Mensa AU Fic Exchange: "Radical Treatments" for chanel_5
Title: Radical Treatments
Author: wanderingwidget
Characters: mensa!Sheppard, mensa!Rod
Setting: MENSA-verse
Rating: PG-13 for swearing
Warnings: Minor character death(s), rampant cliche abuse, hackneyed psychology, present tense
Summary: in which mensa!Sheppard is agoraphobic, Rod's overprotective, and Sumner's kind of an ass.
Recipient: chanel_5
Johnny Sheppard is such a very bad boy that, at seven years old and change, God decides to punish him by taking away his mother and unborn baby brother. He remembers that it was raining that night, and that Mommy was singing to him with one hand on the wheel and one over her stomach. He remembers lights, and sounds. He doesn't remember the crash.
He does remember sitting in the hospital waiting room until a pretty lady with hair like Mommy's comes to get him.
Rod doesn't remember running down the stairs to the gate room, he doesn't remember dropping to his knees next to Sheppard or reaching out to grasp his arm and pull him up so that he can see his face. What he remembers is Sheppard's glazed, empty eyes and the sticky wet feeling of the blood soaking his sleeve.
John Sheppard is so smart that, at the age of fourteen, he graduates from high school with a black eye and acceptance letters to MIT and Cal-Tech. The black eye is from Brad Connelly, his foster brother. The acceptance letters are hidden in the back of his sock drawer until he can talk to Becky (his caseworker) about being allowed to leave the state.
He doesn't go to the graduation ceremony. There's no reason to. His father won't be there, he hasn't seen him in over four years, since the Brewsters had tried to adopt him so that they could take him with them when they moved to England. Harry Sheppard sure didn't want to have anything to do with his only child, but that didn't mean he was going to give up the right to fuck John over six ways to Sunday.
The Brewsters send him a congratulations card that arrives five months late, forwarded twice before it reaches him in his single dorm room. John wouldn't hear from his father for almost a decade more.
Everything in the infirmary is controlled chaos, as if the end of the world is one penicillin dose away and everyone's just realized that the medicine cabinets are empty. Carson refuses to let him see Sheppard.
"We need to know what happened," Rod says. He tries to push past Carson's broad shoulders again, and he's pushed back again. "Colonel Sumner's going to want a report."
"And I'll tell him what I'm telling you. The last thing Dr. Sheppard needs right now is visitors agitating him." He sighs. "Besides, you'll not get any sense out of him. Not tonight."
Rod stews on that, glowering and leaning to the side as if he could see through the door and into Sheppard's private room if only Carson was out of the way. "What if I promise not to ask him any questions?" he tries.
The look Carson gives him is equal parts exasperation and determined bullheadedness, which was usually something that Rod liked in the man but right now it was between him and all of the answers he wanted, needed.
"Come back in the morning," Carson says. "But I won't make any promises."
"Is it really that bad?"
Carson shakes his head with a shrug. "Medically? No. A minor concussion, some bruises and abrasions. Psychologically?" He shrugs again. "That's not really my field."
John Sheppard, at the age of twenty-six, is burying his father. Row sixty-three, plot seven, right next to his wife and their son. He's surrounded by dozens of mourners, all of them in respectful black, and none of them with the slightest clue of who he is. He stands at the back of the crowd and watches the honor guard folds the flag and hands it to a woman named Hillary. John isn't sure what she'd been to his father. He's almost sure that he doesn't care.
He lingers, after the coffin has been lowered and the others have started to file back to their cars and their lives, until it's only him and Hillary and the guys standing by with the yellow CAT. Her makeup's smeared cartoonishly across her face, when she finally notices him, eyes widening. She sniffs.
It feels like her eyes are burning into him, seeking out all of his secrets and setting them on fire. He shifts uncomfortably and clears his throat. "Sorry for your loss," he manages.
She smiles at him, a gentle, wavering smile. "Did you know Harry?"
'Yes,' he wants. 'He was my father,' or 'I'm his son.' He wants to ask how he'd died. He wants to know what he was like. He wants to know if his father had ever even mentioned him at all. But his eyes are burning, and his throat is closing up and the gravestones are spinning around him. He clenches his hands into fists and forces himself to breathe.
"No," he says. "Not well."
The next morning Rod arrives in the infirmary armed with coffee (his), a carafe of that Athosian tea that only Sheppard and Teyla seem to really like (for Sheppard), and three hundred and thirty seven kilobytes of reasons why Carson should let him into Sheppard's room. After a long and sleepless night spent worrying over his friend's mental state what he finds is profoundly anti-climatic.
Sheppard's door is standing wide open. The nurses don't even glance at him as he makes his way across the infirmary. And Carson's nowhere to be seen. Rod stops in the doorway and stares, because what else can he do? He'd been expecting a shivering mess of a man or perhaps the over-medicated zombie version that could occasionally be spotted in the halls.
Instead he found Sheppard sitting up in bed, eating purple not-oatmeal with one hand and scribbling furiously on a yellow legal pad with the other. Sure, there's a bruise over one cheek and he's wearing light blue scrubs, not his usual defensive neon coloring, but Sheppard actually looks... Good. Honestly he looks better than he had before the damn mission. Sure, it's terribly Machiavellian, but Rod can't help thinking that - as disastrous as this entire experience has been - it might have been worth it if it could serve as a catalyst for Sheppard's recovery.
He clears his throat and Sheppard's head darts up, fixing his gaze on him for a moment before sliding it away to the left.
"I know how to get them back," he says before Rod can even ask how he's doing.
It's a good thing that he's still standing in the doorway, because Rod can use that as an excuse to step to the side and lean against it, just his usual casual slouch. He forces himself to ask the question, even if he doesn't want to know the answer.
"Get who back?"
"Ford, Parrish," Sheppard waves his spoon through the air in a vague circle. "That other one. I know how to get them back." He sounds, God, he actually sounds happy, as if he's just announced that of course he can MacGuyver together a few extra ZPM's and all he'll need is some bubblegum and a toothpick.
"Oh?" Rod says, and hides his frown by taking a healthy swig of coffee. It's too hot, burns the back of his throat and he doesn't care because Sheppard's actually looking at him for maybe the fourth time in over five years, and he's only doing it because he's had some sort of complete psychotic break.
John Sheppard, at the age of thirty-one, is the best computer programmer in the world. Hands down and without competition. He is the guy that other geeks want to be. Smart, funny, handsome, with all of the best jobs and all of the money that comes with them. He has his pick of positions, from a cushy offer from Carnegie Melon - they were salivating over the thought of getting him on their AI program - to intriguingly top-secret government contracts.
He vacations in Hokkaido for the snowboarding, in Australia for the surfing, and in France for the food. He makes his own hours, signs his own paychecks, and deals with only the rules and regulations that he feels like dealing with at any particular moment.
And on an otherwise perfectly normal Tuesday in September, in the middle of a Chicago subway station, he suffers a severe panic attack and becomes agoraphobic.
"I never should have asked him to go," Rod says, slumping further down into his chair and staring morosely at the gibberish scrolling past on his laptop's screen. Sheppard had spent the last six hours furiously typing what amounted to a load of pseudo-Alteran shit and convinced that it was somehow going to bring the dead back to life.
Zelenka, the Czech bastard, only shrugs in reply. At least he has the decency not to say 'I told you so.' Instead he says. "What does Dr. Heightmeyer have to say about all of this?"
Rod snorts and sets Sheppard's 'code' to scroll from the beginning. "Blah blah trauma blah blah Post Traumatic Stress Disorder blah blah dissociative states blah blah fucking blah." It's heart wrenchingly beautiful, Sheppard's code, simple and elegantly flowing - for all that it's an elegantly flowing river of shit - just like all of his code. Except for the part where Sheppard's never written anything utterly useless before.
Zelenka hmm's and peers over his shoulder.
"Sumner's gnashing at the bit to get in there and debrief him," Rod continues. In Rod's head Sumner has a paper chain hanging up in his office, and he's removing one brightly colored link for every hour, in celebration of being one hour closer to finally having an excuse to ship Sheppard back earth side.
"Mmm," Zelenka says. "Is very sad, but I do not understand what staring at product of deranged genius is supposed to accomplish," he points at the screen.
"He's not deranged," Rod says, automatically, sending a glare over his shoulder for good measure.
The expression on Zelenka's face is some wayside amalgamation of compassion and vindication. He's never liked Sheppard, had been against Rod recruiting him into the program from the beginning. "He believes the others they are still alive, yes? That is what this nothing is meant to do is to save them?"
Rod nods, knowing where this is going and closing his eyes, as if not being able to see it will make it go away.
"But they are dead, he watched them die with his eyes just yesterday. Believing the opposite of what is known, that is definition of deranged."
John Sheppard, at the age of thirty-nine, hasn't set foot outside of his apartment building in over six months. He does free-lance work from his home office, has his groceries delivered every other Tuesday by PeaPod, and telecommutes to his therapist's office twice a week (sometimes more). His apartment is on the fourth floor, which he shares with two other apartments. Mrs. Applegate (retired, widowed, brandisher of baked goods) owns the double across the hall while the Ingrams (newlyweds, no children, thrice weekly shouting matches) share his living room wall.
Everything is going absolutely fine until one Tuesday when the delivery boy knocks early and he opens the door to find a complete stranger holding his groceries. "Hi," the stranger says, somehow managing to extend a hand without so much as jostling one of the three bags he's holding. "I'm Rod McKay. I have a job offer for you."
"I'm not interested," John very calmly says before he slams the door shut in the man's face, turns the deadbolt, and throws up.
The scene when Rod returns to the infirmary is exactly what he'd been expecting that morning. Nurses waltzing in and out of Sheppard's room in a controlled one-two medical waltz and Sheppard himself in four point restraints, screaming bloody murder up at a needle wielding Carson.
"They're not dead," Sheppard screams, thrashing in his bonds. "I know they're not dead and I can bring them back if you'll just listen to me. Why won't anybody listen to me?"
"Easy there," Carson says, finally sinking the needle home in Sheppard's thigh muscle. "It'll be alright now."
Sheppard's eyes find Rod, somehow, through all the chaos. They're bloodshot and already sliding shut but Rod can see the pleading in them well enough. "I can bring them home," he mutters, fighting the sedative even as his body goes slack with it. "Can save them, why won't you let me?"
Everyone in the room lets out a collective sigh of relief as he finally succumbs to the drugs and slips away. They stand there for a moment, just watching him, before the nurses start their dance back up (at a much more subdued pace) and Carson takes Rod's arm and leads him through the door, shutting it gently behind them.
"Well," he says brightly. "That went better than expected."
At that moment Rod really, really wants to punch him. "I thought we weren't telling him?"
"We weren't, and then Sumner bullied his way past my nurses and let the cat out of the bag so to speak," Carson says. "He should stay down for the rest of the night. I don't suppose anything came of all that scribbling he was doing?"
"What? No, no, it was just. Gibberish."
John Sheppard, on his fortieth birthday, has a new therapist (her name's Heightmeyer and if there were such a thing as an agoraphobia groupie then her picture would be next to the definition), a new apartment (inside of a top-secret Antarctic military base buried under a ton of snow and ice), a new job (cracking alien computer code, which he could just as easily have hacked long distance from his home office), and a dozen new friends (who're almost as mentally damaged as he is, though they seem to be better at hiding it). The person he has to thank for it all, the one person to blame for dragging him out of self-imposed hermit hood and back into the 'field' as it were, is Dr. McKay and at this precise moment John can't decide if he wants to punch him or kiss him or demolish him on an atomic level with that weird Ancient drilling tool they'd found last week.
"You want me to go with you," he says, just to be clear. "To Atlantis."
Rod nods, grinning like a kid who's just been given a fifty and left alone in the arcade with his best buds. "Your genetic facility with the technology aside," Rod waved his hands as if physically brushing the fact that he was a genetic freak out of the air between them, "you're knowledge of Ancient and alien programming is phenomenal, in the past three months alone you've raised our understanding of their entire system tenfold and you would be invaluable to the expedition. I'd be an idiot if I didn't ask you to come."
To another galaxy. To an alien city on an unexplored planet in another galaxy with no guarantee that there would be any way back. It's everything he's ever wanted in his life - adventure, exploration, camaraderie, the chance to play with really cool alien toys - wrapped up in everything that he's learned to hate over the last decade, everything that terrifies him and keeps him hiding under the covers in his quarters like he's six again and they provide some protection from the big bad world beyond the door.
He'd be crazy to say no. It's the chance of a lifetime, a very probably once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and if he says no then there's no second guessing it, there's no changing his mind later on. If he says no then he'll always regret it.
He'd be crazy to say yes. Even aside from the obvious physical dangers involved in trekking across alien planets (bugs, diseases, lack of indoor plumbing) there are the much more concrete psychological factors. John knows his limits, they'd had to knock him out cold just to get him here and it'd taken two weeks before he'd even opened the door to his quarters and looked into the hall. He'd be absolutely useless in the sort of situations Rod was looking forward to. He'd be a liability.
Trying to explain all of that verbally takes some time, but John's almost sure he's gotten it across. Rod sits still, quietly listens, and then laughs in his face. Actually laughs in his face. John feels his cheeks heating up and turns himself away, unable even to match gazes with Rod's ear.
"It'll be fine," Rod says after finally getting his laughter under control. "You'll do fine. Besides, I'm going too, you aren't going to leave me to the tender mercies of Kavanaugh's coding expertise, are you?"
"What I want to know," Sumner is saying, his face an alarming shade of beetroot red even though his voice is so calm he could be talking about the weather, "is how the hell a crazy, doped up, severely injured geek managed to get past a full security detail and activate the gate without any clearance or authorization codes and then lock us out."
It's Rod, Sumner, and Elizabeth locked in Sumner's office and - respectively - glaring, glaring, and staring reproachfully at the wall. So far the only one doing any talking was Sumner. His office, just like his personality, is bland and military and practically empty. Elizabeth is sitting in the only chair and Sumner's pacing back and forth in front of her, as if she's somehow personally responsible for Sheppard fighting his way back up out of the anesthesia and haring off into the great unknown.
"You should have assigned a guard detail to him," Rod says.
Sumner rounds on him. "He's afraid of his own fucking shadow, aside from P3X-771 he hasn't set foot out of this city since he got here. I didn't have the manpower to devote to babysitting your pet whack job-"
"The only reason he's out there at all is because he's trying to save peoples lives."
"Yeah, dead people. Like I said, whack job," Sumner circled one finger at the side of his head.
"All you had to do was keep your mouth shut and lie to him, that's all you had to do."
"I wasn't going to stand there and listen to him blathering on about how he could save lieutenants Ford and Stackhouse. They're dead, they're all dead. He told us that himself."
"Gentlemen," Elizabeth speaks. It's enough of a shock that both of them shut up and turn to stare at her. She turns to Rod. "How long before we can use the gate again?"
"The macro he wrote was incredibly complex, but I'd say, oh, three hours. Or so?"
Sumner huffs.
"Then we have three hours to prepare a rescue."
John Sheppard, at the age of forty-five, is not ready for this.
"You're ready for this," Rod says, checking over the myriad straps attached to the field uniform before gripping John's shoulders and trying to get him to meet his eyes. "You're more than ready for this. I know you are."
John swallows and tries not to think about wide open skies, empty ground, or only three doses of Prozac being all that stands between him and a whole alien world. He shakes his head, opens his mouth to tell Rod what a mistake this is, that he can't do it he just can't, but Rod cuts him off with the statistics again.
"Moderate climate, completely uninhabited. The compound is structurally sound and it's only a five mile stroll from the gate, you'll be there before you know it. Get in, play with the Ancient architecture, and come home. Easy as that."
"If it's so easy then why aren't you coming?" John asks suspiciously.
"Paperwork," Rod answers immediately. "Sumner's grounded me from going off-world until I clear the personnel reviews."
"Trade you."
Rod just smirks and manhandles him out of the locker room and down the hall.
P3X-771 is just like Ford described it. Pale blue cloudless sky, a sea of golden brown grass surrounding the gate, and - just visible against the horizon - the gray bulk of the Ancient compound. Rod checks the HUD for life signs and comes up with only one, dead center of the compound.
Sumner hadn't been happy about letting him go alone, but it hadn't really taken that much convincing in the end. As far as he was concerned Sheppard was Rod's problem, if Rod wanted to handle it then that was no problem. Still, he'd offered to send a team of marines with him.
"Just in case the nut job puts up a fight."
Rod declined, as politely as he could manage, and then disappeared into the infirmary to stock up on happy pills and tranquilizers. He turned the ship in the direction of the compound and willed Sheppard to stay put, stay safe, until he could get to him.
Inside the compound is cold and gray, the walls thick and unadorned. Whatever purpose it had been built for, aesthetics certainly hadn't been taken into account. Rod checks his hand held life signs detector and takes another turn, bringing him to - surprise surprise - more stairs. They lead down into damp smelling darkness, darkness that doesn't abate even when he furiously thinks 'on' at the walls. No lights, or they'd burnt out, or they were running on a completely different interface.
With a sigh he pulls out his pen light and heads down into the dark.
He finds Sheppard on his knees, twenty feet north of the stairwell, in the dark. If he'd brought a light with him it'd burnt out or he'd dropped it. The thin beam of Rod's penlight shows him only flashes of rubble, the same gray industrial stone that makes up the walls and floors surrounding them.
"John," he calls out, pitching his voice quietly, trying not to startle him. Sheppard twitches, but doesn't turn or even shift in place.
"I couldn't save them," he says, voice flat. "It was, I couldn't, I could hear them but," he gestures at the rocks. Rod moves closer, so that he's standing at Sheppard's shoulder, the flashlight playing over the dust at their feet. He thinks he can see a smear of blood there, but doesn't let himself think about it.
"I couldn't move. It was only five miles, I could have run and brought back help but all I could do was fucking sit here and listen to them, listen to them-" he breaks off, voice hoarse, and Rod reacts without thinking. He drops to his own knees and pulls Sheppard to him, only mildly surprised when he allows Rod to tighten his hold.
It's not okay, it's not alright, it's not fine, but this is the moment when he's supposed to say something supportive. He opens his mouth, to lie, but no sounds come out.
They sit together in silence for a very long time, at least that's the way it seems, before Sheppard sniffs and pulls himself back, pushes shakily to his feet and swipes at his face with his sleeve.
"Let's go home," he says.
THE END
Poll Author, author!
Author: wanderingwidget
Characters: mensa!Sheppard, mensa!Rod
Setting: MENSA-verse
Rating: PG-13 for swearing
Warnings: Minor character death(s), rampant cliche abuse, hackneyed psychology, present tense
Summary: in which mensa!Sheppard is agoraphobic, Rod's overprotective, and Sumner's kind of an ass.
Recipient: chanel_5
Johnny Sheppard is such a very bad boy that, at seven years old and change, God decides to punish him by taking away his mother and unborn baby brother. He remembers that it was raining that night, and that Mommy was singing to him with one hand on the wheel and one over her stomach. He remembers lights, and sounds. He doesn't remember the crash.
He does remember sitting in the hospital waiting room until a pretty lady with hair like Mommy's comes to get him.
Rod doesn't remember running down the stairs to the gate room, he doesn't remember dropping to his knees next to Sheppard or reaching out to grasp his arm and pull him up so that he can see his face. What he remembers is Sheppard's glazed, empty eyes and the sticky wet feeling of the blood soaking his sleeve.
John Sheppard is so smart that, at the age of fourteen, he graduates from high school with a black eye and acceptance letters to MIT and Cal-Tech. The black eye is from Brad Connelly, his foster brother. The acceptance letters are hidden in the back of his sock drawer until he can talk to Becky (his caseworker) about being allowed to leave the state.
He doesn't go to the graduation ceremony. There's no reason to. His father won't be there, he hasn't seen him in over four years, since the Brewsters had tried to adopt him so that they could take him with them when they moved to England. Harry Sheppard sure didn't want to have anything to do with his only child, but that didn't mean he was going to give up the right to fuck John over six ways to Sunday.
The Brewsters send him a congratulations card that arrives five months late, forwarded twice before it reaches him in his single dorm room. John wouldn't hear from his father for almost a decade more.
Everything in the infirmary is controlled chaos, as if the end of the world is one penicillin dose away and everyone's just realized that the medicine cabinets are empty. Carson refuses to let him see Sheppard.
"We need to know what happened," Rod says. He tries to push past Carson's broad shoulders again, and he's pushed back again. "Colonel Sumner's going to want a report."
"And I'll tell him what I'm telling you. The last thing Dr. Sheppard needs right now is visitors agitating him." He sighs. "Besides, you'll not get any sense out of him. Not tonight."
Rod stews on that, glowering and leaning to the side as if he could see through the door and into Sheppard's private room if only Carson was out of the way. "What if I promise not to ask him any questions?" he tries.
The look Carson gives him is equal parts exasperation and determined bullheadedness, which was usually something that Rod liked in the man but right now it was between him and all of the answers he wanted, needed.
"Come back in the morning," Carson says. "But I won't make any promises."
"Is it really that bad?"
Carson shakes his head with a shrug. "Medically? No. A minor concussion, some bruises and abrasions. Psychologically?" He shrugs again. "That's not really my field."
John Sheppard, at the age of twenty-six, is burying his father. Row sixty-three, plot seven, right next to his wife and their son. He's surrounded by dozens of mourners, all of them in respectful black, and none of them with the slightest clue of who he is. He stands at the back of the crowd and watches the honor guard folds the flag and hands it to a woman named Hillary. John isn't sure what she'd been to his father. He's almost sure that he doesn't care.
He lingers, after the coffin has been lowered and the others have started to file back to their cars and their lives, until it's only him and Hillary and the guys standing by with the yellow CAT. Her makeup's smeared cartoonishly across her face, when she finally notices him, eyes widening. She sniffs.
It feels like her eyes are burning into him, seeking out all of his secrets and setting them on fire. He shifts uncomfortably and clears his throat. "Sorry for your loss," he manages.
She smiles at him, a gentle, wavering smile. "Did you know Harry?"
'Yes,' he wants. 'He was my father,' or 'I'm his son.' He wants to ask how he'd died. He wants to know what he was like. He wants to know if his father had ever even mentioned him at all. But his eyes are burning, and his throat is closing up and the gravestones are spinning around him. He clenches his hands into fists and forces himself to breathe.
"No," he says. "Not well."
The next morning Rod arrives in the infirmary armed with coffee (his), a carafe of that Athosian tea that only Sheppard and Teyla seem to really like (for Sheppard), and three hundred and thirty seven kilobytes of reasons why Carson should let him into Sheppard's room. After a long and sleepless night spent worrying over his friend's mental state what he finds is profoundly anti-climatic.
Sheppard's door is standing wide open. The nurses don't even glance at him as he makes his way across the infirmary. And Carson's nowhere to be seen. Rod stops in the doorway and stares, because what else can he do? He'd been expecting a shivering mess of a man or perhaps the over-medicated zombie version that could occasionally be spotted in the halls.
Instead he found Sheppard sitting up in bed, eating purple not-oatmeal with one hand and scribbling furiously on a yellow legal pad with the other. Sure, there's a bruise over one cheek and he's wearing light blue scrubs, not his usual defensive neon coloring, but Sheppard actually looks... Good. Honestly he looks better than he had before the damn mission. Sure, it's terribly Machiavellian, but Rod can't help thinking that - as disastrous as this entire experience has been - it might have been worth it if it could serve as a catalyst for Sheppard's recovery.
He clears his throat and Sheppard's head darts up, fixing his gaze on him for a moment before sliding it away to the left.
"I know how to get them back," he says before Rod can even ask how he's doing.
It's a good thing that he's still standing in the doorway, because Rod can use that as an excuse to step to the side and lean against it, just his usual casual slouch. He forces himself to ask the question, even if he doesn't want to know the answer.
"Get who back?"
"Ford, Parrish," Sheppard waves his spoon through the air in a vague circle. "That other one. I know how to get them back." He sounds, God, he actually sounds happy, as if he's just announced that of course he can MacGuyver together a few extra ZPM's and all he'll need is some bubblegum and a toothpick.
"Oh?" Rod says, and hides his frown by taking a healthy swig of coffee. It's too hot, burns the back of his throat and he doesn't care because Sheppard's actually looking at him for maybe the fourth time in over five years, and he's only doing it because he's had some sort of complete psychotic break.
John Sheppard, at the age of thirty-one, is the best computer programmer in the world. Hands down and without competition. He is the guy that other geeks want to be. Smart, funny, handsome, with all of the best jobs and all of the money that comes with them. He has his pick of positions, from a cushy offer from Carnegie Melon - they were salivating over the thought of getting him on their AI program - to intriguingly top-secret government contracts.
He vacations in Hokkaido for the snowboarding, in Australia for the surfing, and in France for the food. He makes his own hours, signs his own paychecks, and deals with only the rules and regulations that he feels like dealing with at any particular moment.
And on an otherwise perfectly normal Tuesday in September, in the middle of a Chicago subway station, he suffers a severe panic attack and becomes agoraphobic.
"I never should have asked him to go," Rod says, slumping further down into his chair and staring morosely at the gibberish scrolling past on his laptop's screen. Sheppard had spent the last six hours furiously typing what amounted to a load of pseudo-Alteran shit and convinced that it was somehow going to bring the dead back to life.
Zelenka, the Czech bastard, only shrugs in reply. At least he has the decency not to say 'I told you so.' Instead he says. "What does Dr. Heightmeyer have to say about all of this?"
Rod snorts and sets Sheppard's 'code' to scroll from the beginning. "Blah blah trauma blah blah Post Traumatic Stress Disorder blah blah dissociative states blah blah fucking blah." It's heart wrenchingly beautiful, Sheppard's code, simple and elegantly flowing - for all that it's an elegantly flowing river of shit - just like all of his code. Except for the part where Sheppard's never written anything utterly useless before.
Zelenka hmm's and peers over his shoulder.
"Sumner's gnashing at the bit to get in there and debrief him," Rod continues. In Rod's head Sumner has a paper chain hanging up in his office, and he's removing one brightly colored link for every hour, in celebration of being one hour closer to finally having an excuse to ship Sheppard back earth side.
"Mmm," Zelenka says. "Is very sad, but I do not understand what staring at product of deranged genius is supposed to accomplish," he points at the screen.
"He's not deranged," Rod says, automatically, sending a glare over his shoulder for good measure.
The expression on Zelenka's face is some wayside amalgamation of compassion and vindication. He's never liked Sheppard, had been against Rod recruiting him into the program from the beginning. "He believes the others they are still alive, yes? That is what this nothing is meant to do is to save them?"
Rod nods, knowing where this is going and closing his eyes, as if not being able to see it will make it go away.
"But they are dead, he watched them die with his eyes just yesterday. Believing the opposite of what is known, that is definition of deranged."
John Sheppard, at the age of thirty-nine, hasn't set foot outside of his apartment building in over six months. He does free-lance work from his home office, has his groceries delivered every other Tuesday by PeaPod, and telecommutes to his therapist's office twice a week (sometimes more). His apartment is on the fourth floor, which he shares with two other apartments. Mrs. Applegate (retired, widowed, brandisher of baked goods) owns the double across the hall while the Ingrams (newlyweds, no children, thrice weekly shouting matches) share his living room wall.
Everything is going absolutely fine until one Tuesday when the delivery boy knocks early and he opens the door to find a complete stranger holding his groceries. "Hi," the stranger says, somehow managing to extend a hand without so much as jostling one of the three bags he's holding. "I'm Rod McKay. I have a job offer for you."
"I'm not interested," John very calmly says before he slams the door shut in the man's face, turns the deadbolt, and throws up.
The scene when Rod returns to the infirmary is exactly what he'd been expecting that morning. Nurses waltzing in and out of Sheppard's room in a controlled one-two medical waltz and Sheppard himself in four point restraints, screaming bloody murder up at a needle wielding Carson.
"They're not dead," Sheppard screams, thrashing in his bonds. "I know they're not dead and I can bring them back if you'll just listen to me. Why won't anybody listen to me?"
"Easy there," Carson says, finally sinking the needle home in Sheppard's thigh muscle. "It'll be alright now."
Sheppard's eyes find Rod, somehow, through all the chaos. They're bloodshot and already sliding shut but Rod can see the pleading in them well enough. "I can bring them home," he mutters, fighting the sedative even as his body goes slack with it. "Can save them, why won't you let me?"
Everyone in the room lets out a collective sigh of relief as he finally succumbs to the drugs and slips away. They stand there for a moment, just watching him, before the nurses start their dance back up (at a much more subdued pace) and Carson takes Rod's arm and leads him through the door, shutting it gently behind them.
"Well," he says brightly. "That went better than expected."
At that moment Rod really, really wants to punch him. "I thought we weren't telling him?"
"We weren't, and then Sumner bullied his way past my nurses and let the cat out of the bag so to speak," Carson says. "He should stay down for the rest of the night. I don't suppose anything came of all that scribbling he was doing?"
"What? No, no, it was just. Gibberish."
John Sheppard, on his fortieth birthday, has a new therapist (her name's Heightmeyer and if there were such a thing as an agoraphobia groupie then her picture would be next to the definition), a new apartment (inside of a top-secret Antarctic military base buried under a ton of snow and ice), a new job (cracking alien computer code, which he could just as easily have hacked long distance from his home office), and a dozen new friends (who're almost as mentally damaged as he is, though they seem to be better at hiding it). The person he has to thank for it all, the one person to blame for dragging him out of self-imposed hermit hood and back into the 'field' as it were, is Dr. McKay and at this precise moment John can't decide if he wants to punch him or kiss him or demolish him on an atomic level with that weird Ancient drilling tool they'd found last week.
"You want me to go with you," he says, just to be clear. "To Atlantis."
Rod nods, grinning like a kid who's just been given a fifty and left alone in the arcade with his best buds. "Your genetic facility with the technology aside," Rod waved his hands as if physically brushing the fact that he was a genetic freak out of the air between them, "you're knowledge of Ancient and alien programming is phenomenal, in the past three months alone you've raised our understanding of their entire system tenfold and you would be invaluable to the expedition. I'd be an idiot if I didn't ask you to come."
To another galaxy. To an alien city on an unexplored planet in another galaxy with no guarantee that there would be any way back. It's everything he's ever wanted in his life - adventure, exploration, camaraderie, the chance to play with really cool alien toys - wrapped up in everything that he's learned to hate over the last decade, everything that terrifies him and keeps him hiding under the covers in his quarters like he's six again and they provide some protection from the big bad world beyond the door.
He'd be crazy to say no. It's the chance of a lifetime, a very probably once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and if he says no then there's no second guessing it, there's no changing his mind later on. If he says no then he'll always regret it.
He'd be crazy to say yes. Even aside from the obvious physical dangers involved in trekking across alien planets (bugs, diseases, lack of indoor plumbing) there are the much more concrete psychological factors. John knows his limits, they'd had to knock him out cold just to get him here and it'd taken two weeks before he'd even opened the door to his quarters and looked into the hall. He'd be absolutely useless in the sort of situations Rod was looking forward to. He'd be a liability.
Trying to explain all of that verbally takes some time, but John's almost sure he's gotten it across. Rod sits still, quietly listens, and then laughs in his face. Actually laughs in his face. John feels his cheeks heating up and turns himself away, unable even to match gazes with Rod's ear.
"It'll be fine," Rod says after finally getting his laughter under control. "You'll do fine. Besides, I'm going too, you aren't going to leave me to the tender mercies of Kavanaugh's coding expertise, are you?"
"What I want to know," Sumner is saying, his face an alarming shade of beetroot red even though his voice is so calm he could be talking about the weather, "is how the hell a crazy, doped up, severely injured geek managed to get past a full security detail and activate the gate without any clearance or authorization codes and then lock us out."
It's Rod, Sumner, and Elizabeth locked in Sumner's office and - respectively - glaring, glaring, and staring reproachfully at the wall. So far the only one doing any talking was Sumner. His office, just like his personality, is bland and military and practically empty. Elizabeth is sitting in the only chair and Sumner's pacing back and forth in front of her, as if she's somehow personally responsible for Sheppard fighting his way back up out of the anesthesia and haring off into the great unknown.
"You should have assigned a guard detail to him," Rod says.
Sumner rounds on him. "He's afraid of his own fucking shadow, aside from P3X-771 he hasn't set foot out of this city since he got here. I didn't have the manpower to devote to babysitting your pet whack job-"
"The only reason he's out there at all is because he's trying to save peoples lives."
"Yeah, dead people. Like I said, whack job," Sumner circled one finger at the side of his head.
"All you had to do was keep your mouth shut and lie to him, that's all you had to do."
"I wasn't going to stand there and listen to him blathering on about how he could save lieutenants Ford and Stackhouse. They're dead, they're all dead. He told us that himself."
"Gentlemen," Elizabeth speaks. It's enough of a shock that both of them shut up and turn to stare at her. She turns to Rod. "How long before we can use the gate again?"
"The macro he wrote was incredibly complex, but I'd say, oh, three hours. Or so?"
Sumner huffs.
"Then we have three hours to prepare a rescue."
John Sheppard, at the age of forty-five, is not ready for this.
"You're ready for this," Rod says, checking over the myriad straps attached to the field uniform before gripping John's shoulders and trying to get him to meet his eyes. "You're more than ready for this. I know you are."
John swallows and tries not to think about wide open skies, empty ground, or only three doses of Prozac being all that stands between him and a whole alien world. He shakes his head, opens his mouth to tell Rod what a mistake this is, that he can't do it he just can't, but Rod cuts him off with the statistics again.
"Moderate climate, completely uninhabited. The compound is structurally sound and it's only a five mile stroll from the gate, you'll be there before you know it. Get in, play with the Ancient architecture, and come home. Easy as that."
"If it's so easy then why aren't you coming?" John asks suspiciously.
"Paperwork," Rod answers immediately. "Sumner's grounded me from going off-world until I clear the personnel reviews."
"Trade you."
Rod just smirks and manhandles him out of the locker room and down the hall.
P3X-771 is just like Ford described it. Pale blue cloudless sky, a sea of golden brown grass surrounding the gate, and - just visible against the horizon - the gray bulk of the Ancient compound. Rod checks the HUD for life signs and comes up with only one, dead center of the compound.
Sumner hadn't been happy about letting him go alone, but it hadn't really taken that much convincing in the end. As far as he was concerned Sheppard was Rod's problem, if Rod wanted to handle it then that was no problem. Still, he'd offered to send a team of marines with him.
"Just in case the nut job puts up a fight."
Rod declined, as politely as he could manage, and then disappeared into the infirmary to stock up on happy pills and tranquilizers. He turned the ship in the direction of the compound and willed Sheppard to stay put, stay safe, until he could get to him.
Inside the compound is cold and gray, the walls thick and unadorned. Whatever purpose it had been built for, aesthetics certainly hadn't been taken into account. Rod checks his hand held life signs detector and takes another turn, bringing him to - surprise surprise - more stairs. They lead down into damp smelling darkness, darkness that doesn't abate even when he furiously thinks 'on' at the walls. No lights, or they'd burnt out, or they were running on a completely different interface.
With a sigh he pulls out his pen light and heads down into the dark.
He finds Sheppard on his knees, twenty feet north of the stairwell, in the dark. If he'd brought a light with him it'd burnt out or he'd dropped it. The thin beam of Rod's penlight shows him only flashes of rubble, the same gray industrial stone that makes up the walls and floors surrounding them.
"John," he calls out, pitching his voice quietly, trying not to startle him. Sheppard twitches, but doesn't turn or even shift in place.
"I couldn't save them," he says, voice flat. "It was, I couldn't, I could hear them but," he gestures at the rocks. Rod moves closer, so that he's standing at Sheppard's shoulder, the flashlight playing over the dust at their feet. He thinks he can see a smear of blood there, but doesn't let himself think about it.
"I couldn't move. It was only five miles, I could have run and brought back help but all I could do was fucking sit here and listen to them, listen to them-" he breaks off, voice hoarse, and Rod reacts without thinking. He drops to his own knees and pulls Sheppard to him, only mildly surprised when he allows Rod to tighten his hold.
It's not okay, it's not alright, it's not fine, but this is the moment when he's supposed to say something supportive. He opens his mouth, to lie, but no sounds come out.
They sit together in silence for a very long time, at least that's the way it seems, before Sheppard sniffs and pulls himself back, pushes shakily to his feet and swipes at his face with his sleeve.
"Let's go home," he says.
THE END
Poll Author, author!