Rating: PG
Pairing: John/Rodney
Length: 1100 words
Summary: About 3 years before Living Will. Technically he *wasn’t* Dr. Sheppard, not for another two months, but it was standard for medical students to introduce themselves that way. It reassured the patients. It didn’t do anything for John’s sense of inner calm.
A/N: More of the medical AU. Some of y'all sweet-talked me into it. Also, I randomly only slept about 2 1/2 hours last night. Woot.

The first time John walked into the ER at Atlantis General, he was on a ride-along with a team of paramedics as a fourth-year medical student. He trailed after the rushing paramedics as they wheeled a 56-year-old MI patient down the narrow ancient hallway, feeling out of place and superfluous.

“Don’t touch anything,” said one paramedic, pointing a finger warningly in John’s direction. John held up his hands in mock obeisance, backing away from the chaos of the trauma room, blundering into a cart and a nurse as he went. It would only be another minute or so before the paramedics were off again, he figured, just long enough for them to convey the pertinent information, so there was no point in getting too invested in what was going on around him. But John was curious to a fault and that was how he ended up poking his head around the corner into another curtained area.

There was a very pregnant woman writhing on the gurney. That would have been enough to quell John’s curiosity right there, but he realized that she was crying out and wasn’t being heard over the shouting going on right next door. John backed out, looking around frantically for someone to help, but the halls were deserted; everyone seemed to be with the MI they’d brought in. John took a deep breath and plunged through the curtains.

“Oh, help me, help me,” moaned the pregnant woman, and John took a quick inventory of the equipment around her, reading numbers off the screens frantically. Everything looked fine, it looked good. The baby wasn’t in distress, the woman’s heart-rate and BP were normal given the circumstances. But clearly something was happening.

“Hi, I’m Dr. Sheppard,” said John nervously, reaching for a box of latex gloves. Technically he *wasn’t* Dr. Sheppard, not for another two months, but it was standard for medical students to introduce themselves that way. It reassured the patients. It didn’t do anything for John’s sense of inner calm. “How far apart are the contractions?”

“Where’s Dr. Beckett, I had Dr. Beckett?” the woman panted, squeezing John’s hand.

“He’s with another patient,” John said, and located the woman’s chart with his free hand. He immediately breathed out with relief: six centimeters, eighty percent effaced as of half an hour ago. The woman was at least another half hour away from delivery. Still, better safe than sorry. “Okay, I’m just going to check your cervix,” he said, mustering all the confidence he could. Truth be told, he’d done exactly three pelvic exams, only one of which was on a pregnant woman, and she’d only been in her second trimester.

The cervix under his fingers felt alien, like a whole new anatomical structure had erupted in there. Not the tight secretive knot of a closed cervix, not even the slightly open mouth of a softened dilated cervix, but something hard and round and pulsing rapidly.

“Holy shit,” breathed John.

He had his hand on a baby’s head.

She was at zero station, ten centimeters, fully effaced, all in the span of thirty minutes. “Okay, I just,” said John, pulling his hand back, determined to go and find someone right the hell *now*, because he was in no way supposed to be touching *this*.

“Dr. Sheppard, please,” begged the woman, and her face scrunched up and she curled forward, and suddenly the baby’s head was a hell of a lot closer to daylight.

“Wow, you’re crowning,” said John stupidly. “Okay. Uh.” And he didn’t have time to say more because the woman was pushing again, her perineum stretching obscenely, and John had to get his hands back in there because, yep, that was a baby’s head and it was out. John murmured to himself, trying to remember how this went, and as if it was trying to remind him, the baby’s head turned to face down in his palms. “Right, shoulders,” John said, and on the next push he eased the posterior and then the anterior shoulder through. And after that it was like a greased pig: the rest of the baby shot into John’s hands, slimy with vernix and pale streaked with red.

John pivoted a little, baby in hands, trying to locate a surgical drape to wrap the baby and some clamps for the umbilical cord, and saw that a man in orange scrubs had pushed his way into the curtained area. “Oh,” said John.

“Oh my god,” said the orange-scrubs guy. “Did you do that?” And he rushed forward to help, strong capable hands holding out a drape, laying the baby down on the mother, calm voice telling her it was a girl. “Here, you cut the cord,” said the medical guy, and John did, stupid with awe and unable to stop grinning.

“Ah,” said the orange-scrubs guy, once they’d delivered the placenta and there was a cloud of nurses around each of their two patients, “I’m Dr. McKay. You’re a paramedic?”

“Dr. Sheppard,” said John, sticking out his hand to shake before realizing it was still sleeved in a vernix- and slime-sticky glove. “Mr. Sheppard,” he corrected himself. “I’m a fourth-year med student on a ride-along. I came in with the MI?”

“Wow,” said McKay. “Your paramedics left, like, fifteen minutes ago.” He stared at John contemplatively. “You’re surprisingly competent for a med student.” He folded his arms across his chest and stared some more. “Have you applied for your internship yet?” In spite of his flat tone, there was a kind of crazy ebullience radiating outwards from McKay, like he was as giddy as John felt but much better at controlling it.

“I was planning to do internal medicine and get a residency in dermatology,” said John – a gentleman’s specialty, and therefore the only kind his father would tolerate.

McKay grimaced, disgusted, and something about that abrupt shift in expression made John hasten to continue.

“But I’m really enjoying my emerg rotation,” he said. “Maybe I should put in for a position here.”

“Maybe,” said McKay in the same fake-cool voice, and turned towards the baby-warmer. “Did we get the five-minute Apgar on her yet?”

John leaned up against the cool tile wall and closed his eyes, exhaling shakily, remembering the live throb of the fontanel pulse still held secret, cradled by the cervix.

“Hey, hey!” bellowed McKay, suddenly right in John’s face, snapping his fingers. “Since you’re here, you wanna do something other than hold up the walls? You ever done sutures before?”

John shook his head, peeling his gloves off.

“Okay, we’ll get you in some fresh scrubs and then we’ll get you set up in the suture room,” said McKay, already mostly out of the room. He held up his fist, snapping his fingers again. “Sheppard, with me, now!”

John grinned and followed.