Thanks for the Memories by liketheriver (not dead yet challenge)
Title: Thanks for the Memories
Author: liketheriver
Category: gen, missing scene, angst
Word Count: ~2,900
Rating: T
Characters: Sheppard and McKay
Warnings: None.
Spoilers: since it's a missing scene for The Last Man, you can do the math.
A/N: It seems like The Last Man has inspired quite a few entries in this challenge lately... here's one more because, seriously, would it have killed John to say thanks? Thanks as always to Koschka for the beta.
Summary: Behind the cut since it is sort of spoilerish.
Summary: I never thanked him for finding a way to keep me alive, even after he was long dead. I never thanked him for talking to me while I fought my way through the sandstorm. I never thanked him for sharing his memories of all the pain he had experienced over the years so that we could avoid them this time around.
Thanks for the Memories
by liketheriver
Memories are funny things. Like when you’re in the middle of a fire fight and something triggers a memory of how your third grade teacher used to make these freaky little gurgling sounds as she walked through the room while you took a test and you find yourself fighting the snickers as much as the bad guys. Sometimes a good one can depress the hell out of you, like how a memory of sitting and laughing with your team over dinner can make that empty chair across from you feel all the more desolate. Sometimes the bad ones can consume a person until they will do anything to make them go away, even if it means giving up the good ones that went with the bad. And sometimes you get so consumed with the events in the here and now that you forget how your actions will make memories of their own and that those memories can have impacts, how they can change the fucking universe.
I guess I should have known I’d end up in the isolation room. I should have remembered that it is standard protocol to be poked and prodded when you run through the gate unexpectedly, especially when you’ve been unaccountably missing for a couple of weeks. But, honestly, I didn’t have time to think about how Atlantis would react to my return. Rodney’s hologram had been there when I came out of stasis, just like he’d promised, and, as soon as I could stay on two feet without immediately falling over, he was rushing me to the gate so I didn’t turn into a human marshmallow roasting in the heat of a Red Giant campfire. I’d staggered through the abandoned city eight hundred and fifty-three years after I’d first walked through the gate to find everything and everyone I had ever cared about had died forty-eight thousand years before. So maybe it’s understandable that I was kind of disoriented as McKay’s image coaxed me to move faster and it isn’t until I am sitting here looking up at the hologram’s creator that I realize I never even thanked him for what he did.
I never thanked him for finding a way to keep me alive, even after he was long dead. I never thanked him for talking to me while I fought my way through the sandstorm. I never thanked him for sharing his memories of all the pain he had experienced over the years so that we could avoid them this time around. They were the kind of memories anyone would want to keep buried away and he had programmed them all into the database he’d set up so I’d know what happened and could, hopefully, keep those memories from forming in the first place… or second place.
Christ, time travel gives me a headache.
McKay and Ronon are watching me from the deck above the room, right where I knew they would be. Watching my back is what my team does best, so of course they’re up on the observation deck… well half of them anyway. But with the data crystal Rodney had left for me, we are going to get the fourth member back and fix this fuck up that started way back when Carson first helped the Hoffans develop the Wraith virus.
It’s ironic to think that just a few days I was standing up there looking down into this very room on the very man who had unintentionally led us to where we are today. Wait, Carson wasn’t in this room a few days ago; it was a few weeks ago. Time has been moving fast and loose around me lately, shifting and slipping like the blowing sands that will eventually consume this city. But I’ve made it back in time to prevent Rodney’s future his hologram told me about, that is if they’ll ever let me out of here so we can go find Teyla, and it’s all because of that genius son of a bitch staring down at me right now.
Keller is inputting data into one of the portable monitors from the last scan her team ran on me. Hell, I can’t blame them… replicators, clones, mutants… with all the choices of what I could be, they’d be stupid to take my word that I’m who I say I am, especially since I just vanished without a trace nearly two weeks before. The physician finishes her work then turns in her hazmat suite to look up at the two men on the observation deck and give a small wave. Both men return the gesture then look suspiciously at each other.
I can’t help the small grin at the reaction. Rodney going off to live happily ever after with Keller is almost as improbable as Ronon blushing when she sits beside the big guy in the cafeteria. But both have happened, one in the past, one in the future, and given the change in circumstances my return has brought to the timeline, there’s no telling where these three will end up. For all I know, once we get Teyla and her baby back and things return to normal, Ronon might decide to bump up the flirting and settle down to have a whole litter of dred-headed, genius babies with the doctor. Without the loss of all their friends and everything they’ve worked for, Rodney and Jennifer may never move beyond that one beer they shared. And the thing is, McKay knew that might happen when he came up with this plan, knew that he’d be erasing the good along with the bad by sending me back and he did it anyway.
Carter has joined my teammates now and Rodney is arguing with her, pointing at me, and my CO finally gives in to McKay’s demands with a relenting nod of her head. Rodney disappears, leaving me to wonder what he has planned, although I have a pretty good idea. When Carson was in here before, McKay climbed the walls until he was able to get in and see him. Then, it had been almost two days before they let Rodney into the isolation room, but things had been a little different. Beckett had died. We’d seen it, seen what was left of his body, and that sort of thing stays with you. It also made it very hard to believe he could still be alive when he showed up almost two years later. I, on the other hand, had just disappeared… no bloodied corpse to burn its image into everyone’s memory forever and still not long enough for them give up hope for my return completely. I knew that sort of lack of proof can be even harder to accept, because, just like the future Rodney, I’d attended more than one funeral where the casket was empty. But it makes the miraculous return a little easier to accept and Keller is only running the tests once instead of multiple times like she did with Carson.
I’m right; a few minutes later the medical team doffs their hazmat gear, although they aren’t quite ready to release me just yet. That just means the minutes are ticking on Teyla’s life. The longer I’m here instead of on the planet where they’ll find her in a few weeks, the less chance we have of rescuing her. Not only will that mean we’ll lose Teyla, but it might mean everything McKay had done will have been a waste. I won’t let that happen, I can’t, not after everything Rodney told me.
The genius in question walks into the isolation room with a food tray in his hand and my stomach grumbles at the sight of it. A sandwich, apple, and two pieces of cake served up on a sectioned piece of plastic, and it looks like a goddamn feast.
“I thought you might be hungry seeing as the last time I saw you was at breakfast twelve days ago and you never carry enough snacks in the field with you and I doubt there was much food in the city fifty-thousand years in the future.”
He shifts uncomfortably, trying not to stare at me and yet unable to look anywhere else. I feel the same way, seeing a face with little more than a splay of laugh lines around his eyes and frown lines around his mouth, so similar and yet so different from the wrinkled face that greeted me in the future.
Shaking my head and dropping my eyes, I take the tray. “Yeah, I’m starving. You can really work up an appetite over eight hundred years.”
McKay’s lips attempt to curl at my joke but it falls as flat as the single crease across his forehead. He’ll have more, so many more, and unless I get out of this room and find Teyla, I doubt the laughs will outnumber the frowns.
“I’ve been thinking about that, actually…how long you were in stasis. Given the slowdown in metabolic rate and the like, that would mean you aged almost four and a half years.”
I speak around a large bite of my sandwich. “I guess that means you owe me a few birthday presents, then.”
With a quirk of much less bushier eyebrows than he’ll have in twenty-five years, he admits, “I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way.”
Taking another bite, I shrug. “That’s just the glass-half-full kind of guy I am.”
He seems to want to ask me a question, then stops, and I don’t coax him on. I’ve been debriefed by Carter already, told her what Rodney told me, at least the abridged edition… everyone dies except McKay, who spends the next twenty-five years finding a way to send me back when I eventually show up again… and I’m sure he’s heard it, too. But I really don’t want to go into any of the details that Rodney told me, not so much because I might interfere with history like Colonel Carter has warned, but because I don’t want to think about them anymore.
McKay’s stories had been just that-stories. The sort of thing a friend of a friend went through and you sit there listening to it and think, ‘holy shit!’ but it doesn’t seem real. Even though I could see it written in the wrinkles on Rodney’s face and the haunted look in his eyes, it just didn’t fucking seem real.
Finally, Rodney works up his courage to say, “So, Sam told me what you told her… how I’d appeared in holographic form twenty-five years older and that I was pretty much the only one to survive.”
“Yeah,” I respond evasively. “That’s right.”
Seeing that I’m not going to volunteer any information, he nods, twiddles his fingers, then asks, “What happened to me… you know… after?”
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “You weren’t dead yet when you programmed the hologram, so I don’t know how things… ended for you.”
“Oh, well, I guess that would make it hard,” he concedes with a self-abashing wobble of his head. “I was just wondering if maybe there was something in the city’s database about me finally winning my Nobel or the Field’s Medal or something.”
“If there was, your hologram didn’t mention it.”
Again my answer is technically honest, but I’ve been thinking about just that question. Not necessarily, did Rodney win the accolades he feels he deserves, because, as much as he deserved them, you don’t hear about a lot of community college instructors winning Nobels. No, my questions ran more along the lines of, what did happen after he finished his work and solved the riddle for how to send me back.
What did he do once his life’s work was done? Did he reconcile with Jeannie, again? Did he publish his work and get his recognition? In his mid-sixties it’s not like he could go back to industry or even start teaching at the more prestigious universities. He’d lost or pushed away anyone who ever meant anything to him. He’d done it all on the off chance that the payoff would come millennia after he died. But even if he did truly believe it would work, would that be enough to hold him for the intervening years between accomplishment and death? Because Rodney had died; as much as I hated that thought, it was true. More than that, he had watched everyone else die and in the end he was the last man standing.
But how long would he have been able to stand alone?
And maybe that’s the real reason why I never told the holographic version of him thank you. If I had said it, that would have been admitting Rodney had made a sacrifice as noble and heroic as Carter or Ronon or Keller or any of the others who stood up to Michael. It would have been admitting that Rodney had died; chances are he’d died alone and in relative obscurity, and to me, that was just… unacceptable.
“Huh,” McKay considers in disappointment. “Well, you could have at least asked. Didn’t you ask my future self anything?”
“I asked him about who won the Super Bowl.” His dissatisfaction just grows at that news, so I tell him with a grin, “I should have asked him where he got that snazzy sweater he was wearing.”
“Sweater?” he grimaces.
I nod as I bite into the apple. “Very Mr. Rogers.”
“Christ, I turn into one of those old men?”
“Mmm,” I shrug noncommittally, wiping at a bit of apple juice that’s running down my chin. His disenchantment has his shoulders slumping slightly. “But it’s a whole new world out there now. Anything can happen, including you developing a fashion sense.”
He scowls and crosses his arms. “I guess making it to the sweater-wearing old man stage is an improvement over dying the same day we walked through the gate like I did in the other Elizabeth’s reality.”
“Ultimate failure wasn’t an option for you… this time around,” I allowed.
McKay snorts and rolls his eyes and it’s so familiar that it makes my throat constrict to realize that it’s so familiar that I take it for granted. But, in one reality, I never saw it again.
“Sheppard? Are you okay?”
Rodney’s worried question has me concluding that there’s an expression on my face I wish I could hide. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s possible because he is still alive, and so are all the others, and I feel a chill run through me at how close I’ve come to losing them all.
“Hey, I’m fine.” I wave my hand to dismiss his concern with a grin. “It’s just been a long several thousand years.”
“Right.” He looks around awkwardly and I’m almost thankful that he’s as uncomfortable with emotions as I am. “They still have some more tests to run, so I should get out of here and let them get back to work. Besides, I need to get ready to go once they release you.”
“Sure. Good idea.”
My agreement has McKay hitching his thumb toward the door. “So, I’ll see you once they spring you.” I nod and he tells me earnestly, “Welcome back, Sheppard. It’s really good to see you again.”
Now it’s McKay’s face showing the raw emotions and I can’t help but think the only reason I’m here in this time is because of him. If things go as planned, he will have saved the lives of thousands, not just here on Atlantis but throughout the entire Pegasus galaxy. For that he deserves every damn Nobel they can throw at him, but unfortunately that’s not something I can do much about. On a more personal level, he saved my life with his crazy scheme. With no food or water, the blistering heat and smothering sandstorms, I would have been dead in a matter of days in the future Atlantis. Instead, I’m sitting here alive with a tray of food on my lap, and there is something I can do about that.
“McKay…”
When he turns to go, I reach out and grab his arm. His hologram couldn’t touch me, couldn’t help me sit up, couldn’t be there to lean on as I made my way staggering to the stasis chamber, couldn’t shake my hand goodbye. But this Rodney, the real Rodney, my Rodney, is solid and stable, like every anchor should be. When he looks at my hand on his sleeve, I squeeze and say what I should have said a thousand times in the past… and definitely should have said several thousand years in the future.
“Thanks.”
For a split second his eyes travel to my lunch tray, as if he can’t understand why I’d be so adamant about thanking him for bringing me a meal. But then his eyes drift to mine, past the dust and sand still coating my clothes and skin, and he sees what I’m really thanking him for.
A small, genuine smile has the creasing around his eyes deepening momentarily, and he quickly places his hand over mine with a minute squeeze of his own before letting go. “Any time, Sheppard.”
There aren’t many men who can say that and mean it, but Rodney can. Whether it’s an hour from now when we head out the gate or forty-eight thousand years in the future, McKay will be there for me, with me, making new memories, better memories, together. And if that’s not worth being thankful for, then I don’t know what the hell is.
The End
Author: liketheriver
Category: gen, missing scene, angst
Word Count: ~2,900
Rating: T
Characters: Sheppard and McKay
Warnings: None.
Spoilers: since it's a missing scene for The Last Man, you can do the math.
A/N: It seems like The Last Man has inspired quite a few entries in this challenge lately... here's one more because, seriously, would it have killed John to say thanks? Thanks as always to Koschka for the beta.
Summary: Behind the cut since it is sort of spoilerish.
Summary: I never thanked him for finding a way to keep me alive, even after he was long dead. I never thanked him for talking to me while I fought my way through the sandstorm. I never thanked him for sharing his memories of all the pain he had experienced over the years so that we could avoid them this time around.
Thanks for the Memories
by liketheriver
Memories are funny things. Like when you’re in the middle of a fire fight and something triggers a memory of how your third grade teacher used to make these freaky little gurgling sounds as she walked through the room while you took a test and you find yourself fighting the snickers as much as the bad guys. Sometimes a good one can depress the hell out of you, like how a memory of sitting and laughing with your team over dinner can make that empty chair across from you feel all the more desolate. Sometimes the bad ones can consume a person until they will do anything to make them go away, even if it means giving up the good ones that went with the bad. And sometimes you get so consumed with the events in the here and now that you forget how your actions will make memories of their own and that those memories can have impacts, how they can change the fucking universe.
I guess I should have known I’d end up in the isolation room. I should have remembered that it is standard protocol to be poked and prodded when you run through the gate unexpectedly, especially when you’ve been unaccountably missing for a couple of weeks. But, honestly, I didn’t have time to think about how Atlantis would react to my return. Rodney’s hologram had been there when I came out of stasis, just like he’d promised, and, as soon as I could stay on two feet without immediately falling over, he was rushing me to the gate so I didn’t turn into a human marshmallow roasting in the heat of a Red Giant campfire. I’d staggered through the abandoned city eight hundred and fifty-three years after I’d first walked through the gate to find everything and everyone I had ever cared about had died forty-eight thousand years before. So maybe it’s understandable that I was kind of disoriented as McKay’s image coaxed me to move faster and it isn’t until I am sitting here looking up at the hologram’s creator that I realize I never even thanked him for what he did.
I never thanked him for finding a way to keep me alive, even after he was long dead. I never thanked him for talking to me while I fought my way through the sandstorm. I never thanked him for sharing his memories of all the pain he had experienced over the years so that we could avoid them this time around. They were the kind of memories anyone would want to keep buried away and he had programmed them all into the database he’d set up so I’d know what happened and could, hopefully, keep those memories from forming in the first place… or second place.
Christ, time travel gives me a headache.
McKay and Ronon are watching me from the deck above the room, right where I knew they would be. Watching my back is what my team does best, so of course they’re up on the observation deck… well half of them anyway. But with the data crystal Rodney had left for me, we are going to get the fourth member back and fix this fuck up that started way back when Carson first helped the Hoffans develop the Wraith virus.
It’s ironic to think that just a few days I was standing up there looking down into this very room on the very man who had unintentionally led us to where we are today. Wait, Carson wasn’t in this room a few days ago; it was a few weeks ago. Time has been moving fast and loose around me lately, shifting and slipping like the blowing sands that will eventually consume this city. But I’ve made it back in time to prevent Rodney’s future his hologram told me about, that is if they’ll ever let me out of here so we can go find Teyla, and it’s all because of that genius son of a bitch staring down at me right now.
Keller is inputting data into one of the portable monitors from the last scan her team ran on me. Hell, I can’t blame them… replicators, clones, mutants… with all the choices of what I could be, they’d be stupid to take my word that I’m who I say I am, especially since I just vanished without a trace nearly two weeks before. The physician finishes her work then turns in her hazmat suite to look up at the two men on the observation deck and give a small wave. Both men return the gesture then look suspiciously at each other.
I can’t help the small grin at the reaction. Rodney going off to live happily ever after with Keller is almost as improbable as Ronon blushing when she sits beside the big guy in the cafeteria. But both have happened, one in the past, one in the future, and given the change in circumstances my return has brought to the timeline, there’s no telling where these three will end up. For all I know, once we get Teyla and her baby back and things return to normal, Ronon might decide to bump up the flirting and settle down to have a whole litter of dred-headed, genius babies with the doctor. Without the loss of all their friends and everything they’ve worked for, Rodney and Jennifer may never move beyond that one beer they shared. And the thing is, McKay knew that might happen when he came up with this plan, knew that he’d be erasing the good along with the bad by sending me back and he did it anyway.
Carter has joined my teammates now and Rodney is arguing with her, pointing at me, and my CO finally gives in to McKay’s demands with a relenting nod of her head. Rodney disappears, leaving me to wonder what he has planned, although I have a pretty good idea. When Carson was in here before, McKay climbed the walls until he was able to get in and see him. Then, it had been almost two days before they let Rodney into the isolation room, but things had been a little different. Beckett had died. We’d seen it, seen what was left of his body, and that sort of thing stays with you. It also made it very hard to believe he could still be alive when he showed up almost two years later. I, on the other hand, had just disappeared… no bloodied corpse to burn its image into everyone’s memory forever and still not long enough for them give up hope for my return completely. I knew that sort of lack of proof can be even harder to accept, because, just like the future Rodney, I’d attended more than one funeral where the casket was empty. But it makes the miraculous return a little easier to accept and Keller is only running the tests once instead of multiple times like she did with Carson.
I’m right; a few minutes later the medical team doffs their hazmat gear, although they aren’t quite ready to release me just yet. That just means the minutes are ticking on Teyla’s life. The longer I’m here instead of on the planet where they’ll find her in a few weeks, the less chance we have of rescuing her. Not only will that mean we’ll lose Teyla, but it might mean everything McKay had done will have been a waste. I won’t let that happen, I can’t, not after everything Rodney told me.
The genius in question walks into the isolation room with a food tray in his hand and my stomach grumbles at the sight of it. A sandwich, apple, and two pieces of cake served up on a sectioned piece of plastic, and it looks like a goddamn feast.
“I thought you might be hungry seeing as the last time I saw you was at breakfast twelve days ago and you never carry enough snacks in the field with you and I doubt there was much food in the city fifty-thousand years in the future.”
He shifts uncomfortably, trying not to stare at me and yet unable to look anywhere else. I feel the same way, seeing a face with little more than a splay of laugh lines around his eyes and frown lines around his mouth, so similar and yet so different from the wrinkled face that greeted me in the future.
Shaking my head and dropping my eyes, I take the tray. “Yeah, I’m starving. You can really work up an appetite over eight hundred years.”
McKay’s lips attempt to curl at my joke but it falls as flat as the single crease across his forehead. He’ll have more, so many more, and unless I get out of this room and find Teyla, I doubt the laughs will outnumber the frowns.
“I’ve been thinking about that, actually…how long you were in stasis. Given the slowdown in metabolic rate and the like, that would mean you aged almost four and a half years.”
I speak around a large bite of my sandwich. “I guess that means you owe me a few birthday presents, then.”
With a quirk of much less bushier eyebrows than he’ll have in twenty-five years, he admits, “I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way.”
Taking another bite, I shrug. “That’s just the glass-half-full kind of guy I am.”
He seems to want to ask me a question, then stops, and I don’t coax him on. I’ve been debriefed by Carter already, told her what Rodney told me, at least the abridged edition… everyone dies except McKay, who spends the next twenty-five years finding a way to send me back when I eventually show up again… and I’m sure he’s heard it, too. But I really don’t want to go into any of the details that Rodney told me, not so much because I might interfere with history like Colonel Carter has warned, but because I don’t want to think about them anymore.
McKay’s stories had been just that-stories. The sort of thing a friend of a friend went through and you sit there listening to it and think, ‘holy shit!’ but it doesn’t seem real. Even though I could see it written in the wrinkles on Rodney’s face and the haunted look in his eyes, it just didn’t fucking seem real.
Finally, Rodney works up his courage to say, “So, Sam told me what you told her… how I’d appeared in holographic form twenty-five years older and that I was pretty much the only one to survive.”
“Yeah,” I respond evasively. “That’s right.”
Seeing that I’m not going to volunteer any information, he nods, twiddles his fingers, then asks, “What happened to me… you know… after?”
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “You weren’t dead yet when you programmed the hologram, so I don’t know how things… ended for you.”
“Oh, well, I guess that would make it hard,” he concedes with a self-abashing wobble of his head. “I was just wondering if maybe there was something in the city’s database about me finally winning my Nobel or the Field’s Medal or something.”
“If there was, your hologram didn’t mention it.”
Again my answer is technically honest, but I’ve been thinking about just that question. Not necessarily, did Rodney win the accolades he feels he deserves, because, as much as he deserved them, you don’t hear about a lot of community college instructors winning Nobels. No, my questions ran more along the lines of, what did happen after he finished his work and solved the riddle for how to send me back.
What did he do once his life’s work was done? Did he reconcile with Jeannie, again? Did he publish his work and get his recognition? In his mid-sixties it’s not like he could go back to industry or even start teaching at the more prestigious universities. He’d lost or pushed away anyone who ever meant anything to him. He’d done it all on the off chance that the payoff would come millennia after he died. But even if he did truly believe it would work, would that be enough to hold him for the intervening years between accomplishment and death? Because Rodney had died; as much as I hated that thought, it was true. More than that, he had watched everyone else die and in the end he was the last man standing.
But how long would he have been able to stand alone?
And maybe that’s the real reason why I never told the holographic version of him thank you. If I had said it, that would have been admitting Rodney had made a sacrifice as noble and heroic as Carter or Ronon or Keller or any of the others who stood up to Michael. It would have been admitting that Rodney had died; chances are he’d died alone and in relative obscurity, and to me, that was just… unacceptable.
“Huh,” McKay considers in disappointment. “Well, you could have at least asked. Didn’t you ask my future self anything?”
“I asked him about who won the Super Bowl.” His dissatisfaction just grows at that news, so I tell him with a grin, “I should have asked him where he got that snazzy sweater he was wearing.”
“Sweater?” he grimaces.
I nod as I bite into the apple. “Very Mr. Rogers.”
“Christ, I turn into one of those old men?”
“Mmm,” I shrug noncommittally, wiping at a bit of apple juice that’s running down my chin. His disenchantment has his shoulders slumping slightly. “But it’s a whole new world out there now. Anything can happen, including you developing a fashion sense.”
He scowls and crosses his arms. “I guess making it to the sweater-wearing old man stage is an improvement over dying the same day we walked through the gate like I did in the other Elizabeth’s reality.”
“Ultimate failure wasn’t an option for you… this time around,” I allowed.
McKay snorts and rolls his eyes and it’s so familiar that it makes my throat constrict to realize that it’s so familiar that I take it for granted. But, in one reality, I never saw it again.
“Sheppard? Are you okay?”
Rodney’s worried question has me concluding that there’s an expression on my face I wish I could hide. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s possible because he is still alive, and so are all the others, and I feel a chill run through me at how close I’ve come to losing them all.
“Hey, I’m fine.” I wave my hand to dismiss his concern with a grin. “It’s just been a long several thousand years.”
“Right.” He looks around awkwardly and I’m almost thankful that he’s as uncomfortable with emotions as I am. “They still have some more tests to run, so I should get out of here and let them get back to work. Besides, I need to get ready to go once they release you.”
“Sure. Good idea.”
My agreement has McKay hitching his thumb toward the door. “So, I’ll see you once they spring you.” I nod and he tells me earnestly, “Welcome back, Sheppard. It’s really good to see you again.”
Now it’s McKay’s face showing the raw emotions and I can’t help but think the only reason I’m here in this time is because of him. If things go as planned, he will have saved the lives of thousands, not just here on Atlantis but throughout the entire Pegasus galaxy. For that he deserves every damn Nobel they can throw at him, but unfortunately that’s not something I can do much about. On a more personal level, he saved my life with his crazy scheme. With no food or water, the blistering heat and smothering sandstorms, I would have been dead in a matter of days in the future Atlantis. Instead, I’m sitting here alive with a tray of food on my lap, and there is something I can do about that.
“McKay…”
When he turns to go, I reach out and grab his arm. His hologram couldn’t touch me, couldn’t help me sit up, couldn’t be there to lean on as I made my way staggering to the stasis chamber, couldn’t shake my hand goodbye. But this Rodney, the real Rodney, my Rodney, is solid and stable, like every anchor should be. When he looks at my hand on his sleeve, I squeeze and say what I should have said a thousand times in the past… and definitely should have said several thousand years in the future.
“Thanks.”
For a split second his eyes travel to my lunch tray, as if he can’t understand why I’d be so adamant about thanking him for bringing me a meal. But then his eyes drift to mine, past the dust and sand still coating my clothes and skin, and he sees what I’m really thanking him for.
A small, genuine smile has the creasing around his eyes deepening momentarily, and he quickly places his hand over mine with a minute squeeze of his own before letting go. “Any time, Sheppard.”
There aren’t many men who can say that and mean it, but Rodney can. Whether it’s an hour from now when we head out the gate or forty-eight thousand years in the future, McKay will be there for me, with me, making new memories, better memories, together. And if that’s not worth being thankful for, then I don’t know what the hell is.
The End