The hand surgeries were more difficult, requiring an hour each to put implants in each finger to lengthen them and more silicone to give her knuckles the bony ridges of a Wraith. The fake feeding slit was a challenge as well, constructed similarly to the nasal pits but ringed by temporary tattoos to simulate lips. But the moments blurred, faded, and while she was dimly conscious of the beeping monitors showing Teyla’s vitals regular and steady, of her own knees and feet that wanted a rest, those things seemed insignificant. Like only her eyes and hands were alive.
While the adhesive on Teyla’s hand set, Jennifer turned her attention to her teeth, using strong dental adhesive to attach the fanged caps. She’d never wanted to be a dentist, either. Too messy, and nobody liked you, a lifetime of bad breath and crying kids. She’d thought about oncology because of her mom, but she hadn’t wanted a lifetime of that many dying patients, either. But surgery — surgery wasn’t about the patient, not while she was in the operating room. It was about fixing a problem, and it was only afterwards that the person became real again.
After the teeth, the rest was easy. She’d worked out the right drugs with Todd’s help last time. The first was designed to engorge and darken her veins, making them stand out black against her skin. The second spread throughout her body quickly, bonding to the melanin in her skin and giving it a greenish cast. Jennifer wasn’t sure how she’d have done the same to someone paler, and was glad she didn’t have to figure that out. The last IV push was the drug to send Teyla’s oil glands into overdrive, making her skin look slick instead of soft.
A glance at the monitor told her the drugs had made Teyla’s blood pressure spike, a known risk. Teyla usually ran somewhere around 110/70, ridiculously healthy, and she wasn’t in an immediately dangerous range now. Even so, Jennifer made a mental note to keep an eye on that.
She stepped back and pulled her mask down, breathing the cooler, drier air with relief. The band of her cap was itching, too; fully back to herself now, back in her own skin, she noticed that as well as her aching back and thirst. Teyla was stable and not likely to wake for at least an hour yet, so Jennifer took a moment to snag a bottle of water and sat down by Teyla’s bedside, her eyes on the monitors.
All that was left was cosmetic, putting in hair extensions and dying Teyla’s hair black, and applying and polishing long, clawed fake fingernails. Not exactly doctor’s work, but Jennifer had done her own experimentation with hair dye and fake French tips in college, and you could find instructions for just about anything on the Internet. You could buy just about anything online, too, like the cat’s eye contact lenses they’d had sent over from Earth last time.
The hair would have to wait until Teyla could sit up, but the fingernails would be easier while she was unconscious. She applied the acrylic nails she’d carefully filed to sharp points and waited for them to set, shaking the bottle of green nail polish. Green-wich Village, the label said. There was probably a college student wearing the same nail polish sitting in a New York coffee shop right now, some girl with Teyla’s eyes who had never heard of the Wraith.
Teyla’s skin was already beginning to change color as Jennifer took her hand and gently stroked color on her thumbnail. Her skin felt smoother, too, and a little cooler, its normal brown changing quickly now to a black-marbled green. The nail polish really was her color, Jennifer had to admit. For a moment she imagined a Wraith queen frowning at bottles of nail polish, trying to choose a shade of green to match her skin. Maybe they did.
Jennifer’s gaze fell back to their hands as her thumb lightly stroked along Teyla’s knuckles, careful of the IV. Her tired eyes made Teyla’s hand blur when she blinked, and it was easy to imagine it bigger, squarer.
She closed her eyes as they started to burn in a way that had nothing to do with fatigue. It was so easy to imagine that they’d just rescued Rodney and she’d found some way to turn him back to a human as he slept. She’d sit by his bedside just like this, holding his hand and waiting for him to wake up and know her. Waiting for everything to be fine.
She knew better. It wasn’t going to be easy to return Rodney to anything like human, if it could be done at all. Whatever she did when they got him back, whatever treatment she tried in her attempt to even keep him alive, it wouldn’t make it like this had never happened. And that was what some part of her wanted, the part that was still a little girl hearing her mother saying Honey, I have cancer, saying in her own small voice But you’ll be okay, right? She remembered curling up in bed that night, closing her eyes and praying she would wake up in the morning and have it all be a dream.
Make it not have happened, she thought, her eyes stinging, but she was too old to believe in magic, and she hadn’t prayed and meant it in a long time. Teyla’s hand was warm and limp under hers, and she tried not to hang onto it tightly enough to smear the drying nail polish. I can’t cry, her mother had always said briskly. I’ll ruin my makeup. She’d worn it to the end, touching up her lipstick in her hospital bed with shaking hands and making a face at her reflection in the compact mirror.
Jennifer startled when Teyla’s hand twitched, then slowly turned in order to curl around her own. She looked up to see Teyla watching her. Teyla’s lips twitched in the closest she could get to a smile. “Do I look that bad?” she asked, voice still a little thick from the anesthesia.
Jennifer straightened her shoulders, trying to find her professional voice. “Everything went just fine,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
“Jennifer.”
“You look … probably a lot like Rodney looks right now,” Jennifer said, glancing up at the monitor because it was easier than meeting Teyla’s gaze.
“If there is any way,” Teyla said, “you know that we will bring him home.”
“I know,” Jennifer said, but she couldn’t bring herself to add that that wasn’t even going to be the hard part.
Jeannie scanned the tables for familiar faces but, this early, there weren’t many people eating yet. At last she spotted Radek in the far corner, reading something on his laptop as he ate, and made her way over. “Hey, Radek. Mind if I join you?”
He looked up, blinking at her behind his glasses. He definitely had the perpetually startled absentminded genius thing down, reminding her of her favorite physics professor from grad school.
“Please,” Radek replied, nudging the laptop aside as Jeannie sat, arranging her tray. “You have been working on the computers?”
“If you can call it working,” she said, her mouth full of sandwich, and then shrugged, amending that. “Well. I think I’ve made some progress on that problem I mentioned yesterday, the safety protocol he buried in the controls for the underwater lights.”
“Good.” He nodded, spearing pasta with his fork. “And the override of the locking mechanisms coded into the translation program? Have you gone further with that?”
“Not yet. The encryption is — ”
“You do not have to tell me.” He smiled. “Why do anything simply if you can instead make it incredibly complex? That is the way of Rodney McKay.”
Jeannie laughed. “Incomprehensible to mere mortals. I know.” She shook her head, taking another bite of sandwich and wondering what the spicy blue stuff in it was. “How’s the Wraith ship coming along?”
Radek waggled his head from side to side, chewing. “It is coming,” he said. “More slowly than I would like, and more like surgery at times than engineering, but…it progresses.”
“I don’t suppose you can give it a truckload of aspirin and hope for the best?”