Chapter 6

John's reprieve from Jane's medical tests was over the next morning. He'd fallen deep asleep and the sound of keys jingling in the lock of his cage door felt far away, like a dream. He tried to open his eyes, but after the first unsuccessful attempt, he gave up, content to let himself slide back to sleep—if he was really even awake.

A buzz, then a sharp jolt of electricity ripped through his side. He half sat up, screaming, before collapsing back to the floor. The muscles in his ribs where he'd been jabbed with the electric prod twitched wildly, and he panted against both the pain from the shock and the shock of waking up so abruptly. He caught movement out of the corner of his half closed eyes and knew Pavlov was coming for him. He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the jolt of pain from the electric prod.

The pain didn't come—not right away. John cracked his eyes open, and gasped when he saw Pavlov's wide, pale face bending over him. The eyes were dark and bright, filled with some kind of emotion John could not identify. The alien allowed the end of the prod to hover over John's stomach.

Pavlov spoke, and John frowned at the sound. He couldn't understand a single word, but the tone and intent were almost recognizable. Whatever Pavlov had had to say to John, he'd said it quietly so only he could hear him. The alien's face pulled back then in a terrifying sneer, and he jabbed the end of the prod into John's stomach.

.

.

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John woke up next in Jane's lab. His stomach cramped and twisted and throbbed. He was lying on the metal tabletop, unrestrained. Jane's back was turned away from him and studying something on a counter on the far side of the room. This was his chance, the moment he'd been waiting for.

Escape escape escape escape. His mind screamed at him. John twisted on the table and managed to edge himself closer and closer to the side. The door into the room was on this side of the lab, maybe fifteen feet away from the table, and it was propped open. He squirmed a little more, keeping his eyes trained on the hallway. So far, the hallway outside seemed quiet and empty.

John heard a noise from Jane, a soft guttural grunting. He turned his head toward her in a panic, wondering if he'd made any noise. He watched her rub her hands through the braided ropes of hair covering her head. She'd straightened momentarily, but then immediately bent over the counter again and continued to mumble to herself.

John turned his head away from her and focused again on the edge of the table. He wiggled slowly, biting his lip against the sharp, throbbing pain in his stomach. Damn you, Pavlov, he thought. He pressed one arm into his stomach to hold the pain at bay and reached out with the other. John's fingers curled around the edge of the table.

He cringed at the sound of Jane yelping behind him, and his heart began beating frantically when he heard her moving around. He was so close—so, so close. He pulled at the edge of the table, ignoring the pain spiking in his body as he slid closer.

And then, suddenly, he was at the edge and rolling forward. There was a brief moment where he felt himself suspended in the air, and then he was falling. The ground rushed up at him, and he couldn't seem to get his legs completely underneath him fast enough. His body slammed into the ground, shoulder first. His left ankle hit next and twisted painfully beneath him. He opened his mouth to scream but no sound came out when he felt the ankle pop, and then both knees slammed into the ground. His throat was raw, his vocal cords expended after who knows how much screaming he'd been doing.

He lay on the floor and squirmed weakly against the onslaught of pain. All thoughts of escape fled his mind. He heard Jane's high-pitched guttural voice over his head. Bile rose in his throat and he clenched his teeth in desperation. There was no way either his throat or his stomach could handle vomiting right now.

Jane lifted him up and placed him gently on the table. He was vaguely aware of her petting the side of his head as she tried to soothe him. Time passed in a blur. John shook as he tried to breathe through the pain and was relieved when his churning stomach began to settle down a little while later.

He gasped when Jane gently began un-prying him, pulling his limbs out straight and rolling him so he was flat on his back on the table. She did her usual check, pressing against his arms, legs, chest, stomach, neck, and head. He winced at the shooting pain in his shoulder as she maneuvered one of his arms and cried out in a hoarse, choking gasp when she touched his swollen ankle, but when Jane pressed against his stomach, he jackknifed up off the table.

His vision grayed as the pain in his stomach consumed him, and he distantly felt her arms wrap around him and lower him gently back to the table. She rubbed his face and head again with her hand, alternately scratching the side of his head lightly with the nails of her long fingers.

He was an animal. John jolted at the thought. He'd known it before, but it struck with such force this time that he almost jerked away from Jane's touch. Thank God he was the test subject of a kind doctor, but he was still a test subject. No matter how much she cared for him or worried about his welfare, eventually she would do what she had to do for her science.

The sudden absence of Jane's hands startled John into opening his eyes. Jane stood nearby, filling one of the baby bottles with a light blue liquid. She turned back almost immediately and lifted John into a sitting position. John whimpered soundlessly at the throbbing pain the movement incited, and he sagged into her arms. Jane tilted his head back, and John opened his mouth at the sight of the syringe, sucking in every last drop of the blue liquid like a baby.

Whatever the blue liquid was, it was effective. It had no discernible taste, but gradually the screaming pains throughout his body diminished. His limbs grew heavy, almost numb, and his head slumped forward. Jane lifted him and John's arms and legs dangled limply as she cradled him in her arms. She was speaking softly to him, petting him again with one hand.

They walked back to the cage. John could barely feel his lifeless body. Jane had positioned him like a small child with his head on her shoulder, but when she stopped to talk to the pen tapper at the desk, his weight shifted inadvertently, and his head lolled backward to hang awkwardly. A moment later, Jane moved again, bringing a hand up to lift John's head and reposition it on her shoulder, and he sighed in relief.

The next thing he knew, she had deposited him in his cage and locked the door. He stared at her through half-lidded eyes as she watched him. Her eyes were bright, the corners of her mouth pulled down. She looked sad. She left finally, but John could not move the muscles in his neck to turn his head, and he stared in a drugged stupor at the space Jane had occupied. It was a long time before his eyes finally closed and he slipped into sleep.

The blue liquid drug wore off sometime during the night. John woke up to throbbing pain in his shoulder, stomach, ankle, and knees. The room was dark and quiet, and he dragged himself over to the darkest corner of the litter box to take care of business. By the time he was done, he was shaking from the exertion, and his heart stuttered as he tried to breath through the pain. He could feel himself growing weaker. His mouth was dry and he looked toward the bowl of water, but it was four feet away at least, and tonight, four feet was too far.

John drifted off to sleep again, waking up to streaming sunlight. A low, hissing growl caused him to lift his head slightly and look at that cage across from his. The animal behind the bars was pacing again, occasionally moving close enough to hiss at something standing nearby.

Pavlov. The alien stepped forward into John's line of sight and poked the animal in the face with a long bar. The animal jumped back with a cry and Pavlov made a rolling, throaty, grunting noise. Laughter, John decided. Pavlov was laughing. He dropped his heavy head back to the ground and hoped Pavlov kept his attention on the other animal.

Not to be. John jerked his eyes open at the sound of keys in his cage door. Pavlov swung the door open, then crouched down to crawl in. He still held the bar he'd been poking the other animal with.

With a surge of adrenaline infusing his body with energy he had not had a moment before, John jerked up and scrambled to the back corner of his cage. The bar in Pavlov's hand was not—as John had assumed—the electric prod. It was a gun. John hit the back wall but managed to stay standing on shaky legs. Pavlov swung the gun around, pointing it directly at John.

"I won't fight. I won't fight," John rasped. He held his hands up and tried to still his shaking body. "Don't shoot, please. I won't fight." He was begging, he knew it, but he also knew that he couldn't handle getting shot.

Pavlov fired the weapon. It was over with before it had barely begun. John looked down in shock at a sharp stabbing pain in his leg that quickly became numb. Some type of feathered dart stuck there. John took a deep breath even as his legs folded underneath him and he slid against the wall to the ground.

"You bastard," he slurred. He kept sliding until his head hit the ground. His arms were heavy and useless, and darkness crept in along the edges of his vision. He saw Pavlov crouching in the cage, still holding the gun, a grimace twisting the alien's face, and then he saw no more.

"Hey, buddy," Ronon said. John lay curled up on the floor of an empty, white room, his knees pulled tight into his chest.

"Hey," John answered. He was freezing.

"Stop lying around," Ronon said, grinning down at his friend. John watched him squat down a few feet away.

"Help me," John whispered.

"Can't."

"Why not?"

Ronon pointed to a thin blue line that encircled John. "Can't cross that."

"Get up!" Ronon's face morphed into McKay's and the physicist slapped his hand on the floor. "Get up, Sheppard."

"C-cold," John chattered, and he wrapped his arms around his bare chest even more tightly.

"So you're just going to lie there and die? You're just going to give up?" McKay started pacing, and then his heavy steps turned light and Teyla walked past his head.

"John," she said, her voice light and musical. "Don't give up, John."

"Not…g-giving up…" John stammered. His body was starting to shake uncontrollably.

"Don't die, John."

John shook his head.

"Die, John."

John opened his eyes and reared back. Teyla's face morphed into a Wraith's, which in turn morphed into Pavlov's. Pavlov held the electric cattle prod.

"Die, John," he said and he slammed the end of the prod into John's stomach.

John screamed, sitting part way up before collapsing back to the ground. No, not the ground. A table. The final images of the nightmare dissipated, and he could just make out Jane's lab in the darkness. He looked around for Pavlov, but found himself alone in the room.

He blinked his eyes, trying to remember what had happened. Nausea churned in his stomach at the sudden memory of Pavlov shooting him with a tranquilizer dart, and he moved his hands to cover the pulsing ache in his stomach. A railing had been raised around the table, and the small leather blanket was draped partially over John's body. The table had been turned into a crib or pen.

A minute later, the stomach ache still hadn't let up. John rolled onto his side and curled into himself. His arms felt heavy and his head was pounding, and he could tell there was something wrong with his leg. He panted, willing the bile in his stomach to stay down as his gut twisted and cramped. He couldn't feel his leg. John squeezed his eyes shut at the memory of the dart hitting his right leg, of the sharp pain and then the absolute numbness that quickly followed.

He was dying. He could feel it. The knowledge came to his mind with absolute surety. His heart stuttered in his chest. The door to the lab was wide open. The hallway was quiet, the lab itself empty. John stared at the open door and felt moisture pool in his eyes, but he had no energy left to fight.

A bright light flipped on overhead, and John cringed and jerked as the light stabbed into his eyes. Jane was suddenly bending over him, and she spoke as she rubbed John's shoulder. Her attempts to soothe him were in vain, however. They had never really soothed him, he realized. His body shook uncontrollably. He was freezing cold, but he could feel the sweat dripping off his skin.

Jane lowered one of the bars and lifted John up. She continued to speak to him as she cradled him in her arms and sat down on a nearby chair. She stroked his head as he shook. When she held a bottle to John's mouth, he took it without question, and she fed him as she rocked. John started to laugh at the image this created in his mind, but the sound caught in his throat and he choked on the water. When Jane lifted him and began rubbing his back, he felt tears burning in his eyes, and nothing about any of this was funny to him anymore.

In Jane's arms, he was a little warmer than he had been, and the tremors in his body slowly stilled. Get up, John. Don't give up. The voices of his team floated around him, and his heart stuttered. He wondered if he would ever see them again, and the thought left a heavy, unrelenting pressure in his chest.

When he woke up again, he was back on the table. The railings had been lowered and the blanket removed. He tried to lift his head up to look around and realized that it was strapped down. Something pulled at his face, and he could just see the edge of a clear plastic mask over his nose. Tubes snaked away from the mask to a small tank set next to the table, barely visible in the corner of his eye.

What the hell? John thought. He was getting sick and tired of these aliens and all their tubes and contraptions. His arms were strapped down as well, and he pulled uselessly against them. He could feel another strap over his waist and one over his knees. The straps around his ankles were as strong as the ones around his wrists, and one of them dug painfully into his swollen ankle. As he struggled, he realized that his boxers had finally been taken from him. His heart thudded heavily in his chest when he realized they'd been taken off of him without him realizing it, and he wondered what else had been done to him while he'd lain oblivious in Jane's lab.

John forced himself to take a deep breath. He would know, he was sure of it, if they'd done something weird to him while he'd been unconscious. As freaked out as he was about being strapped naked to a table, he didn't feel like he'd been violated in that way.

Not yet anyway, he thought. He fought against the fear and panic threatening to drag him under and pulled against the straps again. He was alone, and if he could find some weakness in the bindings, then he still had a chance. But even as the idea crossed his mind, the door opened.

Four aliens entered the lab, their faces and heads covered in weird shrouds. One of them moved forward and stroked the side of his face, and he recognized Jane's sad eyes just barely visible through a gap in her mask. The other aliens gathered around him then. Jane spoke, and John wished he could understand even just a few words, and then she held out a gloved hand.

Someone handed her a scalpel. The overhead light glinted off the metal, serrated edge. John's heart began to double time as Jane moved the scalpel down toward his chest. They were going to cut him open. They were going to cut him open while he was awake. All this time they'd pumped him full of numbing drugs, and now they were giving him nothing. He squirmed, but the straps held him down firmly.

He felt a sharp stinging sensation in the center of his chest that grew deeper as Jane pressed the scalpel against his sternum. He gave a choked cry as he felt the blade move across his skin. It burned and throbbed, and John shuddered beneath the knife.

The aliens bent forward, peering closely at the incision Jane was making. John tried to scream, but no sound came out. He panted as the ceiling above whirled dizzily. The aliens were speaking and yelling at one another, pointing to each other and turning toward the door of the lab, but John was barely aware of anything. A loud buzzing noise filled his ears as he struggled to pull in a breath.

There was a deep rumbling sound that shook the table John was strapped to and his eyes flew open to see Jane staring in shock at the door, the scalpel in her hand dripping blood.

TBC…