Fatigue

Quamquam Longissimus Dies Cito Conditur

oOo

Carson walked out of the isolation room after checking up on Colonel Sheppard again. The memories of the nanovirus incident still too clear in his memory, he had immediately thought of a contagion when Major Lorne had reported the colonel's bizarre behaviour. The fear was always there. It was a virus that had wiped out the Ancients and it was still out there somewhere. A few years ago, a research team had stumbled across it in Antarctica. The virus was fast and deadly and there was no cure.

But all tests, conventional and Ancient had failed to reveal the presence of a virus or other pathogen.

Carson had no idea what had caused John Sheppard's episode that had started with violent behaviour and had continued with neurological irregularities and disorientation. Carson had yet to run a full neurological exam; he would have to wait with that until the effects of the sedative had worn off to get accurate results.

Carson headed back to the infirmary. He had been on feet for almost forty-eight hours, and then he had only had a four hour nap before.

Since Rodney had come through the Gate after his escape from Ford's men, he had stayed with him in the infirmary, ignoring Rodney's insults, pleas and scream. He had needed to see Rodney through this. And the others as they had returned to Atlantis. He had been up for three days, with only naps in between and he knew he was nearing the end of his strength. There was going to come a point where his mind became too frazzled and his body too tired to continue working.

Teyla and Ronon had both been reluctant, but they had agreed to stay in the infirmary for observation.

Teyla was lying back on her bed, eyes closed. Maybe she was sleeping, Carson couldn't tell. Ronon was sitting on the bed next to her, staring at the wall. They seemed all right for the moment. He hadn't been able to determine anything conclusive from the tests.

Dr. Weir was already waiting in his office. The tension of the last two weeks was showing on Elizabeth's face as she sat down in a chair opposite his desk. When Major Lorne and his team had come up empty again and again in their search and not even Dr. Zelenka had managed to come up with a way to trace where they had been taken to, Elizabeth had been forced to call off the search. No one had wanted to believe that they were really gone, but with a galaxy full of planets, Elizabeth had done the only thing she could.

"What are we dealing with, Carson?"

"To tell you the truth, I don't know. The only thing I can pretty much rule out is a pathogen or virus. The City would have gone into lock down as soon as they came back. So I don't think the rest of us are in any danger." Carson decided to go with the good news first, they all could use it.

"I hate to ask, but you are sure that this is connected to what happened on the mission?"

"At the moment, I don't know, it seems like the only reasonable assumption. Blood scans haven't turned up anything yet, and according to his report, Colonel Sheppard was at no point exposed to the enzyme."

"You doubt that?" Elizabeth sounded both surprised and shocked.

"No, I don't," Carson said simply. He wasn't sure what to believe. Not everything ended up in a report, especially when it came to situations that weren't supposed to happen.

"Is it possible that Colonel Sheppard is suffering from post-traumatic stress? He was being held prisoner for two weeks." Elizabeth considered.

"That might have played a part. His PET scan indicated a patter that has some commonalities with what's associated with depression, but there is also heightened activity similar to what Teyla experienced last year when she started having dreams about the Wraith. I'm not sure this means anything. We know very little about psychic abilities and frankly, that's out of my field of expertise. Colonel Sheppard spoke to Kate this morning. If she thought he was in danger of harming himself, she would have told me. Otherwise, their session is confidential," Carson told her. He had been thinking about the psychological ramifications, but to the test results couldn't be explained away by post-traumatic stress.

"I'll authorise Kate to hand over her notes on their session as well as Sheppard's file from the past year," Elizabeth said. "I want to know what we are dealing with. If there is any possibility that this is going to spread, the SGC needs to know."

"I think we can rule that out at this point. As I said, the City would have caught any pathogen even before we would. But there is strong possibility that, Teyla, Ronon and Rodney could be affected by the same agent the colonel has been exposed to. Dr. Millhouse and I started a series of test, so far without conclusive results." Carson paused, not sure how to explain his suspicions that despite conclusive proof, caution was warranted.

"What was the last time you slept? Or ate for that matter?" Elizabeth's question made sense, but still caught him unaware.

Carson shook his head. "Lunch. I caught an hour of sleep in between shifts yesterday. It's been a crazy week. But we got everyone back. That's what counts." Carson might have been afraid to go through the Stargate, but he didn't leave the infirmary on Atlantis until the work was done and this time was no exception.

"Yes, almost everyone," Elizabeth agreed. "I'll send Kate along. I haven't ordered Teyla and Ronon to see her. Kate may be experienced, but she said herself that she isn't trained for aliens from another Galaxy."

Carson knew Elizabeth's doubted not Kate Heightmeyer's skill, but psychologists in general. It was a luxury for easy times. Elizabeth had made hard decisions before as a UN diplomat, but before coming to the Pegasus Galaxy, she had never actually seen the people die as a result of her decisions. She wasn't career military like Sheppard and Lorne, they had come better prepared for what had awaited them, and they had seen war before.

"I'll ask her to talk to them. It can't do any harm if they at least tell someone how they feel. I doubt Ronon will talk to her, but you know him, he's not very talkative," Carson said with a tired smile.

"Dr. Millhouse can take over for a few hours, Carson. You picked her yourself, let her do her job," Elizabeth said firmly. "Don't make me make this an order." Elizabeth got.

"Let me know when there is anything new."

Carson just nodded. Elizabeth had a point. He was dead on his feet. His back and neck had been bothering for hours, he couldn't recall how long exactly.

He had prescribed himself a Tylenol earlier, but he knew it wouldn't help. Every pill checked out was documented in the records. That was a good thing. It was too easy fall into the trap of substituting drugs for rest and recuperation, even for professionals who knew better.

But to draw the line between being needed and personal needs was near impossible when other lives were on the lines. He was replaceable. There were other physicians on Earth, physicians with some field experience than he. His passion was genetics; his career focus had been on research. He had wanted to help people with his research. He had hoped of finding the means to improve existing gene therapy.

Carson had achieved more than he had ever dreamt about. The ATA gene had been the discovery of a lifetime. It had shown him that there were still wonders waiting to be discovered. Yet he had seen the other side of science. It was a tool of the powerful. Years of his research were collecting dust in the filing cabinets of Area 51, deemed classified by the US government.

The gene therapy, which allowed forty percent of patients to receive the ATA gene, had the potential to help hundreds of not thousands of people afflicted by genetic diseases. There was a lot of research to be done, but that was not going to happen, not on Earth anyways. Carson had been denied permission for human trials. Rodney had been his first test subject, in the Pegasus Galaxy where the need for gene carriers overruled laws from a far away Galaxy.

Rodney had been eager to volunteer. When the therapy had taken at the first attempt, Carson had been overjoyed.

But it was a bittersweet triumph. He could live with not receiving recognition for what would probably be the biggest achievement of his lifetime.

It was better that way. People wouldn't judge him kindly, they'd see all the deaths he'd caused and then, they'd put him right up there, together with some of the worst examples of his profession. It was harder to accept that the results of his research would remain a military secret. It could have helped people, but Earth needed soldiers with the ATA gene. There weren't enough humans born with the gene and it was easier to give people the gene afterwards, than train people who had the gene naturally. Carson had come to the only place where he could research the ATA gene, but there were days when he wished he had never heard of the Stargate. Today was one of those days.

Carson reached down and opened the bottom shelf of his desk. He kept a box of black tea in there, a small piece of Earth in a galaxy far from home.

While he really longed for some Scotch right now, his drinking days were long behind him. He hadn't been an excessive drinker, but when he had finally taken that first step, he had quit all forms of self-medication. Carson hadn't thought about that time for a long time. With the passing years, he had stopped looking back to that dark time in his life. The Wraith enzyme had brought everything back. All the times he didn't want to remember.

Carson got up to heat some water for a cup of tea. He was watching the water come to a boil when Kate entered his office.

"Kate, can I make you a cup?" Carson asked.

"Thanks, I'd appreciate it," Kate said and sat down.

Carson pulled out a second cup. He used cup he'd brought from Earth, not the standard issue aluminium cups.

"They are beautiful." Kate commented.

"Yes, they are from a small pottery in my hometown. I picked them up when I went to see my family before we left Earth. They remind me of home," Carson explained and poured water into their cups.

"It's important to remind ourselves of where we come from. We have come very far, but we are still explorers from Earth and we are very far away from home."

"It's just that some of us seem to miss home more than others." Carson sighed and slumped down in his chair. He stretched out his aching legs.

"Is everything all right at home?" Kate asked.

"That's not it. My folks are fine, last I heard. My mom was already assuming the worst when she didn't hear from me for months after I had left for Atlantis. She's still worried, despite my letters. I don't think she was buying the official story for a minute, but she knows that I have been doing classified research for the military. She's stopped asked me what I'm doing years ago and there's hardly anything I can tell her anyways, except reassure her that everything is fine. I don't want to lie to her."

Officially Carson was involved in a vaccination program in the rural communities of Central Africa. The paperwork was solid, he would pass a background check, but anyone who had a closer look at his research background would be wondering what am expert in genetics was doing out in the field.

"It's a price all of us have to pay," Kate agreed and nodded sadly.

"How long have you been with the Stargate program? Five years?"

"Around that. Back then, the Ancients were more of a myth than anything else. We didn't know where they had come from or where they had gone, but everyone wanted to find them because we knew they had they knowledge to once build the Stargates. I never expected to find this." Carson shook his head. "I don't even know how I ended up in another galaxy."

Kate slowly fished the teabag out of her cup, and then she looked at Carson. "You need some sleep, but you know that better than I do. What's really bothering you? Everything you tell me is confidential."

Carson realized that Kate had come as a psychologist, not as a friend.

"Everything that happened, it made me look back on the last few years and I'm not sure I can live with what I see." Carson admitted.

He could have brushed Kate off with a lie or an excuse and she would have left him alone, but he had kept to himself for too long.

It had worked, as long as the memories had stayed buried, but as the cruel scenes had played out in front of him in the infirmary, the past had come back in Technicolor.

"Do you regret coming to Atlantis?" Kate sounded sympathetic.

"The people on Hoff would still be alive if I had stayed on Earth. Elia wouldn't have had to die like she did and Colonel Sheppard wouldn't have been infected with the virus. There is hardly any more that I can do to violate the oath I took."

"The Hoffans knew what the vaccine did and still wanted to use it. It was their choice to make, not yours."

"If a patient was intent on harming himself, would you give him a knife?" Carson returned. He knew it wasn't that simple.

"No, I wouldn't. But even as a doctor, you can't save everyone. The Hoffans have found their solution that we might not be able to accept, but the majority of their society agrees that it is the best way for them. I agree with you, it is a terrible and barbaric thing to condemn half a world to die to save the other half, but we can't judge the decisions of a culture we have been in contact with for only a few weeks. The Hoffans made the choice, knowing the price." Kate argued. Carson knew she had a point. The Hoffan society was a democracy and a public vote had ruled in favour of the vaccine. He had been stunned and horrified.

"Perna didn't want to die, but she wanted to save her people from the Wraith. She was willing to go all the way and so the Hoffans. I'll never understand how they could do what they did, but I understand now why they were so desperate. Desperation...it drives us to the worst of things." It wasn't an excuse, more an observation. Living under the threat of the Wraith in the Pegasus Galaxy had made him understand how desperate scientists must have been in times of war, when the enemy seemed impossible to defeat. It was so easy to cross to line.

Kate waited, taking sip from her tea. She was letting him decided whether to continue or not.

"With Elia, it was an accident, the virus wasn't ready to be used, but eventually, I would have had to do it. I would have had to test it on a living Wraith. I keep telling myself that they are Wraith and that they won't stop killing humans because they have to, because it's their nature. Still, it feels we have stepped back in time. I didn't come here to develop biological weapons. I became a doctor because I wanted to help people, silly as that sounds now. But as Rodney is fond of pointing out, I could have said no. We have to live with the choices we make."

"That is true. Are you worried about Rodney?" The question came unexpected, but Kate read people for a living and the recent events had hardly been a secret.

"Yes, I am. He's had a hard time the last few months. Rodney is undoubtedly the most intelligent person I've ever met, but you know he's difficult enough to get along with when he's in a good mood. I met him at Area 51, long before anyone knew Atlantis even existed." Carson paused. It was not something he felt comfortable talking about without revealing detail Rodney had told him in confidence or details of his own past that might ruin him.

"Rodney was pretty bitter, especially when he was sent Siberia to help with the Russian Stargate program. Nobody wanted the job and Rodney wasn't exactly popular with the SGC at the time. I think that here on Atlantis, he's finally found his challenge. Sheppard made a good choice when he picked Rodney for his team. But with everything that's he's gone through in the last four months...I've noticed that he's shutting himself off from people." Carson forced the words out, but he was worried about his friend and this time, Rodney wouldn't listen to him. He had seen how the scientist had avoided his gaze earlier in the infirmary.

"Right now, Rodney feels hurt and embarrassed at what happened."

Carson stopped her before she could continue. "I know that Elizabeth waived the privilege, but I'm sure that Rodney wouldn't agree to this."

"Rodney is directing a good deal of his anger and anxiety at the outside. He is suffering from some post-traumatic stress in reaction to the events, but he's dealing in his own way," Kate told Carson.

"I'm still going to keep a close eye on him, even if he doesn't like it."

"Give him a bit of space. Rodney has spent almost three weeks with absolutely no privacy. It's natural that he's pulling back right now," Kate reassured him. "We've got another session tomorrow."

Kate meant to dispel his concerns, but Carson still worried. Rodney was suffering from the unpredictable physical after-effects of the enzyme and at least to him, Rodney had seemed withdrawn, if not depressed.

"I'm afraid I can't tell you much about Colonel Sheppard. He wasn't very forthcoming during our session. In retrospect, I should have pushed him harder. I let him choose where he wanted to start, because I was hoping he would open up that way." Kate sighed. "But I didn't see any signs that he was severely depressed."

Carson shrugged. "At this point, it's just a theory. I don't have any answers."

TBC