ficpost: "Shining Time Station" Weir/Zelenka
Title: "Shining Time Station"
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Pairing: Weir/Zelenka
Spoilers/Timeline Pre-series
Rating: PG-13 for language and imagery
Notes: For rosewildeirish in the welovezelenka ficathon. She requested Zelenka/any, exploration, light or high adventure, and good characterization. I hope I managed to meet at least one of those criteria.
Summary: Shining time station, where dreams can come true/your own imagination/waiting there for you
Words: 2147
Shining Time Station
Radek is traveling westward by train. It is a silly thing to do but cheaper than flying and safer. Safety is not a number one concern, actually, but that is what he told Dr. Weir's secretary over the phone, and the secretary said very nicely that was fine and someone would meet him at the train station and not to worry about a thing. Radek never worries of course, but he is grateful for the permission given to let his mind relax and his thoughts flow as he presses his nose to the window of the train and watches America roll by at 175 kilometers an hour. America is big, amazingly big. When you are flying to Utah after a ten-hour flight already, as Radek did five years ago for a data compression conference, you miss something of the vastness. Radek is determined not to miss anything, because he is convinced, in some crazy mystical way that he cannot explain to his colleagues, that he is never coming home. One of the students, the attractive one with a shaggy brown beard, took him out to dinner and tried to talk him into staying. He refused to stay, but promised to write from America -- but he knows he is not staying in America either.
Everyone -- okay so not everyone, but everyone who has access to certain secret government files, and okay maybe not access but has been able to figure out the passwords the very stupid government officials use -- knows that in America, the real secrets are not in the Pentagon or even Roswell but in Colorado Springs, so Radek was very surprised and also very happy when he learned that he'd been asked to interview with someone at NORAD. He knows NORAD isn't where he's really going to be interviewing, not with all the security passes he's had to apply for, and this makes him even happier. He's going where the action is, he thinks, and he hums a song his mother taught him about a duck swimming out past the horizon to meet the sun.
He's left a little patch of fog on the windowpane, showing where his breath was, and through it he can see only hazily the contours of the landscape. She is like a beautiful woman, America, he has heard, a beautiful woman who has already been fucked by everyone and his brother. He doesn't think this is true really in the sense that his friend meant it. America is a woman who is young enough to be good in bed but experienced enough to know what to do. When they pass through big cities with smoke stacks polluting the air Radek is reminded of the woman who taught him how to smoke, and he smiles and blows a kiss towards the smoke stack city; she is beautiful too.
When he arrives in Colorado, Dr. Weir herself is there to greet him. She is short and has blonde hair that frizzes around her neck. She is carrying several folders and hands one to him. Her smile looks a bit pasted on, like she is wearing it just to greet him and forgotten to take it off now that he is in the car with her, holding her papers and driving back to NORAD. She is still calling it NORAD, and he smiles to himself, because he knows a secret and knows that Dr. Weir knows it too.
The interview is very easy. "They'll want to talk to you later," Dr. Weir tells him with the same tired smile that Radek now knows is just part of her outfit, as fake as her lipstick and as necessary as her stockings. "I just want to make sure you're halfway human."
"Scientists!" Radek says with a grin.
"Exactly." Dr. Weir is perpetually sympathetic, but it would be difficult to fool her. She seems to know about everything.. This is lucky; Radek will not have to explain anything to her. "Have you heard of Dr. McKay?"
"Rodney McKay?" Radek is secretly a little ashamed to let on how impressed he is. Dr. McKay's work became suddenly classified many years ago, but that doesn't mean he can't still be happy to hear his name in conjunction with work he himself will soon be doing.
"The same." Dr. Weir rolls her eyes.
"He is -- how would you say it --?"
"Slightly abrasive," Dr. Weir finishes for him, and he frowns.
"He is a brilliant physicist."
"And he is a -- very annoying -- human being."
Radek can tell from the way her lips crease upwards that she doesn't truly mean this, so he feels completely justified in saying, "Which is why you like him so much, yes?"
Dr. Weir laughs, and Radek is slightly surprised at her amusement. "Maybe I shouldn't take you along, after all," she says. "I'll have enough on my hands with Rodney."
"'Rodney' already?" He raises an eyebrow.
"He's my chief scientist," she tells him. "You can call me Dr. Weir until you've saved my life a few times."
"Is it likely to need saving?"
She tosses him one of the folders she is never without. "Read SG-1's mission reports."
He does read them, in the VIP room he has been assigned. It's a very nice room, hardly touched, no dust. A pleasant room, but not a lived-in one. He would truly rather be above ground, exploring the city he will be leaving to go South. He has many friends who have gone to Antarctica. They always come back a little different, a little touched in the head and wanting hot chocolate even in summer. He heard about a man who went to Antarctica and tried to come home before his time was up, wearing nothing warmer than long underwear and with chocolate tucked into all his pockets.
But this is all unnecessary consideration, because he knew that he would be doing this as soon as he heard the words top secret. Like a little boy who wants to play his big brother's game, Radek is sure he is going to tag along. Dr. Weir -- Elizabeth, he thinks with a mischievous grin -- is letting him, and he is wanting to go, quite badly.
He doesn't stop wanting to go, not even when there are several mild disasters at their research base every day, mostly relating to Dr. McKay, who does not possess the gene he needs to operate the machinery and is very, very upset as a result. Radek tries to stay out of Dr. McKay's way when he is in one of those moods, which is most of the time, and it is quite disappointing, as he was hoping to work with the famous scientist, side by side. But he really much prefers stringing wires far, far away from the tantrum that erupts from the Chair Room every time Rodney tries and fails to make it work.
Dr. Weir has duties of her own of course, back in Colorado; on the days when she's flown in from McMurdo the whole station goes mad, and Radek hangs back then, too, all too aware that if he becomes conspicuous now, he might waste his chance to make a good impression when it matters, when the world is all in tatters and he's the only person who can sew it back together. He whistles while he works, old railroad songs his father sang at night. The scientist who is his closest companion frowns at him; she disapproves of song.
So does McKay, but in a different way. When he overhears Radek singing he says, "Who's being happy on my watch? I hear sounds of merriment, and it's half past-three my time. I should be safe in bed. No one else should be happy when I'm not!"
Radek hates to make his leader unhappy, so he stops singing when McKay is around. Weir, though, loves to hear him sing. When she comes, she always takes the time to organize an event for them, a talent show or a movie night, and always compliments him when he sings for them. Her trips down to Antarctica consist mostly, though, of discussions with all the department heads. She has long talks with Dr. McKay, and Radek knows they are making a plan to convince their President to give them the go-ahead. There is lots of money involved, which he is less interested in, and Rodney always sputters when he emerges from these meetings, muttering to himself about how he is a scientist and cannot allow himself to be tainted with the fuzzy arithmetic of economics. Radek resists the temptation to ask him if he's heard of the numbers involved in quantum physics and simply always has a problem that needs his urgent attention. "The generator is showing signs of trouble, Doctor," or "One of the Air Force men is trying to use the Chair." Those will generally interest Dr. McKay enough to keep his mind off the terrible things that Dr. Weir tells him in their private meetings, and allows Radek to greet Dr. Weir privately.
On one occasion she tells him, "It's very thoughtful of you to distract Rodney like that. I appreciate it."
Radek smiles at her. "There is a favor you could do for me."
"What?" Her eyebrow quirks upward.
"You could join me in the laboratory and tell me what you think of these chemicals we have found hidden deep beneath the permafrost."
"You were down there?" Radek is quite touched by her worry, though it is quite pointless.
"I myself, no," he says. "Dr. McKay refused to let anyone but himself go down once they had dug the hole, and it took three of us, three!, to convince him that it would not be safe. Finally Dr. Beckett threatened him; he said, 'Rodney, if you should break your arm down there, I won't be the one fixing it for you!'"
"And that worked?" Dr. Weir has followed him into his laboratory as he hoped.
"It worked somewhat, because then he refused to go at all and wanted to send some of the apprentices down. He called them canaries and they were much offended and refused to do anything all day. It was extremely bothersome as we were working on a difficult experiment."
"And all this is somehow related to us getting to the Pegasus Galaxy?"
"Of course, of course! In any event, Dr. McKay was very upset. Finally one of the useless Army men --"
"Air Force," mutters Dr. Weir.
"Of course they are all Air Force. One of them volunteered himself to go down into the hole and retrieve the chemicals, but once he was down there a slight mishap occurred regarding the rope I had tied to a pole, and it was necessary that someone else go down with another piece of rope that would be tied perhaps more carefully."
"And you couldn't just throw down the rope?"
"And it would have landed on the useless Army man's head and then we would have to find another Army man to do all our work for us? I don't think this will happen, Elizabeth."
She laughs. "All right, so you really brought me down here for that?"
"No," he says. "I really brought you down here for this." He kisses her, for no particular reason except that he knows they are getting ever closer to a departure date, and he knows she is very worried all the time, and he is in love with her. These are in fact excellent reasons, so he kisses her again.
"Oh," she says, and suddenly her hands are fluttering and her eyes are darting everywhere. She is confused, perhaps guilty. Radek apologizes but she tells him there is no need, but that she has no time and no energy and needs to talk to Rodney again and
"Hush, Elizabeth, it will all be okay, no? I'll sing you a song."
"That's not really necessary," she says. "I'd rather you --"
"Make love to you?"
He looks at her hopefully and his heart beats in a very strange way when she puts her hands to her face and says, "I shouldn't. There's someone --" and sits on a hard metal chair.
"I'm sorry, then."
"No, don't be sorry. Just give me a minute."
"And then?"
"Then I'll be on my way," she says.
Soon they will all be on their way, and he doesn't know where they are going, but he knows that he is going with her and that her someone, whoever he is, is not. They will rush away from Antarctica and Colorado and all the intermediate places, faster than a train or even an airplane, and the only scheduled station stop is a destination he can't imagine.
He cannot wait to arrive, but before then, he cannot wait to depart.
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Pairing: Weir/Zelenka
Spoilers/Timeline Pre-series
Rating: PG-13 for language and imagery
Notes: For rosewildeirish in the welovezelenka ficathon. She requested Zelenka/any, exploration, light or high adventure, and good characterization. I hope I managed to meet at least one of those criteria.
Summary: Shining time station, where dreams can come true/your own imagination/waiting there for you
Words: 2147
Shining Time Station
Radek is traveling westward by train. It is a silly thing to do but cheaper than flying and safer. Safety is not a number one concern, actually, but that is what he told Dr. Weir's secretary over the phone, and the secretary said very nicely that was fine and someone would meet him at the train station and not to worry about a thing. Radek never worries of course, but he is grateful for the permission given to let his mind relax and his thoughts flow as he presses his nose to the window of the train and watches America roll by at 175 kilometers an hour. America is big, amazingly big. When you are flying to Utah after a ten-hour flight already, as Radek did five years ago for a data compression conference, you miss something of the vastness. Radek is determined not to miss anything, because he is convinced, in some crazy mystical way that he cannot explain to his colleagues, that he is never coming home. One of the students, the attractive one with a shaggy brown beard, took him out to dinner and tried to talk him into staying. He refused to stay, but promised to write from America -- but he knows he is not staying in America either.
Everyone -- okay so not everyone, but everyone who has access to certain secret government files, and okay maybe not access but has been able to figure out the passwords the very stupid government officials use -- knows that in America, the real secrets are not in the Pentagon or even Roswell but in Colorado Springs, so Radek was very surprised and also very happy when he learned that he'd been asked to interview with someone at NORAD. He knows NORAD isn't where he's really going to be interviewing, not with all the security passes he's had to apply for, and this makes him even happier. He's going where the action is, he thinks, and he hums a song his mother taught him about a duck swimming out past the horizon to meet the sun.
He's left a little patch of fog on the windowpane, showing where his breath was, and through it he can see only hazily the contours of the landscape. She is like a beautiful woman, America, he has heard, a beautiful woman who has already been fucked by everyone and his brother. He doesn't think this is true really in the sense that his friend meant it. America is a woman who is young enough to be good in bed but experienced enough to know what to do. When they pass through big cities with smoke stacks polluting the air Radek is reminded of the woman who taught him how to smoke, and he smiles and blows a kiss towards the smoke stack city; she is beautiful too.
When he arrives in Colorado, Dr. Weir herself is there to greet him. She is short and has blonde hair that frizzes around her neck. She is carrying several folders and hands one to him. Her smile looks a bit pasted on, like she is wearing it just to greet him and forgotten to take it off now that he is in the car with her, holding her papers and driving back to NORAD. She is still calling it NORAD, and he smiles to himself, because he knows a secret and knows that Dr. Weir knows it too.
The interview is very easy. "They'll want to talk to you later," Dr. Weir tells him with the same tired smile that Radek now knows is just part of her outfit, as fake as her lipstick and as necessary as her stockings. "I just want to make sure you're halfway human."
"Scientists!" Radek says with a grin.
"Exactly." Dr. Weir is perpetually sympathetic, but it would be difficult to fool her. She seems to know about everything.. This is lucky; Radek will not have to explain anything to her. "Have you heard of Dr. McKay?"
"Rodney McKay?" Radek is secretly a little ashamed to let on how impressed he is. Dr. McKay's work became suddenly classified many years ago, but that doesn't mean he can't still be happy to hear his name in conjunction with work he himself will soon be doing.
"The same." Dr. Weir rolls her eyes.
"He is -- how would you say it --?"
"Slightly abrasive," Dr. Weir finishes for him, and he frowns.
"He is a brilliant physicist."
"And he is a -- very annoying -- human being."
Radek can tell from the way her lips crease upwards that she doesn't truly mean this, so he feels completely justified in saying, "Which is why you like him so much, yes?"
Dr. Weir laughs, and Radek is slightly surprised at her amusement. "Maybe I shouldn't take you along, after all," she says. "I'll have enough on my hands with Rodney."
"'Rodney' already?" He raises an eyebrow.
"He's my chief scientist," she tells him. "You can call me Dr. Weir until you've saved my life a few times."
"Is it likely to need saving?"
She tosses him one of the folders she is never without. "Read SG-1's mission reports."
He does read them, in the VIP room he has been assigned. It's a very nice room, hardly touched, no dust. A pleasant room, but not a lived-in one. He would truly rather be above ground, exploring the city he will be leaving to go South. He has many friends who have gone to Antarctica. They always come back a little different, a little touched in the head and wanting hot chocolate even in summer. He heard about a man who went to Antarctica and tried to come home before his time was up, wearing nothing warmer than long underwear and with chocolate tucked into all his pockets.
But this is all unnecessary consideration, because he knew that he would be doing this as soon as he heard the words top secret. Like a little boy who wants to play his big brother's game, Radek is sure he is going to tag along. Dr. Weir -- Elizabeth, he thinks with a mischievous grin -- is letting him, and he is wanting to go, quite badly.
He doesn't stop wanting to go, not even when there are several mild disasters at their research base every day, mostly relating to Dr. McKay, who does not possess the gene he needs to operate the machinery and is very, very upset as a result. Radek tries to stay out of Dr. McKay's way when he is in one of those moods, which is most of the time, and it is quite disappointing, as he was hoping to work with the famous scientist, side by side. But he really much prefers stringing wires far, far away from the tantrum that erupts from the Chair Room every time Rodney tries and fails to make it work.
Dr. Weir has duties of her own of course, back in Colorado; on the days when she's flown in from McMurdo the whole station goes mad, and Radek hangs back then, too, all too aware that if he becomes conspicuous now, he might waste his chance to make a good impression when it matters, when the world is all in tatters and he's the only person who can sew it back together. He whistles while he works, old railroad songs his father sang at night. The scientist who is his closest companion frowns at him; she disapproves of song.
So does McKay, but in a different way. When he overhears Radek singing he says, "Who's being happy on my watch? I hear sounds of merriment, and it's half past-three my time. I should be safe in bed. No one else should be happy when I'm not!"
Radek hates to make his leader unhappy, so he stops singing when McKay is around. Weir, though, loves to hear him sing. When she comes, she always takes the time to organize an event for them, a talent show or a movie night, and always compliments him when he sings for them. Her trips down to Antarctica consist mostly, though, of discussions with all the department heads. She has long talks with Dr. McKay, and Radek knows they are making a plan to convince their President to give them the go-ahead. There is lots of money involved, which he is less interested in, and Rodney always sputters when he emerges from these meetings, muttering to himself about how he is a scientist and cannot allow himself to be tainted with the fuzzy arithmetic of economics. Radek resists the temptation to ask him if he's heard of the numbers involved in quantum physics and simply always has a problem that needs his urgent attention. "The generator is showing signs of trouble, Doctor," or "One of the Air Force men is trying to use the Chair." Those will generally interest Dr. McKay enough to keep his mind off the terrible things that Dr. Weir tells him in their private meetings, and allows Radek to greet Dr. Weir privately.
On one occasion she tells him, "It's very thoughtful of you to distract Rodney like that. I appreciate it."
Radek smiles at her. "There is a favor you could do for me."
"What?" Her eyebrow quirks upward.
"You could join me in the laboratory and tell me what you think of these chemicals we have found hidden deep beneath the permafrost."
"You were down there?" Radek is quite touched by her worry, though it is quite pointless.
"I myself, no," he says. "Dr. McKay refused to let anyone but himself go down once they had dug the hole, and it took three of us, three!, to convince him that it would not be safe. Finally Dr. Beckett threatened him; he said, 'Rodney, if you should break your arm down there, I won't be the one fixing it for you!'"
"And that worked?" Dr. Weir has followed him into his laboratory as he hoped.
"It worked somewhat, because then he refused to go at all and wanted to send some of the apprentices down. He called them canaries and they were much offended and refused to do anything all day. It was extremely bothersome as we were working on a difficult experiment."
"And all this is somehow related to us getting to the Pegasus Galaxy?"
"Of course, of course! In any event, Dr. McKay was very upset. Finally one of the useless Army men --"
"Air Force," mutters Dr. Weir.
"Of course they are all Air Force. One of them volunteered himself to go down into the hole and retrieve the chemicals, but once he was down there a slight mishap occurred regarding the rope I had tied to a pole, and it was necessary that someone else go down with another piece of rope that would be tied perhaps more carefully."
"And you couldn't just throw down the rope?"
"And it would have landed on the useless Army man's head and then we would have to find another Army man to do all our work for us? I don't think this will happen, Elizabeth."
She laughs. "All right, so you really brought me down here for that?"
"No," he says. "I really brought you down here for this." He kisses her, for no particular reason except that he knows they are getting ever closer to a departure date, and he knows she is very worried all the time, and he is in love with her. These are in fact excellent reasons, so he kisses her again.
"Oh," she says, and suddenly her hands are fluttering and her eyes are darting everywhere. She is confused, perhaps guilty. Radek apologizes but she tells him there is no need, but that she has no time and no energy and needs to talk to Rodney again and
"Hush, Elizabeth, it will all be okay, no? I'll sing you a song."
"That's not really necessary," she says. "I'd rather you --"
"Make love to you?"
He looks at her hopefully and his heart beats in a very strange way when she puts her hands to her face and says, "I shouldn't. There's someone --" and sits on a hard metal chair.
"I'm sorry, then."
"No, don't be sorry. Just give me a minute."
"And then?"
"Then I'll be on my way," she says.
Soon they will all be on their way, and he doesn't know where they are going, but he knows that he is going with her and that her someone, whoever he is, is not. They will rush away from Antarctica and Colorado and all the intermediate places, faster than a train or even an airplane, and the only scheduled station stop is a destination he can't imagine.
He cannot wait to arrive, but before then, he cannot wait to depart.