My usual inadequate thanks for the fantastic reviews!
Chapter Eight: Arcturus
"I hate them all," McKay told his coffee cup.
Normally, he'd do this sort of griping to Zelenka, but right now he hated Zelenka most of all, with a bitter and all-consuming loathing. Traitor! McKay needed him to help troubleshoot the Arcturus project, and where was he? Gallivanting around offworld with Sheppard's team! He'd sent Elizabeth no less than sixty-three emails inquiring (okay, demanding) that Sheppard's team be grounded until they got the spacetime rift problem solved, but she was ignoring him. She didn't want the project to succeed in the first place; if it worked, it would be a huge blow to her credibility with the IOA, since she'd done everything in her power to stamp it down in the beginning.
He hated her, too.
And he hated the Dorandans, who were inexplicably dragging their feet and making it even more difficult to do the troubleshooting that he needed to do to make it work. Didn't they realize that they had the most to lose of anyone, if the project failed? Idiots.
He hated the military, in the wake of a series of missives from the SGC wanting to know how the project was coming along. His last report had said that they were close to completion and ready for a live test. Now, of course, he didn't want to send another report until he solved the current range of problems. The longer he waited, the more impatient they got. This was why he didn't want the military in charge of the project! Civilian investors understood that results took time. The military wanted to see results now, now, now.
He also hated the doppelgangers, who provided continual living proof that the project wasn't quite working as advertised. He particularly hated the alternate McKay, who kept demanding access to the labs and equipment so that he could figure out how to get home. Didn't he understand that they were working on it? Two heads, NOT better than one, common misconception. Even if both heads were his own.
He hated his underlings for being incompetent and the cafeteria staff for not being able to make a proper pot of coffee, and he hated Sheppard on general principles. Somehow this was probably Sheppard's fault; he just hadn't figured out how yet.
Sheppard.
Sheppard, who wouldn't listen when McKay had tried to share fears and suspicions with him after the Arcturus test. He was still worried that Larissa had picked up something weird in Sheppard's DNA; there was no telling if the Iratus DNA showed up on her scanners, and he hadn't even thought that it might, until seeing the weird look on her face when she had scanned the Colonel. Now he was beginning to doubt his own suspicions, because she hadn't said anything, and she hadn't been anything less than polite.
On the other hand, she hadn't been anything more than polite, either. He'd thought that the two of them were developing, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of a rapport, but ever since the test their communications had been short and strictly business. And every time that he suggested coming back to the planet to run more tests, the Dorandans had some kind of polite and plausible excuse. There were bad storms on Doranda, Larissa told him on one occasion, and they shouldn't come through. Another day, the Dorandans were having problems with their ship, and she told him that while he could come work on the project, she wouldn't be there. Elizabeth had then nixed the idea of taking a team to Doranda; McKay had argued and railed, but Elizabeth asked him flat-out: "Are you absolutely positive you can accomplish anything there that you can't from working on your simulations here? This is supposed to be a joint project between our peoples; how does it look if we go behind their backs?"
And maybe it wouldn't matter anyway.
McKay swirled the coffee in his cup and stared at the lines of code on his screen with burning eyes. He'd been working for -- what was it now? Fifteen, sixteen hours straight? It wasn't working, and it wouldn't work, and he didn't know how to make it work. The results were all coming up the same. As promising as the bridge idea was, the containment protocols on the Arcturus station weren't adequate to make the bridge stable. When they shunted off the unpredictable particles into another universe, it was going to create a highly unstable portal with one end in their reality. It was impossible to tell, without running more physical tests, what the effects of such a portal would be, but he didn't like the way the simulations were coming out.
It's not going to work. If we run the project, even if we shunt the particles into another reality that isn't inhabited, we'll still run the risk of destroying our own. Unpredictable particles that'll kill everyone in the system, or a wormhole between realities that'll eventually unravel our universe ... those are the options.
He was so damn tired.
He picked up his coffee cup, found it empty. Rubbing his aching eyes, he wondered if it was worth going down to the infirmary, running the risk of encountering the doppelgangers, to get something from Carson to give him a few blessed hours of dreamless sleep. It would probably be accompanied by a lecture on the perils of too much caffeine, but there was something comforting in that. Carson was the only person in the city who still interacted with him on a friendly level. Otherwise ... it was like the SGC all over again. Or Russia, or any of the other places he'd worked. People might appear friendly at first, but it didn't take long before their true colors started to show through -- as Sheppard had certainly proven.
He slid down from his lab stool, yawning, and turned around -- only to come to a dead halt at the sight of Ronon lounging in the doorway, watching him. Seeing the barbarian in the labs was so completely unexpected that he just sputtered for a moment before he could even muster up a suitable head of righteous indignation.
"Do you want something?"
"Nope," Ronon said, and continued to watch him.
"How long have you been there?"
"Awhile," was the laconic answer.
McKay stared back with eyes narrowed, but Ronon's face was unreadable as always. "Yes. Well. I was just ... leaving."
"Okay," Ronon said, and obligingly moved to the side. Of course, McKay would have to brush past him in order to get out into the hall. He had no desire to get that close.
"In the ... other room," he clarified, edging towards the door leading to the biology labs.
Ronon just grunted, and continued to watch him with no noticeable change of expression until he'd backed into the biology lab and escaped into a different hallway.
That had been very weird.
------
Sheppard drifted in and out of consciousness. Things didn't make a whole lot of sense when he was awake; he kept thinking he saw Carson, which was patently impossible, and Rodney kept explaining things to him in an exasperated tone which indicated that he'd probably asked the questions before -- but he could never remember the answers. His throat was raw and he recognized the weird floaty feeling that meant he was probably doped to the eyeballs. He couldn't remember what had happened to him. Everything was in pieces. And something felt different. Off. He couldn't put his finger on it, but there was a wrongness to his surroundings that he couldn't quite name, a feeling that some nebulous something, which normally hovered around the edges of his perceptions, just wasn't there anymore.
It was a relief to finally wake to a full-body ache which meant that they were starting to taper off the drugs. Lying with his eyes closed, he listened to the familiar beep of monitoring equipment and, closer, to small rustles and a scritchy sound of pencil on paper. A member of his team, or Elizabeth, he guessed, and wasn't surprised to see Rodney come slowly into focus when he cracked his eyes open.
He tried to say a casual "Hi," but having to clear his throat a couple of times to get the words out sort of spoiled the effect.
Rodney looked up, over the top of his legal pad. He looked exhausted, but he managed to offer a friendly scowl. "You'd better be coherent this time. I'm getting tired of Drug-Addled Sheppard 101."
"If I weren't, would I know?" Then he coughed, and pain rippled down his side.
Rodney leaned forward and offered him a plastic mug of water with a bendy straw. Sheppard turned his head away from the offered straw and insisted on bringing up his hand to take the mug from Rodney -- then had to use both hands when one proved not equal to the task.
"Stubborn idiot," Rodney muttered. "Want me to get a nurse?"
"No, I got it." After he drank, feeling a little better, he handed the mug back and asked, "Don't you have work to do, or something?" Normally when he was in the infirmary, Rodney tended to wander in and out -- he wasn't a sitting-at-the-bedside type.
"I wish. They won't let me do anything. It's sit here, or sit in strange quarters under house arrest, so I may as well be out here where there are at least people to talk to. I'm telling you, we were a lot nicer than this to Rod."
"Rod..." Snatches of memory flashed behind his eyes, bits and pieces of things Rodney had told him while he was drugged. "We're in another universe?"
"And he goes for the win," Rodney said dryly. "We took a jumper out to check an anomaly over Atlantis's ocean. Looks like it dumped us here, in another reality."
"Weird."
"Yeah, wait'll you meet everybody. This is like the inverse of Rod's happytime universe. There, everybody was insanely smart and competent; here, they're all a bunch of moody, emo versions of the people we know."
Sheppard blinked, working to put together his fragmented recollections into something resembling a coherent whole. "Then ... I really did see -- Carson?" He had to force the word out; the stab in his chest had nothing to do with his injuries.
Rodney swallowed, and rubbed a hand across his face; it rasped across what looked like a couple days' growth of beard. "Guess so," he said shortly. "This universe's version, anyway."
Sheppard thought about saying something flippant, like Guess we can't take him back with us, but the words died in his mouth. No. It wasn't funny.
Instead he said, "What happened to the puddlejumper?"
Rodney blinked, irritation climbing up over the edges of the funk he appeared on the verge of sinking into. "Excuse me, are you retarded? Look at you. What do you think the jumper looks like?"
"Elizabeth's not going to like hearing we lost another one."
"No," Rodney agreed glumly. "If we ever see her again, that is."
"Rodney, I hate to break it to you, but if this is the emo alternate Atlantis, then it's infecting you, too."
"Oh, very funny. You'll be depressed too when I tell you about this place."
And Rodney proceeded to fill him in on the details that he'd missed, in between nurses coming in to check his vitals and offer him a bowl of soup. He took a few desultory sips of the hot liquid before his stomach decided it had had enough, and slumped back as exhaustion began to claim him, listening to Rodney's slightly skewed and self-pitying version of events.
"The only person who's the same appears to be Ronon, which is just creepy, let me tell you. He keeps coming in here and staring at me. I've found that if I give him food, it makes him go away, at least for a while."
"You know what they say about feeding strays, Rodney," Sheppard mumbled.
"Excuse me, who's the one who brought him back to Atlantis in the first place?" Rodney sighed; his shoulders slumped. "I wonder what Ronon and Teyla are doing right now. I bet they're going crazy, looking for us."
"Any luck on figuring out how to get us back to our universe?"
Rodney gritted his teeth and wadded up a sheet of paper from the notepad. "You can see how it's going. They won't let me near their computers! These people are completely paranoid! What do they think I'm going to do, hack in and steal all their secrets? This is Atlantis! I already know all their secrets!"
Sleep was drawing him down, but Sheppard pulled himself back to the land of the living to say, "I would think that by now you'd have stolen a computer, cobbled together a killer robot from spare parts in the trash cans and taken over the city. I'm disappointed, Rodney."
"Well, aren't you funny. I'm not MacGyver, you know."
Sheppard closed his eyes, missing out on any further McKay body language, but opened them again at the unmistakable rustling sounds of Rodney standing up. Noticing the Colonel looking sleepily at him, Rodney said impatiently, "Oh, I'm just going down to the mess to get something to eat. Want me to bring you some real food?"
"Not really hungry." Seeing the lost, exhausted look creeping back into Rodney's face, Sheppard realized that it really was bothering Rodney hugely that he didn't have anything to do here, and no good way to get them back where they came from. The Answer Man didn't have any answers. Maybe giving him a mission would help a little bit with that. "On the other hand, maybe if they have some chocolate chip cookies ..."
Rodney looked a little more cheerful. "Cookies. Got it."
"You'll have to sneak it past the nurses."
"I can do that."
Sheppard gave him a thumbs-up, and then closed his eyes and let himself drift for a while in a semi-comfortable haze.
He woke up when someone started fussing with the equipment hooked into him. Peeking from under half-closed eyelids, he gave a little jolt when he saw that it was Carson, then sucked in a breath at the resulting stab of pain in his ribs -- thereby ruining any pretense of being asleep.
"Well, hello, Colonel." The doctor gave him a smile that was mostly friendly, with maybe a tiny bit of nervousness mixed in. Sheppard couldn't blame him for that; remembering how odd it had been to deal with Rod, he could only imagine how the local Atlanteans were handling not just one but two alien versions of themselves.
"I've heard Rodney call you Colonel," the doctor added, "so I presume you had your promotion in your universe as in ours, though we haven't exactly had much of a chance to chat."
"I did," Sheppard agreed, blinking against the dim lights of the infirmary. "Promotion, that is." As the level of painkiller in his system declined, it was harder to get a deep enough breath to speak in anything longer than short sentences.
Carson's too-perceptive blue eyes assessed him. "Any pain? Discomfort?"
"No," he said promptly, ignoring the dull ache in his chest that blossomed into full-blown pain whenever he tried to move. But it felt so good to be able to think clearly again that he had no intention of getting back into that drugged-up state, pain or not.
"Hmm," was all Carson said to that. He tapped on a beige-colored box clamped next to the bed. "I'm putting you on a PCA since you're a little more alert now. I presume you've used these in your universe; I can't imagine you being any less accident-prone there than you are here."
"Yeah." Sheppard eyed the painkiller-administering device. "You, the other you, always tell me I don't push the button enough." Only after the words had left his mouth did he notice that he was still using present tense -- but of course, it was present-tense here, where Carson was still alive.
He wondered if it would be possible to give warning; would Carson listen? Believe him? It was hard to get his thoughts together; the painkiller dose might be lighter than earlier, but he was still pretty heavily doped.
Carson gave a soft laugh. "I can see some things are the same in any universe. I presume you're an adult and capable of acting like one -- so if the pain is keeping you from sleeping or moving, use the thing, Colonel, or I'll take it away and put you back on scheduled drugs."
Sheppard made what he hoped was a noncommittal sound. Carson patted him on the shoulder. "Get some sleep, Colonel."
"Mmm." As Carson started to turn away, Sheppard opened his eyes again. "Hey ... how bad was it?"
Carson turned back, frowning down at him. "How bad was what?"
"Me. You know. How close did I ..." He gestured, not liking the way that his hand wavered in the air; just that small movement seemed to take all the strength he had.
Carson looked at him for a moment, then gave a small smile. "Close, Colonel. Too damn close. We'll save the gory details for when you're feeling a little stronger, why don't we?"
"If you say so."
"That I do, Colonel."
Sheppard let his eyes slide shut as Carson fiddled with the equipment around the bed. Rodney might complain about this place until the cows came home, but from Sheppard's point of view, it was comforting and familiar in a way that the Atlantis infirmary hadn't been since -- well. Better not to think of that.
"Colonel, are you still awake?" Carson's voice was soft, pitched not to disturb him.
"More or less, Doc."
"Do you mind if I ask a question?"
Sheppard blinked his eyes open, and looked up to see that Carson was adjusting the IV and not looking at him. "Sure, shoot."
"I take it in your universe, Rodney and I don't get on."
This genuinely surprised him. "What makes you say that, Doc?"
"The way he's avoiding me here."
Oh. Oh. Crap. Apparently, Rodney hadn't been particularly forthcoming with the details of "his" Atlantis. "I wouldn't say that. It's nothing to do with you. Or him. It's ..."
His protective instincts surged up full-force; he desperately wanted to warn this Carson, but he wasn't even sure where to begin. This universe appeared to be so different that there was no telling if the same chain of events would occur. For all he knew, Carson could die in a Wraith raid tomorrow.
Still, he felt as if he had to make the attempt -- but how did you tell someone that they were dead in another reality? Words were never something he was good at anyway, and this ... how did you find words for this? They sure as hell didn't have a Hallmark card for it.
Carson apparently mistook his silence for weariness, and rested a hand briefly on his arm. "Well ... perhaps I'll take it up with Rodney, then. Get some sleep."
No, he thought. I have to save you. Here, even if I couldn't there. But then the curtain around the bed drew back and there was Rodney, frozen, balancing a tray in one hand. "Oh ... um. Hi. Carson."
"Rodney." Carson's eyes went to the tray. So did Sheppard's. It looked as if McKay had glommed onto one of every dessert in the cafeteria. Send him for a cookie and he comes back with the entire dessert buffet. The man was an over-achiever, no doubt about it.
"What?" Rodney snapped defensively.
"Those had better not be intended for my patient."
"They're not," and Rodney took a large bite of a doughnut to prove it.
"I'm not sure if they should be intended for you, either. Assuming you have the same health issues in your universe that you do here ... and possibly even if not," Carson added, raising an eyebrow.
"I'm sorry, did I ask for your medical advice?" Rodney scoffed through a mouthful of pastry. "Unless temporary amnesia is a side effect of traveling between universes."
"Unfortunately not; nor, it seems, does it impair your ability to speak, more's the pity."
Immobile but comfortable as long as he didn't move, Sheppard cheerfully watched the show. He'd really missed this. Besides, it was nice to see Rodney doing something other than moping around; at times, being Rodney's friend was like being stuck with a bizarre hybrid of Eeyore and Chicken Little.
"--and my medical situation isn't really any of your business, Carson, and what are you implying, anyway?"
"As your doctor, I think it --" Carson broke off, apparently remembering that he wasn't this Rodney's doctor. Something shut down in Rodney's face, too, and he edged around Carson with the tray of food.
"In any case," Carson went on after a moment, in a softer voice, "you might consider going back to your quarters and getting some rest, Rodney. You're obviously running on the edge, and sugar and caffeine are only going to make it worse."
"I'm fine," Rodney said shortly, slamming the tray down on the bedside table.
Carson frowned at him, in a puzzled and worried kind of way. Sheppard's scowl was a little more pointed.
"What?" Rodney demanded.
Just then a door slid open somewhere else in the infirmary; it couldn't be seen, beyond the privacy curtain, but it could be heard along with a familiar, strident voice: "Carson! Where is that man?"
"Bugger," Carson muttered under his breath, and raised his voice. "I'm coming, Rodney; don't have a fit."
Rodney had stiffened at the sound of the other Rodney's voice, slipping around to place Sheppard's bed between himself and the privacy curtain. As Carson vanished around the end of the curtain, Sheppard slid a hand over the bed's rail to pluck at Rodney's jacket and get his attention. "What's the matter with you?" he asked quietly.
"What do you mean, what's the matter with me?" Rodney hissed back. "Are you telling me that creepy funhouse-mirror versions of ourselves don't freak you out? Of course, you liked Rod, too," he spat in an accusing tone.
Sheppard rolled his eyes. "You wanted information," he murmured, nodding towards the curtain. "How do you expect to get it if you treat them all like they have the plague?"
Rodney's eyes went wide. "Oh God. Germs. Do you suppose we have immunity to their germs? If the ATA genes don't work, then that might mean that virus genetics are different too. I knew I shouldn't have spent all these years ignoring the pseudoscientists in the biology lab..."
"The ATA genes don't work?" And suddenly the sense of wrongness that he'd been feeling ever since he woke up clicked over in his head. He couldn't feel Atlantis. Normally it was a continual vague awareness; not really a presence as Heightmeyer had sometimes put it when he tried to describe the sensation to her, but more nebulous than that. Just something there, like the way that you could sometimes be aware of an engine noise on the very edge of hearing without really being able to consciously detect it.
"No, they don't. I can't explain it, but they don't." Rodney shuddered and wiped his hands on his pants, obviously still thinking about germs. Beyond the privacy curtain, the sound of Carson and the other Rodney's voices rose and fell as they spoke. Rodney raised his eyes to stare in that direction, curiosity warring with nervousness.
"Rodney, for pete's sake..." After a moment, when Rodney didn't move, Sheppard -- wincing -- rolled over so that he could reach an arm out of bed and pull back the curtain enough to see what was happening.
The alternate McKay was sitting on another bed in the infirmary with his back to all of them and Carson, in front of him, shining a light in his eyes. "How have you been sleeping?" Sheppard heard Carson ask.
"Like crap," the alternate McKay grumbled. "Look, I didn't come down here to be interrogated; I just want some pills. Is that too much to ask?"
"Considering that I just gave you a bottle of prescription-strength sleep aids less than a month ago ..."
"There were only twelve pills in that bottle, Carson! It's been a lot more than twelve nights!"
"Yes, but you're not supposed to be taking them every night." Carson's voice went soft; Sheppard had to strain to hear it. "I heard about the fight you and the Colonel had in the jumper bay --"
"Don't you start with me, Carson!" Rodney's sharp tones, by contrast, were no problem at all to hear. "If I want psychoanalysis, I'll go to Heightmeyer! The only reason I come down here is for drugs and that's it."
From Sheppard's viewpoint, Carson's face was partially obscured by the IV stand, but he could see that the doctor was frowning. "You come down here because you need someone to talk to, and I'm the only one in the city you haven't managed to alienate by now, though not for lack of trying. You can lie to yourself, but not to me."
The alternate McKay sputtered. "It's not -- I have -- I'm not -- Damn it, Carson!" He scrubbed his hands over his face and then ran them through his hair. Sheppard tried to remember if he'd ever seen Rodney use that particular mannerism; there was something especially un-Rodneylike about it, a sense of exhausted defeat.
Glancing over at Rodney, he raised an eyebrow: Do you know what they're talking about? Rodney just shrugged. And then he stiffened as if he'd touched a livewire, and Sheppard tensed also, turning his attention back to the scene beyond the curtain. They'd both heard the other Rodney say Arcturus.
"I know it's not going well, but I don't know any of the details," Carson was saying.
"Project Arcturus is a giant mess, that's what the problem is." Alternate-Rodney swung his legs over the side of the infirmary bed, watching as Carson crossed the room to the medical storage lockers and passed out of Sheppard's line of sight. "The bridge, I still maintain, is a stroke of genius, but I'm starting to think there's no way to stabilize it. The particles that are being created don't just vanish into their reality; they tunnel between the two realities, and as long as the weapon is running, the hole is going to get larger and more dangerous. We could maybe fire up Arcturus long enough to shoot down a Wraith cruiser if we had to, but there's no way we can use it for power generation."
"Have you had this out with Larissa?" Carson asked from somewhere out of sight.
Alternate-Rodney snorted. "If I could get her to talk to me! She's been acting weird ever since the test and them." He jerked his head towards Sheppard's side of the infirmary, but didn't look over to notice that he was being watched. "She and I are going to go over some of the test data tomorrow -- finally."
There were clinks and clatters from Carson's unseen position. "On Doranda?"
"No. Here. She doesn't want to do it on Doranda. Says we need the computing power of Atlantis to run the simulations faster."
"Elizabeth's fine with this?" Carson asked dubiously, coming back into view with a bottle in his hand.
"Elizabeth would rather have me here than on Doranda, and normally, believe me, I'd be happy enough that she didn't want to risk my genius brains offworld, but that's not what this is about." He snatched the bottle from Carson's hand with a sharp, angry motion. "She doesn't trust me. She hasn't had the respect to say so to my face, but as soon as she got the report about the results of the first experiment, suddenly it's all Rodney, we need you here, and Rodney, you can run your simulations from Atlantis just as easily as you can on Doranda. Carson, the woman doesn't want me within light-years of Doranda and I can't help wondering if that's Larissa's problem, too."
"Rodney, don't borrow trouble where there is none."
Alternate-Rodney's shoulders slumped. "I'm not. I'm being realistic. I said I could make it work, it's starting to look like I can't, and we both know that when it comes right down to it, the sole reason I'm here is for my brains."
To Sheppard's surprise, Carson didn't deny it. The doctor started to reach out as if to pat Rodney's slumped shoulder, then drew his hand back. "Have you eaten?" he asked instead.
"At some point."
"Daft fool. Tell you what, I could use a bite. Assuming the other you has left anything for us."
"The other me? What's the idiot done now?" alternate-Rodney snapped, jumping down from the infirmary bed with the bottle of sleeping pills clutched tightly in one hand.
"Only cleaned out everything in the mess with sugar in it, from the look of things."
"Have you noticed he's heavier than me, Carson? And nowhere near as good looking..."
Their voices trailed out of the infirmary, and Sheppard looked over at his universe's Rodney, expecting irritation with incipient explosion. Instead, Rodney was staring after them with a distant look on his face. He sat down heavily in the chair by the bedside. When he raised his hand and snapped his fingers, the sound was shockingly loud in the silence.
"That's why it was so familiar. The place we came through to this universe, Colonel. It was the control room for Project Arcturus."
"Doranda didn't blow up here."
Rodney nodded. His hand dropped absently onto the tray of pastries, grabbed a muffin and brought it mechanically to his mouth.
Sheppard frowned at him. He couldn't figure out why it mattered that much to Rodney now, any more than he'd been able to figure out why it apparently had been such a big deal to Rodney after the whole thing was over. The motto of Sheppard's life was Leave it behind. He didn't hold grudges, usually; he got pissed and then got over it. In the wake of Arcturus, he'd spent a couple of days being pissed at Rodney, and then he wasn't anymore, and everything was fine.
He'd thought.
Of course he sucked at being comforting, especially when hot pokers were digging steadily deeper into his chest. He eyed the button on the PCA, but decided he wasn't that desperate yet. Besides, needling Rodney was more satisfying, and without side effects -- well, aside from the risk of being hit in the head with the nearest soft-edged object. And Rodney definitely looked in need of being poked at.
"You know, I think they're right about the weight thing. The 'you' in this universe is definitely thinner."
"Says the man who looks like a strong wind could blow him away," Rodney muttered absently, spraying muffin crumbs. "I'm trying to have a serious conversation here. And figure out how to get us out of this hell. If Arcturus is what brought us here, then we're that much closer to figuring out how to get back."
"That's great, Rodney: blow up the Doranda system in this universe too. I'm sure that'll endear you to everybody here."
"It was an accident!"
"I know that," Sheppard said. "Do you?"
Rodney gave him a vicious glare, which softened slowly into something a lot lighter ... and wicked. "You know, Sheppard, I just realized that I never told you about your hair."
"My ... hair?" Startled, he raised a shaky hand to his forehead and touched bandages. "What about my hair?"
"Oh no." Rodney leaned back in his chair and broke off a piece of the muffin. "I wouldn't want to interfere with your recovery by getting you that upset. Carson would kill me." His smirk was entirely unrepentant.
Sheppard would have felt a lot more cheerful about finding something to perk Rodney up, if it hadn't been his damn hair. "McKay, what is wrong with my hair?"
"Oh, nothing at all." The smirk widened, and he popped a piece of muffin into his mouth. "What's left of it," he added, chewing.
Sheppard stared at him. "Bring me a mirror," he said flatly.
"I don't think Carson would like that."
"Mirror, McKay. Now."
"I wouldn't feel too bad about it if I were you, Colonel. Lots of people are bald. Patrick Stewart, for example. Caldwell. Hermiod ..."
"McKay!"
----
TBC