sga_flashfic | Normal by Nickeyb (Amnesty/38 Minutes)

Title: Normal
Author:

nickeyb
Rating: Gen
Word Count: 568
Summary: Stress gets to everyone. Radek has a moment.

Sometimes, Radek thinks, it would be nice to be… What is the word.

Normal.

Not to be here in Atlantis. Not to be struggling, all the time, struggling like insects under glass, always one second away from being fried in the sun. Or eaten. Or drowned. There are so many ways to die, here in the Pegasus Galaxy.

Of course, there is variety. That is something. Today, for instance, he has helped prevent a death by slow paralysis, several deaths by molecular disintegration, a death by asphyxiation, and it is not even time yet for his tea. That is certainly something.

He’s just not sure that it should be something that he wants to do.

He is a physicist, and that would be rare and strange back home. Not normal at all. But back home, he would be publishing papers, and going home to apple dumplings and pickled cabbage, and snow would be falling on Charles Bridge. But here. Here, he is an utterly normal physicist. They are commonplace. He is not even the best and the brightest of them, and that is rare and strange as well. He is unsure about his comfort with that. He has always struggled to be the best, and to understand…

He wonders sometimes when he became so happy to become part of a team. He wonders when that became normal too.

But when Rodney waves his hands, and shouts once more, and Radek shouts back, that feels good. That feels right. No-one else will do that. Not among the scientists anyway. But that too is therefore unusual. Abnormal.

Rodney evens listens some of the time. And that is hardly normal behaviour either.

And here in Atlantis, a scientist is important. Important enough to risk lives for, and that disturbs Radek, even as it warms him. Even as it chills him. Is that normal? Should the fact that he has value to these people, that he is not just a cog in the political machine, make him so very happy? Should it instead disturb him? That he is so comfortable with his place in this dangerous, beautiful, challenging world?

He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand his own reactions. He doesn’t know any more what he should feel.

It is topsy-turvy, he thinks. All of it.

He is losing himself, in all the contradictions. He is losing himself in the paradox. That is becoming normal.

Sometimes he stares out of the windows and watches the ocean. He feels attenuated down to a little thread - a paper man being held in place by paper chains, ready to fly away. He listens to the wind blow, and the people he has saved today and yesterday, and all the other days, murmur in his ears like waves against a shore.

Then he hears it. His name. And fingers are being snapped under his nose, and Rodney is almost, almost being annoying enough to hit. But, of course, he never would. Instead, he follows Rodney back into the labs, and he reaches for the next problem, and then the next, and he begins to solve them. Of course.

This is what holds him. This is what keeps him grounded. And he will keep on solving them, and arguing, and listening to Rodney, and all the others, even Kavanagh. Because this is what he does. This is what they all do.

Because this is what is normal now.

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

spubba.livejournal.com

GREAT character study and a peek into what must be a very troubled mind sometimes. (I'd be troubled if Rodney was my boss, at least.) This is very, very cool!

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