After You've Gone, Part V
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
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PART 5
1945
September 10th, 1945
Forsyth, Michigan wasn't much of a place to live in.
It had grown around its railroad station, branching out from it for about 400 meters and not much farther. It had two blocks worth of downtown. The rest was residential.
It had freaked out Rodney a bit, when he had first arrived to Forsyth, the silence of the town. It had been late at night and the silence had been expected, of course. In a town where people worked during the week and barbequed and mowed the lawn during the weekend, it was normal that they'd spend their nights in bed, their city at a seeming stand still.
It still unnerved Rodney. Before arriving to Forsyth there had been his brief stint at his parent's house where his mother never stopped talking. Before that had been the London hospital, and the hospital had been home for more than a year. Before the hospital, Fairfield. In all of these places people had spoken, whined, yelled or screamed. Rodney had forgotten entirely about the silence of a small town in America.
And it was a quiet town during the day, too. Most of the people in town worked at the nearby Powers Plant, just 5 miles north of Forsyth. The plant manufactured planes by the hundreds per month; unemployment was unheard of.
This was the main reason Jeannie and Caleb had chosen the city - they'd moved here in the 30s, when people were still unemployed by the thousand.
It was not lost on him the fact that Powers manufactured B-24s, the same plane John had been flying when he went down.
Everywhere he went, there was John.
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6:34 pm
Madison had taken the habit of walking backwards lately. At five years old this seemed like something incredibly brave and daring to do, not to mention it was rebellion at its finest: Jeannie was always afraid she might trip and fall and crack her skull open.
Alright, Jeannie was afraid she'd hurt herself. Rodney was the one with the paranoid and rather colorful version of Madison's impeding doom.
Rodney stood on his front yard, watching Madison walk backwards towards her home and wave at him while at the same time watching out for her house's front door. As soon as she spotted it, she climbed up the steps to her porch and opened her front door, yelling for her mom.
Rodney could hear the scream three houses away from hers.
She waited till Jeannie came outside to wave at him that everything was alright and finally he could go back inside - Madison was a handful at her best behavior. Pretty, and intelligent like him, but still a handful.
He started picking up the toys Madison had left behind, trying to quiet the monologue and rant that usually emerged when Jeannie arrived from work and Madison went back home.
It wasn't that he wanted Jeannie out working all day, or that he wanted her in her home at every moment either (Madison was cute, but anyone spending the entire day with her was bound to go crazy sooner or later). Rodney just wanted her out of the goddamn plant.
Jeannie was smart. She was intelligent. She could easily get a job at any university in the area; she could go into research, Jeannie -
Jeannie wanted to make planes. Rodney had said this once to her. He had told her he still had contacts at many universities. He could get her a good job. Jeannie had answered this:
"Mer, I've had this job practically ever since Caleb went to war. I struggled through it while alone with a one-year-old, and the fact that you are here now does not mean that I'm going to quit everything I've worked for, it does not mean I'm going to give up the feeling that by helping make better planes, I feel like I'm helping Caleb a little bit."
Rodney had tried not to scoff. Scoffing while Jeannie was worked up about Caleb was not a good thing to do. "You don't know where Caleb's been sent."
"That doesn't matter. Anyway, you work there too - why don't you quit and get a job at the university?"
Rodney had ended the conversation there. He'd shared little about his time in England beyond the extent of his injuries and what he’d told her on the letters, and he was not going to start now - it was futile anyway. Luckily, Jeannie had never asked about John.
Rodney looked at the pile of toys he had in his arms, threw them over an armchair and went outside again, heading for downtown. The post office should've gotten his package by now, if nobody had managed to screw it up.
That is, considering Zelenka had sent it.
He stuck his hands in his pockets, head down and frown in place so people wouldn't stop him to chat - not that many wanted to be nice to him, but Jeannie was well known in town, and if anyone was nice to Jeannie then by extent they'd have to be to her brother too.
He managed to get to the post office without crossing paths with anyone, which was not a strange thing at this hour - most workers at the Powers Plant were still an hour away from their day coming to an end.
When Rodney moved to town, when Jeannie had known for sure her brother was going to stay there, she had grabbed him, sat him down in her living room, and worked up a schedule. She left work at 6, Rodney at 4.30, Madison left school at 4.30. So far she had managed with her neighbors, but they still charged. And money wasn’t in abundance those days.
By the time the day ended, Rodney had already been officially assigned nanny duties from 4.30 till 6.30, and Rodney had begun questioning the logic of coming to work in a plant that was so near Jeannie's place.
Rodney left the post office and started walking back to his house, knowing better than to open the packet downtown because he was sure he’d run into some curious busy-body who would want to see what he was reading.
He passed by a toy store and stopped in front of the window. There was a toy chest there, made of light brown wood and decorated with some flowers. Madison was leaving an increasing amount of toys over at his house, and he knew better than to return them - she’d only bring them back again.
He went into the toy store, bought the toy chest before he could think better of it and happily checked that it was light enough for him to carry it all the way back home.
He opened the post packet, getting one of the books out - what do you know, Zelenka could send a package in time - and flinging the rest inside the chest. He grabbed the chest and held it under his arm and started back towards his house, book open in front of him. He got so absorbed by it he almost missed the turn into his street.
He was almost run over by three kids riding their bikes, glancing nastily after them but saying nothing. He put the book back in the toy chest before any more vandals made an attempt at his dignity and turned into his front yard, stopping cold where he was standing.
"The address I had was Jeannie's. Your niece told me where you lived" said John.
He was sitting on the front steps of his porch, frowning a bit at him, squinting in the same rather confused way he had done the first time Rodney had attempted to explain how radar technology was supposed to work.
John stood up, living a satchel on the steps. Rodney placed the toy chest on the ground - dropping it would've been too dramatic, not to mention it would lose him a perfectly good gift for his niece. They seemed acts too mundane to do while Rodney was staring into the face of a dead man.
"Your bomber went down” he said, surprised his voice worked at all. “The odds of you surviving were -”
“Four men of my crew died. Lorne and Chuck among them. Ronon’s fine."
Rodney walked to where John was standing, stopping just before him and gently poking him in the gut. "You're the most real hallucination I've had since ‘43."
John smiled at this and Rodney's head swayed at that, grabbing one of John's arms for support. John grabbed him and hugged him, hand splayed over Rodney’s back, firm and real and not letting go.
Rodney was trying to asses the situation, he was trying to get into his head that this was John, and while John didn’t like to hug people he was hugging him. John had always liked hugging him. He tried to wrap his head around this but got lost in the feel of the rough cloth under his hands, the heat beneath it, and the slight tickle of John's breath hitting him somewhere on his shoulder. John was here, and okay, and safe and oh god, John hadn't died.
+++
September 10th 1945, 3:06 am
Rodney had known for years he talked a lot.
He talked more than other people normally did and that was valid in his case, because he had more things to say than the average twit with a 9-to-5 desk job. He was a genius, he directed a whole department and saved the day at the plant more times than he could count - he spent the day talking, and with reason.
And being so aware of his talking habits, Rodney was also aware of his silences.
He’d invited John to stay at his house for a few days - it was almost seven, John was probably hungry, and he wasn’t quite ready to see him leave again when he had just appeared on his doorstep after two years of being dead.
Did John have family beyond his dad? Friends he could be on his way to visit? Rodney’s brain wouldn’t provide him these details.
They ate. John talked very little about his time ‘dead’, not going into great lengths to describe his time at the POW camp or how he and Ronon escaped; Rodney filled in the blanks with his work at the Plant and not much else had been said. What do you say to a person you’ve mourned every day for the past two years?
By three in the morning, unable to fall asleep, the silence around him heightening every sound from the drip of the kitchen tap to John’s breathing in the next room, Rodney got up, closing the door to the hallway so the light wouldn’t wake John.
He turned on the kitchen light - still half expecting to see blacked out windows and to hear a voice barking at him to turn the light off.
But the windows were merely curtained with that silly corn-patterned thing Jeannie had put up and the house was silent. He inspected his fridge and his pantry, finding nothing he’d be willing to give up - rationing was still very well in place.
He settled on a piece of cake Jeannie had baked a few days ago, which was getting a bit hard on the edges but still as tasty as the first day.
Living near Jeannie and taking care of Madison every day certainly had its perks.
Rodney settled on the dinner table with the cake and one of the books Zelenka had sent him, getting lost on the little notes Radek had written on the side margins.
After about ten minutes of this, the door to the hallway opened and John entered, looking very much awake for that time of night.
“Can’t sleep either?” John said, entering the kitchen and spotting the leftover cake Rodney had left over the counter, grabbing a piece. Rodney pointed him to where the glasses were and he filled one with tap water.
Rodney shrugged and took a bite of what remained of his piece of cake. “The war’s over and dead people are coming back to life. Sleeping sounds overrated.”
John grinned. “I was never dead, Rodney.” Rodney felt his face harden, never lifting his eyes off the book, instead keeping them stubbornly fixed on the middle of the page. “Well, not really” added John sheepishly a bit later.
Rodney tried keeping the façade of reading for a few minutes longer, but the cake was finished and John kept looking at him in that way that Rodney could feel John’s eyes on him.
He closed his book, carefully wiped the crumbles off his fingers and stood up. “Rodney”
Rodney lifted a finger in that unmistakable ‘Shut up now’ manner of his and went over to a chest of drawers on a side of the room. He carefully got an envelope out of one of the drawers, getting a letter out of it and walked back to the table.
“You do know about your father, right?” he asked John.
John nodded. “General O’Neill came to see us - Ronon and me - after we escaped from the POW camp. He told me he had died shortly after we went down,” he said, looking for confirmation.
Rodney momentarily ignored the POW camp remark and nodded. “Yes, on August ‘43” he said and settled the letter on the table, in front of John.
“O’Neill gave it to me a couple of weeks after you disappeared. He had Washington make two copies of this” said Rodney, sitting back down. “Told them you had family over there.”
“Not by their definition” said John, reading the letter without even touching it. He looked up. “Why would O’Neill give one of these to you? You were there; you didn’t need a letter to know what had happened.”
Rodney involuntarily conjured the image of Radek, very early one morning, very calm and collected telling him John had gone down in Germany, and nobody knew what had happened to him. He could remember the early morning sun hitting Radek’s messy hair, glinting off his glasses and reflecting on Rodney’s pillow, and all Rodney could do was stare at that reflection.
Rodney whisked away the memory and others like it and crossed his arms. “So that I could be sure he’d tell me anything he learnt about you. O’Neill is not an idiot,” he said briskly.
John nodded. “Right. Rodney, look -”
“It’s been two years, John” said Rodney, effectively stopping him with the use of his first name. “I don’t even know how to react to you being alive, less of all… having you here” he finished, though it was obviously not what he had originally wanted to say.
John looked at the letter in front of him and then back up Rodney. “Are you… with someone?”
Rodney lifted his eyebrows and looked at the room around them. “Does it look like this house gets any other visitors apart from my sister and her five-year-old?”
John smiled widely. “Not really."
“There’s your answer” shrugged Rodney.
John cocked his head a bit. “Why aren’t you living with Jeannie?”
“Besides the fact that two McKays under the same roof would cancel each other out?” said Rodney, making both of them laugh. “Jeannie got her MIA letter for Caleb a year ago. She’s still hoping he’ll come back; she wants to hear nothing about anyone else besides Madison and herself living in that house. When she learns you were MIA it will only strengthen her silly hope.”
John frowned. “He could be in a POW camp, Rodney. The war might be over but many are still being liberated.”
Rodney sighed, grabbing the letter in front of John and standing up to put it back in the chest of drawers. “I did a little digging I wasn’t supposed to. Caleb was sent to the Pacific.” He closed the drawer and faced John again. “He’s not coming back.”
“Bad mission?” Rodney nodded. “Why don’t you tell her this?”
Rodney leaned against the chest of drawers. “Because she’s his wife and I’ve come to know my sister. Nothing besides… concrete evidence will convince her of his death.”
“She has to know she might never get it.”
Rodney nodded. “She does. She’s smart, she knows the possibilities.”
“What about you?” asked John.
Rodney frowned, pushing himself off the chest of drawers slowly. “I just told you he’s -”
John shook his head. “I mean about me. When did you start thinking I was dead?”
Rodney looked at John for a moment and then started towards the pantry again, grabbing what little was left of the cake and putting it back again.
“Rodney,” said John, standing up and going to him.
Rodney closed the pantry door. “I don’t know. I guess sometime after the bombing, or back when Radek and I went our respective ways after the hospital, I don’t know.”
John frowned. “What bombing? What hospital?”
Rodney sighed. “It’s a long story.”
John grinned slightly. “We’re not exactly busy now, Rodney.”
“Look, I have work tomorrow, very early I might add, and it’s already past three and this has been a very odd day” he said, already walking towards the hallway and to his room.
John had to give him that point. “Yeah”
“Let’s just leave the McKay Story Telling Time for another day,” he said as he reached his room.
John nodded. “Goodnight Rodney,” he said as he headed for the guest room, to which Rodney only replied with a wave in John’s general direction.
Rodney entered his bedroom, not bothering to close the door, turn on the light or even think at all. Halfway through his walking to bed he heard John’s feet tracing back the path, walking into Rodney’s room.
The room was dark and cool, the floor cold and John’s hands were so warm. John grabbed one of Rodney’s wrists and the back of his neck and was now kissing him like you’re supposed to kiss a person you haven’t seen in years. John was everywhere without needing to move his hands, kissing him on his lips and yet somehow managing to be all over Rodney. It was an end and a beginning, something bad and something good, it was everything and there was no word in the world for how close Rodney needed John.
They fell backwards to the bed without even bothering to stop kissing, Rodney falling on top of John, straddling him and smiling into the kiss. He felt John smile too and Rodney could not remember a better moment in his life than this.
They stopped kissing at some point, both realizing this only when morning came. They weren’t two people but one person, a tangle of limbs to separate and issues to go through that suddenly didn’t seem so ominous anymore.
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September 22nd, 1945 5:35 pm
It really didn’t take Madison long to begin calling him Uncle John.
By the end of John’s first week at Rodney’s house, it was well established he wouldn’t be leaving any time soon, probably never. It had Rodney silently giddy, to come home from the plant and have John there, either grumbling about not having a job or acting like a kid with Madison.
Soon enough, the question of what to do about Jeannie popped up. Hiding their relationship at Fairfield Base had been difficult enough, neither of them felt like doing it for the rest of their lives.
So Rodney summed up all the courage he had and said he’d have an earnest talk with his sister - in any case, hiding was a very silly thing to do with a nosy five-year-old popping into the house at all times.
On Saturday, John offered to take Madison to buy some ice cream, and Rodney insisted Jeannie stay. He sat her down on one of the armchairs, he himself sitting on the sofa, and started telling her the basics.
England, their jobs, their friendship, his birthday in 1942… He barely skimmed over John’s previous MIA status. It was probable that Jeannie hadn’t even heard that part with all the things that were probably going through her head.
“If you don’t agree with… us and want Madison to stop coming over, I’ll understand perfectly,” he said, one hand waving about wildly, the other gripping his pants into a fist. “I will appreciate if you don’t,” he added, “but will do nothing to prevent it.”
Jeannie stood up, pacing the room. Rodney knew better than to ask her anything right away, and managed to stay silent for a whole minute.
But then Jeannie started asking question after question in such a manner that Rodney stopped being polite and began being himself again. Jeannie asked about John, about how much he knew him, how they had met. Rodney answered with sarcasm, which Jeannie could handle perfectly. Then she asked why he showed up in his life only now.
Rodney told her.
Jeannie frowned at him, not with confusion but with sorrow. She sat down on the couch besides him, carefully not touching him so he wouldn’t startle.
She gave in, and her hand landed on his arm. “Mer, you - you though he had been dead? For two years?”
Rodney nodded, eyes fixed on a spot somewhere between the wall and the coffee table. “His plane went down in Germany, there was nothing anyone could do”
Rodney looked at her as Jeannie’s hand on his arm tightened. “All those times I said you had no idea how I felt about Caleb. About him in my life and now…” She sighed. “You did. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Why? It wouldn’t have brought him back, it wouldn’t have changed your many little opinions about me. Besides, it wasn’t exactly a fond memory to recall.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice clear and loud in the silent room.
Rodney cleared his throat and stood up. “Yes, well. That’s water under the bridge, as they say.”
Jeannie stood up after him, tugging lightly from his forearm. “Come on, let’s see what they’re up to,” she said.
“Jeannie?”
Jeannie rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “Mer. I’ve known the guy a week and I like him more than I like you. I’m not going to disinherit you or anything because you found someone crazy enough to be willing to spend time with you.”
“Yes, very funny,” he said as he headed for the door, smiling lightly. “Besides, for disinheritance to happen you’d have to have an actual inheritance.”
“Do you always have to focus on the unimportant details?” Jeannie smiled.
When they arrived at the ice cream parlor, they saw John had - somehow - managed to keep Madison from staining her dress. Jeannie walked to him, ignored his apprehensive face and kissed John on the cheek. She then kneeled down and asked Madison what Uncle John had bought her.
John smiled back at her. Rodney, for once, knew he didn’t need to say a word.
+++
EPILOGUE
September 25th, 1945 4:40 pm
Madison was a punctual little thing, John mused.
John had arrived from a job interview at exactly 4:39 pm, and not a minute later Madison was crossing the front door, dropping her books besides the door.
She left school at 4:30. Ten minutes walk between the school and her Uncle’s house. Freakishly punctual, in fact.
“We need a present for my mum!” she yelled from the front door. John emerged from the hallway, finishing buttoning up a white shirt. “Her birthday’s coming up, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “Yes. I want to give her a picture of us,” she said, and proceeded to dive into the ‘Mad-Box’ Rodney had settled for her in a corner of the living room; she started getting out sheets of paper and crayons.
She held a sheet of paper in front of her. “This paper isn’t big enough.”
John kneeled besides her and held the paper between them - it covered Madison’s head completely. He peeked from a corner. “It’s not?”
Madison giggled but soon returned to what John called her ‘Rodney face’ which simply meant she was a girl on a mission. “No.”
“Maybe…” He turned and set four sheets of paper over the coffee table, “…we can glue four of them together,” he said.
Madison’s eyes lighted up. “Yes!”
“That’s big enough, I assume?” he said amused.
Madison started counting with her fingers while she fished the glue from her Mad-Box. “Well, it needs the five of us and the street and my school…” she kept counting things to put in the drawing.
John did not miss the head count - five, well enough to include John and Caleb.
John left Madison to do the basic drawing, taking a pencil and drawing people, buildings and streets. They started coloring next, John always asking Madison which color she thought best would fit a certain part of the drawing.
Madison dedicated herself to coloring her portrait of her daddy. While she was coloring his hair, she said “My uncle thinks my daddy won’t be coming back.”
John frowned, troubled. Rodney could be blunt, but this was ridiculous. “He said this?”
“No,” said Madison, and John breathed relieved. Rodney had more tact than that. “But I know that’s what he thinks. Mom gets angry with him because she says my dad will be back. But we got the letter that said the army people didn’t know where he was. I think my uncle is right.”
“Well...” John winced, trying to find words that’d settle Madison and that wouldn’t make Jeannie and Rodney want to kill him. “It’s important for you to know that he may be right. But it’s also important for you to know that he may not be. Rodney isn’t always right. Madison, that letter doesn’t mean anything. My dad got a letter like the one they sent to your mom - the letter said the same thing about me. That I was missing.”
Madison stopped coloring the drawing and looked at John. “Really?”
John moved the drawing a bit and sat over the coffee table, Madison crawling over and coming to a stop besides him. John nodded. “I was working with Rodney when I went missing, that’s where we met.”
“In England,” she said, almost whispering. Evidently Madison had either seen the posters of ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships’ or Jeannie herself had said that she should never say where her uncle was working.
John nodded. “Rodney thought I was dead for two years before I showed up here.”
Madison frowned, her little face troubled with thoughts. “But the war is over. My daddy should be back by now” she said, and took a crayon. John kneeled besides her, took a crayon and kept coloring. Her pink ponytails fell over her face, her expression screwed up in concentration, her hand tight over the crayon.
“My uncle was sad when he came here,” she said after a while.
John’s interested piqued. “He was?”
Madison nodded. She dropped the brown crayon and picked up a yellow one, coloring her mum’s curly hair. “Yeah, even though he said he was fine. I think he was sad because you were dead,” she said, eyes not lifting from the drawing of her mum’s curls.
“Yeah, he might have been. Green?” he said, lifting a crayon and pointing at Rodney’s clothes. Madison shook her head and gave him one blue crayon and one black one. “How do you see him now?”
Madison’s little face screwed up in confusion again, dropping the crayon and sitting back on her bum between the coffee table and the couch. “He yells more. Mum says that means he’s okay.”
John laughed, sitting besides her on the floor and managing to fold his long legs in the small space. “She’s right. Rodney yelling and grumbling is a happy Rodney.”
As if on cue, the front door opened and then slammed shut. Rodney entered talking and grumbling to himself. He threw a stack of papers over an armchair, dropped a kiss on both John’s and Madison’s foreheads and went on into the hallway. “Why do I keep working with these idiots? Flyboys would make better engines than these supposed experts, these are idiots with a degree, a degree they probably got over mail, which would explain so many things about how they think an engine needs to be assembled, which -” his voice got lost inside the house.
John couldn’t help but grin. “See? He’s happy,” he said. Madison giggled and then took a pink crayon, coloring her mom’s dress.
John took a Madison-approved brown crayon and colored Rodney’s hair on the stick figure, then taking the pencil and drawing crazy eyes on it that made Madison laugh (which, in turn, made Madison grab the black crayon and draw wild hair over John’s head, which would probably have Rodney in stitches).
John wasn’t much of an artist - in fact, his drawing was terrible, and he always painted outside the lines - but Madison seemed to like it at Rodney’s and she took after Jeannie in how to properly scold someone.
Madison was probably going to make an artist out of him sooner or later. And John had all the time in the world to be so.
+++
Fin
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PART 5
1945
September 10th, 1945
Forsyth, Michigan wasn't much of a place to live in.
It had grown around its railroad station, branching out from it for about 400 meters and not much farther. It had two blocks worth of downtown. The rest was residential.
It had freaked out Rodney a bit, when he had first arrived to Forsyth, the silence of the town. It had been late at night and the silence had been expected, of course. In a town where people worked during the week and barbequed and mowed the lawn during the weekend, it was normal that they'd spend their nights in bed, their city at a seeming stand still.
It still unnerved Rodney. Before arriving to Forsyth there had been his brief stint at his parent's house where his mother never stopped talking. Before that had been the London hospital, and the hospital had been home for more than a year. Before the hospital, Fairfield. In all of these places people had spoken, whined, yelled or screamed. Rodney had forgotten entirely about the silence of a small town in America.
And it was a quiet town during the day, too. Most of the people in town worked at the nearby Powers Plant, just 5 miles north of Forsyth. The plant manufactured planes by the hundreds per month; unemployment was unheard of.
This was the main reason Jeannie and Caleb had chosen the city - they'd moved here in the 30s, when people were still unemployed by the thousand.
It was not lost on him the fact that Powers manufactured B-24s, the same plane John had been flying when he went down.
Everywhere he went, there was John.
+++
6:34 pm
Madison had taken the habit of walking backwards lately. At five years old this seemed like something incredibly brave and daring to do, not to mention it was rebellion at its finest: Jeannie was always afraid she might trip and fall and crack her skull open.
Alright, Jeannie was afraid she'd hurt herself. Rodney was the one with the paranoid and rather colorful version of Madison's impeding doom.
Rodney stood on his front yard, watching Madison walk backwards towards her home and wave at him while at the same time watching out for her house's front door. As soon as she spotted it, she climbed up the steps to her porch and opened her front door, yelling for her mom.
Rodney could hear the scream three houses away from hers.
She waited till Jeannie came outside to wave at him that everything was alright and finally he could go back inside - Madison was a handful at her best behavior. Pretty, and intelligent like him, but still a handful.
He started picking up the toys Madison had left behind, trying to quiet the monologue and rant that usually emerged when Jeannie arrived from work and Madison went back home.
It wasn't that he wanted Jeannie out working all day, or that he wanted her in her home at every moment either (Madison was cute, but anyone spending the entire day with her was bound to go crazy sooner or later). Rodney just wanted her out of the goddamn plant.
Jeannie was smart. She was intelligent. She could easily get a job at any university in the area; she could go into research, Jeannie -
Jeannie wanted to make planes. Rodney had said this once to her. He had told her he still had contacts at many universities. He could get her a good job. Jeannie had answered this:
"Mer, I've had this job practically ever since Caleb went to war. I struggled through it while alone with a one-year-old, and the fact that you are here now does not mean that I'm going to quit everything I've worked for, it does not mean I'm going to give up the feeling that by helping make better planes, I feel like I'm helping Caleb a little bit."
Rodney had tried not to scoff. Scoffing while Jeannie was worked up about Caleb was not a good thing to do. "You don't know where Caleb's been sent."
"That doesn't matter. Anyway, you work there too - why don't you quit and get a job at the university?"
Rodney had ended the conversation there. He'd shared little about his time in England beyond the extent of his injuries and what he’d told her on the letters, and he was not going to start now - it was futile anyway. Luckily, Jeannie had never asked about John.
Rodney looked at the pile of toys he had in his arms, threw them over an armchair and went outside again, heading for downtown. The post office should've gotten his package by now, if nobody had managed to screw it up.
That is, considering Zelenka had sent it.
He stuck his hands in his pockets, head down and frown in place so people wouldn't stop him to chat - not that many wanted to be nice to him, but Jeannie was well known in town, and if anyone was nice to Jeannie then by extent they'd have to be to her brother too.
He managed to get to the post office without crossing paths with anyone, which was not a strange thing at this hour - most workers at the Powers Plant were still an hour away from their day coming to an end.
When Rodney moved to town, when Jeannie had known for sure her brother was going to stay there, she had grabbed him, sat him down in her living room, and worked up a schedule. She left work at 6, Rodney at 4.30, Madison left school at 4.30. So far she had managed with her neighbors, but they still charged. And money wasn’t in abundance those days.
By the time the day ended, Rodney had already been officially assigned nanny duties from 4.30 till 6.30, and Rodney had begun questioning the logic of coming to work in a plant that was so near Jeannie's place.
Rodney left the post office and started walking back to his house, knowing better than to open the packet downtown because he was sure he’d run into some curious busy-body who would want to see what he was reading.
He passed by a toy store and stopped in front of the window. There was a toy chest there, made of light brown wood and decorated with some flowers. Madison was leaving an increasing amount of toys over at his house, and he knew better than to return them - she’d only bring them back again.
He went into the toy store, bought the toy chest before he could think better of it and happily checked that it was light enough for him to carry it all the way back home.
He opened the post packet, getting one of the books out - what do you know, Zelenka could send a package in time - and flinging the rest inside the chest. He grabbed the chest and held it under his arm and started back towards his house, book open in front of him. He got so absorbed by it he almost missed the turn into his street.
He was almost run over by three kids riding their bikes, glancing nastily after them but saying nothing. He put the book back in the toy chest before any more vandals made an attempt at his dignity and turned into his front yard, stopping cold where he was standing.
"The address I had was Jeannie's. Your niece told me where you lived" said John.
He was sitting on the front steps of his porch, frowning a bit at him, squinting in the same rather confused way he had done the first time Rodney had attempted to explain how radar technology was supposed to work.
John stood up, living a satchel on the steps. Rodney placed the toy chest on the ground - dropping it would've been too dramatic, not to mention it would lose him a perfectly good gift for his niece. They seemed acts too mundane to do while Rodney was staring into the face of a dead man.
"Your bomber went down” he said, surprised his voice worked at all. “The odds of you surviving were -”
“Four men of my crew died. Lorne and Chuck among them. Ronon’s fine."
Rodney walked to where John was standing, stopping just before him and gently poking him in the gut. "You're the most real hallucination I've had since ‘43."
John smiled at this and Rodney's head swayed at that, grabbing one of John's arms for support. John grabbed him and hugged him, hand splayed over Rodney’s back, firm and real and not letting go.
Rodney was trying to asses the situation, he was trying to get into his head that this was John, and while John didn’t like to hug people he was hugging him. John had always liked hugging him. He tried to wrap his head around this but got lost in the feel of the rough cloth under his hands, the heat beneath it, and the slight tickle of John's breath hitting him somewhere on his shoulder. John was here, and okay, and safe and oh god, John hadn't died.
+++
September 10th 1945, 3:06 am
Rodney had known for years he talked a lot.
He talked more than other people normally did and that was valid in his case, because he had more things to say than the average twit with a 9-to-5 desk job. He was a genius, he directed a whole department and saved the day at the plant more times than he could count - he spent the day talking, and with reason.
And being so aware of his talking habits, Rodney was also aware of his silences.
He’d invited John to stay at his house for a few days - it was almost seven, John was probably hungry, and he wasn’t quite ready to see him leave again when he had just appeared on his doorstep after two years of being dead.
Did John have family beyond his dad? Friends he could be on his way to visit? Rodney’s brain wouldn’t provide him these details.
They ate. John talked very little about his time ‘dead’, not going into great lengths to describe his time at the POW camp or how he and Ronon escaped; Rodney filled in the blanks with his work at the Plant and not much else had been said. What do you say to a person you’ve mourned every day for the past two years?
By three in the morning, unable to fall asleep, the silence around him heightening every sound from the drip of the kitchen tap to John’s breathing in the next room, Rodney got up, closing the door to the hallway so the light wouldn’t wake John.
He turned on the kitchen light - still half expecting to see blacked out windows and to hear a voice barking at him to turn the light off.
But the windows were merely curtained with that silly corn-patterned thing Jeannie had put up and the house was silent. He inspected his fridge and his pantry, finding nothing he’d be willing to give up - rationing was still very well in place.
He settled on a piece of cake Jeannie had baked a few days ago, which was getting a bit hard on the edges but still as tasty as the first day.
Living near Jeannie and taking care of Madison every day certainly had its perks.
Rodney settled on the dinner table with the cake and one of the books Zelenka had sent him, getting lost on the little notes Radek had written on the side margins.
After about ten minutes of this, the door to the hallway opened and John entered, looking very much awake for that time of night.
“Can’t sleep either?” John said, entering the kitchen and spotting the leftover cake Rodney had left over the counter, grabbing a piece. Rodney pointed him to where the glasses were and he filled one with tap water.
Rodney shrugged and took a bite of what remained of his piece of cake. “The war’s over and dead people are coming back to life. Sleeping sounds overrated.”
John grinned. “I was never dead, Rodney.” Rodney felt his face harden, never lifting his eyes off the book, instead keeping them stubbornly fixed on the middle of the page. “Well, not really” added John sheepishly a bit later.
Rodney tried keeping the façade of reading for a few minutes longer, but the cake was finished and John kept looking at him in that way that Rodney could feel John’s eyes on him.
He closed his book, carefully wiped the crumbles off his fingers and stood up. “Rodney”
Rodney lifted a finger in that unmistakable ‘Shut up now’ manner of his and went over to a chest of drawers on a side of the room. He carefully got an envelope out of one of the drawers, getting a letter out of it and walked back to the table.
“You do know about your father, right?” he asked John.
John nodded. “General O’Neill came to see us - Ronon and me - after we escaped from the POW camp. He told me he had died shortly after we went down,” he said, looking for confirmation.
Rodney momentarily ignored the POW camp remark and nodded. “Yes, on August ‘43” he said and settled the letter on the table, in front of John.
“O’Neill gave it to me a couple of weeks after you disappeared. He had Washington make two copies of this” said Rodney, sitting back down. “Told them you had family over there.”
“Not by their definition” said John, reading the letter without even touching it. He looked up. “Why would O’Neill give one of these to you? You were there; you didn’t need a letter to know what had happened.”
Rodney involuntarily conjured the image of Radek, very early one morning, very calm and collected telling him John had gone down in Germany, and nobody knew what had happened to him. He could remember the early morning sun hitting Radek’s messy hair, glinting off his glasses and reflecting on Rodney’s pillow, and all Rodney could do was stare at that reflection.
Rodney whisked away the memory and others like it and crossed his arms. “So that I could be sure he’d tell me anything he learnt about you. O’Neill is not an idiot,” he said briskly.
John nodded. “Right. Rodney, look -”
“It’s been two years, John” said Rodney, effectively stopping him with the use of his first name. “I don’t even know how to react to you being alive, less of all… having you here” he finished, though it was obviously not what he had originally wanted to say.
John looked at the letter in front of him and then back up Rodney. “Are you… with someone?”
Rodney lifted his eyebrows and looked at the room around them. “Does it look like this house gets any other visitors apart from my sister and her five-year-old?”
John smiled widely. “Not really."
“There’s your answer” shrugged Rodney.
John cocked his head a bit. “Why aren’t you living with Jeannie?”
“Besides the fact that two McKays under the same roof would cancel each other out?” said Rodney, making both of them laugh. “Jeannie got her MIA letter for Caleb a year ago. She’s still hoping he’ll come back; she wants to hear nothing about anyone else besides Madison and herself living in that house. When she learns you were MIA it will only strengthen her silly hope.”
John frowned. “He could be in a POW camp, Rodney. The war might be over but many are still being liberated.”
Rodney sighed, grabbing the letter in front of John and standing up to put it back in the chest of drawers. “I did a little digging I wasn’t supposed to. Caleb was sent to the Pacific.” He closed the drawer and faced John again. “He’s not coming back.”
“Bad mission?” Rodney nodded. “Why don’t you tell her this?”
Rodney leaned against the chest of drawers. “Because she’s his wife and I’ve come to know my sister. Nothing besides… concrete evidence will convince her of his death.”
“She has to know she might never get it.”
Rodney nodded. “She does. She’s smart, she knows the possibilities.”
“What about you?” asked John.
Rodney frowned, pushing himself off the chest of drawers slowly. “I just told you he’s -”
John shook his head. “I mean about me. When did you start thinking I was dead?”
Rodney looked at John for a moment and then started towards the pantry again, grabbing what little was left of the cake and putting it back again.
“Rodney,” said John, standing up and going to him.
Rodney closed the pantry door. “I don’t know. I guess sometime after the bombing, or back when Radek and I went our respective ways after the hospital, I don’t know.”
John frowned. “What bombing? What hospital?”
Rodney sighed. “It’s a long story.”
John grinned slightly. “We’re not exactly busy now, Rodney.”
“Look, I have work tomorrow, very early I might add, and it’s already past three and this has been a very odd day” he said, already walking towards the hallway and to his room.
John had to give him that point. “Yeah”
“Let’s just leave the McKay Story Telling Time for another day,” he said as he reached his room.
John nodded. “Goodnight Rodney,” he said as he headed for the guest room, to which Rodney only replied with a wave in John’s general direction.
Rodney entered his bedroom, not bothering to close the door, turn on the light or even think at all. Halfway through his walking to bed he heard John’s feet tracing back the path, walking into Rodney’s room.
The room was dark and cool, the floor cold and John’s hands were so warm. John grabbed one of Rodney’s wrists and the back of his neck and was now kissing him like you’re supposed to kiss a person you haven’t seen in years. John was everywhere without needing to move his hands, kissing him on his lips and yet somehow managing to be all over Rodney. It was an end and a beginning, something bad and something good, it was everything and there was no word in the world for how close Rodney needed John.
They fell backwards to the bed without even bothering to stop kissing, Rodney falling on top of John, straddling him and smiling into the kiss. He felt John smile too and Rodney could not remember a better moment in his life than this.
They stopped kissing at some point, both realizing this only when morning came. They weren’t two people but one person, a tangle of limbs to separate and issues to go through that suddenly didn’t seem so ominous anymore.
+++
September 22nd, 1945 5:35 pm
It really didn’t take Madison long to begin calling him Uncle John.
By the end of John’s first week at Rodney’s house, it was well established he wouldn’t be leaving any time soon, probably never. It had Rodney silently giddy, to come home from the plant and have John there, either grumbling about not having a job or acting like a kid with Madison.
Soon enough, the question of what to do about Jeannie popped up. Hiding their relationship at Fairfield Base had been difficult enough, neither of them felt like doing it for the rest of their lives.
So Rodney summed up all the courage he had and said he’d have an earnest talk with his sister - in any case, hiding was a very silly thing to do with a nosy five-year-old popping into the house at all times.
On Saturday, John offered to take Madison to buy some ice cream, and Rodney insisted Jeannie stay. He sat her down on one of the armchairs, he himself sitting on the sofa, and started telling her the basics.
England, their jobs, their friendship, his birthday in 1942… He barely skimmed over John’s previous MIA status. It was probable that Jeannie hadn’t even heard that part with all the things that were probably going through her head.
“If you don’t agree with… us and want Madison to stop coming over, I’ll understand perfectly,” he said, one hand waving about wildly, the other gripping his pants into a fist. “I will appreciate if you don’t,” he added, “but will do nothing to prevent it.”
Jeannie stood up, pacing the room. Rodney knew better than to ask her anything right away, and managed to stay silent for a whole minute.
But then Jeannie started asking question after question in such a manner that Rodney stopped being polite and began being himself again. Jeannie asked about John, about how much he knew him, how they had met. Rodney answered with sarcasm, which Jeannie could handle perfectly. Then she asked why he showed up in his life only now.
Rodney told her.
Jeannie frowned at him, not with confusion but with sorrow. She sat down on the couch besides him, carefully not touching him so he wouldn’t startle.
She gave in, and her hand landed on his arm. “Mer, you - you though he had been dead? For two years?”
Rodney nodded, eyes fixed on a spot somewhere between the wall and the coffee table. “His plane went down in Germany, there was nothing anyone could do”
Rodney looked at her as Jeannie’s hand on his arm tightened. “All those times I said you had no idea how I felt about Caleb. About him in my life and now…” She sighed. “You did. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Why? It wouldn’t have brought him back, it wouldn’t have changed your many little opinions about me. Besides, it wasn’t exactly a fond memory to recall.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice clear and loud in the silent room.
Rodney cleared his throat and stood up. “Yes, well. That’s water under the bridge, as they say.”
Jeannie stood up after him, tugging lightly from his forearm. “Come on, let’s see what they’re up to,” she said.
“Jeannie?”
Jeannie rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “Mer. I’ve known the guy a week and I like him more than I like you. I’m not going to disinherit you or anything because you found someone crazy enough to be willing to spend time with you.”
“Yes, very funny,” he said as he headed for the door, smiling lightly. “Besides, for disinheritance to happen you’d have to have an actual inheritance.”
“Do you always have to focus on the unimportant details?” Jeannie smiled.
When they arrived at the ice cream parlor, they saw John had - somehow - managed to keep Madison from staining her dress. Jeannie walked to him, ignored his apprehensive face and kissed John on the cheek. She then kneeled down and asked Madison what Uncle John had bought her.
John smiled back at her. Rodney, for once, knew he didn’t need to say a word.
+++
EPILOGUE
September 25th, 1945 4:40 pm
Madison was a punctual little thing, John mused.
John had arrived from a job interview at exactly 4:39 pm, and not a minute later Madison was crossing the front door, dropping her books besides the door.
She left school at 4:30. Ten minutes walk between the school and her Uncle’s house. Freakishly punctual, in fact.
“We need a present for my mum!” she yelled from the front door. John emerged from the hallway, finishing buttoning up a white shirt. “Her birthday’s coming up, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “Yes. I want to give her a picture of us,” she said, and proceeded to dive into the ‘Mad-Box’ Rodney had settled for her in a corner of the living room; she started getting out sheets of paper and crayons.
She held a sheet of paper in front of her. “This paper isn’t big enough.”
John kneeled besides her and held the paper between them - it covered Madison’s head completely. He peeked from a corner. “It’s not?”
Madison giggled but soon returned to what John called her ‘Rodney face’ which simply meant she was a girl on a mission. “No.”
“Maybe…” He turned and set four sheets of paper over the coffee table, “…we can glue four of them together,” he said.
Madison’s eyes lighted up. “Yes!”
“That’s big enough, I assume?” he said amused.
Madison started counting with her fingers while she fished the glue from her Mad-Box. “Well, it needs the five of us and the street and my school…” she kept counting things to put in the drawing.
John did not miss the head count - five, well enough to include John and Caleb.
John left Madison to do the basic drawing, taking a pencil and drawing people, buildings and streets. They started coloring next, John always asking Madison which color she thought best would fit a certain part of the drawing.
Madison dedicated herself to coloring her portrait of her daddy. While she was coloring his hair, she said “My uncle thinks my daddy won’t be coming back.”
John frowned, troubled. Rodney could be blunt, but this was ridiculous. “He said this?”
“No,” said Madison, and John breathed relieved. Rodney had more tact than that. “But I know that’s what he thinks. Mom gets angry with him because she says my dad will be back. But we got the letter that said the army people didn’t know where he was. I think my uncle is right.”
“Well...” John winced, trying to find words that’d settle Madison and that wouldn’t make Jeannie and Rodney want to kill him. “It’s important for you to know that he may be right. But it’s also important for you to know that he may not be. Rodney isn’t always right. Madison, that letter doesn’t mean anything. My dad got a letter like the one they sent to your mom - the letter said the same thing about me. That I was missing.”
Madison stopped coloring the drawing and looked at John. “Really?”
John moved the drawing a bit and sat over the coffee table, Madison crawling over and coming to a stop besides him. John nodded. “I was working with Rodney when I went missing, that’s where we met.”
“In England,” she said, almost whispering. Evidently Madison had either seen the posters of ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships’ or Jeannie herself had said that she should never say where her uncle was working.
John nodded. “Rodney thought I was dead for two years before I showed up here.”
Madison frowned, her little face troubled with thoughts. “But the war is over. My daddy should be back by now” she said, and took a crayon. John kneeled besides her, took a crayon and kept coloring. Her pink ponytails fell over her face, her expression screwed up in concentration, her hand tight over the crayon.
“My uncle was sad when he came here,” she said after a while.
John’s interested piqued. “He was?”
Madison nodded. She dropped the brown crayon and picked up a yellow one, coloring her mum’s curly hair. “Yeah, even though he said he was fine. I think he was sad because you were dead,” she said, eyes not lifting from the drawing of her mum’s curls.
“Yeah, he might have been. Green?” he said, lifting a crayon and pointing at Rodney’s clothes. Madison shook her head and gave him one blue crayon and one black one. “How do you see him now?”
Madison’s little face screwed up in confusion again, dropping the crayon and sitting back on her bum between the coffee table and the couch. “He yells more. Mum says that means he’s okay.”
John laughed, sitting besides her on the floor and managing to fold his long legs in the small space. “She’s right. Rodney yelling and grumbling is a happy Rodney.”
As if on cue, the front door opened and then slammed shut. Rodney entered talking and grumbling to himself. He threw a stack of papers over an armchair, dropped a kiss on both John’s and Madison’s foreheads and went on into the hallway. “Why do I keep working with these idiots? Flyboys would make better engines than these supposed experts, these are idiots with a degree, a degree they probably got over mail, which would explain so many things about how they think an engine needs to be assembled, which -” his voice got lost inside the house.
John couldn’t help but grin. “See? He’s happy,” he said. Madison giggled and then took a pink crayon, coloring her mom’s dress.
John took a Madison-approved brown crayon and colored Rodney’s hair on the stick figure, then taking the pencil and drawing crazy eyes on it that made Madison laugh (which, in turn, made Madison grab the black crayon and draw wild hair over John’s head, which would probably have Rodney in stitches).
John wasn’t much of an artist - in fact, his drawing was terrible, and he always painted outside the lines - but Madison seemed to like it at Rodney’s and she took after Jeannie in how to properly scold someone.
Madison was probably going to make an artist out of him sooner or later. And John had all the time in the world to be so.
+++
Fin