No Time

by Kylie Lee

URL: http://www.area52hkh.net/ask/klee/notime.php
Summary: It always catches up with you in the end.
Info: Written for thefannishwaldo for the Insane Carson Ficathon. Prompt: John/Carson; Carson injured/ill, an explanation of what Carson meant by "I have an inkling" in "The Hive," Dom/sub relationship with John as Dom, spanking, a ferret.

He squints into the light, disoriented, shapes moving just beyond his field of vision, and he thinks *pink elephants* and huffs out a laugh. He feels hot and cold at the same time, and when he catches the scent of burning wood (a campfire?), his mouth explodes with saliva, as though he smelled food, his gran's cooking, home, but then the heat roils around him, enfolding him and making him cold with sweat, and he knows with horrible certainty that he's going to vomit.

It's completely different, but it's absolutely the same: the feelings of illness, with something worse lying behind the physical discomfort: the feeling that he has done it to himself. He's been stupid. Again. Only this time he's in for it, because he hasn't completed his research. Four Athosians have died, and he has work to do. But he can't get up, because he hadn't realized that the disease, whatever it is, was airborne. He'd been fooled by the long incubation period. So now he swallows convulsively and wills himself into a place without discomfort. He thinks of his rooms on Atlantis, the expectation of a knock on the door. It works. His stomach calms.

In the bed next to him, beyond the pathetic plastic shower curtain that he himself had hastily rigged last week, someone moans miserably. He knows he should get up and check on his patient. At the very least, he should squirt water into the patient's mouth. A white bottle with a black pop top, beaded with condensation in the heat, sits under each bed, next to buckets. He knows exactly how the faceless patient feels: hot and cold at once, dizzy, pounding headache. Cold water filling his mouth would be just the thing.

He can't move. He can't push himself up to a sitting position, much less stand up, push aside a curtain, lean over, grab a bottle, and aim and squeeze. The very thought of the intricacy of the steps to complete this task makes him dizzy. And to think, just two days ago, giving someone a sip of water had been no trouble at all--no sooner said than done. When the moan comes again, he blinks away hot wetness from his eyes, because he feels like crap and he can't help.

Isn't it what makes him a good doctor? The ability to empathize?

He always was too tender-hearted.

Last time, he'd done it to himself: just to stay awake, he told himself, just this once, just for today, and today, and again today. Today was an eternal string without tomorrows. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He knew it even as he did it. Why not be an idiot in love? But that's now. Then, he had to be the idiot who needed to stay awake. Just a few more hours' work, that's all he had wanted--a few more hours for a few more weeks. *Let me get through this.* It had been like a prayer, those promises to God. But of course they were really to himself, until the time finally came, and he had to go cold turkey because of the new job and the urine in a cup. Then, as now, there was no *time.*

No time.

It always catches up with you in the end.

"It's amazing we don't all fall ill more often," he'd said chirpily to a worried Halling when he examined the sick in the offworld Athosian camp. "When you think about it, the Stargate is a wonderful means of transmitting illness. A single woman walks through the Stargate, ill, and can spread it to ten other worlds, even more, in a week." As he blocks out the moans behind the shower curtain, feeling the endless falling sensation of vertigo, he imagines it: the Stargate explodes and an ordinary woman walks through, but what comes out the other end is bacteria, virus, fungi--stained microorganisms, huge and immobile, looming, as though seen through a microscope.

He would really rather not die.

He closes his eyes and tries to go back to the place of calm, but the thought of his rooms in Atlantis (the knock, the lazy smile, the black hair and pale skin, the touch of skin against skin, fingers clenching his hips, the sting of a slap on his buttocks, hardness thrusting into him, and ragged words, a breathless voice saying, *No, not yet, not yet* until *not yet* morphs into *now, now, now* and he can let himself go) make his skin flush, so he thinks of the tiny rented house on the Isle of Skye, with no phone, the sheep with bright splotches of unlikely color spray-painted by their tails wandering across the road and through what passed as the garden. The B&B a mile's walk away served very good fish and chips. He'd treated himself to dinner and a pint there when he'd gotten through it, unshaven and pale and shaking. "Lad, you look like hell," the barkeep had told him as he'd set the plate down.

"You look like hell, Doc," a familiar voice drawls. The shock of cold on his forehead makes him open his eyes, and of course it's John Sheppard. It takes him a long, slow moment to realize that the cold is from a damp white cloth--white like the light, the terry cloth blurry because of its closeness, and then it disappears altogether when John folds it onto his forehead, cold seeping into his forehead and immediately dissipating. Runnels of water trickle by his ears with a faint tickle. Almost immediately, the cool water warms. His fever wars with the hot, humid air.

"John," he whispers. "I--" He can barely catch his breath. He can only imagine what he looks like, fevered and ill and most definitely no longer in charge, just as he let himself go when he and John were alone, just as he let John tell him what to do, even while knowing he could stop everything with a word. He tries to sit up when it finally occurs to him that John shouldn't be here. They were in quarantine. "You can't--you need to leave at once--"

"Carson. Relax," John cuts in, and Carson subsides, because the gladness and relief he feels at the sight of John has filled his chest, making it tight. "It's all right."

"I suppose I look a right mess," he says, instead of saying what he's thinking: It's airborne. You need to get out of here.

"And you would suppose right." John sits next to Carson's low cot, his back to the bright light. His face is thrown into shadow. But it's him, John, with the sharp nose and the unruly hair. John reaches for his hand. It's cool and wet, from the cloth. He tries to imagine John nursing him back to health, and the thought is so ridiculous, so against the grain of all those elements that comprised what he supposed he should call their relationship, that he has to smile. John continues with, "Carson, I thought you were going to fix all this. You weren't supposed to get sick yourself."

True. That was so very, very true. "Aye. Well. Sorry about that."

His hand is in John's hand, where it should be. The usual frisson of panic, the thought that someone would notice, that someone would find out, is gone, because it's all right: he's ill and John is sympathetically, if uncharacteristically, nursing him. *Nursing him.* Caring for him. Touching him. Soothing him, instead of striking him and taking what he wants, what Carson wants to give because he knows John needs it as much as he does. He should say, "Don't get too close, because I don't want you to fall ill too," but he doesn't, because really, it's too late. And he doesn't say it because he doesn't want John to move away from him, the way John does when the two of them are together and others are around. The way they don't touch, the way they don't look at each other--

John's fingers briefly weave into his sweat-damp hair, and he feels his vertigo recede, as if banished by the simple imperative of John's touch. "I've felt worse," Carson says, remembering first two weeks alone on the Isle of Skye, and then, almost viscerally, his work here, in the present, because this is no time to be thinking about the past. *It always catches up with you in the end.* He has work to do. "The--uh--the culture results--I cultured some sputum samples--"

John's lazy voice overrides his. "And it's being handled, because Doctor Friedman is here, and apparently, she can actually read your handwriting."

Liz Friedman. Good. That was good. "She keeps a ferret," he said, apropos of nothing. "Doctor Friedman. In a cage, but she lets it run about while she's in her room. Its--its scent glands were removed."

"You know, Carson," John says, the cadence of his voice so familiar that Carson, even while ill, feels the same frisson of desire he always feels when he hears it, "I'm so glad you can focus in times like this--times of emergency."

"Clear heads must prevail," Carson agrees. "And Doctor Friedman--what?" He looks at John expectantly as he feels water drip down his face, wonderfully cool water, contrasting with the warmth of John's hand, casually holding his. It must be John's touch that makes the trickle of water morph from cold to tepid--John's heat, the heat they have together. "Why is she here, then?"

"Oh, did I forget to mention that?" John shifts to a more comfortable position, his hand clenching slightly as he moves, and Carson squeezes back. He imagines that everything is on his face, but he doesn't care. "Your samples grew something, and she tested some drugs, and she found something that worked. Obviously I don't know the details."

"Obviously," Carson murmurs, because John is being terribly uninformative. Tested some drugs? What drugs? What dosage? Had she tested it on a person yet, or was it all being done in petri dishes? And what about the long incubation period? Did that imply that the pathogen grew slowly? But a thought strikes him: John is here, without full-body protective gear or even a simple mask, and Doctor Friedman is here. Elizabeth Weir would not let them break quarantine unless she thought it was safe. He props himself on his free arm so he can see John better, the cloth falling onto his pillow. "So I'm not going to die, then, am I?"

John shakes his head. "Nope. Not going to die. Doctor Friedman took your research and came up with a cure. Well," he adds, "some Ancient technology was involved too. A little doohicky thing that accelerated the growth of the bacteria. It was bacteria, by the way."

Carson flops back, incredibly relieved. Bacteria? That was far better than a virus or a fungus. Doctor Friedman has it covered. She is an expert in infectious diseases. She'd been to Thailand, for god's sake. "Good. That's...good." The inadequate words can't convey the depth of his relief.

"Yeah, I was focusing on the 'not going to die' part." John's head turns, the shadows from the intense light crisp and hard-edged. It makes Carson think of John's harsh, breathless voice saying *no, not yet, don't.* "I told Elizabeth--that's Doctor Weir, not Doctor Friedman--that I'd deliver the good news to you myself."

"I'm glad you did," Carson says, because John pauses.

"Well, I had a thing to say to you." John looks distinctly uncomfortable. He can't meet Carson's eyes, but he still has Carson's hand. "Because I was offworld. When I heard you'd gotten sick, and when I heard that people were dying--I thought maybe you..."

Carson cuts in before John can finish saying, "I thought maybe you would die," because John is clearly flailing. John, for all his directness, can't talk about how he feels, unlike Carson, whose feelings are almost always obvious: he cries at sad movies and he gets teary when he thinks of his dear gran, but it goes the other way too: he also can't help but sing along and dance when he hears a song he likes, and he can't help but be moved when he's with John. *Now,* he hears in his mind, John's voice low and wanting as his body moves faster. In a way, John grants permission; but in another way, Carson lets him. *Now.* It's too complex, how he feels, what they do, permission and pain. John's need to be in control warred with what happened after *Now, now.* "John, you don't have to--"

"You know, I kind of do," John responds mildly. "I don't know what I thought when I--when we--I mean, I know what we do together, and it might not seem like it's important to me, but it is."

He stares at John, because he never thought John would ever say anything like this. "I know," Carson murmurs, a beat too late, but he doesn't. He knows how he feels, and he only pretends to know how John feels--John, with his need for control, his need for physical mastery, his need to strike out and then make it better. He wants John to feel the same way, but he can't ask about it, because if John dismisses him, he knows what would happen: he'd be devastated. He'd have to break it off.

"Do you?" Now John's voice is sharp.

"It always catches up with you in the end." Carson gently pulls his hand out of John's as Doctor Friedman bustles in, syringe in hand.

"You found him, I see," Friedman says to John as he hauls himself to his feet. "Doctor Beckett. This should do the trick." Carson barely feels the swipe of the antiseptic pad and the quick needlestick a second later. Before he can ask her what it is or her plan for treatment, she says, "Wow, that light's kind of bright. I'll turn it off."

"Thanks," Carson murmurs.

"Good timing for you to be released from your mission," Friedman tells John as she effortlessly leans down to grab the sweaty water bottle under Carson's cot. Carson dutifully accepts a sip of water, thinking of how easy things are when you are well.

John extends a hand. He gives her his trademark grin, as if he's flirting with her. "Let me. You have a lot of people to...uh...inject."

"Thanks." Friedman hands over the water bottle. "Do you need anything else, Doctor?" she asks as she solicitously tucks in the light sheet that he'd struggled out of an hour ago.

"Nothing at all," Carson assures her as John fiddles with the water bottle, unscrewing and rescrewing the black collar. He likes to think it's because John is impatient for her to be gone. "The light," he hints, hoping she'll leave, and she immediately says, "Yes, of course. I'll do that right now." As she heads off, he says to John, "Released from the mission? What exactly does that mean, then? Is everyone back?" He imagines that Teyla is quite worried about her fellow Athosians, and she probably had burial rites to see to.

"Well, *I'm* back." John proffers the water bottle, and Carson lets John give him a sip of water. He finds he enjoys the attention. "Everyone else is still there, finishing up. We're almost done."

Carson blinks as the implication of John's words hit him. "You left a mission early?"

"They didn't really need me," John hedges, which means *yes,* just as the light blessedly goes off. "Oh, thank god--that light was driving me crazy. Are you done?"

"What?" Carson frowns. "Oh, sorry. Yes, thanks."

John stows the water bottle under the cot as Carson laboriously uses his feet to untuck the sheet again. He likes one leg to hang out. It makes him feel cooler. He knows that Friedman's interruption broke the moment between them. John won't pick up the thread of conversation. He won't say, "I left the mission early because I was really worried about you and thought you might die." But Carson knows it's true, so he smiles. It will probably take another near-death experience to make John tell him how he feels. *Now,* he hears John, caught in an eternal moment of approaching crisis and ecstasy, say in his mind.

"Why don't you tell me about the mission?" he asks, the question mundane, not at all in line with the train of his thoughts. What they did together, the pain and pleasure, the power plays, had somehow turned into a relationship. Carson--romantic, emotional Carson--might call it love. John likely never would. But actions could speak louder than words.

To his surprise, John leans over and gently kisses him on the lips. It's curiously unerotic, like being formally kissed by an offworld dignitary. "I'm not good at this stuff," John whispers, eyes intent, as though he's signaling something important to Carson. But he's here, and Carson knows what it is.

*Now. Yes.*