A/N – RL has me by the throat lately, so for ease of reference and to save backtracking confusion due to the slower updates, I'm going to add day markers now. Oh, and the planet has a name too (always has!)
Chapter 10 – Shards
Rodney woke up in the morning and the first thing he saw was warm sunlight streaming through the Jumper's window. He was surprised that he had stayed unconscious throughout the whole night, but he felt a lot better than he had done the evening before. The pain of his broken bones had reduced to a constant aching rather than the blinding agony he had experienced just after they had been fractured. There was a sharp sting running around his belly and up over his chest, but again, that had diminished to something much more bearable.
He sniffed and very slowly and carefully rolled over without jarring his injuries. There was a distinct smell of bacon and eggs which made his empty stomach grumble. He looked up and got a shock when he saw that Jennifer was staring at him where she sat perched on the edge of one of the Jumper's benches.
Rodney glanced around nervously and asked, "What?"
She rubbed her hands together and her face was totally blank as her eyes bored into him. Rodney was starting to get a little worried now. "What is it?" he asked and tried to sit up, only for dizziness and pain to assail him and make him sink back down again. He whimpered pitifully and closed his eyes.
A moment later, when he had recovered enough to see again, Jennifer was crouched down next to him with the medical kit nearby. She was still looking at him and Rodney furrowed his brow in fright, "What's wrong? Oh! It's me isn't it?"
Jennifer reached over into the med kit and drew out a long, flat, covered object, which Rodney could not see properly due to his supine and helpless position. Jennifer knelt down and placed the object on her lap. She then pulled a needle out of the med kit and before Rodney could ask, she jabbed it into his arm and he could no longer move. But he could still feel the pain just as keenly as before. He grunted and would have asked what she was doing if his voice would release anything other than an incoherent moan.
Jennifer frowned and shifted her eyes to Rodney's extremely sore, broken forearm. She grabbed his upper arm in one hand and unwrapped the bandages and removed the splints around his lower arm.
She said soothingly, "You're arm's badly infected and the bones have shifted out of place again. If I don't act, you'll die. I'm sorry, Rodney, but you don't really need it. I did the best I could to save it, but I can't work miracles."
"What! Of course I need it! Stop!" Rodney screamed in panic. Although what came out of his slack mouth was just a high pitched screech.
Jennifer grabbed his wrist and painfully stretched out his limb. She then pulled a saw out of its covering on her lap. She placed it against the soft flesh of his upper arm and tilted her head at him. "You've got another one anyway. And this one's completely useless now. I have to do this for your own good. It won't take long."
She purposefully moved the blade back and forth over his skin and drew blood. Rodney closed his eyes as he lost all his thoughts and screamed and screamed as his body was drowned in agony.
Planet Whitefall, The Second Night (9 days until rescue)
Rodney woke with a start and his eyes flew open. He saw Jennifer asleep next to him and he grimaced and scrabbled away from her.
He shouted, "My arm! What've you done to me?" Only to look down at himself and realise that it was still there and what he had thought was reality had only been a terror and hunger induced nightmare, no doubt also partially caused by what she had had to do to him to set his arm without any anaesthetic.
The damage was already done though and his flailing had upset the loose edges of bone inside him. He wheezed as the pain made him sink back down onto the deck and pass out again. The last thing his frail mind showed him through the blur of tears was Jennifer coming over with her face full of sympathetic concern.
The first thing Rodney became aware of was the fiery sting of white hot pain in his body as it consumed him from the inside out. He remained floating on the edge of consciousness for as long as he could, to stay away from it, and he desperately wanted only to sink beneath the waves and drift off again.
His mind was filled with primal terror that if he opened his eyes he would have to ask Jennifer for some painkillers. He vehemently did not want to do that in case she felt that she needed to hurt him again just for her entertainment as she had done earlier.
But the pain ratcheted up a notch and he could no longer fight it down. His throat was sore and he felt dizzy. There was something rumbling in his throat and chest, which only served to make the pain radiating through his battered ribs and arm even worse than before. He had been abandoned by any form of natural anaesthetic and he wondered why the severe and constant pain alone had not killed him yet and released him from the torment forever.
He could feel something else though and it did not hurt. In fact, it was lessening the pain ever so slightly and he tried to localize it as the vibration continued in his throat. The calming sensation was centred on his belly, but lower down than the bandaged cuts which smarted and burned their trails across his abdomen and chest. The feeling was one of warmth and security and he tried to focus on that one piece of pleasantness within the midst of the agony. Strangely, the more he concentrated on the sensation, the less intense his pain became.
He decided that he really was going to have to wake himself right up so that he could ask Jennifer for some of the precious painkillers or he knew for certain that was going to be sick again. He could already feel himself trembling with hunger, but the thought of food just made him feel worse.
He opened his eyes blearily and realised that he was actually sitting upright and leaning against something that fitted the curve of his back perfectly. He then noticed that the sensation wrapped around his waist, was not so much a something, but more a someone.
A woman whispered, "That's it, let it all out. Don't worry about it."
Jennifer was sitting behind him, hugging him around the middle as she held him upright and he then noticed that the rumble in his throat was actually the sounds of pain as they were involuntarily verbalised. He had not realised just how much noise he had been making in his valiant efforts to detach himself from his body, but Jennifer had heard and instead of sadistically grating his broken bones together again, she was only holding onto him and trying her best to alleviate the worst of his pain. In any other situation he would have been embarrassed, but it hurt too much for him to care.
He was sitting on the deck in the Jumper. Through the bulkhead doors ahead of him, the windscreen was completely dark and the only light source was a faint orange glow which he associated with warmth. He was curious as to how Jennifer had removed the drone power cell without his help, but he had more pressing concerns at the moment to do with clawing sufficient strength from his dwindling reserves just to breathe, endure and live. He knew that he had no choice other than to ride through the waves of pain engulfing him and to fight off the beckoning unconsciousness as it drew him nearer and seduced him to give in to the darkness.
He closed his eyes in anguish and hung his head down, which shifted his collarbone and made him wince and groan. He mumbled woefully, "Oh, I'm still here!"
"Nice to see you too!" Jennifer said into his ear. "Glad you finally decided to join me in the land of the living." Jennifer's grip shifted slightly and one arm moved away from him. "I don't mind the company either. How are you feeling?"
"Ready to hop, skip and jump! How on Earth do you think I'm feeling? An elephant squashed me like a grape!"
"I know. You're being very brave, Rodney." She pressed a pill into Rodney's left hand and then held out a bottle of water. "These should help; painkillers and antibiotics. You had a hell of a nightmare earlier. Gave me a bit of a fright."
Rodney swallowed the pills as she passed them to him one at a time and helped him with the water bottle due to him having one arm completely out of commission. He choked as some of the water went down the wrong way and it upset his rib. The hacking jarred through his chest and into his arm where it was strapped across him.
Rodney let loose a sobbing whimper and deeply furrowed his brow as the movement he made to make such a mournful sound only hurt him even more.
He wondered whether Jennifer was just waiting until he was fully awake and coherent before she took advantage of his weakness and hurt him again. He was pretty sure his bones had just lost alignment. It felt like his broken frame now had the consistency of twigs which would need to be frequently pushed back into place. He knew that he would gradually lose his sanity if she was going to put him through the worst and most terrible torture he had ever experienced over and over until he was hollow.
He was unsure if he could ever like Jennifer again as she had done nothing but cause him unbearable pain. How could he feel anything other than resentment and fear of a woman who took pride in her job of inflicting like that? She had never shown any remorse over what she did and now Rodney only associated her with the anguished memory of her firm hands prodding, jabbing and wrenching his injuries and making them infinitely worse.
A calm voice was talking soothingly right into his ear, but it took a while for his brain to engage enough with the real world to register the words being said. "Rodney, I want you to take some slow breaths. Breathe deeply; as deeply as you can."
He felt an incredulous bubble breaking through the surface of the pain and sorrow and whispered, "Uh, broken rib here! It really hurts."
The hands around his middle shifted slightly, but they did not press on his wounds and served to anchor him. The gentle voice spoke once more, "I know, but you have to. Just a few times and then you can relax again."
"Why?" he gasped.
"Because if you don't, you could get pneumonia."
Rodney flinched at the sudden bluntness of the voice and cried out as he was jostled. His vision was filled with white and he drew in shallow and fast breaths. He gritted his teeth with his eyes closed and willed himself to slow them down as they were causing a feedback loop of pain that was more severe, the more times he panted.
He then realised in alarm that his face was sopping wet. Had he been crying? In front of Jennifer? He felt a blush of humiliation warming his soaked cheeks and furrowed his brow. She would think of him as nothing more than a weak excuse for a man, if she even saw him as anything more than a person to be pitied and comforted like a small child.
The grip around him changed and moved around to hold his sides. "Deep breaths."
Rodney nodded and instantly regretted it, but he obliged as best he could. As his chest rose, he scrunched up his face, and Jennifer slowly breathed in time with him as spoke into his ear, "In... and... out..." Rodney's actual breaths were not quite as steady as hers and he flinched as he expected to feel his loose rib stabbing his lung at any moment. It hurt like hell, but nothing sliced him inside, so he relaxed a little as he took the next shaky breath.
Jennifer moved her hands up from behind him and placed them on either side of his face as she said, "You did good, Rodney. But you must try not to flail around like you did after your nightmare as you have got a snapped arm, collar and you do actually need that spare rib."
The pain started to diminish as he sat there and she constantly kept hold of him. Not moving helped, but breathing was very difficult and his chest was tight and sore. Rodney closed his eyes and leant back against Jennifer. She yielded slightly as he moved.
She helped to gently shift him backwards until he was resting against the base of the bench, instead of her, and then made sure would stay sitting upright.
She stood up and stretched, "I'll get you something to eat. We don't want to add hypoglycaemia to your extremely long list of medical complaints now, do we?"
Rodney was too weary to say anything, but he narrowed his eyes and when she turned away from him, he shot her a scathing look.
He tilted his head back against the bench behind him and as the pain level lowered to something he could just about deal with, he noticed that he was shaky and weak. He feebly raised his left hand up and felt at his face. He had been right, there was tear tracks down his cheeks and his stubble, which was fast becoming a beard, was damp.
Jennifer came back and sat down next to him. He watched as her hair fell across her grubby face. It was messy, but still amazing and he wanted to run his hand through it, even if his fingers got stuck in the incredible cascading waterfall of golden tangles.
She moved her head and shook it out of the way. She unwrapped the MRE she had and then looked across at him and thought for a moment. "You need to have something to eat. Do you think you can keep this down?"
Rodney nodded and wrenched his shattered clavicle again. He knew he should really just stop trying to move altogether if he had any modicum of self respect left for his damaged body. He gasped, "Yes…"
Jennifer looked at him kindly and was all businesslike again as she said, "Ideally I'd put you on a drip, but I don't have anything like that in the med kit, so you're going to have to eat it."
She helped him to eat a few mouthfuls before he was too weary to continue. It must have still been the middle of the night and between the pain induced unconsciousness and the long hike from the day before he was deeply tired anyway. He closed his eyes and said, "That's enough."
Jennifer nodded and sealed the MRE. She placed it in the storage container, came back and sat next to him again. She made sure she was on his left side so that she could sit so close to him that they were touching, without hurting him.
It was then that his misery sharply intensified as he came to realise that she probably did not really care about him. At least not as an individual and certainly not as a scared man called Rodney McKay, who had yet to realise or acknowledge how strong and tenacious he truly was. He convinced himself that he was not receiving any special treatment. She was just doing her job, nothing more. He was not special to her. She would have done the same for Ronon or Teyla or even Sheppard.
"Oh, God! I'm never going to see them again!" Rodney suddenly blurted out loud.
Jennifer took hold of the upper part of his uninjured arm and squeezed reassuringly. But the effect was diminished, because she did not speak and that only made Rodney know for sure that she was thinking the same thing.
They still had nine more days before the Daedalus would reach them. Nine days of the three physical adversaries Rodney feared the most; pain, hunger and cold. They would start showing up when their supplies finally ran out in a couple of days. Rodney knew that he had not fared so well and that was only the first day. He dreaded to think what might happen in the morning or what would become of them when the food and heat ran out. He did not have much faith that he would survive for very long after he had used the last of the painkillers as there would then be nothing left to ease his suffering except the open arms of death.
TBC
A/N – surely nothing else could possibly go wrong?