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sga_flashficTitle: Sweet Nothings for the Numb
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tzi & zaganthi
Pairing: One-sided John/Rodney. More or less.
Rating: PG-ish. Ish =D
Summary: He only wanted to apologize.
Spoilers: Trinity, and a fairytale which should be clear right off the bat. ^_~
Length: 2,917 words.
He was left out in the cold.
It wasn't a literal cold. Rodney McKay had not been shuffled out into freezing snow and rain bareheaded and barefooted with only a pocket full of matches left to sell or be beaten, but he might as well have been. The metaphoric chill was frigid, an icy impediment clearly placed between himself and everyone else.
Once upon a time, Rodney had been a boy named Meredith. Meredith hadn't had friends, and hadn't had particularly good parents. He'd only had his sister, and she had grown up to prefer an English major and babies to him. He'd learned not to let that sort of thing bother him.
The Pegasus galaxy had destroyed that education, changed everything about who he was and who he wanted to be. It had given him friends, or he thought it had.
Sometimes, even geniuses thought the wrong thing entirely. In its way, Rodney McKay feared that would be a far greater mistake than the one they called Doranda.
He wanted to keep his friends. He wanted to patch that as quickly as he could, wanted to fix the holes before they grew. He understood the structural problems with ignoring a hole knocked into a bare wall. It crumbled, and sure, it looked like a little spackle over the top might fix it, but if something leaked into the wall and started to rot a beam, the whole house fell.
The whole friendship fell. For all he knew, and he had a tight inkling in his chest as he turned the corner back to Elizabeth's office, maybe the studs holding together the walls of his friendships weren't as stable to begin with as he'd hoped. He was arrogant, yes, and he was good at what he did, yes, but they'd encouraged him. They'd suggested and offered, and, and Rodney didn't know what to do except apologize and hope he could fix it.
He didn't make a lot of mistakes. When he did, they were monumental, the kinds of miscalculations that tended to break whatever tentative bonds he had managed to fix in place.
He was desperately afraid that he would find that to be the case this time, as well.
"I thought I told you that you were off-duty, Rodney." He couldn't ever remember hearing Elizabeth's voice so hard, crystalline, but shot through with fractures and faults that he felt as though he had created.
He was sure he'd created them. "I am. I just wanted to, uh..." Rodney swallowed, stepped a little further into the room. He'd retreated after she'd finished reaming in that first time, and she probably thought he was back for a second round. "I wanted to apologize."
There was something strange about that moment; he wasn't sure what it was, what was off about it. Perhaps it was the way she softened, or the vague sense that the lighting had changed. He couldn't say, not then or later.
"I know, Rodney." she looked up at him, and her eyes were sad, and sweet. "I know. We expect so much of you, and sometimes we forget that you are not any closer to perfect than the rest of us are." Elizabeth rose, then, moved around the desk and laid her hand on his forearm, gentle and easy. "I accept your apology. I think it is very brave of you to make it."
It eased the tightness around his chest, soothed his nerves down, and then it was gone again, like a rubber band snapping in the air, and Elizabeth wasn't standing near him at all. She was behind her desk, mouth tight, surveying him as if he'd said something that she didn't know what to do with. No hand on his arm, but he could almost predict her words, her diplomatically phrased acceptance of words with words that were meaningless to Rodney. They meant nothing because now he was just one more screw-up genius in a medley of nothing but geniuses instead of their version of Superman.
"I'm sure you did." She lifted her eyes and looked at him, or more precisely through him. "I think you should return to your quarters, if it's all the same to you."
Exiled already. Rodney turned, his jaw tight. "I'm sorry, Elizabeth. I didn't expect it to happen the way it did." And then he moved to leave, to find Radek, before the hole in that wall spread. It was moving fast, that flat intolerance of his errors, and Rodney didn't know how to patch it if Elizabeth could smoothly deflect him like that.
He had thought -- honestly believed, really -- that perhaps, for the first time ever, he had something more. He had believed he had something real on Atlantis. The possibility that he didn't, that it wasn't, tired him out more than he was willing to admit.
His march through the halls was followed by whispers, watched with sideways glances, and he hated that. He had never wanted that, had told them that he wasn't perfect. Everything had snowballed out of proportion, beyond his ability to keep up with it. Even he could only run so fast. His ego had caught up with him to the point where he had honestly believed his own propaganda, and the names he chose for himself in his own head were likely harsher than anything the other denizens of the city might be thinking, saying, yelling.
The Ancients were people whose concepts of science far outstripped theirs, whose understanding of the universe led to the creation of stable wormholes, inter-universe mirrors, ways to transverse the warps of space and time for what were essentially batteries. He had no idea in retrospect why he'd thought and hoped that he could have solved their flaws, the inherent instability of particles from their own universe used in that way. Radek had seen that coming, and Rodney hadn't listened.
Radek deserved an apology, too.
From the first, he'd forgotten Zelenka as often as not. Rodney had never been good with names, but he was great with faces, and he had known that Zelenka was definitely the go-to guy when they got stuck in the gate. Since then, their working relationship had expanded, amplified into a friendship where they thought on almost the same wavelength. It was amazing, for lack of a better term, something Rodney had never really had before. His relationship with Jeannie held too much by way of sibling rivalry for them to have it, unfortunately.
Now, he'd probably destroyed that connection with implications of professional jealousy and a statement implying, no, not implying, practically proclaiming Radek stupid, not just... not as smart as Rodney.
So he stuck his head into the lab, and he could hear silence descend over the workspace. As if none of them had ever fucked up before -- and it wasn't as if he'd given them the cold shoulder for it. At least he was apparently serving as a human repellant, because they left.
All of them.
All but Radek, and that was the important part.
He cleared his throat and stepped forward, hands clutched behind his back, slipping a little with the dampness of his palms. "Radek," he began, and then paused, not quite sure how to go on. After all, Radek had been right. Radek had been right the whole time, and Rodney had almost cost his life, John's life, the lives of the crew of the Daedalus, and he'd destroyed the better part of a solar system.
"I thought I should... I'm sorry. For what I said. I was caught up in the hope that I could actually make it work."
Make it work. Save them all. Win a Nobel while doing it. What was wrong with all of that?
There came that moment again. It was almost... almost a flare, really, a flare of Atlantis, where the light changed, became less blue, more sweetly golden, and Radek turned slowly to look at him. "You are a very arrogant man, Rodney. You believe you can make these things work, yes?"
"That was my hope. I'm not always right. I should, I should listen to you more." He edged closer, hopeful again.
"You should. I know you should, but it is difficult for your pride. This, this apology, it is also difficult for you. I understand, Rodney." There was a step forward, and then Radek laid his hand on his shoulder, and it was... it was almost all right. Almost. Not quite.
There was something off about the moment, just like there had been with Elizabeth, and his stomach clenched, because he knew the shift back, the snap, was coming. He knew it, and so when it did, when he looked again and saw Radek with his back still turned, he wanted to vomit. He was losing his mind, and maybe Arcturus had just been a sign of that, and nothing more.
"Well. It is very manly of you to apologize, McKay." There was no particular implication that Radek planned to accept it, though. None at all.
"Radek, I'm sorry," Rodney repeated. "I didn't mean to -- and you were right about it."
"Yes. Yes, I was. Perhaps next time, you will listen when I speak. You are the most brilliant mind here, it is true, perhaps, but sometimes even brilliance can be overrated, Dr. McKay."
Doctor McKay. "We were trying to do the impossible, Radek. I just didn't want to admit that it was impossible." One more reach, but he was being dismissed, being shrugged off.
Radek gave a heavy sigh. "Yes. It is... understandable. Perhaps with time, we will become comfortable with one another again."
With time. He was on probation, and all it took was a few hours of screwing up. Rodney nodded, turned to show himself out. With time, they might be comfortable with Rodney was what Radek meant.
The sheer extent of depression weighing down on him made him sick at the center, made his hands shake as he headed down the hall. He'd sent an email to Colonel Caldwell, quite a nice one, he thought. It was the best he could do, under the circumstances. He supposed he should consider himself lucky that they hadn't sent him to his quarters and had a guard put on him until they sent him back to Earth.
Elizabeth had said they wouldn't.
He was still afraid John might.
So John was his next person to find. John was almost more important than the rest of them, because he was the least likely of them all to have liked Rodney, to become his best friend. He was military and he liked to play stupid, but he had the same geeky tendencies that Rodney did, only quieter. John was the cool kid who tried not to be cool. John was the beautiful boy that only played with guys like him.
Rodney had fallen ridiculously, stupidly head over heels within a matter of days, no matter how stupid it was. He couldn't help himself. Not in any way, shape or form. It just was, and now things were ruined, even the little bit that he'd allowed himself to have.
He didn't know how he could live without that. Without that little bit of friendship they'd built, and he'd destroyed.
He wasn't a hundred percent sure. He wished, he had the hope that it wouldn't crumble like Elizabeth and apparently Radek had. Just one wall, that was all he needed to keep patched, because if John would at least give him a chance, he could manage, weather the rest, the stares and the way that people arced around him to stay out of his path.
If John could just be found.
It took him an hour to find anyone who would tell him anything, and then another twenty minutes to pin him down at the end of the hall, on the verge of escaping him again via transporter. "Oh, Colonel! Colonel! I've been looking all over for you." Everywhere and back again. He'd even asked Major Lorne, despite the deep clench of his jaw.
If he thought about it, he suspected that John was avoiding him like the world was going to end if he saw Rodney's face.
It didn't help that when he turned around, it was with his arms crossed tight over his chest. "I heard."
"Oh, uh..." Maybe he should have taken breaks between the apologies, taken a rest for his mind. "I suppose I had that coming after we, uh. I wanted to apologize for how I acted."
"I'm sure you did." It sounded like the colonel. It almost looked like John, but that strange flaxen edge was there again, making Rodney desperate, making him shake with the feeling that everything, everything, was going wrong. It was going to be wrong. "What happened back there was pretty rough."
He wanted that. He wanted that to be real, but it wasn't and he knew it wasn't even when he replied to John, "It was. And it was my fault, and I just want to, I don't want this to hurt our friendship."
"It won't. It wouldn't." John was moving away from the transporter, and he reached up, ignoring everyone in the hallway. His hand cupped the nape of Rodney's neck, calluses rubbing just at the edge of his hairline. "It will be all right."
And then John kissed him. If Rodney hadn't known it was all a lie before, he knew it then.
He knew it, but he wanted it, so he leaned into John, savored it before the world snapped back to sharp, hurtful reality, before it all went away. Before everything he wanted to have, friendship and love twisted together with ease in comforting simplicity, went away.
"Just like that," John murmured against his lips, thumbs rubbing just at the front of Rodney's ears. "Just like that. It's going to be all right, Rodney. It will be. I promise you that."
But it wasn't. He was going to be replaying Siberia again, but in Atlantis, the best place that had ever happened to him, full of friendships and people with whom he would never have had a chance to meet or interact otherwise, not in a way where he'd be listened to and understood and allowed to work and prove himself. And now he wouldn't have that, all over again. He was going to be shut out in the cold again as soon as he shook off that warm hallucination. His sinuses pricked, but there was no point in letting anything slip.
"John..."
And then it was gone. It was gone, and John was turned to face him, arms crossed over his chest. "I heard."
The only thing left was the tightness in his chest, the way his eyes pricked. Fine, no, that was apparently how it was going to be now. "I'm sorry." And John would say 'fuck you' but in a stoic, not nearly as colorful way, and Rodney would go back to his quarters and hide for a bit while they decided what to do with him and fuck, it was bad enough that he'd ruined his best chance at a major scientific discovery that could have reinvigorated the city, but to lose all of his chances on everything when they'd pushed and pulled at him, encouraged him to get it to work...
"Yeah. Well. I'm sorry, too, McKay. Sorry I trusted you when it's obvious that a Nobel comes way before our friendship." The bitter slash of his mouth almost matched Rodney's, a peculiar mirror-moment.
"It doesn't. I just, I was caught up in the work, and I hope that this hasn't irreparably damaged our relationship. I've tried to apologize to Elizabeth and Radek, but I don't know what else I can do." He tried to stand up straighter, because if he was going to get knocked down, he was at least going to take it like a man.
"I guess all you can do is keep trying. One of 'em's bound to accept, sooner or later."
Not John, though. John wasn't going to accept anything, and in that moment of realization, Rodney almost felt it -- the tangible, audible crack that spread down the center of his heart, and maybe that was where the honeyed edge had come from all along, because there was someone there, someone with him, and he would have screamed if he'd had any will to do more than stand there, numb.
"It is all right," he said, a hand cascading with tendrils of light held out to Rodney. "I understand. I built it, and I failed." The kind of failure where a man couldn't ever again be trusted, Rodney knew. He knew.
"I can do research, I can do any project they point me at, any impossible, unthinkable thing, but they won't let me or I don't know how to do whatever it is that they're looking for, to, to..." He couldn't do it, and he was talking to another hallucination. It was only a matter of time before he woke up in Carson's infirmary, to get glared at for breathing there, too.
But he reached for the hand.
He took it.
And when Rodney McKay's body fell to the floor from the injury to his heart seconds after John Sheppard left him behind via transporter, no one ever saw it become a spill of light that reached upwards as an Ancient helped him to Ascend.
tzi: This is all because my granny forever and a day read us "The Little Matchstick Girl" by Hans Christian Anderson before bed. Well, that and "The Snow Queen", but there just wasn't time to have John run off with Yet Another Ancient Priestess. ^_~
Authors:
tzi & zaganthiPairing: One-sided John/Rodney. More or less.
Rating: PG-ish. Ish =D
Summary: He only wanted to apologize.
Spoilers: Trinity, and a fairytale which should be clear right off the bat. ^_~
Length: 2,917 words.
He was left out in the cold.
It wasn't a literal cold. Rodney McKay had not been shuffled out into freezing snow and rain bareheaded and barefooted with only a pocket full of matches left to sell or be beaten, but he might as well have been. The metaphoric chill was frigid, an icy impediment clearly placed between himself and everyone else.
Once upon a time, Rodney had been a boy named Meredith. Meredith hadn't had friends, and hadn't had particularly good parents. He'd only had his sister, and she had grown up to prefer an English major and babies to him. He'd learned not to let that sort of thing bother him.
The Pegasus galaxy had destroyed that education, changed everything about who he was and who he wanted to be. It had given him friends, or he thought it had.
Sometimes, even geniuses thought the wrong thing entirely. In its way, Rodney McKay feared that would be a far greater mistake than the one they called Doranda.
He wanted to keep his friends. He wanted to patch that as quickly as he could, wanted to fix the holes before they grew. He understood the structural problems with ignoring a hole knocked into a bare wall. It crumbled, and sure, it looked like a little spackle over the top might fix it, but if something leaked into the wall and started to rot a beam, the whole house fell.
The whole friendship fell. For all he knew, and he had a tight inkling in his chest as he turned the corner back to Elizabeth's office, maybe the studs holding together the walls of his friendships weren't as stable to begin with as he'd hoped. He was arrogant, yes, and he was good at what he did, yes, but they'd encouraged him. They'd suggested and offered, and, and Rodney didn't know what to do except apologize and hope he could fix it.
He didn't make a lot of mistakes. When he did, they were monumental, the kinds of miscalculations that tended to break whatever tentative bonds he had managed to fix in place.
He was desperately afraid that he would find that to be the case this time, as well.
"I thought I told you that you were off-duty, Rodney." He couldn't ever remember hearing Elizabeth's voice so hard, crystalline, but shot through with fractures and faults that he felt as though he had created.
He was sure he'd created them. "I am. I just wanted to, uh..." Rodney swallowed, stepped a little further into the room. He'd retreated after she'd finished reaming in that first time, and she probably thought he was back for a second round. "I wanted to apologize."
There was something strange about that moment; he wasn't sure what it was, what was off about it. Perhaps it was the way she softened, or the vague sense that the lighting had changed. He couldn't say, not then or later.
"I know, Rodney." she looked up at him, and her eyes were sad, and sweet. "I know. We expect so much of you, and sometimes we forget that you are not any closer to perfect than the rest of us are." Elizabeth rose, then, moved around the desk and laid her hand on his forearm, gentle and easy. "I accept your apology. I think it is very brave of you to make it."
It eased the tightness around his chest, soothed his nerves down, and then it was gone again, like a rubber band snapping in the air, and Elizabeth wasn't standing near him at all. She was behind her desk, mouth tight, surveying him as if he'd said something that she didn't know what to do with. No hand on his arm, but he could almost predict her words, her diplomatically phrased acceptance of words with words that were meaningless to Rodney. They meant nothing because now he was just one more screw-up genius in a medley of nothing but geniuses instead of their version of Superman.
"I'm sure you did." She lifted her eyes and looked at him, or more precisely through him. "I think you should return to your quarters, if it's all the same to you."
Exiled already. Rodney turned, his jaw tight. "I'm sorry, Elizabeth. I didn't expect it to happen the way it did." And then he moved to leave, to find Radek, before the hole in that wall spread. It was moving fast, that flat intolerance of his errors, and Rodney didn't know how to patch it if Elizabeth could smoothly deflect him like that.
He had thought -- honestly believed, really -- that perhaps, for the first time ever, he had something more. He had believed he had something real on Atlantis. The possibility that he didn't, that it wasn't, tired him out more than he was willing to admit.
His march through the halls was followed by whispers, watched with sideways glances, and he hated that. He had never wanted that, had told them that he wasn't perfect. Everything had snowballed out of proportion, beyond his ability to keep up with it. Even he could only run so fast. His ego had caught up with him to the point where he had honestly believed his own propaganda, and the names he chose for himself in his own head were likely harsher than anything the other denizens of the city might be thinking, saying, yelling.
The Ancients were people whose concepts of science far outstripped theirs, whose understanding of the universe led to the creation of stable wormholes, inter-universe mirrors, ways to transverse the warps of space and time for what were essentially batteries. He had no idea in retrospect why he'd thought and hoped that he could have solved their flaws, the inherent instability of particles from their own universe used in that way. Radek had seen that coming, and Rodney hadn't listened.
Radek deserved an apology, too.
From the first, he'd forgotten Zelenka as often as not. Rodney had never been good with names, but he was great with faces, and he had known that Zelenka was definitely the go-to guy when they got stuck in the gate. Since then, their working relationship had expanded, amplified into a friendship where they thought on almost the same wavelength. It was amazing, for lack of a better term, something Rodney had never really had before. His relationship with Jeannie held too much by way of sibling rivalry for them to have it, unfortunately.
Now, he'd probably destroyed that connection with implications of professional jealousy and a statement implying, no, not implying, practically proclaiming Radek stupid, not just... not as smart as Rodney.
So he stuck his head into the lab, and he could hear silence descend over the workspace. As if none of them had ever fucked up before -- and it wasn't as if he'd given them the cold shoulder for it. At least he was apparently serving as a human repellant, because they left.
All of them.
All but Radek, and that was the important part.
He cleared his throat and stepped forward, hands clutched behind his back, slipping a little with the dampness of his palms. "Radek," he began, and then paused, not quite sure how to go on. After all, Radek had been right. Radek had been right the whole time, and Rodney had almost cost his life, John's life, the lives of the crew of the Daedalus, and he'd destroyed the better part of a solar system.
"I thought I should... I'm sorry. For what I said. I was caught up in the hope that I could actually make it work."
Make it work. Save them all. Win a Nobel while doing it. What was wrong with all of that?
There came that moment again. It was almost... almost a flare, really, a flare of Atlantis, where the light changed, became less blue, more sweetly golden, and Radek turned slowly to look at him. "You are a very arrogant man, Rodney. You believe you can make these things work, yes?"
"That was my hope. I'm not always right. I should, I should listen to you more." He edged closer, hopeful again.
"You should. I know you should, but it is difficult for your pride. This, this apology, it is also difficult for you. I understand, Rodney." There was a step forward, and then Radek laid his hand on his shoulder, and it was... it was almost all right. Almost. Not quite.
There was something off about the moment, just like there had been with Elizabeth, and his stomach clenched, because he knew the shift back, the snap, was coming. He knew it, and so when it did, when he looked again and saw Radek with his back still turned, he wanted to vomit. He was losing his mind, and maybe Arcturus had just been a sign of that, and nothing more.
"Well. It is very manly of you to apologize, McKay." There was no particular implication that Radek planned to accept it, though. None at all.
"Radek, I'm sorry," Rodney repeated. "I didn't mean to -- and you were right about it."
"Yes. Yes, I was. Perhaps next time, you will listen when I speak. You are the most brilliant mind here, it is true, perhaps, but sometimes even brilliance can be overrated, Dr. McKay."
Doctor McKay. "We were trying to do the impossible, Radek. I just didn't want to admit that it was impossible." One more reach, but he was being dismissed, being shrugged off.
Radek gave a heavy sigh. "Yes. It is... understandable. Perhaps with time, we will become comfortable with one another again."
With time. He was on probation, and all it took was a few hours of screwing up. Rodney nodded, turned to show himself out. With time, they might be comfortable with Rodney was what Radek meant.
The sheer extent of depression weighing down on him made him sick at the center, made his hands shake as he headed down the hall. He'd sent an email to Colonel Caldwell, quite a nice one, he thought. It was the best he could do, under the circumstances. He supposed he should consider himself lucky that they hadn't sent him to his quarters and had a guard put on him until they sent him back to Earth.
Elizabeth had said they wouldn't.
He was still afraid John might.
So John was his next person to find. John was almost more important than the rest of them, because he was the least likely of them all to have liked Rodney, to become his best friend. He was military and he liked to play stupid, but he had the same geeky tendencies that Rodney did, only quieter. John was the cool kid who tried not to be cool. John was the beautiful boy that only played with guys like him.
Rodney had fallen ridiculously, stupidly head over heels within a matter of days, no matter how stupid it was. He couldn't help himself. Not in any way, shape or form. It just was, and now things were ruined, even the little bit that he'd allowed himself to have.
He didn't know how he could live without that. Without that little bit of friendship they'd built, and he'd destroyed.
He wasn't a hundred percent sure. He wished, he had the hope that it wouldn't crumble like Elizabeth and apparently Radek had. Just one wall, that was all he needed to keep patched, because if John would at least give him a chance, he could manage, weather the rest, the stares and the way that people arced around him to stay out of his path.
If John could just be found.
It took him an hour to find anyone who would tell him anything, and then another twenty minutes to pin him down at the end of the hall, on the verge of escaping him again via transporter. "Oh, Colonel! Colonel! I've been looking all over for you." Everywhere and back again. He'd even asked Major Lorne, despite the deep clench of his jaw.
If he thought about it, he suspected that John was avoiding him like the world was going to end if he saw Rodney's face.
It didn't help that when he turned around, it was with his arms crossed tight over his chest. "I heard."
"Oh, uh..." Maybe he should have taken breaks between the apologies, taken a rest for his mind. "I suppose I had that coming after we, uh. I wanted to apologize for how I acted."
"I'm sure you did." It sounded like the colonel. It almost looked like John, but that strange flaxen edge was there again, making Rodney desperate, making him shake with the feeling that everything, everything, was going wrong. It was going to be wrong. "What happened back there was pretty rough."
He wanted that. He wanted that to be real, but it wasn't and he knew it wasn't even when he replied to John, "It was. And it was my fault, and I just want to, I don't want this to hurt our friendship."
"It won't. It wouldn't." John was moving away from the transporter, and he reached up, ignoring everyone in the hallway. His hand cupped the nape of Rodney's neck, calluses rubbing just at the edge of his hairline. "It will be all right."
And then John kissed him. If Rodney hadn't known it was all a lie before, he knew it then.
He knew it, but he wanted it, so he leaned into John, savored it before the world snapped back to sharp, hurtful reality, before it all went away. Before everything he wanted to have, friendship and love twisted together with ease in comforting simplicity, went away.
"Just like that," John murmured against his lips, thumbs rubbing just at the front of Rodney's ears. "Just like that. It's going to be all right, Rodney. It will be. I promise you that."
But it wasn't. He was going to be replaying Siberia again, but in Atlantis, the best place that had ever happened to him, full of friendships and people with whom he would never have had a chance to meet or interact otherwise, not in a way where he'd be listened to and understood and allowed to work and prove himself. And now he wouldn't have that, all over again. He was going to be shut out in the cold again as soon as he shook off that warm hallucination. His sinuses pricked, but there was no point in letting anything slip.
"John..."
And then it was gone. It was gone, and John was turned to face him, arms crossed over his chest. "I heard."
The only thing left was the tightness in his chest, the way his eyes pricked. Fine, no, that was apparently how it was going to be now. "I'm sorry." And John would say 'fuck you' but in a stoic, not nearly as colorful way, and Rodney would go back to his quarters and hide for a bit while they decided what to do with him and fuck, it was bad enough that he'd ruined his best chance at a major scientific discovery that could have reinvigorated the city, but to lose all of his chances on everything when they'd pushed and pulled at him, encouraged him to get it to work...
"Yeah. Well. I'm sorry, too, McKay. Sorry I trusted you when it's obvious that a Nobel comes way before our friendship." The bitter slash of his mouth almost matched Rodney's, a peculiar mirror-moment.
"It doesn't. I just, I was caught up in the work, and I hope that this hasn't irreparably damaged our relationship. I've tried to apologize to Elizabeth and Radek, but I don't know what else I can do." He tried to stand up straighter, because if he was going to get knocked down, he was at least going to take it like a man.
"I guess all you can do is keep trying. One of 'em's bound to accept, sooner or later."
Not John, though. John wasn't going to accept anything, and in that moment of realization, Rodney almost felt it -- the tangible, audible crack that spread down the center of his heart, and maybe that was where the honeyed edge had come from all along, because there was someone there, someone with him, and he would have screamed if he'd had any will to do more than stand there, numb.
"It is all right," he said, a hand cascading with tendrils of light held out to Rodney. "I understand. I built it, and I failed." The kind of failure where a man couldn't ever again be trusted, Rodney knew. He knew.
"I can do research, I can do any project they point me at, any impossible, unthinkable thing, but they won't let me or I don't know how to do whatever it is that they're looking for, to, to..." He couldn't do it, and he was talking to another hallucination. It was only a matter of time before he woke up in Carson's infirmary, to get glared at for breathing there, too.
But he reached for the hand.
He took it.
And when Rodney McKay's body fell to the floor from the injury to his heart seconds after John Sheppard left him behind via transporter, no one ever saw it become a spill of light that reached upwards as an Ancient helped him to Ascend.
tzi: This is all because my granny forever and a day read us "The Little Matchstick Girl" by Hans Christian Anderson before bed. Well, that and "The Snow Queen", but there just wasn't time to have John run off with Yet Another Ancient Priestess. ^_~
