DVD commentary for julad's Secret Life of Scientists
No, I haven't been sitting on my hands waiting until I wouldn't be the first to post. Of course not.
Technically, I think this might be all squee.
Posting in roughly equal halves, as I wound up a little over postable wordcount.
Commentary for The Secret Life of Scientists, by Julad.
Rodney had no idea who he was, but he already hated P. Kavanagh. Ah, Kavanagh. Sure, he's a handy punching bag, but also? That he would label his stuff like that is completely in character. What kind of a man wrote his name on his food rations? Snorting in disgust, Rodney peeled the label off P. Kavanagh's banana and stuck it to the front of the break room fridge, and then wolfed the banana down, humming a happy tune. Might as well establish his authority right off the bat. And by right off the bat, this has to be the first couple of days. Because bananas, they haven't got much of a shelf-life.
A few hours later, there was a note stuck to the fridge: "Please [underlined twice] show respect for other people's property. Consideration and courtesy are essential to a well-functioning team. Sincerely, P. Kavanagh." Hee! It's the "sincerely" that makes the note. Chortling, Rodney looked for something else of P.'s in the fridge, and found a loaf of bread and a stick of butter. He stuck the label from the bread on the break room detergent, and the label from the butter on the scourer.
The following day, the note said, "Please be aware that disrespect for the personal belongings of others will be reported to your superiors." Inside the fridge, P. had written on his carton of UHT milk with a sharpie - "Property of P. Kavanagh, DO NOT TOUCH." Yeah, that's sort of asking for it. Red flag to a bull, Rodney thought, and opened the carton to drink from it.
Somebody tapped on his shoulder. Little guy, fuzzy hair, glasses. Rodney put the milk behind his back. "P. Kavanagh, I presume?" he said brightly. Ah, the confidence born of being everyone else's boss.
"Ah, no," the guy said softly, in a thick accent. "I am not P. Kavanagh. I am person guilty of spitting into milk of P. Kavanagh. It was wrong of me. I feel terrible. I see you take milk out, and I think, I must urgently confess to my superior, before I am reported." This is such a perfect intro to Zelenka. He's snarky, he's letting McKay in on the joke, and he's non-threatening. And all of that allows a reaction without forcing McKay to admit complicity.
Rodney looked at the guy, and then at the milk, and then put the milk back in the fridge and closed the door. "Well, no harm done, this time. In future, just think before you go spitting in perfectly good milk, understand?" Priorities! Conservation of resources! It's important to take the long view on these things.
The guy nodded earnestly. "Yes, I now see the error of my ways."
Rodney was pleased. The team camaraderie was obviously coming along very nicely.
At the first science heads meeting, P. Kavanagh turned out to be "Dr Peter Kavanagh, Senior Chemist." Figured. Rodney had always hated chemists. I don't think this is the only story I've read that makes Kavanagh a chemist. I'll roll with that, but I'm not sure it works very well with canon, particularly 38 Minutes - of course, I also see Kavanagh in that episode as a twin to McKay in 48 Hours. Which maybe makes it harder for me to buy that he wouldn't be a physicist. But that's just me.
The most important item on the agenda, according to P., was that some juvenile delinquent thought it was funny to remove the labels from his food and put them on inappropriate items. It was hard to decide whether to reveal himself now or let P. dig himself deeper. However, victory came to the patient man, so Rodney assured P. that he'd learn who was responsible sooner or later. Then, since this was the highest-level science meeting, he tried to move the agenda on to issues such as, oh, what they'd discovered, and how they were ever going to get home. P. first wanted to bring up the problem of junior scientists claiming better quarters than senior scientists, and the need to establish a clearer chain of command.
"The chain of command is perfectly clear," Rodney told him. "I am smarter, better looking, better qualified and better paid than everyone else here, and I am also, coincidentally, what did they call it?" He snapped his fingers, as if groping for the phrase. "Oh, yes, Chief Science Advisor, that was it." Finger-snapping + snideness = awesome.
"I understand that," P. said, mutinously. I also love the way he's still being referred to as "P."
"Consequently, there is no problem with the chain of command unless I say there is a problem with the chain of command. Which I don't. Therefore, there is no problem with the chain of command. Is that all right with you, Dr Kavanagh?"
"I hardly think--"
"Oops!" Rodney said, cupping his ear. "I thought you didn't say, 'Yes, Sir,' but I'm a little hard of hearing sometimes; I set off a few too many bombs in my well-spent youth. You'll have to speak up, I'm afraid." Rodney/bombs=otp!
Kavanagh stared at him with tightly pursed lips. "Yes, Sir," he said eventually, clearly meaning, 'I have nothing but contempt for you, Sir.'
Rodney beamed at him. Just so long as the feeling was mutual.
Sometime on the third or fourth day (nobody had established a time system that coped with Atlantean planetary rhythms yet) Rodney was approached in the cafeteria by a handsome Arab woman.
"Dinah Hushmand," she said, holding out her hand. Clipped English accent, immaculately dressed, obviously going to have a bug up her ass about something. Rodney brushed the chocolate crumbs off his hand and shook hers as quickly as possible, before going back to his list. I meant Rodney/chocolate=otp, of course. He hoped she didn't want to talk about the state of the showers or something. He had a partially-translated list of what seemed to be precincts of the ancient database, and was trying to prioritise areas for decryption and translation.
"I'm the xenobotanist," she said, putting her manicured hand on top of his printout. "It's my job to write safety guidelines on the handling of alien plant matter," she continued, without a trace of irony, "and then do damage control when nobody follows them. There is a set of recommendations in your inbox for preventing xenobotanical disasters in the city, but I'm sure you won't read it." After I read this the first time, I walked around practicing saying "xenobotanical" for a while. Some day I'll work it into conversation.
"That's nice," Rodney told her. "Now if you don't mind--"
"My lab is in Section B4, Level Two," she interrupted, speaking slowly and clearly. "That's where you need to go when, for instance, you are choking to death after inhaling the spores of an alien fungus."
They had an entire precinct in the database for fractal mathematics?!? "Yes, that's nice." Is he reading around her hand? Because that's awesome. I'm going to try not to use the word awesome any more in this commentary. Sorry.
"Section B4, Level Two," she repeated, enunciating every syllable.
Rodney rolled his eyes. "Right, yes, okay, fine! B4, Level 2, choking, fungus. Got it." See, I would have thought that she used the perfect come-on line for him. Why didn't it work? Oh, Dr McKay. You are a mystery wrapped in an enigma.
She smiled at him, in that clipped English way, and lifted her hand from the printout. "Thank you for your time, Dr McKay."
Two or three weeks later (still nobody had established a goddamn time system) Rodney actually read her recommendations, which were brief, lucid, and surprisingly intelligent. For xenobotany. He was mildly impressed, and headed down to her lab to, well - not to tell her that he was impressed (by a xenobotanist, ha!), but to at least poke his nose into whatever else she was doing. This actually is all in line with the managerial skills of the Rodney McKay in my head. A really good boss, as long as you have a thick skin and don't ever have to share a workspace with him.
Her lab was closed. There was a sign on the door giving her office hours (in Earth Antarctic Time and Atlantean Adjusted Time Version 1.3) along with directions to her living quarters and a list of steps to take in the event of a xenobotanical emergency. As far as Rodney was concerned, it was vaguely mid-morning, so he stopped by her quarters on his way to the break room for elevenses. I love the steady thread of struggle to find a timekeeping system. The way it just pops up in the story as a persistent annoyance.
She answered the door in her nightgown. After thirty seconds of small-talk, she had Rodney flat on his back in her bed, and was riding him in a way that had nine-tenths of his brain melting out of his ears and the remaining tenth comparing her to a praying mantis. Afterwards, she sat down at her dresser and started brushing the tangles out of her hair. I think Dinah's hilarious. And yes, a little scary.
Rodney sat up and pulled his pants back on. His hands were shaking, and his cock was quivering like it couldn't decide if it wanted to run away or do that again. "Well, Dinah, that was, uh."
She smiled at him, in that clipped English way. "Thank you for your time, Dr McKay. Please stop by any time. I do so hate having to sleep with subordinates."
Despite the fact that she was obviously nuts (in that clipped English way) (or perhaps because she was), Rodney stopped by her quarters every week or so. When all was said and done, sex was sex, and she hadn't actually bitten off his head and eaten his body after he came.
Eventually he heard through the grapevine that she'd slept with all of the Security team and was working her way through the Munitions team. That news gave him those queasy feelings of inferiority and inadequacy that he despised, so he stopped seeing her, the occasional xenobotanical emergency excepted.
Kate Somebody-or-Other arranged to meet with him in her office not long after they arrived. It was important, she said. Rodney forgot; a lot of things were important. The next day she rescheduled with a patient, understanding smile. He forgot that one, too, and the one after that. After she gave him yet another of those patient, understanding smiles, underlaid with a certain steeliness that promised she could keep doing this as long as he could, he put a reminder into his laptop and went directly to her office when it went off. She wasn't there. It turned out nobody had told him that Atlantean Adjusted Time had moved on to version four. Dude needs to quit letting memos pile up in his inbox unread.
He ran into her in the corridors the next day. He wanted to explain before getting another damn smile, but she was wearing a little white uniform and carrying a squash racquet. "That was your personal luggage?" he blurted.
"It's the best stress relief ever invented," she replied, and swung the racquet violently at a few imaginary balls. "Come with me now." Rodney was too unnerved to argue. Rodney McKay, defeated by imaginary raquetball.
In her office, she gave him coffee, which improved things considerably, sat in the chair opposite him, and studied his face. "So how are you feeling, Dr McKay?" Rodney/coffee=otp!
That was a very odd question, for a scientist. He looked around her office with a sinking feeling. There were the doctorates on the wall, and shit. Of course. She was the mission shrink. Wait! I have it this time - Rodney/obliviousness=otp. For serious.
"I'm feeling just fine, thank you," he said, and drained his coffee. "Excuse me, but I have a lot of work to do, and I think it's better for everyone if I--"
"No, please," she said, standing quickly. "Please, stay the full hour. It's extraordinarily difficult, getting people to see me, even when they need the help. If you could set an example--"
"No, no, I don't think so," Rodney said. "I'm sorry, but some days my neuroses are the only thing holding me together. I can't possibly function without them." Likely true.
"To be honest," she said, and sat back down carefully, "I care much less about your neuroses than I do about the example you set. We can spend the time here any way you want. Just, please, Doctor, spend the time. There are people who will need my help more than you do, and they need to be shown that there's no stigma attached to seeing the mission psychologist."
It sounded like a trick to get him to talk; Rodney wasn't born yesterday, and he had the neuroses to prove it. Rodney/neuroses=otp? Oh, I give up. I'll actually go for McKay/anything.
"All the coffee you can drink," she urged. "And while you're here, nobody can interrupt you."
"Oh, all right," he said, with a sinking feeling. He'd been suckered, but he wasn't going down without a fight. He'd been meaning for weeks to calculate the diffuse refraction of the gas clouds around the Atlantean sun, and hadn't had the time. "Can I have a pen and paper?" So, Heightmeyer. She's pretty awful and incompetent in canon, I think. And I like stories that show her being good at her job - the expedition is made up of the best & brightest, right? Or at least the best and brightest who were willing to take a one-way trip with even chances of a messy death at the destination. This, however, is a Heightmeyer who I think hits the middle ground. She's good enough at what she does that it makes sense that she's there, but not so astounding that I can't make her mesh with the wrongheaded woman of Duet or Michael in my head.
The massive Maori guy was the geologist, Darren Taupeaffe. Rodney had idly wondered what he did, besides organising rugby games, until he saw Darren walk through the stargate pulling half a ton of rocks on a sled behind him. He was a very funny guy, hugely popular with the soldiers, and always hugged everyone, including Rodney. Rodney getting non-consensual hugs? Comedy gold.
"My personal space is not big enough for both of us," he'd snapped, the first time.
"That's pretty obvious, bra," Darren had said, and hugged him again, harder, then held him out at arms' length. "You'd make a good centre-forward, hey. Come play with us against Reconaissance."
Rodney had better things to do than learn a version of football even more bizarre and pointless than the American kind, but sometimes, when all the equations started to blur before his eyes, he let Darren talk him into playing corridor cricket with the Athosians. I love the idea of expedition members playing modified sports in the corridors, and tried to steal it for my Chuck story. I'm still bitter that my beta made me cut it.
Someone in the Engineering team had a very nasty habit of leaving little caricatures of Rodney lying around the laboratories. "Who did this?" he'd shout, crumpling up a cartoon of himself as a squirrel, hiding in a tree with cheeks puffed up with acorns. All it got him was calculated blank looks, and loud snickers behind his back. However insulting it was, though, Rodney wasn't so petty as to launch a disciplinary investigation into such rank insubordination, particularly after Elizabeth stopped laughing for just long enough to tell him she would support no such action. Good manager or not, you would need to take the offensive to share lab space with the bastard.
Okay, so the cartoons were kind of cute, in a puerile and pathetic way. After the first month, they stopped making him fat and pasty, and started giving him a puffed out chest and manly bearing, which Rodney could appreciate as much better work, aesthetically, than the previous scribblings. He even took the time to apologise to Miko about their little misunderstanding with the sensor data, after seeing the cartoon where he gloated cruelly at the destruction of yet another scientist's sense of self-worth. I love Miko. I honestly believe she is the heart of the show, even if she never again shows up in an episode.
The next one he saw was slipped under his door at midnight, Rodney's time, which was probably late afternoonish in Revised Atlantean Time Mark II. It was himself, striding down the corridors of Atlantis with a P-90, very macho and handsome, and one long piece of toilet paper trailing from one shoe. Rodney stuck it to the wall by his desk and then noticed that it was signed. RZ. He pulled out the personnel files.
The culprit was obvious in retrospect. That little guy with the fuzzy hair was exactly the sort of idiot who would draw insulting pictures to get his superior's attention.
Radek Zelenka also turned out to be same person as Yebanat Prezrennyj, as the Russians called him. Rodney supposed he should have realised that the inventor of dual gamma-reflex conduits hadn't been named Fuckhead Traitor by his parents, but had in fact earned the name after stealing the highly classified method for polarising gamma radiation and selling it to the Americans in exchange for an extremely well-funded research laboratory in San Francisco. Ok, this is genius. Because while Rodney is the smartest man in two galaxies, Radek has to come in someplace in the top ten. This explains, neatly, why Rodney doesn't recognize the name.
Rodney hated the Russians with an unholy passion, so he tracked down Zelenka and they traded horror stories about the RAI and everyone in it. In his personal luggage, Zelenka had brought DVDs of every Olympic ice hockey match from 1994 onwards. They watched Sweden beat Russia to the 1994 gold, then broke out the vodka for the 1998 Czech Republic victory. By the time Canada took the 2002 gold, Rodney was drunk as a skunk and determined to move in with Radek Zelenka. Ice hockey! Hours and hours and hours of ice hockey! All the commentary was in Czech, unfortunately, but from it he learned enough of the language to tell whether Radek was swearing or gloating under his breath as he married Ancient technology to Earth technology in surprising and often disturbing ways. So hockey's been mentioned in canon once, right? They need to mention it more. There's some good SGA hockey fic out there, too.
Despite Kate's occasional prompting, Rodney didn't like to think about whether he was happy on Atlantis. He hadn't thought about his own happiness in years, if not decades. It wasn't relevant, and he had too much else to think about without adding his emotional state to the list. Still, after a week of hanging out with Zelenka, he felt a little lighter, a little freer. It was good to talk about Russians, and hockey, and stupid military decisions throughout history, and naquada generators, and Ancient database algorithms. It was fun to pick fantasy scientist leagues, and argue about whether the Wraith were scarier than the Borg. The Borg. Obviously. They're sexier, too. Though that first Wraith queen? In The Rising? She was hot. Whoa, what if some Wraith got borgified? Hmmmm.
"I think I have a best friend," he blurted to Kate, in the middle of studying schematics of the city water purification system on the floor of her office.
She looked up from her computer and smiled at him. "Good, I'm glad," she said, and something in her voice made him want to blush. He went back to his tools, and she went back to her... whatever she did while he worked. Oh, Rodney.
After the tenth person pointed out that Kavanagh had refused to leave his quarters for days, Rodney felt obliged to do something about it. Obviously he wasn't going to get anything productive done until Kavanagh was fixed. Unfortunately, Kate insisted that telling the shrink to deal with it was not the optimal way of resolving this particular situation.
It was with a heavy heart and not a small amount of irritation that he overrode the locks on Kavanagh's doors and went inside. Kavanagh was lying on his perfectly made bed, staring at the ceiling. He looked sad and pathetic without his glasses. Well, even more so.
The conversation that followed was excruciating. Rodney had never in his wildest nightmares anticipated that being Chief Science Advisor would mean he had to:
a) assure a subordinate that he valued and respected their role in his team,
b) fabricate in great detail the ways in which talking to a professional psychologist was helping him resolve the many emotional issues that were hindering his personal development,
and
c) explain to a grown man that women were fickle, flighty and wanton creatures whose logic was not earth logic and whose actions had broken the heart of many a good man who had done nothing to deserve the callous and unjust treatment the fairer sex so frequently meted out. Sidelong BtVS reference. Awesome.
After that, he had to stop by Dinah Hushmand's quarters, since it was four in the morning, Revised Atlantean Time Mark VI, and she wasn't in her office. He spent thirty seconds trying to explain why she couldn't have sex with the chemists, and then made a break for the door. Conversations Rodney initiates with Dinah last 30 seconds.
"For this," Zelenka told him, when Rodney had related the horrific tale from beginning to end, "for this we need vodka."
"We finished all the vodka," Rodney said morosely.
"Yes, but city is big," Zelenka said, pulling a bottle from under his mattress. "Has many empty laboratories with room to build distillery." Zelenka's still should be canon. If there were any justice in the world.
Rodney reached out for it. "That would be against many, many regulations, of course."
"So it would," Zelenka said blandly, handing the bottle over. "Good thing that I fit many, many bottles in my personal luggage."
They got thoroughly smashed and then watched Russia knock the Czech Republic out of the 1996 IHL semifinals, in honour of Rodney's horrible day.
"You didn't sleep with her, did you?" he begged Zelenka, sometime after they had fallen off the couch onto the floor. "Promise me you won't sleep with her."
"Rodney," Zelenka said, frowning in confusion. "Huh."
"'Huh' what? Huh?"
"Ah."
"Ah?"
"Yes."
"I am far too drunk to make sense of this conversation," Rodney admitted. This is a great way to portray a drunk conversation - all repetition and verbal pauses.
Zelenka pointed at him with a wobbling finger. "You don't know that I like men."
Rodney blinked. "I was supposed to know that you like men?"
"I thought you did know."
"How was I supposed to know?"
"Because I am being perfectly obvious about it?" There's all the flirting and note-passing! Oh, Radek.
"You're out?"
"Don't be stupid, this is military operation."
"Then how was I supposed to know?"
"You use your gaydar!"
"What gaydar? I have no gaydar! What made you think I have a functioning gaydar?"
"You got blowjob from redhead soldier with big ears." A fine point, well made.
"Yes, well, he pushed me against a wall. Huh? Is that an excuse or an explanation? And how did you know that?"
"I had misfortune to be working in jumper bay at time." Ha! Hahahahahaha. Zelenka looked at him, eyes narrowed. "Are you going to tell me you are straight?"
"Well, no," Rodney said, vaguely aware that the self-preservation part of his brain had recently died of alcohol poisoning, "it's not that I'm straight, per se, it's more that I'm really not choosy." Entirely credible summation of McKay's sexuality. He has more important things to do with his powers of discrimination.
"Ah," Zelenka said, apparently satisfied. "Yes, that is most likely explanation."
Rodney's head hurt so much the next day (which was that afternoon, for a lot of people), he couldn't think of a single nasty thing to say when Kavanagh quietly thanked him for his support.
"You're welcome," he said, rubbing his temples with his fingers. "But don't do it again. Please."
This section is my favorite part of the whole story. I go along reading it, dum-de-dum, fa-la-la, and then I'm crying. Boom!
It's just right. And it echoes Rodney's canon treatment of Dr Dumais in Hot Zone, his implied regard for the potential of his subordinates. This is what makes good managers - they understand that it serves their best interests to nurture the abilities of their employees. I'm about to break into a few stanzas of "Rodney McKay: On Leadership" here, so I'll stop. I'm not sure he leads well, anyway - not when he's trying to. Accidentally, (by example,) maybe. But leadership and managing a team are different things.
Myong-suk Park was, in Rodney's humble opinion, a very mediocre quantum physicist. Her practical work was perfectly reliable, yes, but her theory deviated not one iota from the status quo. Her conjecture was uninspiring at best, timid usually, and sometimes seemed determined to move the entire field of physics backwards instead of forwards. Rodney had been hoping to get Waisale Maikelekelevesi, the only quantum physicist who was actually making progress toward an applied theory of Zero Point Matrices, but everyone knew the world would end before military brass would even tell the chief science advisor who they were considering for a team to be stranded alone in another galaxy, let alone ask his opinion of any of them. And here? The explanation for why Rodney knows no names at the beginning of the story. Very nice.
That said, Myong-suk turned out to be a hell of a software engineer. The first time Rodney saw her code, leaning over her shoulder to take the protein bar Rodney/protein bars=otp she was obviously not going to finish, he stood there watching the program unfold for a good twenty minutes. Her routines were diabolical, she wrote a method for calculating intergalactic telemetry in eleven lines, and she even, for god's sake, documented her APIs. I don't even know what APIs are, but I know that's awesome. She was like an ordinary physicist by day, superhero programmer by night (if anybody had figured out a way to distinguish night and day on Atlantis yet).
He traded her to Peter Grodin's systems team for two boxes of chocolate-macadamia bars, then got seller's remorse a week later. It cost him the remaining box of choc-maccas plus two boxes of raisin-almond and a bottle of HP sauce to get her back, but Rodney figured if he could just trick her into thinking about quantum theory like she thought about memory management, he could have the next Waisale Maikelekelevesi on his hands.
A week after that, she died screaming from the Ancient nanite virus, which was a colossal waste of all the food he'd just traded, but also gnawed at him more than a dozen other deaths should have. The enormity of that day seemed to narrow itself down to one woman, whose mind was on the verge of breakthroughs he couldn't even anticipate.
He found himself thinking of her at odd moments, staring at half a protein bar abandoned on top of an invaluable Ancient console. What a goddamn waste, he'd think, a hot wave of bitterness flooding through him. She really could have been something. Yeah.
Part 2 is here.
Technically, I think this might be all squee.
Posting in roughly equal halves, as I wound up a little over postable wordcount.
Commentary for The Secret Life of Scientists, by Julad.
Rodney had no idea who he was, but he already hated P. Kavanagh. Ah, Kavanagh. Sure, he's a handy punching bag, but also? That he would label his stuff like that is completely in character. What kind of a man wrote his name on his food rations? Snorting in disgust, Rodney peeled the label off P. Kavanagh's banana and stuck it to the front of the break room fridge, and then wolfed the banana down, humming a happy tune. Might as well establish his authority right off the bat. And by right off the bat, this has to be the first couple of days. Because bananas, they haven't got much of a shelf-life.
A few hours later, there was a note stuck to the fridge: "Please [underlined twice] show respect for other people's property. Consideration and courtesy are essential to a well-functioning team. Sincerely, P. Kavanagh." Hee! It's the "sincerely" that makes the note. Chortling, Rodney looked for something else of P.'s in the fridge, and found a loaf of bread and a stick of butter. He stuck the label from the bread on the break room detergent, and the label from the butter on the scourer.
The following day, the note said, "Please be aware that disrespect for the personal belongings of others will be reported to your superiors." Inside the fridge, P. had written on his carton of UHT milk with a sharpie - "Property of P. Kavanagh, DO NOT TOUCH." Yeah, that's sort of asking for it. Red flag to a bull, Rodney thought, and opened the carton to drink from it.
Somebody tapped on his shoulder. Little guy, fuzzy hair, glasses. Rodney put the milk behind his back. "P. Kavanagh, I presume?" he said brightly. Ah, the confidence born of being everyone else's boss.
"Ah, no," the guy said softly, in a thick accent. "I am not P. Kavanagh. I am person guilty of spitting into milk of P. Kavanagh. It was wrong of me. I feel terrible. I see you take milk out, and I think, I must urgently confess to my superior, before I am reported." This is such a perfect intro to Zelenka. He's snarky, he's letting McKay in on the joke, and he's non-threatening. And all of that allows a reaction without forcing McKay to admit complicity.
Rodney looked at the guy, and then at the milk, and then put the milk back in the fridge and closed the door. "Well, no harm done, this time. In future, just think before you go spitting in perfectly good milk, understand?" Priorities! Conservation of resources! It's important to take the long view on these things.
The guy nodded earnestly. "Yes, I now see the error of my ways."
Rodney was pleased. The team camaraderie was obviously coming along very nicely.
At the first science heads meeting, P. Kavanagh turned out to be "Dr Peter Kavanagh, Senior Chemist." Figured. Rodney had always hated chemists. I don't think this is the only story I've read that makes Kavanagh a chemist. I'll roll with that, but I'm not sure it works very well with canon, particularly 38 Minutes - of course, I also see Kavanagh in that episode as a twin to McKay in 48 Hours. Which maybe makes it harder for me to buy that he wouldn't be a physicist. But that's just me.
The most important item on the agenda, according to P., was that some juvenile delinquent thought it was funny to remove the labels from his food and put them on inappropriate items. It was hard to decide whether to reveal himself now or let P. dig himself deeper. However, victory came to the patient man, so Rodney assured P. that he'd learn who was responsible sooner or later. Then, since this was the highest-level science meeting, he tried to move the agenda on to issues such as, oh, what they'd discovered, and how they were ever going to get home. P. first wanted to bring up the problem of junior scientists claiming better quarters than senior scientists, and the need to establish a clearer chain of command.
"The chain of command is perfectly clear," Rodney told him. "I am smarter, better looking, better qualified and better paid than everyone else here, and I am also, coincidentally, what did they call it?" He snapped his fingers, as if groping for the phrase. "Oh, yes, Chief Science Advisor, that was it." Finger-snapping + snideness = awesome.
"I understand that," P. said, mutinously. I also love the way he's still being referred to as "P."
"Consequently, there is no problem with the chain of command unless I say there is a problem with the chain of command. Which I don't. Therefore, there is no problem with the chain of command. Is that all right with you, Dr Kavanagh?"
"I hardly think--"
"Oops!" Rodney said, cupping his ear. "I thought you didn't say, 'Yes, Sir,' but I'm a little hard of hearing sometimes; I set off a few too many bombs in my well-spent youth. You'll have to speak up, I'm afraid." Rodney/bombs=otp!
Kavanagh stared at him with tightly pursed lips. "Yes, Sir," he said eventually, clearly meaning, 'I have nothing but contempt for you, Sir.'
Rodney beamed at him. Just so long as the feeling was mutual.
Sometime on the third or fourth day (nobody had established a time system that coped with Atlantean planetary rhythms yet) Rodney was approached in the cafeteria by a handsome Arab woman.
"Dinah Hushmand," she said, holding out her hand. Clipped English accent, immaculately dressed, obviously going to have a bug up her ass about something. Rodney brushed the chocolate crumbs off his hand and shook hers as quickly as possible, before going back to his list. I meant Rodney/chocolate=otp, of course. He hoped she didn't want to talk about the state of the showers or something. He had a partially-translated list of what seemed to be precincts of the ancient database, and was trying to prioritise areas for decryption and translation.
"I'm the xenobotanist," she said, putting her manicured hand on top of his printout. "It's my job to write safety guidelines on the handling of alien plant matter," she continued, without a trace of irony, "and then do damage control when nobody follows them. There is a set of recommendations in your inbox for preventing xenobotanical disasters in the city, but I'm sure you won't read it." After I read this the first time, I walked around practicing saying "xenobotanical" for a while. Some day I'll work it into conversation.
"That's nice," Rodney told her. "Now if you don't mind--"
"My lab is in Section B4, Level Two," she interrupted, speaking slowly and clearly. "That's where you need to go when, for instance, you are choking to death after inhaling the spores of an alien fungus."
They had an entire precinct in the database for fractal mathematics?!? "Yes, that's nice." Is he reading around her hand? Because that's awesome. I'm going to try not to use the word awesome any more in this commentary. Sorry.
"Section B4, Level Two," she repeated, enunciating every syllable.
Rodney rolled his eyes. "Right, yes, okay, fine! B4, Level 2, choking, fungus. Got it." See, I would have thought that she used the perfect come-on line for him. Why didn't it work? Oh, Dr McKay. You are a mystery wrapped in an enigma.
She smiled at him, in that clipped English way, and lifted her hand from the printout. "Thank you for your time, Dr McKay."
Two or three weeks later (still nobody had established a goddamn time system) Rodney actually read her recommendations, which were brief, lucid, and surprisingly intelligent. For xenobotany. He was mildly impressed, and headed down to her lab to, well - not to tell her that he was impressed (by a xenobotanist, ha!), but to at least poke his nose into whatever else she was doing. This actually is all in line with the managerial skills of the Rodney McKay in my head. A really good boss, as long as you have a thick skin and don't ever have to share a workspace with him.
Her lab was closed. There was a sign on the door giving her office hours (in Earth Antarctic Time and Atlantean Adjusted Time Version 1.3) along with directions to her living quarters and a list of steps to take in the event of a xenobotanical emergency. As far as Rodney was concerned, it was vaguely mid-morning, so he stopped by her quarters on his way to the break room for elevenses. I love the steady thread of struggle to find a timekeeping system. The way it just pops up in the story as a persistent annoyance.
She answered the door in her nightgown. After thirty seconds of small-talk, she had Rodney flat on his back in her bed, and was riding him in a way that had nine-tenths of his brain melting out of his ears and the remaining tenth comparing her to a praying mantis. Afterwards, she sat down at her dresser and started brushing the tangles out of her hair. I think Dinah's hilarious. And yes, a little scary.
Rodney sat up and pulled his pants back on. His hands were shaking, and his cock was quivering like it couldn't decide if it wanted to run away or do that again. "Well, Dinah, that was, uh."
She smiled at him, in that clipped English way. "Thank you for your time, Dr McKay. Please stop by any time. I do so hate having to sleep with subordinates."
Despite the fact that she was obviously nuts (in that clipped English way) (or perhaps because she was), Rodney stopped by her quarters every week or so. When all was said and done, sex was sex, and she hadn't actually bitten off his head and eaten his body after he came.
Eventually he heard through the grapevine that she'd slept with all of the Security team and was working her way through the Munitions team. That news gave him those queasy feelings of inferiority and inadequacy that he despised, so he stopped seeing her, the occasional xenobotanical emergency excepted.
Kate Somebody-or-Other arranged to meet with him in her office not long after they arrived. It was important, she said. Rodney forgot; a lot of things were important. The next day she rescheduled with a patient, understanding smile. He forgot that one, too, and the one after that. After she gave him yet another of those patient, understanding smiles, underlaid with a certain steeliness that promised she could keep doing this as long as he could, he put a reminder into his laptop and went directly to her office when it went off. She wasn't there. It turned out nobody had told him that Atlantean Adjusted Time had moved on to version four. Dude needs to quit letting memos pile up in his inbox unread.
He ran into her in the corridors the next day. He wanted to explain before getting another damn smile, but she was wearing a little white uniform and carrying a squash racquet. "That was your personal luggage?" he blurted.
"It's the best stress relief ever invented," she replied, and swung the racquet violently at a few imaginary balls. "Come with me now." Rodney was too unnerved to argue. Rodney McKay, defeated by imaginary raquetball.
In her office, she gave him coffee, which improved things considerably, sat in the chair opposite him, and studied his face. "So how are you feeling, Dr McKay?" Rodney/coffee=otp!
That was a very odd question, for a scientist. He looked around her office with a sinking feeling. There were the doctorates on the wall, and shit. Of course. She was the mission shrink. Wait! I have it this time - Rodney/obliviousness=otp. For serious.
"I'm feeling just fine, thank you," he said, and drained his coffee. "Excuse me, but I have a lot of work to do, and I think it's better for everyone if I--"
"No, please," she said, standing quickly. "Please, stay the full hour. It's extraordinarily difficult, getting people to see me, even when they need the help. If you could set an example--"
"No, no, I don't think so," Rodney said. "I'm sorry, but some days my neuroses are the only thing holding me together. I can't possibly function without them." Likely true.
"To be honest," she said, and sat back down carefully, "I care much less about your neuroses than I do about the example you set. We can spend the time here any way you want. Just, please, Doctor, spend the time. There are people who will need my help more than you do, and they need to be shown that there's no stigma attached to seeing the mission psychologist."
It sounded like a trick to get him to talk; Rodney wasn't born yesterday, and he had the neuroses to prove it. Rodney/neuroses=otp? Oh, I give up. I'll actually go for McKay/anything.
"All the coffee you can drink," she urged. "And while you're here, nobody can interrupt you."
"Oh, all right," he said, with a sinking feeling. He'd been suckered, but he wasn't going down without a fight. He'd been meaning for weeks to calculate the diffuse refraction of the gas clouds around the Atlantean sun, and hadn't had the time. "Can I have a pen and paper?" So, Heightmeyer. She's pretty awful and incompetent in canon, I think. And I like stories that show her being good at her job - the expedition is made up of the best & brightest, right? Or at least the best and brightest who were willing to take a one-way trip with even chances of a messy death at the destination. This, however, is a Heightmeyer who I think hits the middle ground. She's good enough at what she does that it makes sense that she's there, but not so astounding that I can't make her mesh with the wrongheaded woman of Duet or Michael in my head.
The massive Maori guy was the geologist, Darren Taupeaffe. Rodney had idly wondered what he did, besides organising rugby games, until he saw Darren walk through the stargate pulling half a ton of rocks on a sled behind him. He was a very funny guy, hugely popular with the soldiers, and always hugged everyone, including Rodney. Rodney getting non-consensual hugs? Comedy gold.
"My personal space is not big enough for both of us," he'd snapped, the first time.
"That's pretty obvious, bra," Darren had said, and hugged him again, harder, then held him out at arms' length. "You'd make a good centre-forward, hey. Come play with us against Reconaissance."
Rodney had better things to do than learn a version of football even more bizarre and pointless than the American kind, but sometimes, when all the equations started to blur before his eyes, he let Darren talk him into playing corridor cricket with the Athosians. I love the idea of expedition members playing modified sports in the corridors, and tried to steal it for my Chuck story. I'm still bitter that my beta made me cut it.
Someone in the Engineering team had a very nasty habit of leaving little caricatures of Rodney lying around the laboratories. "Who did this?" he'd shout, crumpling up a cartoon of himself as a squirrel, hiding in a tree with cheeks puffed up with acorns. All it got him was calculated blank looks, and loud snickers behind his back. However insulting it was, though, Rodney wasn't so petty as to launch a disciplinary investigation into such rank insubordination, particularly after Elizabeth stopped laughing for just long enough to tell him she would support no such action. Good manager or not, you would need to take the offensive to share lab space with the bastard.
Okay, so the cartoons were kind of cute, in a puerile and pathetic way. After the first month, they stopped making him fat and pasty, and started giving him a puffed out chest and manly bearing, which Rodney could appreciate as much better work, aesthetically, than the previous scribblings. He even took the time to apologise to Miko about their little misunderstanding with the sensor data, after seeing the cartoon where he gloated cruelly at the destruction of yet another scientist's sense of self-worth. I love Miko. I honestly believe she is the heart of the show, even if she never again shows up in an episode.
The next one he saw was slipped under his door at midnight, Rodney's time, which was probably late afternoonish in Revised Atlantean Time Mark II. It was himself, striding down the corridors of Atlantis with a P-90, very macho and handsome, and one long piece of toilet paper trailing from one shoe. Rodney stuck it to the wall by his desk and then noticed that it was signed. RZ. He pulled out the personnel files.
The culprit was obvious in retrospect. That little guy with the fuzzy hair was exactly the sort of idiot who would draw insulting pictures to get his superior's attention.
Radek Zelenka also turned out to be same person as Yebanat Prezrennyj, as the Russians called him. Rodney supposed he should have realised that the inventor of dual gamma-reflex conduits hadn't been named Fuckhead Traitor by his parents, but had in fact earned the name after stealing the highly classified method for polarising gamma radiation and selling it to the Americans in exchange for an extremely well-funded research laboratory in San Francisco. Ok, this is genius. Because while Rodney is the smartest man in two galaxies, Radek has to come in someplace in the top ten. This explains, neatly, why Rodney doesn't recognize the name.
Rodney hated the Russians with an unholy passion, so he tracked down Zelenka and they traded horror stories about the RAI and everyone in it. In his personal luggage, Zelenka had brought DVDs of every Olympic ice hockey match from 1994 onwards. They watched Sweden beat Russia to the 1994 gold, then broke out the vodka for the 1998 Czech Republic victory. By the time Canada took the 2002 gold, Rodney was drunk as a skunk and determined to move in with Radek Zelenka. Ice hockey! Hours and hours and hours of ice hockey! All the commentary was in Czech, unfortunately, but from it he learned enough of the language to tell whether Radek was swearing or gloating under his breath as he married Ancient technology to Earth technology in surprising and often disturbing ways. So hockey's been mentioned in canon once, right? They need to mention it more. There's some good SGA hockey fic out there, too.
Despite Kate's occasional prompting, Rodney didn't like to think about whether he was happy on Atlantis. He hadn't thought about his own happiness in years, if not decades. It wasn't relevant, and he had too much else to think about without adding his emotional state to the list. Still, after a week of hanging out with Zelenka, he felt a little lighter, a little freer. It was good to talk about Russians, and hockey, and stupid military decisions throughout history, and naquada generators, and Ancient database algorithms. It was fun to pick fantasy scientist leagues, and argue about whether the Wraith were scarier than the Borg. The Borg. Obviously. They're sexier, too. Though that first Wraith queen? In The Rising? She was hot. Whoa, what if some Wraith got borgified? Hmmmm.
"I think I have a best friend," he blurted to Kate, in the middle of studying schematics of the city water purification system on the floor of her office.
She looked up from her computer and smiled at him. "Good, I'm glad," she said, and something in her voice made him want to blush. He went back to his tools, and she went back to her... whatever she did while he worked. Oh, Rodney.
After the tenth person pointed out that Kavanagh had refused to leave his quarters for days, Rodney felt obliged to do something about it. Obviously he wasn't going to get anything productive done until Kavanagh was fixed. Unfortunately, Kate insisted that telling the shrink to deal with it was not the optimal way of resolving this particular situation.
It was with a heavy heart and not a small amount of irritation that he overrode the locks on Kavanagh's doors and went inside. Kavanagh was lying on his perfectly made bed, staring at the ceiling. He looked sad and pathetic without his glasses. Well, even more so.
The conversation that followed was excruciating. Rodney had never in his wildest nightmares anticipated that being Chief Science Advisor would mean he had to:
a) assure a subordinate that he valued and respected their role in his team,
b) fabricate in great detail the ways in which talking to a professional psychologist was helping him resolve the many emotional issues that were hindering his personal development,
and
c) explain to a grown man that women were fickle, flighty and wanton creatures whose logic was not earth logic and whose actions had broken the heart of many a good man who had done nothing to deserve the callous and unjust treatment the fairer sex so frequently meted out. Sidelong BtVS reference. Awesome.
After that, he had to stop by Dinah Hushmand's quarters, since it was four in the morning, Revised Atlantean Time Mark VI, and she wasn't in her office. He spent thirty seconds trying to explain why she couldn't have sex with the chemists, and then made a break for the door. Conversations Rodney initiates with Dinah last 30 seconds.
"For this," Zelenka told him, when Rodney had related the horrific tale from beginning to end, "for this we need vodka."
"We finished all the vodka," Rodney said morosely.
"Yes, but city is big," Zelenka said, pulling a bottle from under his mattress. "Has many empty laboratories with room to build distillery." Zelenka's still should be canon. If there were any justice in the world.
Rodney reached out for it. "That would be against many, many regulations, of course."
"So it would," Zelenka said blandly, handing the bottle over. "Good thing that I fit many, many bottles in my personal luggage."
They got thoroughly smashed and then watched Russia knock the Czech Republic out of the 1996 IHL semifinals, in honour of Rodney's horrible day.
"You didn't sleep with her, did you?" he begged Zelenka, sometime after they had fallen off the couch onto the floor. "Promise me you won't sleep with her."
"Rodney," Zelenka said, frowning in confusion. "Huh."
"'Huh' what? Huh?"
"Ah."
"Ah?"
"Yes."
"I am far too drunk to make sense of this conversation," Rodney admitted. This is a great way to portray a drunk conversation - all repetition and verbal pauses.
Zelenka pointed at him with a wobbling finger. "You don't know that I like men."
Rodney blinked. "I was supposed to know that you like men?"
"I thought you did know."
"How was I supposed to know?"
"Because I am being perfectly obvious about it?" There's all the flirting and note-passing! Oh, Radek.
"You're out?"
"Don't be stupid, this is military operation."
"Then how was I supposed to know?"
"You use your gaydar!"
"What gaydar? I have no gaydar! What made you think I have a functioning gaydar?"
"You got blowjob from redhead soldier with big ears." A fine point, well made.
"Yes, well, he pushed me against a wall. Huh? Is that an excuse or an explanation? And how did you know that?"
"I had misfortune to be working in jumper bay at time." Ha! Hahahahahaha. Zelenka looked at him, eyes narrowed. "Are you going to tell me you are straight?"
"Well, no," Rodney said, vaguely aware that the self-preservation part of his brain had recently died of alcohol poisoning, "it's not that I'm straight, per se, it's more that I'm really not choosy." Entirely credible summation of McKay's sexuality. He has more important things to do with his powers of discrimination.
"Ah," Zelenka said, apparently satisfied. "Yes, that is most likely explanation."
Rodney's head hurt so much the next day (which was that afternoon, for a lot of people), he couldn't think of a single nasty thing to say when Kavanagh quietly thanked him for his support.
"You're welcome," he said, rubbing his temples with his fingers. "But don't do it again. Please."
This section is my favorite part of the whole story. I go along reading it, dum-de-dum, fa-la-la, and then I'm crying. Boom!
It's just right. And it echoes Rodney's canon treatment of Dr Dumais in Hot Zone, his implied regard for the potential of his subordinates. This is what makes good managers - they understand that it serves their best interests to nurture the abilities of their employees. I'm about to break into a few stanzas of "Rodney McKay: On Leadership" here, so I'll stop. I'm not sure he leads well, anyway - not when he's trying to. Accidentally, (by example,) maybe. But leadership and managing a team are different things.
Myong-suk Park was, in Rodney's humble opinion, a very mediocre quantum physicist. Her practical work was perfectly reliable, yes, but her theory deviated not one iota from the status quo. Her conjecture was uninspiring at best, timid usually, and sometimes seemed determined to move the entire field of physics backwards instead of forwards. Rodney had been hoping to get Waisale Maikelekelevesi, the only quantum physicist who was actually making progress toward an applied theory of Zero Point Matrices, but everyone knew the world would end before military brass would even tell the chief science advisor who they were considering for a team to be stranded alone in another galaxy, let alone ask his opinion of any of them. And here? The explanation for why Rodney knows no names at the beginning of the story. Very nice.
That said, Myong-suk turned out to be a hell of a software engineer. The first time Rodney saw her code, leaning over her shoulder to take the protein bar Rodney/protein bars=otp she was obviously not going to finish, he stood there watching the program unfold for a good twenty minutes. Her routines were diabolical, she wrote a method for calculating intergalactic telemetry in eleven lines, and she even, for god's sake, documented her APIs. I don't even know what APIs are, but I know that's awesome. She was like an ordinary physicist by day, superhero programmer by night (if anybody had figured out a way to distinguish night and day on Atlantis yet).
He traded her to Peter Grodin's systems team for two boxes of chocolate-macadamia bars, then got seller's remorse a week later. It cost him the remaining box of choc-maccas plus two boxes of raisin-almond and a bottle of HP sauce to get her back, but Rodney figured if he could just trick her into thinking about quantum theory like she thought about memory management, he could have the next Waisale Maikelekelevesi on his hands.
A week after that, she died screaming from the Ancient nanite virus, which was a colossal waste of all the food he'd just traded, but also gnawed at him more than a dozen other deaths should have. The enormity of that day seemed to narrow itself down to one woman, whose mind was on the verge of breakthroughs he couldn't even anticipate.
He found himself thinking of her at odd moments, staring at half a protein bar abandoned on top of an invaluable Ancient console. What a goddamn waste, he'd think, a hot wave of bitterness flooding through him. She really could have been something. Yeah.
Part 2 is here.