HIDE

By BadgerGater

E-mail: [email protected]

Category: Drama, Word A Month Challenge, Hide; Janet's POV

Season: Three, Carter is finally a major

Spoilers: None

Rating: G

Warnings: None

Summary: Word a Month Challenge, Hide

Author’s note: Campers, what do you think?

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Klaxons were sounding, red lights flashing, and the loudspeaker was blaring, "medical team to the gateroom. Medical team to the gateroom." Now who? Now what? I wondered as I ran.

Pushing members of the security team out of my way as I entered the gateroom, my heart skipped a beat. Major Carter was down on her knees, cradling someone. I saw Teal'c behind her, and then somebody moved and I saw Dr. Jackson kneeling beside Sam, which meant that the man down was Colonel O'Neill.

I should have known.

"What's up?" I asked.

"Not me," muttered O'Neill, and I was relieved to hear his voice. That meant he was alive, conscious and more or less in one piece. All too often, with him and his team, there was too much of the less and too little of the more.

"His back. They used some sort of device on him, on his back...." Daniel started to explain.

"Lets get him down to the infirmary, then," I told the orderlies who had been right at my heels.

Colonel O'Neill protested. "I can walk, " he said, and proved it, by pushing himself to his feet, and taking about three steps before wobbling. He'd have hit the ramp if I hadn't grabbed him. I made the mistake of touching his back, felt him flinch and heard his indrawn, painfilled breath.

He waved me away and walked, albeit unsteadily, toward my baliwick.

I couldn't see his back, someone's jacket was wrapped around him, but from the awkward way he was hunching his shoulders, I could tell it hurt.

I got him seated on a bed, took his vitals, which all looked surprisingly good, noted the scrapes and bruises on his wrists, which meant he'd been tied up and had fought whatever it was they'd done to him. There was a nasty bruise blossoming on his jaw, too. "Anything else?" I asked, and he shook his head no. Finally, as gently as I could, I slipped the jacket off his shoulders. He cringed and I shivered.

"They took a pretty good piece out of my hide," he said.

"That's an understatement," I answered. Pretty good piece, indeed. An area the size of my outstretched hand, on the lower left side of his backbone was red, raw flesh, like someone had peeled the skin right off of him. I touched it with my gloved hand, and he jerked so hard I thought he was going to fall off the bed.

"That hurt," he said in a very tight voice.

"I'll bet. Here, Sir, lie down, on your stomach."

He moaned as he did so, buried his face in the pillow.

I gave him something for the pain and gave it a few minutes to take effect before I began to clean and disinfect the wound. This was going to take a while. Bits of his shirt, dirt and debris were embedded in the raw flesh.

Looking at his back, I was amazed at what I saw there, the pattern of old scars underlying the new. Knowing his medical records, I looked at each one, mentally checking off the source, the mission and the accumulated damage.

The barely healed red welt high on his spine, near his neck, that was from Hathor's goau'ld larvae.

Farther down his backbone, that had to be the scar from his back surgery after the bad parachute drop in Iran back in the 80's.

There was the neat row of stitches, ones I'd put there myself, after the blast when we disconnected from the Black Hole. The explosion had thrown him into the gateroom wall, the deep gash caused when he hit a light fixture.

That irregular, long blemish on his ribcage was from a knife wielding East German soldier, back in the days of the Iron Curtain.

The small round neat, puckered mark on his shoulder was left by a bullet, fired by a cornered drug dealer in Columbia. It went all the way through his shoulder, front to back.

The uneven scar across his shoulderblade was from a bit of shrapnel when a Beirut terrorist tossed a grenade at the jeep he was riding in. He'd barely survived; others with him, I knew, hadn't been so lucky.

Then there were all the little marks, the nasty reminders of man's intentional inhumanity to man: the cigarette burns, the marks left by clips used to shock with electricity, the ugly welts left by a chain wielded in anger against a defenseless captive's body. They were the legacy of four months in an Iraqi prison.

I knew there were plenty more scars, all over his body. And then there were the worst scars, the ones no one could see, the ones on his pysche, buried deep inside.

The marks on this tough hide were like a roadmap of the trouble spots of our world, and a few other worlds, too.

As I finished cleaning and dressing the nasty new mark on his back, he lay quietly, letting the painkillers do their work. His eyes were closed and I might have thought he was asleep, except for his hands, clenching and unclenching. "Almost done, sir," I said kindly. "How are you doing?"

"Oh fine, Doc, I can't feel a thing." He opened one eye, raised an eyebrow. "So, Doc, will I ever play the violin again?"

I smiled. "You, the violin? Now that I've got to see." I peeled off my gloves. "I've got the wound cleaned, and applied an antibiotic dressing. I'm not going to put a bandage on it, so you'll have to be careful to keep it clean and dry. Should heal in a few days, but I think you'll have another scar, here, Sir."

"Ah, one more for the collection. Good thing I have a tough hide, Doc."

It sure was, I thought, as I turned out the lights and left the Colonel to get a night's rest.

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