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sga_flashficTitle: Atlantis In Tatters
Author: Ekaterinn
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Summary: It's not like Area 51, or Siberia, or any other place he's worked. It's nothing like Atlantis.
Notes: Heavy angst warning. Much thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
raucousraven for doing a wonderful beta on this and to bejiin, for allowing me to pick her brains about her college. 1798 words.
Rodney ends up at a small women's college in Decatur, GA because:
a) he hasn't actually published anything in years, due to being in another galaxy.
b) he quit the Stargate program and refuses to have anything to do with the American government. Or any other governments, for that matter.
c) he just doesn't care.
It's actually pretty nice here. The campus is all rolling green lawns and red brick buildings. The science center is full of eighteen to twenty-two-year-old girls, who giggle about when they're not freaking out over exams. Quite a few of them are blonde. He has a small lab, and the physics department is on the first floor, so he doesn't have to worry about the stairs. There's even access to really decent coffee off-campus, the kind Rodney hasn't had in ages, at a place called Java Monkey. He's already a fan of their chocolate mocha cake.
It's not like Area 51, or Siberia, or any other place he's worked.
It's nothing like Atlantis.
*
In Rodney's dreams, he never sees the hole in Elizabeth's chest until the last minute. He thinks she's sleeping, and as long as he never looks down past her face, he doesn't have to know. The reality was much different, of course. They were running; there was a flash of light and Elizabeth fell. It was both astoundingly quick and agonizingly slow.
In the dream, he calculates relativity:
E = mc2, where E is for Elizabeth, m equals the moments she lived and c represents all the shock and pain on her face.
In the dream, he doesn't keep running.
*
There was a cot in his lab when he moved in and Rodney never got around to having it removed. The first night he stays up way too late working, more because he doesn't want to go home to his bare apartment than any real engagement with what he's doing, he's glad he didn't. He curls up on the cot, his sweater crunched up under his head for a pillow, and falls asleep.
Two hours later, the light comes on in the lab and Rodney's scrambling to stand up and reaching for his sidearm, when he realizes 1) he's not too steady on his feet anymore and 2) he doesn't carry here. He stumbles backward and sits down on the cot, hard. The intruder is staring at him. A black kid, not a day older than twenty-five. He reminds Rodney of Ford, before the Pegasus Galaxy chewed him up, made him into something deadly and different. Just part of the night crew, more scared of Rodney than Rodney is of him. This isn't a huge research institution, where people fall asleep in their labs every day.
"Sorry," says Rodney, rubbing at his face with his hands, "sorry."
*
Radek's hands were burned black. Rodney's eyes couldn't stop flickering between them and Radek's screwdriver, fallen on the floor. Radek's own eyes were wide, screaming an intense pain just barely kept in check. But his voice was steady as he said, "Go, Rodney. Go, bůh tě zatrať!" Rodney ran, clutching the database in his gene therapy treated, unburned arms.
*
Autumn fades away into December. It's suddenly quite cold. Rodney digs into his closet, searching for a coat. He finds his Atlantis jacket, identifying him as a scientist and a Canadian, stuffed away at the very back. He drops it to the floor in horror and contemplates curling up on the carpet and crying. Instead, he swigs back three-fifths of a bottle of Scotch and stumbles into bed. The next morning, he picks up the jacket, smoothes it out and hangs it up.
The end of the semester sneaks up on everyone. His upper-year students become too frantic with work and deadlines to have the grace to act cowed when he yells at them in seminar. He writes three recommendation letters, and is only overly sarcastic in one. Dr. Finco invites him to a faculty Christmas party, and a part of Rodney sneers, cell biologist. Another part is fiercely glad the man's not a geneticist, because he sounded an awful lot like Carson telling Rodney to sleep, for god's sake, at that moment. Rodney will never know if Carson managed to get offworld in time. He doesn't go to the party.
During the holidays, Rodney stays around campus, grading exams and working. He'll have his first official paper in years published in the spring. There are hundreds of others, of course, in the database under Cheyenne Mountain, but he doesn't think about that.
Every few days, Rodney goes for a walk, making his way slowly up from science center to the library, passing the campus center and the music building. During these sometimes painful jaunts, he wears the sweatshirt he bought in the campus bookstore. He always stops to stare up at the gargoyles perched on top of the library, losing himself in the quiet.
His leg aches more in the morning, though it's now less troublesome at night. Rodney installs a coffemaker in the lab. He drinks cup after cup and that seems to help, though he finds it hard to work the electron microscope when his hands are shaking. He wastes his days like minutes, all the fractions of time the others will never have. They splash like drops of blood behind him, and he doesn't look back.
*
He never got used to watching John fly away from him. It was like the citrus allergy; with repeated exposure he just got more fucking sick. Rodney keeps expecting John to just show up, lounging prettily on a couch in the atrium, flirting with the math chicks, hanging around outside the lab. But he doesn't.
*
When the wormhole spat him out, Rodney was barely conscious. He collapsed on the hard floor, left leg crumbling like Atlantis’ broken spires. He told General O'Neill to only let people with the Ancient gene to touch the database. Then he passed out.
When he woke up, Carter was there. She asked him questions about the database, about what had happened on Atlantis, about the Wraith. He answered each one, numb on painkillers - opioids. His hands shook if he wasn't careful, though, so he hid them under the sheets. He had been running scared for so long that his body didn't know how to stop.
She visited three more times after that. The last time she had said, "Christ, McKay, I'm so sorry." and then looked away. Rodney had told her, level and quiet, to go away and not come back. He never saw her again.
General O'Neill came by once. Rodney told him about the end of Sheppard's last flight, just another flash of light in a sky already filled with arcs of blue lightening. He told him he wanted out of the Stargate program.
O'Neill had nodded gravely, and spoken of sending a rescue mission to the Alpha Site in Pegasus, as soon as it was deemed safe. They would see if anyone had made it out and bring them home. Rodney had bit his lip and nodded back. Then he had puked all over O'Neill's shoes.
It was one of the few things Rodney wasn’t sorry for at all.
*
When his students come back, Rodney surprises himself by feeling glad. Suddenly, there are classes to prepare, more assignments to mark, insane quizzes to create. More brash mathletes in the halls. It keeps him busy, and Rodney finds himself drinking less coffee and sleeping better at night. (The last two things might be connected, but Rodney believes it's only a correlation. Nothing causal to see here.)
He writes on the whiteboard in one of his intro sections:
w = mg and v = gt, where w is weight, m is mass, v is velocity and g is acceleration of gravity at 9.81 m/s2.
Their pens scratch, taking down this most basic information. In Atlantis, gravity was .23% lighter than on Earth. The equations for the energy weapons and shield capacity were much more complicated than this, but that change in gravity had made a difference, buying them - him - an extra three minutes and fifty-four seconds.
They talk about vertical and horizontal motion. He has them calculating the speed of an apple falling to Earth from the height of two meters. When the shield fell, the city took fire, bolts thudding into the structure from high above. Height affects speed. That's not only elementary, but vital. Atlantis' weapons fired faster over a longer range. It still wasn't enough. For Rodney, the smell of burning circuitry will forever be conflated with that of charred flesh.
Rodney lectures to his seminar about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and its effect on electromagnetic fields in quantum mechanics. He thinks about asymptotic curves and the price of the knowledge he brought back and wonders if any of it will be worth what they paid. When he dismisses the class early, he swears his students almost look disappointed.
*
Atlantis is still alive. Rodney knows this, can't not know this. She's in tatters, the sea eating into her scars, but she's still standing on a planet they never named. If Stargate Command ever figures out how to disable the long-range weapons from a distance, if they can avoid the Wraith swarm in Pegasus, if Rodney's and Radek's bombs didn't completely destroy the stargate, another expedition could be sent. They have not necessarily lost the city of the Ancients.
It's no comfort.
*
Rodney stands in the atrium, leaning against the glass of the window. Behind him, a chem study group chatters about organic molecules and their plans for the weekend. Outside, it is a warm spring day. A slight wind rustles the leaves of a tree in the distance.
If he closes his eyes, he can almost feel the breeze in here. He can almost feel John's hands on his face, ghosting down to trace his lips. John's mouth on his own, hungry and sweet. John's voice in his ears, whispering all the things they never said. John's tongue, licking a path down his neck to his collarbone. John's fingers, pressed against his nipples. John's body, pressed against his own.
He's aching with need, and his fingers spasm and clench onto his cane. "Sheppard," he says out loud, "John, you - I -" You left me, he thinks, and you didn't tell me it would hurt so fucking much. If he opens his eyes, Rodney knows he'll see the green field in front of the science center, the red path cutting a line though it. There might be two students walking arm-in-arm in the sunlight, on their way to class. Rodney leans on the cane and keeps his eyes closed, for just a bit longer.
Author: Ekaterinn
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Summary: It's not like Area 51, or Siberia, or any other place he's worked. It's nothing like Atlantis.
Notes: Heavy angst warning. Much thanks to
raucousraven for doing a wonderful beta on this and to bejiin, for allowing me to pick her brains about her college. 1798 words.Rodney ends up at a small women's college in Decatur, GA because:
a) he hasn't actually published anything in years, due to being in another galaxy.
b) he quit the Stargate program and refuses to have anything to do with the American government. Or any other governments, for that matter.
c) he just doesn't care.
It's actually pretty nice here. The campus is all rolling green lawns and red brick buildings. The science center is full of eighteen to twenty-two-year-old girls, who giggle about when they're not freaking out over exams. Quite a few of them are blonde. He has a small lab, and the physics department is on the first floor, so he doesn't have to worry about the stairs. There's even access to really decent coffee off-campus, the kind Rodney hasn't had in ages, at a place called Java Monkey. He's already a fan of their chocolate mocha cake.
It's not like Area 51, or Siberia, or any other place he's worked.
It's nothing like Atlantis.
*
In Rodney's dreams, he never sees the hole in Elizabeth's chest until the last minute. He thinks she's sleeping, and as long as he never looks down past her face, he doesn't have to know. The reality was much different, of course. They were running; there was a flash of light and Elizabeth fell. It was both astoundingly quick and agonizingly slow.
In the dream, he calculates relativity:
E = mc2, where E is for Elizabeth, m equals the moments she lived and c represents all the shock and pain on her face.
In the dream, he doesn't keep running.
*
There was a cot in his lab when he moved in and Rodney never got around to having it removed. The first night he stays up way too late working, more because he doesn't want to go home to his bare apartment than any real engagement with what he's doing, he's glad he didn't. He curls up on the cot, his sweater crunched up under his head for a pillow, and falls asleep.
Two hours later, the light comes on in the lab and Rodney's scrambling to stand up and reaching for his sidearm, when he realizes 1) he's not too steady on his feet anymore and 2) he doesn't carry here. He stumbles backward and sits down on the cot, hard. The intruder is staring at him. A black kid, not a day older than twenty-five. He reminds Rodney of Ford, before the Pegasus Galaxy chewed him up, made him into something deadly and different. Just part of the night crew, more scared of Rodney than Rodney is of him. This isn't a huge research institution, where people fall asleep in their labs every day.
"Sorry," says Rodney, rubbing at his face with his hands, "sorry."
*
Radek's hands were burned black. Rodney's eyes couldn't stop flickering between them and Radek's screwdriver, fallen on the floor. Radek's own eyes were wide, screaming an intense pain just barely kept in check. But his voice was steady as he said, "Go, Rodney. Go, bůh tě zatrať!" Rodney ran, clutching the database in his gene therapy treated, unburned arms.
*
Autumn fades away into December. It's suddenly quite cold. Rodney digs into his closet, searching for a coat. He finds his Atlantis jacket, identifying him as a scientist and a Canadian, stuffed away at the very back. He drops it to the floor in horror and contemplates curling up on the carpet and crying. Instead, he swigs back three-fifths of a bottle of Scotch and stumbles into bed. The next morning, he picks up the jacket, smoothes it out and hangs it up.
The end of the semester sneaks up on everyone. His upper-year students become too frantic with work and deadlines to have the grace to act cowed when he yells at them in seminar. He writes three recommendation letters, and is only overly sarcastic in one. Dr. Finco invites him to a faculty Christmas party, and a part of Rodney sneers, cell biologist. Another part is fiercely glad the man's not a geneticist, because he sounded an awful lot like Carson telling Rodney to sleep, for god's sake, at that moment. Rodney will never know if Carson managed to get offworld in time. He doesn't go to the party.
During the holidays, Rodney stays around campus, grading exams and working. He'll have his first official paper in years published in the spring. There are hundreds of others, of course, in the database under Cheyenne Mountain, but he doesn't think about that.
Every few days, Rodney goes for a walk, making his way slowly up from science center to the library, passing the campus center and the music building. During these sometimes painful jaunts, he wears the sweatshirt he bought in the campus bookstore. He always stops to stare up at the gargoyles perched on top of the library, losing himself in the quiet.
His leg aches more in the morning, though it's now less troublesome at night. Rodney installs a coffemaker in the lab. He drinks cup after cup and that seems to help, though he finds it hard to work the electron microscope when his hands are shaking. He wastes his days like minutes, all the fractions of time the others will never have. They splash like drops of blood behind him, and he doesn't look back.
*
He never got used to watching John fly away from him. It was like the citrus allergy; with repeated exposure he just got more fucking sick. Rodney keeps expecting John to just show up, lounging prettily on a couch in the atrium, flirting with the math chicks, hanging around outside the lab. But he doesn't.
*
When the wormhole spat him out, Rodney was barely conscious. He collapsed on the hard floor, left leg crumbling like Atlantis’ broken spires. He told General O'Neill to only let people with the Ancient gene to touch the database. Then he passed out.
When he woke up, Carter was there. She asked him questions about the database, about what had happened on Atlantis, about the Wraith. He answered each one, numb on painkillers - opioids. His hands shook if he wasn't careful, though, so he hid them under the sheets. He had been running scared for so long that his body didn't know how to stop.
She visited three more times after that. The last time she had said, "Christ, McKay, I'm so sorry." and then looked away. Rodney had told her, level and quiet, to go away and not come back. He never saw her again.
General O'Neill came by once. Rodney told him about the end of Sheppard's last flight, just another flash of light in a sky already filled with arcs of blue lightening. He told him he wanted out of the Stargate program.
O'Neill had nodded gravely, and spoken of sending a rescue mission to the Alpha Site in Pegasus, as soon as it was deemed safe. They would see if anyone had made it out and bring them home. Rodney had bit his lip and nodded back. Then he had puked all over O'Neill's shoes.
It was one of the few things Rodney wasn’t sorry for at all.
*
When his students come back, Rodney surprises himself by feeling glad. Suddenly, there are classes to prepare, more assignments to mark, insane quizzes to create. More brash mathletes in the halls. It keeps him busy, and Rodney finds himself drinking less coffee and sleeping better at night. (The last two things might be connected, but Rodney believes it's only a correlation. Nothing causal to see here.)
He writes on the whiteboard in one of his intro sections:
w = mg and v = gt, where w is weight, m is mass, v is velocity and g is acceleration of gravity at 9.81 m/s2.
Their pens scratch, taking down this most basic information. In Atlantis, gravity was .23% lighter than on Earth. The equations for the energy weapons and shield capacity were much more complicated than this, but that change in gravity had made a difference, buying them - him - an extra three minutes and fifty-four seconds.
They talk about vertical and horizontal motion. He has them calculating the speed of an apple falling to Earth from the height of two meters. When the shield fell, the city took fire, bolts thudding into the structure from high above. Height affects speed. That's not only elementary, but vital. Atlantis' weapons fired faster over a longer range. It still wasn't enough. For Rodney, the smell of burning circuitry will forever be conflated with that of charred flesh.
Rodney lectures to his seminar about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and its effect on electromagnetic fields in quantum mechanics. He thinks about asymptotic curves and the price of the knowledge he brought back and wonders if any of it will be worth what they paid. When he dismisses the class early, he swears his students almost look disappointed.
*
Atlantis is still alive. Rodney knows this, can't not know this. She's in tatters, the sea eating into her scars, but she's still standing on a planet they never named. If Stargate Command ever figures out how to disable the long-range weapons from a distance, if they can avoid the Wraith swarm in Pegasus, if Rodney's and Radek's bombs didn't completely destroy the stargate, another expedition could be sent. They have not necessarily lost the city of the Ancients.
It's no comfort.
*
Rodney stands in the atrium, leaning against the glass of the window. Behind him, a chem study group chatters about organic molecules and their plans for the weekend. Outside, it is a warm spring day. A slight wind rustles the leaves of a tree in the distance.
If he closes his eyes, he can almost feel the breeze in here. He can almost feel John's hands on his face, ghosting down to trace his lips. John's mouth on his own, hungry and sweet. John's voice in his ears, whispering all the things they never said. John's tongue, licking a path down his neck to his collarbone. John's fingers, pressed against his nipples. John's body, pressed against his own.
He's aching with need, and his fingers spasm and clench onto his cane. "Sheppard," he says out loud, "John, you - I -" You left me, he thinks, and you didn't tell me it would hurt so fucking much. If he opens his eyes, Rodney knows he'll see the green field in front of the science center, the red path cutting a line though it. There might be two students walking arm-in-arm in the sunlight, on their way to class. Rodney leans on the cane and keeps his eyes closed, for just a bit longer.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-24 11:55 pm (UTC)