(no subject)
Uh.
This is another in my fleshing out Rodney in my head stories. I CAN NOT HELP MYSELF. Send help!
Hans Bethe This dude is awesome, btw.
Set some time in S2, which is obvious.
now
Zelenka reads back through a year's worth of newspapers and periodicals on a datastick brought on the Daedalus, Rodney sees him scrolling and humming to himself when he gets stuck on a problem, using the old news as a focusing tool, a way to let his mind drift from a thought-rut in an indistinct pattern, waiting for a solution to occur to him. Rodney does the same thing with tinkering with the Jumpers. Rodney's never really paid much attention to current events or the news, because it's all a collection of spin and reductionism and claptrap.
One afternoon, or after lunch, who knows what time it is, Zelenka shows up at Rodney's elbow pushing up his glasses and hovering with intent. He clears his throat and hmms and brushes a hand over his hair.
"What?" Rodney snaps. He's in the middle of recalibrating one of few devices they can actually figure out how to fix and he's annoyed enough that he has to masquerade as an engineer to begin with, he doesn't need Zelenka's loitering.
Zelenka angles his datapad towards Rodney. "I am sorry, Rodney, this is a loss, great loss to us all, and for you loss is greater, personal…"
He probably keeps on yapping, but Rodney tunes it out when he sees the headline of the article, which looks like something from Newsweek or Time: "Hans Bethe, Physicist, Dead at Age 98."
"Oh," Rodney says, but he doesn't hear it. He reaches for Zelenka's datapad and feels the smooth edges under his fingers. He looks at the obituary photo of Hans, black and white with a crew cut, young, so young with dark hair and no glasses, and this isn't the man Rodney knows. Knew. "Oh," Rodney says when he sees the article is dated months ago.
then
Rodney speaks fluent French, because his grandmother was from Montreal and she made sure Rodney and Jeannie were "truly Canadian." Rodney thinks speaking broken French is truly Canadian, but that was a long time ago and he wasn't so good with the sarcastic comebacks at three. His French came in handy when he read Fermat and Poincare (and fueled his teenaged crush on Emilie du Chatelet).
Rodney also speaks fluent German. This happened later in life, starting at about seventeen, when it became totally clear to him that his intellectual development was being hampered by his parents' shortsighted insistence on being Canadian and not German or Swiss or Austrian. How could he read Einstein's notes in the original if he couldn't speak German? How could he trace the thought-patterns of his forbearers if he couldn't think like them? Rodney is hobbled by thinking one instead of ein, and he hates his father for a couple years because his father knew how important German was to a career in physics. His father knew. What a total asshole. Of course Jeannie starts taking German in grade nine because of Rodney's rantings (he realizes himself that perhaps he went a little overboard when he called his father a whoremonger, but Rodney was more right than wrong since Hubble was something of a whore) and Rodney thinks she does it just to fuck with him.
Rodney's German improves exponentially when he begins studying with Hans. Hans looks at him one afternoon and says "Also, Planck mit Nu…" he lifts an eyebrow and smiles "Sie sprechen Deutsch, ja?" and he goes right back to what he was explaining. Then Rodney is Sie, Meredith McKay, but he's Rodney, du not long afterwards.
Rodney becomes "mein Rodney, meine Hoffnung".
*
Rodney's father actually says, "Hans says you doing good work," at Thanksgiving the year Rodney's finishing his second PhD. It would sound like nothing to anyone else, but to Rodney, it's almost as good as hearing "the Nobel Prize for Physics goes to M. Rodney McKay for groundbreaking work reenvisioning the fundamental workings of the universe."
*
When Rodney first goes to work at Area 51, he signs five billion non-disclosure and I-owe-you-my-first-born forms. He sends Hans coded emails about his work. Hans invented the atomic bomb; Rodney hardly thinks the guy needs to be shielded from sensitive information when ham-handed jarheads know about it.
Hans laughs down the phone line and makes puns about the number fifty-one. "I think any marriage you'd have would be antimony instead of matrimony, Rodney."
"Good god, that's a bad joke." Rodney laughs all the same, because he can see Hans' delighted face. "I made it already, too--you wouldn't believe how few people know the atomic weight of antimony is fifty-one."
"No?" Hans wheezes a little. "Infidels and rubes!"
"It really ruins a punch line when you have to explain it." Rodney has a hierarchy of hatred starting with Leafs fans and progressing through people who hold up the line at Starbucks. Military types are situated right above proselytizing bicycle riders and right below Creationists.
"Too true. Aber, I was calling about Jeannie…"
This was before Jeannie threw her future away to play house. It was when he was still jealous of her instead of disappointed in her.
*
When Rodney's in Russia, he publishes three papers unrelated to his actual "job." He has a lot of time on his hands. The first paper calls into question one of Heisenberg's fundamental assumptions, the second proves one of Jeannie's margin doodles to be a massive breakthrough in particle mechanics, and the third is an essay in Science about the chaotic system of melting ice.
Hans sends him a hand-annotated copy of the third with illustrations including a large Icee he colors in with colored pencils. Rodney keeps the drawing in his wallet next to the lock of his mother's hair and Habs ticket stub.
now
When Rodney went to Antarctica, he had no idea it was a one-way trip. He said no good-byes. He only regrets that twice, when he truly believes for fifteen minutes or so that All Is Lost (he learns what some people would call the power of positive thinking because of this misadventure, but he considers that everyone in Atlantis continues living through crisis after crisis through the power of Rodney's ego, really, and his father said that would be his undoing! Ha! Double ha!) and when Zelenka shows him the obituary.
Rodney reads all the little facts that map out a Great Life in Science, Nobel Prize, Anti-Nuclear Weapons Proliferation treaties, important papers, and long shadow. It says nothing about how Hans' hair was clear, like a polar bear's, only appearing white, or that he ate limes as snacks ("Linus Pauling, he is a genius! You will see. Posterity, it will prove it."), or that he loved dogs in a pathological manner.
Rodney thinks of all the books he's read of all the great thinkers, important people who changed everything about how humans understand the workings of the universe. He reads Hans' obituary over and over, numbers and figures and N and E spinning together in another part of his brain. He realizes why the crystals in the third unit Jumper aren't working about the same time he recognizes the weight he feels on his skin is self-manufactured and not a malfunctioning of the internal atmosphere of the room he's in.
He's scared all the time here. Pegasus comes fully functional with new bonus vampire life-sucking aliens! And since he acted fast, Rodney also got the weight of an entire population to be responsible for--for free! He's used to terror and the feeling of futility. This feels different, though, maybe more like depression, inchoate, free-floating.
Rodney sighs.
"Hey," John says. Because of course Zelenka's on suicide watch, zero to nannying in less than five seconds.
Rodney swivels on his stool and he feels his face pinch up. "What?" His heart's not really in it, though.
"Thought you might want to catch some supper." John rocks on his heels with his hands in his pockets, even his hair looks hopeful and reassuring.
"I thought you learned your lesson from your abysmal previous fishing experience." Rodney sets Zelenka's datapad down, though, and stands, wiping his sweating palms on the thighs on his pants.
"Ha ha. You're a comic genius, McKay." John waits for Rodney to bustle around him and falls into step at his heels. "I thought we'd just stick to mystery meat today. I'm hoping for mystery cutlets!"
Rodney would give a kidney for a cheeseburger or a ham and pineapple pizza. He knows the cravings indicate ennui, but he feels he's due some indulgence.
"Do you know what element has the atomic weight of fifty-one?" He asks, looking over his shoulder towards Sheppard.
Sheppard doesn't even blink. "Antimony." He snaps his fingers. "I think Teyla said they brought some of those peppery crackers back from the Planet of the Disco Queens. You wanna hit her up? I thought they tasted like salt and pepper potato chips."
Rodney turns back around, aware that he's being handled but feels more pleased about that than annoyed, for once. "They tasted like cat butt."
"And here you just admitted to having licked a cat's butt. I mean, Rodney, I know everything's technically legal in Canada, but do you guys have to try everything by statute? There are limits."
Rodney laughs, his chin bumping against his chest as he ducks his head.
~they eat meatloaf and cat butt crackers!
oops. I fixed the massive typo in the last line. ahahahha
I hate myself.