Tag by Leah and Bastet

Category: General
Rating: PG
Warnings: None

Summary: McKay wakes up with a hangover, and then the city tries to kill him. And things go downhill from there.

A long, long time ago, back when Leah had a Live Journal, she participated in a challenge set out by Lady Bastet, to use the line "Oh, crap, he's dead," as the first line of a vignette. Leah wrote what ended up being the first scene of this story, and Bastet liked the scene so much that she continued it. Then Leah continued that, and pretty soon this story was the result.

"Tag" was originally published in the Zine "Atlantis Utopia" by Demon Bunny Press in 2005.

"Oh, crap, he's dead," Sheppard mumbled, nudging the still figure at his feet with his toe.

"I am not," McKay said, and then groaned. He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of Sheppard's boot. "Quit it already." He rolled heavily onto his back and threw an arm over his tightly shut eyes. "Oh dear lord. I'm dying."

Sheppard looked at Ford, who shrugged.

"He didn't have any more of the wine than I did, sir."

"It had citrus in it," McKay kept groaning. "It must have had citrus in it. My throat's going to close up any second. Stop kicking me."

"Oh, sorry," Sheppard said absently. He stopped prodding McKay's kidney. He'd kind of got into a rhythm. "I don't think this is an allergic reaction, though--not unless it normally takes twelve hours..."

McKay moved his arm, squinting up at the two men. "Twelve hours?" he asked. He tried to look around, but didn't manage it very well from his position on the floor. "Where is everyone? Were they medically evacuated?"

"They went home," Sheppard said. He nudged McKay again. "C'mon--time to get up. We'll get you back to Atlantis and you can have some food and aspirin, okay?"

McKay looked like he was considering that very hard. "Okay."

Sheppard and Ford grinned at each other. They reached down and helped McKay stand.

The trip back to the Jumper was mercifully quiet. Teyla had talked the village chief into trading a substantial amount of grain and a couple of barrels of the wine they had tasted the night before for a rather small amount of medical supplies.

They were to come back in a few days, to give the people time to gather the things together to complete the deal.

Now, just to get everyone home and call it a day.

Sheppard frowned and rolled his eyes at the man currently slung between him and Ford. "Lightweight," he quipped. He could not believe that McKay was this hung over from the single glass of the wine the villagers had insisted they drink the night before. "How much did you have, really?" he asked.

"Just that one glass they made us all drink and do you have to talk so loud?" McKay griped; his eyes squeezed shut, letting them lead him.

"He really doesn't look that good, Major," Ford commented, frowning at the scientist.

Sheppard sighed. "Let's get him back to Atlantis and get Beckett to check him out." He was starting to get a little worried at how quiet McKay was being. Give the man a hangnail and he'd whine for hours that he was sure to get some kind of flesh-eating bacteria, and gangrene, and about every other infectious agent known to man. This silence from him was unnerving.

"McKay, how you holding up?" Sheppard asked.

"Don't talk to me. If I talk, I might throw up," McKay ground out.

Sheppard's irritation quickly gave way to concern. "Let's get a move on."

"Are you sure he only had as much as you did?" Beckett asked Sheppard and Ford. The three of them, plus Teyla and Weir, were in the doctor's office. McKay had been brought in by Sheppard and Ford about a half hour earlier, and was now sleeping on one of the medical cots after an examination.

"Yeah," Ford said, nodding. "Just one glass. And they were small glasses, too." He looked at Sheppard for confirmation, who nodded. Ford shrugged. "At least while I was there, anyway. And he seemed perfectly fine when I left--he was just talking with the Headwoman about ways to improve their crop yields, I think."

Sheppard looked at him. "Crop yields? Are you serious?" Was there anything the man didn't know?

"Did you notice anything unusual about Rodney, Major?" Weir asked pointedly, bringing him back on topic.

"I'd already gone, myself," Sheppard said. "I went to relieve the guys guarding the Jumper, so they could mingle with the natives." He raised his eyebrows when Weir gave him a look of mild admonishment. "What? It was a good party."

"I did not see anything untoward before I left as well, Doctor," Teyla said. "I retired after Aiden and the Major, and McKay did not drink anything else in that time, that I remember."

"Carson," Weir said. "What's wrong with him?"

"That's the thing," Beckett said. "I don't really know. To all intents and purposes, he's just got a really bad hangover. But it makes no sense how a man his size could be so badly affected by the same alcohol you all drank without any consequences."

Sheppard pursed his lips, thinking. "He did say he thought there might have been citrus in it…"

Beckett's eyes widened. "What? Good Lord, man! Don't even joke! He'd be dead by now if that drink had citrus in it!"

"Whoa, hey," Sheppard said, a little shocked by the doctor's vehemence. He took a step back, spreading his hands. "I'm just going on what McKay told me."

"Could this be something like an allergic reaction?" Weir asked. "Perhaps there was something in this wine that his body reacted to more strongly than the rest of his team?"

Beckett nodded. "I'd thought of that, but it would be impossible to tell without a lot of testing."

"Will that be necessary?" Weir asked. "After all, if this is essentially just a hangover, he'll be fine in a few hours, right?"

"Most likely," Beckett said. "But I would like to find out what may have caused this, in case it's a harbinger of a more serious allergic reaction to the substance--it might be common in this galaxy."

"All right," Weir said. "I'll make sure you get a bottle."

Sheppard arched an eyebrow. "Have fun trying to run the tests on him."

Beckett's expression was equally sardonic. "Oh, it'll be a joy, I assure you."

"Carson, this is completely unnecessary," McKay protested. I'm fine." He sighed. "Well, I've still got a headache, but other than that, I'm fine."

"Is that so?" the Scottish doctor responded, not even bothering to look up at him. "How about you let me be the judge of that? You were unconscious on an alien planet for an unspecified time under the effects of a completely alien substance that may or may not be something you're allergic to."

McKay sighed and continued to fidget on the diagnostic bed, his knee bouncing with his impatience. "You make it sound like I got abducted by lemons or something," he said, snorting at his joke.

Beckett muttered something under his breath and McKay stared at him.

"What?"

Beckett looked up, smiling benignly. "Nothing."

McKay sighed again, loudly, and rolled his eyes. "You've taken samples of nearly everything inside and outside of my body and poked placed I didn't even know I had, can I please go before you start to dissect me?"

Beckett had a malicious gleam in his eye. "Now, there's a thought."

"Carson!" McKay snapped.

Beckett laughed. "I was teasing. And, yes, you can go, but I want you to tell me if your headache gets worse or you start to notice any other symptoms." Then he quickly added, "Not that I expect you will."

McKay hopped down and stretched. "I'll be in my lab if you decide you have this irresistible urge to torture someone." He grimaced at his own wording. "I--" he shook his head. "I'll be in my lab," he said quickly, hurrying from the infirmary, leaving the startled physician in his wake.

McKay finally slowed to brisk walk when the infirmary was out of sight. He sighed. Why couldn't he keep his big mouth shut? Beckett didn't deserve that jab. He was just doing his job, and his job was keeping them all alive.

He scrubbed a hand across his mouth, trying to push back his memory of the short time the Genii had been on the base and his own failures then. Everyone kept telling him, he wasn't trained for that kind of situation, that it wasn't his fault. But he knew it was. He was weak and the Genii had known that and exploited it.

He gritted his teeth as he neared his lab and tapped the mechanism that triggered the door. Nothing happened. He tapped it again, and almost reluctantly, it opened. He frowned. He had never noticed it doing that before. Even before Beckett had done the gene therapy on him to give him the artificial ATA gene, simple things like this in the city had always responded to him.

"Doctor McKay!" a female voice called from down the hall.

He turned and saw a redheaded woman heading for him. He racked his brain for her name and came up with nothing. "Yes…?" He waited for her to fill in the blank.

She trotted up with a small device in her hands. "Can you turn this on?" she asked him, holding it out, slightly breathless. "I was going to go try to find Doctor Zelenka or Doctor Beckett, but you're here and so…" She smiled and thrust the device at him.

He took it, giving her a bewildered look. "What is it?"

"We think that it is some kind of memory storage device, but none of my linguistics team has the ATA gene. So…" She gestured at it. "It won't turn on for us."

McKay closed his eyes and frowned in concentration, willing the device to activate. His first few attempts yielded nothing, and he started to wonder if it were broken until it switched on. He grimaced as his headache flared a notch. He handed it back to her, pinching the bridge of his nose. "There," he stated, irritation coloring his voice.

The woman frowned at him. "Are you all right? You don't look all that good." She gave him a sympathetic smile. "Bad mission?"

McKay stared at her. "Who are you?"

Her eyebrows rose. "Oh!" She smiled, a bit sheepishly. "I'm sorry. Daria Peterson," she said, holding out her hand to him. He took it.

"Hello."

"I didn't mean to sound presumptuous about the mission remark," she said. "I was just a member of SG4 for a couple years, and I know some missions can really take a lot out of you."

He looked at her. "You don't look military."

Peterson smiled. "I'm not. Civilian anthropologist," she told him. "I've been part of Doctor Jackson's research team, working on translating the Ancient's language for the last three years. That's how I ended up in the Atlantis Project."

She looked down at the device. "Oh."

He followed her gaze. "Oh, what?"

"That looks like it needs the other device we found to work." She looked at him. "Could I borrow you for a moment to come look at it?"

McKay shrugged. "Sure."

Peterson led him to one of the transporter alcoves. "Our lab is a few levels down," she said in explanation.

Again the door didn't seem to want to open for him.

Peterson looked at him. "That's odd. I've never seen them do that before."

"There must be some kind of malfunction going on with them," McKay told her. "That's the second one to do that for me."

They stepped in and the doors covering the control panel hissed open. Peterson reached up tap the section of the map that held the lab, and then things went nuts.