.fic: The Five Great Love Affairs of Rodney McKay - PG13/R (McShep) 1.1
Title: The Five Great Love Affairs of Rodney McKay
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: McShep
Rating/Warnings: PG13 for a bit of the sex.
Disclaimers: Not mine. Sci-Fi's.
Advertisements: For wordclaim50 challenge #10 "Character Study." Set at some point in the six weeks we don't see in 3.10.
Notes: Written between three and four a.m., so this is likely to make very little sense.
THE FIVE GREAT LOVE AFFAIRS OF RODNEY MCKAY
Not necessarily in this order:
i. Himself
Well, yes. This is obvious. What, after all, isn’t there to love? Moving on…
Actually, come to think of it, when it’s him… alone… in the lab at three in the morning and the memory of the last girl he'd asked out (four months ago) looking at him like he'd crawled out from under her shoe is still fresh and he doesn’t really have any family he talks to (he doesn’t know if he can be civil to Jeannie, that homemaking traitor), someone has to volunteer to provide moral support and consolation, and other things we won’t speak of here.
But anyway, like we said, moving swiftly on.
ii. Music
According to his mother, when he was little - as in “young enough not to remember” and so his mother might have fabricated the whole thing for all he knows - Rodney would sit in front of the record player for hours, hypnotized by Mozart and Haydn, sometimes Schubert. Hours and hours, nodding his head along with the time signature.
Somewhere around six, he started reading music, and maybe not reading so much as watching the notes march across the page, the symmetry - that was what it was, he knows now, the balance, the force that controlled, wove sound together into something rich and complicated, and knowing those symbols on the page, how they captured sound like that… that was the key to understanding the structure he’d always sensed.
Rodney managed to coax his parents into piano lessons by pointing out that said lessons would get him out of their hair for a few hours each week.
He loved playing, loved how the ink on the page reproduced itself in sound, the measure and meter, the rhythm working like the paper said they should, and for the next few years he played like that: precise, steady, and loved it despite his instructor and his disapproval.
Feel the music, Rodney, his instructor would say, over and over again, blathering on about channeling and passion and become the music, Rodney and generally interfering with Rodney’s concentration. And Rodney would say, very calmly, I am feeling it, because he was, keys and pedals and chords bringing the silent symmetry on the page to life, but the instructor would say No, you’re not, frustration forcing his voice up a couple octaves to where it cracked and broke and he’d finally shut up.
Not long after he turned twelve, Rodney quit the piano, and now he doesn’t really think about it anymore, most days.
iii. Physics
Studies say that people who are good with numbers are generally good with music and languages. They’re good with systems in general, and that’s why Rodney can play piano “technically” and why he picked up Ancient snap, like that.
He knows he can’t explain why he loves physics and so he never tries, and really, it’s probably better that people don’t know. It proves order runs underneath the chaos, and you can know that order, that some point in the history of creation - or even, some of the newer theories suggest, the prehistory of creation - there had been a symmetrical nirvana, one now bent and broken in places.
Rodney can’t even really explain it to himself. It’s maybe the scary, obsessive, stalker kind of love, love that keeps him up until three or four in the morning, hunting through thickets of calculations, looking for that order, waiting for some secret to unfold. Sometimes it frightens him, if he thinks too much about it, what he’s doing.
There are times, usually when he’s facing imminent death, that he wishes he could go back to pure research, scribbling random thoughts and the beginnings of experiments into his notebook, exploring the world from the comfort of his couch, with Planck the Cat snoring on his lap. It’s certainly much safer, and he might get a Nobel Prize out of it eventually.
Of course, sometimes the Nobel committee awards its prizes decades after the publication of the work for which the person is being rewarded, and there’s something to be said for instant gratification: scientific wizardry to save Atlantis (and/or himself) at the eleventh hour has its perks.
iv. Atlantis
It’s at this point that he starts to realize his most successful relationships are either with inanimate objects or abstractions. And that… that sounds kind of sad.
Okay, really fucking pathetic.
Then again this is Atlantis, the next thing to sentient, and he thinks about her sometimes stupidly, romantically, a moron in love, the clingy and exuberant kind most people want to smack. There are days when he realizes he’s been up thirty hours straight and Zelenka’s all worried and solicitous and trying to shepherd him off to bed, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to learn her, to persuade her out of her secrets. And Rodney knows he’s not like John, who simply knows Atlantis, who talks to him silently and they’re really a lot alike, those two, peaceful on the surface and powerful, terrible beneath.
But he knows her maybe even better than John: every flaw, every strength, the punishment she can take and what he can do to save her, what he’ll do to keep her from the Wraith or the Genii or anyone else who wants her. Yet for all his knowledge she endlessly surprises him, dangerous sometimes, beautiful, a safe place in a galaxy Rodney’s pretty sure is out to get them.
So Rodney does it the hard way, the fun way, through persistence - and that’s what it took in the first few months in the city, coaxing her back to life from her long silence. So much knowledge in her - his heart skips faster, thinking about it - and most projects in his life he’d finished quickly, ready for the next problem.
But for her... For her time and time and time.
She’s home now.
Wait. Talking in present tense here. Atlantis is home, Atlantis is his… not so much anymore, now that SGC’s exiled him to Area 51 with huge ungraceful machinery and a staff of monkeys thinly disguised as physicists. He doesn’t even get the puddlejumper; O’Neill had said something about “not encouraging him.”
So now he stares down at the turbines, their eternal groaning, disharmony of wires and pipes, faint smell of rust and the staff’s voices echoing into meaninglessness, and hates them.
v. Col. John Sheppard
Sheppard proves it. Sheppard proves that Rodney has terrible taste in love interests.
He - being Sheppard - has gravity-defying hair; he is rude (subtly) and sarcastic (overtly); he insults Rodney, threatens him with citrus, has shot him (twice, but once was okay and it was kind of neat, watching the bullet bounce off his leg like that), and has two very annoying habits. One is the habit of nearly dying every other time he steps through the stargate. The second is the habit of trying to convince Rodney to save himself and that he’s important.
Rodney hasn’t figured out a way to convince Sheppard he’s important, other than being more short-tempered during debriefings and then shouting at him in private. Sex usually follows the shouting, though, and that… that makes up for a lot.
He tries to be careful about the bruises but John never seems to care, not minding that his body’s a map of pain and violence.
The scars freak Rodney out, new and old both - and the old are the worst in some ways, thin and pale (there’s this one between John’s second and third rib on his right side…), old enough to have almost vanished, reminders of how long John has done this. And looking, staring, touching inevitably lead to calculations of probability, and either John can read his mind or his eyes or something because that’s usually when he pulls Rodney hard against him - ridges of hot muscle under Rodney’s body, and he can feel John’s heartbeat, weird, seismic, disastrous, he’s that close - and says Fuck me in the same way he says Rodney, get out of here; I’ll cover you.
Wait. Dammit. Not anymore.
Rodney equals “in Area 51, buried underneath a mountain.” John equals “buried under another mountain.” So RodneyandJohn... not so much anymore, either.
Not fair, not fucking fair to have two things taken without anyone asking him. And while yes, he’s self-centered and egotistical and a complete bastard, Rodney figures he should have some say in how the fates have planned to ruin his life.
Six weeks of terrestrial chaos and he’s a complete foreigner on Earth now, circadian rhythms belonging to another planet, everything feeling heavier somehow. Or that could just be his pessimism talking, talking ever more loudly as the fawning idiocy of his assistants seeps in, the bureaucracy saying No no, work on this, you’ll like this after swearing he’d have first refusal on Atlantis-related projects, the turbines and the huge hideous cave that is his lab.
So this brings us to today, sitting in the office and all the assistants have decided that discretion is the better part of kissing ass and have left him alone. He’s either contemplating the universe or contemplating the whiteness of the opposing wall, Rodney isn’t sure, maybe a bit of both and God he can’t think here.
He’s in the middle of debating whether or not to go home and think on the couch, where he’d at least be comfortable, when the phone rings.
Rodney answers it, and John’s voice, welcome, breathing memory, slides over him.
-end-
Notes: I can't remember if Rodney's cat has a name (or sex) or not, so I named him after Max Planck (pioneer in quantum physics).
PS to lilithilien: this may be the lead-in to your phone sex XD
In other news: I feel surprisingly good for having about five hours of sleep. Usually this is catastrophic for me.
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: McShep
Rating/Warnings: PG13 for a bit of the sex.
Disclaimers: Not mine. Sci-Fi's.
Advertisements: For wordclaim50 challenge #10 "Character Study." Set at some point in the six weeks we don't see in 3.10.
Notes: Written between three and four a.m., so this is likely to make very little sense.
THE FIVE GREAT LOVE AFFAIRS OF RODNEY MCKAY
Not necessarily in this order:
i. Himself
Well, yes. This is obvious. What, after all, isn’t there to love? Moving on…
Actually, come to think of it, when it’s him… alone… in the lab at three in the morning and the memory of the last girl he'd asked out (four months ago) looking at him like he'd crawled out from under her shoe is still fresh and he doesn’t really have any family he talks to (he doesn’t know if he can be civil to Jeannie, that homemaking traitor), someone has to volunteer to provide moral support and consolation, and other things we won’t speak of here.
But anyway, like we said, moving swiftly on.
ii. Music
According to his mother, when he was little - as in “young enough not to remember” and so his mother might have fabricated the whole thing for all he knows - Rodney would sit in front of the record player for hours, hypnotized by Mozart and Haydn, sometimes Schubert. Hours and hours, nodding his head along with the time signature.
Somewhere around six, he started reading music, and maybe not reading so much as watching the notes march across the page, the symmetry - that was what it was, he knows now, the balance, the force that controlled, wove sound together into something rich and complicated, and knowing those symbols on the page, how they captured sound like that… that was the key to understanding the structure he’d always sensed.
Rodney managed to coax his parents into piano lessons by pointing out that said lessons would get him out of their hair for a few hours each week.
He loved playing, loved how the ink on the page reproduced itself in sound, the measure and meter, the rhythm working like the paper said they should, and for the next few years he played like that: precise, steady, and loved it despite his instructor and his disapproval.
Feel the music, Rodney, his instructor would say, over and over again, blathering on about channeling and passion and become the music, Rodney and generally interfering with Rodney’s concentration. And Rodney would say, very calmly, I am feeling it, because he was, keys and pedals and chords bringing the silent symmetry on the page to life, but the instructor would say No, you’re not, frustration forcing his voice up a couple octaves to where it cracked and broke and he’d finally shut up.
Not long after he turned twelve, Rodney quit the piano, and now he doesn’t really think about it anymore, most days.
iii. Physics
Studies say that people who are good with numbers are generally good with music and languages. They’re good with systems in general, and that’s why Rodney can play piano “technically” and why he picked up Ancient snap, like that.
He knows he can’t explain why he loves physics and so he never tries, and really, it’s probably better that people don’t know. It proves order runs underneath the chaos, and you can know that order, that some point in the history of creation - or even, some of the newer theories suggest, the prehistory of creation - there had been a symmetrical nirvana, one now bent and broken in places.
Rodney can’t even really explain it to himself. It’s maybe the scary, obsessive, stalker kind of love, love that keeps him up until three or four in the morning, hunting through thickets of calculations, looking for that order, waiting for some secret to unfold. Sometimes it frightens him, if he thinks too much about it, what he’s doing.
There are times, usually when he’s facing imminent death, that he wishes he could go back to pure research, scribbling random thoughts and the beginnings of experiments into his notebook, exploring the world from the comfort of his couch, with Planck the Cat snoring on his lap. It’s certainly much safer, and he might get a Nobel Prize out of it eventually.
Of course, sometimes the Nobel committee awards its prizes decades after the publication of the work for which the person is being rewarded, and there’s something to be said for instant gratification: scientific wizardry to save Atlantis (and/or himself) at the eleventh hour has its perks.
iv. Atlantis
It’s at this point that he starts to realize his most successful relationships are either with inanimate objects or abstractions. And that… that sounds kind of sad.
Okay, really fucking pathetic.
Then again this is Atlantis, the next thing to sentient, and he thinks about her sometimes stupidly, romantically, a moron in love, the clingy and exuberant kind most people want to smack. There are days when he realizes he’s been up thirty hours straight and Zelenka’s all worried and solicitous and trying to shepherd him off to bed, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to learn her, to persuade her out of her secrets. And Rodney knows he’s not like John, who simply knows Atlantis, who talks to him silently and they’re really a lot alike, those two, peaceful on the surface and powerful, terrible beneath.
But he knows her maybe even better than John: every flaw, every strength, the punishment she can take and what he can do to save her, what he’ll do to keep her from the Wraith or the Genii or anyone else who wants her. Yet for all his knowledge she endlessly surprises him, dangerous sometimes, beautiful, a safe place in a galaxy Rodney’s pretty sure is out to get them.
So Rodney does it the hard way, the fun way, through persistence - and that’s what it took in the first few months in the city, coaxing her back to life from her long silence. So much knowledge in her - his heart skips faster, thinking about it - and most projects in his life he’d finished quickly, ready for the next problem.
But for her... For her time and time and time.
She’s home now.
Wait. Talking in present tense here. Atlantis is home, Atlantis is his… not so much anymore, now that SGC’s exiled him to Area 51 with huge ungraceful machinery and a staff of monkeys thinly disguised as physicists. He doesn’t even get the puddlejumper; O’Neill had said something about “not encouraging him.”
So now he stares down at the turbines, their eternal groaning, disharmony of wires and pipes, faint smell of rust and the staff’s voices echoing into meaninglessness, and hates them.
v. Col. John Sheppard
Sheppard proves it. Sheppard proves that Rodney has terrible taste in love interests.
He - being Sheppard - has gravity-defying hair; he is rude (subtly) and sarcastic (overtly); he insults Rodney, threatens him with citrus, has shot him (twice, but once was okay and it was kind of neat, watching the bullet bounce off his leg like that), and has two very annoying habits. One is the habit of nearly dying every other time he steps through the stargate. The second is the habit of trying to convince Rodney to save himself and that he’s important.
Rodney hasn’t figured out a way to convince Sheppard he’s important, other than being more short-tempered during debriefings and then shouting at him in private. Sex usually follows the shouting, though, and that… that makes up for a lot.
He tries to be careful about the bruises but John never seems to care, not minding that his body’s a map of pain and violence.
The scars freak Rodney out, new and old both - and the old are the worst in some ways, thin and pale (there’s this one between John’s second and third rib on his right side…), old enough to have almost vanished, reminders of how long John has done this. And looking, staring, touching inevitably lead to calculations of probability, and either John can read his mind or his eyes or something because that’s usually when he pulls Rodney hard against him - ridges of hot muscle under Rodney’s body, and he can feel John’s heartbeat, weird, seismic, disastrous, he’s that close - and says Fuck me in the same way he says Rodney, get out of here; I’ll cover you.
Wait. Dammit. Not anymore.
Rodney equals “in Area 51, buried underneath a mountain.” John equals “buried under another mountain.” So RodneyandJohn... not so much anymore, either.
Not fair, not fucking fair to have two things taken without anyone asking him. And while yes, he’s self-centered and egotistical and a complete bastard, Rodney figures he should have some say in how the fates have planned to ruin his life.
Six weeks of terrestrial chaos and he’s a complete foreigner on Earth now, circadian rhythms belonging to another planet, everything feeling heavier somehow. Or that could just be his pessimism talking, talking ever more loudly as the fawning idiocy of his assistants seeps in, the bureaucracy saying No no, work on this, you’ll like this after swearing he’d have first refusal on Atlantis-related projects, the turbines and the huge hideous cave that is his lab.
So this brings us to today, sitting in the office and all the assistants have decided that discretion is the better part of kissing ass and have left him alone. He’s either contemplating the universe or contemplating the whiteness of the opposing wall, Rodney isn’t sure, maybe a bit of both and God he can’t think here.
He’s in the middle of debating whether or not to go home and think on the couch, where he’d at least be comfortable, when the phone rings.
Rodney answers it, and John’s voice, welcome, breathing memory, slides over him.
-end-
Notes: I can't remember if Rodney's cat has a name (or sex) or not, so I named him after Max Planck (pioneer in quantum physics).
PS to lilithilien: this may be the lead-in to your phone sex XD
In other news: I feel surprisingly good for having about five hours of sleep. Usually this is catastrophic for me.