason he hates it when people get emotional, and he can’t deal with John’s anger any better than with Miko’s occasional crying fits. Less, even, because at least when he pats Miko on the back and tries to apologize, sometimes that makes her stop.
“Look, I know this sucks - I mean, hello, Wraith here! - but hurting yourself isn’t going to help anything - I mean, we don’t even know yet if - maybe Radek -"
“Radek doesn’t know a thing about how the device works, and you know it,” John grates out harshly, and Rodney catches his fist just in time before it can make contact with the wall again.
“Stop it,” he says sharply, suddenly pissed off. “You’re really not helping, here. I am trying not to think about the fact that I am probably going to die in a week, and your pessimism is making that really hard, you know? Also -" and that’s when the thought finally catches up with him.
“Oh, God, I really am going to die this time”, he says weakly, sitting down on his bed with a thump. You’d think that he should be used to near-death experiences by now, as often as it has happened in the last few months, but instead it just seems to get harder every time - one of these days, his luck is going to run out, and this might just be it.
He stares at the wall and feels like crying, even though his Wraith eyes stay dry. After a few minutes, John sits down next to him and hesitantly puts an arm around his shoulders. Rodney gives in to the impulse to hide his face in John’s shoulder. It’s not like he’s going to have all that much time left to be embarrassed about it.
On the seventh day, he wakes up from a soft touch on his shoulder. Even without opening his eyes, he knows it’s John, and not only because he’s the only one who ever comes in here in the mornings. It’s like the beautiful warm light surrounding John has suddenly got even brighter, shinier, so striking he can see it with his eyes closed now, can feel the enticing siren call of it humming along his skin, and suddenly he wants it so much he can hardly think, so much that the thought of not having hurts.
He doesn’t remember making any kind of conscious decision, but suddenly John is sprawled on the bed, Rodney’s weight pressing him down. John’s soft black t-shirt is crinkling under the searching pads of his fingers, light gathering around his hand. It’s the nicest thing he’s ever felt, pure energy crackling and humming along his nerves, gathering for him, and all he has to do is reach out and take, bury his hand in that well of life…
It doesn’t even last a second, then John makes a startled, shocked sound, and Rodney is suddenly, painfully awake, snapping out of the trance and off the bed, stumbling back until his back hits the wall.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says, frantically, miserable with shame. “I don’t know what - I’m so sorry, John, I didn’t mean -"
John is on his feet in one single quick motion, gun in his hand, and Rodney flattens himself to the wall even more, arms spread beside his body, palms out. Not a threat, not a threat…
Damn. This has probably just destroyed every last bit of trust between them. And still John is tempting his hunger, drawing him like a moth to the flame - except that when they touch, it’s John who’s going to wither and die.
“What the fuck was that, Rodney?”
“I’m sorry,” he repeats, helplessly. He’s still shaking with the restraint of staying away from John. It’s easier to resist now that he’s fully awake, his mind unclouded and burning with the horror of what he almost did, but it’s still there, undiminished, waiting for him to relax his guard so it can take control again. All this time, the Wraith instincts have been dormant, barely noticeable, but now the hunger is bringing them out in full force.
“I’m so sorry.” It’s nowhere near enough, but he doesn’t know what else to say - how the hell do you apologize to your best friends for almost killing him?
John sighs, shaking his head. “Forget it. It’s not your fault. Just - be more careful in the future, will you?”
After that, John stops touching him.
On the eight day, Rodney makes John chain him to the bed. He’s really not safe to be around anymore. All he can think about is the hunger burning inside him, and John’s mere presence is torture now, taunting him with what he can’t have.
Radek comes by once, his eyes red-rimmed and tired, dark bruises under his eyes. He looks like he did during the siege, when they stopped eating and sleeping for days, working non-stop. Even the aura of light surrounding him looks dull and sickly. He apologizes for being unable to figure it out in time in broken, accented English, losing his grasp of the language like he always does when he’s dead tired.
On the eleventh day, the cramps start. It begins with shivers, running through his body in irregular intervals, accompanied by little twitches of pain all through his muscles. They get steadily worse, until he’s shuddering and panting with the pain. John’s aura is shining like a beacon now, promising an end to the unbearable hunger and salvation from the pain.
Carson injects him with something that doesn’t help at all, examines him again, and takes more blood. Rodney clutches the sheets so he won’t reach out for him, fabric ripping to shreds under the death grip of his claws.
In the end Carson can’t really do anything but confirm what they all already know: He’s starving to death. They’ve never actually seen a Wraith starve - they killed Steve before it got anywhere near this bad - and this rapid deterioration isn’t typical anyway, so they don’t know exactly what to expect. Rodney is pretty sure it’s going to keep getting worse, though. Suddenly a bullet through the head doesn’t seem all that unappealing an end anymore, but he knows that he can’t do that to John, who is staring fixedly at the wall with a mixture of concern, anger and sorrow on his face.
He knows this has to be hell on him - John can’t just stand back and watch, he always has to do something, and this helplessness isn’t something he really knows how to deal with. And he has this stupid tendency to feel personally responsible for everything that goes wrong, too.
“John?” Rodney says, and waits until John faces him, eyes huge and dark in the dimness of the room. “You know this is not your fault, right?”
Just then, the next shudder rips through him, muscles clenching up in a wave of pain. He screams, panting through the worst of it with his eyes closed, and when he opens them again, John is standing beside the bed, unbuckling the cuff around his right arm.
“Hey! Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing, have you lost your mind?”
e forces the arm down, out of reach of John’s tempting energy, stuffing the hand under his hip to keep it still. He watches incredulously as John tugs off his t-shirt, exposing his naked chest, dog-tags glinting right above that place where the glow that surrounds him is strongest. He spreads his arms, offering himself up. “Just… just be careful, okay?” he says, a bit shakily. “Try not to take more than a year or so.”
Rodney stares at him in horror. “John, no! Seriously, get away from me, I don’t have that kind of self-control,” and, when John refuses to comply, “Oh, that is just typical, you really don’t have an ounce of self-preservation, do you? I am not going to take your life so I can survive, what kind of moronic plan is that? Really, really not.”
He would have crossed his arms over his chest, but that’s not really possible with one of them still chained. And right now he isn’t so sure that he could stop himself from reaching out and taking John’s stupid heroic sacrifice if he allows his arm to move even a little bit.
John is glaring at him. “Don’t be stupid, Rodney - you’re not supposed to take all of it. Look, the Wraith have got to be pretty energy-efficient, or the one in the crashed hive-ship would never have been able to survive for 10.000 years. A month of my life is going to give you plenty of time, more than enough for Carson and Radek to fix this, and I won’t even miss it.”
Part of him finds the logic wonderfully compelling, but that’s the part that is screaming and salivating, and he really, really doesn’t want to listen to it.
“No. Really, I think not.”
John sits down on the edge of the bed, right next to him. Rodney can feel the burn of his warmth even through his clothes.
“Rodney, please,” he says. “Think about it. We’re in the middle of a war. Chances that I’ll ever die of old age are pretty damn slim, and even if I manage to get that old by some miracle, a month isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference. You need it more than I do. Please.”
It’s too much to resist. Rodney closes his eyes and puts his hand on John’s chest, wiry hair crinkling beneath his hand and energy gathering under his palm. John makes a hissing sound, muscles tensing up, but stays still. Rodney traces his claws across the skin, trying to figure out how to do this. John’s naked chest feels startlingly vulnerable, and the thought of digging his claws in there is repulsive.
John is completely motionless, frozen under Rodney’s touch - nothing like Gaul, who was screaming and trying to fight, skin withering and drying up, body aging and dying… No. He can’t do this. He pulls his hand back with almost superhuman effort, shaking his head desperately. It hurts to let go.
“No. No, John, I won’t.”
“Rodney -" John starts, but doesn’t get any further than that, because suddenly the door is bursting open, and Lorne is storming in in full combat dress.
“Colonel -"
He stops dead when he see the scene in front of him: John with his shirt off, Rodney partially uncuffed - but John is already on his feet, waving him down.
“Don’t worry, Major, not what it looks like -" Even though that’s exactly what it is, of course. “What’s the matter?”
“The Wraith are coming,” Lorne says, staring at Rodney with hate in his eyes. “Several darts, heading straight for Atlantis, ETA in half an hour - he must have betrayed us.”
“Hey! Hey, I did not!” Rodney protests, but they’re not even listening.
“We can sort this out later,” John says impatiently, “Come on, let’s get going - and I want a guard here who is not going to shoot him, you hear me?”
With that they are out of the room, the door closing between them and Rodney.
He waits in tense silence, biting his lips whenever a new wave of pain rips through his body. Where the hell did the Wraith come from? Even now he doesn’t feel any kind of telepathic connection to them, nothing like what Teyla described - the transformation doesn’t seem to have affected that. He can’t have called them here. He clings to that thought while he lays helpless in the dim room, waiting for any kind of sign. Once he’s sure he hears the screeching of a dart overhead, followed by an explosion, but the sound is so faint he can’t be sure.
The pain has stopped getting worse, at least, but that’s not much of a consolation - the cramps are coming steadily about every other minute, so intense they leave him shaking and weak. His thoughts are revolving around John, though. He’s probably up there in the air by now, guarding the city against those Wraith darts - taking stupid risks, in all probability.
There are sounds in the corridors too, now – running, and someone is shouting orders. Damn. The Wraith must have gotten through somehow.
Suddenly the door slides open with a screeching sound, and a Wraith storms in. Rodney recoils in instinctive terror, but the chains jerk him back down on the bed harshly. The Wraith doesn’t attack, though - instead he starts fumbling with the cuffs around Rodney’s arm, claws scraping against his wrist. Rodney is dazed enough from panic and fear that it takes him a few seconds to understand what the hell is going on - until he realizes that the Wraith thinks he’s one of them. Well, of course.
Just then, another wave of pain crashes through him. The Wraith holds his arms down and keeps him from thrashing, but not cruelly - and when it’s over and Rodney falls back on the bed in exhaustion, he makes an angry sound.
“I can’t believe they let you starve - soulless creatures, those damn humans. They don’t even know what the word mercy means!”
Rodney stares at him, stunned beyond words by the irony of it all for a moment, but he supposes it may make sense from a Wraith’s perspective.
“Uh,” he says noncommittally.
The Wraith is pulling him to his feet. “Can you walk? Come on, we’ll get you a human to feed on. You were lucky we caught your distress signal - after they made us believe that the city of the traitors had been destroyed, we don’t usually get that close anymore.”
“Um, yes,” Rodney says weakly. Distress signal? “Hey, how did you get down here, anyway?” They have a shield now, after all.
“We transported down. It took us a while to find a way to reach through their shield, but we managed it in the end,” the Wraith says, sounding proud.
It’s hard to walk. His muscles are shaking from fatigue and pain, and the hunger is still burning brightly through his veins. He really, really has to get rid of the damn Wraith and lock himself somewhere he can’t do any harm.
From the corridor in front of him he can hear the sounds of a fight, shots and screams - and a second later, a Marine comes running around the corner. The Wraith is whipping around, lifting his gun. Rodney reaches out to shove him, hoping to divert the shot - but the second his palm makes contact with the Wraith’s chest he realizes what he’s forgotten – he can feed on other Wraith, too - and then another instinct entirely takes over, and suddenly the Wraith is screaming, falling to his knees, as Rodney drinks his energy in.
It’s amazing, the most awesome rush ever, like food and power and an orgasm all rolled into one, energy crackling and singing along his nerves, and the glorious relief from the pain. When it’s over, he comes back to himself to find the Marine staring at him in shock, gun wavering uncertainly, He saved my life by killing the Wraith and He is a Wraith fighting it out across his face.
But he has his full strength back now, a Wraith’s full strength, and it’s only too easy to move across the corridor, faster than he’s ever been as a human, and wrench the gun from the man’s hands.
The Marine jerks back, back crashing into the wall as he tries to get away. Rodney opens his mouth to reassure him, but then a scream echoes through the corridor, and he’s off and running before he has consciously realized what’s happening.
Teyla.
He takes the corner so fast he almost crashes into the wall, but he’s still too late. Ronon and Teyla are surrounded by a whole group of Wraith, at least five of them. Ronon is lying on the floor, a puddle of blood spreading underneath his body, but he’s still firing, desperately trying to get up, to get to Teyla, who is writhing and twisting in the grip of one of the Wraith, his palm already pressed to her chest.
Ronon manages to take out one of the Wraith before another kicks the gun out of his hands, and Rodney suddenly remembers that he himself is still clutching the Marine’s gun. He sends a fierce thanks to John for the endless training sessions he has made him go through and opens fire, catching one of the Wraith square in the chest and the other one in the head, knocking them down to the floor. But he can’t get a good aim on the third one, who is holding Teyla in front of himself like a shield.
And then it is already too late. Rodney watches in horror as he growls and slams his hand into her chest, Teyla’s scream making every hair on his body stand on end as she ages before his eyes. By the time he’s close enough to rip her away from the Wraith, it is all but over - she is limp in his hands, her body brittle and fragile and her hair completely white.
Rodney lowers her to the floor carefully, and then turns to the Wraith, who is watching him with narrowed, suspicious eyes. “What are you doing?” he hisses, pulling himself up to his full, intimidating height.
Rodney doesn’t give him time to reach for his weapon, or try to lift his own – he’s too close for that, anyway - he just reaches put, ramming his claws into the Wraith’s chest as hard as he can, and sucks.
It doesn’t feel as good this time - he isn’t as hungry, and the grief over Teyla is bright and sharp enough to drown out the pleasure - but the rush of revenge is still strong and heady.
The Wraith falls to his feet as a limp, dried-out husk when he finally lets go.
Rodney doesn’t give him a second glance. He kneels down next to Teyla and turns her on her back tenderly. She looks at least a hundred years old, much worse than Gaul had, her breath coming in painful, wheezing gasps. Rodney strokes her cheek tenderly. God, Teyla.
“Get away from her, Wraith,” Ronon hisses from behind him, dragging himself towards them despite what Rodney can now see is a huge bleeding gash in his right thigh.
“It’s me, Ronon,” Rodney says tiredly. “I’m not going to hurt her.”
Ronon’s expression is still deeply suspicious, but Rodney can’t bring himself to care. He feels hollow and empty inside, and he wishes he could have cried.
Teyla’s dying, her aura is fading fast. His own shines bright and powerful in comparison, brimming with the two Wraiths’ life-force, more than - oh. Oh. No, this wouldn’t work, it couldn’t possibly - but he’s already reaching out, pulling her ripped top to the side and fitting his hand into the claw marks left by the other Wraith, trying to remember how it had felt to feed, to suck the energy inside himself - “No! Get away from her! Leave her alone!” Ronon is screaming, but Rodney ignores him - trying to turn the feeling around, to feed the energy back to her.
t’s hard, and he has to fight against a resistance, but suddenly it works, the energy is flowing out of him and back into her body - and before his eyes, the transformation starts to run backwards, her hollow cheeks filling out, wrinkled skin smoothing out and regaining its youth, the color of her hair darkening until it is a vibrant, shiny brown again. Behind him, Ronon gives a startled hiss, but he keeps going, concentrating until the resistance becomes too high, until her body refuses to accept any more. Only then does he let go, touching her cheek in wonder. Teyla’s eyes are still closed, but her breath is strong and steady, lifting her sides in a regular rhythm.
“She’s alive,” he whispers, reverently. “I think she’s going to be all right, Ronon.”
Ronon has dragged himself beside him, collapsing flat on the floor with an audible thump. He reaches up a trembling hand to touch Teyla’s shining hair - and then puts it on Rodney’s thigh, the only part of him he can reach without moving anything else, and squeezes, hard.
“Thank you, McKay. Thank you.” He closes his eyes, hand sliding limply to the floor. Rodney suddenly becomes aware of how painfully ironic it would be to have saved Teyla only to have Ronon bleed out next to him. He fumbles Ronon’s headset off and on, already screaming for Carson.
There is a stupidly dangerous moment when the Marines find him sitting next to their unconscious, bleeding bodies, with Rodney screaming “Not a Wraith! I’m not a Wraith!” in his panic like a complete idiot, because, okay, not so very credible right now - but then Teyla opens her eyes and practically growls at the Marines to leave him alone, squeezing his hand in hers, and a minute after that, John arrives, too, panting and running and shouting orders.
Carson is able to fix Ronon’s leg, although he grumbles a lot about patients who don’t have the good sense to stay down even with a fifteen-centimeter-long gash in their leg. Teyla is not quite as perfectly recovered as it has seemed at first - there are a few wrinkles around her eyes that have not been there before, and her hair has kept a few white strands - but all in all she doesn’t seem to have lost more than a year or two.
The next day is a series of horribly embarrassing moments, where Teyla, Lorne and Elizabeth all apologize to him, separately and agonizingly, for having doubted him, during which Rodney nods and squirms a lot. John apologizes repeatedly to everyone for having let those darts get through - which is just ridiculous in light of the eleven darts he did shoot down, and Rodney doesn’t hesitate to tell him so.
onon is the only one of them who has any sense - he doesn’t apologize at all, but the next morning Rodney finds a huge stack of pilfered sweets on his desk, which he appreciates a lot more. Okay, so they don’t actually have any nutritional value for this body, but they taste just as good, anyway. After that, Elizabeth doesn’t try to stop him from entering the labs anymore. Radek has done an amazing job in his absence, keeping the city running and doing everything in his power to decipher the Ancient device, but that’s not a job for a single human, even a genius. Now that Rodney is doing his share of the work again, and they can bounce ideas off each other, it’s much easier to make progress.
The Ancient database finally decides to cooperate, too, and deigns to tell them that the device was used to enable Ancients to infiltrate Wraith ships, by temporarily turning them into Wraith and then sending out a distress signal to attract the ships. Of course they didn’t actually try to use it in Atlantis, and Rodney and Radek spend a sleepless night trying to turn the signal off.
After that, it’s practically smooth sailing. Well, their experiments fail a few more times, but after one melted console, one potted plant catching fire, seven dead and two wraithified mice, they’re finally reasonably sure that they know how to operate the device without killing anyone.
When they finally try to turn Rodney back, half of Atlantis seems to have crowded into lab six, which is spacious, but not that huge, so Radek finally shoos most of them out impatiently. Only Elizabeth and Rodney’s team stay behind.
Teyla earnestly wishes him the blessing of the ancestors and touches her forehead to his, Elizabeth hugs him, Ronon grumbles something unintelligible, and John looks at him for a long moment, silently - until he reaches out and catches Rodney in a quick, hard hug that takes him completely by surprise.
“Good luck,” John says, shuffling his feet a little.
“Uh, thanks,” Rodney stammers, and then ducks in front of the device.
Radek pushes a few buttons, swears, does something to the laptop controlling the thing, pushes some more buttons, and then the world goes dark.
When Rodney wakes up, he is lying in a soft bed. John is sitting next to him, fingers lightly resting on Rodney’s hand - his completely human hand.
The End
ETA:
cynicatlantis has drawn a wraithified mouse: OMGWTFwraithmouse?! and made animated wraithmouse icons!
