SGA/BC: Childish Things (gen)
Title: Childish Things
Author: Mad Maudlin
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis/Bloom County crossover.
Characters: Milo Bloom, Michael Binkley, Oliver Wendell Jones, Rodney McKay, various
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Uh...
Warning: Implied minor character death?
Summary: It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
A/N: I have no excuses for this, except that I read about 900 Bloom County strips online in one sitting, and then my brain broke. I attempt to remain true to canon, to the extent that a strip like Bloom County has one, though I make few attempts to reconcile it with Outland and am utterly ignoring Binkley's appearances in Opus. There is also the issue of timeline, namely, that Milo and Binkly appeared to have remained ten years old for the entire period of 1981-1989; to which I say, roundly, "Pthbbbt!"
Childish Things
by Mad Maudlin
"Milo? Miiilooo….Milo, are you there? Are you awake?"
Well, he was now. He groped for his radio and whispered into the microphone, "You know, Binkley, I don't really care if Adam and Eve had navels. In fact, I'm sorry I asked. Now will you please just go to bed?"
"This isn't about that," Binkley said, and while the radios here tended to make everyone's voice sound high and thin, Binkley's sounded especially so, even for Binkley. "Could you just…could you come by my quarters for a minute?"
"Binkley. Buddy. It's like three in the morning."
"I know."
"I'm on duty tomorrow. Today."
"I know."
"What the fuck do you need in your quarters?"
"I…well…say it's in the spirit of scientific inquiry."
Milo squinted into the darkness of his quarters, already feeling uncomfortably awake. "Scientific inquiry can't wait until breakfast?"
"I wouldn't ask you if it wasn't important."
"Yeah, you would."
"Okay, I would. …so are you coming?"
"Are you gonna tell me what I'm leaving my nice, warm bed to go see, or is it a surprise?" Milo asked, juggling the radio and his glasses onto his face.
"I'm…not entirely sure you'd believe me if I told you."
That stilled him with his pants half-on. "Is that because it's objectively bizarre or just plain Atlantis-bizarre, or…?"
Binkley seemed to be waiting for him to say it, but Milo wasn't going to. Ultimately Binkley just said, "It's probably nothing. Go back to sleep." Which was as good as an admission.
But Milo found himself buttoning his pants up and scanning the room for a shirt anyway. "I'll be there in a couple minutes. Just don't…don't do whatever it is you do, okay?"
"Thanks, Milo," Binkley sighs, and the radio goes dead.
-\--\--\-
At some point in middle school, Milo realized he and Binkley weren't actually friends, in any way that normal people would recognize as friends. It was more that Milo told Binkley to do things, and Binkley did them. Writing love letters to Miss Harlow in the fifth grade. Mounting a national presidential campaign for a dead cat. Going out with Olivia Nutt. Standing up to his dad. He even did the things that Milo wouldn't or couldn't do himself.
It's sort of ironic that meek little Michael Binkley with his soulful brown eyes went off to some hippie school in California to study plant sex. Milo advised him to suck it up and go for it, reasoning Binkley could live with his mom and one of her Hell's Angel friends during breaks if he had to, and that his sense of self-actualization, nay, his entire psychological well-being rested on his ability to stand up to his father on these terms, and if he didn't-if he caved and went to Iowa State for business as ordered-he'd be bitter and emasculated for the rest of his life.
So Binkley did it, and the ensuing argument had woken up everybody in the boarding house; the Major had threatened to call the cops. Binkley had to spend the last month of senior year bunking in Oliver's attic, but he'd gone away with his scholarship, self-actualization intact. His dad eventually started speaking to him again, and even mustered the courage to talk to one of those Hell's Angels in order to get Binkley's off-campus phone number. It all seemed to work out for the best in the end, or so Milo heard.
See, it's a sick sort of irony that Tom Binkley lost his round and the Major won his. Because Milo told Binkley to stand up for his terms, but couldn't stand up on his own. The Major may have been hypertensive and bombastic and sclerotic in both arteries and opinions, but in the end he was the only family Milo had.
Ironic that Binkley did the one thing Milo couldn't do himself. Ironic that they parted ways, drifted apart, faded to black.
Ironic they'd found each other again in the only place in the universe weirder than Bloom County.
-\--\--\-
Milo half-expected to find Binkley in some kind of terrified stupor, or possibly being held captive by a crazed marine biologist after the latest algae study went awry. He hadn't expected to find Binkley's quarters dark, except for a laptop computer and scanner. Those were being manned by Oliver, who didn't react to Milo's arrival in the slightest. The dim light just revealed Binkley, wearing nothing but a pair of flannel pajama bottoms, pacing on the other side of the room.
"Okay, where's the fire?" Milo asked, once the doors had slid shut and swallowed the light from the corridor.
Binkley grimaced and rubbed his arms up and down, though if he was really cold he could put on a damn t-shirt. "Over there."
Milo obediently turned towards the wall. "What am I looking at?" he asked. It was a wall not unlike, oh, every other wall in Atlantis, with a closet door and a crystal control and an old, framed Billy and the Boingers poster. Okay, so most of Atlantis did not have the posters, but the rest held. Swap the decorations around and it could've been anyone's room.
Binkley cleared his throat, and said tentatively, "You remember, back home, when we were little…?"
"You'll have to be a little more specific, Bink," Milo said, folding his arms across his chest.
"My anxiety closet," Binkley blurted.
"Right," Milo said. "You used to have nightmares about shit coming out of your closet to get you. Purple monsters and stuff."
"Giant purple snorklewacker," Binkley corrected timidly.
"Yeah, whatever." Milo looked at Oliver. "There something wrong with Binkley's closet or something? Is that why you woke me up at three in the morning?"
Oliver looked up, glassed sheeted in the glow of the laptop screen. It was his personal-use model, the one Dr. McKay had tried to have confiscated as a threat to homeworld security on more than one occasion. "We're attempting a controlled study."
"Of what?"
There was a moment of silence, and then Binkley said quietly, "The snorklewacker followed me to Atlantis."
-\--\--\-
Milo's first month in the Air Force Academy, he got referred to counseling almost a dozen times, mostly for things that were not his fault. He maintained, for instance, that any sentence starting with "I wonder what would happen if…" should not be construed as actual advice. It was a free country, after all. (He'd argued that the right to hair, like the right to privacy, was in the penumbra, but they'd still made him cut it on arrival.)
But there were other things, the ones that didn't result in extra laps or loss of privileges, only confused looks and awkward coughs and whispers behind his back. Some of the stories about the boarding house, for instance. Stories about the newspaper. Love poems to Betty Crocker. Letters from Hodge-Podge. An old Bill + Opus '88 button hidden inside his uniform jacket. Finally, one of his teachers slipped him a book and told him to think about what it said. The book was called Deferring Dreams by Dr. Susan Pevensie, and the epigraph was the Apostle Paul: When I was a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things.
Milo was a lot more careful after that.
-\--\--\-
Milo may have shouted at Binkley. He may have shouted a lot.
"You wake me up at three o'clock in the fucking morning because you had some kind of fucking hallucination about monsters in your fucking closet? Jesus Christ, Binkley, did you give yourself brain damage down in that greenhouse? Have you been snorting the space mushrooms or something? Because I really thought we got over this, you know, back around puberty, the part where we stopped being afraid of the dark, you know? The part where we grew up?"
Binkley just sat on the bed with his head in his hands, not looking at Milo or anything else. Milo carried on in this vein until he was hoarse, until he had enough sense to quiet down before he started waking Binkley's neighbors. That was when Oliver piped up quietly, "I saw it too, Milo."
"What?" he croaked. "You saw what?"
"The…creature." Oliver picked up the ancient scanner and compared its screen with the laptop's. "That's why we asked you down here."
"To figure out if you're both crazy?" Milo hazarded.
Oliver held out the scanner to him. "To figure out if it needs to be believed in to be seen."
-\--\--\-
By the time Milo was a first lieutenant-and the best public affairs officer Peterson AFB had ever seen, thanks-he'd almost forgotten about things like the Meadow Party and the electro-photo-pigmentizer and the cockroaches. He was more occupied with press releases and newsletters and photo ops, and in his spare time, compiling a list that would put Skippy to shame. Definitely not the hallucinations of a misspent childhood, or the Major, who was by that time deep in his grave. He was doing enough speechwriting for people in high enough pay grades that he thought his future was nearly laid out before him: Milo Bloom, ghostwriter to power, retired with his pension at forty and safely ensconced in a congressional staff or a lobbying firm until the heat death of the universe.
Then he got called to meet somebody named Major Davis. "You have a very impressive record, Lieutenant Bloom."
"Thank you, sir."
"Are you any good at lying?"
"Sir?"
"Lying, Bloom."
"I like to think I'm an accomplished liar, sir."
"Good. Excellent."
"A question, sir? Why do you ask?"
"Well, there's not much else a public affairs officer does on a top-secret assignment."
-\--\--\-
Binkley still looked kinda weedy on the outside, but he was freakish strong in a pinch, with the kind of muscles that you only get from being a deeply committed ballet dancer since the age of ten. He wrestled the gun out of Milo's hands while Oliver shut the closet again.
Milo, bereft of both weapon and target, sat down on the bed. After a moment, he put his head between his knees. It didn't help.
"If it's any consolation," Binkley panted, holding Milo's gun by the end of the barrel like he's planning to sweep it for prints, "I'm fairly certain it was as scared of you as you were of it."
"Wasn't scared," Milo said.
"Oh. Of course."
"Wasn't."
"I'm just judging by the screaming and the gunplay, Milo."
"It wasn't…" Real, he screamed inside, real, real, none of this was supposed to be real. His throat closed up on the word.
Oliver must've keyed his radio somewhere beyond the space between Milo's boots. "Dr. McKay, hello? Hello. Yes, Dr. McKay, I know what time it is. Yes, this is Dr. Jones. Would you please come to Dr. Binkley's quarters, Dr. McKay? We're attempting a controlled experiment."
-\--\--\-
By the time Milo made captain, he was the best public affairs officer the SGC had. Everybody from the governor of Colorado to the National Enquirer were wrapped around his little finger, and he drafted statements that ended up in the president's office. Plague? What plague? That was tainted cauliflower, sir. The Air Force is just conducting a counterterrorism drill, sir. I'm afraid that's just a high-tech weather balloon.
Of course, he also got to brief the geeks on the communications policy, with exhaustive power-point slides about what they were and weren't allowed to publish, or even try to publish, no, not even just circulate in manuscript form as a way of gloating to old colleagues-did you actually read the non-disclosure agreement? It never fails to frustrate, until the day he spots the skinny guy in the back with the big brown eyes and the ridiculous cowlick of gingery hair. Well, it frustrates that day, too, but then it gets better.
Because at some point Binkley actually finished his growth spurt, learned how to talk to girls and occasionally let people call him "Mike." Oh, and he picked up a Ph.D. along the way, something to do with plant sex (still), and he still hugs Milo like he did the day he left for Oakland, on a bus two hours earlier than Milo's one to Colorado Springs.
"How long's it been, man?" Binkley asked over commissary jell-o. "Feels like forever. I keep expecting to run into you when I go home."
"Ah, jeez, I don't remember the last time I was back in the county," Milo said.
"Really? What about the Major's funeral? Uh, sorry about that, by the way-Dad wrote me about it, but I was in the Peace Corps."
"I hired Steve Dallas to handle the estate and stuff," Milo muttered. "And what the hell were you doing in the Peace Corps?"
"Well, pooping, mainly….planting watermelons…getting malaria…"
And they did manage to talk about that stuff for a while, the watermelons and the malaria and the hilarious misunderstandings inherent in tonal languages, but somehow they still got back to the county, and whatever-happened-to Yaz and Blondie and Olivia and Alphonso and…
"Port died, you know," Binkley said, peering into the bottom of his jell-o bowl. "We had services in the meadow. He wanted his ashes spread on Christie Brinkley's bottom, but, well, under the circumstances we decided burial in the dandelion patch would have to do. Opus played the tuba."
Milo could hear the sounds of the commissary, other people talking and eating, steel on ceramic. "What are you talking about, Binkley?"
"Port. Portnoy." Binkley blinked at him. "You remember Port, Milo? Groundhog, about yea high, always getting into it with Hodge-Podge?"
And Milo never stopped smiling as he said, "Binkley, old boy, are you talking about those stupid games we used to play out in the meadow?"
"Games?"
"Games. Make-believe. Kid stuff."
Binkley looked stricken and confused. "Port wasn't a game, Milo, he was-"
"Make-believe," Milo said loudly. "You really shouldn't talk about that kind of stuff like it was real, Bink. People are going to get funny idea about you. C'mon, what do you say we get off-base for a couple hours, find ourselves some dames?"
Eventually, Binkley did stop talking about it. He's always done what Milo told him to.
-\--\--\-
"You woke me up at three-fifteen in the morning and called me out of bed in order to have me look into an empty closet?" Dr. McKay asked icily, hair sticking up rather wildly to one side.
Over his shoulder, the Snorklewacker put its finger to its lips, such as they were. Milo fingered his empty holster. (Binkley had hidden the gun.)
"We're attempting to prove a version of Schroedinger's Cat Theory, sir," Oliver said. He was comparing the scanner to his computer again, not looking at any of them.
McKay's face pinches up like he's going to sneeze or something. "Jones, Schroedinger's Cat is not a theory. It's a thought experiment, a metaphor, a paradox-there's nothing to actually prove!"
"That's the traditional interpretation," Oliver said.
McKay's eyes snapped open and started to bulge.
"Sir," Milo said, because he really was an accomplished liar, "I think Dr. Jones is just giving an example of something that illustrates his personal theory."
"And what is that theory, Captain, uh, You?" McKay asked.
"The superposition of the cat collapses into simultaneous and mutually exclusive states selected by the preconceptions of the observer," Oliver said.
"What's what mean?" Binkley whispered to Milo.
"The dead cat is in the eye of the beholder, I think."
"Didn't we already know that, though? I mean, with Bill?"
McKay waggled his finger at Oliver and ignored the others. "That is the most ridiculous statement I have heard since at least Tuesday," he declared. "You're a disgrace to science, Jones. Of all the five hundred things in this city which violate quantum mechanics as we understand them, you pick the closet of some…some…who the hell are you, anyway?"
"Mike Binkley, botany."
"Right," McKay says with a snap. "Anyway, Jones, I generally expect a lower degree of blinding idiocy from you, considering your record, so the next time you wake me up in the middle of the night to make a mockery of science, please try a little harder to deceive me, or at least entertain me, or I will send you back to Earth fast enough to distort the subspace geometry of the outgoing wormhole. And make sure you return that scanner to the lab by morning."
"Don't worry," the Snorklewacker said as McKay stormed out in a flutter of bathrobe. "He's getting the whales again before dawn."
-\--\--\-
A public affairs officer on Atlantis had slightly different duties than a PA anywhere else in the, uh, known universe, as far as Milo could tell. He did produce a base newsletter nobody read, and got Binkley to contribute a celebrity gossip section. (His own idea for a city gossip page was crushed when Colonel Sheppard nixed a gag headline implicating Dr. McKay in a vast Canadian world-domination plot. "We don't want to give him any ideas," he said. Not Milo's favorite editor.)
He had plans for a daily podcast but could never quite sort out the logistics. He tried to talk Sergeant Campbell into a morning radio show, but they couldn't agree on a definition of "morning" that worked for more than two-thirds of the city. He insinuated himself into the informal library/Netflix system already established, but couldn't do much more than threaten to withhold pornography, or occasionally the latest George R. R. Martin novel, from people he didn't like. He was sometimes quietly asked to help Sheppard write letters for the families of the dead, and even less often, sent offworld to handle negotiations with indigenous populations. Though not so much, after his last mission resulted in the formation of a Tava-Pickers' Union on MF0-975.
But other than that, he had a lot of free time, and it turned out that Oliver had gotten out of prison in enough time to finish his own Ph.D. or two. He was the city sysadmin as well as a research physicist, and when he wasn't vandalizing other people's desktops or playing with the drone weapons, he was usually good for a nice meaty discussion about copyright law, Barack Obama, or the intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican Party. Sometimes he joined Milo and Binkley for root beer floats and movie nights. He had a vague standing agreement to help with the podcast.
The problem was, Milo and Oliver had been friends, in ways that other people would recognize as friends. Oliver didn't always do what Milo told him.
Milo didn't see a lot of Oliver in Atlantis.
-\--\--\-
"So you're saying we can only see the Snorklewacker because we know it's there?" Binkley asked.
"I'm saying we can only see it because we on some level accept the possibility of its existence," Oliver said. He had tossed the scanner in a corner and was typing very fast. "In essence, the space within the closet consists of two coextant sub-universes, one containing the creature and one without it. Each universe is absolutely contiguous with this one in all dimensions, and we preselect for which universe we will perceive based on various factors-"
"We can see the Snorklewacker because we know it's there," Milo said, and pointed at the closet, which was now closed again.
Oliver stopped short and looked at them. "Yes. Sort of."
"So what did Dr. McKay see?" Binkley asked.
"He told us, an empty closet."
Oliver suddenly hit enter on his computer and leaned back from the keyboard. "In the universe preselected by Dr. McKay, nightmares are the result of chaotic electrical activity in the brain, thoughts on a subconscious level made manifest. They are not brought out of the closet by Snorklewackers. The same phenomenon with two separate causalities. It's entirely possibly the coextant Snorklewacker-containing sub-universe has entirely different physical laws than we're accustomed to, ones which permit Snorklewackers to bring physical representations of our anxieties into being, to travel between closets, et cetera."
"And it just happens to bump up against our universe in Binkley's closet," Milo asked. He took off his glasses and tried to rub the headache out from behind his eyes, the one that was built of equal parts of lack of sleep, stress and giant purple Snorklewackers.
"Or it brushes our universe in every closet," Oliver suggested, "and only we can perceive the difference."
"But where did it come from?" Binkley asked. "The Snorklewackerverse, I mean. I don't think I could've created something like that just out of my own mind. I'm not that smart."
"Maybe it came from the Outland."
It took a moment for Milo to realize he'd said that out loud. And another to realize the others were slowly nodding.
-\--\--\-
The truth was, Milo had gone back to Bloom County just once, just long enough to make sure that Major P. F. Bloom (retired) was thoroughly buried, and then shaken the dust of the place from his boots. He had a career, after all, one that didn't have room for tuba-playing penguins or evangelizing cats. It was what the Major had wanted, after all. It wasn't Milo's fault that neither of them were entirely happy with the outcome.
One night in Atlantis, Binkley (after a few too many of the thoroughly disgusting rum-and-root-beer-floats he claimed to favor) had said, "Hey, Milo, what happens when you get promoted, huh? What then?"
"Whaddayah mean, what happens?"
"Well, you're Captain Bloom now, right? And the rank after captain is major, right?" Binkley's eyes had been tracking a little to the left at this point; Milo could practically see the cartoon booze bubbles bursting around his head. "So if you get promoted you'll be Major Bloom. Isn't that funny, Milo? What do you think the Major would think of that? If you became the Major?"
And Milo had asked, "I got a better one for you, Binkley: did Adam and Eve have navels?"
-\--\--\-
In the end, there wasn't much they could do about the Giant Purple Snorklewacker in Binkley's closet, since no one else could see it. Well, nobody that they knew of; it wasn't like they could parade the whole city through Binkley's room to check, even if the Snorklewacker would've put up with such nonsense.
"He's just going to keep marching the grant committee through here in their Speedos after you leave," Binkley pointed out while Oliver packed up the laptop. "Plus, I need to go water the dandelion patch by six. So we might as well just get an early breakfast together."
"I'm on duty today," Milo said, with the headache still pounding. "And I have to report to Major Lorne. I hate talking to Major Lorne."
"Waffles today," Oliver suggested.
"Sleep is better than waffles."
"Nothing is better than waffles."
But Milo still went back to his room, stripped off his glasses and his pants, and prepared to snatch an hour or so more of Snorklewacker-free sleep before…
Unless…
No.
Dammit.
Milo opened his closet, and there it was, all eight or so feet of it, smiling slightly. "And what precisely are you hiding behind your back?" he asked.
The Snorklewacker shuffled its bulk backwards. "Nothing, nothing special at all."
"I have places to be later. Gimme."
"Are you sure?"
"I don't know about ol' Binkley or Dr. McKay, my good Snorklewacker, but I'm quiet old enough to face my own anxieties like a man."
The Snorklewacker chuckled, and stepped sideways, revealing the sunlit meadow, the limpid pond, the gnarled tree; the steep drop-off that from the age of ten had seemed like a cliff; the boarding house. And beyond that, purple skies, gargantuan flowers, and a horizon with a definite twist. "Bloom County, Iowa," it declared with a sigh.
Milo cleared his throat several times. "I, uh, I hate to break it to you, but that's the Outland."
"And this is an empty closet."
-\--\--\-
They'd called it Milo's Meadow, back in the day. When they ran national political campaigns and slaughtered snakes and snorted dandelions. Before puberty and Prozac and the guidance counselors of Bloom County Central (and Only) High School. When the scariest things in life usually involved hunting ducks with the Major, or talking to girls.
He wondered, absurdly, if the sign was still there. He wondered what it would mean if it weren't.
-\--\--\-
Oh-six-hundred found Milo dozing lightly outside an innocuous-looking botany lab. Binkley nudged him awake with one foot. "Uh, Milo? You all right there?"
Milo stood, stretched. "Fine, Bink. I'm superb. Everything's glorious."
Binkley's brows met in the middle. "Right."
When Milo didn't say anything further, Binkley went into the lab. On the floor, a square tray about six inches deep had been mounded with soil, and the soil planted with what resembled totally innocuous dandelions, in their fluffiest and whitest of moods. Milo stayed in a corner while Binkley gently watered them all and took a few height measurements. He was so gentle not a single puff of down was disturbed.
When he was done, he said to Milo, "You know, there's still waffles left, in the mess hall."
"Can I…?" Milo tried to ask, but he couldn't find the words. Not now, not for this.
Binkley blinked at him. "Can you what? Get waffles? Transfer into the botany department? Believe in the new face of American liberalism?"
"No, Binkley. I…" He gestured, helplessly, at the dandelion patch.
"Oh. Oh." Binkley closed his laptop. "Well, why didn't you just say that?"
Answering that would've taken all morning and required him to pry open the anxiety closet a little too wide. Instead, he carefully removed his jacket and gun belt, and with all the dignity and gravitas of a Captain in the United States Air Force, flung himself face-first into the dandelion patch. The soil was damp and smelled oddly coppery, and when he rolled over the dandelion fluff snowed down on his face and hands. He was careful not to inhale.
"Feel better?" Binkley asked after a few moments.
"Yeah," Milo said. "Sorry if I ruined your experiment, though."
"Wasn't any experiment," Binkley said. "I just needed an excuse to keep a dandelion patch in the city."
Milo looked up at him. "So are these regular Earth dandelions?"
Binkley shook his head. "Nah, we got 'em off the mainland. The snakes seem a little too fond them, though."
"We could handle the snakes. We've handled snakes before."
"We have?"
"Well, battery cables disguised as snakes."
Binkley's eyes went wide, and then suddenly he, too, sat among the dandelions. The ultraviolet lamps above them were warmer than sunshine. "Do you think Dr. McKay could use a dandelion patch?"
"Don't think he'd know what to do with one if he had it," Milo replied.
"True." Binkley squirmed a bit. "I wouldn't have watered them if I'd known you were coming by. Your uniform's going to get all soppy."
Milo sat up and gently blew the fluff off his glasses. "Don't worry about it. What's a damp tush between good friends?"
Binkley's smile was warm as sunrise. "Couldn't have said it better myself."
Author: Mad Maudlin
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis/Bloom County crossover.
Characters: Milo Bloom, Michael Binkley, Oliver Wendell Jones, Rodney McKay, various
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Uh...
Warning: Implied minor character death?
Summary: It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
A/N: I have no excuses for this, except that I read about 900 Bloom County strips online in one sitting, and then my brain broke. I attempt to remain true to canon, to the extent that a strip like Bloom County has one, though I make few attempts to reconcile it with Outland and am utterly ignoring Binkley's appearances in Opus. There is also the issue of timeline, namely, that Milo and Binkly appeared to have remained ten years old for the entire period of 1981-1989; to which I say, roundly, "Pthbbbt!"
Childish Things
by Mad Maudlin
"Milo? Miiilooo….Milo, are you there? Are you awake?"
Well, he was now. He groped for his radio and whispered into the microphone, "You know, Binkley, I don't really care if Adam and Eve had navels. In fact, I'm sorry I asked. Now will you please just go to bed?"
"This isn't about that," Binkley said, and while the radios here tended to make everyone's voice sound high and thin, Binkley's sounded especially so, even for Binkley. "Could you just…could you come by my quarters for a minute?"
"Binkley. Buddy. It's like three in the morning."
"I know."
"I'm on duty tomorrow. Today."
"I know."
"What the fuck do you need in your quarters?"
"I…well…say it's in the spirit of scientific inquiry."
Milo squinted into the darkness of his quarters, already feeling uncomfortably awake. "Scientific inquiry can't wait until breakfast?"
"I wouldn't ask you if it wasn't important."
"Yeah, you would."
"Okay, I would. …so are you coming?"
"Are you gonna tell me what I'm leaving my nice, warm bed to go see, or is it a surprise?" Milo asked, juggling the radio and his glasses onto his face.
"I'm…not entirely sure you'd believe me if I told you."
That stilled him with his pants half-on. "Is that because it's objectively bizarre or just plain Atlantis-bizarre, or…?"
Binkley seemed to be waiting for him to say it, but Milo wasn't going to. Ultimately Binkley just said, "It's probably nothing. Go back to sleep." Which was as good as an admission.
But Milo found himself buttoning his pants up and scanning the room for a shirt anyway. "I'll be there in a couple minutes. Just don't…don't do whatever it is you do, okay?"
"Thanks, Milo," Binkley sighs, and the radio goes dead.
-\--\--\-
At some point in middle school, Milo realized he and Binkley weren't actually friends, in any way that normal people would recognize as friends. It was more that Milo told Binkley to do things, and Binkley did them. Writing love letters to Miss Harlow in the fifth grade. Mounting a national presidential campaign for a dead cat. Going out with Olivia Nutt. Standing up to his dad. He even did the things that Milo wouldn't or couldn't do himself.
It's sort of ironic that meek little Michael Binkley with his soulful brown eyes went off to some hippie school in California to study plant sex. Milo advised him to suck it up and go for it, reasoning Binkley could live with his mom and one of her Hell's Angel friends during breaks if he had to, and that his sense of self-actualization, nay, his entire psychological well-being rested on his ability to stand up to his father on these terms, and if he didn't-if he caved and went to Iowa State for business as ordered-he'd be bitter and emasculated for the rest of his life.
So Binkley did it, and the ensuing argument had woken up everybody in the boarding house; the Major had threatened to call the cops. Binkley had to spend the last month of senior year bunking in Oliver's attic, but he'd gone away with his scholarship, self-actualization intact. His dad eventually started speaking to him again, and even mustered the courage to talk to one of those Hell's Angels in order to get Binkley's off-campus phone number. It all seemed to work out for the best in the end, or so Milo heard.
See, it's a sick sort of irony that Tom Binkley lost his round and the Major won his. Because Milo told Binkley to stand up for his terms, but couldn't stand up on his own. The Major may have been hypertensive and bombastic and sclerotic in both arteries and opinions, but in the end he was the only family Milo had.
Ironic that Binkley did the one thing Milo couldn't do himself. Ironic that they parted ways, drifted apart, faded to black.
Ironic they'd found each other again in the only place in the universe weirder than Bloom County.
-\--\--\-
Milo half-expected to find Binkley in some kind of terrified stupor, or possibly being held captive by a crazed marine biologist after the latest algae study went awry. He hadn't expected to find Binkley's quarters dark, except for a laptop computer and scanner. Those were being manned by Oliver, who didn't react to Milo's arrival in the slightest. The dim light just revealed Binkley, wearing nothing but a pair of flannel pajama bottoms, pacing on the other side of the room.
"Okay, where's the fire?" Milo asked, once the doors had slid shut and swallowed the light from the corridor.
Binkley grimaced and rubbed his arms up and down, though if he was really cold he could put on a damn t-shirt. "Over there."
Milo obediently turned towards the wall. "What am I looking at?" he asked. It was a wall not unlike, oh, every other wall in Atlantis, with a closet door and a crystal control and an old, framed Billy and the Boingers poster. Okay, so most of Atlantis did not have the posters, but the rest held. Swap the decorations around and it could've been anyone's room.
Binkley cleared his throat, and said tentatively, "You remember, back home, when we were little…?"
"You'll have to be a little more specific, Bink," Milo said, folding his arms across his chest.
"My anxiety closet," Binkley blurted.
"Right," Milo said. "You used to have nightmares about shit coming out of your closet to get you. Purple monsters and stuff."
"Giant purple snorklewacker," Binkley corrected timidly.
"Yeah, whatever." Milo looked at Oliver. "There something wrong with Binkley's closet or something? Is that why you woke me up at three in the morning?"
Oliver looked up, glassed sheeted in the glow of the laptop screen. It was his personal-use model, the one Dr. McKay had tried to have confiscated as a threat to homeworld security on more than one occasion. "We're attempting a controlled study."
"Of what?"
There was a moment of silence, and then Binkley said quietly, "The snorklewacker followed me to Atlantis."
-\--\--\-
Milo's first month in the Air Force Academy, he got referred to counseling almost a dozen times, mostly for things that were not his fault. He maintained, for instance, that any sentence starting with "I wonder what would happen if…" should not be construed as actual advice. It was a free country, after all. (He'd argued that the right to hair, like the right to privacy, was in the penumbra, but they'd still made him cut it on arrival.)
But there were other things, the ones that didn't result in extra laps or loss of privileges, only confused looks and awkward coughs and whispers behind his back. Some of the stories about the boarding house, for instance. Stories about the newspaper. Love poems to Betty Crocker. Letters from Hodge-Podge. An old Bill + Opus '88 button hidden inside his uniform jacket. Finally, one of his teachers slipped him a book and told him to think about what it said. The book was called Deferring Dreams by Dr. Susan Pevensie, and the epigraph was the Apostle Paul: When I was a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things.
Milo was a lot more careful after that.
-\--\--\-
Milo may have shouted at Binkley. He may have shouted a lot.
"You wake me up at three o'clock in the fucking morning because you had some kind of fucking hallucination about monsters in your fucking closet? Jesus Christ, Binkley, did you give yourself brain damage down in that greenhouse? Have you been snorting the space mushrooms or something? Because I really thought we got over this, you know, back around puberty, the part where we stopped being afraid of the dark, you know? The part where we grew up?"
Binkley just sat on the bed with his head in his hands, not looking at Milo or anything else. Milo carried on in this vein until he was hoarse, until he had enough sense to quiet down before he started waking Binkley's neighbors. That was when Oliver piped up quietly, "I saw it too, Milo."
"What?" he croaked. "You saw what?"
"The…creature." Oliver picked up the ancient scanner and compared its screen with the laptop's. "That's why we asked you down here."
"To figure out if you're both crazy?" Milo hazarded.
Oliver held out the scanner to him. "To figure out if it needs to be believed in to be seen."
-\--\--\-
By the time Milo was a first lieutenant-and the best public affairs officer Peterson AFB had ever seen, thanks-he'd almost forgotten about things like the Meadow Party and the electro-photo-pigmentizer and the cockroaches. He was more occupied with press releases and newsletters and photo ops, and in his spare time, compiling a list that would put Skippy to shame. Definitely not the hallucinations of a misspent childhood, or the Major, who was by that time deep in his grave. He was doing enough speechwriting for people in high enough pay grades that he thought his future was nearly laid out before him: Milo Bloom, ghostwriter to power, retired with his pension at forty and safely ensconced in a congressional staff or a lobbying firm until the heat death of the universe.
Then he got called to meet somebody named Major Davis. "You have a very impressive record, Lieutenant Bloom."
"Thank you, sir."
"Are you any good at lying?"
"Sir?"
"Lying, Bloom."
"I like to think I'm an accomplished liar, sir."
"Good. Excellent."
"A question, sir? Why do you ask?"
"Well, there's not much else a public affairs officer does on a top-secret assignment."
-\--\--\-
Binkley still looked kinda weedy on the outside, but he was freakish strong in a pinch, with the kind of muscles that you only get from being a deeply committed ballet dancer since the age of ten. He wrestled the gun out of Milo's hands while Oliver shut the closet again.
Milo, bereft of both weapon and target, sat down on the bed. After a moment, he put his head between his knees. It didn't help.
"If it's any consolation," Binkley panted, holding Milo's gun by the end of the barrel like he's planning to sweep it for prints, "I'm fairly certain it was as scared of you as you were of it."
"Wasn't scared," Milo said.
"Oh. Of course."
"Wasn't."
"I'm just judging by the screaming and the gunplay, Milo."
"It wasn't…" Real, he screamed inside, real, real, none of this was supposed to be real. His throat closed up on the word.
Oliver must've keyed his radio somewhere beyond the space between Milo's boots. "Dr. McKay, hello? Hello. Yes, Dr. McKay, I know what time it is. Yes, this is Dr. Jones. Would you please come to Dr. Binkley's quarters, Dr. McKay? We're attempting a controlled experiment."
-\--\--\-
By the time Milo made captain, he was the best public affairs officer the SGC had. Everybody from the governor of Colorado to the National Enquirer were wrapped around his little finger, and he drafted statements that ended up in the president's office. Plague? What plague? That was tainted cauliflower, sir. The Air Force is just conducting a counterterrorism drill, sir. I'm afraid that's just a high-tech weather balloon.
Of course, he also got to brief the geeks on the communications policy, with exhaustive power-point slides about what they were and weren't allowed to publish, or even try to publish, no, not even just circulate in manuscript form as a way of gloating to old colleagues-did you actually read the non-disclosure agreement? It never fails to frustrate, until the day he spots the skinny guy in the back with the big brown eyes and the ridiculous cowlick of gingery hair. Well, it frustrates that day, too, but then it gets better.
Because at some point Binkley actually finished his growth spurt, learned how to talk to girls and occasionally let people call him "Mike." Oh, and he picked up a Ph.D. along the way, something to do with plant sex (still), and he still hugs Milo like he did the day he left for Oakland, on a bus two hours earlier than Milo's one to Colorado Springs.
"How long's it been, man?" Binkley asked over commissary jell-o. "Feels like forever. I keep expecting to run into you when I go home."
"Ah, jeez, I don't remember the last time I was back in the county," Milo said.
"Really? What about the Major's funeral? Uh, sorry about that, by the way-Dad wrote me about it, but I was in the Peace Corps."
"I hired Steve Dallas to handle the estate and stuff," Milo muttered. "And what the hell were you doing in the Peace Corps?"
"Well, pooping, mainly….planting watermelons…getting malaria…"
And they did manage to talk about that stuff for a while, the watermelons and the malaria and the hilarious misunderstandings inherent in tonal languages, but somehow they still got back to the county, and whatever-happened-to Yaz and Blondie and Olivia and Alphonso and…
"Port died, you know," Binkley said, peering into the bottom of his jell-o bowl. "We had services in the meadow. He wanted his ashes spread on Christie Brinkley's bottom, but, well, under the circumstances we decided burial in the dandelion patch would have to do. Opus played the tuba."
Milo could hear the sounds of the commissary, other people talking and eating, steel on ceramic. "What are you talking about, Binkley?"
"Port. Portnoy." Binkley blinked at him. "You remember Port, Milo? Groundhog, about yea high, always getting into it with Hodge-Podge?"
And Milo never stopped smiling as he said, "Binkley, old boy, are you talking about those stupid games we used to play out in the meadow?"
"Games?"
"Games. Make-believe. Kid stuff."
Binkley looked stricken and confused. "Port wasn't a game, Milo, he was-"
"Make-believe," Milo said loudly. "You really shouldn't talk about that kind of stuff like it was real, Bink. People are going to get funny idea about you. C'mon, what do you say we get off-base for a couple hours, find ourselves some dames?"
Eventually, Binkley did stop talking about it. He's always done what Milo told him to.
-\--\--\-
"You woke me up at three-fifteen in the morning and called me out of bed in order to have me look into an empty closet?" Dr. McKay asked icily, hair sticking up rather wildly to one side.
Over his shoulder, the Snorklewacker put its finger to its lips, such as they were. Milo fingered his empty holster. (Binkley had hidden the gun.)
"We're attempting to prove a version of Schroedinger's Cat Theory, sir," Oliver said. He was comparing the scanner to his computer again, not looking at any of them.
McKay's face pinches up like he's going to sneeze or something. "Jones, Schroedinger's Cat is not a theory. It's a thought experiment, a metaphor, a paradox-there's nothing to actually prove!"
"That's the traditional interpretation," Oliver said.
McKay's eyes snapped open and started to bulge.
"Sir," Milo said, because he really was an accomplished liar, "I think Dr. Jones is just giving an example of something that illustrates his personal theory."
"And what is that theory, Captain, uh, You?" McKay asked.
"The superposition of the cat collapses into simultaneous and mutually exclusive states selected by the preconceptions of the observer," Oliver said.
"What's what mean?" Binkley whispered to Milo.
"The dead cat is in the eye of the beholder, I think."
"Didn't we already know that, though? I mean, with Bill?"
McKay waggled his finger at Oliver and ignored the others. "That is the most ridiculous statement I have heard since at least Tuesday," he declared. "You're a disgrace to science, Jones. Of all the five hundred things in this city which violate quantum mechanics as we understand them, you pick the closet of some…some…who the hell are you, anyway?"
"Mike Binkley, botany."
"Right," McKay says with a snap. "Anyway, Jones, I generally expect a lower degree of blinding idiocy from you, considering your record, so the next time you wake me up in the middle of the night to make a mockery of science, please try a little harder to deceive me, or at least entertain me, or I will send you back to Earth fast enough to distort the subspace geometry of the outgoing wormhole. And make sure you return that scanner to the lab by morning."
"Don't worry," the Snorklewacker said as McKay stormed out in a flutter of bathrobe. "He's getting the whales again before dawn."
-\--\--\-
A public affairs officer on Atlantis had slightly different duties than a PA anywhere else in the, uh, known universe, as far as Milo could tell. He did produce a base newsletter nobody read, and got Binkley to contribute a celebrity gossip section. (His own idea for a city gossip page was crushed when Colonel Sheppard nixed a gag headline implicating Dr. McKay in a vast Canadian world-domination plot. "We don't want to give him any ideas," he said. Not Milo's favorite editor.)
He had plans for a daily podcast but could never quite sort out the logistics. He tried to talk Sergeant Campbell into a morning radio show, but they couldn't agree on a definition of "morning" that worked for more than two-thirds of the city. He insinuated himself into the informal library/Netflix system already established, but couldn't do much more than threaten to withhold pornography, or occasionally the latest George R. R. Martin novel, from people he didn't like. He was sometimes quietly asked to help Sheppard write letters for the families of the dead, and even less often, sent offworld to handle negotiations with indigenous populations. Though not so much, after his last mission resulted in the formation of a Tava-Pickers' Union on MF0-975.
But other than that, he had a lot of free time, and it turned out that Oliver had gotten out of prison in enough time to finish his own Ph.D. or two. He was the city sysadmin as well as a research physicist, and when he wasn't vandalizing other people's desktops or playing with the drone weapons, he was usually good for a nice meaty discussion about copyright law, Barack Obama, or the intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican Party. Sometimes he joined Milo and Binkley for root beer floats and movie nights. He had a vague standing agreement to help with the podcast.
The problem was, Milo and Oliver had been friends, in ways that other people would recognize as friends. Oliver didn't always do what Milo told him.
Milo didn't see a lot of Oliver in Atlantis.
-\--\--\-
"So you're saying we can only see the Snorklewacker because we know it's there?" Binkley asked.
"I'm saying we can only see it because we on some level accept the possibility of its existence," Oliver said. He had tossed the scanner in a corner and was typing very fast. "In essence, the space within the closet consists of two coextant sub-universes, one containing the creature and one without it. Each universe is absolutely contiguous with this one in all dimensions, and we preselect for which universe we will perceive based on various factors-"
"We can see the Snorklewacker because we know it's there," Milo said, and pointed at the closet, which was now closed again.
Oliver stopped short and looked at them. "Yes. Sort of."
"So what did Dr. McKay see?" Binkley asked.
"He told us, an empty closet."
Oliver suddenly hit enter on his computer and leaned back from the keyboard. "In the universe preselected by Dr. McKay, nightmares are the result of chaotic electrical activity in the brain, thoughts on a subconscious level made manifest. They are not brought out of the closet by Snorklewackers. The same phenomenon with two separate causalities. It's entirely possibly the coextant Snorklewacker-containing sub-universe has entirely different physical laws than we're accustomed to, ones which permit Snorklewackers to bring physical representations of our anxieties into being, to travel between closets, et cetera."
"And it just happens to bump up against our universe in Binkley's closet," Milo asked. He took off his glasses and tried to rub the headache out from behind his eyes, the one that was built of equal parts of lack of sleep, stress and giant purple Snorklewackers.
"Or it brushes our universe in every closet," Oliver suggested, "and only we can perceive the difference."
"But where did it come from?" Binkley asked. "The Snorklewackerverse, I mean. I don't think I could've created something like that just out of my own mind. I'm not that smart."
"Maybe it came from the Outland."
It took a moment for Milo to realize he'd said that out loud. And another to realize the others were slowly nodding.
-\--\--\-
The truth was, Milo had gone back to Bloom County just once, just long enough to make sure that Major P. F. Bloom (retired) was thoroughly buried, and then shaken the dust of the place from his boots. He had a career, after all, one that didn't have room for tuba-playing penguins or evangelizing cats. It was what the Major had wanted, after all. It wasn't Milo's fault that neither of them were entirely happy with the outcome.
One night in Atlantis, Binkley (after a few too many of the thoroughly disgusting rum-and-root-beer-floats he claimed to favor) had said, "Hey, Milo, what happens when you get promoted, huh? What then?"
"Whaddayah mean, what happens?"
"Well, you're Captain Bloom now, right? And the rank after captain is major, right?" Binkley's eyes had been tracking a little to the left at this point; Milo could practically see the cartoon booze bubbles bursting around his head. "So if you get promoted you'll be Major Bloom. Isn't that funny, Milo? What do you think the Major would think of that? If you became the Major?"
And Milo had asked, "I got a better one for you, Binkley: did Adam and Eve have navels?"
-\--\--\-
In the end, there wasn't much they could do about the Giant Purple Snorklewacker in Binkley's closet, since no one else could see it. Well, nobody that they knew of; it wasn't like they could parade the whole city through Binkley's room to check, even if the Snorklewacker would've put up with such nonsense.
"He's just going to keep marching the grant committee through here in their Speedos after you leave," Binkley pointed out while Oliver packed up the laptop. "Plus, I need to go water the dandelion patch by six. So we might as well just get an early breakfast together."
"I'm on duty today," Milo said, with the headache still pounding. "And I have to report to Major Lorne. I hate talking to Major Lorne."
"Waffles today," Oliver suggested.
"Sleep is better than waffles."
"Nothing is better than waffles."
But Milo still went back to his room, stripped off his glasses and his pants, and prepared to snatch an hour or so more of Snorklewacker-free sleep before…
Unless…
No.
Dammit.
Milo opened his closet, and there it was, all eight or so feet of it, smiling slightly. "And what precisely are you hiding behind your back?" he asked.
The Snorklewacker shuffled its bulk backwards. "Nothing, nothing special at all."
"I have places to be later. Gimme."
"Are you sure?"
"I don't know about ol' Binkley or Dr. McKay, my good Snorklewacker, but I'm quiet old enough to face my own anxieties like a man."
The Snorklewacker chuckled, and stepped sideways, revealing the sunlit meadow, the limpid pond, the gnarled tree; the steep drop-off that from the age of ten had seemed like a cliff; the boarding house. And beyond that, purple skies, gargantuan flowers, and a horizon with a definite twist. "Bloom County, Iowa," it declared with a sigh.
Milo cleared his throat several times. "I, uh, I hate to break it to you, but that's the Outland."
"And this is an empty closet."
-\--\--\-
They'd called it Milo's Meadow, back in the day. When they ran national political campaigns and slaughtered snakes and snorted dandelions. Before puberty and Prozac and the guidance counselors of Bloom County Central (and Only) High School. When the scariest things in life usually involved hunting ducks with the Major, or talking to girls.
He wondered, absurdly, if the sign was still there. He wondered what it would mean if it weren't.
-\--\--\-
Oh-six-hundred found Milo dozing lightly outside an innocuous-looking botany lab. Binkley nudged him awake with one foot. "Uh, Milo? You all right there?"
Milo stood, stretched. "Fine, Bink. I'm superb. Everything's glorious."
Binkley's brows met in the middle. "Right."
When Milo didn't say anything further, Binkley went into the lab. On the floor, a square tray about six inches deep had been mounded with soil, and the soil planted with what resembled totally innocuous dandelions, in their fluffiest and whitest of moods. Milo stayed in a corner while Binkley gently watered them all and took a few height measurements. He was so gentle not a single puff of down was disturbed.
When he was done, he said to Milo, "You know, there's still waffles left, in the mess hall."
"Can I…?" Milo tried to ask, but he couldn't find the words. Not now, not for this.
Binkley blinked at him. "Can you what? Get waffles? Transfer into the botany department? Believe in the new face of American liberalism?"
"No, Binkley. I…" He gestured, helplessly, at the dandelion patch.
"Oh. Oh." Binkley closed his laptop. "Well, why didn't you just say that?"
Answering that would've taken all morning and required him to pry open the anxiety closet a little too wide. Instead, he carefully removed his jacket and gun belt, and with all the dignity and gravitas of a Captain in the United States Air Force, flung himself face-first into the dandelion patch. The soil was damp and smelled oddly coppery, and when he rolled over the dandelion fluff snowed down on his face and hands. He was careful not to inhale.
"Feel better?" Binkley asked after a few moments.
"Yeah," Milo said. "Sorry if I ruined your experiment, though."
"Wasn't any experiment," Binkley said. "I just needed an excuse to keep a dandelion patch in the city."
Milo looked up at him. "So are these regular Earth dandelions?"
Binkley shook his head. "Nah, we got 'em off the mainland. The snakes seem a little too fond them, though."
"We could handle the snakes. We've handled snakes before."
"We have?"
"Well, battery cables disguised as snakes."
Binkley's eyes went wide, and then suddenly he, too, sat among the dandelions. The ultraviolet lamps above them were warmer than sunshine. "Do you think Dr. McKay could use a dandelion patch?"
"Don't think he'd know what to do with one if he had it," Milo replied.
"True." Binkley squirmed a bit. "I wouldn't have watered them if I'd known you were coming by. Your uniform's going to get all soppy."
Milo sat up and gently blew the fluff off his glasses. "Don't worry about it. What's a damp tush between good friends?"
Binkley's smile was warm as sunrise. "Couldn't have said it better myself."