And now my memories turn pale by less_star (amnesty 2008, backstory challenge)
Title: And now my memories turn pale
Author: less_star
Characters: Rodney, McKays, honorary uncles, Torren
Word count: 1900, give or take
Rating: PG
Warning: OC death
Summary: You grow up and leave your family. That’s how it’s supposed to be.
A/N: I love, love, love stories where Rodney’s childhood is positively gothic, but my personal canon has shifted a bit and I now see the McKays as ordinary, rather sad people who tried their best. I also think the ancient gene is recessive, with a very random pattern of inheritance.
My profound apologies to anyone who knows anything about Euclid, or geometry. It made sense when I translated it at 4 am.
His throat hurts, and his forehead, too. He’s cold, and Mom left his bedroom door open again, and the hallway outside is dark. In the day he knows there are no monsters, but at night he’s not so sure.
Mom must think he’s asleep because she starts to move from his bed. He takes her hand.
“Stay.” It hurts to speak.
Mom sighs. “Mer, it’s late. I have to work tomorrow. Please try to sleep.” But she sits down on the edge of his bed again, shifts a little to get some light on the pages of her book. As she reads she strokes his hair. It feels good, but he can’t forget about the monster in the hallway.
“Read to me. From your book.”
“I can’t.” Mom glances towards the door. “We’ll wake Daddy.”
“You can be real quiet. Read the parts I know already. Please.” He tugs at her hand and when she smiles a little he knows she will read to him. Mom smiles with half her mouth and nudges him.
“Scoot over then. I’ll get cold sitting here.” She lies beside him and he’s not cold anymore.
The book is old. Mom got it for school a long time ago. She starts near the beginning, with stuff he’s heard many times before. She whispers but he’s close so he can still hear.
“A point is that which cannot be parted.”
Mom wears a flannel shirt. It’s soft under his cheek. The blue and red of its pattern starts to swirl and mix and then he closes his eyes.
“A line is a length without width.”
He forgets the darkness and the monster.
sSs
“Tell me a story.” Dad isn’t home today.
Mom yawns. She keeps her eyes closed but tells the story anyway.
“A long time ago, our family came from the sea...” He hears the story in the dark. He’s big now, not afraid of monsters anymore.
sSs
“Come on, Mer, there’s something I want to show you.” Mom is smiling. She was sad for a long time, before. She had to go see a special doctor many times and Dad was extra nice. But she looks happy now, searching in an old suitcase inside her closet. “Your grandpa first showed me when I was eight, so it’s time you saw it as well. It’s something magical, you’ll love it.” She’s found whatever she was looking for and motions for him to go into the living room. They tiptoe past the door to Jeannie's room. She's a good baby, but she'll be fussy if she doesn't get her nap.
It looks like a tiny, old box. It’s made of some sort of dark metal and there’s something written on the side, in strange letters that he can’t read. Mom smiles at him and pats the space beside her on the couch. He sits down, feeling weird and worried.
Mom holds the little box carefully in both hands and when she closes her eyes it starts to shine a faint blue and play a hesitant melody. A music box, then. He’s much too old for stuff like that, but it’s pretty neat that you can’t even see the button that starts it.
Mom smiles again and gives him the box and he looks at it carefully but he can’t see any buttons or a way to open the lid.
“No, no, you have to want to hear it play.” Mom takes it from him. “Like this.” And she closes her eyes and the box glows again and plays its sad little song. But when she gives it back to him it stays quiet.
“It’s probably broken. Inside. Old things do that.” Mom just looks at the music box in her lap and she doesn’t seem happy at all anymore. She stays like that until Dad comes home. They fight and there’s no dinner.
sSs
When he’s at college Mom keeps calling every week. It’s so embarrassing, everyone already thinks he’s a baby. And she always says the same things, how she’s so proud of him and it was the happiest time of her life and did he meet some professor or other that she remembers.
When she calls him Mer he snaps at her. It’s Rodney now, he doesn’t care if Meredith is a family name. You grow up and leave your family, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
Then one week she doesn’t call and he’s relieved. And still. Well. All the others have gone out, so if she had called no-one would have known about it.
sSs
The house is quiet, now. His dad started to pack up all of Mom’s things, like he was angry with her. Then he just seemed to run out of steam. Mom’s things are all over the living room and Dad just sits in the kitchen and looks bewildered, like he’s waiting for her to come back, so he can yell at her. Jeannie cries and says over and over again that it was so quick.
“It was leukemia,” Rodney says “of course it was quick.” He keeps picking things up and then he doesn’t know where to put them and it’s just such a mess, old books and clothes.
Jeannie has picked up the old music box and is running her fingers over the strange letters on the side. It must be Celtic, or something. He never could figure out how to open it, you’d need a tool to break inside and see the mechanism.
“Mom said it was magical. But it didn’t work for me.“ She turns the box over, slowly, and Rodney wonders if it’s made of silver, the metal looks so dark.
“I know, she told me too. Said it came from grandpa.” It’s just junk. All of it.
Rodney makes Jeannie go to their Dad in the kitchen and starts gathering stuff for the garbage collectors. He picks up the old copy of Euclid. The ink on the inside of the cover is faded, but he can still make out Meredith Trelawney, Northeastern U, 1966. He puts that on the table.
A picture of Mom and grandpa, smiling at each other, not at the camera. And one of Mom with him and Jeannie, when Jeannie was just a baby. She looks past the photographer, into the distance and doesn’t smile.
Mom’s old diary has pink covers. There are still blank pages near the end. He reads random entries, there’s nothing after he was born, she must have stopped writing soon after she quit college.
Susie and Karen were talking about some guys they like and I said that I think Dr Ingram is good-looking and they laughed and I pretended it was just a joke.
/.../
I waited and waited but they didn’t come and I thought I had the wrong day but then yesterday Susie called and said she had been busy. I said it didn’t matter, that I saw the movie alone. It’s just that she has a lot of friends.
/.../
He said I could trust him.
/.../
I was having coffee when Brian McKay came and sat at my table. He left the conservatory because there was some mistake about his scholarship and now he’s in accounting until he can get it sorted out.
/.../
I wish dad was still alive. He could have helped me with this whole mess.
People can live a whole life and love other people and like things and have memories and when they die none of that means anything anymore. To those outside, your life will just look sad.
He puts the diary and the pictures on Jeannie’s desk. For a moment he’s almost tempted to get the broken music box out of the trash, but there’s no point.
When he enters the kitchen Dad has his arm around Jeannie. Rodney makes sandwiches and Dad looks at the food like it’s something he’s heard of but never thought he’d actually see.
“Do, um, do you like school then, Mer?”
The kitchen is so small, he never noticed before, but now it makes his chest feel tight. “Yeah, sure.” Jeannie’s crying again and Dad looks old and tired. “I, uh, need to get back early.”
When Rodney goes back to college he takes the copy of Euclid with him. Many years later it follows him to Russia, Antarctica and then the Pegasus galaxy.
sSs
“A semi-circle is the figure enclosed by a diameter and the periphery...”
There’s a muffled snore from Sheppard and Rodney lifts his eyes from the book. Sheppard’s curled up on his side, one hand on Torren’s little chest. Torren’s face is turned towards Rodney, peaceful in sleep, lashes impossibly long against his chubby cheek.
He puts the book on his bedside table, reminds himself that the lower part of the spine needs another layer of tape. It’s almost falling apart. The little Ancient music box that Zelenka thought was a kitchen timer lies on the bed where Sheppard dropped it. It has sharp edges so Rodney puts that on the bedside table as well. Torren seemed to like it, even if it didn’t make him remotely sleepy. He’ll rig it so Teyla can activate it without finding a gene carrier. Later.
Ronon is sitting on the floor with his back against Rodney’s bed, slowly and meticulously carving something (and Rodney is so telling Teyla that Ronon took his knife out while Torren was still awake). When Rodney stops reading Ronon turns towards him and jerks his head towards Sheppard and Torren on the other side of the bed.
“Asleep?” he asks quietly. Rodney nods and checks his watch. If he goes to the lab now he could put in a few hours before he really needs to get to bed. And he will. In a minute. If he moves now Torren might wake up.
Ronon has stopped carving and is just sitting, looking at the stars outside Rodney’s window. It looks like he’s seeing something else entirely, something inside his mind.
“I think there’s a blanket somewhere.” Rodney waves his hand towards his desk chair and dear God, his room is a mess now. “If you want to...”
Ronon gets settled on the floor between the door and the bed. He yawns and stretches and Rodney thinks of his cat.
“Teyla and Kanaan owe us now. Big time.” Ronon sounds content.
“Tell me about it! I’m skipping work-out for weeks.” Ronon snorts.
Rodney’s sure that Ronon’s fallen asleep and is startled when he speaks. He has a way of talking quietly but very clearly, probably something he learnt in the military, for stealth operations and such. It’s useful for babysitting, too; Rodney managed to wake Torren twice earlier in the evening when he was whispering.
“My father used to tell us stories at bedtime.” Ronon’s laughter is quiet, and Rodney wonders if it was always like that or if the years on the run taught him to hide his happiness. “He was pretty bad at it. Always the same...Once upon a time there was a little baby gnarush who ran away from home...”
“I think parents do that on purpose. To make the kids fall asleep.”
“Yeah, probably. Lucky you had that book.”
Rodney shifts carefully to lie on the narrow part of the bed Torren and Lt Colonel starfish left for him. The lab can wait.
He’s drifted off when Ronon speaks again. “Do you think we should turn off the lights?”
“Um, better leave them on. In case he wakes up.” You never know, darkness at night might make a kid think of monsters.
End
Author: less_star
Characters: Rodney, McKays, honorary uncles, Torren
Word count: 1900, give or take
Rating: PG
Warning: OC death
Summary: You grow up and leave your family. That’s how it’s supposed to be.
A/N: I love, love, love stories where Rodney’s childhood is positively gothic, but my personal canon has shifted a bit and I now see the McKays as ordinary, rather sad people who tried their best. I also think the ancient gene is recessive, with a very random pattern of inheritance.
My profound apologies to anyone who knows anything about Euclid, or geometry. It made sense when I translated it at 4 am.
His throat hurts, and his forehead, too. He’s cold, and Mom left his bedroom door open again, and the hallway outside is dark. In the day he knows there are no monsters, but at night he’s not so sure.
Mom must think he’s asleep because she starts to move from his bed. He takes her hand.
“Stay.” It hurts to speak.
Mom sighs. “Mer, it’s late. I have to work tomorrow. Please try to sleep.” But she sits down on the edge of his bed again, shifts a little to get some light on the pages of her book. As she reads she strokes his hair. It feels good, but he can’t forget about the monster in the hallway.
“Read to me. From your book.”
“I can’t.” Mom glances towards the door. “We’ll wake Daddy.”
“You can be real quiet. Read the parts I know already. Please.” He tugs at her hand and when she smiles a little he knows she will read to him. Mom smiles with half her mouth and nudges him.
“Scoot over then. I’ll get cold sitting here.” She lies beside him and he’s not cold anymore.
The book is old. Mom got it for school a long time ago. She starts near the beginning, with stuff he’s heard many times before. She whispers but he’s close so he can still hear.
“A point is that which cannot be parted.”
Mom wears a flannel shirt. It’s soft under his cheek. The blue and red of its pattern starts to swirl and mix and then he closes his eyes.
“A line is a length without width.”
He forgets the darkness and the monster.
sSs
“Tell me a story.” Dad isn’t home today.
Mom yawns. She keeps her eyes closed but tells the story anyway.
“A long time ago, our family came from the sea...” He hears the story in the dark. He’s big now, not afraid of monsters anymore.
sSs
“Come on, Mer, there’s something I want to show you.” Mom is smiling. She was sad for a long time, before. She had to go see a special doctor many times and Dad was extra nice. But she looks happy now, searching in an old suitcase inside her closet. “Your grandpa first showed me when I was eight, so it’s time you saw it as well. It’s something magical, you’ll love it.” She’s found whatever she was looking for and motions for him to go into the living room. They tiptoe past the door to Jeannie's room. She's a good baby, but she'll be fussy if she doesn't get her nap.
It looks like a tiny, old box. It’s made of some sort of dark metal and there’s something written on the side, in strange letters that he can’t read. Mom smiles at him and pats the space beside her on the couch. He sits down, feeling weird and worried.
Mom holds the little box carefully in both hands and when she closes her eyes it starts to shine a faint blue and play a hesitant melody. A music box, then. He’s much too old for stuff like that, but it’s pretty neat that you can’t even see the button that starts it.
Mom smiles again and gives him the box and he looks at it carefully but he can’t see any buttons or a way to open the lid.
“No, no, you have to want to hear it play.” Mom takes it from him. “Like this.” And she closes her eyes and the box glows again and plays its sad little song. But when she gives it back to him it stays quiet.
“It’s probably broken. Inside. Old things do that.” Mom just looks at the music box in her lap and she doesn’t seem happy at all anymore. She stays like that until Dad comes home. They fight and there’s no dinner.
sSs
When he’s at college Mom keeps calling every week. It’s so embarrassing, everyone already thinks he’s a baby. And she always says the same things, how she’s so proud of him and it was the happiest time of her life and did he meet some professor or other that she remembers.
When she calls him Mer he snaps at her. It’s Rodney now, he doesn’t care if Meredith is a family name. You grow up and leave your family, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
Then one week she doesn’t call and he’s relieved. And still. Well. All the others have gone out, so if she had called no-one would have known about it.
sSs
The house is quiet, now. His dad started to pack up all of Mom’s things, like he was angry with her. Then he just seemed to run out of steam. Mom’s things are all over the living room and Dad just sits in the kitchen and looks bewildered, like he’s waiting for her to come back, so he can yell at her. Jeannie cries and says over and over again that it was so quick.
“It was leukemia,” Rodney says “of course it was quick.” He keeps picking things up and then he doesn’t know where to put them and it’s just such a mess, old books and clothes.
Jeannie has picked up the old music box and is running her fingers over the strange letters on the side. It must be Celtic, or something. He never could figure out how to open it, you’d need a tool to break inside and see the mechanism.
“Mom said it was magical. But it didn’t work for me.“ She turns the box over, slowly, and Rodney wonders if it’s made of silver, the metal looks so dark.
“I know, she told me too. Said it came from grandpa.” It’s just junk. All of it.
Rodney makes Jeannie go to their Dad in the kitchen and starts gathering stuff for the garbage collectors. He picks up the old copy of Euclid. The ink on the inside of the cover is faded, but he can still make out Meredith Trelawney, Northeastern U, 1966. He puts that on the table.
A picture of Mom and grandpa, smiling at each other, not at the camera. And one of Mom with him and Jeannie, when Jeannie was just a baby. She looks past the photographer, into the distance and doesn’t smile.
Mom’s old diary has pink covers. There are still blank pages near the end. He reads random entries, there’s nothing after he was born, she must have stopped writing soon after she quit college.
Susie and Karen were talking about some guys they like and I said that I think Dr Ingram is good-looking and they laughed and I pretended it was just a joke.
/.../
I waited and waited but they didn’t come and I thought I had the wrong day but then yesterday Susie called and said she had been busy. I said it didn’t matter, that I saw the movie alone. It’s just that she has a lot of friends.
/.../
He said I could trust him.
/.../
I was having coffee when Brian McKay came and sat at my table. He left the conservatory because there was some mistake about his scholarship and now he’s in accounting until he can get it sorted out.
/.../
I wish dad was still alive. He could have helped me with this whole mess.
People can live a whole life and love other people and like things and have memories and when they die none of that means anything anymore. To those outside, your life will just look sad.
He puts the diary and the pictures on Jeannie’s desk. For a moment he’s almost tempted to get the broken music box out of the trash, but there’s no point.
When he enters the kitchen Dad has his arm around Jeannie. Rodney makes sandwiches and Dad looks at the food like it’s something he’s heard of but never thought he’d actually see.
“Do, um, do you like school then, Mer?”
The kitchen is so small, he never noticed before, but now it makes his chest feel tight. “Yeah, sure.” Jeannie’s crying again and Dad looks old and tired. “I, uh, need to get back early.”
When Rodney goes back to college he takes the copy of Euclid with him. Many years later it follows him to Russia, Antarctica and then the Pegasus galaxy.
sSs
“A semi-circle is the figure enclosed by a diameter and the periphery...”
There’s a muffled snore from Sheppard and Rodney lifts his eyes from the book. Sheppard’s curled up on his side, one hand on Torren’s little chest. Torren’s face is turned towards Rodney, peaceful in sleep, lashes impossibly long against his chubby cheek.
He puts the book on his bedside table, reminds himself that the lower part of the spine needs another layer of tape. It’s almost falling apart. The little Ancient music box that Zelenka thought was a kitchen timer lies on the bed where Sheppard dropped it. It has sharp edges so Rodney puts that on the bedside table as well. Torren seemed to like it, even if it didn’t make him remotely sleepy. He’ll rig it so Teyla can activate it without finding a gene carrier. Later.
Ronon is sitting on the floor with his back against Rodney’s bed, slowly and meticulously carving something (and Rodney is so telling Teyla that Ronon took his knife out while Torren was still awake). When Rodney stops reading Ronon turns towards him and jerks his head towards Sheppard and Torren on the other side of the bed.
“Asleep?” he asks quietly. Rodney nods and checks his watch. If he goes to the lab now he could put in a few hours before he really needs to get to bed. And he will. In a minute. If he moves now Torren might wake up.
Ronon has stopped carving and is just sitting, looking at the stars outside Rodney’s window. It looks like he’s seeing something else entirely, something inside his mind.
“I think there’s a blanket somewhere.” Rodney waves his hand towards his desk chair and dear God, his room is a mess now. “If you want to...”
Ronon gets settled on the floor between the door and the bed. He yawns and stretches and Rodney thinks of his cat.
“Teyla and Kanaan owe us now. Big time.” Ronon sounds content.
“Tell me about it! I’m skipping work-out for weeks.” Ronon snorts.
Rodney’s sure that Ronon’s fallen asleep and is startled when he speaks. He has a way of talking quietly but very clearly, probably something he learnt in the military, for stealth operations and such. It’s useful for babysitting, too; Rodney managed to wake Torren twice earlier in the evening when he was whispering.
“My father used to tell us stories at bedtime.” Ronon’s laughter is quiet, and Rodney wonders if it was always like that or if the years on the run taught him to hide his happiness. “He was pretty bad at it. Always the same...Once upon a time there was a little baby gnarush who ran away from home...”
“I think parents do that on purpose. To make the kids fall asleep.”
“Yeah, probably. Lucky you had that book.”
Rodney shifts carefully to lie on the narrow part of the bed Torren and Lt Colonel starfish left for him. The lab can wait.
He’s drifted off when Ronon speaks again. “Do you think we should turn off the lights?”
“Um, better leave them on. In case he wakes up.” You never know, darkness at night might make a kid think of monsters.
End