fic: A Theory of Parallels snippet [sga au]

[bratfarrar]

Here's another thing that's probably part of something longer. I even have a maybe-sort-of storyline roughed out, but it's not going anywhere. So give it a kick in the pants. Give me prompts for what might happen further down the line. Or tell me to stop being silly and go back to writing about John being all traumatized by everyone dying.

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[bratfarrar]

Oooh her and John could go for five AM runs together and Rodney could be all like - bzah? It's freaking cold out there shut the door and then Lucy (or John) could put sneak in and stick freezing cold fingers down the back of Rodney's t-shirt so he squeals and jumps out of bed with his hair sticking up in nine hundred directions and his blanket wrapped crookedly around his shoulders.

Totally. John (this version of him, anyway) grew up on a farm (there's a long and complicated backstory to this which I really ought to write out at some point), so he's used to getting up reeeeally early, which Rodney cannot understand at all. Sure, Rodney pulls all-nighters with increasing frequency as the semester wears on, but to voluntarily get out of bed once you're in it--crazy.

And John (and Lucy, once she and Rodney come to an understanding) loves to do stuff to Rodney (who is a wimp and not ashamed to admit it) like stick his cold fingers down the back of Rodney's neck and drip on him after he's been out in the rain and drop snow down his coat.

I think Rodney decides he could be friends with Lucy after something happens to John (some kind of not-too-major injury) and they sit in the emergency waiting room together, Rodney wishing he could remember John's parents' phone number and Lucy trying not to cry, because she was on the periphery of whatever happened to John and is sort of in shock. She does break down eventually, and gets Rodney's shirt all wet, and after that it's kind of hard to keep on disliking her.

That's when he realizes that John doesn't belong to him. (Not that he'd actually thought that before, except that he kind of maybe had. A little.)

Afterwards, Lucy starts treating him like a little brother. Which is irritating, even though she is two years older than he is.

[misskatieleigh]

and then suddenly, it's like Rodney has people; people that care about him and worry about him when he stays in the science labs all night; people that pull his face off the keyboard and push him into bed at 2 in the morning so he doesn't walk around for three days with the impression of the return key carved out in red on his cheek. He's not sure what to do with this new information, it doesn't fit into his programming. No one, besides Jeanie, has ever cared about him as more than competition for lab time or another mouth to feed. No one has ever left sticky notes of stick figures dancing across the front of his notes so he has to struggle not to burst out laughing in the middle of a lecture, has ever known how to make him laugh at all. He doesn't know how to act in return, how to absorb the affection and give it back as anything other than snide remarks or blustery narcissism. It almost leaves him speechless, and for Rodney McKay that's saying something.

[bratfarrar]

He tries to show them that he does get it--kind of, sort of, a little bit--even though it's hard. John and Lucy don't seem to need the same way Rodney does, the way he has for years and just never realized. But he does small stuff, stupid stuff, like play poker with John's friends (even though they all cheat all the time and Rodney wins only when they let him) and drag himself out of bed on a Saturday morning just so he can go to one of Lucy's regattas. It seems insignificant in the face of everything they do for him, but maybe it's enough--they don't get frustrated with him, as other people have in the past. When he forgets to meet them for pizza, they simply bring it to the lab and play three dimensional tic tac toe until he's too distracted to continue his calculations. And for some reason, he doesn't get mad at them for the interruption.

It's not just that they seem to want to spend time with him, it's that he wants to spend time with them, even though John's determined to waste himself on farming (except Rodney' not sure anymore if he wants to think of it like that) and Lucy doesn't know what string theory is.

When he has nightmares now, they're not about other people getting awards that should go to him: they're about him standing at the podium, Nobel prize in hand, unable to find John and Lucy in the audience.

[violeteyedcat]

Ok, so, in your five versions of John someone asked if you'd written anything about the fourth version, and I totally didn't connect this (one of my favorite favorite favorite stories of yours that always makes me wish I could yawn like a cat, only I'm not sure it would be as adorable on me as it most definitely is on John) to the fourth version of John, so I followed the links you provided, and then started reading the new comments, and you have a CREWBIE! A woman crewbie! Aiee! *happyhappyhappy*

So yeah. Umm... Have you heard of Quantum Tic Tac Toe? It's considered a formal interpretation of quantum mechanics, and I could definitely see Rodney and John playing it.

Oh, and Rodney going to one of Lucy's regattas? Ultimate sign of friendship. Regattas are miserably boring things to try and watch. They are long, you can't see the race all that well, and what you can see you only see for, like, half a minute. And the weather is either too hot and sunny or too cold and rainy. I've never managed to get my roomie to come to one of mine - even the ones on the creek!

P.P.S: Why is a farmer going to college as a math major? :D It's a very John thing to do, in any case.

[bratfarrar]

Lucy was definitely inspired by you and your insane crewbie ways. :D

I want very much to write more of this, as I think I said fairly recently somewhere--it's just a much more mellow story and so keeps getting shoved to the back of the line by all the other brain-eating WRITE ME NOW stories. Which I have a fair number, some of which I have to keep deliberately squashing or I'd never get anything done.

But it's very much ideal for little snippets of things here and there, so perhaps I'll be able to work it back into my somewhat irregular repertoire. I hope so. It's nice to write about the characters being happy and not in danger of being eaten by space vampires.