NOTES: Genficbunny requested by a LiveJournal friend.
Deadwood
Teyla remembers screaming as a child, her hand coated with her father's blood.
Wind tugs at her hair now as it did then. The same fierce scent of woody forest, leaf-strewn earth, and the bitter tang of scarlet blood mingles in her nostrils. Large hands again lie limp, stained with his own blood where he tried to stem the flow.
For a moment, she does not know which man's blood oozes slugglishly through her fingers. His face, skin, build, and clothing blur. She cannot make out his features. Her hands are at once both long-fingered and adult, and childishly pudgy.
Who is she? When is she?
The approaching snap of Rodney's voice jitters on the edge of her hearing, and the amorphous figure solidifies into the pale skin and dark hair of Colonel Sheppard, lying unconscious on the slippery leaf-mulch of a damp forest floor.
Her team-mates skid to a halt as she looks up at them, her eyes still blurry from the blended confusion of past and present. Teyla does not hear Rodney's gabbled words, but focuses on what needs to be done, what she has learned to do.
"You must bring the 'jumper here," she tells Rodney when he pauses for breath, taking authority in this matter. "Hurry!"
The urgency is such that he does not argue, and Ronon turns on his heel, heading after the other man only to be called back.
"His leg is broken," she tells Ronon. "It must be splinted. Get a stick thick enough to use as a splint." It will be easier to move him that way.
Ronon goes, and she explores the injury.
Beneath her fingers, the warm flesh has odd lumps in it, shattered fragments of bone that have torn up the muscle and vessels within the skin, and his leg lies at an angle that would cause him considerable pain were he awake. She leaves the angle for the moment; when Ronon returns with the splint, they will move the leg back into place.
John's face, usually lively and interested, is lax and still in unconsciousness. His unconscious state concerns her, as does the bruise already darkening on his forehead. A little closer to the temple and he might have dashed his brains out on the branch.
At least the wound she holds closed does not pulse with the bright arterial blood she saw when they brought Dr. Pendryn back to Atlantis after an arrow took her in the thigh. Dr. Beckett's skill saved Dr. Pendryn - Teyla has no such skill.
But she knows how to splint a leg - one of the skills she has learned while in Atlantis.
Ronon crouches down beside her with a straight branch.
"Beneath his leg," she says, and with his knives, various items from her vest pockets, and her instructions, a makeshift splint is constructed and bound in place by the time Rodney brings the 'jumper down, rather closer than Teyla thinks is wise.
The metal edge of the portable stretcher is cool in her fingers - as cool as her voice instructing Ronon where to fit the other half, while Rodney nearly hops from foot to foot in impatient fear.
Teyla lets him help Ronon carry the stretcher to the ship, and takes a deep breath as she climbs to her feet.
Blood, earth, and wood mingle in her nostrils, and her vision wavers, smudging the crisp outlines of the forest as though through tears or a hit upon the head. Dizzied, she lifts one hand to her own forehead and feels the crackle of dried blood in her hair.
She hit her head and did not notice. No wonder she paused a moment and did not know when she was.
"Teyla! Are you coming or not?" Rodney's call has no kindness to it, but she needs no kindness - only the acid of his tones, grounding her in the now.
Her father did not die of his wound, although he lay in pain and fever for many days.
Neither will the Colonel die of his wound.
But she can still remember screaming, as a child.
- fin -