Hunger by Kharessa Bloodrose [Reviews - 16]
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Category: General
Characters: Carson Beckett, Elizabeth Weir, John Sheppard, Other, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex
Rating: R
Genres: Action/Adventure, Angst, Drama
Warnings: Adult themes, Character death
Series: None
Word count: 4048; Completed: Yes
Summary: Rodney and Ronon survive a harrowing experience and return to Atlantis after all hope had been lost. This is a horror story written for Halloween.
Rodney hummed quietly within his morphine haze, listening to himself with the fascinated interest of the truly stoned. The sound rose and fell amid the soft ticks and beeps of the infirmary's equipment, briefly matching one or another mechanical voice before trailing away into vocalized breathing. It was nice, really, even though Rodney had always loathed the infirmary, and even though he'd recently had more bones than he cared to think of re-broken and set. It was nice because he was home, and because there was a call button that would instantly summon concerned faces and voices, and after a solid two months of no one but Ronon Dex for company, that was a huge relief. The call button meant that he didn't have to worry about the basics - Rodney could lie back and hum and watch his toes that peeked out from the ends of his two new casts.
Every ten minutes or so he could hit the button, and Rodney had noticed that the nurses were doing a better job of covering their annoyance than usual. Carson had given him one of the few private rooms though, and that meant that the call button was his only means of keeping other people within reassuring audio and visual range. Keeping them in the room was more problematic, and that resulted in repetitious button pressing. It was almost as satisfying as a self administering morphine button, though he hadn't gotten one of those.
The nurse who had brought his dinner tray had stayed for a while, and that had been nice. She'd sat at his bedside watching him push his reconstituted mashed potatoes and sliced beef around with his fork as if it was the most fascinating thing she'd ever seen. Rodney had stretched it out as far as he'd been able, complaining about the gritty potatoes and babbling about his preference for MREs, but eventually he'd had to admit that he simply wasn't hungry.
At some point during the past twelve hours, his appetite had completely and inexplicably vanished. He could remember the sound of his own voice droning into darkness, reciting endless lists of foods to Ronon, and he'd thought that if they were ever rescued he'd eat and eat and eat until he couldn't eat another bite. They hadn't been starving, but after they'd run through their supplies it had been the same thing day after day. Rodney had recovered from his aversion to the idea of eating rodents fairly quickly, but it had taken less than two weeks for him to want something, anything else. Brussels sprouts, liver, anything that had been cooked and seasoned rather than hacked and half burned on a fire built from broken shelves and scavenged debris.
He'd actually cried while eating his first real meal at home, but after that his interest in food had disappeared without a trace. Not even the thought of chocolate could bring back that yearning that had felt almost like love, and in spite of the nurse's gentle persistence, Rodney hadn't been able to force himself to eat more than a few bites of his dinner. She'd finally left it with him, and an hour later she'd returned to take it away.
"Rodney?" A soft voice spoke, and Rodney shifted his gaze from his toes to the door. Elizabeth had appeared there, her expression an odd blend of worry, relief, wariness, and sympathy. Her smile wavered as she stepped into the room, but regained strength when Sheppard entered behind her. His expression was more guarded but less complicated, and Rodney found it easier to return his smile.
"Rodney?" Elizabeth repeated. "You have no idea how glad we are to have you back. We thought..." Her words trailed off, but Rodney heard her never the less. ~We thought you were dead. You and Ronon and Lt. Cadman.~
"No such luck," he returned, his smile turning into a wide, loopy grin. "I'm relieved to see that no one has blown up the city in my absence." His lips tried and failed to twist into a smirk. "Surprised, actually."
"Keep it up, Rodney," Sheppard drawled, dropping into a chair beside his bed. Elizabeth shot him a quick, ambiguously disapproving glance. Sheppard shrugged, cocking an eyebrow, and Rodney rolled his eyes.
"Please, Elizabeth," Rodney said, shaking his head against his pillow in mock disappointment. "This is exactly the sort of reception I'd expected. It wouldn't be home otherwise." He wiggled his shoulders against the pillow, and then waved his hand toward the bedside. "Sit down. Stay a while if you want."
"Yes, well," Elizabeth said, pursing her lips. She hovered for a moment, and then leaned forward to catch one of Rodney's hands in her own. Her brow furrowed as she leaned into his space, her eyes full of earnest sincerity. "But we're glad to have you back, Rodney. We're glad you're alive, and we never would have stopped looking if we'd thought there was any chance that anyone could have survived. But, we're damned glad you did survive, Rodney. Do you understand me?"
Rodney licked his lips, his gaze shifting from her suspiciously bright eyes to Sheppard's face. Sheppard's mouth had become a tight line, but he nodded his agreement.
"I realize I've never been the most popular person in Atlantis, but I hadn't really thought that anyone would actually be hoping I'd die," Rodney snapped at Sheppard, uneasiness working its way in around the edges of the morphine. "Thanks for the sentiments, I really am grateful, but I don't need quite that much validation."
Sheppard blinked, and for a split second Rodney saw both dismayed uncertainty and something that looked horribly like tenderness in the other man's face. The look was gone almost before Rodney could register it, smoothing into shuttered, generic pleasantness. It didn't suit Sheppard in the least, and Rodney's stomach trembled on the edge of a slow forward roll. That temporary look of shocked, helpless hurt had been bad, but somehow this was worse.
"All right, then," Elizabeth said, drawing Rodney's attention away from Sheppard. He could still hear the odd edge to Elizabeth's voice, but she released his hand. "Dr. Beckett says that if you have no objections we can ask you a few questions."
"What's to know?" Rodney groused, his eyes darting back to Sheppard. "Another point scored for the Genii. You and Teyla were with Zelenka and Simpson, and you must have been near the entrance when the bomb detonated. Cadman and Ronon and I were in what was left of the main lab. We already knew the area was geographically unstable; Kolya and his goons managed to drop most of the facility into the sublevel."
"Yes," Elizabeth said, nodding as she pulled up a chair beside Sheppard. "Barring seismic activity - or a bomb - it should have been safe."
"The plan had been for them to take what they wanted and then destroy the rest," Sheppard cut in. "We beat 'em to the punch, and you know what their mentality on that is."
"Yeah," Rodney said, shifting uncomfortably against the pillow. Pain flared from his right hip, its bright, cutting edge turned into peripherally disconcerting sensation by the morphine. "You just have to love Genii philosophy. I know I do. Especially when I'm lying in agony under roughly twenty tons of debris because some crazy bastard doesn't want to share the toys."
"But what happened?" Elizabeth asked, her tone gentle. "If you don't mind talking about it right now?"
Rodney rolled his eyes. "What happened? Well, isn't it obvious what happened?"
"Rodney," Elizabeth said.
Rodney looked away, not wanting to meet her eyes or Sheppard's. "It happened fast, alright? The actual, internal structure is as close to invulnerable as any unshielded structure can be. It didn't explode - it broke and collapsed inward, and all of it ended up under God alone knows how many tons of rock and dirt. Like blocks from a tower that's been knocked over and then buried. That's what saved us. We were in the main block, and when everything went it was like being in an elevator with a cut cable."
"It did trigger a quake," Sheppard interjected. "Nothing big, but there had been mild activity, and that bomb helped it right along. Your 'block' wasn't in the sublevel - the caverns underneath the sublevel collapsed. If that place had been five hundred yards further north, you'd have drowned."
Rodney paled, and his mouth formed a perfect, pallid circle. "I so didn't need to know that," he finally said. The line of Elizabeth's jaw tightened, and she glared at Sheppard, shaking her head in a sharp, negating gesture. Sheppard shrugged, but said nothing further.
"What do you remember?" Elizabeth asked, turning back to Rodney. Her frown had returned, and Rodney watched with interest as the tip of her tongue briefly appeared between her lips. "We need you to fill in the gaps between then and now."
"Cadman died," he said abruptly, closing his eyes. "I didn't see it. By the time we hit bottom I was already out of it. The subsections were sturdy and mostly self-contained, but there was plenty of damage. We all landed against the east wall, but the center column collapsed and fell with us. Missed Ronon completely. Landed on me and Cadman, broke pretty much everything below my waist and-" He stopped short, swallowing hard. When he spoke again, his voice was carefully, desperately even. "She was gone when I woke up. Ronon put her in the freezer. It took him a while to get the column off of me, but... for her... he didn't have to be careful. I guess he just... pulled... until-"
"I see," Elizabeth said, cutting off the flow of broken words. "I understand."
"No, no you don't," Rodney retorted, his lips twisting into a pained grimace. "She wasn't my favorite person, but she'd been in my head and I knew who she was and that she really did take her job seriously, and-"
"Rodney," Elizabeth spoke again, but Rodney overrode her.
"And some of her hair was stuck on the column, and I was too out of it to really put it all together on any deep and meaningful level, but you have to be pretty far gone not to realize that something is very wrong when one of your teammates is gone and all that's left is clots of blood and hair on a giant chunk of marble you can't get away from-"
"I think that maybe we should finish this discussion later," Sheppard said. "I think-"
"No, no, that's it," Rodney said, his eyes still shut. "That's the worst of it, besides the rats. Just give me a minute."
"The rats?" Sheppard asked, brows knitting. He shot a questioning glance at Elizabeth, and she shook her head in response. "What rats?"
"I said to give me a minute," Rodney snapped, diving for the numbing comfort of artificial serenity. Behind his closed eyelids he saw darkness and Ronon's face illuminated by the piercing glow of the flashlight; he heard the menacing rumble of shifting debris and his own panting breaths. He couldn't remember Ronon finding the morphine in the med kit, but at some point the agony had become inconsequential. The tacky, congealing wetness on the column had become a far greater concern than its crushing weight, and Rodney could remember a voice monotonously repeating, ~Get it off, get it off of me, you have to get it off of me.~
"You'd know better than me how Ronon got out," he finally said, opening his eyes. Glaring infirmary lights replaced suffocating darkness, and Rodney took a deep breath. "I know he had access to the other half of the main laboratory area - he had to climb to get to it, but that was where he took Cadman and that was where the backup generator was. Most of the systems were self-contained, but they'd taken too much damage to be of any use. We got the generator running-"
"We?" Elizabeth asked.
Rodney frowned. "Yes, we. I have no idea how long it took, but Ronon told me what he had, and I told him what to do. Not ideal. No way in hell I could give him a crash course in engineering under those circumstances, so we had power that didn't do anything but keep the freezer case running because that was the only piece of equipment that was relatively intact and not alarmingly difficult to connect." Rodney's mouth tightened. "We had two rooms, and I couldn't move. I think you can understand why it seemed important to be able to keep... things frozen."
"Yes, yes I do," Sheppard said. His voice sounded strained, but his features remained impassive. Rodney stared at him with fogged suspicion, and then returned his attention to Elizabeth.
"And that was it. Lay in the dark. Eat. Sleep or pass out. Ronon came and went - I thought he was digging or something, but I guess from what you've said that he was trying to find a way out through the caves. Then he must have found it because he said he was going for help, and he was gone so long I thought he'd died, too, and then Sheppard was there."
"And the rats?" Elizabeth questioned, her tone carefully neutral.
"Yeah, the rats," Rodney said musingly. "You wouldn't have thought there'd be anything alive down there. Whoever ran that place apparently didn't care about little things like radiation and chemical waste disposal." He closed his eyes again, and then re-opened them a second later. "You saw the initial readings. Everything was toxic. Not a damned thing around, in or under it. Except the rats. Thank God."
"There were rats in the facility?" Sheppard asked. His voice had become inquisitive, and Rodney felt a surge of irritation tinged with unease. "And that was good?"
"Hey, look, we had to eat something," Rodney said, his own voice taking on a defensive edge. "I'm not stupid. I figured it was rat, and Ronon didn't bother lying when I asked him. I'm guessing now that they came up from the caverns, and yes, Ronon killed the little bastards and we ate them. I'm hypoglycemic, you know; I had to eat. Ronon said some of them were as big as cats. You'd have done it, too."
"Military training," Sheppard said, nodding his head. "Hell, I've eaten a few things that would turn most people's stomachs, as far as that goes."
"Of course," Elizabeth agreed, looking down at her hands.
"It wasn't bad," Rodney said, his own gaze cutting to the thin infirmary blanket. "Ronon dragged back everything he could find that would burn so he could cook it, and with a little seasoning it might have been okay. If it weren't for the disease issue-"
"Alright," Elizabeth said, taking a deep breath. "You saw the rats, Rodney?"
"No," Rodney returned, his expression turning to one of shock. "Hell no, Elizabeth. Ronon kept them out. The flashlight scared them off, and he had traps outside to keep them out of the room so I'd be safe when he was away."
"I see," Elizabeth said, nodding slowly. She licked her lips and glanced at Sheppard, shrugging her shoulders almost imperceptibly.
"That was what scared me the most when Ronon left that last time," Rodney continued, his hands knotting in the blanket. "All those rats out there, and I couldn't move. Out of all the ways I'd thought I might die, being eaten alive by rats had never crossed my mind."
"But you had the traps and the flashlight," Sheppard interjected, his own eyes dropping to the blanket.
"Batteries don't last forever," Rodney said, heaving an exasperated sigh. "Mostly it was dark, and when Ronon was gone I could hear them out there. I could hear them running, and I knew if they overran the freezer room that'd be it. I could have shot some of them, but... well."
"Dear God, Rodney," Elizabeth whispered.
"I mean, I suppose it would have been ironic," Rodney continued, one hand rising to wave irrelevantly in the air. "I mean, how many of them did we eat? But still, there's a limit to the amount of irony a man can be expected to appreciate, and after Ronon left..." Rodney looked up at the ceiling, and when he spoke again, his voice had become small and strangled. "He said some of them were as big as cats." He paused, gritting his teeth. "And they were waiting. I knew they were waiting, the vengeful little sons of bitches, but Ronon gave me my gun before he left, just like I gave that gun to Gaul."
"Rodney," Sheppard said, his voice gentle.
"I'd decided to use it when the last set of flashlight batteries died."
"And then John and Teyla and Carson came back for you," Elizabeth spoke, reaching out to rest her hand on Rodney's shoulder. "I'm so, so terribly sorry."
"Interference," Rodney said, his tone oddly indifferent. "No life signs detectable, right?"
"Right," Sheppard answered.
"I hate that bastard Kolya," Rodney said. "If there was ever a person who deserved to be eaten by rats..." He shook his head. "I'm tired. Tell Carson not to dim the lights."
"Alright," Sheppard rose to his feet, and Elizabeth followed suit. She hovered uncertainly for a moment, and then bowed to plant a brief, hard kiss on Rodney's forehead. Rodney gave no acknowledgment. "Is there anything else you need?"
"Come back later?" he asked. "It's the rats," he continued, his words coming fast and breathless and helplessly embarrassed. "Sometimes I wake up and I think I can still hear them, like they're still there waiting..."
Sheppard nodded, his voice failing him. Rodney's expression shifted from guarded hopefulness to something like despair, and Elizabeth's brows contracted threateningly. "Of course, Rodney. Right after I'm done with the report." he said, his hands locking helplessly together behind his back. "There aren't any rats."
"I know." Rodney replied, and for a split second he felt almost overwhelmed by a sense of formless horror. Sheppard frowned, and then the moment passed. "Thank you."
****************
"Rats," Elizabeth said. John frowned at the edge of hysteria to her voice, but she only shook her head in shocked amazement. "I know he was in pain and delirious, but for that long?"
Carson's lips quirked into something that couldn't be called a smile. "Even the most brilliant among of us have a knack for believing what we want to believe when it becomes a necessity. So, another sort of man believes in a higher power, and our Rodney believes in rats."
"He knows better," John said, his tone curt. "And sooner or later, he's going to have to deal with it."
"Aye, he is," Carson said, "and that is why I intend to have Dr. Heightmeyer in to see him tomorrow. This isn't the sort of thing that is going to stay quiet."
"No, no it isn't," John agreed. He sighed in tired exasperation, his frustrated gaze sweeping Carson's office, finally settling on a framed photograph. A younger version of Carson smiled from beneath the glass, beaming perpetual proud happiness alongside a much older woman with silver shot hair and an equally brilliant smile. John looked abruptly away, fighting the urge to knock the picture from its place on Carson's neat, clean shelves. "He's right, though, and I'm damned glad he and Ronon are alive. That's the bottom line here. I don't think anyone here would see it differently."
"And the rest of his story does check out?" Elizabeth asked.
"Yes," Carson said. He picked up his water glass, and then set it back down. "Laura... she would have died instantly." He took a deep breath and looked down at his hands. "Her head was crushed. The evidence at the site fully supports Rodney and Ronon's descriptions of what happened and the autopsy report is also in agreement. Putting the rest together isn't terribly difficult."
"No, it isn't." John swallowed, unable to meet Carson's eyes. John had seen worse things over the course of his career, but nothing that had ever triggered the same atavistic revulsion as the sight of Lt. Cadman's stripped and partially butchered body. He'd slammed the freezer shut and ordered everyone out of the room, but Teyla had seen, and Lorne and Stackhouse. He and Teyla had bagged her, and that was anything but standard, but at the time he hadn't been thinking. It had seemed crucially important to protect her poor, mutilated body - to return some semblance of dignity to this woman who had sworn to defend the lives of others.
"Laura would have wanted them to live," Carson said. The last shreds of professionalism gave way, turning into barely restrained grief. "She was an amazing woman, and I know that's what she would have wanted. She'd been prepared to give her life for Rodney before, and it's not as if they killed her."
"No," Elizabeth said, her eyes fixed on her own untouched water glass. She said nothing further, and John wasn't surprised. He didn't care what schooling and experience she might have under her belt; nothing could prepare anyone for something like this. What exactly could she say? ~I'm sorry your girlfriend died, Carson, but in the long run it's probably best this way because if it hadn't been her, it would have been Rodney. He was the weakest of the three, he has health problems, and he was badly injured. When you combine that with starvation you have to see that he wouldn't have made it long, and then Cadman and Ronon would have been in the same situation. Out of the three, Rodney's the one we could least afford to lose.~
John thought about running and weightlifting, calisthenics and fieldwork; he thought about hard, lean muscle under a thin layer of feminine fat. Rodney was in better shape than he'd been when he'd arrived in Atlantis, but he'd still been far from an example of physical fitness and good health when the explosion had taken place. If a person wanted to look at it from that angle, John supposed that Rodney could be viewed as junk food and Cadman as prime rib.
~...with a little seasoning it would have been okay...~
"I have to go," John said, rising abruptly to his feet. "I told Rodney I'd be back to sit with him."
"Because he's afraid of the rats," Elizabeth explained to Carson, and the horrified wonder in her voice followed John into the corridor. He could see the door to Rodney's private room at the end of the hall, ordinary and mundane and no different from any of the other doors in the Atlantis infirmary. He could imagine Rodney lying helpless behind it, clutching his call button and listening for the sound of small, hand-like paws and the chittering of sharp, yellow teeth.
John took a deep breath before stepping away from Carson's doorway. He was no expert on psychology, but John thought that Rodney would keep on listening for those hungry, righteously wrathful rats for a long time to come. He'd seen that momentary panic in Rodney's eyes when he'd said that there were no rats, and John suspected that meant that part of Rodney knew that there were things far worse than rats to consider. As long as he believed that, John thought that Rodney would prefer the company of imaginary, vengeful vermin.
- Text Size +
Category: General
Characters: Carson Beckett, Elizabeth Weir, John Sheppard, Other, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex
Rating: R
Genres: Action/Adventure, Angst, Drama
Warnings: Adult themes, Character death
Series: None
Word count: 4048; Completed: Yes
Summary: Rodney and Ronon survive a harrowing experience and return to Atlantis after all hope had been lost. This is a horror story written for Halloween.
Rodney hummed quietly within his morphine haze, listening to himself with the fascinated interest of the truly stoned. The sound rose and fell amid the soft ticks and beeps of the infirmary's equipment, briefly matching one or another mechanical voice before trailing away into vocalized breathing. It was nice, really, even though Rodney had always loathed the infirmary, and even though he'd recently had more bones than he cared to think of re-broken and set. It was nice because he was home, and because there was a call button that would instantly summon concerned faces and voices, and after a solid two months of no one but Ronon Dex for company, that was a huge relief. The call button meant that he didn't have to worry about the basics - Rodney could lie back and hum and watch his toes that peeked out from the ends of his two new casts.
Every ten minutes or so he could hit the button, and Rodney had noticed that the nurses were doing a better job of covering their annoyance than usual. Carson had given him one of the few private rooms though, and that meant that the call button was his only means of keeping other people within reassuring audio and visual range. Keeping them in the room was more problematic, and that resulted in repetitious button pressing. It was almost as satisfying as a self administering morphine button, though he hadn't gotten one of those.
The nurse who had brought his dinner tray had stayed for a while, and that had been nice. She'd sat at his bedside watching him push his reconstituted mashed potatoes and sliced beef around with his fork as if it was the most fascinating thing she'd ever seen. Rodney had stretched it out as far as he'd been able, complaining about the gritty potatoes and babbling about his preference for MREs, but eventually he'd had to admit that he simply wasn't hungry.
At some point during the past twelve hours, his appetite had completely and inexplicably vanished. He could remember the sound of his own voice droning into darkness, reciting endless lists of foods to Ronon, and he'd thought that if they were ever rescued he'd eat and eat and eat until he couldn't eat another bite. They hadn't been starving, but after they'd run through their supplies it had been the same thing day after day. Rodney had recovered from his aversion to the idea of eating rodents fairly quickly, but it had taken less than two weeks for him to want something, anything else. Brussels sprouts, liver, anything that had been cooked and seasoned rather than hacked and half burned on a fire built from broken shelves and scavenged debris.
He'd actually cried while eating his first real meal at home, but after that his interest in food had disappeared without a trace. Not even the thought of chocolate could bring back that yearning that had felt almost like love, and in spite of the nurse's gentle persistence, Rodney hadn't been able to force himself to eat more than a few bites of his dinner. She'd finally left it with him, and an hour later she'd returned to take it away.
"Rodney?" A soft voice spoke, and Rodney shifted his gaze from his toes to the door. Elizabeth had appeared there, her expression an odd blend of worry, relief, wariness, and sympathy. Her smile wavered as she stepped into the room, but regained strength when Sheppard entered behind her. His expression was more guarded but less complicated, and Rodney found it easier to return his smile.
"Rodney?" Elizabeth repeated. "You have no idea how glad we are to have you back. We thought..." Her words trailed off, but Rodney heard her never the less. ~We thought you were dead. You and Ronon and Lt. Cadman.~
"No such luck," he returned, his smile turning into a wide, loopy grin. "I'm relieved to see that no one has blown up the city in my absence." His lips tried and failed to twist into a smirk. "Surprised, actually."
"Keep it up, Rodney," Sheppard drawled, dropping into a chair beside his bed. Elizabeth shot him a quick, ambiguously disapproving glance. Sheppard shrugged, cocking an eyebrow, and Rodney rolled his eyes.
"Please, Elizabeth," Rodney said, shaking his head against his pillow in mock disappointment. "This is exactly the sort of reception I'd expected. It wouldn't be home otherwise." He wiggled his shoulders against the pillow, and then waved his hand toward the bedside. "Sit down. Stay a while if you want."
"Yes, well," Elizabeth said, pursing her lips. She hovered for a moment, and then leaned forward to catch one of Rodney's hands in her own. Her brow furrowed as she leaned into his space, her eyes full of earnest sincerity. "But we're glad to have you back, Rodney. We're glad you're alive, and we never would have stopped looking if we'd thought there was any chance that anyone could have survived. But, we're damned glad you did survive, Rodney. Do you understand me?"
Rodney licked his lips, his gaze shifting from her suspiciously bright eyes to Sheppard's face. Sheppard's mouth had become a tight line, but he nodded his agreement.
"I realize I've never been the most popular person in Atlantis, but I hadn't really thought that anyone would actually be hoping I'd die," Rodney snapped at Sheppard, uneasiness working its way in around the edges of the morphine. "Thanks for the sentiments, I really am grateful, but I don't need quite that much validation."
Sheppard blinked, and for a split second Rodney saw both dismayed uncertainty and something that looked horribly like tenderness in the other man's face. The look was gone almost before Rodney could register it, smoothing into shuttered, generic pleasantness. It didn't suit Sheppard in the least, and Rodney's stomach trembled on the edge of a slow forward roll. That temporary look of shocked, helpless hurt had been bad, but somehow this was worse.
"All right, then," Elizabeth said, drawing Rodney's attention away from Sheppard. He could still hear the odd edge to Elizabeth's voice, but she released his hand. "Dr. Beckett says that if you have no objections we can ask you a few questions."
"What's to know?" Rodney groused, his eyes darting back to Sheppard. "Another point scored for the Genii. You and Teyla were with Zelenka and Simpson, and you must have been near the entrance when the bomb detonated. Cadman and Ronon and I were in what was left of the main lab. We already knew the area was geographically unstable; Kolya and his goons managed to drop most of the facility into the sublevel."
"Yes," Elizabeth said, nodding as she pulled up a chair beside Sheppard. "Barring seismic activity - or a bomb - it should have been safe."
"The plan had been for them to take what they wanted and then destroy the rest," Sheppard cut in. "We beat 'em to the punch, and you know what their mentality on that is."
"Yeah," Rodney said, shifting uncomfortably against the pillow. Pain flared from his right hip, its bright, cutting edge turned into peripherally disconcerting sensation by the morphine. "You just have to love Genii philosophy. I know I do. Especially when I'm lying in agony under roughly twenty tons of debris because some crazy bastard doesn't want to share the toys."
"But what happened?" Elizabeth asked, her tone gentle. "If you don't mind talking about it right now?"
Rodney rolled his eyes. "What happened? Well, isn't it obvious what happened?"
"Rodney," Elizabeth said.
Rodney looked away, not wanting to meet her eyes or Sheppard's. "It happened fast, alright? The actual, internal structure is as close to invulnerable as any unshielded structure can be. It didn't explode - it broke and collapsed inward, and all of it ended up under God alone knows how many tons of rock and dirt. Like blocks from a tower that's been knocked over and then buried. That's what saved us. We were in the main block, and when everything went it was like being in an elevator with a cut cable."
"It did trigger a quake," Sheppard interjected. "Nothing big, but there had been mild activity, and that bomb helped it right along. Your 'block' wasn't in the sublevel - the caverns underneath the sublevel collapsed. If that place had been five hundred yards further north, you'd have drowned."
Rodney paled, and his mouth formed a perfect, pallid circle. "I so didn't need to know that," he finally said. The line of Elizabeth's jaw tightened, and she glared at Sheppard, shaking her head in a sharp, negating gesture. Sheppard shrugged, but said nothing further.
"What do you remember?" Elizabeth asked, turning back to Rodney. Her frown had returned, and Rodney watched with interest as the tip of her tongue briefly appeared between her lips. "We need you to fill in the gaps between then and now."
"Cadman died," he said abruptly, closing his eyes. "I didn't see it. By the time we hit bottom I was already out of it. The subsections were sturdy and mostly self-contained, but there was plenty of damage. We all landed against the east wall, but the center column collapsed and fell with us. Missed Ronon completely. Landed on me and Cadman, broke pretty much everything below my waist and-" He stopped short, swallowing hard. When he spoke again, his voice was carefully, desperately even. "She was gone when I woke up. Ronon put her in the freezer. It took him a while to get the column off of me, but... for her... he didn't have to be careful. I guess he just... pulled... until-"
"I see," Elizabeth said, cutting off the flow of broken words. "I understand."
"No, no you don't," Rodney retorted, his lips twisting into a pained grimace. "She wasn't my favorite person, but she'd been in my head and I knew who she was and that she really did take her job seriously, and-"
"Rodney," Elizabeth spoke again, but Rodney overrode her.
"And some of her hair was stuck on the column, and I was too out of it to really put it all together on any deep and meaningful level, but you have to be pretty far gone not to realize that something is very wrong when one of your teammates is gone and all that's left is clots of blood and hair on a giant chunk of marble you can't get away from-"
"I think that maybe we should finish this discussion later," Sheppard said. "I think-"
"No, no, that's it," Rodney said, his eyes still shut. "That's the worst of it, besides the rats. Just give me a minute."
"The rats?" Sheppard asked, brows knitting. He shot a questioning glance at Elizabeth, and she shook her head in response. "What rats?"
"I said to give me a minute," Rodney snapped, diving for the numbing comfort of artificial serenity. Behind his closed eyelids he saw darkness and Ronon's face illuminated by the piercing glow of the flashlight; he heard the menacing rumble of shifting debris and his own panting breaths. He couldn't remember Ronon finding the morphine in the med kit, but at some point the agony had become inconsequential. The tacky, congealing wetness on the column had become a far greater concern than its crushing weight, and Rodney could remember a voice monotonously repeating, ~Get it off, get it off of me, you have to get it off of me.~
"You'd know better than me how Ronon got out," he finally said, opening his eyes. Glaring infirmary lights replaced suffocating darkness, and Rodney took a deep breath. "I know he had access to the other half of the main laboratory area - he had to climb to get to it, but that was where he took Cadman and that was where the backup generator was. Most of the systems were self-contained, but they'd taken too much damage to be of any use. We got the generator running-"
"We?" Elizabeth asked.
Rodney frowned. "Yes, we. I have no idea how long it took, but Ronon told me what he had, and I told him what to do. Not ideal. No way in hell I could give him a crash course in engineering under those circumstances, so we had power that didn't do anything but keep the freezer case running because that was the only piece of equipment that was relatively intact and not alarmingly difficult to connect." Rodney's mouth tightened. "We had two rooms, and I couldn't move. I think you can understand why it seemed important to be able to keep... things frozen."
"Yes, yes I do," Sheppard said. His voice sounded strained, but his features remained impassive. Rodney stared at him with fogged suspicion, and then returned his attention to Elizabeth.
"And that was it. Lay in the dark. Eat. Sleep or pass out. Ronon came and went - I thought he was digging or something, but I guess from what you've said that he was trying to find a way out through the caves. Then he must have found it because he said he was going for help, and he was gone so long I thought he'd died, too, and then Sheppard was there."
"And the rats?" Elizabeth questioned, her tone carefully neutral.
"Yeah, the rats," Rodney said musingly. "You wouldn't have thought there'd be anything alive down there. Whoever ran that place apparently didn't care about little things like radiation and chemical waste disposal." He closed his eyes again, and then re-opened them a second later. "You saw the initial readings. Everything was toxic. Not a damned thing around, in or under it. Except the rats. Thank God."
"There were rats in the facility?" Sheppard asked. His voice had become inquisitive, and Rodney felt a surge of irritation tinged with unease. "And that was good?"
"Hey, look, we had to eat something," Rodney said, his own voice taking on a defensive edge. "I'm not stupid. I figured it was rat, and Ronon didn't bother lying when I asked him. I'm guessing now that they came up from the caverns, and yes, Ronon killed the little bastards and we ate them. I'm hypoglycemic, you know; I had to eat. Ronon said some of them were as big as cats. You'd have done it, too."
"Military training," Sheppard said, nodding his head. "Hell, I've eaten a few things that would turn most people's stomachs, as far as that goes."
"Of course," Elizabeth agreed, looking down at her hands.
"It wasn't bad," Rodney said, his own gaze cutting to the thin infirmary blanket. "Ronon dragged back everything he could find that would burn so he could cook it, and with a little seasoning it might have been okay. If it weren't for the disease issue-"
"Alright," Elizabeth said, taking a deep breath. "You saw the rats, Rodney?"
"No," Rodney returned, his expression turning to one of shock. "Hell no, Elizabeth. Ronon kept them out. The flashlight scared them off, and he had traps outside to keep them out of the room so I'd be safe when he was away."
"I see," Elizabeth said, nodding slowly. She licked her lips and glanced at Sheppard, shrugging her shoulders almost imperceptibly.
"That was what scared me the most when Ronon left that last time," Rodney continued, his hands knotting in the blanket. "All those rats out there, and I couldn't move. Out of all the ways I'd thought I might die, being eaten alive by rats had never crossed my mind."
"But you had the traps and the flashlight," Sheppard interjected, his own eyes dropping to the blanket.
"Batteries don't last forever," Rodney said, heaving an exasperated sigh. "Mostly it was dark, and when Ronon was gone I could hear them out there. I could hear them running, and I knew if they overran the freezer room that'd be it. I could have shot some of them, but... well."
"Dear God, Rodney," Elizabeth whispered.
"I mean, I suppose it would have been ironic," Rodney continued, one hand rising to wave irrelevantly in the air. "I mean, how many of them did we eat? But still, there's a limit to the amount of irony a man can be expected to appreciate, and after Ronon left..." Rodney looked up at the ceiling, and when he spoke again, his voice had become small and strangled. "He said some of them were as big as cats." He paused, gritting his teeth. "And they were waiting. I knew they were waiting, the vengeful little sons of bitches, but Ronon gave me my gun before he left, just like I gave that gun to Gaul."
"Rodney," Sheppard said, his voice gentle.
"I'd decided to use it when the last set of flashlight batteries died."
"And then John and Teyla and Carson came back for you," Elizabeth spoke, reaching out to rest her hand on Rodney's shoulder. "I'm so, so terribly sorry."
"Interference," Rodney said, his tone oddly indifferent. "No life signs detectable, right?"
"Right," Sheppard answered.
"I hate that bastard Kolya," Rodney said. "If there was ever a person who deserved to be eaten by rats..." He shook his head. "I'm tired. Tell Carson not to dim the lights."
"Alright," Sheppard rose to his feet, and Elizabeth followed suit. She hovered uncertainly for a moment, and then bowed to plant a brief, hard kiss on Rodney's forehead. Rodney gave no acknowledgment. "Is there anything else you need?"
"Come back later?" he asked. "It's the rats," he continued, his words coming fast and breathless and helplessly embarrassed. "Sometimes I wake up and I think I can still hear them, like they're still there waiting..."
Sheppard nodded, his voice failing him. Rodney's expression shifted from guarded hopefulness to something like despair, and Elizabeth's brows contracted threateningly. "Of course, Rodney. Right after I'm done with the report." he said, his hands locking helplessly together behind his back. "There aren't any rats."
"I know." Rodney replied, and for a split second he felt almost overwhelmed by a sense of formless horror. Sheppard frowned, and then the moment passed. "Thank you."
****************
"Rats," Elizabeth said. John frowned at the edge of hysteria to her voice, but she only shook her head in shocked amazement. "I know he was in pain and delirious, but for that long?"
Carson's lips quirked into something that couldn't be called a smile. "Even the most brilliant among of us have a knack for believing what we want to believe when it becomes a necessity. So, another sort of man believes in a higher power, and our Rodney believes in rats."
"He knows better," John said, his tone curt. "And sooner or later, he's going to have to deal with it."
"Aye, he is," Carson said, "and that is why I intend to have Dr. Heightmeyer in to see him tomorrow. This isn't the sort of thing that is going to stay quiet."
"No, no it isn't," John agreed. He sighed in tired exasperation, his frustrated gaze sweeping Carson's office, finally settling on a framed photograph. A younger version of Carson smiled from beneath the glass, beaming perpetual proud happiness alongside a much older woman with silver shot hair and an equally brilliant smile. John looked abruptly away, fighting the urge to knock the picture from its place on Carson's neat, clean shelves. "He's right, though, and I'm damned glad he and Ronon are alive. That's the bottom line here. I don't think anyone here would see it differently."
"And the rest of his story does check out?" Elizabeth asked.
"Yes," Carson said. He picked up his water glass, and then set it back down. "Laura... she would have died instantly." He took a deep breath and looked down at his hands. "Her head was crushed. The evidence at the site fully supports Rodney and Ronon's descriptions of what happened and the autopsy report is also in agreement. Putting the rest together isn't terribly difficult."
"No, it isn't." John swallowed, unable to meet Carson's eyes. John had seen worse things over the course of his career, but nothing that had ever triggered the same atavistic revulsion as the sight of Lt. Cadman's stripped and partially butchered body. He'd slammed the freezer shut and ordered everyone out of the room, but Teyla had seen, and Lorne and Stackhouse. He and Teyla had bagged her, and that was anything but standard, but at the time he hadn't been thinking. It had seemed crucially important to protect her poor, mutilated body - to return some semblance of dignity to this woman who had sworn to defend the lives of others.
"Laura would have wanted them to live," Carson said. The last shreds of professionalism gave way, turning into barely restrained grief. "She was an amazing woman, and I know that's what she would have wanted. She'd been prepared to give her life for Rodney before, and it's not as if they killed her."
"No," Elizabeth said, her eyes fixed on her own untouched water glass. She said nothing further, and John wasn't surprised. He didn't care what schooling and experience she might have under her belt; nothing could prepare anyone for something like this. What exactly could she say? ~I'm sorry your girlfriend died, Carson, but in the long run it's probably best this way because if it hadn't been her, it would have been Rodney. He was the weakest of the three, he has health problems, and he was badly injured. When you combine that with starvation you have to see that he wouldn't have made it long, and then Cadman and Ronon would have been in the same situation. Out of the three, Rodney's the one we could least afford to lose.~
John thought about running and weightlifting, calisthenics and fieldwork; he thought about hard, lean muscle under a thin layer of feminine fat. Rodney was in better shape than he'd been when he'd arrived in Atlantis, but he'd still been far from an example of physical fitness and good health when the explosion had taken place. If a person wanted to look at it from that angle, John supposed that Rodney could be viewed as junk food and Cadman as prime rib.
~...with a little seasoning it would have been okay...~
"I have to go," John said, rising abruptly to his feet. "I told Rodney I'd be back to sit with him."
"Because he's afraid of the rats," Elizabeth explained to Carson, and the horrified wonder in her voice followed John into the corridor. He could see the door to Rodney's private room at the end of the hall, ordinary and mundane and no different from any of the other doors in the Atlantis infirmary. He could imagine Rodney lying helpless behind it, clutching his call button and listening for the sound of small, hand-like paws and the chittering of sharp, yellow teeth.
John took a deep breath before stepping away from Carson's doorway. He was no expert on psychology, but John thought that Rodney would keep on listening for those hungry, righteously wrathful rats for a long time to come. He'd seen that momentary panic in Rodney's eyes when he'd said that there were no rats, and John suspected that meant that part of Rodney knew that there were things far worse than rats to consider. As long as he believed that, John thought that Rodney would prefer the company of imaginary, vengeful vermin.