FIC: Already Seen (1/1)

Aug 19, 2006 08:57

Ideally, I think, episode tags should come up within a week of the episode's first run, but it's been a very busy week and I'm hoping that people will actually still be interrested in a "Progeny"-tag. This has a different style than anything I've really done before--more experimental--so if it doesn't work for you, I'd also love some constructive criticism. It has, however, been a really long time since I've been able to do a one-shot (there were quite a few attemped and abandoned between "I See Skies of Blue" and this), so I'm just relieved to have been productive.

ETA: The summary comes from a Stephen King quote--if memory serves correctly, it was both in an introduction for "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French" and the screenplay "Storm of the Century". Credit where credit is due.

Already Seen

spoilers for "Progeny"



Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Rodney has lost his mind before, but never in the traditional sense.

Even with Cadman pushing aside bits of his cerebellum and claiming her own portion of his headspace, even with the enzyme rush making him angry and stupid, even with a knife point biting down into his skin and Kolya’s mouth an inch from his ear - - it was never like this. Never this thorough, never this careful, never this cruel. Intimate, he says, and means it: they came in and he gave it up and it happened again and again and again.

Rodney always has been easy.

*

In his most uncharitable moments, Rodney thought that Sheppard only wanted him on the team because in at least four out of every five inevitable doom scenarios, Rodney’s genius allowed Sheppard to be lazy. He never said it- - he could never work out which of them he was really insulting - - but he thought it very loudly as he tried to figure out the almost imperceptible fluctuations in the cell’s shield while Sheppard sat in the corner and taught Teyla and Ronon how to play cat’s cradle with their bootlaces.

“Do you mind?” he snapped, and it wasn’t that they were actually being too loud for him to concentrate, but rather the principle of the thing. “Some of us are actually trying to work.”

Sheppard gave him that look, the one that said he knew Rodney was full of shit.

“McKay,” he said, “you’re poking a force field with a pencil.”

“I’m testing for energy fluctuations,” he said. Ronon actually had the nerve to chuckle.

Sheppard didn’t look bemused anymore; he looked coldly furious, the way he did on Doranda, when the sky was falling because Rodney had destroyed everything holding it up. “You need to do a little more than that, Rodney,” he said, not yelling, not threatening, but just saying. His hands were still knotted up in the cradle. “And you need to hurry.”

Sometimes, Sheppard scared him more than Kolya ever could have.

Elizabeth was not tangled, not tied-she stood too close to him and put her hand on his shoulder. He was scared of her, too.

“Hurry,” she said. “We don’t know what they’ll do when they come back.”

*

For two days, Sheppard follows him closely and asks vague, open-ended questions, like, “How are you feeling?” and “Anything going on?” Rodney knows what he’s thinking, knows what kind of impression he’s given, but he doesn’t correct Sheppard. The truth isn’t worse, but it’s harder to explain.

For two months, Elizabeth schedules him appointments with Heightmeyer-first regularly and then sporadically, as if therapy sessions were ambushes and he could be surprised into giving away all of his secrets. He doesn’t complain because he doesn’t mind-Kate is nice enough to let him talk about unified field theory for his first thirty minutes and actual psychological problems only in his last ten.

Once it’s clear that Rodney is getting actual professional help, Sheppard stops being thoughtful and starts being real again.

*

“You should be glad, really,” he said after the first stupid, fruitless hour of trying to find a large enough variation in the shield pattern. “This is identical to our cell design, you know. Now we know that it’s impossible to escape.”

“The bright side isn’t a good look for you, Rodney,” Sheppard said.

“Well, I can’t help it, can I? It’s just my optimistic nature shining through. That, or the fact that we’re totally and completely screwed.” He was buried alive again, pressed against the sea floor with only his subconscious as company. He was too suddenly claustrophobic, his windpipe smaller and smaller as each second passed. “There’s no way out. I can’t just invent one because I feel like it.”

“Then we’re all going to die,” Sheppard said. He crossed his arms.

“John,” Elizabeth said.

“No point in making it easy on him,” Sheppard said. “If he’s not going to find a way out, then he needs to know what happens. Rodney. If you don’t get us out, we all die. Probably you last. Probably me first. They’ll know that they can’t get anything from me, so I’ll at least die quickly, but you.” His smile was all teeth. “You’ll talk. They’ll know it. That’s why everyone always keeps you alive. Kolya. The Wraith.”

“This is not fair, John,” Teyla said evenly.

Sheppard did not blink. “But it’s true.”

Ronon said, “Maybe.”

“I’m sorry,” Rodney said, because it was true and because he knew it, he’d always known it. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. I don’t know the way out. There is no way out-these cells are impenetrable!”

“Now, that’s no way to think,” Sheppard said. “Come on, Rodney. You’ll have to try a little harder. Show us what you’re made of.”

He pulled his fingers out of Rodney’s head.

“This is not what we were looking for,” Oberoth said, while Rodney scrambled further back in the cell, against the limp bodies of his teammates. They did not bother to drag him away; they only held him still. “Again.”

*

He introduces Ronon to the concept of pudding blending and, by the end of their first hour in the mess, they have cleaned out four chocolate cups, five butterscotch, and two vanilla. Ronon wants to try mixing chocolate and lemon crème, and Rodney says, “Oh my God, are you trying to kill me? We’re eating out of the same bowl!” and “You’re just trying to get the whole thing all for yourself, aren’t you?”

They try pistachio and tapioca instead. There’s a hint of pale green in Ronon’s beard when he points his spoon at Rodney and says, “So what did they do to your head? Sheppard told me to ask.”

“I don’t actually think you’re supposed to tell me that,” Rodney said. He sticks his finger into the bowl of pudding. “You know. I told you. Torture.”

Ronon actually stops eating pudding long enough to look at him. “You good?”

“Oui,” Rodney says.

Like most of his jokes, it’s funny-hilarious, even, if Ronon only understood why.

When he's done laughing, he says, “You wouldn't understand. It's French.”

*

“Do you mind? Some of us are actually trying to work.” He ran his scanner over the force field again. “It is amazing that I even managed to keep this, so the least you could do-for the sake of my sanity and well, your lives-is be quiet. Hmm.”

“Good hmm or bad hmm?”

He turned around to see Sheppard with his hands still knotted up in bootlaces. He raised one hand and then decided to be charitable in addition to brilliant. “Good hmm. Very, very good hmm. I mean, we might have to redesign our own jail system, considering I just found a really glaring flaw, but we just might be home-free. And by home I mean cell.”

“McKay,” Ronon said.

“Right, right, right.” He pushed the scanner toward them. “See these numbers? Okay, these are the power levels for the force field. The system can’t maintain a continuous field, in fact, it’s impractical, considering the kind of power you’d have to use. What you do is maintain a relatively continuous shield-you keep the down-times in nanoseconds. Almost every other nanosecond, randomized.”

“Rodney, that doesn’t sound very helpful.” Elizabeth touched his shoulder. She hadn’t joined Sheppard’s bastardized cat’s cradle-Rodney had known there was a reason he respected her-and so she was free to stand alone. “Why don’t you tell us what it means? Exactly.”

“Yeah,” Ronon said. “How do we get out?”

“How good are you?” Sheppard smiled at him. “Good enough to blow up a solar system, we know that. But really, Rodney. Show us what you’re made of.”

*

He doesn’t ask Teyla what the Asurans made her see. Teyla does not ask him.

After dealing with Sheppard’s hands-off concern and Elizabeth’s tactical therapy, avoidance is a blessed relief. And if he hadn’t expected Teyla to be the one to recognize his need for silence, then it’s just proof that he doesn’t know her as well as he should. He starts to spend more time with her, partly out of guilt and partly out of sheer relief. They really are, he thinks one day, growing quite close.

It takes him three weeks to realize that the only reason Teyla isn’t asking is that Teyla isn’t talking-not really, anyway. Pleasantries, questions, safe conversations about things they both already know.

“You notice that Teyla isn’t talking much?” He throws this out at Sheppard when they’re both trying to fit their boots on before a mission, and he’s fixedly not thinking about bootlaces and white fingertips and Sheppard’s grimmest smile.

“It’s nice to see you, Pot,” Sheppard says, raising his eyebrows. “Have you met my friend Kettle?”

Rodney doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean.

*

“Hurry,” Elizabeth said. “We don’t know what they’ll do when they come back.”

The first stunner blast knocked her back against the wall: her hand was on Rodney’s shoulder and then it wasn’t anymore, she had just been blown back. Sheppard jumped up and the cat’s cradle brought Ronon and Teyla up with him-Rodney, unconnected, just crouched there, frozen. He didn’t know what was in his hand. Pencil? Scanner?

Sheppard stepped in front of Elizabeth. “If you want her, you’ll have to go through us.”

“Major Sheppard,” Kolya said, “we don’t want any of you.”

It was a short fight.

Kolya got down beside him and took out the knife. “Now, Dr. McKay,” he said. “Tell me everything you know about Atlantis.”

The blade dropped closer to his arm. Rodney tried not to look.

*

“There’s no shame in admitting what happened to you,” Kate says.

Her face is smooth and expressionless, but Rodney wonders if she gets frustrated with them. He knows that he used to be a very good patient, always ready to confess the slightest mishap inside his head, but he’s been around Sheppard for too long. What is solitary is shameful and what is shameful is also secret. There’s no point in talking, not really-someone must have passed on the latest rumor and Kate responds to every piece of gossip that filters through the city. Rodney never had a chance to get to her with the truth.

Rodney shrugs. “I don’t remember what happened,” he says.

She leans forward. “You said that you remember torture.”

“I remember waking up with someone’s hand sticking into my brain,” he says sharply. “You try it. See if it’s a pleasant memory.”

She is undaunted. “Is that the torture?”

“It’s all the torture,” Rodney says. “You don’t understand.”

*

“If you’re good enough to blow up a solar system,” Sheppard said, “you’re good enough to get us out of here. You can get us out and back to Atlantis.”

“Colonel, the shield fluctuations are only in nanoseconds.” He stood up and dug his fingers into the tight muscles of his lower back. “Given a microsecond pause, maybe, but nanoseconds? Randomized nanoseconds? I can’t tap into that with the scanner, the equipment just isn’t that sophisticated. That’s probably the only reason they even left it with us in the first place-they knew we couldn’t get out.”

“Come back to the bright side, McKay,” Sheppard said. “It’s a better look for you.”

Rodney blinked. “What?”

“You know,” Sheppard said. “Sunshine and silver linings. Just keep your chin up.”

“This is all starting to feel very familiar,” Rodney said.

Elizabeth shook her head. “We don’t have time for this, Rodney. We don’t know what they’ll do when they get back.” There was a hole in the center of her chest; he had been wrong, it hadn’t been a stunner that had knocked her away from him but actual gunfire. Rodney had never seen, before, what it could do to the body.

“Come on,” Sheppard said, “you’re a genius, right? Show us what you’re made of.”

“We must return to Atlantis,” Teyla said.

There was a knife in Ronon’s hand. Rodney closed his eyes.

They looped the cat’s cradle around his wrists.

*

“I don’t know why I should talk about it,” Rodney says. He and Sheppard are on the balcony, doing what Sheppard calls relaxing and what Rodney calls wasting valuable time. Hypothetically, they are sharing a bowl of butterscotch-pistachio-caramel, but Rodney managed to get it a few inches closer to him and has therefore claimed it. “I don’t want to talk about it. It happened. It’s over. And you don’t know what a relief that is.”

“I think I have a pretty good idea,” Sheppard says. “There were all these hive ships-”

“I repeat: at least you got out.”

*

“Again,” Oberoth said.

*

“Sure,” Sheppard says. “Out of the cell, out of Atlantis, out of the whole flesh and blood thing . . . it was quite the escape, really.”

He looks to Rodney for a reaction, but Rodney is too tired to really muster up much surprise.

“So you died,” he says, flat and almost uninterested. He digs his spoon into the pudding. It isn’t that he doesn’t care, it’s just that he saw it coming-Sheppard always dies, really. It’s a déjà vu all its own. “You almost do that all the time anyway.”

“You offered to stay behind. You said that we could flip a coin to see who activated the five-second self-destruct.”

*

“Tell me everything you know about Atlantis.”

*

“There is no five-second self-destruct,” Rodney says. “Not anymore. We changed that a month ago. You might remember if you tried-it was the meeting where you played hangman with Ronon, like it’s even challenging to outwit someone who just graduated from cave art. But I suppose a thirty second clock with enough time for you to make it to the Stargate might not be as appealing as going down with the city.”

“Well,” Sheppard says, “I didn’t make it all the way. What’s that thing about you not being able to actually die in your dreams?”

“They weren’t dreams,” Rodney says.

“Technically, no, but the same principles-”

“No,” Rodney says. “You could have died. You could have died and then come back. There weren’t any rules.”

*

“You blew up a solar system, didn’t you?”

*

“You mean you died,” Sheppard says. “More than once.”

He knocks the spoon against the bowl so hard that it chips the paint. “You tricked me. What is it with you and the talking thing lately?”

“You were giving everyone the silent treatment.” After one look, Sheppard amended it to, “Well, your version of the silent treatment. Let’s face it, Rodney, you aren’t exactly prone to bottling it all up inside. You’re a talker. Everyone knows that.”

*

“That’s why everyone keeps you alive.”

*

He takes a step back. “What did you say?”

When Sheppard moves toward him, he takes his hand off the pudding bowl and it topples forward, splitting apart on the floor. Rodney turns his head, hearing the stunner blast, the gunfire, and seeing the place in Elizabeth’s body where her heart used to be. Sheppard rests a hand on his shoulder, fingers warm, and says, “Come on, Rodney.”

Rodney wants to believe that it’s real.

*

“Show us what you’re made of.”

*

He could, he thinks. He could talk to Sheppard.

It’s like a weight coming off his chest.

He leans a little more on Sheppard’s arm and moves his foot across the fractured curve of the broken bowl, wondering how to begin explaining that his head feels sort of like that-knocked down and cracked open.

“Okay,” Rodney says, because it isn’t worth fighting anymore, because he isn’t Sheppard, and because it’s finally time for him to give up. “If you’re that desperate to have a heart-to-heart, I’ll see if I can speed up the process.” His mouth tenses and he makes it into a nervous little smile, flashes it at Sheppard to see if it meets his approval. “Who knows? Might even be cathartic.”

“There you go,” Sheppard says, squeezing his shoulder. “Always look on the bright side. Better view, for one thing, and you don’t tend to get the cramps in your neck-”

He doesn’t notice that Rodney has gone still.

*

“No. This is not what we need. Again.”

*

Rodney shakes his head. “No,” he says. “Please.”

He gets down on his knees next to the shards of pottery and looks past Sheppard to the ocean. He drowned once. It was easier than this. Head down, eyes down, he says, “I’ll tell you what you want to know. Just make it stop. I can’t do this anymore.” He presses one hand against his forehead, as if they won’t be able to stick their hand right through his to get at what they want, as if he can actually stop them from taking whatever they want, and he says, again, “Please.”

Sheppard’s shoulders are hunched and his eyes are dark-he looks like the sky is falling again, and Rodney doesn’t know why. He hasn’t done anything wrong yet. They’ll get there-they always do-but not yet. He wonders if it’s a matter of nanoseconds, or microseconds, or even the hours that he spent with Kolya in the dark.

Maybe they need him.

Sheppard just stands there, horrified and angry, missing all of his cues, and Rodney says, “Here. Let me show you.”

He unlaces one of his boots.

When Sheppard finally gets down beside him, Rodney shows him how to make a cat’s cradle.

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