While You Were Sleeping - Unconsciousness

[rinkhc]

Title: While You Were Sleeping
Fandom: SGA
Characters: Parrish, Lorne, Sheppard, Beckett
Pairing: Lorne/Parrish
Orientation: Slash
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1,084 
Warnings: Mostly!Dead!Evan
Notes: For Bunny clwilson2006   for giving me the perfect prompt (Claire #278) 

 

Prompt: for HC Bingo fill: “Unconsciousness” 
 
It still amazed David that he had literally been holding Evan’s life in his hands. One moment, Evan was leaning against the console, talking amiably with the Grand High Whatcamacallit of Bumbletown and the next, Evan was across the room in a bloody and charred heap. The shrapnel from the exploding equipment had torn wide gashes in his chest and abdomen and bits and pieces of smoking remnants of the machine were still raining down on them. 
 
He vaguely remembered shouting Evan’s name and then running to his side, skidding on his knees the last few feet. He had pulled a piece of hot metal off Evan’s chest and thrown it aside. Then he had instinctively put his hand across the hole in his abdomen and pushed the piece of intestine back inside. Remembering his SGC field first aid courses, David had applied pressure to a second wound higher up. Then he’d started shouting for help.  
 
David didn’t know how long he had stayed there, keeping pressure on the wounds while Evan bled over his hands. There was chaos going on around him, but he ignored everything, including the pain from his hand, which he had burned on the hot metal.  Evan Lorne was the only thing he cared about. He kept up a steady stream of encouragement, calling Evan’s name, telling him to hold on, promising him help was on the way, begging him not to leave him, begging him to stay, begging him not to die. 
 
Then suddenly Carson Beckett was there, kneeling beside Evan. “All right now, lad. Let go, move aside, let me see what I’m working with.”
 
From behind him, Colonel Sheppard grasped David’s shoulders gently, “Parrish, let me in there, you go and get yourself looked after.” Reluctantly, David pulled his hands away and let Beckett take over, let Sheppard slip into the spot beside Evan to help the doctor. A medic ran up and guided David away to a clear spot and sat him down to fuss over his injuries. He kept his eyes locked on Evan. A small irrational part of him fervently believed that so long as he could see Evan, he couldn’t slip away from him. David hadn’t realized he was bleeding from a dozen wounds until the medic started peeling his field jacket away in strips of charred and bloody fabric. 
 
“Oh,” David whispered, looking down and seeing all the blood, really seeing it, for the first time; his blood, Evan’s blood. He felt his stomach churn and he turned aside and upchucked the lovely meal the Bumbletown people had fed them before their tour of the malfunctioning exploding junk works they called state of the art in Bumbletown. 
 
Across the room, Beckett had pulled out a defibrillator. “Evan, no!” David called.
 
He scrambled away from the tech to land on his knees beside Sheppard. He reached out, but Sheppard caught him and held him back, just as Beckett yelled, “Clear!” Evan’s body jerked under the shock. 
 
Thankfully, the cardiac machine started to emit a rhythmic beat, Evan’s heart had started again. “That’s a good lad. Right, let’s get him back to Atlantis.” David began to sob in relief, turning his face into Sheppard’s neck and crying unashamedly as Beckett and the medics lifted Evan and got him on a stretcher then carried him away.
 
“Parrish, I have to go fly the jumper now, come on, time to go.” Sheppard’s voice was not unkind as he patted David’s back and helped him to his feet. 
 
David nodded and got up to follow the Colonel to the jumper. He sat on the floor beside Evan’s head, staying out of the way as the medics worked on him.
 
~*~
 
David flipped through the pages of the book in his lap awkwardly. His bandaged hand made it difficult. Laura Cadman had lent him the book of poetry when he started to read Shakespeare’s sonnets for the third time in her presence. He cleared his throat and started to read.
 
“The end was quick and bitter.
Slow and sweet was the time between us,
Slow and sweet were the nights
When my hands did not touch one another in despair but in the love
Of your body which came between them…”
 
A gently touch on his arm made him pause. He looked up to see Marie the medical technician standing at his shoulder. “Doctor Parrish, you’ll need to step out for a bit, we need to change Major Lorne’s dressings and clean him up a bit.” 
 
Going up on his toes, David leaned over the side of the bed rail and kissed Evan’s forehead. “I’ll be back.”
 
“You should get your own dressings changed while you wait. Go see Suzanne.” He nodded at the nurse’s suggestion and went to find Suzanne.
 
Suzanne had just gone to gather supplies to do his bandages when a ruckus rose up from Evan’s corner of the infirmary, equipment being moved around, and an alarm sounded. David panicked as Marie jogged past him, calling for Doctor Beckett. He ran back to Evan’s bedside. He stopped short at the foot of the bed when he saw that Evan’s eyes were open. “Evan?”
 
He smiled up at David. Evan’s voice was raspy and a little raw after days of disuse and intubation with a breathing tube. “There you are. You stopped reading.”
 
He should have been happy. He should have been overjoyed that his lover was no longer lying there unconscious. Instead, he was mildly annoyed. “You were listening?”
 
“Of course I was. I like when you read to me,” Evan yawned, his voice a little slurred and sleepy. 
 
“You weren’t unconscious?”
 
“I woke up a while ago. You seemed very intent on your reading; I didn’t want to bother you.”
 
David moved up by Evan’s head and shook his head as he groused, “You didn’t want to bother me? For crying out loud, Evan, I was reading to pass the time while I waited for you to wake up!” 
 
“Oh. Well, I like when you read to me.” Evan’s eyelids started to flutter and he yawned. “Read to me some more, David.”
 
As Carson came in and started checking Evan over, David slumped down into the bedside chair with relief. Evan seemed to be asleep again, but David didn’t mind so much now. He picked up a book from the pile on the floor beside his chair and thumbed it open with his good hand. “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes…”
 

Poetry: Quick and Bitter by Yehuda Amichai
             Sonnet 29 by William Shakespeare