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Ice (SGA, John-centric team gen)
Ice ~ team gen, John-centric, 2100 wds
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fandom_stocking. Originally posted here at fandom_stocking.
John wasn't looking forward to writing the report for this mission, assuming he lived that long. On the other hand, he kinda wished he could stop shooting long enough to pull out a camera, because it wasn't every day that you were attacked by a giant Arctic-dwelling land octopus.
A tentacle whipped through the air, missing Teyla only because she dived into a snowbank. Ronon fired over her head, timing the shot perfectly to intercept the tentacle. It fell twitching in the snow, but there were plenty more where that came from.
"Fall back!" John bellowed.
"Fall back to where?" Rodney yelled back, his face bright red with cold and probably agitation as well. And he had a point. They were backed up against the edge of a frozen lake, extending all the way to a distant snow-covered shore. The black ice did not look capable of supporting human weight.
The thing heaved its bulk a little closer to them. It looked sort of like a huge slime mold or something, except there were tentacles all over the place. The biologists would have been fascinated. John was more concerned about how to kill something that didn't have a visible head.
"We need explosives! Ronon, do you have --"
He saw the tentacle coming out of the corner of his eye, but he'd been focused on the main bulk of the creature, and all he managed to do was turn enough to catch it on his shoulder rather than across the back of his head. It still felt like getting hit with a tree trunk, and sent him sailing through the air to smack into the ice, which gave immediately under his weight. The shock of the blow and the cold locked his muscles rigid, as he sank into the dark water. The thought occurred to him that Ronon, where are the explosives was a depressingly predictable choice of last words.
He fought the clutching black water with limbs made of lead. His right arm wouldn't move, and his heavy winter clothes and the P90 clipped to his vest may as well have been a weighted net, tangling him and dragging him down. The breath had been knocked out of his lungs when the tentacle hit him. Black spots danced in front of his eyes as he struggled against the almost overwhelming urge to take a breath.
A shockwave passed through the water. John grinned, even though cold water flooded his teeth. Ronon must have taken his advice. Dredging up his fading reserves of energy, he kicked hard towards the light filtering down through the water. His head bumped the ice, and he reached up to push against it with his left hand, scrabbling at it with fingers rapidly going numb. It refused to yield; the ice may not have supported his weight, but was more than capable of resisting efforts to break it from below. He had no leverage and only the dregs of his strength to draw on.
No. No. It won't end like this.
Something sleek and dark darted through the water. John drifted, sinking again, watching with dull amazement as Teyla -- stripped of her heavy coat and boots, moving with grace through the freezing water -- gripped his coat in both her hands and kicked them both towards the light.
The next thing he knew, he was coughing up water with hard, violent spasms. Someone had an arm around him, supporting him. When he opened his eyes he saw his fingers curled like claws inside sodden, ice-stiff gloves. He could not feel anything but a dull, directionless ache throughout his body, and a sharp tearing pain in his chest when he coughed again.
"Okay, this is bad, really bad," Rodney's voice said, and John realized that Rodney was the one holding him. They were both kneeling in the snow, one of Rodney's arms supporting his chest and the other around his back.
"I'll get help," Ronon said. "Here." A pile of fur and leather landed in front of John's dazed eyes: Ronon's coat.
"Are you insane?" Rodney demanded. "Do you know how cold it is out here?"
"Running'll keep me warm. It isn't that far to the gate."
They'd come about two miles, John recalled. This was just supposed to be a few hours' trip to check out some anomalous readings that Vizetti's team had found on a routine jumper survey. They hardly had anything with them beyond weapons and a few basic items of survival gear.
"What if you meet another of those things?"
"I'll just run faster." John could hear the grin in Ronon's voice, and then his boots crunched swiftly in the snow.
"You better!" Rodney yelled after him. John raised his head enough to see unmistakable bits of fried tentacle scattered in the snow around them, along with brownish swatches and stains. Nice going, Ronon. That was definitely one Arctic octopus that wouldn't be bothering them anymore.
"R-Rodney, how is he?" Teyla's voice shook so that her words were barely comprehensible. She knelt in front of John, her coat wrapped around her shoulders and her hair hanging in wet, half-frozen strands in front of her face.
"Breathing," Rodney said. "Uh, how are you?"
"C-cold," Teyla said succinctly. She began to spread out Ronon's coat on the snow. "Rodney, p-put him here."
When Rodney moved him, a lightning bolt went through his shoulder and down his arm. John let out a hoarse yell. "Sorry!" Rodney said quickly, "sorry ..." His hands patted swiftly down John's arm, and John choked off a gasp that turned into another coughing fit. "Teyla, I think his arm is broken."
"We will worry about that when we can. Gi-give me some help with his c-coat." Her small hands were so cold that he could barely tell she was touching him. Rodney began unfolding their silver emergency blankets and arranging a sort of tent over the two of them.
"Not dead yet," John managed, trying to assist Teyla. His heavy coat crackled with ice as the two of them stripped it off him, and he clenched his teeth when they had to move his arm. He was starting to regain some of his faculties, though. Moving helped. After Rodney got his boots off -- the laces were frozen into solid blocks of ice -- he was able to remove his pants himself, though the fingers of his good hand were still numb and too stiff to bend much; they'd also started prickling, the precursor to what he expected was going to be some serious pain.
"You too," Rodney said to Teyla.
She nodded and skinned out of her wet clothes, her normally graceful movements jerky and uncoordinated. By this point they'd all, for the most part, gotten over body-consciousness with each other; there had been too many infirmary visits and decontaminations, too many sun-baked beaches and ice-world saunas, not to mention Rodney delivering Teyla's baby. Still, John shut his eyes, giving her as much privacy as he could, considering that she was crowded onto Ronon's coat under the blanket with him.
The blanket was over John's head, so he couldn't see Rodney, but he could hear the crunching as Rodney moved around, and he jumped when Rodney piled the soft weight of Teyla's coat on top of them. This was followed by a heavier, stiffer weight that must be John's sodden, freezing coat. The blanket was waterproof, so it wasn't a bad idea, though neither John nor Teyla had much body heat to warm up the shelter. John was starting to shiver, the spasms jerking his arm with sharp bolts of pain.
"I can find wood, make a fire --" Rodney began.
"In the t-time it will take Ronon to return, your body heat will be m-more helpful to us," Teyla said, her voice muffled as she wormed closer to John.
"I was afraid of that," Rodney sighed. The weight of his coat joined the rest, and he yelped. "Augh, it's cold out here!"
A moment later he lifted the edge of the blanket and crawled in to the middle of John and Teyla's tangle of limbs, in his underwear and T-shirt. Lack of body consciousness was one thing, but just John and Teyla curled on top of Ronon's coat was crowded enough; adding Rodney to the mix put them right over the edge of the coat's limited carrying capacity. A struggle ensued as they tried to get arranged without throwing off the coats or knocking anyone into the snow, punctuated with Teyla's politely firm "Rodney, that is personal" (forced out through chattering teeth) and Rodney's "Ow! Cold feet! Cold feet!" and John's shaky "Damn it, Rodney, not the arm!"
Eventually they managed to get themselves in a knot that was going to result in some serious cramping if they had to keep it up for very long, which hopefully, they wouldn't. Also, as the feeling started to return, John's hands and feet were starting to hurt about as much as he'd been afraid they were going to. On the bright side, Rodney was like a furnace. John really hoped that was Teyla's hand on his hip, though.
"Rodney," Teyla said with grim politeness, "you are lying on my hair."
"Am I complaining about your knee in my ribs? No, no I am not."
"Technically, I believe that is no longer true. Ow! Rodney!"
"You said to get off your hair!"
"I did not mean you should pull it out by the roots!"
Every time they squirmed, they jostled John's arm, and the pain was making him nauseous. "Guys," he said between his teeth, with lips and tongue that had thawed slightly, "it's not that I don't appreciate the rescue and all, but can we stop thrashing?" Then he coughed again. There was a heavy, wet ache in his chest.
"Sorry," Rodney said, simultaneous with Teyla's, "I am sorry, John." There were a few more little fidgets as everyone settled down. Rodney's head was resting on John's unbroken arm; he could tell this was going to get really uncomfortable really fast, but in the meantime, Teyla had taken hold of his hand on the other side of Rodney's forehead and was chafing it gently, which was nice. Painful, but nice.
Fortunately, it was only a few more minutes before Ronon showed up with a jumper full of medical personnel -- that was about as much time as it took for John's one arm to fall asleep and his other arm to progress from severe aching to Give me morphine now, tears-to-the-eyes throbbing. Rodney had also begun complaining about his back, and Teyla had almost rolled off into the snow twice. Another ten minutes, and they'd probably all have been ready to murder each other.
Still, as he nestled down in the back of the jumper in a pile of sleeping bags, with Nurse Marie crouching next to him and the promise of morphine waiting on the other side of the gate, he looked up and met Teyla's eyes. She was snuggled down in a sleeping bag on the floor, like him, with her back propped against the opposite bench and her legs stretched out alongside his. Rodney was sitting on the bench beside her, struggling back into his coat, and John could feel the comforting pressure of Ronon's hand on his shoulder.
"John?" Teyla said, and Rodney glanced up quickly, a flicker of worry showing on his expressive face. "Are you all right?"
The question unfortunately reminded him of just how lousy he did feel. He was still freezing, everything hurt, and his chest still felt like an elephant had kicked him in the lungs.
"Just thinking how jealous the biologists are gonna be that they turned down this mission."
Teyla giggled softly, and Rodney rolled his eyes. "Yes, we'll probably have to endure endless complaining about how we've ruined a unique, virgin ecosystem by blowing up the wildlife before they had a chance to examine them."
"I got a picture," Ronon said.
The two teammates on the other side of the jumper stared at him; even John flicked a glance upward.
"When?" Rodney demanded. "While we were running for our lives? Or while you and Teyla were planting explosives on it?"
Ronon chuckled, low in his throat. "Unlike you, Rodney," he said, "I can do more than one thing at once."
Teyla laughed again, Rodney spluttered wildly, and John leaned back and closed his eyes. The warmth that sank through him had nothing to do with the sleeping bags wrapped around his shoulders.
~
For
kriadydragon at fandom_stocking. Originally posted here at fandom_stocking.John wasn't looking forward to writing the report for this mission, assuming he lived that long. On the other hand, he kinda wished he could stop shooting long enough to pull out a camera, because it wasn't every day that you were attacked by a giant Arctic-dwelling land octopus.
A tentacle whipped through the air, missing Teyla only because she dived into a snowbank. Ronon fired over her head, timing the shot perfectly to intercept the tentacle. It fell twitching in the snow, but there were plenty more where that came from.
"Fall back!" John bellowed.
"Fall back to where?" Rodney yelled back, his face bright red with cold and probably agitation as well. And he had a point. They were backed up against the edge of a frozen lake, extending all the way to a distant snow-covered shore. The black ice did not look capable of supporting human weight.
The thing heaved its bulk a little closer to them. It looked sort of like a huge slime mold or something, except there were tentacles all over the place. The biologists would have been fascinated. John was more concerned about how to kill something that didn't have a visible head.
"We need explosives! Ronon, do you have --"
He saw the tentacle coming out of the corner of his eye, but he'd been focused on the main bulk of the creature, and all he managed to do was turn enough to catch it on his shoulder rather than across the back of his head. It still felt like getting hit with a tree trunk, and sent him sailing through the air to smack into the ice, which gave immediately under his weight. The shock of the blow and the cold locked his muscles rigid, as he sank into the dark water. The thought occurred to him that Ronon, where are the explosives was a depressingly predictable choice of last words.
He fought the clutching black water with limbs made of lead. His right arm wouldn't move, and his heavy winter clothes and the P90 clipped to his vest may as well have been a weighted net, tangling him and dragging him down. The breath had been knocked out of his lungs when the tentacle hit him. Black spots danced in front of his eyes as he struggled against the almost overwhelming urge to take a breath.
A shockwave passed through the water. John grinned, even though cold water flooded his teeth. Ronon must have taken his advice. Dredging up his fading reserves of energy, he kicked hard towards the light filtering down through the water. His head bumped the ice, and he reached up to push against it with his left hand, scrabbling at it with fingers rapidly going numb. It refused to yield; the ice may not have supported his weight, but was more than capable of resisting efforts to break it from below. He had no leverage and only the dregs of his strength to draw on.
No. No. It won't end like this.
Something sleek and dark darted through the water. John drifted, sinking again, watching with dull amazement as Teyla -- stripped of her heavy coat and boots, moving with grace through the freezing water -- gripped his coat in both her hands and kicked them both towards the light.
The next thing he knew, he was coughing up water with hard, violent spasms. Someone had an arm around him, supporting him. When he opened his eyes he saw his fingers curled like claws inside sodden, ice-stiff gloves. He could not feel anything but a dull, directionless ache throughout his body, and a sharp tearing pain in his chest when he coughed again.
"Okay, this is bad, really bad," Rodney's voice said, and John realized that Rodney was the one holding him. They were both kneeling in the snow, one of Rodney's arms supporting his chest and the other around his back.
"I'll get help," Ronon said. "Here." A pile of fur and leather landed in front of John's dazed eyes: Ronon's coat.
"Are you insane?" Rodney demanded. "Do you know how cold it is out here?"
"Running'll keep me warm. It isn't that far to the gate."
They'd come about two miles, John recalled. This was just supposed to be a few hours' trip to check out some anomalous readings that Vizetti's team had found on a routine jumper survey. They hardly had anything with them beyond weapons and a few basic items of survival gear.
"What if you meet another of those things?"
"I'll just run faster." John could hear the grin in Ronon's voice, and then his boots crunched swiftly in the snow.
"You better!" Rodney yelled after him. John raised his head enough to see unmistakable bits of fried tentacle scattered in the snow around them, along with brownish swatches and stains. Nice going, Ronon. That was definitely one Arctic octopus that wouldn't be bothering them anymore.
"R-Rodney, how is he?" Teyla's voice shook so that her words were barely comprehensible. She knelt in front of John, her coat wrapped around her shoulders and her hair hanging in wet, half-frozen strands in front of her face.
"Breathing," Rodney said. "Uh, how are you?"
"C-cold," Teyla said succinctly. She began to spread out Ronon's coat on the snow. "Rodney, p-put him here."
When Rodney moved him, a lightning bolt went through his shoulder and down his arm. John let out a hoarse yell. "Sorry!" Rodney said quickly, "sorry ..." His hands patted swiftly down John's arm, and John choked off a gasp that turned into another coughing fit. "Teyla, I think his arm is broken."
"We will worry about that when we can. Gi-give me some help with his c-coat." Her small hands were so cold that he could barely tell she was touching him. Rodney began unfolding their silver emergency blankets and arranging a sort of tent over the two of them.
"Not dead yet," John managed, trying to assist Teyla. His heavy coat crackled with ice as the two of them stripped it off him, and he clenched his teeth when they had to move his arm. He was starting to regain some of his faculties, though. Moving helped. After Rodney got his boots off -- the laces were frozen into solid blocks of ice -- he was able to remove his pants himself, though the fingers of his good hand were still numb and too stiff to bend much; they'd also started prickling, the precursor to what he expected was going to be some serious pain.
"You too," Rodney said to Teyla.
She nodded and skinned out of her wet clothes, her normally graceful movements jerky and uncoordinated. By this point they'd all, for the most part, gotten over body-consciousness with each other; there had been too many infirmary visits and decontaminations, too many sun-baked beaches and ice-world saunas, not to mention Rodney delivering Teyla's baby. Still, John shut his eyes, giving her as much privacy as he could, considering that she was crowded onto Ronon's coat under the blanket with him.
The blanket was over John's head, so he couldn't see Rodney, but he could hear the crunching as Rodney moved around, and he jumped when Rodney piled the soft weight of Teyla's coat on top of them. This was followed by a heavier, stiffer weight that must be John's sodden, freezing coat. The blanket was waterproof, so it wasn't a bad idea, though neither John nor Teyla had much body heat to warm up the shelter. John was starting to shiver, the spasms jerking his arm with sharp bolts of pain.
"I can find wood, make a fire --" Rodney began.
"In the t-time it will take Ronon to return, your body heat will be m-more helpful to us," Teyla said, her voice muffled as she wormed closer to John.
"I was afraid of that," Rodney sighed. The weight of his coat joined the rest, and he yelped. "Augh, it's cold out here!"
A moment later he lifted the edge of the blanket and crawled in to the middle of John and Teyla's tangle of limbs, in his underwear and T-shirt. Lack of body consciousness was one thing, but just John and Teyla curled on top of Ronon's coat was crowded enough; adding Rodney to the mix put them right over the edge of the coat's limited carrying capacity. A struggle ensued as they tried to get arranged without throwing off the coats or knocking anyone into the snow, punctuated with Teyla's politely firm "Rodney, that is personal" (forced out through chattering teeth) and Rodney's "Ow! Cold feet! Cold feet!" and John's shaky "Damn it, Rodney, not the arm!"
Eventually they managed to get themselves in a knot that was going to result in some serious cramping if they had to keep it up for very long, which hopefully, they wouldn't. Also, as the feeling started to return, John's hands and feet were starting to hurt about as much as he'd been afraid they were going to. On the bright side, Rodney was like a furnace. John really hoped that was Teyla's hand on his hip, though.
"Rodney," Teyla said with grim politeness, "you are lying on my hair."
"Am I complaining about your knee in my ribs? No, no I am not."
"Technically, I believe that is no longer true. Ow! Rodney!"
"You said to get off your hair!"
"I did not mean you should pull it out by the roots!"
Every time they squirmed, they jostled John's arm, and the pain was making him nauseous. "Guys," he said between his teeth, with lips and tongue that had thawed slightly, "it's not that I don't appreciate the rescue and all, but can we stop thrashing?" Then he coughed again. There was a heavy, wet ache in his chest.
"Sorry," Rodney said, simultaneous with Teyla's, "I am sorry, John." There were a few more little fidgets as everyone settled down. Rodney's head was resting on John's unbroken arm; he could tell this was going to get really uncomfortable really fast, but in the meantime, Teyla had taken hold of his hand on the other side of Rodney's forehead and was chafing it gently, which was nice. Painful, but nice.
Fortunately, it was only a few more minutes before Ronon showed up with a jumper full of medical personnel -- that was about as much time as it took for John's one arm to fall asleep and his other arm to progress from severe aching to Give me morphine now, tears-to-the-eyes throbbing. Rodney had also begun complaining about his back, and Teyla had almost rolled off into the snow twice. Another ten minutes, and they'd probably all have been ready to murder each other.
Still, as he nestled down in the back of the jumper in a pile of sleeping bags, with Nurse Marie crouching next to him and the promise of morphine waiting on the other side of the gate, he looked up and met Teyla's eyes. She was snuggled down in a sleeping bag on the floor, like him, with her back propped against the opposite bench and her legs stretched out alongside his. Rodney was sitting on the bench beside her, struggling back into his coat, and John could feel the comforting pressure of Ronon's hand on his shoulder.
"John?" Teyla said, and Rodney glanced up quickly, a flicker of worry showing on his expressive face. "Are you all right?"
The question unfortunately reminded him of just how lousy he did feel. He was still freezing, everything hurt, and his chest still felt like an elephant had kicked him in the lungs.
"Just thinking how jealous the biologists are gonna be that they turned down this mission."
Teyla giggled softly, and Rodney rolled his eyes. "Yes, we'll probably have to endure endless complaining about how we've ruined a unique, virgin ecosystem by blowing up the wildlife before they had a chance to examine them."
"I got a picture," Ronon said.
The two teammates on the other side of the jumper stared at him; even John flicked a glance upward.
"When?" Rodney demanded. "While we were running for our lives? Or while you and Teyla were planting explosives on it?"
Ronon chuckled, low in his throat. "Unlike you, Rodney," he said, "I can do more than one thing at once."
Teyla laughed again, Rodney spluttered wildly, and John leaned back and closed his eyes. The warmth that sank through him had nothing to do with the sleeping bags wrapped around his shoulders.
~
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