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Rodney jerked awake as the door chimed. He was tempted to let it chime until whoever it was got bored and went away, but how likely was that? Given that the chiming was now being supplemented by knocking, not very. It was probably time that he got up, anyway, and he could do with a shower. His skin felt tight all over, like the second day of a sunburn.
"Coming," he yelled, and rolled out of bed. The covers rustled as they fell behind him, and he wondered absently if he'd been so tired the night before that he'd gone to sleep on top of the papers he'd been working on. He opened the door and blinked at Carson, mumbling, "Jesus. I don't know what's so important you have to bother me at midnight—" and then flinched at what he saw as the light from the hallway flooded inside. What had happened to his hand while he was sleeping? Shiny opalescent skin, pointed sturdy looking claws on his fingers—he had to get away from here. Now. Before anyone else saw, or found out. He didn't know how he knew this, but it was a solid certainty in his gut. Go. Now. Or as soon as he could, given where he was, and Carson's being right there in front of him.
He grabbed at Carson and yanked him inside his room. Carson stumbled through the doorway, and Rodney slapped the door controls closed again, and swiped at the light switch.
"What? Where's Rodney? What have you done with him?" Carson demanded, taking a half a step away from him, scanning the corners of the room.
And that was as far as he could be allowed to go. Rodney reached out and took Carson by the neck and squeezed, until his struggles weakened and then ceased. It was surprisingly easy. When he was quiet and limp, the frantic twitch of his pulse slowing against Rodney's thumbs, Rodney laid him on the floor. Duct tape made trussing him up a quick job. Rodney grabbed pants and a shirt from the wardrobe and put them on. The fit was odd, and the fabric stretched and bunched in places it never had before. Shoes? No, they'd never fit over his feet as they were now. Jacket. Tac vest. He filled the pockets with anything portable he thought might be useful.
Had he left anything behind that he shouldn't? He surveyed the room. The remains of at least ten MREs lay stacked on the desktop, but all they would give away was the impression that he'd been overeating. Rodney snorted. Nothing anyone would find suspicious, there. There wasn't much to do about the litter of cast-off hair, bits of skin, and scales in the bedding, but with any luck he'd be long gone before it meant anything significant to anyone.
He booted up his laptop. Typing required a little more concentration than usual; his claws kept wanting to slide off the keys. He still had admin access. Good. Though there were some new safeguards he had to take down before he could get where he wanted to be in the command code. Never mind. By the time the tattle-tale programs worked their way out of the loop he'd tied them in and alerted Radek, he wouldn't need to worry about it. There. Lights dimmed to about ten percent of normal night time levels. Overload and explosion in thirty seconds in one of the labs close to the central tower. Power down everywhere else, set to re-activate for the Gate and its controls only in five minutes.
Rodney picked up Carson and slung him over his shoulder. He took a breath, opened the door, and started jogging down the corridor.
Of the staff on duty in the Gate room, two had apparently been drawn off station by the explosion. Rodney suspected that if the lights had been at normal levels, the remaining guard would have reacted more quickly to Rodney's changed appearance—and to the presence of Carson's silent form draped over his shoulder—but as it was, Rodney was able to keep his back turned to him while shouting a panicked-sounding babble of instructions and complaints, and that bought him enough time to dial the Gate. Then, it was just a short dash to the Gate, and he was safely on the other side. He didn't know or care what the guard had seen or surmised or done; what was important was that he hadn't managed to prevent Rodney from leaving.
He quickly went over to the DHD to shut down the wormhole and dial a new address. The event horizon swirled into life. Rodney stepped through, then repeated his actions twice more, stopping, satisfied, when he and his burden arrived on an unremarkable world whose address he'd had in mind for some time as a possible temporary refuge from any number of potential dangers. It was a quiet planet, with a relatively benign climate in the latitude of the Gate area, and a very small local population which was shy of contact with outsiders.
Rodney laid Carson on the ground beside the DHD and squatted beside him to wait. The hard core of certainty that had driven him so urgently to flee Atlantis was as insistently present as it had been before; it thrummed within his mind, coloring every thought with a new perspective and tangential—ideas? memories?—he ought to have been surprised by. And everything was brighter, somehow, and there were so many smells. He could tell, just by lifting his head and taking in a breath of air, that there was water, not too far away. The dust under his toes told him things, too. More than a few feet had trodden this ground, and it felt like most of them would be, what? Suitable? Where had that come from? The cascade of associations and urges which followed made him dizzy for a moment, but gradually everything seemed to settle into place, and he and the world were both different from what he'd known them to be just yesterday, but he also felt like he was starting to fit into the world in a way he never had before.
Carson was starting to come around. He rolled his head to look at Rodney, and then jerked against the tape binding his hands. "What? Who are you, and where are we?" Carson was getting more agitated as he spoke. "And what have you done with Rodney?"
"I am Rodney, Carson." This got him a disbelieving glower. "Or I was Rodney."
"I—" Carson looked him in the eyes, and then took a deep breath. "You'll admit you've changed a bit, won't you, lad?"
"Just a little," Rodney said drily, "and wouldn't you say that that's just typical of a random day in the Pegasus Galaxy? Finding new ways to mess up our lives is what we do here." Talking with Carson, he felt a little more like the himself-that-was than the new person he was just beginning to know himself as, but even as he spoke, himself-that-was was slowly melting into that new person.
"Do you remember what you asked me for, the day before yesterday?" Carson asked.
"More epi-pens, but I thought that was yesterday. I've lost a day, I suppose. Still, either I'm telling the truth, or I'm an alien monster who can read your mind, right? Or maybe it's both at the same time." He couldn't resist tilting his head and giving Carson a bright, insincere smile.
Carson blinked at him, then lifted his hands. "Can you take this stuff off, then?"
"Hold still." Rodney held Carson's wrists immobile with one hand and drew a claw-tip carefully across the tape. The severed edges rolled back cleanly from the cut, and Carson peeled the tape the rest of the way off. "There," Rodney said. "I'm pretty sure I'm stronger than you, now, so don't be stupid."
"Not on purpose," Carson said. "Rodney. What are we doing here?"
"The simple answer is that I couldn't stay on Atlantis like this, and you got in the way while I was leaving," Rodney said.
"That's not enough. I want the whole answer, or as much as you can give me," Carson said. "Because you're going to let me go back, but you're thinking that you're not going back yourself, aren't you? You're wrong. We can look for a way to cure you, or—"
"There isn't going to be a cure," Rodney said. "I'm like this because this is what I am."
"You're not making any sense."
"Yes, I am. You're not listening. This is my true form. It's in my DNA. You thought I was human. Hell, I thought I was human, but I'm not." Rodney shook his head. "That explains so many things."
"You're wrong. I'd know, lad. You're as human as they come, despite what's happened to your, ah, appearance. I could show you the test results to prove it if we were in my lab."
Rodney rolled his eyes. "Yeah, and when did you ever do a complete sequencing on my genome? Read a few nucleotides here, a few there, find enough to be pretty sure you could splice in your mouse ATA gene, and yes, that worked fine. But there's all that 'junk' DNA I bet you never looked at, because everybody knows it's just random garbage there to separate the working genes. Idiots."
"I think you're forgetting that genetics is my specialty, Rodney, not yours." Carson sounded a little miffed.
"Oh, I'm not forgetting that, but I've read the occasional scientific journal in your specialty. You leave them lying around, and it used to get boring when I was stuck in the infirmary without anything decent to read. Besides, I know other things now, too. Things I couldn't know if I were human."
Carson folded his arms across his chest and looked at Rodney, radiating disbelief.
"It's something like ancestral memory, and it ought to be weird, but it just feels right, like remembering the lyrics to a song you haven't heard for a while. I think about something, and all this other knowledge comes spooling up out of nowhere."
Carson still didn't look convinced.
"Okay. I'll give you the Creature Features version," Rodney said. "Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with Area 51 as Santa Mira, and a piece of alien biotech instead of creepy pods. I was human before that, and I was unconscious through the process so I didn't even know myself that I'd changed, until today, but afterwards I wasn't human any more, even if I looked the same. And the change mostly, ah, hibernated, until now." He cocked his head. "Ask me why the change woke up now, Carson. Go ahead."
"You'll tell me anyway," Carson said. His voice was level, but his eyes were sad. So he was starting to believe.
"I don't know what the threshold is for the triggers to kick the change into gear, but everything that has happened in the last two weeks was certainly enough. Just being unhappy—" Collins, Weir, Sheppard, "—wouldn't have done it, I've been unhappy before. But when I realized that not only was I not safe in Atlantis—" Too many stressed-out angry people with weapons looking at him, everywhere, and he had nothing in common with any of them, "—but that I didn't have any real connection with anybody, and so there wasn't any reason anyone would want that to change. I'd always be just a half a step away from being too much of a problem to them to be allowed to continue unconfined." To be allowed to exist.
"Rodney! You can't say I didn't—"
"Compassion is part of your job. I knew I was as safe with you as I was anywhere, but that obviously wasn't enough to counter the rest of it." He stood up. "Time for you to go home." He pressed the controls of the DHD, and the Atlantis address connected right away. He entered Carson's IDC; no point in trying his own. "If they ask, you can tell them I left because I was feeling—" he laughed out loud, "—alienated."
He concentrated, instinct telling him how, and it felt completely natural and uncomplicated, as simple as taking a deep breath. Carson's eyes widened, remaining focused on where Rodney had been standing, even as he moved. Rodney went over to where Carson sat, stooped and picked him up, so easily, even with the frantic startled jerk that galvanized Carson's muscles.
"Yeah. Invisible alien monster, when I want to be. Do tell them not to try to find me." Rodney looked into the fleshy pink face of the man who had been as close to a friend as he'd had. What an odd concept. Carson smelled of fear, not of friendship.
"We're a solitary sort most of the time, by necessity. I'm going to be spending a while doing my part to perpetuate my species, planting my little changelings to hide safely away here and there in Pegasus. I'll leave Atlantis alone, unless you do something to demand my attention."
He slung Carson lightly through the event horizon. When the blue swirls cleared, he dialed another world. Time to do his duty to his species. And then? Well, there would be time enough to entertain himself. He wondered how the Wraith would taste.