John, along with the rest of his team, was waiting in the observation room when the figure in the hospital bed below began to stir. It had been almost nine hours of nerve-wracking anticipation, during which Carson had finally banished Sheppard and the others from the isolation room because they were driving him up the wall. But at last the wait was over, and they were going to get some answers.
At the first sign of movement, Dr. Beckett jumped out of his chair and went over to Rodney's bedside. It was another few minutes before a sliver of blue iris was revealed between drooping eyelids.
"There you are," said Carson. "I was wondering when you were going to join us."
Rodney's eyes sprang fully open at the sound of the other man's voice. "Carson?" he asked, as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing.
"It's me," Carson replied cautiously. "It's alright—you're safe now."
Rodney looked around and spotted Sheppard, Ronon and Teyla through the observation window. Sheppard did his best to smile at him, but it felt forced and it must have looked that way to Rodney, too, because his face fell, conveying a deep sadness.
"Carson, you need to listen to me carefully," Rodney said with complete earnestness. "You have to lock me up in the brig and post guards on me, like, right away."
Carson's mouth curled up in a placating smile. "Son, I really don't think that'll be necessary," he said, his words tinged with humour.
Rodney lifted and lowered his arms a couple of times and then he stared at Carson as if he thought the Scott had gone mad. "I'm not strapped down?" he burst out incredulously. "You've gotta be kidding me! Have you people no sense of self-preservation? You need to strap me down, now!" he demanded.
Carson's eyebrows shot up at the bizarre request. "I assure you, there's no need for that. But if it makes you feel any better, I'll have you know there's a guard posted outside the door."
"What? Of course that doesn't make me feel better! One guard? That's not nearly enough!"
Carson tilted his head up slightly and slid Sheppard a questioning glance up in the observation room. Sheppard shrugged back and gave the doctor a nod—erring on the side of caution was always a smart move, after all. Giving his radio a quick tap, John contacted Lorne and ordered him and his team down to the isolation room.
In the room below, Carson scowled up at him, making his view of needlessly restraining his patients crystal clear. Still, both the military leader of Atlantis and the patient himself were in agreement, so he had little choice. But as Carson moved to hold down Rodney's arm so he could strap it down, Rodney suddenly went ballistic, batting the doctor away while he frantically kicked to free himself from his blankets. The IV in Rodney's arm ripped loose, spattering patient and doctor alike with fine droplets of blood as Carson struggled to contain him.
"No! No, no—get away from me!" Rodney shouted. "Don't touch me!"
"Ye daft bugger! You're the one told me to put you in restraints," Carson huffed, backing away. "Make up your bloody mind."
Rodney's lips thinned into a straight line as his eyes shot daggers at Beckett. "Forgive me for not wanting my friend to end up a dried husk on the floor!" he barked, his chest heaving in the aftermath of their encounter.
"What are you on about?" asked the exasperated Scotsman.
At that moment Lorne and his team burst through the door as if they were expecting to find a hive ship's worth of Wraith waiting for them on the other side.
"It's about time," Rodney snarked. "Did you stop on the way to get pizza? What took you so long? Dangerous man, here!" he snapped, fingers pointing towards his own face.
Up in the booth, Sheppard smiled for the first time in days. It had to be Rodney. Only Rodney could lay into Lorne with such vindictiveness while simultaneously demanding to be placed under guard.
"Hey, Rodney," John said, leaning eagerly into the mike, "any chance you think it might be safe enough for us to come down there now? We're all kind of curious to hear what happened to you."
Rodney seemed to consider it for a moment. "That should be fine," he agreed. "So long as these trained military monkeys promise not to hesitate to shoot me at the first sign of trouble… And when I say shoot, I mean stun—you got that, right?" he asked anxiously, turning his wide blue eyes on Lorne for confirmation.
John, Teyla and Ronon shared a quick smile and filed out of the observation room, which, over the last several hours had started to smell more and more like the inside of the men's locker room. On their way down, they met up with Dr. Weir, who'd been alerted to the change in Rodney's status by Lorne. Greetings were nodded before they entered the now-crowded room. John noted uneasily that Elizabeth had on her 'serious business' face and he started feeling pre-emptively defensive on behalf of his friend.
"Elizabeth, good," said Rodney. "I'm glad you're here—saves me the trouble of having to go through all this a second time."
Dr Weir's eyebrows rose slightly at the very Rodney-like words and attitude coming from the young man on the bed. But before she could get a word out, Rodney was off and running again, his face and hands animated as he launched into a hair-raising account of the events that occurred after being thrown into the volcano. He was sailing along at a respectable clip when Carson interrupted him.
"Hold on a moment," the doctor jumped in after Rodney had explained what he believed the machine was designed to do. "Are you telling us that the Wraith came about as the result of a messed up Asgard genetic experiment?"
"Yes, Carson; you get a gold star for managing to keep up," Rodney quipped. "Now, if I can get back to my story?"
"Aren't the Asgard those tiny, big-headed aliens like the one on the Daedalus?" asked Ronon, his brow crunched up in confusion.
"Yes. So?" asked Rodney impatiently.
Ronon crossed his arms more firmly across his midriff as if to help support his argument physically. "They're tiny—like little kids. I could easily snap one in half like a twig. But the Wraith…"
"Yes, yes; believe it or not, I don't need you to connect the dots for me," said Rodney with his trademark annoyance. "The reason the Asgard look the way they do now is because of the degenerative side effects of their cloning process. Basically, Hermiod's current body is a copy of a copy of a copy and so on, and each successive copy is genetically inferior to the previous one. Hermiod's original body, which most likely ceased to exist tens of thousands of years ago, was not all that different from our own. According to Samantha Carter, who saw one of their preserved ancestors, the Asgard were once a tall, lean and mostly androgynous race of people. Which, when combined it with iratus bug DNA, led to the creation of the Wraith."
John couldn't help wincing at the mention of iratus bugs. He couldn't fathom why anyone would willingly manipulate their DNA to become more like the hideous creatures, no matter what kind of benefits were involved.
With another complaint or ten about the constant interruptions, Rodney continued to relate his story to the wrapt attention of his audience. There was total silence in the room when he reached the part where he fought the swordsman.
John's eyes narrowed suspiciously when Rodney's account abruptly ended with the Pawnim man looking up at him as he bled out on the kitchen floor. There was more to the story, John was sure of it. The way Rodney's face had gone grey at the end…there was something he wasn't telling them, and whatever it was, it had to be pretty damn bad if it ranked as 'unspeakable' compared to being genetically altered and fed on by a Wraith. He had a feeling he knew what it was, and decided to dig a little.
"So…it was an accident, then," John stated matter-of-factly.
"Hardly." Rodney humphed and sneered at him, but the look lost some of its impact coming from such an innocent-looking young face. "Were you even listening? I drained the life right out of him!"
"He bled to death," John corrected. "On his own weapon, I might add. You were only defending yourself. And unless you got off on it…"
"No—of course not!"
"…or he ended up a dried-up, withered old man…"
Rodney didn't respond this time, but he looked uncertain, so John took that as a 'no'.
"…then you're not a Wraith, Rodney. You're just the victim of really bad timing." John was fairly certain he'd got at the heart of the matter. He could read every emotion that crossed young Rodney's face—it was even more expressive than the face he was used to seeing—and what he saw there was fear and doubt, a touch of hope and a crap-load of guilt.
Next to him, Carson cleared his throat, effectively drawing the focus of everyone in the room. "Rodney, I'd like to run a few more tests in light of what you've told us, including a full body scan," he said, his voice taking on the no-nonsense tone he always got when he was about to subject his patient to hours of tedious and invasive tests.
Rodney flinched. "It's bad, isn't it?" he asked, letting his inner hypochondriac out to play. "Am I green or something? Or, or did my eyes go all weird like a Wraith's? What aren't you telling me?"
"You mean you don't know?" Carson asked, stunned.
"Know what?" Rodney's worried eyes jumped from one of them to another until they settled on Sheppard. "What did that machine do to me?" he demanded, his voice squeaking slightly at the end.
John swallowed and fixed Rodney with a grim look. "It's not pretty," he said, knowing full well that he was being an asshole, but desperately needing to lighten the mood. "Doc, you got a mirror around here?"
Carson's lips thinned as he gave John a stern, disapproving glare, but he reached into one of the drawers of his portable equipment cabinet and, after a bit of rummaging, handed Sheppard a small, hand-held mirror.
John made as if to give Rodney the mirror, but snatched it back at the last second. "I just want to say, for the record, that I think the hair looks cute," he said with a sly smirk, and he handed his friend the mirror.
It was at times like this that John really wished he kept a camera with him at all times, because the astonishment on Rodney's face was absolutely priceless. Long, nimble fingers danced over high cheekbones and thicker, fuller eyebrows before confronting the pile of wavy, light-brown hair that stuck out from his head in all directions. An expression of awe mixed with confusion lit up the youthful features, and his blue eyes fairly sparkled.
"That's—that's not possible!" Rodney breathed, his eyes still glued to the mirror, marvelling at the experience of coming face to face with a younger, but still familiar, reflection of himself. "There's no way that genetic manipulation could result in…in this!"
Carson's serious blue gaze snuck into Rodney's line of sight as he forced the mirror down onto the other man's lap to get his full attention. "That's why I'd like to run some more tests," Carson reminded him. "I have a theory, and if I'm right, then it's possible you may have just stumbled across a means of defeating the Wraith once and for all."