SGA Fic: A Far Better Thing, 1/5
A Far, Far Better Thing
“Unscheduled offworld activation,” the Gate tech announced.
“Whose IDC?” Sheppard asked. There were several teams out in the field, and he was in the Gateroom waiting for them to check in.
The technician hesitated. “That’s…weird. It’s Doctor McKay’s.”
“Huh?”
“Not his current one,” the tech added. As a security precaution, their IDCs were changed every few months. “It’s from more than a year ago.”
Pulling his sidearm, Sheppard stepped closer to the Gate. “Let it through.”
“Yes, sir,” the tech said dubiously.
The wormhole opened, and a moment later, a figure staggered through the Gate. It was-undeniably-Doctor McKay. Weighing at least fifty pounds less than usual, with a filthy bandage covering half of his face-including one eye-and a scrub of beard covering most of the rest, but John would recognize him anywhere. “Rodney?” he said, amazed.
Rodney staggered a few more steps, then crumpled unceremoniously to the floor. “John,” he said thickly. “Thought you had to be dead. Knew you’d’a come for me if you weren’t dead.” He dropped his head to the floor with a hollow thud, then picked it up again. “Why aren’t you dead?”
A squad of Marines showed up, and at the same time, a panting, out-of-breath voice from the balcony said, “What happened? What did I miss?”
John would recognize the voice anywhere, too, but he looked up, just to be sure. Yep. Rodney. Weighing the normal amount, clean-shaven (more or less), and uninjured. “Rodney, look who dropped in. It’s Rodney.”
“Oh, not this again,” said Rodney-his Rodney, the one he’d seen at breakfast that morning.
The Rodney on the floor looked up, too. “Explains why John didn’t come for me,” he said, to no one in particular. He picked himself up, and seemed to notice for the first time that John still had a gun pointed at him, and so did four Marines. Fumbling inside his shirt, he came up with a knife-it seemed to be around his neck on a string-and crawled backwards until his back was to the base of the Gate. Voice shaking, he demanded, “What’s going on?”
He looked so betrayed that John hoped none of the worst-case scenarios that flashed into his mind were true. Waving the Marines back, and lowering his own gun slightly, he said, “I think we’d all like to know that.”
“You start,” Rodney said from the balcony. “Where did you come from?”
Rodney glanced up at him and swallowed hard, hunching his shoulders.
More gently than Rodney had, John said, “Where didn’t I rescue you from?”
“The Wraith ship-there, ah, there was a culling. You were there. I woke up on a hive ship, in one of those pods. They make some kind of enzyme, you know, to keep the…people in stasis, until they want them. But it didn’t work on me, or something. Maybe the pod was malfunctioning. I never worked it out.”
John bumped the theory that this Rodney was a replicator-made copy to the top of his mental list. Nanites might explain why the toxin hadn’t worked. The Asuran renegades could have tried again, after the first set of copies had escaped. It was even possible that this set had never found out they weren’t the originals. “Okay. Then what?”
“Then I hid. I checked the other pods, but I couldn’t find you or Teyla or any of you, and I couldn’t wake up any of the…you know, the rest of the people. So I hid. I thought you’d come, and I just had to stay alive until you--” He scrubbed his face with this free hand. “Until you got there.”
“I’m sorry about that,” John said, meaning it. Even if this wasn’t the Rodney he knew, he’d have rescued him if he’d known. “I didn’t know.”
“I know,” Rodney said, glancing up at the other McKay. “I mean, I understand now. When I figured out you weren’t coming, I decided I had to escape. They took my weapons, but they didn’t take my tablet, and I managed to get it connected to the control systems in a Dart, but I couldn’t get it out, not without them noticing, until they culled a planet from space. They don’t really do that all that often, you know? Usually they just send a few darts through a gate. I had to wait a long time.”
John really didn’t want to think about that. Wraith ships were creepy even under the best of circumstances, and being trapped on one, unarmed and with no avenue for escape, had to be hellish. “But you did escape.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I landed the Dart-crashed the Dart-as far away from the settlement as I could get, and stayed in it until I couldn’t hear any more Darts flying around.” He laughed humorlessly. “But I forgot about survivors. That’s how this happened.” He gestured at the bandage with the hand that wasn’t holding his knife. “They saw me getting out of the Dart, and I guess they thought I was…I don’t know what they thought. A worshipper or something. They had these blowguns, and I got shot in the face. I had to hide out in the woods for maybe a week before I managed to get to the gate.” He looked around. “Now I’m here.”
Reluctantly, John realized he had to add another scenario to his list. Rodney’s story of surviving undetected on a Wraith ship didn’t sound all that likely. For one thing, Wraith didn’t need food or water, so what had he lived on? Leaving aside for a moment the question of how he even existed, it was just possible that this Rodney was a Wraith worshipper, and they had planted him here to lead them to Atlantis’s new location.
“Right,” McKay said from the balcony. “I’m going to dump all the data from the gate, see if I can find any traces of interdimensional activity.”
“I’ll take him down to the infirmary,” John decided. “He’s hurt, that’s the first thing we should do anyway.” While she was treating him, Keller could check him for nanites, Wraith tracking devices, and anything worse that John hadn’t thought of yet.
Rodney flinched when he approached, but let John help him to his feet. John thought he might need to call for a gurney, but Rodney was able to walk, limping and leaning heavily on John.
Once they were out of sight of the Marines-and the other McKay-Rodney seemed to relax. “Who is he?” Rodney asked quietly, after a moment.
John decided not to pretend he didn’t know what Rodney meant. “Dr. McKay.”
“But….”
“It’s not like this hasn’t happened before,” John pointed out.
Rodney stopped walking, and slumped against the wall. “It’s not?”
“No.” John knew he probably shouldn’t be telling him this, but it was Rodney. Sure, he wasn’t their Rodney, but John couldn’t really make himself believe that any version of Rodney could mean them any harm. “You don’t remember Rod? Copy of yourself from a parallel universe?”
“How did I-never mind, I’ll ask…him…later, you wouldn’t know. I don’t think there’s any way I could have come from a parallel universe without knowing it. The energy requirements alone would be massive, it’s not the kind of thing you do by accident.”
“You kind of did,” John said, just to needle him. “Well, you knew you were messing around with parallel universes that time. And Rod did send himself through the rift on purpose.”
“Maybe the Wraith…but I can’t think why they’d do something like that.”
“Can you keep walking?” John asked. If Rodney was carrying a transmitter-and he might not even know about it if he was-it was important to get it deactivated as soon as possible.
“Yeah, okay.” Rodney leaned up against him again and they kept going. “This is…this is really weird. I didn’t know what was going to happen when I got back here-I thought maybe you guys would all be gone, I was ready for that, and like I said I thought you had to be dead, but…this is really weird.”
“I know.”
After they had walked a few more steps, Rodney said, “There was the time we found Elizabeth in a stasis pod, ten thousand years older. Did you guys have that?”
“Yeah, we did.”
“That’s not much like this, though. She knew what happened to her.”
“We’ll figure it out. The other you’s working on it, and you’ve got a head injury.”
“Oh, yeah.” Rodney actually let go of his knife to touch his bandage. “It hurt a lot, and there was a lot of blood, but I don’t know how bad it is. I hope Carson can save my eye.”
“Oh.” John wondered if he had to tell him, and realized that he did. If he tried to pretend that Carson was just off duty or something, Rodney would probably demand that somebody wake him up. “Carson, uh. We lost Carson.”
“You lost him?” Rodney sounded outraged.
Realizing Rodney may have misunderstood, John clarified, “Uh, not the way we lost you. He…died. I’m sorry.”
“Carson’s dead?” Rodney repeated. To John’s surprised horror, he started to cry.
The other Rodney-the real Rodney-hadn’t cried when Carson died, at least not that John knew about. Shit, maybe he had. But this Rodney was having one hell of a bad day, at the end of a string of bad days, and John guessed maybe it was more than he could take. He went into a slow-motion collapse, clutching the wall and sliding down until he was crouched on the floor.
John hunkered down next to him, and awkwardly patted his shoulder. He started to say a few things-that Beckett had died bravely, or that Keller, the new head of medicine, was good-but stopped when it was clear Rodney wasn’t listening.
Rodney rocked a little, his arm curled around his head, making these hiccupping sobs that reminded John of the way babies sometimes cried so hard they forgot how to breathe.
The infirmary corridor wasn’t one of the most trafficked in the city, but still, a few people passed by. All of them slowed and looked at Rodney with poorly-disguised curiosity, until John growled, “Keep moving.”
After a few minutes, with Rodney just starting to calm himself, Dr. Keller appeared with a wheelchair. She smiled at him awkwardly. “Can you help get him--”
“Sure,” John said. “Here, Rodney, let’s get you up.”
“I can walk,” Rodney mumbled, but he climbed into the wheelchair anyway.
While John pushed, Keller said, “Colonel Carter radioed me. She said he’s….”
“Yeah,” John answered.
“We should get him under the scanner right away.”
John walked faster.
By the time they got to the infirmary, Rodney had stopped crying, and was wiping his nose on what was left of his sleeves. Keller got him a Kleenex and helped him onto the scanner table. “Just hold still,” she told him kindly. “This won’t hurt.”
“Yeah, I have been here before,” Rodney said, in a tone suggesting that Keller was an idiot, while he rubbed the balled-up Kleenex under his nose.
“Right.” Keller nodded, her expression changing to a tight-lipped “dealing with Rodney” look. John found it strangely encouraging-this Rodney was a pathetic spectacle, but if he was still able to annoy people, he couldn’t be that badly off.
John stood next to Keller and watched the scan results as they appeared on the screen. He didn’t see any of the bright dots that indicated nanites, but other than that, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. “Looks okay,” Keller murmured. “I’ll study the scans in detail, but nothing’s jumping out at me.”
Rodney sat up. “If they put a transmitter in me, I would have noticed,” he said peevishly.
“Just making sure,” John answered.
“Let’s take a look at that eye,” Keller said, starting to unwind the bandage. It looked like it was made out of the lining of Rodney’s uniform jacket, held in place with a strip of gauze that must have come out of his tac vest.
“It hurts,” Rodney said. “There was a lot of blood. I bet it’s really bad. Is it really bad? I couldn’t look at it, there wasn’t a mirror or anything. I tried to look at it in a puddle, but there was mud. Do you think you’ll be able to save my eye?”
The last layer of bandage was soaked through with dried blood, adhered to his skin. When Keller peeled it off, he started bleeding again. “Oh my God,” she gasped, involuntarily.
“That’s not good,” Rodney said faintly. “That’s never good. Doctors aren’t supposed to say ‘oh my God.’ Especially not when they’re treating me.”
“Sorry. It’s, um.”
“She’s not going to be able to save your eye,” John told him, because it was clear Keller wasn’t sure how to say it. It didn’t look like there was anything there to save, just an empty socket seeping something that John thought might be vitreous humor.
“Oh, God,” Rodney moaned.
“How long ago did this happen?” Keller asked.
“Six or seven days,” Rodney said. “It’s infected, isn’t it? Maybe it looks worse than it is. You can fix it, can’t you?”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Rodney’s face crumpled slowly as he realized what that meant. John wondered if he was going to cry again, but apparently he was finished with that for now. He took a few deep breaths. “Right. Right. I don’t really need depth perception, anyway. It’s not like I’m a pilot or anything. Okay. I can deal.”
Whatever this Rodney was, he wasn’t a fake. John had known him for a long time before he figured out that Rodney was a lot better at coping with disaster that had already happened than disaster he was only anticipating. Nobody could have faked that.
“Good,” Keller said. “We’d better get it cleaned up.”
Rodney was fairly stoic-for him-only whimpering, “Ow,” a few times and yelling, “Watch it!” twice as Keller cleaned away the dried blood and re-bandaged the wound.
Keller’s exam didn’t turn up any other serious injuries. Rodney’s limping had been caused by blisters-“blisters with blisters on them,” Rodney pointed out.
She drew some blood, saying, “You’re pretty dehydrated. I’m going to start you on an IV, but you can take a shower first if you want.”
“God, yes,” Rodney answered, sliding off the table. He knew where the infirmary shower was, and where the extra scrubs were-more proof, if John needed it, that this really was Rodney. He’d been here plenty of times before.
“Keep an eye on him,” Keller told him, in an undertone.
“Okay. He’s-he’s all right?” John wasn’t sure if he was keeping an eye on Rodney for his own protection, or for everybody else’s.
“I think so. I’m going to start these tests,” she said, waving the three vials of blood she’d drawn. Oh, here.” She tossed him another container. “Tell him I need a urine sample.”
After giving Rodney the specimen cup, John lurked outside of the washroom, feeling slightly creepy about it. “You all right in there?” he called after a moment.
“Yeah.”
“Yell if you need any help.”
“I think I remember how to do this,” Rodney called back.
The shower turned on, and John leaned against a counter, listening for ominous thuds. With the Asuran theory more or less ruled out, John had no idea where this Rodney could have come from. The other Rodney probably had theories. Lots of them. Chances were, this Rodney would come up with some, too.
But ultimately, figuring out how he came to be there might not be the biggest problem they faced. If they couldn’t send him back where he belonged-or if he didn’t belong anywhere else-what would they do with him? John wasn’t sure Atlantis was big enough for two Rodneys. But was sending him back to Earth any better? Even once the SGC decided they could trust him-which John bet would take some time-no one there would have any idea what being trapped on a Wraith ship would be like. They wouldn’t be able to help him with the post-traumatic issues he was almost certainly about to start having.
More importantly, he was Rodney. He belonged here on Atlantis. He and the other Rodney would just have to learn to get along.
John realized that the shower had been turned off for some time. He knocked on the door. “You okay?”
There was no answer, but the doorknob turned and the door opened a crack. John pushed it open a little further to find Rodney, dressed in a clean set of scrubs, gulping water from the faucet. He glanced up, water dripping off his chin. “You have no idea how much I missed water.”
“What did you drink on the Wraith ship?” John asked.
Rodney picked up a disposable razor. “You know the ships are sort of alive,” he began. “They can repair themselves.”
“Yeah.”
“They have a sort of circulatory system that takes raw materials to the parts that are damaged or worn out. Tubes full of…stuff. Organic stuff.”
“Oh, God,” John said, swallowing hard to fight back nausea.
“I decided to call it sap, because it sounds slightly less disgusting that way.” Rodney shuddered. “Sometimes I found actual food, in the Dart bay. From when people were carrying supplies while they….”
Ran for their lives, John’s brain filled in helpfully. Rodney had survived by stealing from the dead and drinking ship-goo. “I’ll be right back,” he said.
The infirmary kept a supply of MREs on hand-sometimes teams came back injured and too hungry to wait until they’d been treated to go to the mess. John dug through the carton until he found a meat loaf one, Rodney’s favorite.
When he saw it, Rodney dropped the razor, leaving his face half shaved, and grabbed it out of John’s hands. He ate the candy first-he always did, but this time he crammed it all into his mouth at once-then poured water into the entrée pouch and started the heater while he chewed, leaning it against the soap dispenser. “You can’t believe how much I missed these things,” he said around a mouthful of tootsie rolls. “Remember the time I got the cheese omelet one and didn’t eat it? I’ve been kicking myself for that for months. Years. Whatever it’s been.”
John did remember that time-cheese omelet MREs were one of the few things Rodney wouldn’t eat, other than things he was allergic to. After that first experience, if he somehow ended up with one, he whined until someone traded with him just to shut him up.
Once he’d managed to swallow the candy, Rodney tore the jelly packet open with his teeth and squeezed strawberry jelly into his mouth. Once he’d squeezed out every last drop, he started on the crackers, eating more slowly now. “Thanks,” he said, ducking his head and picking crumbs off the front of his scrubs.
“You’re welcome.”
Rodney’s eye widened. “Coffee!” he exclaimed, digging into the MRE bag for the accessory pouch. “I’ve been dreaming about coffee. Seriously. This recurring dream where I’m chasing a cup of coffee through the ship. It’s awful.”
John decided not to tell Rodney just yet that the meatloaf MRE now came with lemon tea-the first time Rodney had discovered the travesty, he’d carried on about it for days. It might be one shock too many. Instead, he pocketed the accessory pouch and brought Rodney a cup from the infirmary’s coffee pot.
Rodney drank it with a blissful expression, and wordlessly held his cup out for more.
By the time he was fed and cleaned up, Keller had finished running tests. “You’re dehydrated and malnourished,” she said, “and I’m not wild about your kidney function, but I think you’ll live.”
Rodney frowned a little, like maybe he didn’t realize Keller was joking. “That’s a good thing,” John said.
“I know.” He sat on the edge of his bed and shuffled his feet around in his infirmary-issue slippers.
Keller took his arm and inserted the IV. “I’m giving you some antibiotics and a pain reliever. Try to get some rest, okay?”
Nodding soberly, Rodney swung his legs up onto the bed and pulled up the covers. He settled against the pillow, still looking troubled.
“You okay?”
Rodney nodded.
“I’ll sit with you for a while.”
Rodney looked at him for a moment, then said, “Thanks,” in a small voice.
#
Sam called the meeting for Keller’s office. Something about her and Sheppard not wanting to go too far away from the other Rodney. The imposter, Rodney couldn’t help thinking of him.
Keller reported that the other Rodney had lost an eye-so at least people would be able to tell them apart-and that he didn’t have any nanites.
Sheppard reported next. “He seems okay. He got a little upset when I told him about Carson, but he’s dealing.” Rodney knew what a little upset meant. Everyone was talking about it. People had seen him. They better not even try to keep what had happened a secret, or people would think it had been him.
Sam said, “So,” and glanced at him. “Is it…Rodney?”
“Of course it isn’t,” Rodney said.
But John said, “Yeah. I think so.” The traitor.
“I didn’t find anything that would suggest he isn’t,” Keller added. “He has your appendectomy scar, and your citrus allergy, his blood type matches. I’m still processing the DNA test, but I think it’s Rodney.”
“I’m Rodney,” said Rodney.
“So’s he,” Sheppard answered. And it just figured, that he’d take the other one’s side.
“Then the next thing to do is figure out how this happened,” Sam said. She looked at him.
“I haven’t found anything yet. He said he was on the Wraith ship a long time-whatever it was could have happened then. It would help if we could pin down the time frame.” If he had any luck at all, this Rodney would be from a parallel universe. At least then they’d have a chance at getting rid of him, like they had with Rod.
John rubbed at his jaw. “Rod was pretty different from our Rodney,” he said slowly. “I mean, we’d have noticed right away. Doesn’t that make it less likely that it’s another parallel universe thing?”
“No,” Rodney said. He was about to start explaining why when he noticed that the others were all looking past him, at the doorway. He turned, and saw that the other one was standing here, barefoot and holding on to an IV pole. Rodney edged away from him, getting behind Keller’s desk.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said tersely, not quite looking at Rodney. Fine with him-Rodney didn’t want to look at him, either. “Anyway, you’re not going to figure it out without me.”
Rodney bit back a yes, we can. He’d already admitted they needed to know the time frame, and the imposter was the only one who could help them with that. “When did this Wraith ship pick you up? And where?”
The other Rodney couldn’t quite remember the date, or the name of the planet, but as he started to explain, Rodney had a sinking sensation that it all sounded pretty familiar. “I was supposed to be going out with Katie Brown that night,” he remembered. “Is she still-never mind. I was talking to what’s-her-name. That girl lieutenant. It was like the Dart came out of nowhere.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Rodney interrupted. “But then the Dart crashed, and Zelenka got me out, and some things happened that we will never talk about, and I didn’t end up on a Wraith ship.” Not that time, anyway.
He glanced at the other Rodney, and saw that he was looking curiously at Sheppard. “He and Lieutenant Cadman ended up sharing a body for a little while,” Sheppard explained.
“Hers?” the imposter asked.
“Mine,” said Rodney. “She kissed Carson with my mouth. And didn’t we agree we weren’t going to talk about it?”
“Well, it certainly sounds worse than spending however-long-it-was trapped on a Wraith ship. I dodged a bullet there,” the other one said. And there was no reason at all for him to take that tone, Rodney thought.
“About two years,” Sheppard said quietly.
The other Rodney snapped his fingers a few times. “It crashed,” he said. “Right after it picked us up?”
“Yes,” Sheppard said.
“Before it had time to sweep anyone else up.”
“Yes.”
Rodney didn’t see why that was relevant, until he did. “So our patterns were still in the buffer,” he realized.
“Even though the Dart had already uploaded them to the hive.” The other Rodney turned to Sheppard and Sam, and explained, “A Dart’s cargo drive only has enough memory to hold a few patterns. That’s why they sometimes show up and just take a few people before they go away. It’s like picking up takeout. If a hive ship’s in range, they upload the patterns as they go, so they can clear the drive and keep culling. That’s what they do when they want to clear a planet. The Dart’s copy of our patterns would have been overwritten the next time they used the culling beam, but it must have crashed before then.”
“How do you know that?” Rodney asked suspiciously. That mission had been the first time they got their hands on a Dart to study.
“I was there for--” He glanced at Sheppard “-two years? I poked around some.”
Rodney had to admit that sounded like something he would do.
The other Rodney glanced at him, then took a long look at Sam. “What are you doing here? Visiting? Are you and him…together?” He sounded like he wasn’t sure whether he hoped that they were or that they weren’t.
Sam laughed. “No, Rodney. And believe it or not, you’ve stopped asking.”
The imposter took another quick look at him. “Oh. So, uh, did it work out with Katie?”
“No,” Rodney said quickly. “She went back to Earth.”
“Dumped you?” the imposter asked.
“Actually, I ended the relationship,” Rodney said archly, hoping Sheppard (traitor!) didn’t mention he’d done it sort of by accident.
He didn’t, but when Keller told the other Rodney to go back to bed, Sheppard went with him.
#
On to Part 2