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losyark.livejournal.com) wrote in
sga_flashfic2007-04-02 10:39 pm
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Entry tags:
(fic) Tamed, by losyark
Tamed
By
losyark
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Challenge: Animals
Characters: Rodney McKay, OFC
Spoilers: Up to “The Tao of Rodney”
Rating: NC-17, mostly for language.
Summary: Doctor Rodney McKay could build a nuclear bomb in thirty seven minutes flat, but he could not, could not learn to jump in a circle on the spot and bark just for the sake of getting fed earlier.
Author’s Note: This got way darker than I expected. And accidentally turned into a kid!fic. Sorry?
***
See, the thing was, the thing was, that there weren’t really supposed to be that many species out there. Of course, yes, yes, the Asgard but they were really just sort of Human way back when, so that didn’t really count even if they had turned into Roswell Greys somewhere down the line, and the Nox, they were sort of Human too but really more Sloth than Human (and did that mean sloths on Earth could read your thoughts, cause that image? Disturbing), and of course the Ancients who were really just Human v 1.0 and nobody knew what the hell Furlings were but they sounded kind of Ewok-ish, and there were those cro-mag things on the planet with no rotational night and day but even those were still Human.
There was that thing that captured Daniel Jackson once, and the Goua’uld of course, but those were parasites, like really, really smart Iratus bugs, and thinking of the Iratus made him think of the Wraith, and even the Wraith were really sort of human, too, somewhere way back in their ancestry, so where did that leave him?
Most of the aliens in the universe were Human, which, Rodney thought peripherally as he stalked back and forth along the shore of the teal water that separated the habitat from the plexiglass, sort of made him feel gypped by the lies of sci-fi television, (he’d yet to meet any Living Plastic, or Space Rhinos, or Gas Sex Monsters, Doctor Who had lied, lied, lied, except for the part about the genocidal robots, that was all too terrifyingly real, and pretty unfairly so, cause if he’d had to choose, Rodney would have gone with the Gas Sex as the ultimate best way to die at the hands of an alien). And this whole thing, the Aliens are Humans thing really made no sense in this context because if every alien in the universe (or two galaxies, at least) were Human then why was Rodney McKay (no “Meredith”, thank you very much) an exhibit in a fucking zoo?
And, oh, hey wow, was his sugar crashing or what?
As if humans were rare enough to warrant a place in an intergalactic fucking zoo – though, okay, Rodney really was a genius and had nearly Ascended and he could see how he in himself could be a prize, one of a kind, no doubt about it – and this was all just way to Superman.
Rodney got to the far east of his enclosure, spun on the ball of his foot, stuck out his chin, and began walking what he had not-so-affectionately dubbed west. North was towards the plexiglass and south was towards the back wall where –and this had to be a big fucking joke, it had to – someone had painted a seascape on the cement with a remarkably well-scaled rendition of Atlantis floating on a serene blue ocean.
So, okay, if practically every alien was actually a Human with little bits added or taken away, then, okay, seriously, what were the bird-jelly-fish things, and hey, was it dinner time yet?
Rodney suddenly felt great empathy for how annoyed the wolves always looked when Jeanie made him take her to the Toronto Zoo. They paced a lot, too.
Also, Rodney missed his cat.
Which, really, was a stupendously horrifically idiotic thing to be doing, Rodney thought as he turned on the ball of his foot and headed east again, but it was lonely in his little water-and-grass-and-one-ridiculous-tree-in-the-corner-just-sturdy-enough-to-climb habitat, and playing catch-the-leaf with Tardis had been really the only worthwhile thing to do outdoors back in Colorado Springs because clearly outdoors didn’t have supercolliders and simulations readouts.
And, yes, wasn’t this the part where they were supposed to throw him a fish or some steak or something?
Or, wait, was Rodney supposed to learn tricks?
That thought was depressing enough to make him stutter to a stop mid-stride and stare a little helplessly at the faux teal of the carefully chlorinated water. He’d given into temptation a few days before, once his foot was healed, stripped down to his skivvies (at least he still had all his clothes, except for the shoes but that was okay because the whole place was soft and filled with springy grass and puffy feather things that were surprisingly hypoallergenic and very comfortable to sleep on) and gone for a splash in the pool because, god, wherever they were got hot sometimes, but the splashing had earned him a few of the young jellyfish-bird-things trailing snot over his north-side plexiglass and clapping their wing-fins so he hadn’t done it since. Now he considered flinging himself in and just drowning.
Oh, god, tricks.
Rodney McKay could build a nuclear bomb in thirty seven minutes flat, but he could not, could not learn to jump in a circle on the spot and bark just for the sake of getting fed earlier. He’d rather starve, thank you very much, and he bet Samantha Carter never had to go through this, lucky blonde bitch (though he did recall reading a report of a mission where she’d been sold off as a wife to some warlord and, god, that was fantastic jerk off material for, seriously, months, Sam Carter getting sold to Rodney McKay, guh.)
Another thought made Rodney drop to his butt on the springing turf beside the artificial pond. Oh, god, would they try to breed him?
Seriously.
Hypoglycaemic.
The faint feeling was from lack of food and not at all the thought of some scientist creature three times the size of him scooping him up, putting him on a cold metal table with a Human woman, jerking him roughly until he was hard and then just placing him between her legs so nature could take over. Yes, Rodney had watched a TLC program on animal husbandry way back when he was still at Area 51, and sometimes he really, really wished he had turned back to the infomercial about the automatic needle-threader.
And damned if any kid of his was going to be raised in a fucking zoo.
No. Fucking. Way.
Right. So. Good to have cleared that up. Yes.
Um. Yes.
Rodney laced his fingers together, twirled his thumbs, whistled for a few bars, then got back up and started pacing again. His kingdom for a pen and some paper. Not that his habitat was much of a kingdom. Or some chalk that he could write all over the south wall with, or a piece or charcoal or, or something to prick his finger on so he could at least write in blood, because he was going to damned stir crazy and hey, maybe training to do tricks wouldn’t be so bad because at least it would be better than pacing and swimming and pacing and sleeping and pacing.
Although, on the up side, Rodney’s internal computer had worked through at least three new configurations for naquadah generators that would make the element more stable, solved the two equations he’d left on his whiteboard, and finally put it together that it was Miko who kept folding everyone’s napkins into panda bears when she was feeling melancholy and not Zelenka because, dear god, that would have been strange.
Also, Rodney wanted coffee.
Sweet, sweet caffeine. Although, here he was actually getting enough sleep and didn’t have the weight of Atlantis on his shoulders at all times and they weren’t just using him as a Miracle-Machine (okay, yes, that was a bit of a low-blow because although Rodney resented the fact that they pretty much only loved him for his brain, he wouldn’t deny that he loved the ego stroking and attention and hey, he actually did have some friends, so take that third-year-TA-jerk-guy who said he’d never have any.) Also, he thought he’d gotten over the worst of his shaky withdrawal, so.
And yes.
Dinner.
Soon would be great.
Rodney gave up the pacing and instead decided to just do a bit more sitting, just to change things up. He rolled up his pant legs and stuck his feet in the comfortably cool water and pulled on his lips to make faces at the jelly-bird-fish on the other side of the wall. Okay, so, yes, he was feeling a bit annoyed and irritable and sugar-crashy and petulant and maybe it wasn’t the most mature thing he’d ever done, but the trick earned him a lobbed piece of candied fruit over the sliver of open bit with no roof.
The fruit landed in the water with a sploosh. He waited for it to bob over to him, because Rodney was so, so above dog paddling out to the middle of his cement pond like a polar bear to fetch it.
“Please do not feed the astrophysists,” Rodney said snottily, and bit deep.
Then he stopped breathing.
***
Several hours later, Rodney woke up feeling like he hadn’t slept at all, his throat raw and puffy, his head bloody pounding and his extremities trembling just a little bit. The inside of one elbow was bruised painfully in an agonizingly familiar epi-pen sort of way, and duh, in the elbow?
Right. So.
Don’t eat the candied red fruits.
Would have served them right, Rodney thought, having their precious little exhibit go into anaphylactic shock and die. He ignored the little deep-down part of him that sort of wished it had actually happened because maybe dieing would be better than being so damned alone all day. And, oh, there was a thought. He could totally Ascend; he’d almost done it once. He could pull a Daniel Jackson. Ascend, escape, Descend right in the freaking middle of the Atlantis Gateroom and force the whole senior staff to see him naked to punish them for leaving him behind.
He winced at his own uncharitable thought.
No, no, Rodney had not been left behind.
He had been scooped up, tagged and bagged and the new earring that didn’t seem to have any sort of catch that was in his left ear itched. He wanted to scratch it but he wasn’t up to moving just yet. He could probably tear the earring out, if he was desperate to get rid of it, but ow, pain, and he wasn’t sure if it would shock him or anything.
Yes, better to think of Ascending. He could start meditating tomorrow, that would pass time, wouldn’t it? He would meditate and his captors/keepers would freak out because he had stopped pacing.
Rodney finally felt steady enough to open his eyes, and he did so slowly. Ah, yes. The veterinary clinic. Metal tables, harsh white lights that did nothing for the throbbing, and oh, hey, look, Alien Saline Drip. At least he wasn’t going into a coma any time soon. Peachy.
Hell, where was Sheppard and his damned puddlejumper and his crazy hair and his suicidal rescue already?
Rodney debated sitting up, and decided against it. The room was swirling a bit and his lungs felt heavy, so he’d just lay here and enjoy the fact that he could breathe again for a while, oh, yes, very nice, in and out. There was a clicking sound to his left and he turned his head, and there was the fish-bird-jelly that wore the green thing on his head which made him some sort of doctor thing, and Rodney’s fear of voodoo and needles and possibly breeding flared to the surface, hot across his skin.
The doctor-thing reached out with one curved talon, surrounded by delicate feathers, and poked his non-IV arm surprisingly gently. Rodey sucked in a shaking breath, released it slowly when was clear that the doctor thing was only petting him. Soothing. Rodney had learned quickly that while these things were three times his size and very, very strange looking, they didn’t actually want to hurt him. The first time he’d woken in this room he’d screamed and panicked and flailed when they tried to hold him down, shove a needle in his arse, and he’d wriggled so hard he’d fallen off the vet’s table like the time Tardis had worms, twisting his ankle a little, but bolted for the door all the same.
A quick attendant had shut the door so Rodney had veered for a wall of cages filled with other injured things, none of which was remotely Human looking, and huddled himself into the corner with a pattering heart and heaving chest. And they hadn’t gone in after him, they hadn’t swiped under the row of cages with a net, they hadn’t tried to gas him. They’d just put down a dish of water and some cubes of cooked maybe-but-sorta-not-beef and waited patiently on the other side of the room for Rodney to decide if the pain in his ankle and the hunger churning his gut were motivators enough to get him to come out.
He had figured that if he stayed in the corner too long, they’d come in after him, or he’d pass out form manly hunger, so with a good long calculating glance at the cages to verify that yes, these were all injured animals being coddled and not vicious vivisected victims, he had limped out and plopped down beside the dish and drank his fill from cupped hands.
They creaked and clicked and took notes and scans and he’d itched his left ear which had revealed the existence of his tag, and wiggled his opposable thumbs at them cheekily. When he’d eaten is fill and his ankle began to throb and tighten, he stood up, stock still, and let them come, pick him up, tend to his foot.
They were gentle people, if he was gentle back, but that didn’t make him any happier to be here.
Could be worse, at least these people meant well. The things that had captured him had sedated him and kept him in a filthy, reeking cage for what felt like days before he was bought by the zoo.
So, yes, doctor thing, poking his arm. Rodney looked up at the doctor thing, let it prod him upright, let it click and moan and make sounds like it was admonishing him, and yeah, Rodney knew better than to eat random food thrown into his pen by screaming brats, but he’d been hungry and edgy and all in all in a bad mood.
Definitely no more red fruit.
The doctor thing held out some of the grey sticky stuff that Rodney supposed was some sort of protein block, but tasted like chalk. It was awful and he hadn’t eaten it at all the first time they’d given it to him, but they didn’t know all that much about Human diet and in the end he had to take what he could get. Food was food was food, though they had started to leave him vegetables. He was usually wary about those, for good reason, and he wondered what strange lapse in judgement had made him eat the candied red fruit without so much as a cursory sniff at it first.
Oh, yes, hunger.
He took the protein block slowly, not wanting to startle either of them, and munched stickily, licking it off his fingers as the doctor thing used his apparent distraction to check his ankle. It didn’t twinge any more, so Rodney was content to let him poke. This stuff sort of felt like swallowing chewing gum, and wow, he had been out of it earlier, hadn’t he. Rodney wished that these people spoke English or Gatespeech or something so he could explain that, hey, food once every five hours was not good enough. At least he still had his watch.
These things were too big to fit through the ‘gate, so there was no way they would ever learn Gatespeech, and Rodney actually despaired of ever seeing a ‘gate ever again, because clearly they had come here by ship, and maybe even the zoo was on a ship, like a book-mobile only with animals instead of crusty, dusty copies of Nancy Drew, and they could be in a different galaxy already for all he knew and he wasn’t really going to place his faith in the Ancients having populated this one too, because, hey, only Human in the room.
And this whole Ascension plan? Looking better all the time. Because god knows Rodney had already tried to pointing-to-himself-and-saying-his-name to prove that he was capable of sentient thought routine four times already, and just was too tired to do it a fifth.
Yes. So. No breeding, no red fruit, no communication, not gonna wait on Sheppard.
And... uh... something else that he was supposed to think about, something he was supposed to remember... but um, head felt wooley and ... oh, well, that’s not very fair, sedating the poor hurt creature thing with laced grey gum.
Not fair at all.
***
Rodney woke, surprise, surprise, in his habitat. On his feathers. Um, but not so alone.
“Uhg,” he said.
“Most people say ‘hello’,” she said back in Gatespeech, right into his ear. His. Ear.
“Uhg,” he repeated, rolled over on his feathers, and pressed his eyes against his forearm. He still felt like shit, the exhaustion from the allergic reaction mostly slept off, but he felt achy and stiff in every joint and desperately wished for some Advil. “I’m not making babies with you,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, and cuddled closer to him, which really just made him tense up and want to hiss and spit like Tardis used to do when someone he didn’t know tried to pet him, but Rodney was feeling too blah to do any real hissing and spitting so he just settled for going tense. “Maybe later?”
“Maybe never,” he corrected. “Where are you from?”
He could feel her eyelashes brushing against his cheek as she blinked. Really, this was unfair, slow as well as not blonde? Seriously not the correct temptation.
“Where are you from?” Rodney asked again, turning on his side to meet her dark eyes. “What planet?”
“Here,” she said, pushing forward to press her lips against his and he recoiled, because she was like, what, fifteen? No way. “Like you.”
“I’m not from here,” he said, jerking back, breaking her grip. He stood up. She sat up, and he realized that she was wearing nothing, so he took off his jacket and threw it at her head and stole some of the feathers and made a new bed against the west wall and when she cooed into the jacket and fell asleep snuffling on it he did his very best not to beat his brains out against the cement.
***
She said her name was Neen, which was so ridiculously stereotypical, wasn’t it? Chaya and Teyla and Neen and Sora – all the women in the galaxy were allergic to polysyllables.
She said she was from this place but not this part, which Rodney took to mean that she was from either a different area of the zoo or a habitat he couldn’t see when he pressed his own nose up against the north wall and tread water. When he asked her age she said younger than her mother but older than her brother and that was no help either. She had no concept of years, very vague concept of what a day was (“The time when you are awake, yes?”), and if there was any good to come of her being in the habitat with Rodney it was that he was a little less lonely and they fed him in smaller intervals.
“I’ve had babies before,” Neen said, pouting prettily in his expedition jacket and nothing else. Thank god it came down to her mid-thighs, her very creamy-skinned curvy thighs. “I like having babies.”
“Where’s your... your baby now?” Rodney asked from three branches above her in the tree. He had climbed it for something to do, and to try to get some private time to start his big mediation plan, and she had followed.
She shrugged.
Rodney felt hazily sickened.
“Let’s make a baby,” she said, expression wide open and god, so fucking earnest that it hurt. “It’s fun.”
“It is,” Rodney agreed, “But I’m not giving you my baby.”
“Why not?”
“I’m just not,” he snapped grumpily, but when they pushed the food through the little door in the south wall, he felt guilty for making her face crumple like that and he’d never known what to do with a teary woman-child, so he gave her the best bits and knew that the behavioural scientists would mistake his guilt for ‘protecting and providing for the female’ but he didn’t care.
He went for a swim before the world went dark with either a real or a simulated sunset, because they had no showers and he was getting a bit funky. He swam laps between the east and west walls and decided to do this every night, because as much as he hated exercise, it was more relaxing than pacing.
***
He came to an agreement with Neen. He would teach her how to swim if she would stop goddamned poking him in the head every time he tried to meditate.
He was so thisclose to Ascending, he could feel it, could feel the calm and the whiteness, felt himself becoming less jittery all the time, less prone to snap and snarl at the visitors at the north wall, and it was Ascension, it was and it was not just that he was actually eating healthy and getting enough sleep and exercising for once in his life.
Neen splashed warily in the cement pond and Rodney stood on his tiptoes on the bottom to keep both their heads over the water, and gave her a grudging smile when she offered him the mega-watt kind that reminded him so much of Sam’s and Sheppard’s and Zelenka’s.
Made his chest hurt.
“Make a baby with me?” Neen whispered in his ear when he slept that night, “It’s fun. It feels good.”
“No,” Rodney grumped and swatted her away, and she went back to her own feathers on the other side of the habitat and he stuffed his fingers in his ears when she began that hiccoughing sound again.
***
No one was ever careless about the doors, or the locks. They had no mental component that he could tell from watching, there was no Ancient technology to manipulate. He had none of his gear, and he couldn’t break down the north wall. He couldn’t slip under the crack of the door in the vet clinic and he couldn’t make a break for it when they cleaned out the habitat because the keepers put them in humiliating little carrying cases.
Rodney refused to learn any of the tricks and jumps and twirls that Neen did to get the little green potato chips, though he thanked her when she shared, and meditated for hours every afternoon. He was almost at the bit, just days away from being able to stop thinking about tweaking puddlejumpers and running equations in his head for ZPM output. He was so close to being able to blank out his mind.
If Neen wasn’t here bothering him, he could have been back on Atlantis by now.
Every time they were taken to the vet’s, which was once every four or so days, Rodney thought that this was going to be it, the day that they got sick of waiting for him to shape up and impregnate the mate they had chosen. Every time the doctors took blood, listened to hearts, rewarded Neen’s giggling and fawning over the head doctor thing with red fruits that Rodney avoided like the plague, Rodney sat on the end of the table and said and did nothing, refused to respond to anything or anyone.
They offered him purple fruits but he didn’t take them.
***
“You’re bleeding!” Rodney yelped, watching the blood drop and swirl heavily through the water of the pond. “Out, out, get out, no lesson today, why are you bleeding, are you okay, what did you do?”
Neen blinked at him, sat in the grass, wrinkled her nose. “Oh,” she said, looking between her legs. “We can’t make a baby right now.”
Rodney scrambled over to the litter box in the corner that the keepers changed daily and vomited up all of his protein block.
***
Rodney revised his theory about the zoo being on a ship because the weather was changing and it was getting fucking cold at night. When Neen pulled her feathers over to his side of the habitat and snuggled in close to his body, he turned into her heat and wrapped an arm around her shaking shoulders, but only because he felt sorry for her.
***
The second time Neen had her period, she cried for four days straight and the doctors took her away and Rodney felt vaguely guilty, like maybe he should have tried harder to be nicer to her. They brought her back a week later, looking full and healthy and smelling, wow, hell, great, and Rodney was more than happy to let her snuggle in beside him to sleep, but she stopped smelling great after their next swimming lesson and Rodney was so angry that he’d almost been duped by chemically engineered pheromone spray that he actually lashed out and struck one of the keepers when they tried to herd him into his case so they could clean the cage.
He hadn’t drawn blood but they had all looked shocked. They tried to take Neen away after that, and Rodney knew this time it would be for good, so he got between them and snarled in a way that didn’t require language to convey his deep displeasure at that thought, so they let her be.
“Do you want to make babies now?” Neen asked, when the keepers were gone.
“No,” Rodney said. “But I don’t want them to make you make them with someone else, either. It’s not right.”
“It’s okay, I like doing it,” Neen said, her eyebrows drawn together in confusion. The world was so simple for her, so easy to understand, and Rodney wished he could just let go sometimes, stop thinking about Atlantis and physics and friends and just be like her. “It’s what I do. I make babies.”
“Babies don’t belong in zoos!” Rodney snapped so viciously that Neen cowered away and didn’t sleep beside him that night.
***
A week or so after Neen’s third period, when the weather had begun to warm up again and Rodney’d had a spectacular dream about Sam Carter and significantly less clothing than she’d been wearing in the Puddlejumper at the bottom of the ocean, Rodney woke up with something wet and warm around his morning wood.
“Hello,” Neen said, from where she was straddling his hips. “It does feel good, doesn’t it?”
Rodney’s erection withered immediately, but from what he could tell by the slickness and what he remembered of the wet dream, it may have been too late.
Rodney pulled up his pants and went to the litter box and vomited again, because that seemed to really be his cure-all, and climbed the tree as far as he could go and didn’t come down again until the sun set.
Neen sniffled against his neck and said, “I’m sorry. You hate me.”
“No I don’t,” Rodney said, rubbing her shoulders. “I just don’t want a baby.”
Neen ran a hand over her stomach and said nothing.
***
There was no mistaking that it was morning sickness, that Neen’s stomach had gotten just a little bit rounder, that she had not bled in nearly eight weeks according to the scratches Rodney had been making in the paint on the south wall.
She was fucking grinning all the time, and Rodney was miserable. He stopped meditating, got between Neen and the doctors and snarled every time they tried to take her away, and swam too much. He could see the difference in his body when he looked down – his pecs were a bit more defined, his stomach flattened, his arms thicker.
He thought a lot about Tardis, and what the doctors might do to him if he just beat the crap out of Neen and traumatized her enough to make the foetus spontaneously abort. It was a horribly ugly thought and Rodney pushed it away because he was obligated to protect Neen, and yes, his child, too, even if he didn’t love her and never wanted the kid.
Wasn’t the baby’s fault.
***
Neen was to the point where she really couldn`t quite see her own knees, and the jacket Rodney had given her was getting too tight, when the doctors finally figured out that Rodney would only let her go to the clinic if he was there too.
It took him three visits to realize that they were too focussed on Neen and the ultrasound scanner things to watch what Rodney was doing. Faster than he thought himself possible, he grabbed the sharp for one of the needles off the desk, small and thin, and the size of a delicate scalpel in his own small hand. He snapped off the tip with a well-calculated angle against the steel table top and a swimming-improved kick, and put it in his pocket.
***
Digging the sub-dermal transmitter out of the flesh of his own forearm was very, very painful. He was sitting in the top of the tree, where the foliage was thickest and the therefore best place to hide, trying not to bleed on Neen, who was sitting under it, humming some song that she knew in Gatespeech. She had tried to teach it to Rodney once but he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.
She seemed happy, and that made Rodney feel worse. He hadn’t taken any of his anger or guilt out on Neen and he never intended to. Rodney had learned to control his temper, at least around her. They may take her away if he displayed anger towards her, and then he'd never see his child - never be able to rescue it. Neen had only done what she thought was right, and he couldn’t fault her for that. She had never been taught better.
With quick, blood-slicked fingers and the tip of the sharp, Rodney pried back the casing for the microchip, poked, rewired, and boosted the signal slightly by rerouting power from the naquadah battery straight to the emitter. He made the signal stronger, made it pulse out in a recognizable da-da-da daa-daa-daa da-da-da pattern.
Then he climbed out of the tree, left the transmitter in the top branches, and held Neen until predictibly one of the keepers came and collected him, brought him to the clinic where the doctor thing clucked sadly at him and stitched up his arm.
***
Neen was just starting to waddle when a small, pink face pressed up against the plexiglass and twiddled fingers at him in the middle of the night. Rodney had been woken by a sharp rapping sound on the north wall. Rodney dove into the water, pressed his own hands back, and mouthed “Colonel!”
The glass was too thick to hear anything from the other side, but Sheppard’s intention was clear enough when he held up the already-lit blowtorch.
Rodney swam back over to the grass, prodded Neen gently into wakefulness and said, “Okay, kid, the cavalry is here. Time to go.”
“Go where?” Neen asked, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands, with was, okay, yeah, kinda sweet looking, but didn’t protest when Rodney floated her through the water and handed her up to Sheppard to pull through the new hole in the wall.
The colonel raised his eyebrows at Rodney.
“No kid of mine is going to be raised in a fucking zoo,” Rodney said succinctly, and Sheppard snapped his mouth shut.
***
According to Carson, Neen was probably around twenty years old, the baby was a healthy boy, and she was four months along, but there was a danger that she may have trouble with the labour - there had been invasive surgery once, and it hadn`t healed propely. Plans for a cesarian were tentatively made. Also according to Carson, Rodney was in better health than he’d ever been in his life, his hyptertensity gone, his blood pressure equalized, and his dependence on caffeine cured, though now he had matching scars on both forearms.
Rodney scoffed, drank a whole pot of coffee, had three chocolate bars, and went immediately to the labs to see what kind of hell had been going on in his absence.
He returned to the infirmary an hour later when Neen woke and wailed and refused to be consoled, took her to his rooms, shoved the bed against the wall and piled it with feathery pillows pillaged from the surrounding quarters, and petted her hair with one hand as he typed furiously on his tablet with the other, determined to write down everything he’d been thinking about and inventing in his head for the last half a year.
It wasn’t like he loved the girl. He was just used to her.
***
Neen refused to leave Rodney’s quarters and spent the rest of her pregnancy in confinement. She didn't want to be cut open, no matter how patiently they explained she wouldn't agree, so they tabled it for a while. She learned not to bare her teeth at Sheppard when he came by to visit, let Elizabeth make her tea and tell her stories about the people who used to live in the city, decided that the bootleg episodes of Coupling was the best thing ever, and learned not to touch lit candles. She would do her spinning trick but Rodney had no green potato chips to give her, and it made him feel like the worst villian on the planet.
Rodney yelled a lot less than he used to, spent days getting caught up with what he’d missed, and hours and hours in briefings, and evenings petting her hair and picking up pickles soaked in caramel from the commissary. They cut off the tag-earrings with bolt cutters and left them on an abandoned planet just in case they actually were transmitters.
Rodney yelled a lot less than he used to, spent days getting caught up with what he’d missed, and hours and hours in briefings, and evenings petting her hair and picking up pickles soaked in caramel from the commissary. They cut off the tag-earrings with bolt cutters and left them on an abandoned planet just in case they actually were transmitters.
Rodney told the SGC to politely fuck the hell off when they suggested that Rodney may like to transfer back to Area 51 with his ‘partner’ and their child. As if he was going anywhere near the planet with The Trust with a pregnant alien woman. Five months later, Neen gave birth to Rodney’s son in his bed, and when she had pushed the baby into the world, she smiled and kissed his cheek and very quietly died while everyone else was busy tying tubes and wiping away birthing blood.
Carson did his best, but there was too much blood, something torn inside that they hadn’t anticipated, it had just been too damn fast, and Neen hadn’t been as healthy as Rodney.
People from all over the city, from the mainland, from their allies expressed their sorrow for Rodney’s loss, and he held the little noise-making bundle of flesh in his arms, numb. It felt like being in the zoo again. Rodney called it Aiden, and wondered at the strange empty feeling in his chest.
“You miss Neen,” Sheppard explained, leaning over the crib made out of old supply crates and pillows that still smelled like Neen so Aiden could grab at his finger, smiling gumily.
“No, I don’t,” Rodney said, and grabbed his swimming bag. “You and Aiden will be okay while I go do my laps?”
Sheppard gave him that look, the one with the wiggly eyebrows. “Being in the zoo was good for you, Rodney. Voluntary meditation? Swimming? Taking care of someone? Being a Father?”
“Fuck you,” Rodney said, gently and succinctly. “Don’t tell me it was good for me. It was the most lonely and horrible thing to ever happen to me. Will you be okay with Aiden or not?”
“We’ll be fine, Dad,” Sheppard said. “I promise to tell him bedtime stories about String Theory.”
“Fine,” Rodney said, and left the room. He headed down towards the pool, the heel of his hand pressed hard against his heart.