[SGA fic] The McKay Code, UNFINISHED
This began life as commentfic and at this point I'm accepting that it just isn't going to go anywhere, mainly because a) it really wants to be a very plot-heavy story, b) I don't know enough about art history, and c) it stalled.
So: I release it into the wild, because I do like the first bit, at least, and love the first line.
It is unfinished (really, barely started), and will almost certainly remain so unless somebody else wants to run with it.
The McKay Code
Rodney finds Jesus in a bar in Colorado.
"Wow," the man says to him, raising his eyebrows. "And here I thought art history pickup lines only worked on undergrads. Thanks but no thanks," he says, and turns back to his beer.
Rodney splutters. "I wasn't--okay, look, I'm here with someone." He waves. "Wave, Sam," he mutters, and the blonde across the room waves back wryly. "It wasn't a line, you really do look just like someone in a Cavada painting, I look at the things for a living."
He launches into the rest of the explanation: he's a professor of art history, the nation's top Cavada scholar, and sometimes he recognizes faces from sixteenth-century sketches in real life. He's got photographs of the other three: a waitress smiling down like a cartoon of the Madonna, a man he literally ran into in a J.C. Penney's hastily dragged outside and photographed smiling up into the parking lot light like The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds, Mary Magdalene in the form of this adjunct professor of linguistics who was really quite tickled. So if the man--what was his name, anyway? John--if John could just take Rodney's card and call so that Rodney could take a picture or two, isn't John flattered?
John takes the card, looking a little shell-shocked, and Rodney beams at him. "Perfect," he says. "Perfect," and takes Sam home in a daze.
The Cavada Christ Among the Spies is one of his less-well-known works. It's unique in that it does not show the face of Jesus; he's turned from the viewer and lost in contemplation of something (the coin) held in his hand--perhaps gathering his thoughts before turning and asking, "Whose is this image?"
The men who surround him are in a flurry of action in the busy street, holding up tribute coins, mid-sentence with one another, but for all of their flourished movements and animated faces, the eye of the viewer is drawn to the central figure's stillness, and the chiaroscuro of the light illuminating the back of his head in the darkness. Rodney's always been drawn to it.
And then he recognized it in the bar, in the form of a man contemplating nothing more important than a beer bottle. Rodney knew. And then the man turned to him, and yes, that was him, that was the man whom Cavada sketched over and over in drafts, almost obsessively--face, body, moving, still--the man whose face Cavada never showed in a finished work.
***
"Oh, my God, you came," Rodney says. Framed in the doorway of his office is the man from the bar, Cavada's model. John.
John shruggs. "Yeah, you know." He flips up Rodney's card in two fingers. "Turns out you are a professor. What the hell."
He's beautiful, is the thing. Maybe a little taller than the man in the Cavada cartoons, the hair's a little different--or maybe John's hair made cherub-curls when he was younger--and John's got a look in his eye that never made it to paper, a certain suspicion--
"So, the . . . photo?" John says, breaking Rodney's concentration, and Rodney realizes he's been staring.
"Um. Right," Rodney says, wheeling in his desk chair to grab a book from the shelf and incidentally attempt to hide part of his blush.
He thumps the book down on his desk and flips it open. "Cavada produced over a hundred images of the same man over twelve years; he's by far his favorite subject. They're mostly sketches--" and here he points out John in pencil, kneeling at the Adoration, ghostly wisps of clothing over his body-- "but he makes it into the finished paintings every so often." Rodney opens another book to a vision of Hell.
The painting itself is overwhelming in person: Rodney's stood in front of it in a much-too-small room in a French museum. The thing's practically the size of the wall, and in such close quarters it necessitates physically moving around to see each tortured soul; the viewer is left with the unnerving feeling of being among the damned.
Even in print it's disconcerting. Each figure is given its own loving detailed plate, and number ten is John, kneeling with his face buried in his hands, tormented and twisted, the line of his spine frozen in agony.
"Wow," John says softly.
"Not," Rodney says, "one of his more cheerful works."
John flips back to the full view again, studying it, and Rodney takes the opportunity to study John, wondering how some quirk of genetics gave the world this living, breathing work of art, sitting here in Rodney's office, dust motes swirling lazily around him in the sunbeam.
"Hey," John says suddenly, "what's this?" He taps his finger on a symbol half-hidden behind a demon. It's one of the strange, spiky line glyphs that Cavada sometimes slips into a painting--there's been much conjecture about what they mean, but--
"Nobody knows," Rodney says, leaning his chair back and crossing his arms, and he can't quite hide the bitterness that there's some secret of Cavada's he hasn't been able to crack. "They're not any sort of known religious or mystic symbol, alphabet or any other system, they're just . . . there. No one else uses them. Just Cavada."
John frowns and stands up. "Cavada and some tattoo artist in Oaxaca," and then he's pulling the waistband of his track pants down, just a little, to expose a delicate line of spiky glyphs curling over his hip.
As though through a haze, Rodney hears John say something about being twenty and spring break and really too much mezcal and waking up with a line of sixteenth-century secret code inked dark on his pale skin where Rodney should really, really stop staring--
--and at that point Rodney blacks out.
***
Rodney comes to slowly, the face of an angel above him, his hair glowing black and gold, worried eyes the color of the ocean, the sky, and he thinks, Well, that was a stupid way to go. It's worth it, though, heaven like a gilded ceiling.
Before he can say anything embarrassing, though, the angel says, "Seriously, they make chairs now that don't flip over when you lean," and heaven dissolves into Rodney's book-lined office, and it's only John, backlit by Rodney's office window.
"Ow," Rodney says.
"Okay," John says, calmly and quietly, and levers Rodney to his feet. "I'm assuming there's a nurse or something somewhere on this campus?"
"I'm fine," Rodney insists as he pulls his arm out of John's grip. "Just let me--"
John slips an arm around him to support him, and okay, Rodney's totally not above faking feeling worse than he actually does if this is what it gets him. "Not a chance," John says.
Which, well, okay, and Rodney lets himself be turned toward the door. "Wait! Wait, grab the Mahan."
"The what?"
Rodney flails an arm out toward his desk. "The book. The red one."
He can hear John roll his eyes. "I am not carrying you and an enormous book."
No, but Rodney needs that book, they need to look up the rest of the glyphs and hopefully do a lot of detailed comparing to the ones on John's skin. He swerves back around, twisting John, who does not have Rodney's advantage in the realm of weight.
"Fine, fine," John says irritably. "Just stop lurching," and deposits him in the guest chair, the one without wheels, and grabs the book and stuffs it into Rodney's backpack before pulling him up again and out of his office.
Predictably, the student health center is filled with students with twisted ankles and nervous breakdowns--normal for Dead Week--and for a minute Rodney's sorry that there's an empty seat for him.
They spend the twenty-minute wait leafing through the Mahan and marking the glyph paintings with Post-It Flags Rodney bullied out of a sophomore. There's kind of a lot of them, and it becomes something of a game to see who spots them first. Rodney should have the advantage, but he's blaming the concussion for the way that John tends to turn the page and say, "Oh, hey--in the leaves."
Finally, finally, Rodney's name gets called, and between that and the interminably long time it takes a supposed medical professional to see if his brain is scrambled, it's dinnertime by the time Rodney is let go with an ice pack and some Tylenol.
John's still sitting in the waiting room, his head bent studiously over the book in his lap, and Rodney knows he can't let him go.
"So," Rodney says, in lieu of saying I think you might be the key to my entire life's work. "Can we reschedule the picture thing?"
"Sure," John says. "I'm easy."
So: I release it into the wild, because I do like the first bit, at least, and love the first line.
It is unfinished (really, barely started), and will almost certainly remain so unless somebody else wants to run with it.
The McKay Code
Rodney finds Jesus in a bar in Colorado.
"Wow," the man says to him, raising his eyebrows. "And here I thought art history pickup lines only worked on undergrads. Thanks but no thanks," he says, and turns back to his beer.
Rodney splutters. "I wasn't--okay, look, I'm here with someone." He waves. "Wave, Sam," he mutters, and the blonde across the room waves back wryly. "It wasn't a line, you really do look just like someone in a Cavada painting, I look at the things for a living."
He launches into the rest of the explanation: he's a professor of art history, the nation's top Cavada scholar, and sometimes he recognizes faces from sixteenth-century sketches in real life. He's got photographs of the other three: a waitress smiling down like a cartoon of the Madonna, a man he literally ran into in a J.C. Penney's hastily dragged outside and photographed smiling up into the parking lot light like The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds, Mary Magdalene in the form of this adjunct professor of linguistics who was really quite tickled. So if the man--what was his name, anyway? John--if John could just take Rodney's card and call so that Rodney could take a picture or two, isn't John flattered?
John takes the card, looking a little shell-shocked, and Rodney beams at him. "Perfect," he says. "Perfect," and takes Sam home in a daze.
The Cavada Christ Among the Spies is one of his less-well-known works. It's unique in that it does not show the face of Jesus; he's turned from the viewer and lost in contemplation of something (the coin) held in his hand--perhaps gathering his thoughts before turning and asking, "Whose is this image?"
The men who surround him are in a flurry of action in the busy street, holding up tribute coins, mid-sentence with one another, but for all of their flourished movements and animated faces, the eye of the viewer is drawn to the central figure's stillness, and the chiaroscuro of the light illuminating the back of his head in the darkness. Rodney's always been drawn to it.
And then he recognized it in the bar, in the form of a man contemplating nothing more important than a beer bottle. Rodney knew. And then the man turned to him, and yes, that was him, that was the man whom Cavada sketched over and over in drafts, almost obsessively--face, body, moving, still--the man whose face Cavada never showed in a finished work.
***
"Oh, my God, you came," Rodney says. Framed in the doorway of his office is the man from the bar, Cavada's model. John.
John shruggs. "Yeah, you know." He flips up Rodney's card in two fingers. "Turns out you are a professor. What the hell."
He's beautiful, is the thing. Maybe a little taller than the man in the Cavada cartoons, the hair's a little different--or maybe John's hair made cherub-curls when he was younger--and John's got a look in his eye that never made it to paper, a certain suspicion--
"So, the . . . photo?" John says, breaking Rodney's concentration, and Rodney realizes he's been staring.
"Um. Right," Rodney says, wheeling in his desk chair to grab a book from the shelf and incidentally attempt to hide part of his blush.
He thumps the book down on his desk and flips it open. "Cavada produced over a hundred images of the same man over twelve years; he's by far his favorite subject. They're mostly sketches--" and here he points out John in pencil, kneeling at the Adoration, ghostly wisps of clothing over his body-- "but he makes it into the finished paintings every so often." Rodney opens another book to a vision of Hell.
The painting itself is overwhelming in person: Rodney's stood in front of it in a much-too-small room in a French museum. The thing's practically the size of the wall, and in such close quarters it necessitates physically moving around to see each tortured soul; the viewer is left with the unnerving feeling of being among the damned.
Even in print it's disconcerting. Each figure is given its own loving detailed plate, and number ten is John, kneeling with his face buried in his hands, tormented and twisted, the line of his spine frozen in agony.
"Wow," John says softly.
"Not," Rodney says, "one of his more cheerful works."
John flips back to the full view again, studying it, and Rodney takes the opportunity to study John, wondering how some quirk of genetics gave the world this living, breathing work of art, sitting here in Rodney's office, dust motes swirling lazily around him in the sunbeam.
"Hey," John says suddenly, "what's this?" He taps his finger on a symbol half-hidden behind a demon. It's one of the strange, spiky line glyphs that Cavada sometimes slips into a painting--there's been much conjecture about what they mean, but--
"Nobody knows," Rodney says, leaning his chair back and crossing his arms, and he can't quite hide the bitterness that there's some secret of Cavada's he hasn't been able to crack. "They're not any sort of known religious or mystic symbol, alphabet or any other system, they're just . . . there. No one else uses them. Just Cavada."
John frowns and stands up. "Cavada and some tattoo artist in Oaxaca," and then he's pulling the waistband of his track pants down, just a little, to expose a delicate line of spiky glyphs curling over his hip.
As though through a haze, Rodney hears John say something about being twenty and spring break and really too much mezcal and waking up with a line of sixteenth-century secret code inked dark on his pale skin where Rodney should really, really stop staring--
--and at that point Rodney blacks out.
***
Rodney comes to slowly, the face of an angel above him, his hair glowing black and gold, worried eyes the color of the ocean, the sky, and he thinks, Well, that was a stupid way to go. It's worth it, though, heaven like a gilded ceiling.
Before he can say anything embarrassing, though, the angel says, "Seriously, they make chairs now that don't flip over when you lean," and heaven dissolves into Rodney's book-lined office, and it's only John, backlit by Rodney's office window.
"Ow," Rodney says.
"Okay," John says, calmly and quietly, and levers Rodney to his feet. "I'm assuming there's a nurse or something somewhere on this campus?"
"I'm fine," Rodney insists as he pulls his arm out of John's grip. "Just let me--"
John slips an arm around him to support him, and okay, Rodney's totally not above faking feeling worse than he actually does if this is what it gets him. "Not a chance," John says.
Which, well, okay, and Rodney lets himself be turned toward the door. "Wait! Wait, grab the Mahan."
"The what?"
Rodney flails an arm out toward his desk. "The book. The red one."
He can hear John roll his eyes. "I am not carrying you and an enormous book."
No, but Rodney needs that book, they need to look up the rest of the glyphs and hopefully do a lot of detailed comparing to the ones on John's skin. He swerves back around, twisting John, who does not have Rodney's advantage in the realm of weight.
"Fine, fine," John says irritably. "Just stop lurching," and deposits him in the guest chair, the one without wheels, and grabs the book and stuffs it into Rodney's backpack before pulling him up again and out of his office.
Predictably, the student health center is filled with students with twisted ankles and nervous breakdowns--normal for Dead Week--and for a minute Rodney's sorry that there's an empty seat for him.
They spend the twenty-minute wait leafing through the Mahan and marking the glyph paintings with Post-It Flags Rodney bullied out of a sophomore. There's kind of a lot of them, and it becomes something of a game to see who spots them first. Rodney should have the advantage, but he's blaming the concussion for the way that John tends to turn the page and say, "Oh, hey--in the leaves."
Finally, finally, Rodney's name gets called, and between that and the interminably long time it takes a supposed medical professional to see if his brain is scrambled, it's dinnertime by the time Rodney is let go with an ice pack and some Tylenol.
John's still sitting in the waiting room, his head bent studiously over the book in his lap, and Rodney knows he can't let him go.
"So," Rodney says, in lieu of saying I think you might be the key to my entire life's work. "Can we reschedule the picture thing?"
"Sure," John says. "I'm easy."