Icelus, 4/5

Beckett was out of surgery and on the way to his office when Rodney limped into the infirmary. Beckett explained willingly and without unnecessary medical terms what he had done and what had made surgery necessary, even though a valve in Sheppard's head was something Rodney still had troubles grasping.

"Will there be …" he trailed off, not quite daring to voice the question that had been in his mind ever since Beckett had first mentioned brain surgery. There was just too much that could have gone wrong. One false move, one inattentive nurse and Sheppard could be …

"Don't assume worst-case-scenario, Rodney. The haematoma was slowly accumulating after the skull-fracture occurred, that means that the pressure on the major's brain hasn't been the same the whole time he was missing. You found him just in time to prevent the worst. The ancient medical devices did their part to ensure a clean, safe surgery." Beckett smiled. "He'll throw a fit when he finds out we had to shave a part of his head, but there won't be any kind of brain damage."

Rodney shakily reached for the bed behind him and sat down. "Oh, thank god."

He closed his eyes for a moment, collecting himself, trying to bring up his rapidly crumbling walls. "When can I see him?" he asked when he opened his eyes again, glad that his voice had taken on its usual impatient tone.

Beckett ran a hand up and down his lower arm, pondering. "With the ZPM powering the infirmary properly, we could initialise the medical equipment that had been dormant so far. There was no handbook on how to use ancient medical technology, but from what I gleaned from the interface, it should --"

"Whoa, wait, hold on." Rodney's gaze snapped up. "Are you telling me that you connected with the city?"

Beckett blushed and ducked his head.

"Carson?"

"Not with the city, no. With the infirmary. "

"How?"

He saw Beckett shudder as the other man remembered. "Not voluntarily at first. It was as if the infirmary was sensing that we couldn't handle the amount of injured by ourselves. It connected when I was scanning a critical patient." Watching Beckett reminisce made the hair on Rodney's arms stand on edge. "There was this blinding flash of … of knowledge, suddenly, of which devices to use to speed up the recovery, to help patients we would have lost otherwise."

"So, like the control-chair?"

"No, not like that at all. The chair is abrupt and frankly quite scary. This was different. More like someone taking your hand and putting the required tool in them."

There was more Beckett didn't mention. Rodney had the distinct feeling that he was just getting a sugar-coated version of the actual happenings. Scientific curiosity got the better of him: "Has anybody else been able to connect with the infirmary?"

Beckett shook his head. "Just me. I didn't let anybody else try."

"Proprietary much?"

The other man sighed. "Protective much. My gene is natural and already the connection nearly had me blacking out."

Rodney drew his eyebrows together, confused. "Why?"

"Dilution. The city has to make a much greater effort to connect with those of us with a weaker gene. It's causing quite a strong reaction in the body of the person it's trying to connect with."

"What kind of reaction?"

Beckett looked away, busying himself with straightening some wrapped syringes on a nearby table. "It's not important."

"If it wasn't important you'd let others try as well, so what's happening?"

"I told you it's not important. It's just between me and the infirmary, which means it's all voodoo to you anyway, so --"

"Carson." Evasive Beckett was never a good sign, and Rodney was momentarily distracted from watching the ICU over Beckett's shoulder. "What happens when you connect with the infirmary?"

Beckett turned away from him fully, his gaze locked on the ICU. The shoulders under the white lab-coat drooped slightly. "Imagine a long hot needle driven straight through your skull into your brain." He breathed out, hands clenching the table until his knuckles went white. "Imagine all your muscles seizing up in the most painful spasms you'll ever experience."

Rodney's mind went blank for a moment, trying to cope with what he'd just been told. "But why didn't we notice that when you sat in the control chair?"

Flashing a wry grin in his direction, Beckett said: "Why do you think I didn't want to get in it?"

"Oh." Rodney couldn't think of a better answer. "So how do you …"

"It gets better with practice. And the infirmary is a much gentler connector than the chair."

Beckett turned toward the ICU, nodding to Dr. Biro who was checking the vital signs and adjusting the IV. "To come back to your initial question, it shouldn't take more than a week for him to heal fully, now that the medical devices are all working. You should be able to visit him once he's stable."

And Beckett was clever, very clever. Bringing up the major's recovery was sure to stop all other thoughts, all other questions regarding Beckett and the infirmary. Bringing it up made sure Rodney didn't ask any more questions because his brain was preoccupied with the how and the why and the when and why not right now of the majors recovery. He recognised the ruse but let it go, didn't want to argue now.

"How about we have a look at your feet now?" Another distraction.

"Hm?" His feet were the last thing he had thought about when he came here.

Beckett crouched in front of him, removing the heavy boots from Rodney's feet. He sucked in a sharp breath when he examined the soles. "You should have come earlier."

Rodney waved a hand distractedly. "More important things."

"He's safe now, Rodney. Time to get back to your old, hypochondriac self."

He just stared at Beckett as if the other man had lost his mind, the joke lost on him.

Beckett rose, moving with a tired calm to retrieve bandages and antiseptic. "Since I didn't manage to: who told you about the Major, anyway?" he asked when he motioned for Rodney to turn on the bed and rest his legs in an elevated position.

"Hm?" The question seemed inane, but Rodney answered for the sake of politeness. "Elizabeth."

"How was she?" Beckett asked seemingly casual while cleaning the cuts on Rodney's feet.

"Fine," he answered, not really caring about small-talk any longer. His gaze was glued to the prone figure in the ICU.

"Rodney."

His attention wandered back to Beckett. "What?"

"I want to know how she was. How she looked like."

Disbelief and ire bubbled up, triggering a well-oiled reaction. "Good heavens, Carson, if you want to propose to her do it yourself and don't make me your Cyrano. Makes my teeth ache."

Pain lanced through him when the antiseptic touched a deep cut. He inhaled sharply. That had almost felt like a retribution.

"Are you completely daft, man?" Beckett's eyes were narrow and incredulous.

"Why? Hit too close to home? I can send her to your door next time she comes to me. I really don't want to deal with her now anyway." He couldn't contain the smug, self-satisfied grin from spreading over his face.

Beckett breathed deeply. In a way that reminded Rodney uncomfortably of their last argument. "You incredibly stupid, egotistic arse," Beckett finally ground out.

Rodney blinked. He had never heard Beckett swear in earnest before. Never this personal, this deliberately degrading at any rate. "What?"

Beckett finished cleaning the cuts and reached for the bandages. His every movement oozed anger. "I only released Dr. Weir from this infirmary yesterday. She is on active duty against my express warning and she's not reporting back to me about her status and I have simply been too busy to check up on her. So when I'm asking how she is, I'm not joking."

The steel was back in Beckett's eyes and Rodney felt the distinct urge to cross his arms in front of him to shield the hostility.

"She looked pale, okay? And tired. I didn't really look for more, given …" He stopped, his attention snared by a movement in the ICU.

"Given what?"

Rodney looked back to the major where a nurse was currently changing bandages. God, he looked so damn small in that bed. Too slim under the covers, too --

"Given what, Rodney?" Beckett's voice was insistent, allowed no lapse on Rodney's part.

Rodney breathed out, refusing for it to sound like a sigh. "We had an argument."

"You what?"

"An argument. Are you deaf?"

Beckett bandaged his feet with calm professionalism, not letting any of his anger slip into the task at hand. His voice - the eerie upper-class English enunciation again - was an entirely different matter, however. "Are you aware that I had Elizabeth in for a perforated ulcer until yesterday?"

Well. That had been nothing short of spectacular. He was sure that the entire city would be talking about the heated argument he'd had with Beckett. That the doctor had more or less manhandled him through the corridors and into his room didn't help matters of secrecy much.

At the moment, though, Rodney couldn't have cared less.

Yes, he knew he should feel sorry for Elizabeth, and in a way, he did, after all, he was angry with her, but not heartless. But didn't Beckett understand that Rodney had a right to his anger? The betrayal, a betrayal Carson had been part of, still stung. The fact that Elizabeth had let the major go still was an open wound. The fact that she'd written the eulogy two days after the major's disappearance and had exiled him from Atlantis without even listening to his side was a handful of salt in that wound.

He had a right to be angry with her. Angry with anyone. Angry with himself.

If only, a small part of his mind insisted, because it kept him on his feet.

And then there was the matter of those dreams. He believed in prophetic dreams as much as he believed in the Easter bunny. So there had to be more to them. But what? Was there even the remote chance that the city was responsible for that strange connection?

Rodney shifted on his bed, feet carefully propped up. The room was almost dark and the low hum of the city around him, a city that was now alive and thriving on the fully charged ZPM, should have been soothing. However, it did nothing to soothe him tonight. It gnawed at him, the knowledge that he didn't know exactly what had happened.

His mind went from newly functioning systems to Beckett and his connection with the infirmary and immediately wondered of the major had ever felt any pain when he sat down in the control chair. But thinking back on their first meeting, on that look of stunned wonder, Rodney knew that John Sheppard had never had the same problems Beckett had faced. The city seemed to know him and to welcome him. And, god, was it ever irritating. The military man simply had to wave his hand where the scientist had to work long and hard to make the equipment respond to him, and even then, it never seemed to do what it was supposed to quite willingly. In fact, the city sometimes acted like a spoiled child, only wanting its favourite toy and nothing else.

When the blip of Sheppard's jumper on the external sensors had gone out, Rodney had been sure he'd heard something like a wail of pain in the claxon of the alarms.

Even fully powered, the city's systems had been cumbersome, the shield only integrating reluctantly. Like a child, petulant without its toy. Like a lover, bereft of what was most dear to him.

Now that Sheppard was back, he'd heard people talk about how much energy was being re-routed to the infirmary. Again, Atlantis slowed down for John Sheppard. Waited with baited breath. Tried its best to un-break the toy. To mend the lover.

Rodney had noticed changes in his own quarters as well. They were warmer, the shower more gentle, the connection between his laptop and the consoles faster. It almost felt as if Atlantis was grateful.

But this entire line of thinking was absurd.

Wasn't it?

Was it possible at all that Atlantis had tried to connect Sheppard with him because it sensed that the major was still alive, but out of reach and without a radio? But why hadn't it tried to contact someone else? Why not simply stick a rescue operation demand on the main screen in the control room? Or on every single screen in the damn city, for that matter? With the ZPM fully charged and the city coming more and more to life, it should have been easy.

Thoughts racing behind his forehead, he reached for a glass of water on a table next to his bed. The monitor of his laptop went into screensaver mode, a row of equation running from top to the bottom of the screen, melting, dissolving then coming up again. His hand froze halfway when realisation hit.

The city had tried to tell them. In fact, it had tried hard. Only by that time, he'd already been awake for four days and had thought it an overload in one of the computer consoles and had - in a long and complicated operation - shut the section of the mainframe creating the strange images on every screen in the city down.

A headache began to spread from the back of his head to the front when he realised that that had been the city's first attempt at a cry for help on Sheppard's behalf.

He didn't know if it had tried to contact anyone else in another way. If it had, no one had understood it or considered it off enough to come see him about it.

And the dreams of falling and stumbling and burning had started after the misguided attempt of fixing the city.

However, the idea of Atlantis somehow planting what was happening to Sheppard into Rodney's brain was too remote to be even considered a possibility. Why him, for example? And how had it managed to reach him on the mainland, hundreds of kilometres away from the city? And once again, and most importantly: why him?

Because you were the first. You have the gene of the one that is dear to us. Because you never believed.

The city's reasons were clear and Rodney remembered now. Remembered Beckett telling him that he had refined the gene therapy after the personal shield incident. But was his gene really that different from the others? Did it connect him to Sheppard? The thought alone was as frightening as it was fascinating.

But it all boiled down to that one thing again: Sheppard. He couldn't even think without having him pop up at every niche and corner. And as long as he thought and none of his questions were answered, he'd never get any of the sleep Beckett insisted he got.

Earlier, in the halls, when Beckett had dragged him along, he'd heard the awed voices of a group of military men and scientists, talking about what a miracle it was that the major was still alive and that he was truly a hero. Hero. Rodney had felt the need to punch every single one of them. A kamikaze act didn't equal courage or intelligence or heroism. It was nothing but an unnecessary sacrifice, a waste of a good man, of knowledge, of potential, of… a friend.

Damn Sheppard for that, too. Rodney had been perfectly fine without friends. He hadn't wanted any. Didn't want to belong, didn't want the feeling of someone looking out for him or being there for him. And yet here he was. Caring because Sheppard had cared. Holding on to that unlikely friendship for dear life.

He'd never wanted it. Yet he had never wanted anything more than that.

He was tired of all this. Tired of worrying, of his thoughts racing, of caring, of being awake. And whose fault was that? Who had prompted all of this?

Sheppard. Always Sheppard.

Damn him.

Rodney pushed his feet off the bed and winced when he stood. But determination won. Enough was enough. He'd end this. Now.