Fic: Meeting of Minds - Part 1 of 2 (McKay/Sheppard, NC-17)
Title: Meeting of Minds
Author: florahart
Recipient: lilyfarfalla
Pairing: John/Rodney
Rating: NC17
Words: 19,950, give or take
Spoilers: There is reference to Last Man, but no reference to the canonical end of the series. So, either between those two somewhere, or AU sometime after Last Man. Not otherwise AU.
Warnings: So, there is a thing in here which I expect if I leave completely and totally unwarned, a few folks would feel unhappy about it; however, I can't figure out how to warn for it effectively. [It is not, though, any of the things that are among the most likely to trigger (it is not rape or abuse or anything like that). It could, though, be perceived as an uncomfortable kind of deception. If you as a reader really need to know more than that and don't want to wait for reveals or rely on others to tell you, feel free to leave a comment to that effect, and I'll explain via anon PM or via the mods or something.]
Author's Notes: This has maybe less team than the recipient could have hoped, although there is some. Thanks to L and E for lightning-fast above-and-beyond beta services, and to the mods for patience.
Summary: So, let's see: the world is gray, there's no sound, Rodney can't find John or Teyla, and Ronon is evidently moonlighting as an accountant. Yeah, this is going to be a good day.
The silence on this planet is the first thing Rodney notices.
It's deafening.
And kind of creepy.
Also, why is it so dark? Not midnight dark or anything, but he's just about sure they expected something mid-afternoon local, and this is definitely more dawn-or-dusk, less afternoon. It's grayish all around--colors ranging from grayish-mauve to grayish-tan to grayish-cobalt, and he gets the feeling even with better light, the whole place would be as visually silent as it is auditorially. Is auditorially a word? Hm. Aurally? Well, there's no sound, and the light is weird, and everything is gray.
He turns to wonder aloud at the rest of the team, and that's when his day goes from bad to worse.
By a lot.
He takes it all in in a second: the gate itself, glowing eerily some sort of purple that's more red than blue and symbols all wrong in a way that feels like inside-out, not upside-down; the absence of anything he recognizes as possibly the DTD; the way his team consists of Lorne in civvies and Zelenka in gray-green (well at least it fits the general mood of the place) camouflage gear and, and is that Robinson from Medical? Wearing a turban and a sash comprised of bells that don't ring? Maybe they do ring, and it's that Rodney's actually gone deaf.
Crap, what if he's gone deaf? Not that he does all that much of his communicating verbally--well, no, he talks, but listening isn't that important--but he rather likes listening to himself shout when he's worked up a good head of steam.
Thinking about this can wait. Zelenka and Lorne, who is limping, or maybe more staggering, are moving past him, and Robinson's moving out to a flanking position.
And then there's Ronon bringing up the rear, Ronon who one half of his brain recognizes as Ronon, but the other half insists is short, pudgy, balding, and bespectacled. With knives and guns, as per usual, and the whole purposeful stride thing, so that part's all right, but where the hell is Sheppard, and what possessed anyone to send out a team of two physicists, a doctor, an accountant-cum-warrior, and Lorne?
Something is very wrong.
Before he can make his observations aloud, Zelenka's hand is up, a fist, and everybody stops.
Except Rodney, because yes, he knows all about the hand signals but what the hellis wrong with the universe, with Zelenka gone all military signals for once--and yes, they do all know this shit, but since when does Zelenka apply any of it--and Accountant Ronon crouching behind a tree.
"I must have hit my head," he says to no one in particular. Everyone else glares at him in a weird conflation of outrage and horror. Maybe; he doesn't know Robinson well enough to be sure he's making sense of expressions on her.
On the plus side, that he heard his own voice demonstrates to his satisfaction that he hasn't gone deaf.
Unless he knows what he said and therefore only imagined hearing himself say it. That's a possibility to be considered.
Zelenka runs his hand across his throat, a clear signal probably in any sign language to stop talking, but why? This is obviously a nightmare, and what's Radek going to do, curse at him in Czech or something?
Rodney pinches himself hard, then yelps.
Ronon reaches out and drags him down into a couple of exceptionally scratchy bushes.
He's really strong for an accountant, especially a short one. Rodney's on his ass in about two seconds in a patch of thorns which are, predictably, grayish, so at least there's some internal consistency; Rodney isn't sure whether to be glad or annoyed.
He settles on annoyed because there are thorns in his ass.
"Shrro," Ronon says quietly as he hands Rodney an enormous knife.
Rodney grabs it, puzzled, then winces when the blade cuts into his fingers.
Ronon stares at him like he's gone mad--oh, hey, there's another possibility to be considered--and slowly takes the knife back and points to the different parts. "Klaa. Dirrin." Blade, handle. Right.
"So, if I've got this right," Rodney says in an undertone, "Ronon the Accountant speaks Klingon and for some reason Zelenka's been awarded Sheppard's job and apparently received advanced military skulkery training at some point without my awareness. Oh, and the gate is pink."
"Cho'k Shrro."
Shrro means quiet, then. Or idiot. Or stop.
He's going to wake up soon, right? Because his fingers really hurt where they're bleeding (not to mention his ass, which, ow), and with no DTD, it's not like he can go back.
He looks around Ronon again, hoping for the damn thing to have appeared. No dice, and Ronon waves a hand in front of his face. "Rodney, chhht kuip."
Right.
Rodney glances at Zelenka's hand signals and moves forward in sync with the group because the other choice doesn't seem any better, though being stubborn wouldn't be out of character, and he does consider it for a second. No, too many variables being variant, and no way to even weed out a few without stopping to try to understand.
As they move, starting and stopping irregularly, Rodney wonders where John is, and how it's come to pass that the only military man among them--well, Ronon is, when he's not an accountant, but that's different--isn't in the lead.
Something is very, very wrong.
He feels for his--what the hell? In the midst of noticing that everyone else on this trip is altered, even when he looked down at his own hands he's managed to miss that he isn't himself, either.
Ronon called him Rodney, though, so the choices are... he could be hallucinatory. That would explain a lot. Except he doesn't think he's hallucinating the bleeding, and shouldn't someone be bandaging this? Asking seems like a bad idea. He doesn't speak Klingon anyway.
Finally, one of the times they stop, he realizes he might not have his laptop or any other piece of reasonable technology (and what the hell; he's also just noticed Ronon, walking just in front of him, has guns, like, old-fashioned, what are they, flint-locks? Nothing that will stop a Wraith, so shrroing, if that's being quiet, it probably a pretty good idea.), but he does have paper and a... really horrible pencil of sorts.
He gets out both, along with a balled-up strip of fabric that isn't nearly clean enough to use to bind up an open wound, but as no one else seems to be interested, and he doesn't find anything else to use for the task, it seems marginally preferably to continuing to drip blood.
Actually, now that he thinks about it, dripping blood is probably a pretty good way to scream injured person, possibly weak and attackable to whatever in the local fauna represents tiger in the food chain.
Don't pudgy Ronon and hardcore Zelenka even know that? What the hell?
At the next stop, in a moment of genius if he does say so himself, he realizes that his little pad of paper is considerably cleaner than his muslin or linen or whatever the hell the strip of fabric is, and is also relatively porous, so it ought to absorb okay. Infection on top of pink gates seems like a lousy idea, so he constructs a little pad out of a torn-off page and places that against the wound, then wraps the fabric around and ties it off, cutting the fabric with Ronon's knife. Hopefully the bleeding has washed out anything horrible that was on the blade itself. The shushed sound of tearing the flimsy paper earns him a glare from Lorne, but as far as he can tell, Lorne is not very much more useful than he is, in this context, so he just glares back and proceeds.
At the stop after that, he starts writing. He needs to gather his thoughts.
Zelenka takes off his glasses and rubs them on the tail of the t-shirt he has on under the camo, He looks at Rodney as he does so, and Rodney gets the idea he's memorizing the words he's jotting down from way over there and with his glasses off. Weird.
Not that it will matter; he doesn't know their language, and if they know his, then it's just damn rude not to use it, since they've all heard him speak. And Zelenka's usually not rude, or at least, is a lot less rude than Rodney. If the usual Zelenka is anything to go by, which, yes, that's a bit of a stretch, given everything, but again, too many variables. He keeps writing down the things he's noticed so far, and hopes for some sort of pattern to emerge.
After a few minutes, Zelenka signals another move, so Rodney picks up Ronon's knife and follows along. He can't make any suggestions--like, any--until he has some idea what the hell is going on and until they stop long enough, or talk long enough, to establish anything that resembles communication within the team. Military stop-and-go hand signals don't really cover much in the way of abstraction, and they certainly don't include most of the possible answers for, or the question, what the actual fuck?, so it's going to be a while.
The sky brightens, all at once, and Rodney ducks down, hands over his head, and waits for the explosion. Instead, he gets Ronon again, tugging him upright and pointing. "Nrrch'a." He rumbles a few more words, which clearly mean something on the order of, everything's fine, don't be a two-year-old, it's just a little bit of light (nrrch'a?) you idiot, then hands Rodney back his paper and pencil (now damp), and trudges away.
Rodney looks up. The sky is still light, and no explosion has commenced. What the hell? This is ...daylight? It's not especially bright, and there's no apparent point of origin--no visible sun--but the light is lasting and consistent, and it feels like a really cloudy day in some indefinable way. Ergo, daylight, yes. Okay, so language, people, and physics are all fucked up. Perfect. Rodney doesn't think he's likely to forget this part, but he makes a note anyway. Might as well.
They're basically still walking when dusk returns, also all at once. Rodney has no idea when that is, because he has nothing on him keeping time and the whole sudden night and day deal isn't all that conducive to keeping time in his head. Not that that's ever been a skill he's mastered.
In any case, it's been long enough that despite one longish break that involved disgusting green-and-blue (and naturally, gray) ration bars and brief naps (sitting up, unsatisfying), Rodney's exhausted, and finally, he's had it.
He stops, sits down, and waits for the rest of the group to notice.
Ronon comes back first (again), though he can see Zelenka and Lorne stopped up ahead; he has no idea where Robinson's wandered off to, but she must be here somewhere. Also, he's pretty sure that glow to the... he's going to call it south for fun because how the fuck is he supposed to manage any sense of direction with the sun on a switch and no useful landmarks? Anyway, he's pretty sure that glow is the weird pinkish of the gate, which means they've come back in a circle, but there is no part of him that wants to express this belief to any of his colleagues.
God, why isn't Teyla here? Teyla would at least listen before correcting the errors of his ways, assuming they could overcome the language barrier.
His fingers throb, and he stares at them, at the dried-to-grayish dark blood on the makeshift bandage (at least it was bright red when it exited him; that's probably something).
"Rodney. Cho'k Mrn'not." Ronon's crouched next to him, and his face isn't really irritated, just kind of tired, which is in its own way comforting; at least Ronon is finding this experience a little wearing too. Also, Cho'k is a word he said before, when he was saying to be quiet (maybe); Rodney mouths the words he's just heard and scribbles them phonetically.
God, a dictionary would be useful right now. Even babelfish, if it speaks Grayquietian.
He looks up, chin stubborn, and says--quietly, this time; he does learn--"No, not until we rest."
Ronon sighs and sits down on the ground next to him, reaching for Rodney's pad and paper. Rodney spends a couple of seconds arguing with himself (is Ronon going to hurt his notes? Or help them?) then hands it over, and Ronon flips the page and starts marking, a quick circle with a corona around it and a little trapezoidish thing beneath, a fairly straight line from it marked with what Rodney guesses is a local X, though it looks more like some sort of Scandinavian or Old-English, whatsit, a thorn or something. Some kind of rune, anyway. Next to that, Ronon draws a knife, and a hand.
Okay, so it's a map; he already knew that. He gestures keep going, and Ronon grins, one of those brief fierce grins that he doles out once a week or so if you're nice to him and he thinks you're doing a good job. Great; he's used up his stock of proud-Ronon on being able to identify a fucking map. This experience just keeps drawing closer to perfection at every turn.
Ronon goes back to drawing: another rune, a tiny little disgusting ration bar, another rune and a gesture to the ground: here and now.
Soon enough, the point of the map is clear; it's to demonstrate that they're nearly there. Nearly to the city. Assuming the map is to anything remotely resembling scale, which, Rodney thinks it's a lot to ask that he trust this, but then, both an accountant and the usual runner-warrior-whatever type Ronon is the rest of the time probably grasp the importance of proportionality, at least on some rudimentary level, and there would be little point in drawing the map in order to lie to him because that's a trick that would only work once.
Rodney gestures for the pencil and draws a line from start to finish above the map's path, and hatches in something that maybe is close(ish) to representing hours, and hands it back with the part between Now and City left unhatched and his eyebrows raised. Ronon holds up two fingers, then shrugs and folds the second one halfway down.
All right, fine, they'll go on. Ronon had better not be lying.
--
The city, when they finally reach it (Rodney guesses maybe a shade under two hours, though certainly well more than an hour and a half, and it's gloomy unfocused day again and so does that mean they've been walking for two days? What kind of design was that, as far as gate placement?) is dimly lit and eerily familiar, like one other time when they found themselves in a duplicate of Atlantis.
Weird.
This one's not grown-over, and it's not actually complete, but the central tower is there, and it's apparent as they enter the main gate that some of the ground-level parts--the jumper bay that on Atlantis can be approached via the ocean, for instance--are present but not used, because whole areas are sort of cut-away, like a giant life-size model or something. Rodney wonders for a minute if the dark cavernous jumper bay has, you know, jumpers, and whether this would be a whole lot faster of a way to get back to the pink gate when the time comes. He points to where it should be and tugs at Ronon's arm, because clearly this Ronon knows this place (how? Unknown. This is on the very long list of questions).
Ronon glances toward the black, or actually, dark gray, how shocking, there's more gray, hole, and shrugs. "Chaam'ra. Ge'hn til."
It's probably a coincidence how Chaam'ra almost sounds like Jumper. Or, Rodney's telepathically learning a language he'd never even heard of; this seems unlikely.
He keeps on walking toward the tower, wondering whether at least they'll have any sort of translation device or proper data modeling tools or, oh, anything useful.
Ronon sticks close to him, having evidently taken him under his wing, if the warning-off looks are anything to go by. Other people, ones who are not at all familiar which is weird since the team all is, sort of, though he's no longer completely sure Zelenka is Zelenka, and Lorne is now dressed in a hospital gown (what the fuck>), are staring at him, and whispering, bizarre rustling noises that are even less like English than anything Ronon's said so far. Ronon's striding pudgily/purposefully next to him, staring back as needed.
After a brief moment of consideration, Rodney opts to ignore both the staring and the protectiveness and simply follow Lorne's hospital gown because at this point he's so fucking far down the rabbit hole he doesn't even know how the hell he's not either drowning in an underwater reservoir or bursting into flame due to direct contact with magma or something, so what the hell, play it out. The only other option is panicking, and that usually ends badly.
He allows himself several seconds to consider that Sheppard would probably be pleased with his excellent non-panicking, even without anyone doing much to talk him down.
Unless he's drugged or something. That would explain it. No, he likes the personal-growth option better.
The tower, on the inside, is burnished-copper and old iron, and the control room is bustling with hurried--not frantic, just efficient--activity.
Rodney stands quiet while Ronon and maybe-Zelenka explain him to the woman in charge. She's neither Elizabeth nor Sam (nor even Woolsey), and she's clearly on the military side, dressed like Zelenka but possessing stripes on her chest pocket that, if he knows anything about how this sort of things works, are probably a pretty decently-high rank designation.
She keeps looking at him, glancing back and forth between the explanation being offered, and him, eyes raking up and down him as though she's checking for defects.
Well, or as if she's inspecting him like so much meat, which is a little disconcerting since it's the sort of thing he's seen women (and not a few men) do to John, but generally not to him. Big surprise: he's a little rounder, a little shorter, a little (okay a lot) less friendly, not that this body is the usual one, but he doubts he managed to acquire the body of Adonis as the single upside to this little adventure. So yeah, she's probably checking for defects.
After a while, she steps toward him and puts out a hand that isn't for shaking (as he realizes when he puts out his in an effort to greet, and meets empty air). She grips his shoulder and meets his gaze solidly, and says his name.
It's the only word here any of them have in common with him so far; he realizes that just because he'd been aware of who Ronon and Lorne and Zelenka are, he hasn't heard any of them say each other's names.
He nods. "Rodney," he says. "Rodney."
Her answer is a string of words in Weirdplacean, among which are some sounds that might be Zelenka if one pushed around the vowels more than a little and adjusted consonants into local dialect. He puts up both hands in what he hopes is the universally-appreciated sign for oh my god stop too much, and repeats just the one word. "Zelenka."
"Sholienn'akh." The unnamed woman beams at him and points.
"Good," Rodney says. He points at Ronon. "And?"
Her face crumples a little, but Rodney quickly realizes his mistake. 'And' is not Ronon's name, and neither is good--though that seems to have bothered her less, maybe because he was smiling. But that's what they're doing. They're establishing common ground. He shakes his head a little. "Wait. No. Ronon."
She grins again. This is going to take a while, since right now they're barely managing to communicate that they have the same names, but when she lifts her hand off his shoulder and runs her fingers into his hair above his ear, it only takes a second to realize she's not combing his hair; she's checking him for some kind of injury--not deficiency so much as damage, and she's pretty happy about the fact that they're communicating to any effect at all.
Or, maybe not happy so much as relieved.
He has no idea why this unknown woman with her calloused gentle fingers at his temple and her untied boots is so relieved that he's all right, but maybe once they knock out enough words to come up with a pidgin of any sort, he can ask who she is. Relative to the real world, that is; he imagines he'll get her name eventually, and for all he doesn't actually give a rat's furry ass about minutiae like names, he finds he wants to know hers.
She removes her hand from his head and grips his shoulder again, and just to get her attention back (and wow, Rodney, pathetic much?) he brings up his lamely-bandaged fingers.
She glances back at Ronon, who says something about a blade (hey, progress), and Rodney gets a goofy grin and a clap to the shoulder, and then he's being led back out of the control room and down a couple of levels.
The doctor looks nothing like Carson, and he can't quite see Jennifer in her (he doesn't ask; he's a little afraid it is Jennifer and either she'll be all painfully empathetic despite that they can't understand each other, which is, okay it's nice to be cared for, but it also drives Rodney a little insane when she's so damn young which isn't fair to her because she is young, for one thing, but still, he doesn't want to invoke it), but his fingers clean up quickly, and he doesn't even need stitches, so that's good. He's sent away with another clap on the shoulder, and he stands to go ...back to his quarters? Where is he supposed to go? Ronon's gone, and he doesn't recognize a soul.
He reminds himself that panicking is pointless and leads to getting shot in the ass or some other equally-unpleasant option, and looks around until Maybe Jennifer glances his way. He waves his uninjured hand, and gets out the paper and pencil, sketching the tower, the medical department, and a brief route between them. Then he draws a bed.
The doctor frowns.
Rodney looks at the bed. It's not that bad. Huh. He tries again, then starts to draw a line out of here and to the bed, and the doctor's face clears.
He wonders what she thought he was asking; he isn't sure whether that makes the Jennifer potential more likely or less. Well, either way, someone in a nurse's outfit (gray, but otherwise something probably straight out of the standard male fantasy costume catalog and certainly nothing any nurse on Atlantis has ever worn, at least not where he could see) leaves Lorne's side to escort him to his quarters.
They're right where he left them, which is all wrong because they're not his. The door and the room are in the right place, yes, but his laptops are gone, and there's nothing but his bed and his clothes, muted down into gray and minus the maple leaf on the relevant patches.
He considers this for a minute, then nods something he hopes passes as thanks at the nurse and waits for her to go before sitting down on the side of the bed and unlacing his boots. He's starving, but he's kind of afraid the food will be as unappealing as everything else here (everything except the wild-haired woman in the tower, and he tells his subconscious to shush about that because it's a supremely bad idea to even consider any sort of, what, liaison? with someone with whom he shared about six words, all of them names), and he's not so sure it'll be worth it.
He opens cabinets idly until he finds one that does contain food. More Disgusting Ration Bars ™, but this is one of those emergencies for which such things are intended. He looks at the wrapper (surprise! grayish!) and considers the likelihood that this alternate universe (has to be, right?) also has lemons, and that he's allergic to them. And whether it's likely that lemon extract is in a DRB.
He concludes that if there is lemon extract and the AU Gods are in fact mocking him, he's just not up to the task of trying to defeat that anyway, and probably dying of alternative lemon poisoning is no worse than being eaten by a grue, so he tears the thing open, gives it a cursory sniff (more old unsalted wildebeesty than lemony) and takes a bite.
Still disgusting, still not lemon, and enough to get along until morning. Or, at least, lights-on-time, whenever that might be.
He finishes the bar and then yanks off his boots (still unlaced, because why bother tying them just to go 'home' from medical, but that reminds him again of the woman in the tower, which is a little confusing). He leaves them right there next to the bed, one tipped over and the other upright, before flopping back onto his pillow and turning on his side.
Things will look better in the "morning," clearly, since the other choice is assuming they won't and that's really depressing. It's kind of odd that he's going for the non-depressing option, but maybe he's acquiring wisdom in his old age.
Not that he's old; it's a figure of speech.
As he drifts toward sleep, he wonders whether John will spend forever finding him--he's probably not going to have to look millennia into the future and create a holographic self to do it, so he can probably handle the math, right? And then he wonders how long he'll have to be here, first. The advantage to the whole distant future thing, as he understands the story, was in getting there first so John wouldn't have to wait.
He sighs and puts that thought aside, then starts going back over the words he maybe-knows here until he's asleep.
--
A good night's sleep really does do wonders; Rodney wakes in the morning (or, all right, in the time when he wakes after having been asleep for a long time, which it's easier to call morning than some time in the light-gray portion of the time chunks) feeling a whole lot lighter of spirit than before, and a whole lot more confident that it will be possible to figure out what the hell is going on.
He's starving, of course, so first things first; he goes off to the mess hall and looks around for John or Teyla or Ronon or whatever facsimile of them he can find, and really, shouldn't there be a Teyla? Because she wasn't out in the not-woods with them, and she isn't who was in command.
Maybe here, she spends all her time teaching people to fight gracefully with sticks, and doesn't do missions.
He ignores the tiny voice that suggests that maybe here, she is lost to Michael.
Actually, if Ronon's an accountant, what would that make Michael? A therapist?
He amuses himself enough he almost spits his (gray) coffee.
For the record, gray coffee tastes about as good as it sounds; however, he does note that it seems to have the same useful effect of waking him up in quantities roughly as usual, so he takes a fourth cup with him and goes looking for his lab.
Surely he has one.
It occurs to him to see if he can find Zelenka; maybe despite the apparent expertise in skulkitude, he still also works with Rodney in the lab. However, he can't remember how to fuck up the name in the right direction to make it sound right, and also, going around saying "Zelenka? Zelenka?" reminds him of the dreadful book he used to read Jeannie when she was small, in which a bird asks a tractor-trailer or, oh, some piece of construction equipment? whether it is its mother. And that's just beyond undignified.
Even if it's unlikely Zelenka--or half the expedition, really--would have the same point of reference even if he mentioned it; most of them aren't big on little kids.
Except for Teyla, whom he still hasn't seen.
Probably.
Eventually he stops trying to figure out how, exactly, a Teyla-analog might show up here (it's hard to come up with a single composite to attempt to look for, because she's not exactly the easiest woman he's ever met, as far as classifying her, plus, just look at the local Ronon), and just lets his feet carry him to where his lab should be. It's there, so he lets himself in.
The lab admits him; it looks more or less right, and nothing in it works.
Rodney sits scowling on a bench and glares at the useless hunks of tin and silicon that should be laptops for several minutes before turning his glare on the useless hunks of iron and copper and whatever other red-toned metals they have here (maybe amethyst crystals, he thinks, glancing idly at the ceiling for a moment). These useless hunks should be ancient tech, and they look like they are, but they remain inert in his hands, and it sort of stands to reason that that wouldn't work, if his own genes are intact but nothing else here is the same.
He wonders if Lorne is all right.
After a while, just as he's considering whether he even wants to know if there's a functioning coffee dispenser in here, the door swishes open, and Command Chick strides in. Her walk is assured, like Ronon's, but looser, and Rodney cocks his head to the side, looking at her. "Hi," he ventures.
Her words (naturally) make no sense, but the tone is clear, like there's meaning in melody (how stupid is that? Unless you're a whale, melody isn't exactly the most efficient way to convey anything, and he's pretty sure they're not whales. He'd have to be both hallucinating human form and unable to speak the native language, and that seems unlikely. Unlikelier, Crap. He goes back to trying to listen). The meaning he comes away with is, Here you are; I've been looking for you.
"Sorry."
No problem. Just checking in.
Okay, see, that's too complex a message for a simple melody, not that she's singing or anything, to actually carry a whole message forward, so he's probably reading stuff in that isn't there. Still, it's good to be having a conversation. "Thanks for your concern," he says.
The response is a sort of exasperated snort that needs no translation.
"Hey, I sometimes say thank you. Occasionally. If it really needs to be said."
Command Chick beckons, and hey, nothing in here works, so why not? He follows her to the door, then stops. "Hey. Wait."
She looks over her shoulder, then turns a little, eyebrows up, waiting. As requested.
"Uh." He points to himself. "Rodney."
"Rodney," she agrees.
He points at her. And waits.
She tilts her head and rumbles out a string of syllables that would probably confound a Universal Translator if they had such a thing anyway, then presses her lips together and turns away. "Chieh'ad, ngeh."
He isn't sure if that's her name. "Chieh'ad?"
She turns around. "Rodney."
Okay, so it'll do. It's sort of depressing what constitutes progress.
He follows Chieh'ad to the edge of the city, where it sits amid tall gray grasses and reeds, where there are no functional jumper bays and no expanse of blue water (or of horrifying open space that is a vacuum which is a bad, bad thing when your shields go down--no worries on that front, here), and has a seat on what should be a pier and is instead a rock wall, formed of old and crumbled rock.
Rodney looks at the wall. It really is pretty crumbled, and it doesn't look all that sturdy, but she seems pretty content there, so he sits down as well.
She opens a pouch in the bag she's carrying against her hip and hands him something canned which probably is the local analog of beer. It's really awful, but the sense of camaraderie that comes with sipping at beer together and tossing rocks into the water (all right, twigs into the grass), is comfortable. He's glad they came here.
Even if he really needs to find people whom he can communicate with, and who have any idea where the hell he is.
Finally, on his third beer (the taste is growing on him, or, he's getting a little tipsy and caring less), he just starts talking. What can it hurt, he asks himself. He can't understand them, and yesterday's and incident demonstrates they can't really understand him, either. Might as well see if they can accidentally stumble on a topic they can discuss.
"So, the last thing I remember," he says, "is going through the gate, though I have a niggling suspicion there was some part afterward that I can't quite see. Usual team--me, Sheppard, Teyla, Ronon."
"Rohn'on," she repeats, nodding. "Teii'lah."
"Right, and Sheppard, and also, why haven't I seen the others but have seen people I know? Lorne isn't with my team, and Zelenka only comes through the gate if there's actually a reason for him to, so I don't know how he came to be here. Wherever here is."
She sips her beer and listens intently, glancing again and again at his forehead or into his hair, where she touched before.
"Is there something in my hair?" he asks. He puts up his hand and feels nothing. "Well, anyway. It was a routine enough mission, you know, just looking around, and then--then I was here. And everything was all backwards and wrong."
She asks a question he can't understand, but if he doesn't listen to the words, he imagines she might mean, did anything happen? anything unusual?
"Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I suppose yes, something unusual must have happened, because it's not usual to wind up in PinkGateville unable to communicate, so I'd have to say yes, something unusual happened, but I don't know what it was. And I have no tools here to figure it out." He pauses. "Are there tools? Laptops? Ancient tech?"
He pats his pockets and rolls his eyes at himself; the paper and pencil are back in his forlorn empty quarters, and therefore he of course has no way to try to draw a laptop, since it's pretty clear from everything he's seen that they don't have an alphabet in common any more than they do a language, and probably efforts to write would be futile.
Not that he'd probably be that much better at drawing laptops than bedrooms. And given the bed effort, she'd probably think he was suggesting cybersex, which he wouldn't be.
Though, uh, that's a concept worth considering if he finds himself here a long time. And if it's not sacrilege or something. First things first: language acquisition. Problematically, he wasn't even good at French, and that was mandatory and long-lasting and, you know, taught.
He drops the laptop concept and takes a deep breath, trying not to just be frustrated. He's not good at that either. "I really do need something to do, something to work on," he says. He sounds petulant even to himself, and okay, if there's really nothing here he can work on and no one he can talk to, this should be a vacation, right? A vacation that's quiet and restful, like the ones he's supposed to go on periodically, that Jeannie asks him to go on. Well. Tells, actually, not that she's in charge, although it's possible she may have some kind of really small point in there somewhere.
"Jeannie would think I should kick back," he says.
"Chi'dii cha'kt deruukta."
"Yes, Jeannie. You know her?"
"Chi'dii cha'kt dekhakrh."
"Still nothing. Except the name. Basically all I have is names, even for the Jumpers. Weird that yours isn't anyone." He shrugs. "I was expecting you to be Elizabeth, maybe."
"Yillsha'h cha'kt dekhakrh."
"Elizabeth is ...gone. Gone away, from the expedition, and effectively dead as far as we know and please tell me you didn't just tell me my sister was dead because crap, that's really not what I need here in Blandville and you can't really expect me to get news like that and just sit still and do nothing, though I don't know exactly what I could do and was it my fault again? Because last time it was my fault, sort of, okay maybe entirely, and I don't think--"
"Rodney, Rodney. Cho'kt ch'kall. Cho'k shrro." Command Chick Chieh'ad looks a little concerned, and she's looking at his forehead again, and holy crap, he recognizes something she said.
He stops talking, is quiet as he takes a couple of deep breaths and okay, the breaths are a little gulpy and maybe slightly panicky, but he's trying. She looks relieved.
"Wow. Communication," he says. He grins and points to himself and takes another calming breath--Teyla would be proud, and so would John, because this is as close to meditation as he's likely to get this century. Without being almost-ascending. "Shrro?"
Chieh'ad beams at him, then leans over and shoves at his shoulder, letting loose another string of syllables that mostly mean nothing. But yes, he is shrro.
Probably he's not supposed to be thinking she's kind of hot, sitting here with him over beer. He doesn't--all right, so there's nothing wrong with women in the military (for instance, Sam is hardly masculine) and he works with women and none of them are any more idiotic than anyone else, and obviously everyone on the whole expedition has some generally decent skills of some kind so it's not like competent beer-drinking women who walk like Ronon scare him (incompetent women, on the other hand, are shudder-worthy), but still, aside from girls in questionable clothing gracing the pages of magazines (communication with whom was a profoundly ridiculous goal) and Molly Devers in grade nine (communication with whom was impossible on account of him having more or less swallowed his tongue every time he got within fifty meters or so), he's always sort of thought at least one conversation was a minimum qualification for any sort of attraction.
After all, getting all worked up over someone and then learning she's an idiot (of greater than usual degree) is just depressing.
In any case, Chieh'ad, with her dangling combat boots, for which he has no word, and her horrible beer (again no word), is obviously bright enough and seems comfortable with him, despite the weird looks she keeps giving him. He gulps down the rest of his beer and turns to her. "So, you probably have stuff to do. You need to get back."
Chieh'ad licks her lips (this doesn't help to dispel the notion that she's hot), then shrugs and says something which, based on her not getting up and heading back into the city, might be, I've got time. She pats awkwardly on Rodney's knee (thigh, maybe, but it's kneeward and for all he knows that's not at all a come-on to her, and it's not like she's fawning, so it's probably only comfort), though when she's done patting, she leaves the hand, thumb sort of doing this absent little rub as they lean back against other rocks (equally gray, equally rough, not very inspiring) and watch the sun... stop.
As sunsets go, this is the least impressive one he's ever sat out at the pier for; but at least he isn't totally uncomfortable.
--
Rodney knows the instant he wakes up what's going on.
Mostly.
And he has a mother of a headache to prove it. Well, okay, not a headache exactly, though something feels all scrambled. Not painful. Not really even pressured. Just screwed up, like he's taken a hit to the frontal cortex, which would explain why it took him this long to understand.
God, this expedition is turning out to really suck for keeping his brain intact, and seriously, you'd think they'd have a lot of interest in keeping his brain intact, because really, who else would do the math and keep everything working, and even with his brain intact, they still don't always get to everything in a timely manner, right?
So, yes, the problem is about a head injury. Obviously.
He stares at the ceiling for a minute, trying to work out whether that makes everything make sense, or whether, actually, he can self-diagnose that, since the thing about head injuries is, they make you less able to, oh, think, which is kind of the problem, now, isn't it?
Anyway, yes, head injury, and that's why Command Chick keeps checking his forehead. Only that doesn't explain why she gave him beer. Can you have beer with a head injury? Shit, maybe that doesn't make sense, after all.
He finally, reluctantly, puts up his hand to where she kept touching and looking at his hair, and everything feels fine. Not lump, no bruise, no scab. So, what, a stroke? Except then 1. why would she keep looking, and 2. wouldn't that have led to him waking up in hospital?
Damn it.
His continuing observation of the ceiling is interrupted by the sky going dark, which dims down the room, as well, and of course, that doesn't make sense, either; injury to his brain really ought not to alter how the sun sets.
Er, unless it's all a matter of some sort of perception threshold thing. But that wouldn't explain... He sighs and sits up, pulling on a fresh gray shirt (dark, but still gray) and socks before fumbling around in the near-dark room for his trousers, which are still perfectly fine because yesterday did not involve any marching through mixed terrain and communing with mud. The rock wall thing doesn't count.
When his door slides open, he glances up.
It's Chieh'ad, looking tousled and then surprised. She barks a command, and the lights turn up. She points at the ceiling and raises her eyebrows.
Rodney shrugs. "Come again?"
Chieh'ad repeats the word, slowly, and Rodney files it away.
He gets the feeling he's being looked after--that her presence here is because he is awake, not because he is needed or because at this particular moment, she decided to visit. Perfect. He's brain-injured, he can't prove it, and he has a babysitter in fatigues.
Wait, okay, she's always been in military clothes, but today she looks like she's going somewhere. Camouflage--which is sort of conceptually hilarious because really, gray, more gray, and it's not like there's a whole broad other palette here, is it? And yeah, it's true there's variegation and all, and deer are color-blind so orange camo works so it's actually perfectly sensible, but it still makes him snort a little.
Besides the whole part about how every time--every time--he wears something like this, he can't help but look at his life in puzzlement all over again.
"Where are we going?"
She shrugs, not understanding the question, but goes to his drawers and rifles around a little, totally disorganizing the patterns in a manner that is not exactly messy--the drawers remain orderly, but they aren't in the same order, and this is why Rodney doesn't like roommates, always in his space, ugh.
A second later, she's dug out camouflage grays for him, too, and he takes them and waits for her to leave so he can change.
She stares at him and huffs exasperatedly, and apparently has no idea she should, good grief, turn around or something. He motions one finger in a circle and finally goes over and physically turns her, which gets him a severe eyeroll and a tapping booted foot.
Boots are tied; they must be going somewhere that she'll need her feet for something.
He glares at her back for a minute because he can't quite bring himself to simply comply without comment, and as he can't actually comment usefully, that leaves noncompliance at least in the short run by simple refusal. Then he shoves down his perfectly-fine trousers and drapes them across the foot of the bed, and pulls on the other ones. The shirt could probably just go over what he's wearing, but he isn't really sure if that'll just lead to him sweating like a pig, and he kind of hates that. He's a physicist, and yes, sometimes there's pressure and he perspires, but he's really not a grinding-labor sort of man.
Finally, he taps her shoulder until she turns back around, and tugs at her collar a little to see what she's wearing underneath.
She snorts and yanks up the shirt from the waist.
Highly serviceable feminine undergarments, then, no frills, no lace, and probably he's not supposed to be attending to the nature of the underwear, and also, wait, is she, like, flashing him?
His life is so, so weird.
He grimaces, but pulls off his shirt and replaces it, and then puts out both hands, palms up. "Well? Let's go, then."
She leads the way, and five minutes later, they're leaving the city. It's her and once again Ronon, no sign of Zelenka or Robinson. Ronon's leading, and Lorne, apparently feeling better and now properly attired, brings up the rear; Chieh'ad remains next to Rodney.
He still hasn't seen Teyla.
He really hopes Chieh'ad knows a shortcut to the gate, if that's where they're going, because walking for five million hours again isn't an appealing concept at all. Especially if she keeps watching him like a hawk; it's kind of disconcerting.
The walk is at least less long than the last time; that was two bright-and-darks (calling them days is just wrong; what, are they on a planet that abruptly rotates 180° every so many hours?) and this time it's not even one. They left right after dark-time, and it's still light-time when they arrive in the vicinity of the gate, which, he can't actually see it in their environment, but the purple-pink glow some distance ahead is convincing. Which makes Ronon the worst tour guide in the history of the world--or, wait, maybe Zelenka, which isn't exactly unreasonable and once again why was Zelenka leading the team anyway, and also, why were they initially all worried about, what, aliens? Wraith? Why did they have to be quiet?
The world around him is still relatively silent, but it no longer sounds like a tomb. There are the chirps and skitters of ordinary bugs and whatever the local analogue of a shrew or field mouse is, and there must be a breeze up high in the canopy, because the weird curled-in leaves of the gray trees are rustling.
Which they totally were not, before. Before, when they were near the gate, or even, actually, relatively far from the gate, things were silent. What happened in the mean time?
Unless there are other glowing red-toned devices, which, given the construction of the city, isn't totally impossible.
Damn it, reasoning is really not supposed to fail this often.
He turns to Chieh'ad. "Gate?" He points in the direction of the glow.
Chieh'ad raises her eyebrows and gives a short, sharp shake of her head, then frowns a second. "Kieh-t' aiish. Haa..." She trails off and frowns again, and he wishes (and maybe she wishes) the easy listening to her tone would work again, but apparently that's for when they're alone? Or when they're relaxed. Something like that. Finally, she points to the sky and then covers her eyes and then points again.
"Uh. Either you're blinded by the light, which seems like some sort of sick joke in this place, or...tomorrow?" Rodney isn't sure if that gets through, so he points at the sky too and tries to figure out how to represent lit up in pantomime without simply aping her action, which would demonstrate mimicry, not understanding, a difference which he thinks ought to be impressed upon the teachers of small children everywhere because, well, all right, that's neither here nor there, but they're not the same. He settles on jazz hands, and then closes his fists in tight against his body and opened them out again. "One day, local, or whatever the hell a run-through of the dark-and-light is."
She seems to conclude he's understood her, which is good except that he'd like to ask why the hell not now, if that's the gate, but it seems that's going to have to wait, because gray-tan people emerge from the gray-tan trees, still and not especially threatening except in that they have enormous bows and yeah, getting shot in the ass with an arrow again isn't really top of his list.
Waiting it is.
"Rodney," says a voice to his left. Chieh'ad is to his right, and he's been watching her, so he's kind of startled, and more so when he realized the speaker is Teyla. Teyla, aged sixty or so, still lean and agile and kind of frighteningly beautiful in her gray-tan body, even if she's now only as tall as his shoulder and how does any of this make any sense? It seemed so much better with beer and boots and the pier, before.
Head injury, he reminds himself. They make people see things. That's probably most of the issue, right? "Teyla," he says.
"Teii'lah," she agrees. She inflects it weirdly, the way Chieh'ad does, but it's clear she's saying the name. She walks around before him and rises up on her toes to touch their foreheads together, which isn't exactly anything he's been keen to adopt from her people because it sort of involves touching and implies closeness and that's uncomfortable, but in this moment it feels like peace and home and welcome, and it makes him feel a little bereft when she releases him.
Not enough that he'd do anything ridiculous like grab her back, but still. He can admit to himself that he misses the contact and the familiarity.
She goes on past him and stops to speak to Chieh'ad, and of course, because it's Teyla, even though her tone is reaching his ears, her words are too quiet for him to quite hear, even from like a meter and a half away, tops, which doesn't matter because she is speaking the local tongue because apparently everyone but him got the memo (head injury, he reminds himself again. He ought to know by now how completely frustrating they are, head injuries, and this is no exception), but her body language says there's some kind of negotiation going on (he almost interrupts to tell her he's noticing it because again, she would be so proud: him! Noticing totally imprecise and unscientific body language!, but manages to keep what cool he has and doesn't), so he just waits.
After several sentences apiece and some meaningful nods, one of the gray-tan strangers, whom Rodney examines critically because if he recognized Ronon the meek and Teyla the tiny, it seems like this could be, like, Carson or something, but there's no sign--nothing--that suggests this is someone he knows, steps forward and inserts himself into the conversation as though she's said something that is specifically of interest to him.
She seems to have expected that; she explains something complicated to the new guy, including Ronon and Lorne with her eyes and her gestures, and the lot of them, including New Guy, start back for what Rodney assumes is the city. Teyla stays behind with the rest of the... natives, apparently.
"Wait a minute," he says exasperatedly. "You're not even going to try to explain it?"
Chieh'ad gives an apologetic little shrug, and what the hell, they came all they way out here for this? Why does Rodney need to be present for a conversation between Command Chick and Teyla, for fuck's sake? If he had working equipment, he could have been doing something useful, and okay, in the grand scheme it doesn't matter because he doesn't have working equipment, but the principle of the thing still irks him.
It's still light-time when they get back to the city (yes, Zelenka is clearly incompetent at navigation and/or orienteering, which isn't much of a surprise because again, it's not like he usually goes out with a team, but it just makes for ongoing lack of sense and that makes Rodney's head hurt all over again, which is just irritating).
Naturally, Chieh'ad drags his ass back to medical, where New Guy and Possibly Jennifer Though It Seems Increasingly Unlikely talk about him and he recognizes half-snatches of words.
Out of sheer desperation, he places himself on a bed and sits cross-legged, trying to relax his body and mind in some sort of quasi-meditative manner to see if he can get anything that way.
He can't, not the way things made almost-sense with Chieh'ad before, but he does get the sense that Probably Not Jennifer's speech cadence is hard for New Guy to understand.
Of all the things he might possibly pick up on, wow, that's so not useful it's not even funny. What the fuck.
New Guy and Speech Cadence Chick prod him half a dozen times with tools that look like they're straight out of the Cretaceous (well, no, there's really no evidence of any tool-wielding dinosaurs, but it's once again the principle of the thing) and then they have him lie back while they hook up some kind of monitor. He has no idea what they're measuring, except that it's some kind of brain wave. It'd almost certainly work better if he knew what they were looking for, but this has been one of those Weeks In Which Rodney's Life Is Ridiculous, so of course, he can't get that data.
Well, fine. He lies there and thinks about Chieh'ad and beer and boots and--damn it--functional underwear.
He hopes the brain wave thing isn't measuring information about libido. But if it is, his is apparently working fine despite the head injury.
--
( Meeting of Minds - Part 2 of 2 )
Author: florahart
Recipient: lilyfarfalla
Pairing: John/Rodney
Rating: NC17
Words: 19,950, give or take
Spoilers: There is reference to Last Man, but no reference to the canonical end of the series. So, either between those two somewhere, or AU sometime after Last Man. Not otherwise AU.
Warnings: So, there is a thing in here which I expect if I leave completely and totally unwarned, a few folks would feel unhappy about it; however, I can't figure out how to warn for it effectively. [It is not, though, any of the things that are among the most likely to trigger (it is not rape or abuse or anything like that). It could, though, be perceived as an uncomfortable kind of deception. If you as a reader really need to know more than that and don't want to wait for reveals or rely on others to tell you, feel free to leave a comment to that effect, and I'll explain via anon PM or via the mods or something.]
Author's Notes: This has maybe less team than the recipient could have hoped, although there is some. Thanks to L and E for lightning-fast above-and-beyond beta services, and to the mods for patience.
Summary: So, let's see: the world is gray, there's no sound, Rodney can't find John or Teyla, and Ronon is evidently moonlighting as an accountant. Yeah, this is going to be a good day.
The silence on this planet is the first thing Rodney notices.
It's deafening.
And kind of creepy.
Also, why is it so dark? Not midnight dark or anything, but he's just about sure they expected something mid-afternoon local, and this is definitely more dawn-or-dusk, less afternoon. It's grayish all around--colors ranging from grayish-mauve to grayish-tan to grayish-cobalt, and he gets the feeling even with better light, the whole place would be as visually silent as it is auditorially. Is auditorially a word? Hm. Aurally? Well, there's no sound, and the light is weird, and everything is gray.
He turns to wonder aloud at the rest of the team, and that's when his day goes from bad to worse.
By a lot.
He takes it all in in a second: the gate itself, glowing eerily some sort of purple that's more red than blue and symbols all wrong in a way that feels like inside-out, not upside-down; the absence of anything he recognizes as possibly the DTD; the way his team consists of Lorne in civvies and Zelenka in gray-green (well at least it fits the general mood of the place) camouflage gear and, and is that Robinson from Medical? Wearing a turban and a sash comprised of bells that don't ring? Maybe they do ring, and it's that Rodney's actually gone deaf.
Crap, what if he's gone deaf? Not that he does all that much of his communicating verbally--well, no, he talks, but listening isn't that important--but he rather likes listening to himself shout when he's worked up a good head of steam.
Thinking about this can wait. Zelenka and Lorne, who is limping, or maybe more staggering, are moving past him, and Robinson's moving out to a flanking position.
And then there's Ronon bringing up the rear, Ronon who one half of his brain recognizes as Ronon, but the other half insists is short, pudgy, balding, and bespectacled. With knives and guns, as per usual, and the whole purposeful stride thing, so that part's all right, but where the hell is Sheppard, and what possessed anyone to send out a team of two physicists, a doctor, an accountant-cum-warrior, and Lorne?
Something is very wrong.
Before he can make his observations aloud, Zelenka's hand is up, a fist, and everybody stops.
Except Rodney, because yes, he knows all about the hand signals but what the hellis wrong with the universe, with Zelenka gone all military signals for once--and yes, they do all know this shit, but since when does Zelenka apply any of it--and Accountant Ronon crouching behind a tree.
"I must have hit my head," he says to no one in particular. Everyone else glares at him in a weird conflation of outrage and horror. Maybe; he doesn't know Robinson well enough to be sure he's making sense of expressions on her.
On the plus side, that he heard his own voice demonstrates to his satisfaction that he hasn't gone deaf.
Unless he knows what he said and therefore only imagined hearing himself say it. That's a possibility to be considered.
Zelenka runs his hand across his throat, a clear signal probably in any sign language to stop talking, but why? This is obviously a nightmare, and what's Radek going to do, curse at him in Czech or something?
Rodney pinches himself hard, then yelps.
Ronon reaches out and drags him down into a couple of exceptionally scratchy bushes.
He's really strong for an accountant, especially a short one. Rodney's on his ass in about two seconds in a patch of thorns which are, predictably, grayish, so at least there's some internal consistency; Rodney isn't sure whether to be glad or annoyed.
He settles on annoyed because there are thorns in his ass.
"Shrro," Ronon says quietly as he hands Rodney an enormous knife.
Rodney grabs it, puzzled, then winces when the blade cuts into his fingers.
Ronon stares at him like he's gone mad--oh, hey, there's another possibility to be considered--and slowly takes the knife back and points to the different parts. "Klaa. Dirrin." Blade, handle. Right.
"So, if I've got this right," Rodney says in an undertone, "Ronon the Accountant speaks Klingon and for some reason Zelenka's been awarded Sheppard's job and apparently received advanced military skulkery training at some point without my awareness. Oh, and the gate is pink."
"Cho'k Shrro."
Shrro means quiet, then. Or idiot. Or stop.
He's going to wake up soon, right? Because his fingers really hurt where they're bleeding (not to mention his ass, which, ow), and with no DTD, it's not like he can go back.
He looks around Ronon again, hoping for the damn thing to have appeared. No dice, and Ronon waves a hand in front of his face. "Rodney, chhht kuip."
Right.
Rodney glances at Zelenka's hand signals and moves forward in sync with the group because the other choice doesn't seem any better, though being stubborn wouldn't be out of character, and he does consider it for a second. No, too many variables being variant, and no way to even weed out a few without stopping to try to understand.
As they move, starting and stopping irregularly, Rodney wonders where John is, and how it's come to pass that the only military man among them--well, Ronon is, when he's not an accountant, but that's different--isn't in the lead.
Something is very, very wrong.
He feels for his--what the hell? In the midst of noticing that everyone else on this trip is altered, even when he looked down at his own hands he's managed to miss that he isn't himself, either.
Ronon called him Rodney, though, so the choices are... he could be hallucinatory. That would explain a lot. Except he doesn't think he's hallucinating the bleeding, and shouldn't someone be bandaging this? Asking seems like a bad idea. He doesn't speak Klingon anyway.
Finally, one of the times they stop, he realizes he might not have his laptop or any other piece of reasonable technology (and what the hell; he's also just noticed Ronon, walking just in front of him, has guns, like, old-fashioned, what are they, flint-locks? Nothing that will stop a Wraith, so shrroing, if that's being quiet, it probably a pretty good idea.), but he does have paper and a... really horrible pencil of sorts.
He gets out both, along with a balled-up strip of fabric that isn't nearly clean enough to use to bind up an open wound, but as no one else seems to be interested, and he doesn't find anything else to use for the task, it seems marginally preferably to continuing to drip blood.
Actually, now that he thinks about it, dripping blood is probably a pretty good way to scream injured person, possibly weak and attackable to whatever in the local fauna represents tiger in the food chain.
Don't pudgy Ronon and hardcore Zelenka even know that? What the hell?
At the next stop, in a moment of genius if he does say so himself, he realizes that his little pad of paper is considerably cleaner than his muslin or linen or whatever the hell the strip of fabric is, and is also relatively porous, so it ought to absorb okay. Infection on top of pink gates seems like a lousy idea, so he constructs a little pad out of a torn-off page and places that against the wound, then wraps the fabric around and ties it off, cutting the fabric with Ronon's knife. Hopefully the bleeding has washed out anything horrible that was on the blade itself. The shushed sound of tearing the flimsy paper earns him a glare from Lorne, but as far as he can tell, Lorne is not very much more useful than he is, in this context, so he just glares back and proceeds.
At the stop after that, he starts writing. He needs to gather his thoughts.
Zelenka takes off his glasses and rubs them on the tail of the t-shirt he has on under the camo, He looks at Rodney as he does so, and Rodney gets the idea he's memorizing the words he's jotting down from way over there and with his glasses off. Weird.
Not that it will matter; he doesn't know their language, and if they know his, then it's just damn rude not to use it, since they've all heard him speak. And Zelenka's usually not rude, or at least, is a lot less rude than Rodney. If the usual Zelenka is anything to go by, which, yes, that's a bit of a stretch, given everything, but again, too many variables. He keeps writing down the things he's noticed so far, and hopes for some sort of pattern to emerge.
After a few minutes, Zelenka signals another move, so Rodney picks up Ronon's knife and follows along. He can't make any suggestions--like, any--until he has some idea what the hell is going on and until they stop long enough, or talk long enough, to establish anything that resembles communication within the team. Military stop-and-go hand signals don't really cover much in the way of abstraction, and they certainly don't include most of the possible answers for, or the question, what the actual fuck?, so it's going to be a while.
The sky brightens, all at once, and Rodney ducks down, hands over his head, and waits for the explosion. Instead, he gets Ronon again, tugging him upright and pointing. "Nrrch'a." He rumbles a few more words, which clearly mean something on the order of, everything's fine, don't be a two-year-old, it's just a little bit of light (nrrch'a?) you idiot, then hands Rodney back his paper and pencil (now damp), and trudges away.
Rodney looks up. The sky is still light, and no explosion has commenced. What the hell? This is ...daylight? It's not especially bright, and there's no apparent point of origin--no visible sun--but the light is lasting and consistent, and it feels like a really cloudy day in some indefinable way. Ergo, daylight, yes. Okay, so language, people, and physics are all fucked up. Perfect. Rodney doesn't think he's likely to forget this part, but he makes a note anyway. Might as well.
They're basically still walking when dusk returns, also all at once. Rodney has no idea when that is, because he has nothing on him keeping time and the whole sudden night and day deal isn't all that conducive to keeping time in his head. Not that that's ever been a skill he's mastered.
In any case, it's been long enough that despite one longish break that involved disgusting green-and-blue (and naturally, gray) ration bars and brief naps (sitting up, unsatisfying), Rodney's exhausted, and finally, he's had it.
He stops, sits down, and waits for the rest of the group to notice.
Ronon comes back first (again), though he can see Zelenka and Lorne stopped up ahead; he has no idea where Robinson's wandered off to, but she must be here somewhere. Also, he's pretty sure that glow to the... he's going to call it south for fun because how the fuck is he supposed to manage any sense of direction with the sun on a switch and no useful landmarks? Anyway, he's pretty sure that glow is the weird pinkish of the gate, which means they've come back in a circle, but there is no part of him that wants to express this belief to any of his colleagues.
God, why isn't Teyla here? Teyla would at least listen before correcting the errors of his ways, assuming they could overcome the language barrier.
His fingers throb, and he stares at them, at the dried-to-grayish dark blood on the makeshift bandage (at least it was bright red when it exited him; that's probably something).
"Rodney. Cho'k Mrn'not." Ronon's crouched next to him, and his face isn't really irritated, just kind of tired, which is in its own way comforting; at least Ronon is finding this experience a little wearing too. Also, Cho'k is a word he said before, when he was saying to be quiet (maybe); Rodney mouths the words he's just heard and scribbles them phonetically.
God, a dictionary would be useful right now. Even babelfish, if it speaks Grayquietian.
He looks up, chin stubborn, and says--quietly, this time; he does learn--"No, not until we rest."
Ronon sighs and sits down on the ground next to him, reaching for Rodney's pad and paper. Rodney spends a couple of seconds arguing with himself (is Ronon going to hurt his notes? Or help them?) then hands it over, and Ronon flips the page and starts marking, a quick circle with a corona around it and a little trapezoidish thing beneath, a fairly straight line from it marked with what Rodney guesses is a local X, though it looks more like some sort of Scandinavian or Old-English, whatsit, a thorn or something. Some kind of rune, anyway. Next to that, Ronon draws a knife, and a hand.
Okay, so it's a map; he already knew that. He gestures keep going, and Ronon grins, one of those brief fierce grins that he doles out once a week or so if you're nice to him and he thinks you're doing a good job. Great; he's used up his stock of proud-Ronon on being able to identify a fucking map. This experience just keeps drawing closer to perfection at every turn.
Ronon goes back to drawing: another rune, a tiny little disgusting ration bar, another rune and a gesture to the ground: here and now.
Soon enough, the point of the map is clear; it's to demonstrate that they're nearly there. Nearly to the city. Assuming the map is to anything remotely resembling scale, which, Rodney thinks it's a lot to ask that he trust this, but then, both an accountant and the usual runner-warrior-whatever type Ronon is the rest of the time probably grasp the importance of proportionality, at least on some rudimentary level, and there would be little point in drawing the map in order to lie to him because that's a trick that would only work once.
Rodney gestures for the pencil and draws a line from start to finish above the map's path, and hatches in something that maybe is close(ish) to representing hours, and hands it back with the part between Now and City left unhatched and his eyebrows raised. Ronon holds up two fingers, then shrugs and folds the second one halfway down.
All right, fine, they'll go on. Ronon had better not be lying.
--
The city, when they finally reach it (Rodney guesses maybe a shade under two hours, though certainly well more than an hour and a half, and it's gloomy unfocused day again and so does that mean they've been walking for two days? What kind of design was that, as far as gate placement?) is dimly lit and eerily familiar, like one other time when they found themselves in a duplicate of Atlantis.
Weird.
This one's not grown-over, and it's not actually complete, but the central tower is there, and it's apparent as they enter the main gate that some of the ground-level parts--the jumper bay that on Atlantis can be approached via the ocean, for instance--are present but not used, because whole areas are sort of cut-away, like a giant life-size model or something. Rodney wonders for a minute if the dark cavernous jumper bay has, you know, jumpers, and whether this would be a whole lot faster of a way to get back to the pink gate when the time comes. He points to where it should be and tugs at Ronon's arm, because clearly this Ronon knows this place (how? Unknown. This is on the very long list of questions).
Ronon glances toward the black, or actually, dark gray, how shocking, there's more gray, hole, and shrugs. "Chaam'ra. Ge'hn til."
It's probably a coincidence how Chaam'ra almost sounds like Jumper. Or, Rodney's telepathically learning a language he'd never even heard of; this seems unlikely.
He keeps on walking toward the tower, wondering whether at least they'll have any sort of translation device or proper data modeling tools or, oh, anything useful.
Ronon sticks close to him, having evidently taken him under his wing, if the warning-off looks are anything to go by. Other people, ones who are not at all familiar which is weird since the team all is, sort of, though he's no longer completely sure Zelenka is Zelenka, and Lorne is now dressed in a hospital gown (what the fuck>), are staring at him, and whispering, bizarre rustling noises that are even less like English than anything Ronon's said so far. Ronon's striding pudgily/purposefully next to him, staring back as needed.
After a brief moment of consideration, Rodney opts to ignore both the staring and the protectiveness and simply follow Lorne's hospital gown because at this point he's so fucking far down the rabbit hole he doesn't even know how the hell he's not either drowning in an underwater reservoir or bursting into flame due to direct contact with magma or something, so what the hell, play it out. The only other option is panicking, and that usually ends badly.
He allows himself several seconds to consider that Sheppard would probably be pleased with his excellent non-panicking, even without anyone doing much to talk him down.
Unless he's drugged or something. That would explain it. No, he likes the personal-growth option better.
The tower, on the inside, is burnished-copper and old iron, and the control room is bustling with hurried--not frantic, just efficient--activity.
Rodney stands quiet while Ronon and maybe-Zelenka explain him to the woman in charge. She's neither Elizabeth nor Sam (nor even Woolsey), and she's clearly on the military side, dressed like Zelenka but possessing stripes on her chest pocket that, if he knows anything about how this sort of things works, are probably a pretty decently-high rank designation.
She keeps looking at him, glancing back and forth between the explanation being offered, and him, eyes raking up and down him as though she's checking for defects.
Well, or as if she's inspecting him like so much meat, which is a little disconcerting since it's the sort of thing he's seen women (and not a few men) do to John, but generally not to him. Big surprise: he's a little rounder, a little shorter, a little (okay a lot) less friendly, not that this body is the usual one, but he doubts he managed to acquire the body of Adonis as the single upside to this little adventure. So yeah, she's probably checking for defects.
After a while, she steps toward him and puts out a hand that isn't for shaking (as he realizes when he puts out his in an effort to greet, and meets empty air). She grips his shoulder and meets his gaze solidly, and says his name.
It's the only word here any of them have in common with him so far; he realizes that just because he'd been aware of who Ronon and Lorne and Zelenka are, he hasn't heard any of them say each other's names.
He nods. "Rodney," he says. "Rodney."
Her answer is a string of words in Weirdplacean, among which are some sounds that might be Zelenka if one pushed around the vowels more than a little and adjusted consonants into local dialect. He puts up both hands in what he hopes is the universally-appreciated sign for oh my god stop too much, and repeats just the one word. "Zelenka."
"Sholienn'akh." The unnamed woman beams at him and points.
"Good," Rodney says. He points at Ronon. "And?"
Her face crumples a little, but Rodney quickly realizes his mistake. 'And' is not Ronon's name, and neither is good--though that seems to have bothered her less, maybe because he was smiling. But that's what they're doing. They're establishing common ground. He shakes his head a little. "Wait. No. Ronon."
She grins again. This is going to take a while, since right now they're barely managing to communicate that they have the same names, but when she lifts her hand off his shoulder and runs her fingers into his hair above his ear, it only takes a second to realize she's not combing his hair; she's checking him for some kind of injury--not deficiency so much as damage, and she's pretty happy about the fact that they're communicating to any effect at all.
Or, maybe not happy so much as relieved.
He has no idea why this unknown woman with her calloused gentle fingers at his temple and her untied boots is so relieved that he's all right, but maybe once they knock out enough words to come up with a pidgin of any sort, he can ask who she is. Relative to the real world, that is; he imagines he'll get her name eventually, and for all he doesn't actually give a rat's furry ass about minutiae like names, he finds he wants to know hers.
She removes her hand from his head and grips his shoulder again, and just to get her attention back (and wow, Rodney, pathetic much?) he brings up his lamely-bandaged fingers.
She glances back at Ronon, who says something about a blade (hey, progress), and Rodney gets a goofy grin and a clap to the shoulder, and then he's being led back out of the control room and down a couple of levels.
The doctor looks nothing like Carson, and he can't quite see Jennifer in her (he doesn't ask; he's a little afraid it is Jennifer and either she'll be all painfully empathetic despite that they can't understand each other, which is, okay it's nice to be cared for, but it also drives Rodney a little insane when she's so damn young which isn't fair to her because she is young, for one thing, but still, he doesn't want to invoke it), but his fingers clean up quickly, and he doesn't even need stitches, so that's good. He's sent away with another clap on the shoulder, and he stands to go ...back to his quarters? Where is he supposed to go? Ronon's gone, and he doesn't recognize a soul.
He reminds himself that panicking is pointless and leads to getting shot in the ass or some other equally-unpleasant option, and looks around until Maybe Jennifer glances his way. He waves his uninjured hand, and gets out the paper and pencil, sketching the tower, the medical department, and a brief route between them. Then he draws a bed.
The doctor frowns.
Rodney looks at the bed. It's not that bad. Huh. He tries again, then starts to draw a line out of here and to the bed, and the doctor's face clears.
He wonders what she thought he was asking; he isn't sure whether that makes the Jennifer potential more likely or less. Well, either way, someone in a nurse's outfit (gray, but otherwise something probably straight out of the standard male fantasy costume catalog and certainly nothing any nurse on Atlantis has ever worn, at least not where he could see) leaves Lorne's side to escort him to his quarters.
They're right where he left them, which is all wrong because they're not his. The door and the room are in the right place, yes, but his laptops are gone, and there's nothing but his bed and his clothes, muted down into gray and minus the maple leaf on the relevant patches.
He considers this for a minute, then nods something he hopes passes as thanks at the nurse and waits for her to go before sitting down on the side of the bed and unlacing his boots. He's starving, but he's kind of afraid the food will be as unappealing as everything else here (everything except the wild-haired woman in the tower, and he tells his subconscious to shush about that because it's a supremely bad idea to even consider any sort of, what, liaison? with someone with whom he shared about six words, all of them names), and he's not so sure it'll be worth it.
He opens cabinets idly until he finds one that does contain food. More Disgusting Ration Bars ™, but this is one of those emergencies for which such things are intended. He looks at the wrapper (surprise! grayish!) and considers the likelihood that this alternate universe (has to be, right?) also has lemons, and that he's allergic to them. And whether it's likely that lemon extract is in a DRB.
He concludes that if there is lemon extract and the AU Gods are in fact mocking him, he's just not up to the task of trying to defeat that anyway, and probably dying of alternative lemon poisoning is no worse than being eaten by a grue, so he tears the thing open, gives it a cursory sniff (more old unsalted wildebeesty than lemony) and takes a bite.
Still disgusting, still not lemon, and enough to get along until morning. Or, at least, lights-on-time, whenever that might be.
He finishes the bar and then yanks off his boots (still unlaced, because why bother tying them just to go 'home' from medical, but that reminds him again of the woman in the tower, which is a little confusing). He leaves them right there next to the bed, one tipped over and the other upright, before flopping back onto his pillow and turning on his side.
Things will look better in the "morning," clearly, since the other choice is assuming they won't and that's really depressing. It's kind of odd that he's going for the non-depressing option, but maybe he's acquiring wisdom in his old age.
Not that he's old; it's a figure of speech.
As he drifts toward sleep, he wonders whether John will spend forever finding him--he's probably not going to have to look millennia into the future and create a holographic self to do it, so he can probably handle the math, right? And then he wonders how long he'll have to be here, first. The advantage to the whole distant future thing, as he understands the story, was in getting there first so John wouldn't have to wait.
He sighs and puts that thought aside, then starts going back over the words he maybe-knows here until he's asleep.
--
A good night's sleep really does do wonders; Rodney wakes in the morning (or, all right, in the time when he wakes after having been asleep for a long time, which it's easier to call morning than some time in the light-gray portion of the time chunks) feeling a whole lot lighter of spirit than before, and a whole lot more confident that it will be possible to figure out what the hell is going on.
He's starving, of course, so first things first; he goes off to the mess hall and looks around for John or Teyla or Ronon or whatever facsimile of them he can find, and really, shouldn't there be a Teyla? Because she wasn't out in the not-woods with them, and she isn't who was in command.
Maybe here, she spends all her time teaching people to fight gracefully with sticks, and doesn't do missions.
He ignores the tiny voice that suggests that maybe here, she is lost to Michael.
Actually, if Ronon's an accountant, what would that make Michael? A therapist?
He amuses himself enough he almost spits his (gray) coffee.
For the record, gray coffee tastes about as good as it sounds; however, he does note that it seems to have the same useful effect of waking him up in quantities roughly as usual, so he takes a fourth cup with him and goes looking for his lab.
Surely he has one.
It occurs to him to see if he can find Zelenka; maybe despite the apparent expertise in skulkitude, he still also works with Rodney in the lab. However, he can't remember how to fuck up the name in the right direction to make it sound right, and also, going around saying "Zelenka? Zelenka?" reminds him of the dreadful book he used to read Jeannie when she was small, in which a bird asks a tractor-trailer or, oh, some piece of construction equipment? whether it is its mother. And that's just beyond undignified.
Even if it's unlikely Zelenka--or half the expedition, really--would have the same point of reference even if he mentioned it; most of them aren't big on little kids.
Except for Teyla, whom he still hasn't seen.
Probably.
Eventually he stops trying to figure out how, exactly, a Teyla-analog might show up here (it's hard to come up with a single composite to attempt to look for, because she's not exactly the easiest woman he's ever met, as far as classifying her, plus, just look at the local Ronon), and just lets his feet carry him to where his lab should be. It's there, so he lets himself in.
The lab admits him; it looks more or less right, and nothing in it works.
Rodney sits scowling on a bench and glares at the useless hunks of tin and silicon that should be laptops for several minutes before turning his glare on the useless hunks of iron and copper and whatever other red-toned metals they have here (maybe amethyst crystals, he thinks, glancing idly at the ceiling for a moment). These useless hunks should be ancient tech, and they look like they are, but they remain inert in his hands, and it sort of stands to reason that that wouldn't work, if his own genes are intact but nothing else here is the same.
He wonders if Lorne is all right.
After a while, just as he's considering whether he even wants to know if there's a functioning coffee dispenser in here, the door swishes open, and Command Chick strides in. Her walk is assured, like Ronon's, but looser, and Rodney cocks his head to the side, looking at her. "Hi," he ventures.
Her words (naturally) make no sense, but the tone is clear, like there's meaning in melody (how stupid is that? Unless you're a whale, melody isn't exactly the most efficient way to convey anything, and he's pretty sure they're not whales. He'd have to be both hallucinating human form and unable to speak the native language, and that seems unlikely. Unlikelier, Crap. He goes back to trying to listen). The meaning he comes away with is, Here you are; I've been looking for you.
"Sorry."
No problem. Just checking in.
Okay, see, that's too complex a message for a simple melody, not that she's singing or anything, to actually carry a whole message forward, so he's probably reading stuff in that isn't there. Still, it's good to be having a conversation. "Thanks for your concern," he says.
The response is a sort of exasperated snort that needs no translation.
"Hey, I sometimes say thank you. Occasionally. If it really needs to be said."
Command Chick beckons, and hey, nothing in here works, so why not? He follows her to the door, then stops. "Hey. Wait."
She looks over her shoulder, then turns a little, eyebrows up, waiting. As requested.
"Uh." He points to himself. "Rodney."
"Rodney," she agrees.
He points at her. And waits.
She tilts her head and rumbles out a string of syllables that would probably confound a Universal Translator if they had such a thing anyway, then presses her lips together and turns away. "Chieh'ad, ngeh."
He isn't sure if that's her name. "Chieh'ad?"
She turns around. "Rodney."
Okay, so it'll do. It's sort of depressing what constitutes progress.
He follows Chieh'ad to the edge of the city, where it sits amid tall gray grasses and reeds, where there are no functional jumper bays and no expanse of blue water (or of horrifying open space that is a vacuum which is a bad, bad thing when your shields go down--no worries on that front, here), and has a seat on what should be a pier and is instead a rock wall, formed of old and crumbled rock.
Rodney looks at the wall. It really is pretty crumbled, and it doesn't look all that sturdy, but she seems pretty content there, so he sits down as well.
She opens a pouch in the bag she's carrying against her hip and hands him something canned which probably is the local analog of beer. It's really awful, but the sense of camaraderie that comes with sipping at beer together and tossing rocks into the water (all right, twigs into the grass), is comfortable. He's glad they came here.
Even if he really needs to find people whom he can communicate with, and who have any idea where the hell he is.
Finally, on his third beer (the taste is growing on him, or, he's getting a little tipsy and caring less), he just starts talking. What can it hurt, he asks himself. He can't understand them, and yesterday's and incident demonstrates they can't really understand him, either. Might as well see if they can accidentally stumble on a topic they can discuss.
"So, the last thing I remember," he says, "is going through the gate, though I have a niggling suspicion there was some part afterward that I can't quite see. Usual team--me, Sheppard, Teyla, Ronon."
"Rohn'on," she repeats, nodding. "Teii'lah."
"Right, and Sheppard, and also, why haven't I seen the others but have seen people I know? Lorne isn't with my team, and Zelenka only comes through the gate if there's actually a reason for him to, so I don't know how he came to be here. Wherever here is."
She sips her beer and listens intently, glancing again and again at his forehead or into his hair, where she touched before.
"Is there something in my hair?" he asks. He puts up his hand and feels nothing. "Well, anyway. It was a routine enough mission, you know, just looking around, and then--then I was here. And everything was all backwards and wrong."
She asks a question he can't understand, but if he doesn't listen to the words, he imagines she might mean, did anything happen? anything unusual?
"Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I suppose yes, something unusual must have happened, because it's not usual to wind up in PinkGateville unable to communicate, so I'd have to say yes, something unusual happened, but I don't know what it was. And I have no tools here to figure it out." He pauses. "Are there tools? Laptops? Ancient tech?"
He pats his pockets and rolls his eyes at himself; the paper and pencil are back in his forlorn empty quarters, and therefore he of course has no way to try to draw a laptop, since it's pretty clear from everything he's seen that they don't have an alphabet in common any more than they do a language, and probably efforts to write would be futile.
Not that he'd probably be that much better at drawing laptops than bedrooms. And given the bed effort, she'd probably think he was suggesting cybersex, which he wouldn't be.
Though, uh, that's a concept worth considering if he finds himself here a long time. And if it's not sacrilege or something. First things first: language acquisition. Problematically, he wasn't even good at French, and that was mandatory and long-lasting and, you know, taught.
He drops the laptop concept and takes a deep breath, trying not to just be frustrated. He's not good at that either. "I really do need something to do, something to work on," he says. He sounds petulant even to himself, and okay, if there's really nothing here he can work on and no one he can talk to, this should be a vacation, right? A vacation that's quiet and restful, like the ones he's supposed to go on periodically, that Jeannie asks him to go on. Well. Tells, actually, not that she's in charge, although it's possible she may have some kind of really small point in there somewhere.
"Jeannie would think I should kick back," he says.
"Chi'dii cha'kt deruukta."
"Yes, Jeannie. You know her?"
"Chi'dii cha'kt dekhakrh."
"Still nothing. Except the name. Basically all I have is names, even for the Jumpers. Weird that yours isn't anyone." He shrugs. "I was expecting you to be Elizabeth, maybe."
"Yillsha'h cha'kt dekhakrh."
"Elizabeth is ...gone. Gone away, from the expedition, and effectively dead as far as we know and please tell me you didn't just tell me my sister was dead because crap, that's really not what I need here in Blandville and you can't really expect me to get news like that and just sit still and do nothing, though I don't know exactly what I could do and was it my fault again? Because last time it was my fault, sort of, okay maybe entirely, and I don't think--"
"Rodney, Rodney. Cho'kt ch'kall. Cho'k shrro." Command Chick Chieh'ad looks a little concerned, and she's looking at his forehead again, and holy crap, he recognizes something she said.
He stops talking, is quiet as he takes a couple of deep breaths and okay, the breaths are a little gulpy and maybe slightly panicky, but he's trying. She looks relieved.
"Wow. Communication," he says. He grins and points to himself and takes another calming breath--Teyla would be proud, and so would John, because this is as close to meditation as he's likely to get this century. Without being almost-ascending. "Shrro?"
Chieh'ad beams at him, then leans over and shoves at his shoulder, letting loose another string of syllables that mostly mean nothing. But yes, he is shrro.
Probably he's not supposed to be thinking she's kind of hot, sitting here with him over beer. He doesn't--all right, so there's nothing wrong with women in the military (for instance, Sam is hardly masculine) and he works with women and none of them are any more idiotic than anyone else, and obviously everyone on the whole expedition has some generally decent skills of some kind so it's not like competent beer-drinking women who walk like Ronon scare him (incompetent women, on the other hand, are shudder-worthy), but still, aside from girls in questionable clothing gracing the pages of magazines (communication with whom was a profoundly ridiculous goal) and Molly Devers in grade nine (communication with whom was impossible on account of him having more or less swallowed his tongue every time he got within fifty meters or so), he's always sort of thought at least one conversation was a minimum qualification for any sort of attraction.
After all, getting all worked up over someone and then learning she's an idiot (of greater than usual degree) is just depressing.
In any case, Chieh'ad, with her dangling combat boots, for which he has no word, and her horrible beer (again no word), is obviously bright enough and seems comfortable with him, despite the weird looks she keeps giving him. He gulps down the rest of his beer and turns to her. "So, you probably have stuff to do. You need to get back."
Chieh'ad licks her lips (this doesn't help to dispel the notion that she's hot), then shrugs and says something which, based on her not getting up and heading back into the city, might be, I've got time. She pats awkwardly on Rodney's knee (thigh, maybe, but it's kneeward and for all he knows that's not at all a come-on to her, and it's not like she's fawning, so it's probably only comfort), though when she's done patting, she leaves the hand, thumb sort of doing this absent little rub as they lean back against other rocks (equally gray, equally rough, not very inspiring) and watch the sun... stop.
As sunsets go, this is the least impressive one he's ever sat out at the pier for; but at least he isn't totally uncomfortable.
--
Rodney knows the instant he wakes up what's going on.
Mostly.
And he has a mother of a headache to prove it. Well, okay, not a headache exactly, though something feels all scrambled. Not painful. Not really even pressured. Just screwed up, like he's taken a hit to the frontal cortex, which would explain why it took him this long to understand.
God, this expedition is turning out to really suck for keeping his brain intact, and seriously, you'd think they'd have a lot of interest in keeping his brain intact, because really, who else would do the math and keep everything working, and even with his brain intact, they still don't always get to everything in a timely manner, right?
So, yes, the problem is about a head injury. Obviously.
He stares at the ceiling for a minute, trying to work out whether that makes everything make sense, or whether, actually, he can self-diagnose that, since the thing about head injuries is, they make you less able to, oh, think, which is kind of the problem, now, isn't it?
Anyway, yes, head injury, and that's why Command Chick keeps checking his forehead. Only that doesn't explain why she gave him beer. Can you have beer with a head injury? Shit, maybe that doesn't make sense, after all.
He finally, reluctantly, puts up his hand to where she kept touching and looking at his hair, and everything feels fine. Not lump, no bruise, no scab. So, what, a stroke? Except then 1. why would she keep looking, and 2. wouldn't that have led to him waking up in hospital?
Damn it.
His continuing observation of the ceiling is interrupted by the sky going dark, which dims down the room, as well, and of course, that doesn't make sense, either; injury to his brain really ought not to alter how the sun sets.
Er, unless it's all a matter of some sort of perception threshold thing. But that wouldn't explain... He sighs and sits up, pulling on a fresh gray shirt (dark, but still gray) and socks before fumbling around in the near-dark room for his trousers, which are still perfectly fine because yesterday did not involve any marching through mixed terrain and communing with mud. The rock wall thing doesn't count.
When his door slides open, he glances up.
It's Chieh'ad, looking tousled and then surprised. She barks a command, and the lights turn up. She points at the ceiling and raises her eyebrows.
Rodney shrugs. "Come again?"
Chieh'ad repeats the word, slowly, and Rodney files it away.
He gets the feeling he's being looked after--that her presence here is because he is awake, not because he is needed or because at this particular moment, she decided to visit. Perfect. He's brain-injured, he can't prove it, and he has a babysitter in fatigues.
Wait, okay, she's always been in military clothes, but today she looks like she's going somewhere. Camouflage--which is sort of conceptually hilarious because really, gray, more gray, and it's not like there's a whole broad other palette here, is it? And yeah, it's true there's variegation and all, and deer are color-blind so orange camo works so it's actually perfectly sensible, but it still makes him snort a little.
Besides the whole part about how every time--every time--he wears something like this, he can't help but look at his life in puzzlement all over again.
"Where are we going?"
She shrugs, not understanding the question, but goes to his drawers and rifles around a little, totally disorganizing the patterns in a manner that is not exactly messy--the drawers remain orderly, but they aren't in the same order, and this is why Rodney doesn't like roommates, always in his space, ugh.
A second later, she's dug out camouflage grays for him, too, and he takes them and waits for her to leave so he can change.
She stares at him and huffs exasperatedly, and apparently has no idea she should, good grief, turn around or something. He motions one finger in a circle and finally goes over and physically turns her, which gets him a severe eyeroll and a tapping booted foot.
Boots are tied; they must be going somewhere that she'll need her feet for something.
He glares at her back for a minute because he can't quite bring himself to simply comply without comment, and as he can't actually comment usefully, that leaves noncompliance at least in the short run by simple refusal. Then he shoves down his perfectly-fine trousers and drapes them across the foot of the bed, and pulls on the other ones. The shirt could probably just go over what he's wearing, but he isn't really sure if that'll just lead to him sweating like a pig, and he kind of hates that. He's a physicist, and yes, sometimes there's pressure and he perspires, but he's really not a grinding-labor sort of man.
Finally, he taps her shoulder until she turns back around, and tugs at her collar a little to see what she's wearing underneath.
She snorts and yanks up the shirt from the waist.
Highly serviceable feminine undergarments, then, no frills, no lace, and probably he's not supposed to be attending to the nature of the underwear, and also, wait, is she, like, flashing him?
His life is so, so weird.
He grimaces, but pulls off his shirt and replaces it, and then puts out both hands, palms up. "Well? Let's go, then."
She leads the way, and five minutes later, they're leaving the city. It's her and once again Ronon, no sign of Zelenka or Robinson. Ronon's leading, and Lorne, apparently feeling better and now properly attired, brings up the rear; Chieh'ad remains next to Rodney.
He still hasn't seen Teyla.
He really hopes Chieh'ad knows a shortcut to the gate, if that's where they're going, because walking for five million hours again isn't an appealing concept at all. Especially if she keeps watching him like a hawk; it's kind of disconcerting.
The walk is at least less long than the last time; that was two bright-and-darks (calling them days is just wrong; what, are they on a planet that abruptly rotates 180° every so many hours?) and this time it's not even one. They left right after dark-time, and it's still light-time when they arrive in the vicinity of the gate, which, he can't actually see it in their environment, but the purple-pink glow some distance ahead is convincing. Which makes Ronon the worst tour guide in the history of the world--or, wait, maybe Zelenka, which isn't exactly unreasonable and once again why was Zelenka leading the team anyway, and also, why were they initially all worried about, what, aliens? Wraith? Why did they have to be quiet?
The world around him is still relatively silent, but it no longer sounds like a tomb. There are the chirps and skitters of ordinary bugs and whatever the local analogue of a shrew or field mouse is, and there must be a breeze up high in the canopy, because the weird curled-in leaves of the gray trees are rustling.
Which they totally were not, before. Before, when they were near the gate, or even, actually, relatively far from the gate, things were silent. What happened in the mean time?
Unless there are other glowing red-toned devices, which, given the construction of the city, isn't totally impossible.
Damn it, reasoning is really not supposed to fail this often.
He turns to Chieh'ad. "Gate?" He points in the direction of the glow.
Chieh'ad raises her eyebrows and gives a short, sharp shake of her head, then frowns a second. "Kieh-t' aiish. Haa..." She trails off and frowns again, and he wishes (and maybe she wishes) the easy listening to her tone would work again, but apparently that's for when they're alone? Or when they're relaxed. Something like that. Finally, she points to the sky and then covers her eyes and then points again.
"Uh. Either you're blinded by the light, which seems like some sort of sick joke in this place, or...tomorrow?" Rodney isn't sure if that gets through, so he points at the sky too and tries to figure out how to represent lit up in pantomime without simply aping her action, which would demonstrate mimicry, not understanding, a difference which he thinks ought to be impressed upon the teachers of small children everywhere because, well, all right, that's neither here nor there, but they're not the same. He settles on jazz hands, and then closes his fists in tight against his body and opened them out again. "One day, local, or whatever the hell a run-through of the dark-and-light is."
She seems to conclude he's understood her, which is good except that he'd like to ask why the hell not now, if that's the gate, but it seems that's going to have to wait, because gray-tan people emerge from the gray-tan trees, still and not especially threatening except in that they have enormous bows and yeah, getting shot in the ass with an arrow again isn't really top of his list.
Waiting it is.
"Rodney," says a voice to his left. Chieh'ad is to his right, and he's been watching her, so he's kind of startled, and more so when he realized the speaker is Teyla. Teyla, aged sixty or so, still lean and agile and kind of frighteningly beautiful in her gray-tan body, even if she's now only as tall as his shoulder and how does any of this make any sense? It seemed so much better with beer and boots and the pier, before.
Head injury, he reminds himself. They make people see things. That's probably most of the issue, right? "Teyla," he says.
"Teii'lah," she agrees. She inflects it weirdly, the way Chieh'ad does, but it's clear she's saying the name. She walks around before him and rises up on her toes to touch their foreheads together, which isn't exactly anything he's been keen to adopt from her people because it sort of involves touching and implies closeness and that's uncomfortable, but in this moment it feels like peace and home and welcome, and it makes him feel a little bereft when she releases him.
Not enough that he'd do anything ridiculous like grab her back, but still. He can admit to himself that he misses the contact and the familiarity.
She goes on past him and stops to speak to Chieh'ad, and of course, because it's Teyla, even though her tone is reaching his ears, her words are too quiet for him to quite hear, even from like a meter and a half away, tops, which doesn't matter because she is speaking the local tongue because apparently everyone but him got the memo (head injury, he reminds himself again. He ought to know by now how completely frustrating they are, head injuries, and this is no exception), but her body language says there's some kind of negotiation going on (he almost interrupts to tell her he's noticing it because again, she would be so proud: him! Noticing totally imprecise and unscientific body language!, but manages to keep what cool he has and doesn't), so he just waits.
After several sentences apiece and some meaningful nods, one of the gray-tan strangers, whom Rodney examines critically because if he recognized Ronon the meek and Teyla the tiny, it seems like this could be, like, Carson or something, but there's no sign--nothing--that suggests this is someone he knows, steps forward and inserts himself into the conversation as though she's said something that is specifically of interest to him.
She seems to have expected that; she explains something complicated to the new guy, including Ronon and Lorne with her eyes and her gestures, and the lot of them, including New Guy, start back for what Rodney assumes is the city. Teyla stays behind with the rest of the... natives, apparently.
"Wait a minute," he says exasperatedly. "You're not even going to try to explain it?"
Chieh'ad gives an apologetic little shrug, and what the hell, they came all they way out here for this? Why does Rodney need to be present for a conversation between Command Chick and Teyla, for fuck's sake? If he had working equipment, he could have been doing something useful, and okay, in the grand scheme it doesn't matter because he doesn't have working equipment, but the principle of the thing still irks him.
It's still light-time when they get back to the city (yes, Zelenka is clearly incompetent at navigation and/or orienteering, which isn't much of a surprise because again, it's not like he usually goes out with a team, but it just makes for ongoing lack of sense and that makes Rodney's head hurt all over again, which is just irritating).
Naturally, Chieh'ad drags his ass back to medical, where New Guy and Possibly Jennifer Though It Seems Increasingly Unlikely talk about him and he recognizes half-snatches of words.
Out of sheer desperation, he places himself on a bed and sits cross-legged, trying to relax his body and mind in some sort of quasi-meditative manner to see if he can get anything that way.
He can't, not the way things made almost-sense with Chieh'ad before, but he does get the sense that Probably Not Jennifer's speech cadence is hard for New Guy to understand.
Of all the things he might possibly pick up on, wow, that's so not useful it's not even funny. What the fuck.
New Guy and Speech Cadence Chick prod him half a dozen times with tools that look like they're straight out of the Cretaceous (well, no, there's really no evidence of any tool-wielding dinosaurs, but it's once again the principle of the thing) and then they have him lie back while they hook up some kind of monitor. He has no idea what they're measuring, except that it's some kind of brain wave. It'd almost certainly work better if he knew what they were looking for, but this has been one of those Weeks In Which Rodney's Life Is Ridiculous, so of course, he can't get that data.
Well, fine. He lies there and thinks about Chieh'ad and beer and boots and--damn it--functional underwear.
He hopes the brain wave thing isn't measuring information about libido. But if it is, his is apparently working fine despite the head injury.
--
( Meeting of Minds - Part 2 of 2 )