Peg² (13/?)
Title: Square Peg, or, Peg² (Pegasus Squared) [A sequel to Full Circle, set in the Epic Crossover ‘Verse]
Chapter: 13 of ?
Author: neensz
Word Count: ~2,700 [29k+ total so far]
Fandom(s): Leverage, Psych, SG:A
Pairing(s): Eliot Spencer/Shawn Spencer, McShep preslash
Rating: PG-13
General Warnings: language, kid!fic, un-beta’d
Beta: None, so please point out errors (or, you know, volunteer).
Disclaimer: Psych and Leverage and SG:A and Harry Potter (as well as any other television show, movie or book in existence) do not belong to me, nor do any of the characters or places or quotes I'm borrowing for my nefarious slashing purposes. I make no profit from the aforesaid borrowing, or only in the currency of squeeing fangirly joy.
A/N: Ok, so. I re-wrote this chapter, so while the beginning looks the same, it goes in a wildly different direction fairly quickly. I took out all the HP because while making the crossover even more crossovery was like, awesome, I was losing track of what was going on--and since I'm supposed to be the one with the grand master plan, that wasn't working so well on the whole 'having a plot' part of the story. So! I'm leaving the HP chap up and making it an optional link from Ch. 12 (clearly labeled), so if you're in love with it you won't have to let it go. If not, well, don't worry, you don't have to read it. ANYWAY! I'm working on the fic again (mostly as a way to procrastinate on schoolwork, meaning I'll probably be getting a lot done on it in the next few weeks...) and have declared mid-December through mid-January to be my PERSONAL NaNoWriMo (so, like, NePeFiWriMo, which doesn't sound nearly as cool) and hope to get it done over winter break. We'll see. Enjoy!
Summary: Rodney wakes up and there is much astonishment.
One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten | Eleven | Twelve | ϟ | Thirteen
In Which Rodney Regains His Snark
--SHAWN--He tried not to let it get to him most of the time, but it was painfully obvious that Shawn was only on Atlantis as part and parcel of Eliot’s benefits package. Sure, he could make the sparkly things light up for the scientists (which incidentally also sometimes made them squeal like 10 year old girls--those days were always fun. Also, sometimes death-defying), but there was only so much of the day he could spend trapped in a lab playing light switch before he started feeling the urge to break stuff (on purpose, as opposed to normally). And honestly, being the resident lab light switch wasn’t a highly challenging job description--he held the things they gave him to hold, thought ‘On’ at said things, and then A) threw them away from himself in terror (the scientists had had a pretty steep learning curve in regards to standing him beside a containment chamber, after he discovered that first Ancient grenade--Lab 7 would never be the same again) or B) listened to what said things told him they did and then turned around told the eager, interchangeable scientists hovering nearby (though usually on the opposite side of Shawn as the containment chamber) what the sparkly Ancient artifact had told him. Ironically, his job highly resembled a few of the ‘séances’ he’d performed for Psych clients in the past, only this time, he wasn’t pretending to be psychic. The inanimate objects really were talking to him in his head. (Gus would love it--he was, after all, the one who’d pounded the definition of irony into Shawn’s head. Because, well, there was remembering information, and there was remembering correct information.)
Another duty Shawn had picked up over the bare month they’d been in the city was one he still wasn’t sure if he resented or not. Shawn spent the majority of the time he didn’t spend chained in the labs babysitting his nephew. Because Shawn was apparently Atlantis’s new manny.
He doubted that the immeasurable weight of the knowledge of the complete inconsequentialness of his entire existence on Atlantis would be as hard to bear if he actually saw Eliot for more than a few rushed minutes in the mornings (the occasional glimpses of him across the mess hall didn’t count) within the past month--this even with the fact Big Brother had officially roomed them together in a suite with only one bed.
Hell, they’d promised Shawn spaceships he could control with his mind to get him here, and they wouldn’t even let him fly them.
Shawn loved the puddlejumpers with a truly desperate passion, one which only another stealth-geek could ever truly understand. While they wouldn’t let him fly (and he was really starting to think it was long past time to play the sibling card and see how that worked with Big Brother in regards to that particular issue--surely a genetic love for flying would be believable, considering how much it obviously pained John to be denied the Jumpers until he was fully recovered from the rescue mission-two weeks and counting-though maybe reminding him that the fact he couldn’t fly at the moment was kinda sorta Shawn’s fault would be a step in the wrong direction), he still spent as much time as possible with them. He spent up to half of every day he’d been on Atlantis in the Jumper bay, communing with them and cajoling them for flight simulations, even if it was against their programming. (Jumper Two was the most rebellious of the lot, and let him pilot the simulated flights almost every time he asked, so she was his favorite.)
Shawn had never read the Warrior Angel comics or taken a side in the perennial Superman vs. Batman debate in grade school (or in the corridors of Atlantis--he’d blame the scientists, but really, the Marines were even worse, and Big Brother was their king) but late at night while Shawn was growing up, after Henry was finally really asleep and no longer faking, Shawn would sneak downstairs to watch reruns of classic Star Trek. The foundation of his love for the Jumpers probably stemmed from devouring Heinlen and Asimov and Card and all the space operas he could get his hands on, sequestered in a reading carrel at the public library while Gus covered for him with Henry. Shawn had even adored the low-budget, hokey, Air Force-sanctioned Wormhole X-Treme, even before he’d known it was plausible deniability in a box and had just thought it was a cheesy Star Trek remake.
So really, living in the lost city of Atlantis, a giant, flying, space-worthy city, just made it worse. He was here on sufferance, and all the best parts of her were just out of his reach, and felt like they always would be. If he wasn’t allowed to fly a Jumper for the daily taxi trip to the mainland, how was anyone ever going to think he could possibly be trusted with something interesting or exciting or worthwhile, like the Chair?
*oOo*
Shawn had a routine, though not one he was particularly fond of. He’d wake up about halfway every morning as soon as Eliot rolled out of bed (bright eyed and bushy tailed, goddamn him for falling for a morning person), and make an effort to try and keep his lover in bed long enough for a proper wake up, or at least a “Good morning.” For his efforts, he’d invariably end up with a quick kiss on the cheek and a fond noogie of his sleep-rumpled hair as Eliot dashed out the door, with morning sex as distant a possibility as finding a Starbucks on New Athos. Shawn would then try to fall back asleep, but by the time Eliot was out the door the bed was always too big and too cold to allow it. Once Shawn finally dragged himself out of bed and through a bleary shower, a quick bite grabbed at the mess hall meant he was, most days, already running late to the lab.
Jesse seemed to have a sixth sense for when Shawn was ready to commit cold-blooded murder, because the kid always managed to turn up at the lab right around when Shawn started thinking seriously about throwing one of the dangerous artifacts towards the hovering scientists rather than the containment chamber, their unceasing mantra of ‘Can’t you hold onto it a few more seconds before throwing the exploding thing away? We need to run some more tests’ as vile as the stench in the back corridors of a Wraith cruiser. Jesse sometimes wandered down to the lab by himself (with a watchful Marine or five ‘just happening’ to be wandering in the same direction) or one of John’s friends would drop him off when they were done ‘teaching’ him (Shawn had tagged along to a few of Jesse’s ‘classes’, and really, the kid was so much brighter than most of the people teaching him it was scary. The only time he really seemed to be learning something rather than teaching it was his stick-hitty lessons with Teyla. Apparently, in the Pegasus galaxy, it was appropriate to teach a rugrat how to take down a fully grown man holding a gun with a stick. Considering the Wraith, though, Shawn wasn’t too sure they were wrong.)
If Jesse arrived at the labs close enough to lunchtime, the two of them would hit the mess hall straight away. If not, they would hide in the Jumper bay until their stomachs began complaining too loudly to ignore. After lunch, Jesse and Shawn would always return to the Jumper bay, regardless of how much time they might have already spent there on that particular day. Jesse tended to spend his time crawling all over the ships (both inside and out, and not excluding the control panels or investigations of the crystal array trays, though Shawn was usually commanded to perform step-ladder duties in order for Jesse to reach the trays) looking for things he’d forgotten to include in the design schematic for his mini-puddlejumper, a project in which he told Shawn there was ‘always more room for ‘provements’, even if it was still back on Earth hidden in the SGC’s vault until he could convince someone to have it sent through the wormhole for him.
Shawn spent most of his time in the Jumper bay (time he wasn’t acting as a step-ladder, that is) dozing in Jumper Two’s pilot seat between flight simulations, at least until Atlantis would let him know with a mental nudge if Jesse needed him or if someone was looking for them. When people started looking for either of them, they always left the Jumper bay before anyone could notice them on the bio-signs sensors in the control room, because if someone discovered that this was where they spent the majority of their days, no one would ever leave them alone, so once Atlantis gave him the heads-up, Shawn and Jesse would play Hide From The Scientists until dinner. (Jesse was a completely willing participant in the game, since he was co-opted to use his magic gene to turn things on in the lab almost as often as Shawn was. Luckily, for Jesse at least, the kid could quote the child labor laws in exacting detail, as well as being able to freely invoke the wrath of the McKay, the combination of which managed to scare the scientists off often enough he rarely actually had to turn things on even after the scientists had managed to get him into the actual labs.) Dinner was when one or more of the lurking scientists would usually manage to corner Shawn and drag him back to the lab, and John (though sometimes Teyla or Kanaan, with Torren in tow) would collect Jesse, as the cold-hearted child abandoned Shawn to his dismal and fluorescently-lit lab-based fate.
Over the past two weeks, most, if not all of Shawn and Jesse’s Hide From The Scientists time was spent in the infirmary, visiting McKay. Surprisingly enough, even after the word had gotten out that that was where Shawn and Jesse could be found if someone was looking for them, the scientists wouldn’t dare to come and get them. Even in a coma, McKay inspired fear and abject worship in his minions, and was an invincible protection. Enough so that Shawn really started contemplating dragging the gurney to the mess hall with him for meals so the scientists couldn’t get their grubby little hands on him there--or just having dinner in the infirmary.
Shawn didn’t really see the point of the daily visits, considering McKay was in a coma, but Jesse insisted that ‘Uncle Kay’ would get lonely, otherwise, so Shawn just went along with it. Who was he to tell Jesse that coma patients didn’t respond to outside stimuli? Considering the kid’s IQ, Jesse probably knew more about it than Shawn did. He liked McKay, himself (thought he was funny as hell, in fact--at least when he was conscious), but was mildly surprised at how attached Jesse seemed to be. Then again, once again considering the kid’s IQ, McKay was probably the only person around who could still teach him things, so maybe the attachment wasn’t so surprising after all.
*oOo*
By now, Shawn knew what it felt like when Atlantis was talking to him. It wasn’t so much talking, per se, but he’d get an itchy feeling in the back of his brain, and he’d understand what she was trying to tell him. She didn’t speak in words so much as a subliminally fast montage of images he could only almost see, but that would manage to convey her meaning nonetheless.
However, this didn’t feel like that. The more time he’d spent with Jesse, the more he’d feel like he was only hearing half a conversation, and that through a thick door and some seriously soundproofed walls-kind of like when he used to try to listen in on something happening in one of the interrogation rooms at the SBPD from its observation room with the intercom turned off. It wasn’t until Shawn noticed that Jesse always reacted to those soft static bursts-if they were in the puddle jumpers, he’d pull up a new floor panel to trace some conduits, or flip down a hidden crystal tray-that Shawn realized he actually was almost-hearing half a conversation. The fact that it was near-constant when he was around Jesse was a little disturbing, considering how much effort it seemed to take on both Shawn and Atlantis’s parts when they tried to communicate with each other.
Why do you talk to Jesse so much? Shawn thought at Atlantis.
She answered (relatively) slowly, taking as much as a full second to either ponder his question or try to parse together an answer. A flash of medical textbooks (his mom’s, she must have found that one in his own mind), a montage of children’s books with their bright colors and large fonts and larger pictures, children’s drawings, an adult (Shawn, though he was stitched into someone else’s memory) at a study table in a university library with books piled all around him, a kid (Jesse) doodling a smiley face in the dirt with a stick, a bright, uncomplicated smile on his face. He doesn’t think in words, yet, was the essence of what Shawn thought Atlantis was trying to tell him.
Well, shit, Shawn thought to himself. Or thought he thought to himself.
“Don’t swear,” Jesse told him severely, or as severely as a five-year-old could when he’d probably just had a picture of a steaming pile of dog poop shoved into his brain, along with a giant question mark and probably a recap of Shawn and Atlantis’s conversation. Shawn made a face at the kid, and Jesse busted a gut, shrieking “Poop!” before he collapsed to the floor of the puddle jumper in a fit of giggles. Shawn couldn’t have stopped himself from joining in Jesse’s laughter, even if he’d wanted to. He had few enough things to laugh about these days, it seemed, to pass up this one.
--JOHN--When Rodney woke up from his coma, two weeks and one day after the explosion on the Wraith ship, John wasn’t there. His son and his half-brother were, though, and Atlantis transmitted Jesse’s gleeful shriek of “Uncle Kay!” straight from the audio pickups in the infirmary to the radio in John’s ear. Along with the somewhat deeper, and significantly more worrisome, “I can’t believe that worked,” and the familiar raspy tenor that stabbed him straight though the heart demanding, “What the hell took you idiots so long?”
Needless to say, John dropped what he was doing (luckily it was only a clipboard of packing slips from the last grocery run-he’d been taking his frustrations out on the inventory checklists) and raced for the infirmary. Arriving breathless and heaving, he braced himself in the doorway of Rodney’s isolation room, staring at the tableau that greeted him as almost all of the occupants of the room froze and looked at him guiltily. Well, two of them. Jesse and Shawn. Rodney was trying to fend off Carson, and Carson seemed to be attempting to draw some blood. Not that he really needed to, seeing how it was perfectly obvious what had happened, what with the wires coming from a control panel in the infirmary wall that had been jammed into Rodney’s wrist with all the care McKay usually had for punctuality. Oddly enough, however, Rodney, the hypochondriac, appeared to be completely fine with the whole thing, since he kept telling Carson to leave them in whenever Carson so much as twitched toward his wrist.
John caught his breath, and put it to good use. “Does someone want to tell me what the hell is going on here?” he boomed pointedly at his son and bastard brother, tacking on a heartfelt but careless sounding, “nice of you to finally wake up, Rodney. Enjoy your beauty rest?”
Luckily for Jesse and Shawn, Rodney responded to John’s rhetorical question with an acidic comment that back-burnered John’s ire at his kin. “Yes, I had a nice restful coma while the artificial intelligence of the Wraith cruiser tried to re-write my DNA with malice and a poorly engineered nanovirus, while talking the entire time. Let’s just say that its witty repartee left something to be desired.”
John could only stare, gape-mouthed, feeling like a big-mouthed bass.
Fourteen -->
Chapter: 13 of ?
Author: neensz
Word Count: ~2,700 [29k+ total so far]
Fandom(s): Leverage, Psych, SG:A
Pairing(s): Eliot Spencer/Shawn Spencer, McShep preslash
Rating: PG-13
General Warnings: language, kid!fic, un-beta’d
Beta: None, so please point out errors (or, you know, volunteer).
Disclaimer: Psych and Leverage and SG:A and Harry Potter (as well as any other television show, movie or book in existence) do not belong to me, nor do any of the characters or places or quotes I'm borrowing for my nefarious slashing purposes. I make no profit from the aforesaid borrowing, or only in the currency of squeeing fangirly joy.
A/N: Ok, so. I re-wrote this chapter, so while the beginning looks the same, it goes in a wildly different direction fairly quickly. I took out all the HP because while making the crossover even more crossovery was like, awesome, I was losing track of what was going on--and since I'm supposed to be the one with the grand master plan, that wasn't working so well on the whole 'having a plot' part of the story. So! I'm leaving the HP chap up and making it an optional link from Ch. 12 (clearly labeled), so if you're in love with it you won't have to let it go. If not, well, don't worry, you don't have to read it. ANYWAY! I'm working on the fic again (mostly as a way to procrastinate on schoolwork, meaning I'll probably be getting a lot done on it in the next few weeks...) and have declared mid-December through mid-January to be my PERSONAL NaNoWriMo (so, like, NePeFiWriMo, which doesn't sound nearly as cool) and hope to get it done over winter break. We'll see. Enjoy!
Summary: Rodney wakes up and there is much astonishment.
One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten | Eleven | Twelve | ϟ | Thirteen
In Which Rodney Regains His Snark
--SHAWN--He tried not to let it get to him most of the time, but it was painfully obvious that Shawn was only on Atlantis as part and parcel of Eliot’s benefits package. Sure, he could make the sparkly things light up for the scientists (which incidentally also sometimes made them squeal like 10 year old girls--those days were always fun. Also, sometimes death-defying), but there was only so much of the day he could spend trapped in a lab playing light switch before he started feeling the urge to break stuff (on purpose, as opposed to normally). And honestly, being the resident lab light switch wasn’t a highly challenging job description--he held the things they gave him to hold, thought ‘On’ at said things, and then A) threw them away from himself in terror (the scientists had had a pretty steep learning curve in regards to standing him beside a containment chamber, after he discovered that first Ancient grenade--Lab 7 would never be the same again) or B) listened to what said things told him they did and then turned around told the eager, interchangeable scientists hovering nearby (though usually on the opposite side of Shawn as the containment chamber) what the sparkly Ancient artifact had told him. Ironically, his job highly resembled a few of the ‘séances’ he’d performed for Psych clients in the past, only this time, he wasn’t pretending to be psychic. The inanimate objects really were talking to him in his head. (Gus would love it--he was, after all, the one who’d pounded the definition of irony into Shawn’s head. Because, well, there was remembering information, and there was remembering correct information.)
Another duty Shawn had picked up over the bare month they’d been in the city was one he still wasn’t sure if he resented or not. Shawn spent the majority of the time he didn’t spend chained in the labs babysitting his nephew. Because Shawn was apparently Atlantis’s new manny.
He doubted that the immeasurable weight of the knowledge of the complete inconsequentialness of his entire existence on Atlantis would be as hard to bear if he actually saw Eliot for more than a few rushed minutes in the mornings (the occasional glimpses of him across the mess hall didn’t count) within the past month--this even with the fact Big Brother had officially roomed them together in a suite with only one bed.
Hell, they’d promised Shawn spaceships he could control with his mind to get him here, and they wouldn’t even let him fly them.
Shawn loved the puddlejumpers with a truly desperate passion, one which only another stealth-geek could ever truly understand. While they wouldn’t let him fly (and he was really starting to think it was long past time to play the sibling card and see how that worked with Big Brother in regards to that particular issue--surely a genetic love for flying would be believable, considering how much it obviously pained John to be denied the Jumpers until he was fully recovered from the rescue mission-two weeks and counting-though maybe reminding him that the fact he couldn’t fly at the moment was kinda sorta Shawn’s fault would be a step in the wrong direction), he still spent as much time as possible with them. He spent up to half of every day he’d been on Atlantis in the Jumper bay, communing with them and cajoling them for flight simulations, even if it was against their programming. (Jumper Two was the most rebellious of the lot, and let him pilot the simulated flights almost every time he asked, so she was his favorite.)
Shawn had never read the Warrior Angel comics or taken a side in the perennial Superman vs. Batman debate in grade school (or in the corridors of Atlantis--he’d blame the scientists, but really, the Marines were even worse, and Big Brother was their king) but late at night while Shawn was growing up, after Henry was finally really asleep and no longer faking, Shawn would sneak downstairs to watch reruns of classic Star Trek. The foundation of his love for the Jumpers probably stemmed from devouring Heinlen and Asimov and Card and all the space operas he could get his hands on, sequestered in a reading carrel at the public library while Gus covered for him with Henry. Shawn had even adored the low-budget, hokey, Air Force-sanctioned Wormhole X-Treme, even before he’d known it was plausible deniability in a box and had just thought it was a cheesy Star Trek remake.
So really, living in the lost city of Atlantis, a giant, flying, space-worthy city, just made it worse. He was here on sufferance, and all the best parts of her were just out of his reach, and felt like they always would be. If he wasn’t allowed to fly a Jumper for the daily taxi trip to the mainland, how was anyone ever going to think he could possibly be trusted with something interesting or exciting or worthwhile, like the Chair?
*oOo*
Shawn had a routine, though not one he was particularly fond of. He’d wake up about halfway every morning as soon as Eliot rolled out of bed (bright eyed and bushy tailed, goddamn him for falling for a morning person), and make an effort to try and keep his lover in bed long enough for a proper wake up, or at least a “Good morning.” For his efforts, he’d invariably end up with a quick kiss on the cheek and a fond noogie of his sleep-rumpled hair as Eliot dashed out the door, with morning sex as distant a possibility as finding a Starbucks on New Athos. Shawn would then try to fall back asleep, but by the time Eliot was out the door the bed was always too big and too cold to allow it. Once Shawn finally dragged himself out of bed and through a bleary shower, a quick bite grabbed at the mess hall meant he was, most days, already running late to the lab.
Jesse seemed to have a sixth sense for when Shawn was ready to commit cold-blooded murder, because the kid always managed to turn up at the lab right around when Shawn started thinking seriously about throwing one of the dangerous artifacts towards the hovering scientists rather than the containment chamber, their unceasing mantra of ‘Can’t you hold onto it a few more seconds before throwing the exploding thing away? We need to run some more tests’ as vile as the stench in the back corridors of a Wraith cruiser. Jesse sometimes wandered down to the lab by himself (with a watchful Marine or five ‘just happening’ to be wandering in the same direction) or one of John’s friends would drop him off when they were done ‘teaching’ him (Shawn had tagged along to a few of Jesse’s ‘classes’, and really, the kid was so much brighter than most of the people teaching him it was scary. The only time he really seemed to be learning something rather than teaching it was his stick-hitty lessons with Teyla. Apparently, in the Pegasus galaxy, it was appropriate to teach a rugrat how to take down a fully grown man holding a gun with a stick. Considering the Wraith, though, Shawn wasn’t too sure they were wrong.)
If Jesse arrived at the labs close enough to lunchtime, the two of them would hit the mess hall straight away. If not, they would hide in the Jumper bay until their stomachs began complaining too loudly to ignore. After lunch, Jesse and Shawn would always return to the Jumper bay, regardless of how much time they might have already spent there on that particular day. Jesse tended to spend his time crawling all over the ships (both inside and out, and not excluding the control panels or investigations of the crystal array trays, though Shawn was usually commanded to perform step-ladder duties in order for Jesse to reach the trays) looking for things he’d forgotten to include in the design schematic for his mini-puddlejumper, a project in which he told Shawn there was ‘always more room for ‘provements’, even if it was still back on Earth hidden in the SGC’s vault until he could convince someone to have it sent through the wormhole for him.
Shawn spent most of his time in the Jumper bay (time he wasn’t acting as a step-ladder, that is) dozing in Jumper Two’s pilot seat between flight simulations, at least until Atlantis would let him know with a mental nudge if Jesse needed him or if someone was looking for them. When people started looking for either of them, they always left the Jumper bay before anyone could notice them on the bio-signs sensors in the control room, because if someone discovered that this was where they spent the majority of their days, no one would ever leave them alone, so once Atlantis gave him the heads-up, Shawn and Jesse would play Hide From The Scientists until dinner. (Jesse was a completely willing participant in the game, since he was co-opted to use his magic gene to turn things on in the lab almost as often as Shawn was. Luckily, for Jesse at least, the kid could quote the child labor laws in exacting detail, as well as being able to freely invoke the wrath of the McKay, the combination of which managed to scare the scientists off often enough he rarely actually had to turn things on even after the scientists had managed to get him into the actual labs.) Dinner was when one or more of the lurking scientists would usually manage to corner Shawn and drag him back to the lab, and John (though sometimes Teyla or Kanaan, with Torren in tow) would collect Jesse, as the cold-hearted child abandoned Shawn to his dismal and fluorescently-lit lab-based fate.
Over the past two weeks, most, if not all of Shawn and Jesse’s Hide From The Scientists time was spent in the infirmary, visiting McKay. Surprisingly enough, even after the word had gotten out that that was where Shawn and Jesse could be found if someone was looking for them, the scientists wouldn’t dare to come and get them. Even in a coma, McKay inspired fear and abject worship in his minions, and was an invincible protection. Enough so that Shawn really started contemplating dragging the gurney to the mess hall with him for meals so the scientists couldn’t get their grubby little hands on him there--or just having dinner in the infirmary.
Shawn didn’t really see the point of the daily visits, considering McKay was in a coma, but Jesse insisted that ‘Uncle Kay’ would get lonely, otherwise, so Shawn just went along with it. Who was he to tell Jesse that coma patients didn’t respond to outside stimuli? Considering the kid’s IQ, Jesse probably knew more about it than Shawn did. He liked McKay, himself (thought he was funny as hell, in fact--at least when he was conscious), but was mildly surprised at how attached Jesse seemed to be. Then again, once again considering the kid’s IQ, McKay was probably the only person around who could still teach him things, so maybe the attachment wasn’t so surprising after all.
*oOo*
By now, Shawn knew what it felt like when Atlantis was talking to him. It wasn’t so much talking, per se, but he’d get an itchy feeling in the back of his brain, and he’d understand what she was trying to tell him. She didn’t speak in words so much as a subliminally fast montage of images he could only almost see, but that would manage to convey her meaning nonetheless.
However, this didn’t feel like that. The more time he’d spent with Jesse, the more he’d feel like he was only hearing half a conversation, and that through a thick door and some seriously soundproofed walls-kind of like when he used to try to listen in on something happening in one of the interrogation rooms at the SBPD from its observation room with the intercom turned off. It wasn’t until Shawn noticed that Jesse always reacted to those soft static bursts-if they were in the puddle jumpers, he’d pull up a new floor panel to trace some conduits, or flip down a hidden crystal tray-that Shawn realized he actually was almost-hearing half a conversation. The fact that it was near-constant when he was around Jesse was a little disturbing, considering how much effort it seemed to take on both Shawn and Atlantis’s parts when they tried to communicate with each other.
Why do you talk to Jesse so much? Shawn thought at Atlantis.
She answered (relatively) slowly, taking as much as a full second to either ponder his question or try to parse together an answer. A flash of medical textbooks (his mom’s, she must have found that one in his own mind), a montage of children’s books with their bright colors and large fonts and larger pictures, children’s drawings, an adult (Shawn, though he was stitched into someone else’s memory) at a study table in a university library with books piled all around him, a kid (Jesse) doodling a smiley face in the dirt with a stick, a bright, uncomplicated smile on his face. He doesn’t think in words, yet, was the essence of what Shawn thought Atlantis was trying to tell him.
Well, shit, Shawn thought to himself. Or thought he thought to himself.
“Don’t swear,” Jesse told him severely, or as severely as a five-year-old could when he’d probably just had a picture of a steaming pile of dog poop shoved into his brain, along with a giant question mark and probably a recap of Shawn and Atlantis’s conversation. Shawn made a face at the kid, and Jesse busted a gut, shrieking “Poop!” before he collapsed to the floor of the puddle jumper in a fit of giggles. Shawn couldn’t have stopped himself from joining in Jesse’s laughter, even if he’d wanted to. He had few enough things to laugh about these days, it seemed, to pass up this one.
--JOHN--When Rodney woke up from his coma, two weeks and one day after the explosion on the Wraith ship, John wasn’t there. His son and his half-brother were, though, and Atlantis transmitted Jesse’s gleeful shriek of “Uncle Kay!” straight from the audio pickups in the infirmary to the radio in John’s ear. Along with the somewhat deeper, and significantly more worrisome, “I can’t believe that worked,” and the familiar raspy tenor that stabbed him straight though the heart demanding, “What the hell took you idiots so long?”
Needless to say, John dropped what he was doing (luckily it was only a clipboard of packing slips from the last grocery run-he’d been taking his frustrations out on the inventory checklists) and raced for the infirmary. Arriving breathless and heaving, he braced himself in the doorway of Rodney’s isolation room, staring at the tableau that greeted him as almost all of the occupants of the room froze and looked at him guiltily. Well, two of them. Jesse and Shawn. Rodney was trying to fend off Carson, and Carson seemed to be attempting to draw some blood. Not that he really needed to, seeing how it was perfectly obvious what had happened, what with the wires coming from a control panel in the infirmary wall that had been jammed into Rodney’s wrist with all the care McKay usually had for punctuality. Oddly enough, however, Rodney, the hypochondriac, appeared to be completely fine with the whole thing, since he kept telling Carson to leave them in whenever Carson so much as twitched toward his wrist.
John caught his breath, and put it to good use. “Does someone want to tell me what the hell is going on here?” he boomed pointedly at his son and bastard brother, tacking on a heartfelt but careless sounding, “nice of you to finally wake up, Rodney. Enjoy your beauty rest?”
Luckily for Jesse and Shawn, Rodney responded to John’s rhetorical question with an acidic comment that back-burnered John’s ire at his kin. “Yes, I had a nice restful coma while the artificial intelligence of the Wraith cruiser tried to re-write my DNA with malice and a poorly engineered nanovirus, while talking the entire time. Let’s just say that its witty repartee left something to be desired.”
John could only stare, gape-mouthed, feeling like a big-mouthed bass.
Fourteen -->