Baby Blues 3: Colds

Or, How Ronon Learned not to take a baby into the infirmary.
"Are ye daft man?!" cried Beckett in seeming horror as he noticed for the first time that amid the bloody (in both senses of the word) chaos of the infirmary, a touching scene was unfolding by Teyla's bedside.

Ronon stood protectively over the Athosian and the wraithling who was sitting playing on her "mommy's" lap. Mairghread seemed to be babbling happily, crawling all over the formerly pristine bed and trying to relate something though noise and sign.

"What?" asked Ronon innocently, looking at the irate Scotsman.

"Ye cahn't bring a healthy babe to th' infirmary!" Carson cried as he stomped over. "Cahn't ye see, Lieutenant De Boer is working on a terrible cold?"

As if to emphasize his point, the sickly lieutenant sneezed a dozen times in succession before collapsing back on his pillows with a groan.

"Wraith don't get sick."

"We don't know that!" the overworked doctor replied angrily. "And we know nothing about wraith babes! Out!"

Unfortunately, the good Scotsman's worry was well founded. It didn't take long for roughly 8 month-old infant to come down with what Sheppard called 'the sniffles'.

Mairghread, it must be said, was none too pleased to have the sniffles. Her head felt fuzzy and stuffy. Her nose drooled. Her ears felt like they had skewers in them. There was a meanie in her head with a large mallet trying to get out. Everything ached. Even her eyes ached. She hadn't thought it was possible for eyes to ache.

The adult part of her knew that this was a perfectly normal part of life. As a child, she would have a human-like immune system, which would disappear as she grew older, as would the clotting factors in her blood and several other things. But no immune system was perfect, so sickness was to be expected, and what the humans called a cold was a relatively mundane and harmless infection.

The infant (and currently controlling) part of her found no comfort in this whatsoever. It may be normal, but it was still terribly unpleasant. And since her teeth were still bothering her, she was doubly miserable, and she had no compunctions about letting anyone nearby know.

She whimpered pitifully and twisted into many bizarre contortions in her attempts to get away from the thermometer that Uncle Carson was trying to put in her ear. It may only take a second, but it was still an annoying second. And her ear hurt to begin with.

When the doctor tried to shine his penlight in her eyes, she swatted at it and tried to bite him. Unfortunately, even with teeth she still weighed less than 15 pounds and was barely 27 inches long, so her worst attacks were not terribly formidable.

"Hmm. Slight fever, congestion, loss of appetite…," Beckett looked up at Ronon and Teyla, for all the world looking like terrified new parents. Anxiousness wasn't an emotion Carson had ever thought to see play across the former Runner's face, but he could swear he saw it now. "She's got a wee cold, tha's all," he reassured them as he ruffled her fluffy black hair. "Gi'e her fluids, Tylenol every four hours for the fever, make her as comfortable as possible."

As it turned out, "making her as comfortable as possible" was in fact a rather difficult task. Her tiny body was hot, but she trembled as though she were cold. She seemed terribly thirsty, but couldn't keep anything down. She was clearly exhausted, but unable to sleep.

And since she was unable to sleep, no one else could either.

"Shh, shh," John Sheppard whispered tiredly in Mairghread's ear as she whimpered and wailed at two in the morning.

Having heard through the grapevine that Mairghread had caught a bad cold, and that Ronon and Teyla seemed determined to get her through it themselves without the help of strangers (from Mairghread's perspective), Sheppard had dragged Rodney down to the South West pier to see if they could help, being, according to Mairghread, her uncles.

Rodney had left hours ago "to run some diagnostics". Ronon was preparing a bottle in the hopes that it would serve to sooth his distraught daughter, while Teyla had fallen asleep, curled up in a corner of the couch.

"How is she sleeping with all this noise?!" asked Sheppard incredulously as he walked back and forth with the screaming child.

"Didn't sleep at all last night," replied the Satedan with a shrug as he took his daughter and she took the proffered bottle, quiet for the first time in what seemed like hours.

They are talking too much! thought Mairghread as she welcomed the warm, soothing milk to her raw throat. Can't they be quiet?

"Hey, uh, Ronon, have you and Teyla, um, got a thing going?" inquired Sheppard out of the blue. When Ronon simply stared at him, he stuffed his hands in his pockets and laughed. "Probably the worst timing for a question like that."

It was, however, a legitimate question. It was hard not to notice the way the two aliens looked at each other, the camaraderie they had developed, or the way that when one was hurt or sick, the other one was there until the nursing staff kicked them out.

Add to that the fact that the majority of their personal belongings had migrated to their "daughter's" apartments, and the betting pool of Atlantis was already giving odds on when they would officially begin seeing one another.

Ronon looked around as he rocked gently on his feet while Mairghread drank. He knew it was a question that Sheppard had every right to ask. In one corner of the room, his own few belongings and a spare mattress from somewhere were piled. Seen clearly through the open doorway into the attached (assumed) living room was a bed that, rumor had it, Teyla had convinced some marines into helping her purloin from an empty room, as well as many of the more precious objects from her room.

The former Runner hadn't really thought about it, but it did kind of look like they had moved in together. The fact that they had both moved their stuff here because they wanted to be closer to Mairghread if she needed them wouldn't have stopped the Atlantis rumor mills, which were seemingly the only perpetual motion machines in the universe.

"Ya know what? I don't wanna know," declared Sheppard as he filled the humidifier again. "Until you two are ready to be married, I don't wanna know about it."

Ronon nodded. Despite the lack of romantic entanglement between the two of them at the moment, he understood the colonel's concern.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Elizabeth Weir, alerted to the fact that Ronon and Teyla had holed themselves up in Mairghread's room for five days, denying even Sheppard entrance on the grounds that it was a sickroom and had reportedly gotten no sleep during this time, went to relieve them of their charge and order them to get some sleep.

It wasn't the parents she needed to convince.

Mairghread writhed and screamed as Elizabeth took her from a tired looking Teyla.

"Are you sure, Dr. Weir?" the Athosian inquired courteously as the expedition's leader nearly received a black eye from the infuriated babe.

"Nnnnnn!" grunted/screamed the wraithling before shouting at the top of her tiny congested lungs, "MAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMA!"

Both women looked at each other in shock, before asking each other at the same time, "Did she just say what I thought she said?"

TBC

Next: First Steps