Remembering

The Carson Diaries Season 2, #4

by Setcheti

 

 

Disclaimer: Don’t own them, never did, but the CD AU is mine all mine.  And the jackalope is still running free, untouched by the harsh realities of canon.

 

Rodney was remembering.

 

There really wasn’t much he could do besides remember.  The pain was like a soft, heavy curtain falling all around him, dulling his senses and clouding his thinking.  He would push his way through it at irregular intervals, but that was mostly because of Carson.

 

Rodney remembered Carson most of all.  Remembered the doctor ‘disarming’ the Marines in Antarctica, remembered forcing him to test the control chair, remembered sharing the products of various illicit stills late at night while Atlantis lay silent and dark and overpoweringly alien all around them, remembered waking up in the infirmary on half a dozen occasions to the reassuring purr of Carson’s voice and the soothing touch of his hand…

 

It was that voice, that hand, that made Rodney push even as much as he did.  For himself, he would have been content to drift on the tide of weakness that rolled under the pain, but it wasn’t only himself and he knew it, and that meant he had to make an extra effort to break through, break free, and rejoin the land of the living.

 

Because Rodney also remembered what had happened after the city had let him go.  He remembered being freed from the shield, coming back to outside awareness in the dim room and hearing the city around him groan as it was invaded by the crushing weight of the sea that had sheltered it.  He’d been terrified, unable to move, knowing he was going to drown…and then Carson had appeared right beside him, calling his name.  The doctor had told him not to worry about anything, had sealed up some sort of helmet over his head and then tossed him over one shoulder and started moving.  Rodney remembered seeing the water flow over his helmet, watching little pieces of debris swirl lazily past his eyes, and then sometime after that everything had gone dark and still.

 

His next memory was a lot stranger.  He’d been lying on something that was rough and soft at the same time and had a minimal sort of give to it, no more helmet, and someone was shouting at him.  He’d recognized his name, after a few more yells had recognized Carson’s brogue…and then he’d recognized the feel of someone’s mouth touching his.  He’d wanted to respond – you were supposed to respond to that, right? – but had discovered that before he could respond he needed to breathe.  His chest had felt like a sack of mud was sitting on it, but after a few tries and some help he’d managed to fight the weight enough to draw in a shallow breath.  The yelling became Carson’s voice encouraging him: Come on, Rodney, you can do it.  You’re not goin’ to give up on me now, right?  Come on, just a few more and I’ll have the oxygen for you, that’ll make it easier.  Just keep breathin’…  Breathing, right.  Keep doing it.  Carson had sounded almost plaintive and that had worried him, so Rodney had put all the effort he could muster into drawing in one breath after another despite the heavy weight on his chest.  Then something had touched his face, cold not warm and smelling of plastic, but with it came a cool breeze that seemed to flow down into him and lightened the weight considerably.  And once all his concentration didn’t have to be focused on breathing, he’d found himself a little more alert and had even tried to open his eyes.  It hadn’t worked, but from the sound of things Carson had been able to see that he was trying and after a minute or so had even told him he could stop, that it was all right and there was nothing to see anyway.  And Rodney trusted Carson, so he’d stopped trying and had eventually fallen asleep or something like it with the doctor’s soothing voice still humming in his ears.

 

After that things got disjointed.  He’d have little snatches of awareness descend on him without warning out of the blackness and then fade away just as abruptly.  Something was always touching his face; cool plastic, a warm hand, and a few times something that was an in-between sort of temperature and smelled strongly of sour hot rubber, something that forced the returned weight off his chest a lot less pleasantly than the warm mouth or the cool breeze had.  Rodney hadn’t liked that one, and after the first encounter with it he’d tried to get away from it when he’d noticed it again.  Surprisingly, that hadn’t seemed to upset Carson at all; during one exceptional moment of clarity, he remembered hearing the doctor chuckle and tell him that if he’d just keep breathing they’d put the horrid thing away for good.  Rodney hadn’t realized he hadn’t been breathing, so that had come as something of a surprise to him.  But he’d tried to keep it in mind whenever he could, and the more he tried the less often he found the rubber thing there so trying seemed to be working.  And eventually he’d stopped even having to try, and that was when a whole new set of sensations had started intruding on his temporary periods of awareness.

 

Not being able to move was the worst.  The first time he’d realized he couldn’t move, Rodney had panicked; he’d thought he was back in the city again, back in that dim, cold room in that awful chair with the hum in it that hurt so much.  But then he’d heard Carson’s voice in his ear and felt a warm hand rubbing his stomach and he’d done his best to calm down, knowing that if Carson said everything was okay then it would be.  He’d still panicked the next few times he’d awakened, but after a while he’d started accepting what Carson was telling him; they weren’t in the city any more, and everything was going to be all right. 

 

Accepting it hadn’t stopped him from remembering in his sleep, though.  Everyone has nightmares – not bad dreams, but fears which run so deep and strong they only surface in the very worst and rarest dreams of all.  Stephen Hawking skirted the jagged edges of Rodney’s worst nightmares, the brilliant mind confined within a helpless, unresponsive body personifying his deepest fear.  So all those months ago when he’d awakened in the infirmary flat on his back, unable to feel, unable to move, unable to talk …Rodney hadn’t even realized he was panicking until it was too late to stop.

 

There had been loud noise and voices, but he hadn’t been able to understand what they were saying; all he’d known was that he was trapped, trapped in a body he couldn’t control in a world he couldn’t communicate with.  Floundering in nothingness, he’d felt insanity oozing in around the edges of his frantically grasping mind...and then he’d felt something else, and all the panic and creeping madness was slammed back with the force of a piledriver as his entire intellectual being had clenched around the sensation of a hand touching his skin.

 

The voice he couldn’t understand had gotten closer, very close, and even though he still couldn’t fully comprehend what it was saying there was no mistaking its reassuring tone, or its rich, warm accent.  Carson.  And the more Rodney had listened, the more he’d been able to relax, and he’d eventually drifted back to sleep without even realizing he’d done it.

 

Carson had apologized to him when he’d woken up.  Not letting anybody touch, and leaving him alone, had been the doctor’s idea to keep Rodney from freaking out, in the hopes that he’d just go back to sleep from boredom and not wake up again until the side effects from the stun blast had passed.  Carson hadn’t known about Rodney’s greatest fear, and he still didn’t know how Rodney had gotten it.

 

Rodney wasn’t planning on sharing that with him anytime soon, either.  Not that he could share anything right now, but he had hopes that he’d be able to eventually because Carson kept reassuring him that he would and explaining what had happened – repeatedly, since Rodney tended to drift back into the blackness without warning.   They’d used an underwater escape pod, and it had brought them to dry land somewhere that didn’t look like the part of the Atlantean mainland they’d been familiar with.  They were currently staying in one of a little compound of simple buildings not far from the place the pod had docked, buildings that still had power and provided adequate shelter in spite of millennia of abandonment.

 

Rodney had known about the power already; he could feel it and it hurt, a pervasive humming hurt like a dull echo of what he’d felt in the chair.  But he had no way of telling Carson that either, and he wasn’t planning on doing so even once he could manage to hold his eyes open for more than a few seconds and force out some words. 

 

Because complaining wasn’t the way you thanked someone for saving your life at the expense of their own.  Rodney remembered that too.