Fic: First Times, 1/?
Fic: First Times, 1/? (G)
Chapter Title: Dr. Rodney McKay, Head of Sciences
Author: shaych
Pairings: McKay/OFC, McKay/Carter and McKay/Katie Brown as in canon
Rating: G
Warnings: possible spoilers, AU for the events of episode 3x17 “Sunday”
Summary: The “First Times” series chronicles the pre-Atlantis lives of the expedition members, how they wound up in the Pegasus Galaxy, and some of the things they learned there. In this part, Dr. Rodney McKay.
Disclaimer: Don’t own, don’t sue, don’t ask, don’t tell.
Author’s Notes: See story index page for notes.
Dr. Rodney McKay, Head of Sciences, Atlantis Expedition, Pegasus Galaxy
Rodney McKay is seven years old and in grade two the first time he learns to dislike an adult. Up until then, no matter how weird his peers think he is, no matter how many times they call him ‘brains’ and trash his things, or push him around on the playground, or taunt him in the halls, he’s always thought adults were safe. Adults taught him things, and answered his questions, and never thought he was odd for wanting to know things. But this adult thinks Rodney is too young, and should be out playing with the other boys instead of reading, and so now Rodney’s sitting beside dad in a parent-teacher conference, watching as dad gets steadily more frustrated trying to explain to Rodney’s teacher that yes, he knows that seven is a bit young for high-school physics, but what is he supposed to do? Rodney’s interested in it, and he’s capable of understanding it, and anyway the books are just lying around at home because of Dr. McKay’s profession anyway. The teacher suggests that the McKays find Rodney a hobby, and since Mrs. McKay has just inherited her aunt’s antique piano, Rodney starts lessons. He isn’t too sure about it at first, but he’s never given up at anything he’s tried to do, and he doesn’t intend to start now.
~~~
The day Jeannie McKay is born is one of the clearest memories Rodney has of his young life. The year is 1976, and it is the middle of a very hot summer where the McKay family lives, in the city of Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Rodney is eight years old. He’s had to help mom out a lot around the house, much more than usual, but he doesn’t really remember that part of it so well as he remembers the day Jeannie was actually born. Dad is at work, he’s a professor of astronomy at Queens University, and so Rodney is the only one around when mom starts acting really weird. She tells Rodney to be fast and call the 911 number, the one he’s never supposed to use ever unless something really bad has happened, and Rodney gets a little bit scared, but he does what mom asks. He gets more scared when mom turns pale and collapses, but one of the paramedics who come with the ambulance lets him ride up front and, after discovering he can understand a lot for his age, starts explaining how everything in the vehicle works. It distracts Rodney until they get to the hospital, and then dad is there and Rodney thinks it will all be fine now. He picks up one of the science magazines in the waiting room, and even though he doesn’t understand every word, it’s something to do while dad paces around and hospital personnel rush in and out.
Jeannie is bald and wrinkly, but when dad carefully helps Rodney hold her, and she smiles up at him with huge blue eyes, Rodney thinks that there isn’t much he wouldn’t do to make her happy. He’d even give her his favourite toy, the model of the solar system one of dad’s colleagues made him. But even though he’s distracted by his new sister, this tiny life that dad tells him he needs to care for and watch over, he can’t help but notice that dad’s still worried, and that he hasn’t been able to go see mom yet. It’s the first time Rodney has ever been really worried, not just twitchy about things like the closet monster. Looking down again at Jeannie as she yawns and closes her eyes, falling asleep in his hands, it’s also the first time he’s ever felt responsible.
~~~
The first time Rodney really thinks about what it means to love somebody, he is almost ten years old and his dad sits him down for a serious talk. He says that mom is sick, really sick, and that Rodney’s going to have to take on more chores around the house. Rodney wants dad to tell him that mom will get better, but dad just looks sad and says ‘I wish I could, little genius’, and Rodney flings himself at dad and tries to be strong, tries not to cry, but this is mom, and he’s not quite ten years old and mom is still this unchanging, perfect being in his eyes; she’s the purveyor of hugs and bandages and chicken soup, the one who sings him to sleep and teaches him on the piano, the one who wears bright floral dresses and talks for long hours about war and peace and philosophy, while dad marks papers and smiles adoringly at her. Mom just can’t be sick. It would go against the entire order of Rodney’s universe.
But mom is sick, and it’s a few weeks after that that she goes into the hospital, and Rodney has to think about loving people, because suddenly he has to think about what happens when they leave, and he’s got a big hole somewhere inside his chest that won’t go away no matter how often he plays mom’s favourite song - it’s In My Life, by John Lennon, and Rodney never forgets it for the rest of his life - or hides in her closet with his books, or visits her in the hospital as she gets thinner and paler and less able to talk to him about his day at school, never mind Aristotle or Plato or Newton. And then mom isn’t there to visit anymore, and Rodney has to explain it to Jeannie when he doesn’t understand it himself, that mom’s gone and isn’t coming back. And Jeannie keeps asking him where mom’s gone to, as if he knows the answer, looking at him with those big blue eyes that he can’t ever disappoint, and dad doesn’t smile when he marks papers anymore, and the house isn’t quite so bright, and chicken soup never really tastes right ever again.
The only thing that Rodney can do to make the silence stop being so loud is to play the piano, and so he does, whenever he isn’t studying, just to fill up the emptiness. But then two-year-old Jeannie toddles into the room and falls on her diapered butt, bouncing to his playing, and he finds himself picking out the tunes of nursery rhymes just to make her giggle again. At that moment, Rodney decides that even if he loves math, and physics, and the order it gives to the universe, from then on he’s going to work hard to become absolutely perfect at the piano, just so Jeannie will always be able to listen to him and be that happy. It’s the first time Rodney’s contemplated what he wants to be when he grows up.
~~~
The first time Rodney fails at something, he is nearly twelve and halfway through grade six. The piano teacher that dad found for him after mom is a harsh taskmaster, but Rodney sticks with it, determined to keep Jeannie smiling, although she’s the only one in the house who does anymore. But even though Rodney is technically perfect, so technically perfect that he’s aced every RCM exam he’s ever taken, the teacher finally tells him that he’ll never be able to realize his dream. That he plays without heart, without feeling. Rodney thinks that it’s because Jeannie is the heart, and he’s the brain, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s failed, and so he stops the lessons, stops the exams, and almost stops playing entirely, but he can’t bear the sight of Jeannie’s eyes when her Big Brother won’t make music, and so he keeps playing, all her favourites, whenever she asks him to, but inside, he’s alternately empty and filled with anger, with nowhere to direct it and no one to talk to, because he can’t go to dad. Dad still hasn’t smiled at his marking, and Rodney takes his responsibilities seriously: help out, don’t be a burden, watch out for Jeannie, and do your best at everything.
A few months later, Rodney discovers that doing his best isn’t always the answer. Sometimes, what you choose to do is more important than how well you do it. Rodney is still angry, and when one of his classmates taunts him, daring him to build something grandiose for the end-of-year science fair, Rodney decides to end his elementary school career with a bang. He builds a functional model of an atomic bomb, although without the weapons-grade materials, it will never be useable. His teachers don’t know what to do with him. They suggest to dad that he be put into a special accelerated program at a combined Jr/Sr High School nearby, since he’s obviously way ahead of where he should be and they don’t think he should stay in the regular system any more. Dad agrees, but there’s something new in his eyes when he looks at Rodney after being called in to view his exhibit. It isn’t until they get home that Rodney discovers its name - disappointment. Dad’s never been disappointed in him before, and it’s the worst feeling Rodney’s ever had, except when they put mom’s coffin into the ground.
Dad says mom would have been ashamed of him, that he’d built something that was meant to do harm rather than good. He says that he doesn’t want Rodney to ever build a bomb, ever again, no matter what Rodney ends up doing with his life, because life is too precious to take, and Rodney isn’t God even if he is incredibly smart, and that it is never okay to hurt someone, ever. Rodney cries a little, and promises he won’t ever touch weapons, not ever again, and dad hugs him and tells him it’s going to be okay, and it’s the first time dad’s really seemed to be completely in the present since mom died, so even if Rodney hates the thought of dad being so upset with him, he can’t help but think some good came of it all, even when the men in dark suits show up to ask lots of questions. Dad sends them packing, and Rodney is signed up for the accelerated program starting in the fall, and they never talk about it again.
~~~
Rodney is sixteen, nearly seventeen, and getting ready to graduate high school the first time he falls in love. Her name is Kelly Roberts, and she’s like no one else in Rodney’s world. She’s only been at school with him a year, ever since she moved from some small town in Alberta he can never remember the name of to live with her grandparents. She never talks about why, and Rodney never asks. She has an odd accent, half Irish, half western drawl, and she says the Irish comes from her mum and the drawl comes from the ranch she spent her summers on, and Rodney never asks about that either, even though it’s obvious she misses it. Rodney still remembers the first day she was in classes, when she’d called Shakespeare a plagiarising old turd, and called Tolkien a genius, and their English teacher had called her disruptive and sent her to the office to explain herself.
Rodney has, up until now, had a typically teenage fascination with leggy blondes when he isn’t buried in math. Kelly isn’t leggy - she’s short, and a little plump - and she isn’t blonde - her hair is brown, and it goes all the way down to her butt - but there’s so much character in her eyes and so much enthusiasm in her manner that he’s captivated anyway. She doesn’t fit neatly into Rodney’s classifications of people - ‘too stupid to live’, ‘not worth his time’, and ‘tolerable’ - and that intrigues him. She spends half the time they should be in classes working as a teaching assistant in the music department, and she spends half the time they should be doing homework working at the local Ice Cream Shoppe to earn money for college, but somehow she’s still getting high marks in nearly everything. She’s one of two girls in the chess club, and one of three in the Latin club, and she loses badly every time they play prime-not-prime but she’s the only one who can beat Rodney at chess, because he strategises every move and she plays with a madcap disregard for any kind of logic he recognizes.
Rodney thinks, like everyone else, that Kelly’s going to go into music and set the world on its ear with her talent, because she plays with the one thing Rodney never could work out how to play with. She plays with heart, and soul, and she’s not technically perfect but she brings the music alive in a way no one else he’s ever heard can. She plays classical, mostly, long winding pieces full of flying fingers on the piano, but he knows from seeing concerts with the school’s music department that she sings, conducts, and plays most of the band instruments in addition to the piano. She claims her favourites are the flute and the percussion instruments, and she certainly tinkers with them every chance she has. But then the annual spring musical rolls around, and no one but Kelly and the music teacher and a few other students will ever know what happened, because none of them are talking about it, but she stops playing entirely, stops singing, stops doing anything even remotely musical. Rodney leaves it alone; he knows there are things that cut too deeply to talk about, and the loss of music is one of them. It’s six months before a note passes her lips in tune with the radio, a year before her fingers touch an instrument, and nearly two before she plays even semi-regularly again. Even then, it’s only rock music; the only classical piece he ever hears come from her touch after that is Pachelbel’s ‘Canon in D’, and she plays that with so much emotion he wonders whether it’s a curse or a blessing that she can’t seem to give it up as well.
However, all that is far in the future; now, they’re still sixteen going on seventeen, and Kelly’s just given up her music and some of the sparkle that lit everything around her has dimmed, and Rodney can’t help but miss it, and he wonders why. Finally Adam, the chess club president and Rodney’s only real friend at school, corners him for a lecture. “Look,” Adam says, sounding uncomfortable but determined, “She’s a bit odd, but she’s the only person here who gets right back in your face when you snap at people, she can out-insult you from everything I’ve heard out of the lower-level band students, and she’s pretty in a quirky sort of way, if only she’d lose the cowboy hat and the earrings with bits of anatomy dangling from them. You’d be a fool to leave without ever asking her to a dance, or for an ice cream, or something!”
So Rodney asks, and they end up at grad together, and Rodney’s wearing a god-awful shirt with his rented suit, and Kelly’s wearing a quasi-medieval dress and a pair of earrings with stylised human hearts on them (Rodney privately wonders where she finds those things), and they’re weird and snarky and sarcastic and so odd even amongst the really smart kids that go to their school that no one wants to talk to them, but Rodney doesn’t care, because Adam was right, he’d be a fool to let this one go when she’s never bored him, not once in a year, and no one’s ever done that before except Jeannie. And she made dad smile when he saw her earrings when Rodney brought her by for dinner the weekend before (they were spleens, of all things), and she made Jeannie giggle when she talked about how some Prince of England Rodney can’t remember the name of got chucked out a window (or maybe it was his lover, Rodney wasn’t paying attention. History was for squishy people, after all.) but Rodney thinks she’s just about perfect.
~~~
Rodney’s twenty-one the first time he discovers what it’s like to be betrayed by someone he loves. Jeannie has just turned thirteen, and she’s everything Rodney wasn’t at that age. She’s gorgeous, and kind, and friendly, and athletic in an understated sort of way, and smart enough to be in the top group in her class, but not enough to stand out the way he did, and everyone loves her. Even her older brother, who’s been gone from home for three years by now, but who calls every weekend, and sends letters full of pictures, and comes to visit for every special occasion no matter what’s going on at school, no matter how badly he needs to study for an exam, or finish a project, or sleep, because there never seem to be enough hours in the day to finish everything he needs to.
But Jeannie’s just thirteen and dad’s throwing her a party, because thirteen is pretty special - not quite as big a deal as sixteen will be, when she can drive, or eighteen, when she’s an adult and can do whatever she wants with herself, but still a big deal - and Rodney stays up all night driving after pulling three near-all-nighters in a row to finish a project early just so he can get home for the occasion, and Jeannie isn’t quite as excited to see him as usual, but she’s thirteen now and he guesses she has to grow up eventually, and he doesn’t think anything of it. Jeannie’s friends arrive, and they’re all giggly, and silly, and he’s as polite to them as he knows how to be, but he was raised by an academic who didn’t pay much attention to social niceties, and he certainly never learned manners at school, and he isn’t very good at dealing with people anyway. The girls laugh at him, and think he’s a dork, and pity Jeannie for having him for a brother, and for the first time (that Rodney knows about) she doesn’t defend him, just laughs with them, and agrees, and he feels something inside break a little bit.
He still writes to Jeannie, but she doesn’t write back quite so often, or so enthusiastically, and when he comes home after that, she always seems like she wishes he was somewhere else. He tries not to be hurt, but this is Jeannie, who he played with and protected and held when she cried and bandaged when she fell and he can’t help but want his sister back. The final straw comes that summer, when some boy comes to pick her up. He’s part of a group, but Rodney can tell he thinks he’s dating Jeannie, and even if at thirteen he knows there won’t be more than hand-holding going on, the boy is still dressed in stupidly baggy pants that seem to be in fashion these days and he looks like a bum. So Rodney gives him the talk, the one that lets the boy know what will happen to him if one hair on Jeannie’s head is out of place when she gets home, and maybe he’s unnecessarily harsh, but Jeannie didn’t really need to respond to his worry by yelling at him that he wasn’t her father and telling him to get out of her life before slamming out the door. When he calls Kelly that weekend, because they keep in touch, she assures him that it’s just hormones and Jeannie will grow out of it. Rodney wants to believe her, but weeks and then months go by, and Jeannie doesn’t talk to him, and he thinks that he’s lost one of the best things in his life. For the first time, math and physics are cold comfort for him, and when he finishes his first masters’ degree before he turns twenty-two, only dad is there to watch him walk across the stage.
~~~
The first time Rodney thinks seriously about settling down, he is twenty-five and it is 1993. He’s got two doctorates now, one in theoretical astrophysics and the other in electrical and computer engineering, and he’s one of the best brains in his fields, and computers are taking off in a way he knows is going to make the extra work he put into engineering worth it. He’s working for the Canadian government doing research and development and living in Ottawa, and he has a cat named Schrödinger that Kelly gave him for his last birthday (she’d named the poor thing, too, and somehow he should’ve suspected that someone who wore anatomy earrings would name a cat Schrödinger) and he’s as happy as he’s ever been, these last few years. Dad’s retired and living in Kingston still, giving the occasional guest lecture to keep in contact with his peers, and Jeannie’s seventeen and finished high school and about to start University (applied math, and if she’d ever started speaking to Rodney again, he’d have told her how proud he was, because she turned out to be pretty darn smart after all, but she hasn’t, and so he doesn’t.)
At any rate, Rodney’s finished school and has a good job and a good apartment in a reasonable part of town, and it’s big enough for another person and, after struggling through an undergraduate degree in physical anthropology (and oh, the monkey jokes flew for a while between them) and making it through medical school and her residency with, if possible, even less sleep than Rodney got working on his doctorates, Kelly and he are living in the same city again, and after seven years of constant letters and phone bills and visits during holidays, they pick up where they left off. Rodney dated other people in the interim, of course, and he assumes Kelly did too, but somehow the others never quite measured up to the standard she’d set, and they’re good together. They both have crazy hours, but somehow it works, and Rodney’s happier than he can ever remember being, and he almost manages to be nice to his underlings even when they’re complete morons and can’t even solve basic equations that he could do in his sleep. Living together sets them up to discover completely new aspects of each other - Rodney never knew Kelly was religious, really, but she is, deeply so, and when he thinks about it, he doesn’t know if he could deal with terminally ill children all day every day if he didn’t have faith in something else, either - and he’s thinking seriously about proposing to her, maybe passing on their above-average genes, and even though he’s always hated children, he can’t help but think that he’d love them if they were anything like her.
~~~
Rodney is twenty-seven the first time he really begins to understand his father in an adult kind of way. Kelly, who really in some ways is very much like Rodney’s mother, volunteers to go with a UN force into Bosnia, because they need doctors and she says she can’t not go, that she didn’t take her medical oaths in order to sit safe in some sterile hospital while people, any people, were dying horribly. Rodney doesn’t beg her to stay, although he wishes he could. He understands, in a way. It’s the same reason why, when he graduated, and the American military wanted him to come design weapons for them, he turned them down. Because some things are more important than yourself. So Kelly packs her bags and goes off, and when Rodney sees her off at the airport (she’s wearing brains today) he holds her tightly until he has to let her go, and kisses her, and she waves her left hand as she boards the plane, letting him see the silver-and-sapphire ring he’d put on her hand just a few weeks before.
When the letters take longer to get through after a month and a half, Rodney worries, but she still sounds like she’s doing some good, though he can tell it’s wearing on her, what she’s doing, that she can’t save everyone. He sends encouragement, and love, and pictures of Schrödinger. And then two months go by, and he hasn’t had a letter, but his haven’t been returned so he assumes she’s just out of communication range or something, and he ticks off the days, and he buries himself in work and refuses to think about it until the soldier appears at his door one night with a ring and a flag and a stack of letters, and then he knows, knows what dad felt all those years ago watching mom go, only dad had time to say goodbye and Rodney will never have that, and dad had him and Jeannie to live for, and Rodney wishes now he’d proposed earlier, that maybe then there’d be something of Kelly left in the world, but he knows that’s foolish.
They send her body back for burial, along with all the soldiers who were with her when the bombs started falling, and they’re given a speech by the Prime Minister, but Rodney would give anything to have Kelly back and the Prime Minister silent. He makes the arrangements for a quiet service at Kelly’s church and, because he knows it’s what she wanted, he takes care of having her cremated. His father comes for the service, and Jeannie, and for the first time in six years, they talk. And Rodney realizes that Jeannie’s smart, close to brilliant, and she’s going to go places in the world of math and physics, and their relationship is a bit strained now, but it’s there and growing again, and that helps more than he’ll ever be able to tell her. Dad looks frailer than the last time Rodney saw him, and for the first time Rodney realizes that dad was nearly fifteen years older than mom, and that means he’s getting up there, and Rodney doesn’t think he can handle burying the last person who loves him, so he hugs dad a little longer than he normally would, and doesn’t get impatient when Dr. McKay starts daydreaming of all the brilliant things his children will do if they work together.
Rodney makes a trip to Alberta, someplace he’s never been, and standing on the wide prairies, looking at the mountains that dominate the horizon and watching the wheat and canola and cows, he can almost understand how this province produced someone as unique as his Kelly. And then he takes the urn that has her ashes in it, and he rents a car and drives into the mountains, and they’re magnificent unlike anything he’s ever seen, grand in the same wild way that astrophysics can be when it turns the laws of the universe on their head, and he follows the directions he was given to the ranch Kelly used to spend summers on, the one he suspects she never stopped missing, and when he gets there the owners shake his hand quietly (he’d called ahead to let them know he was coming) and it’s the great outdoors and normally he’d hate that, and there are insects and lemonade but he’s brought his epi-pen and he doesn’t want to drink anything anyway, and they lead him up the trail behind the farmhouse to the old overhang that they say Kelly used to sit on, and he sits there until twilight starts shooting out over the peaks around him, and then as the wind comes up a bit he opens the urn and lets her go, releases her. He turns and goes back down, back to Ottawa and his urban setting and his laboratory, and if he’s harsher in his criticism than ever, more demanding of perfection, well, his minions understand, and when they’re replaced with new ones, those new ones have never known Dr. McKay to be any other way.
~~~
Rodney is twenty-nine when dad goes peacefully in his sleep. He’d been fading the last few visits Rodney had made, and he’s sad but not surprised when Jeannie calls in tears late one night, giving him the funeral details. He goes, of course, and stands beside Jeannie (who has just earned her Bachelor’s degree), he doesn’t feel much of anything anymore. He thinks he’s just numb, and that maybe a change is in order. The research he was doing in Ottawa is coming to an end, and the Americans want him again, this time for and R&D position at Area 51, no weapons, and Rodney thinks it’s time to take them up on their offer. And so he packs up his notes and his research and Schrödinger, and he decamps across the border because there’s nothing to tie him to Canada anymore, and he settles in to his work without a problem until some idiot gets stuck in a device called the Stargate, and suddenly theoretical astrophysics isn’t so theoretical and there are apparently stable wormholes that people can step through to visit other planets, and Rodney’s not sure how he feels about that, but before he has a chance to decide he’s met Samantha Carter, who is a genius in his own field, and leggy, and blonde, and something about her just makes him want to lash out as much as he can, so he calls her a dumb blonde, and if she’d been Kelly, she would have laughed, called him a jackass, and hugged him, but she’s not, and he’s pissed her off, which pisses off other people who are in very high places, and he’s being sent to Siberia, which is cold and snowy and really quite a lot like Ontario in the winter, only the food is worse and he doesn’t speak the language. He picks some up in self-defence, of course, but the time he spends there is largely a blur of incompetent subordinates and borscht, until a woman named Elizabeth Weir contacts him to tell him about the mythical city of Atlantis.
~~~
Rodney is thirty-five when he comes on board as the head scientist for the proposed Atlantis Expedition and gets transferred to Antarctica. Antarctica is cold, and snowy, and really a lot like Ontario in the winter except the food is a little more military and fresh fruits and vegetables are a lot harder to find. Rodney had already developed a taste for hospital food during the two years he spent doing his work in the cafeteria while Kelly popped in and out, but now he learns to like MREs and power bars as well. The doctor, a Scottish fellow by the name of Beckett, says that’s probably for the best since he can at least be sure that whatever’s in the things won’t kill him. Rodney rather likes Beckett, actually, despite his generic and probably biased disdain for medical personnel, especially in a military situation, even if it is technically a research lab and Beckett is technically a geneticist and sort of under Rodney’s jurisdiction. Eventually, he and Beckett become cautious friends, and he starts calling him Carson and discovers that underneath the timidity is a quick mind and a rock-solid personality that cares deeply about everything and everyone, and he thinks that Carson would have liked Kelly, but that’s not someplace he wants to go. He makes other friends, slowly, for the first time in his life, friends who don’t seem to mind that he’s abrasive and rude and has the social skills of a dead gnat. Friends like Peter Grodin, and the little Czech guy whose name he never gets right, and in a strange way even Elizabeth, although he gets the feeling she sometimes wishes he would go away.
He’s been there a year when he gets a letter from Jeannie telling him that she’s leaving the University she’s been doing research at, before she earns her second PhD (she’s twenty-eight, now, but she’d taken a couple of years off somewhere in there, to see a bit of the world) and that she’s pregnant, engaged to be married, and incredibly happy, and will her big brother please come to see his niece born? Rodney goes, of course, and there are arguments, and holding little Madeline brings up a few too many things Rodney doesn’t want to think about. Like the first time he held Jeannie, and mom, and how much he wishes there was a little Kelly running around tormenting him. So instead of telling Jeannie this, he lashes out, like he always does, and he hurts her, and he hurts himself, but he doesn’t know how to fix it, so in the end he goes back to his research in Antarctica, and he’s a little more harsh and a little less inclined to be friendly towards anyone, but they don’t really notice.
More scientists and grunts pour in for the expedition, and he ignores the squishy people and yells at the hard sciences personnel and makes life difficult for everyone, but they get used to his antagonistic manner and he gets used to their slightly lower than average incompetence, and they all work fairly well together until the day some flyboy with what Rodney can only assume is the corpse of a hamster on his head sits in the control chair, and Dr. Jackson finds the eighth chevron, and suddenly Atlantis isn’t a Lost City, it’s a real possibility, and there aren’t enough hours in a month to take care of everything he needs to before they leave, but it’s all he has, and Rodney is busy.
On the last night, as he packs his personal duffel and creatively interprets ‘one personal item’ to include ‘whatever you can fit in the cracks’ (it’s not like everyone else isn’t doing the same thing), he’s sitting on his bed with most of his life in boxes at his feet and a letter to Jeannie on the table by the door and Schrödinger’s things boxed up to give to the girl next door, who is too young and too ditzy to have any idea what to do with such a precious being, but he has no other choice - maybe if he ever comes back, he can get Jeannie to take the cat - and he’s trying to figure out what he can’t leave behind. He knows most of the team will assume he’ll pack extra coffee, and he does throw a bag or two in, but he throws in some other things too.
First goes the little box that held all of Kelly’s earrings, one of the few things he’s kept. Then the MP3 player that had his mother’s favourite songs, and his father’s, and recordings of all the music he used to play for Jeannie, and himself, and recordings he’d made of Kelly when they’d lived together, and some he’d tracked down somehow from their days in high school, where she’d had solos, and he adds that to his bag (they’ve pooled all the music and movies and made a database for them, but this isn’t music he wants to share with anyone). The last thing he takes is a photo album; it has his diplomas in it in case anyone questions its presence, but he’s also gone through his pictures and picked out the most precious ones he owns, until he thinks he’s got all of the memories he can’t leave behind ready to go with him. He puts the rest of his things away and closes up the last box, setting it by the door for the marines to take into storage at Cheyenne mountain the next day, and he takes Schrödinger over to the girl next door, and the cat isn’t happy, but neither is Rodney, so that makes it unanimous. Then he goes back home and stretches out on his bed, before a glint on the bedside table catches his eye. It’s the ring he gave Kelly, the one that somehow survived to be returned to him, and without thinking about it he slips it onto his pinkie finger. In the morning, he’ll put it into the box of her earrings he’s taking with him.
~~~
The first time Rodney steps through a wormhole, he is thirty-seven years old and he’s part of the two hundred and fifty person Atlantis Expedition. He has one hundred and thirty-two scientists under his command. Atlantis is like nothing he’s ever seen before. It’s beauty and it’s terror all in one and he’s not sure he’s ever been so scared or excited in his life. Then the shield starts failing, and he settles on scared, looking desperately for a way to extend the power while the military types race about the Pegasus Galaxy in search of a power source. Somehow, instead, they find an entire civilization of refugees, and an enemy that makes the Go’a’uld back home sound like party guests. Then the city is rising and it’s awesome and beautiful and terrible at the same time, and Rodney thinks of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, back on an earth he might never see again, and he thinks that the Ancients may have been more like humans than not.
Life in Atlantis never settles down, but for the first time Rodney is busy and happy and he has friends, real friends, and he’s going through the gate on the flagship team, and the city is divulging her secrets, and nothing’s ever been like this before. If Rodney is scared more often than not (and he is), he’s also fascinated and using more of his mind than he’s ever used before. But life isn’t all fun and excitement, and people are dying, and Rodney’s expected to save them and save the city every other week, and he’s not sure how long he can keep going, but there’s no choice, because it’s their fault the Wraith woke up early, and dad taught him early on about responsibility and how you accept the consequences for what you’ve done.
~~~
The first time Rodney breaks a promise, he’s on an alien planet and being held underground in a concrete (or something like it) bunker by a bunch of guys in uniforms that look suspiciously like Nazi costumes, and he’s scared and he’s babbling like he always does, like he always has ever since he was young and ended up describing the entire plot of season one of Star Trek to Kelly before he’d managed to ask her out (after, she described the second and third seasons to him, and showed him her costume Vulcan ears, and Rodney had grinned like an idiot for three days), and somehow he’s telling the story about making nuclear weapons in elementary school, and Major Sheppard’s telling him to shut up but it’s too late, and now they know he can do it, they know he can build atomic bombs, and he thinks ‘I’m sorry, dad’, but it turns out all right, and they get home, and he thinks that’s the end of it. Until the storm hits, and then everything is pain and water and wind, and he almost fries Carson and Teyla, but he doesn’t, and when the panic settles a bit he thinks he’s home free, but then there are Ancient priestesses and nanovirii and he’s losing a ZedPM to a bunch of monks, and then the Wraith are coming and there’s no time left at all.
He spends a long time talking, babbling really, about all the things he misses and all the things he wishes he’d said, but when it comes down to it, the message he sends home is for Jeannie, because despite everything that’s happened, despite the fact that she’s now thirty and he hasn’t had a real discussion with her since her daughter was born, she’s still his baby sister, and he loves her in ways that he can’t really describe, and the last thing she deserves is some soldier showing up on her doorstep with a flag and platitudes and no goodbye message from her brother. If he’s going down - and he really thinks he is - she deserves to hear it from him. So he records the message in one of his few free hours, when he should really probably be sleeping, and then he gets back to work. And somehow they find a control chair and they manage to complete a couple of nukes, and Rodney thinks ‘sorry dad, but promising to have nothing to do with weapons really didn’t leave much room for situations involving vampiric alien catfish in another galaxy’, and then there are reinforcements from earth and a ZedPM and Ford’s gone crazy and Sheppard’s tried a suicide run and all he really wants to do is sleep for a month, but there’s the cleanup and the memorials and then, somehow, he’s on his way back to earth on the Daedalus.
~~~
The first time Rodney sees earth from orbit, standing on the bridge of the Daedalus, he thinks it’s one of the best things he’s ever seen, even if he’s travelled to another galaxy through a wormhole and lived in Atlantis of all cities. But he has personnel to replace, and Schrödinger to rescue from the girl next door, and Jeannie to visit. Except somehow, in between the interviews and the sleeping and the meetings, he never quite gets around to those last two, and so he never discovers that when he told Ford to tack his message onto the end so that if it got cut off, it wouldn’t matter, that it really did matter. Because Jeannie never gets the message from her brother, the one he recorded in desperation right before he thought he was going to die, and so she never knows that apparently, all it takes is a near-death experience for Rodney to actually talk about his feelings.
But Rodney has to go back to Atlantis, he’d go even if they didn’t need him, because really, Atlantis, and people are still dying and he gets sick from flying through the coronosphere of a sun, and there are still Wraith, and Ford’s still gone, and he ends up with Laura Cadman in his head, and he kisses Carson and isn’t that just the strangest thing he’s done in a while, and he’s back to not having enough time, ever, for anything.
~~~
The first time Rodney makes a mistake - a really big mistake, not just an ‘oops I forgot your birthday’ sort of thing - they’ve discovered an Ancient research out post on Duranda. And Rodney’s sure he can make the weapons there work, so sure that his calculations are accurate, but he doesn’t factor in how reality warps when dealing with the kind of physics the Ancients had advanced to. He’s still using the laws of physics he knows from earth, and when Radek tries to tell him, he snaps at the man. He has to make the weapon work. Not least because it’s his pet project and someone’s already died for it, just like Grodin, who was mostly a friend, died on that damn L-point satellite, and that has to be worth something. But it goes wrong, and this time it’s not his father looking at him with disappointment, it’s John Sheppard and Radek Zelenka, the only men who’ve ever treated Rodney like a best friend, and Rodney feels about six inches tall. He doesn’t know if the planets he’s destroyed were inhabited; he really hopes they weren’t, but they’ll never know now, and he understands Carson and Hoff so much better, but where Carson really wasn’t responsible for that disaster, Rodney is responsible for this, completely responsible, and it’s a long time before he gets even a little bit of trust back from Radek and John and all the other people he’s stepped on in pursuit of the stupid weapon.
But even without that trust and friendship, Rodney has to keep working, because he really is the brightest man in two galaxies, and they need him, but there’s a Go’a’uld trying to destroy the city, and then there’s a man giving up his life so Rodney can survive in a drowning jumper, and there are so many things Rodney wishes he had time to do but doesn’t, and then they’re allying themselves with the Wraith - the Wraith! - and he thinks that this galaxy has changed them all. He can’t help but wonder if those changes are good ones, when he sees Carson, who was so distraught after giving half a planet the means to kill themselves, preparing to use biological warfare on an entire race of alien beings, and Elizabeth willing to torture one of their own people without proof of his guilt, and it scares him, sometimes, what this galaxy and this war are turning them into, and he tries to hold onto the things mom and dad taught him, and the things Kelly believed in, but it’s so hard when people are dying all around him, people he’s responsible for, and he thinks that it can’t go on like this, that something has to break.
~~~
And then something does, and the first time Rodney gets a chance to really think about all these firsts, and what they meant to him, it’s the first time he’s ever been glued to the interior hull of a Wraith Hive Ship, and even if Ronon is right there with him after their brilliant plan went brilliantly pear-shaped, Rodney thinks it’s probably good that he’s been able to think about all of these things, because he doesn’t see any way out of this, and it’s quite possible that this first is going to be his last, as well.
But it isn’t, because when is a hopeless situation ever truly hopeless when John Sheppard decides it isn’t? He’s pulled some crazy stunt based on a theoretical idea Rodney and Radek were tossing around over lunch one day, and he’s saved the day again, and now they have hive ships and a whole pile of Wraith to test their bio-weapon on, and Rodney for the first time starts to see the toll this entire thing is taking on Carson. But they test it, send the Wraith to the alpha site and make their little lie work. At least until some of them start remembering, and then Carson’s been tortured and Rodney’s team has to go in an rescue him, and Rodney thinks that it isn’t worth it, not if he has to watch more of the people he cares about suffer, but there’s no choice anymore.
Things are quiet for a while, which Rodney distrusts completely. Nothing ever stays quiet for long on Atlantis. Sure enough, a while later after a misguided adventure with some guy named Lucius (and really, mature adults should be able to stop themselves from making Harry Potter jokes) and another one chasing after Ronon when he’s abducted offworld, well, then things really get interesting. Because apparently the Wraith weren’t enough to make life interesting, now they’ve discovered Replicators in the Pegasus Galaxy! Rodney really thinks the Ancients should have left some kind of warning about that, but really, since when have the Ancients been any kind of useful? He’s beginning to understand Daniel Jackson’s descension much better, after having lived in Atlantis for three years. Much as he idolizes their science, he’s the first to complain about the lack of any kind of warning system, or any kind of manual for that matter. And really, some of the stuff they’ve discovered? Is just entirely useless, and he can’t figure out why anyone would have invented it in the first place.
But they get out of the mess with the Replicators, and they fix Elizabeth, and things are going quite well for a while until Sheppard gets abducted. If Rodney was superstitious, he’d start panicking at this point, because that’s two teammates abducted offworld in a very short span of time, and what are the odds against his being next? But traumatic as that experience was (and it was. He’d really believed Sheppard would be dead when they found him, and he didn’t have so much family left that he could afford to lose any of it) they got Sheppard back, and learned a thing or two about the Wraith while they were at it. But then Rodney receives the biggest scare of his time in the Pegasus Galaxy when John, newly released from Carson’s voodoo testing, comes to find him to tell him to go back to earth to help with his sister.
His first reaction is 'oh god, Jeannie', but he covers that up well, he thinks, and he’s glad of it when he discovers that she’s fine, just smarter than he ever suspected. And then he’s back on earth, and standing on her front porch, and there’s a small person attached to his legs, and he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself, but this is Jeannie, his little Jeannie, and she takes him in anyway. Despite the fact that he’s an ass, and hasn’t contacted her in four years, and doesn’t know how to make up for that. But he can try, by showing her what she’s done, what he works for, by giving her an opportunity so few people ever get. Letting her see the earth from above, see exactly what it is he’s been fighting all these years to protect.
So now Jeannie’s in Atlantis, and John’s flirting and Rodney wants to kill him, because hello, little sister? But he doesn’t. He tries, really he does, but he just keeps getting it wrong, so wrong, and then there’s Rod. And Rod is everything Rodney isn’t, good with people, perfect uncle, perfect brother, perfect team-mate, friendly and outgoing and charming and in shape, which Rodney will never be even if he’s gotten better these last few years. Rod doesn’t have to eat every few hours to keep himself functioning, he doesn’t have to be afraid of everything he puts in his mouth in case it kills him. And Rodney wishes, looking at Rod, that his life had been just that little bit different, so that he could be that easy with the people around him. But he doesn’t know how. He never learned.
They send Rod home eventually, and Rodney lets Jeannie push the button, and the ZedPM is depleted but that’s okay, really, because Jeannie is smiling at him again, and John doesn’t think he’s a total loser, and his friends are glad to have him there instead of Rod. But then he has to say goodbye to Jeannie, and he tries a little bit harder, or maybe he just remembers what it was like when she was in diapers, and then he’s hugging her for the first time in years, and it feels so good. And then she’s gone, but there are letters and video messages and birthday presents for the little one, even if they’re usually kind of strange and he has to explain that he got them in some market on some forgotten planet, but that they’re kid-safe, really.
~~~
And then they’re all hallucinating, and John’s shot him, and Rodney thinks that that really out to damage their relationship more than it does, but he doesn’t really have time to think about it because shortly after he’s patched back together, they’re all being sent home. Because the Ancients are back. And Rodney is rapidly losing his hero-worship for them, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s also rapidly losing Atlantis, and all his friends and family and he doesn’t know what he’ll do without them. But he goes back to Area 51, and picks up the research which is nowhere near his level, and he has a huge empty lab with minions who’re more moronic than anyone he’s had to deal with in three years (except maybe Kavanagh) and he hates it. The only times he really feels alive anymore are when he visits Jeannie, and when he gets back into Colorado to see John and Carson.
Even that doesn’t last, though, because the Replicators are back, and this time he’s managed to help them override their base code, and they can attack Ancients. The idiots never stand a chance, because they sit there secure in the knowledge that they can’t be harmed. Except they can be, and by the time that simple fact seems to penetrate, they’re dead and there’s no one left to harm except General O’Neill and Richard Woolsey, so Rodney’s helping out on the most insane mission he’s ever been a part of (and he stepped through a wormhole to another galaxy without bothering to think about coming home) and somehow they’re all alive and Rodney’s incredibly glad that Kelly made him take some classes in the fine arts his last year of high school, because apparently that acting prize he won came in useful for something after all.
So they have Atlantis back, and Rodney’s stopped counting first times, because really, every week is a new first here, and there’s no way he could ever remember them all, even if he is a genius. Still, talking whales and solar flares being deflected by the ZedPM-powered shield of a spaceship are unique enough to get a mention, even though he’s pretty sure that he’s now been exposed to sufficient levels of radiation that the chances of his ever procreating have dwindled to zero, even if he could find a willing woman. There’s always Katie Brown, the shy little botanist, but he’s so awkward around her he doubts that’s going anywhere.
Then Harry Potter Guy (as the science department has taken to calling him) is back, and wonder of wonders, Kolya’s finally dead. Rodney should probably not be quite so happy about that, but he has to admit (if only to himself) that he’s been afraid of Kolya deep down for a very long time. And that fear lifting is wonderful. And so maybe Elizabeth is right when she scolds him for doing the Snoopy dance on top of Kolya’s grave, but hey, he’s entitled.
He’s stopped counting the number of times he’s cheated death, but when his brain gets zapped by the Ancient Ascension Machine, he’s pretty sure he’s finally hit the mark. You can’t keep cheating fate; she’s a jealous mistress, by all accounts, and Rodney knows that this time, it’s really all over. For the first time he understands it all, everything that he’s ever wondered about in his life makes perfect sense, and he’s going to lose all of it. But strangely, he’s more upset about the people he’ll leave behind. He knows he’s dying, and he knows that he isn’t Daniel Jackson, and he’s not going to ascend. But at the last minute (pretty much literally) he finally figures it out, and he survives. He’s back to normal Rodney McKay levels of brilliance, but he thinks just maybe he kept some of the things he learned while his brain was expanding. Like how to value the people around him a little bit more.
Rodney’s always been a bit of a gamer. He figures there aren’t too many on the Atlantis expedition who aren’t, what with the high percentage of incredibly geeky people. But when the games turn real, and he discovers that he’s messing with real people’s lives, that he’s become something like a prophet to a real culture - well, he’d be lying if he said that he didn’t find that incredibly cool, up until his people and Sheppard’s nearly went to war. Real war, where real people would end up dying. It put a few things into perspective. When Elizabeth ordered the game room shut down, he didn’t object too hard. Especially when a few weeks later, he had the chance to explore a derelict floating moon that turned out not to be a moon at all. Somehow they lived through that experience, and Rodney’s really starting to wonder which omnipotent being that he doesn’t believe in has taken such a negative interest in the Atlantis expedition, and the flagship gate team in particular. Because it seems like every mission they go on, bad things happen. He’s starting to wish for a nice, quiet market planet, but then those never go well either. Barring that, he’d settle for a long weekend on Atlantis, where he can do some research, catch up on some sleep, and maybe spend a little time being socially awkward with Katie.
He gets his wish, sort of. Kate Heightmeyer orders mandatory downtime one random Sunday for all mission personnel, and they take advantage of it. He doesn’t know what the others are doing, and he doesn’t particularly care; he has plans. If only he can get out of going fishing with Carson. And he does, using Katie as an excuse. Carson goes off to find someone else to fish with, and Rodney goes to baby-sit ferns, something he never would have believed he’d be doing. But then, that describes most of the things he’s done in the past five years or so, so it’s not all that weird, really.
Excepting a minor technical glitch that results in an explosion near the mess hall, it actually is a quiet Sunday, and Rodney enjoys it thoroughly. At least until he enters the infirmary at the end of the day to see how Carson’s doing after treating all the people who came in with variations on the theme of burns when the panel blew, and finds Carson staring blankly at his laptop. Rodney asks him what’s wrong, and Carson looks up, eyes wide and bright and shocked. “Me mum’s in a bad way,” he says quietly. “I’ve got to go. And I may not be back.”
Rodney, like everyone who knows Carson at all, knows how much his sainted mother means to him. And so his quiet Sunday ends with another first for him; saying a possibly permanent (because none of them know how long he’ll be gone, or if they’ll still be there when he’s able to come back) goodbye to one of the only men he’s ever considered his friend, one of the only people he’d ever loved at all. And he thinks this is a first, because he’s never actually been able to say goodbye before. He’s not sure if he likes it, but as he watches Carson walk through the rippling blue event horizon and back to earth, he knows he’s going to miss him. And he resolves to stop befriending doctors, because they’re the ones who always have to go when others need them, no matter how much Rodney needs them to stay.
Posted To:sgaauwtptbdfu, my LJ
Chapter Title: Dr. Rodney McKay, Head of Sciences
Author: shaych
Pairings: McKay/OFC, McKay/Carter and McKay/Katie Brown as in canon
Rating: G
Warnings: possible spoilers, AU for the events of episode 3x17 “Sunday”
Summary: The “First Times” series chronicles the pre-Atlantis lives of the expedition members, how they wound up in the Pegasus Galaxy, and some of the things they learned there. In this part, Dr. Rodney McKay.
Disclaimer: Don’t own, don’t sue, don’t ask, don’t tell.
Author’s Notes: See story index page for notes.
Dr. Rodney McKay, Head of Sciences, Atlantis Expedition, Pegasus Galaxy
Rodney McKay is seven years old and in grade two the first time he learns to dislike an adult. Up until then, no matter how weird his peers think he is, no matter how many times they call him ‘brains’ and trash his things, or push him around on the playground, or taunt him in the halls, he’s always thought adults were safe. Adults taught him things, and answered his questions, and never thought he was odd for wanting to know things. But this adult thinks Rodney is too young, and should be out playing with the other boys instead of reading, and so now Rodney’s sitting beside dad in a parent-teacher conference, watching as dad gets steadily more frustrated trying to explain to Rodney’s teacher that yes, he knows that seven is a bit young for high-school physics, but what is he supposed to do? Rodney’s interested in it, and he’s capable of understanding it, and anyway the books are just lying around at home because of Dr. McKay’s profession anyway. The teacher suggests that the McKays find Rodney a hobby, and since Mrs. McKay has just inherited her aunt’s antique piano, Rodney starts lessons. He isn’t too sure about it at first, but he’s never given up at anything he’s tried to do, and he doesn’t intend to start now.
~~~
The day Jeannie McKay is born is one of the clearest memories Rodney has of his young life. The year is 1976, and it is the middle of a very hot summer where the McKay family lives, in the city of Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Rodney is eight years old. He’s had to help mom out a lot around the house, much more than usual, but he doesn’t really remember that part of it so well as he remembers the day Jeannie was actually born. Dad is at work, he’s a professor of astronomy at Queens University, and so Rodney is the only one around when mom starts acting really weird. She tells Rodney to be fast and call the 911 number, the one he’s never supposed to use ever unless something really bad has happened, and Rodney gets a little bit scared, but he does what mom asks. He gets more scared when mom turns pale and collapses, but one of the paramedics who come with the ambulance lets him ride up front and, after discovering he can understand a lot for his age, starts explaining how everything in the vehicle works. It distracts Rodney until they get to the hospital, and then dad is there and Rodney thinks it will all be fine now. He picks up one of the science magazines in the waiting room, and even though he doesn’t understand every word, it’s something to do while dad paces around and hospital personnel rush in and out.
Jeannie is bald and wrinkly, but when dad carefully helps Rodney hold her, and she smiles up at him with huge blue eyes, Rodney thinks that there isn’t much he wouldn’t do to make her happy. He’d even give her his favourite toy, the model of the solar system one of dad’s colleagues made him. But even though he’s distracted by his new sister, this tiny life that dad tells him he needs to care for and watch over, he can’t help but notice that dad’s still worried, and that he hasn’t been able to go see mom yet. It’s the first time Rodney has ever been really worried, not just twitchy about things like the closet monster. Looking down again at Jeannie as she yawns and closes her eyes, falling asleep in his hands, it’s also the first time he’s ever felt responsible.
~~~
The first time Rodney really thinks about what it means to love somebody, he is almost ten years old and his dad sits him down for a serious talk. He says that mom is sick, really sick, and that Rodney’s going to have to take on more chores around the house. Rodney wants dad to tell him that mom will get better, but dad just looks sad and says ‘I wish I could, little genius’, and Rodney flings himself at dad and tries to be strong, tries not to cry, but this is mom, and he’s not quite ten years old and mom is still this unchanging, perfect being in his eyes; she’s the purveyor of hugs and bandages and chicken soup, the one who sings him to sleep and teaches him on the piano, the one who wears bright floral dresses and talks for long hours about war and peace and philosophy, while dad marks papers and smiles adoringly at her. Mom just can’t be sick. It would go against the entire order of Rodney’s universe.
But mom is sick, and it’s a few weeks after that that she goes into the hospital, and Rodney has to think about loving people, because suddenly he has to think about what happens when they leave, and he’s got a big hole somewhere inside his chest that won’t go away no matter how often he plays mom’s favourite song - it’s In My Life, by John Lennon, and Rodney never forgets it for the rest of his life - or hides in her closet with his books, or visits her in the hospital as she gets thinner and paler and less able to talk to him about his day at school, never mind Aristotle or Plato or Newton. And then mom isn’t there to visit anymore, and Rodney has to explain it to Jeannie when he doesn’t understand it himself, that mom’s gone and isn’t coming back. And Jeannie keeps asking him where mom’s gone to, as if he knows the answer, looking at him with those big blue eyes that he can’t ever disappoint, and dad doesn’t smile when he marks papers anymore, and the house isn’t quite so bright, and chicken soup never really tastes right ever again.
The only thing that Rodney can do to make the silence stop being so loud is to play the piano, and so he does, whenever he isn’t studying, just to fill up the emptiness. But then two-year-old Jeannie toddles into the room and falls on her diapered butt, bouncing to his playing, and he finds himself picking out the tunes of nursery rhymes just to make her giggle again. At that moment, Rodney decides that even if he loves math, and physics, and the order it gives to the universe, from then on he’s going to work hard to become absolutely perfect at the piano, just so Jeannie will always be able to listen to him and be that happy. It’s the first time Rodney’s contemplated what he wants to be when he grows up.
~~~
The first time Rodney fails at something, he is nearly twelve and halfway through grade six. The piano teacher that dad found for him after mom is a harsh taskmaster, but Rodney sticks with it, determined to keep Jeannie smiling, although she’s the only one in the house who does anymore. But even though Rodney is technically perfect, so technically perfect that he’s aced every RCM exam he’s ever taken, the teacher finally tells him that he’ll never be able to realize his dream. That he plays without heart, without feeling. Rodney thinks that it’s because Jeannie is the heart, and he’s the brain, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s failed, and so he stops the lessons, stops the exams, and almost stops playing entirely, but he can’t bear the sight of Jeannie’s eyes when her Big Brother won’t make music, and so he keeps playing, all her favourites, whenever she asks him to, but inside, he’s alternately empty and filled with anger, with nowhere to direct it and no one to talk to, because he can’t go to dad. Dad still hasn’t smiled at his marking, and Rodney takes his responsibilities seriously: help out, don’t be a burden, watch out for Jeannie, and do your best at everything.
A few months later, Rodney discovers that doing his best isn’t always the answer. Sometimes, what you choose to do is more important than how well you do it. Rodney is still angry, and when one of his classmates taunts him, daring him to build something grandiose for the end-of-year science fair, Rodney decides to end his elementary school career with a bang. He builds a functional model of an atomic bomb, although without the weapons-grade materials, it will never be useable. His teachers don’t know what to do with him. They suggest to dad that he be put into a special accelerated program at a combined Jr/Sr High School nearby, since he’s obviously way ahead of where he should be and they don’t think he should stay in the regular system any more. Dad agrees, but there’s something new in his eyes when he looks at Rodney after being called in to view his exhibit. It isn’t until they get home that Rodney discovers its name - disappointment. Dad’s never been disappointed in him before, and it’s the worst feeling Rodney’s ever had, except when they put mom’s coffin into the ground.
Dad says mom would have been ashamed of him, that he’d built something that was meant to do harm rather than good. He says that he doesn’t want Rodney to ever build a bomb, ever again, no matter what Rodney ends up doing with his life, because life is too precious to take, and Rodney isn’t God even if he is incredibly smart, and that it is never okay to hurt someone, ever. Rodney cries a little, and promises he won’t ever touch weapons, not ever again, and dad hugs him and tells him it’s going to be okay, and it’s the first time dad’s really seemed to be completely in the present since mom died, so even if Rodney hates the thought of dad being so upset with him, he can’t help but think some good came of it all, even when the men in dark suits show up to ask lots of questions. Dad sends them packing, and Rodney is signed up for the accelerated program starting in the fall, and they never talk about it again.
~~~
Rodney is sixteen, nearly seventeen, and getting ready to graduate high school the first time he falls in love. Her name is Kelly Roberts, and she’s like no one else in Rodney’s world. She’s only been at school with him a year, ever since she moved from some small town in Alberta he can never remember the name of to live with her grandparents. She never talks about why, and Rodney never asks. She has an odd accent, half Irish, half western drawl, and she says the Irish comes from her mum and the drawl comes from the ranch she spent her summers on, and Rodney never asks about that either, even though it’s obvious she misses it. Rodney still remembers the first day she was in classes, when she’d called Shakespeare a plagiarising old turd, and called Tolkien a genius, and their English teacher had called her disruptive and sent her to the office to explain herself.
Rodney has, up until now, had a typically teenage fascination with leggy blondes when he isn’t buried in math. Kelly isn’t leggy - she’s short, and a little plump - and she isn’t blonde - her hair is brown, and it goes all the way down to her butt - but there’s so much character in her eyes and so much enthusiasm in her manner that he’s captivated anyway. She doesn’t fit neatly into Rodney’s classifications of people - ‘too stupid to live’, ‘not worth his time’, and ‘tolerable’ - and that intrigues him. She spends half the time they should be in classes working as a teaching assistant in the music department, and she spends half the time they should be doing homework working at the local Ice Cream Shoppe to earn money for college, but somehow she’s still getting high marks in nearly everything. She’s one of two girls in the chess club, and one of three in the Latin club, and she loses badly every time they play prime-not-prime but she’s the only one who can beat Rodney at chess, because he strategises every move and she plays with a madcap disregard for any kind of logic he recognizes.
Rodney thinks, like everyone else, that Kelly’s going to go into music and set the world on its ear with her talent, because she plays with the one thing Rodney never could work out how to play with. She plays with heart, and soul, and she’s not technically perfect but she brings the music alive in a way no one else he’s ever heard can. She plays classical, mostly, long winding pieces full of flying fingers on the piano, but he knows from seeing concerts with the school’s music department that she sings, conducts, and plays most of the band instruments in addition to the piano. She claims her favourites are the flute and the percussion instruments, and she certainly tinkers with them every chance she has. But then the annual spring musical rolls around, and no one but Kelly and the music teacher and a few other students will ever know what happened, because none of them are talking about it, but she stops playing entirely, stops singing, stops doing anything even remotely musical. Rodney leaves it alone; he knows there are things that cut too deeply to talk about, and the loss of music is one of them. It’s six months before a note passes her lips in tune with the radio, a year before her fingers touch an instrument, and nearly two before she plays even semi-regularly again. Even then, it’s only rock music; the only classical piece he ever hears come from her touch after that is Pachelbel’s ‘Canon in D’, and she plays that with so much emotion he wonders whether it’s a curse or a blessing that she can’t seem to give it up as well.
However, all that is far in the future; now, they’re still sixteen going on seventeen, and Kelly’s just given up her music and some of the sparkle that lit everything around her has dimmed, and Rodney can’t help but miss it, and he wonders why. Finally Adam, the chess club president and Rodney’s only real friend at school, corners him for a lecture. “Look,” Adam says, sounding uncomfortable but determined, “She’s a bit odd, but she’s the only person here who gets right back in your face when you snap at people, she can out-insult you from everything I’ve heard out of the lower-level band students, and she’s pretty in a quirky sort of way, if only she’d lose the cowboy hat and the earrings with bits of anatomy dangling from them. You’d be a fool to leave without ever asking her to a dance, or for an ice cream, or something!”
So Rodney asks, and they end up at grad together, and Rodney’s wearing a god-awful shirt with his rented suit, and Kelly’s wearing a quasi-medieval dress and a pair of earrings with stylised human hearts on them (Rodney privately wonders where she finds those things), and they’re weird and snarky and sarcastic and so odd even amongst the really smart kids that go to their school that no one wants to talk to them, but Rodney doesn’t care, because Adam was right, he’d be a fool to let this one go when she’s never bored him, not once in a year, and no one’s ever done that before except Jeannie. And she made dad smile when he saw her earrings when Rodney brought her by for dinner the weekend before (they were spleens, of all things), and she made Jeannie giggle when she talked about how some Prince of England Rodney can’t remember the name of got chucked out a window (or maybe it was his lover, Rodney wasn’t paying attention. History was for squishy people, after all.) but Rodney thinks she’s just about perfect.
~~~
Rodney’s twenty-one the first time he discovers what it’s like to be betrayed by someone he loves. Jeannie has just turned thirteen, and she’s everything Rodney wasn’t at that age. She’s gorgeous, and kind, and friendly, and athletic in an understated sort of way, and smart enough to be in the top group in her class, but not enough to stand out the way he did, and everyone loves her. Even her older brother, who’s been gone from home for three years by now, but who calls every weekend, and sends letters full of pictures, and comes to visit for every special occasion no matter what’s going on at school, no matter how badly he needs to study for an exam, or finish a project, or sleep, because there never seem to be enough hours in the day to finish everything he needs to.
But Jeannie’s just thirteen and dad’s throwing her a party, because thirteen is pretty special - not quite as big a deal as sixteen will be, when she can drive, or eighteen, when she’s an adult and can do whatever she wants with herself, but still a big deal - and Rodney stays up all night driving after pulling three near-all-nighters in a row to finish a project early just so he can get home for the occasion, and Jeannie isn’t quite as excited to see him as usual, but she’s thirteen now and he guesses she has to grow up eventually, and he doesn’t think anything of it. Jeannie’s friends arrive, and they’re all giggly, and silly, and he’s as polite to them as he knows how to be, but he was raised by an academic who didn’t pay much attention to social niceties, and he certainly never learned manners at school, and he isn’t very good at dealing with people anyway. The girls laugh at him, and think he’s a dork, and pity Jeannie for having him for a brother, and for the first time (that Rodney knows about) she doesn’t defend him, just laughs with them, and agrees, and he feels something inside break a little bit.
He still writes to Jeannie, but she doesn’t write back quite so often, or so enthusiastically, and when he comes home after that, she always seems like she wishes he was somewhere else. He tries not to be hurt, but this is Jeannie, who he played with and protected and held when she cried and bandaged when she fell and he can’t help but want his sister back. The final straw comes that summer, when some boy comes to pick her up. He’s part of a group, but Rodney can tell he thinks he’s dating Jeannie, and even if at thirteen he knows there won’t be more than hand-holding going on, the boy is still dressed in stupidly baggy pants that seem to be in fashion these days and he looks like a bum. So Rodney gives him the talk, the one that lets the boy know what will happen to him if one hair on Jeannie’s head is out of place when she gets home, and maybe he’s unnecessarily harsh, but Jeannie didn’t really need to respond to his worry by yelling at him that he wasn’t her father and telling him to get out of her life before slamming out the door. When he calls Kelly that weekend, because they keep in touch, she assures him that it’s just hormones and Jeannie will grow out of it. Rodney wants to believe her, but weeks and then months go by, and Jeannie doesn’t talk to him, and he thinks that he’s lost one of the best things in his life. For the first time, math and physics are cold comfort for him, and when he finishes his first masters’ degree before he turns twenty-two, only dad is there to watch him walk across the stage.
~~~
The first time Rodney thinks seriously about settling down, he is twenty-five and it is 1993. He’s got two doctorates now, one in theoretical astrophysics and the other in electrical and computer engineering, and he’s one of the best brains in his fields, and computers are taking off in a way he knows is going to make the extra work he put into engineering worth it. He’s working for the Canadian government doing research and development and living in Ottawa, and he has a cat named Schrödinger that Kelly gave him for his last birthday (she’d named the poor thing, too, and somehow he should’ve suspected that someone who wore anatomy earrings would name a cat Schrödinger) and he’s as happy as he’s ever been, these last few years. Dad’s retired and living in Kingston still, giving the occasional guest lecture to keep in contact with his peers, and Jeannie’s seventeen and finished high school and about to start University (applied math, and if she’d ever started speaking to Rodney again, he’d have told her how proud he was, because she turned out to be pretty darn smart after all, but she hasn’t, and so he doesn’t.)
At any rate, Rodney’s finished school and has a good job and a good apartment in a reasonable part of town, and it’s big enough for another person and, after struggling through an undergraduate degree in physical anthropology (and oh, the monkey jokes flew for a while between them) and making it through medical school and her residency with, if possible, even less sleep than Rodney got working on his doctorates, Kelly and he are living in the same city again, and after seven years of constant letters and phone bills and visits during holidays, they pick up where they left off. Rodney dated other people in the interim, of course, and he assumes Kelly did too, but somehow the others never quite measured up to the standard she’d set, and they’re good together. They both have crazy hours, but somehow it works, and Rodney’s happier than he can ever remember being, and he almost manages to be nice to his underlings even when they’re complete morons and can’t even solve basic equations that he could do in his sleep. Living together sets them up to discover completely new aspects of each other - Rodney never knew Kelly was religious, really, but she is, deeply so, and when he thinks about it, he doesn’t know if he could deal with terminally ill children all day every day if he didn’t have faith in something else, either - and he’s thinking seriously about proposing to her, maybe passing on their above-average genes, and even though he’s always hated children, he can’t help but think that he’d love them if they were anything like her.
~~~
Rodney is twenty-seven the first time he really begins to understand his father in an adult kind of way. Kelly, who really in some ways is very much like Rodney’s mother, volunteers to go with a UN force into Bosnia, because they need doctors and she says she can’t not go, that she didn’t take her medical oaths in order to sit safe in some sterile hospital while people, any people, were dying horribly. Rodney doesn’t beg her to stay, although he wishes he could. He understands, in a way. It’s the same reason why, when he graduated, and the American military wanted him to come design weapons for them, he turned them down. Because some things are more important than yourself. So Kelly packs her bags and goes off, and when Rodney sees her off at the airport (she’s wearing brains today) he holds her tightly until he has to let her go, and kisses her, and she waves her left hand as she boards the plane, letting him see the silver-and-sapphire ring he’d put on her hand just a few weeks before.
When the letters take longer to get through after a month and a half, Rodney worries, but she still sounds like she’s doing some good, though he can tell it’s wearing on her, what she’s doing, that she can’t save everyone. He sends encouragement, and love, and pictures of Schrödinger. And then two months go by, and he hasn’t had a letter, but his haven’t been returned so he assumes she’s just out of communication range or something, and he ticks off the days, and he buries himself in work and refuses to think about it until the soldier appears at his door one night with a ring and a flag and a stack of letters, and then he knows, knows what dad felt all those years ago watching mom go, only dad had time to say goodbye and Rodney will never have that, and dad had him and Jeannie to live for, and Rodney wishes now he’d proposed earlier, that maybe then there’d be something of Kelly left in the world, but he knows that’s foolish.
They send her body back for burial, along with all the soldiers who were with her when the bombs started falling, and they’re given a speech by the Prime Minister, but Rodney would give anything to have Kelly back and the Prime Minister silent. He makes the arrangements for a quiet service at Kelly’s church and, because he knows it’s what she wanted, he takes care of having her cremated. His father comes for the service, and Jeannie, and for the first time in six years, they talk. And Rodney realizes that Jeannie’s smart, close to brilliant, and she’s going to go places in the world of math and physics, and their relationship is a bit strained now, but it’s there and growing again, and that helps more than he’ll ever be able to tell her. Dad looks frailer than the last time Rodney saw him, and for the first time Rodney realizes that dad was nearly fifteen years older than mom, and that means he’s getting up there, and Rodney doesn’t think he can handle burying the last person who loves him, so he hugs dad a little longer than he normally would, and doesn’t get impatient when Dr. McKay starts daydreaming of all the brilliant things his children will do if they work together.
Rodney makes a trip to Alberta, someplace he’s never been, and standing on the wide prairies, looking at the mountains that dominate the horizon and watching the wheat and canola and cows, he can almost understand how this province produced someone as unique as his Kelly. And then he takes the urn that has her ashes in it, and he rents a car and drives into the mountains, and they’re magnificent unlike anything he’s ever seen, grand in the same wild way that astrophysics can be when it turns the laws of the universe on their head, and he follows the directions he was given to the ranch Kelly used to spend summers on, the one he suspects she never stopped missing, and when he gets there the owners shake his hand quietly (he’d called ahead to let them know he was coming) and it’s the great outdoors and normally he’d hate that, and there are insects and lemonade but he’s brought his epi-pen and he doesn’t want to drink anything anyway, and they lead him up the trail behind the farmhouse to the old overhang that they say Kelly used to sit on, and he sits there until twilight starts shooting out over the peaks around him, and then as the wind comes up a bit he opens the urn and lets her go, releases her. He turns and goes back down, back to Ottawa and his urban setting and his laboratory, and if he’s harsher in his criticism than ever, more demanding of perfection, well, his minions understand, and when they’re replaced with new ones, those new ones have never known Dr. McKay to be any other way.
~~~
Rodney is twenty-nine when dad goes peacefully in his sleep. He’d been fading the last few visits Rodney had made, and he’s sad but not surprised when Jeannie calls in tears late one night, giving him the funeral details. He goes, of course, and stands beside Jeannie (who has just earned her Bachelor’s degree), he doesn’t feel much of anything anymore. He thinks he’s just numb, and that maybe a change is in order. The research he was doing in Ottawa is coming to an end, and the Americans want him again, this time for and R&D position at Area 51, no weapons, and Rodney thinks it’s time to take them up on their offer. And so he packs up his notes and his research and Schrödinger, and he decamps across the border because there’s nothing to tie him to Canada anymore, and he settles in to his work without a problem until some idiot gets stuck in a device called the Stargate, and suddenly theoretical astrophysics isn’t so theoretical and there are apparently stable wormholes that people can step through to visit other planets, and Rodney’s not sure how he feels about that, but before he has a chance to decide he’s met Samantha Carter, who is a genius in his own field, and leggy, and blonde, and something about her just makes him want to lash out as much as he can, so he calls her a dumb blonde, and if she’d been Kelly, she would have laughed, called him a jackass, and hugged him, but she’s not, and he’s pissed her off, which pisses off other people who are in very high places, and he’s being sent to Siberia, which is cold and snowy and really quite a lot like Ontario in the winter, only the food is worse and he doesn’t speak the language. He picks some up in self-defence, of course, but the time he spends there is largely a blur of incompetent subordinates and borscht, until a woman named Elizabeth Weir contacts him to tell him about the mythical city of Atlantis.
~~~
Rodney is thirty-five when he comes on board as the head scientist for the proposed Atlantis Expedition and gets transferred to Antarctica. Antarctica is cold, and snowy, and really a lot like Ontario in the winter except the food is a little more military and fresh fruits and vegetables are a lot harder to find. Rodney had already developed a taste for hospital food during the two years he spent doing his work in the cafeteria while Kelly popped in and out, but now he learns to like MREs and power bars as well. The doctor, a Scottish fellow by the name of Beckett, says that’s probably for the best since he can at least be sure that whatever’s in the things won’t kill him. Rodney rather likes Beckett, actually, despite his generic and probably biased disdain for medical personnel, especially in a military situation, even if it is technically a research lab and Beckett is technically a geneticist and sort of under Rodney’s jurisdiction. Eventually, he and Beckett become cautious friends, and he starts calling him Carson and discovers that underneath the timidity is a quick mind and a rock-solid personality that cares deeply about everything and everyone, and he thinks that Carson would have liked Kelly, but that’s not someplace he wants to go. He makes other friends, slowly, for the first time in his life, friends who don’t seem to mind that he’s abrasive and rude and has the social skills of a dead gnat. Friends like Peter Grodin, and the little Czech guy whose name he never gets right, and in a strange way even Elizabeth, although he gets the feeling she sometimes wishes he would go away.
He’s been there a year when he gets a letter from Jeannie telling him that she’s leaving the University she’s been doing research at, before she earns her second PhD (she’s twenty-eight, now, but she’d taken a couple of years off somewhere in there, to see a bit of the world) and that she’s pregnant, engaged to be married, and incredibly happy, and will her big brother please come to see his niece born? Rodney goes, of course, and there are arguments, and holding little Madeline brings up a few too many things Rodney doesn’t want to think about. Like the first time he held Jeannie, and mom, and how much he wishes there was a little Kelly running around tormenting him. So instead of telling Jeannie this, he lashes out, like he always does, and he hurts her, and he hurts himself, but he doesn’t know how to fix it, so in the end he goes back to his research in Antarctica, and he’s a little more harsh and a little less inclined to be friendly towards anyone, but they don’t really notice.
More scientists and grunts pour in for the expedition, and he ignores the squishy people and yells at the hard sciences personnel and makes life difficult for everyone, but they get used to his antagonistic manner and he gets used to their slightly lower than average incompetence, and they all work fairly well together until the day some flyboy with what Rodney can only assume is the corpse of a hamster on his head sits in the control chair, and Dr. Jackson finds the eighth chevron, and suddenly Atlantis isn’t a Lost City, it’s a real possibility, and there aren’t enough hours in a month to take care of everything he needs to before they leave, but it’s all he has, and Rodney is busy.
On the last night, as he packs his personal duffel and creatively interprets ‘one personal item’ to include ‘whatever you can fit in the cracks’ (it’s not like everyone else isn’t doing the same thing), he’s sitting on his bed with most of his life in boxes at his feet and a letter to Jeannie on the table by the door and Schrödinger’s things boxed up to give to the girl next door, who is too young and too ditzy to have any idea what to do with such a precious being, but he has no other choice - maybe if he ever comes back, he can get Jeannie to take the cat - and he’s trying to figure out what he can’t leave behind. He knows most of the team will assume he’ll pack extra coffee, and he does throw a bag or two in, but he throws in some other things too.
First goes the little box that held all of Kelly’s earrings, one of the few things he’s kept. Then the MP3 player that had his mother’s favourite songs, and his father’s, and recordings of all the music he used to play for Jeannie, and himself, and recordings he’d made of Kelly when they’d lived together, and some he’d tracked down somehow from their days in high school, where she’d had solos, and he adds that to his bag (they’ve pooled all the music and movies and made a database for them, but this isn’t music he wants to share with anyone). The last thing he takes is a photo album; it has his diplomas in it in case anyone questions its presence, but he’s also gone through his pictures and picked out the most precious ones he owns, until he thinks he’s got all of the memories he can’t leave behind ready to go with him. He puts the rest of his things away and closes up the last box, setting it by the door for the marines to take into storage at Cheyenne mountain the next day, and he takes Schrödinger over to the girl next door, and the cat isn’t happy, but neither is Rodney, so that makes it unanimous. Then he goes back home and stretches out on his bed, before a glint on the bedside table catches his eye. It’s the ring he gave Kelly, the one that somehow survived to be returned to him, and without thinking about it he slips it onto his pinkie finger. In the morning, he’ll put it into the box of her earrings he’s taking with him.
~~~
The first time Rodney steps through a wormhole, he is thirty-seven years old and he’s part of the two hundred and fifty person Atlantis Expedition. He has one hundred and thirty-two scientists under his command. Atlantis is like nothing he’s ever seen before. It’s beauty and it’s terror all in one and he’s not sure he’s ever been so scared or excited in his life. Then the shield starts failing, and he settles on scared, looking desperately for a way to extend the power while the military types race about the Pegasus Galaxy in search of a power source. Somehow, instead, they find an entire civilization of refugees, and an enemy that makes the Go’a’uld back home sound like party guests. Then the city is rising and it’s awesome and beautiful and terrible at the same time, and Rodney thinks of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, back on an earth he might never see again, and he thinks that the Ancients may have been more like humans than not.
Life in Atlantis never settles down, but for the first time Rodney is busy and happy and he has friends, real friends, and he’s going through the gate on the flagship team, and the city is divulging her secrets, and nothing’s ever been like this before. If Rodney is scared more often than not (and he is), he’s also fascinated and using more of his mind than he’s ever used before. But life isn’t all fun and excitement, and people are dying, and Rodney’s expected to save them and save the city every other week, and he’s not sure how long he can keep going, but there’s no choice, because it’s their fault the Wraith woke up early, and dad taught him early on about responsibility and how you accept the consequences for what you’ve done.
~~~
The first time Rodney breaks a promise, he’s on an alien planet and being held underground in a concrete (or something like it) bunker by a bunch of guys in uniforms that look suspiciously like Nazi costumes, and he’s scared and he’s babbling like he always does, like he always has ever since he was young and ended up describing the entire plot of season one of Star Trek to Kelly before he’d managed to ask her out (after, she described the second and third seasons to him, and showed him her costume Vulcan ears, and Rodney had grinned like an idiot for three days), and somehow he’s telling the story about making nuclear weapons in elementary school, and Major Sheppard’s telling him to shut up but it’s too late, and now they know he can do it, they know he can build atomic bombs, and he thinks ‘I’m sorry, dad’, but it turns out all right, and they get home, and he thinks that’s the end of it. Until the storm hits, and then everything is pain and water and wind, and he almost fries Carson and Teyla, but he doesn’t, and when the panic settles a bit he thinks he’s home free, but then there are Ancient priestesses and nanovirii and he’s losing a ZedPM to a bunch of monks, and then the Wraith are coming and there’s no time left at all.
He spends a long time talking, babbling really, about all the things he misses and all the things he wishes he’d said, but when it comes down to it, the message he sends home is for Jeannie, because despite everything that’s happened, despite the fact that she’s now thirty and he hasn’t had a real discussion with her since her daughter was born, she’s still his baby sister, and he loves her in ways that he can’t really describe, and the last thing she deserves is some soldier showing up on her doorstep with a flag and platitudes and no goodbye message from her brother. If he’s going down - and he really thinks he is - she deserves to hear it from him. So he records the message in one of his few free hours, when he should really probably be sleeping, and then he gets back to work. And somehow they find a control chair and they manage to complete a couple of nukes, and Rodney thinks ‘sorry dad, but promising to have nothing to do with weapons really didn’t leave much room for situations involving vampiric alien catfish in another galaxy’, and then there are reinforcements from earth and a ZedPM and Ford’s gone crazy and Sheppard’s tried a suicide run and all he really wants to do is sleep for a month, but there’s the cleanup and the memorials and then, somehow, he’s on his way back to earth on the Daedalus.
~~~
The first time Rodney sees earth from orbit, standing on the bridge of the Daedalus, he thinks it’s one of the best things he’s ever seen, even if he’s travelled to another galaxy through a wormhole and lived in Atlantis of all cities. But he has personnel to replace, and Schrödinger to rescue from the girl next door, and Jeannie to visit. Except somehow, in between the interviews and the sleeping and the meetings, he never quite gets around to those last two, and so he never discovers that when he told Ford to tack his message onto the end so that if it got cut off, it wouldn’t matter, that it really did matter. Because Jeannie never gets the message from her brother, the one he recorded in desperation right before he thought he was going to die, and so she never knows that apparently, all it takes is a near-death experience for Rodney to actually talk about his feelings.
But Rodney has to go back to Atlantis, he’d go even if they didn’t need him, because really, Atlantis, and people are still dying and he gets sick from flying through the coronosphere of a sun, and there are still Wraith, and Ford’s still gone, and he ends up with Laura Cadman in his head, and he kisses Carson and isn’t that just the strangest thing he’s done in a while, and he’s back to not having enough time, ever, for anything.
~~~
The first time Rodney makes a mistake - a really big mistake, not just an ‘oops I forgot your birthday’ sort of thing - they’ve discovered an Ancient research out post on Duranda. And Rodney’s sure he can make the weapons there work, so sure that his calculations are accurate, but he doesn’t factor in how reality warps when dealing with the kind of physics the Ancients had advanced to. He’s still using the laws of physics he knows from earth, and when Radek tries to tell him, he snaps at the man. He has to make the weapon work. Not least because it’s his pet project and someone’s already died for it, just like Grodin, who was mostly a friend, died on that damn L-point satellite, and that has to be worth something. But it goes wrong, and this time it’s not his father looking at him with disappointment, it’s John Sheppard and Radek Zelenka, the only men who’ve ever treated Rodney like a best friend, and Rodney feels about six inches tall. He doesn’t know if the planets he’s destroyed were inhabited; he really hopes they weren’t, but they’ll never know now, and he understands Carson and Hoff so much better, but where Carson really wasn’t responsible for that disaster, Rodney is responsible for this, completely responsible, and it’s a long time before he gets even a little bit of trust back from Radek and John and all the other people he’s stepped on in pursuit of the stupid weapon.
But even without that trust and friendship, Rodney has to keep working, because he really is the brightest man in two galaxies, and they need him, but there’s a Go’a’uld trying to destroy the city, and then there’s a man giving up his life so Rodney can survive in a drowning jumper, and there are so many things Rodney wishes he had time to do but doesn’t, and then they’re allying themselves with the Wraith - the Wraith! - and he thinks that this galaxy has changed them all. He can’t help but wonder if those changes are good ones, when he sees Carson, who was so distraught after giving half a planet the means to kill themselves, preparing to use biological warfare on an entire race of alien beings, and Elizabeth willing to torture one of their own people without proof of his guilt, and it scares him, sometimes, what this galaxy and this war are turning them into, and he tries to hold onto the things mom and dad taught him, and the things Kelly believed in, but it’s so hard when people are dying all around him, people he’s responsible for, and he thinks that it can’t go on like this, that something has to break.
~~~
And then something does, and the first time Rodney gets a chance to really think about all these firsts, and what they meant to him, it’s the first time he’s ever been glued to the interior hull of a Wraith Hive Ship, and even if Ronon is right there with him after their brilliant plan went brilliantly pear-shaped, Rodney thinks it’s probably good that he’s been able to think about all of these things, because he doesn’t see any way out of this, and it’s quite possible that this first is going to be his last, as well.
But it isn’t, because when is a hopeless situation ever truly hopeless when John Sheppard decides it isn’t? He’s pulled some crazy stunt based on a theoretical idea Rodney and Radek were tossing around over lunch one day, and he’s saved the day again, and now they have hive ships and a whole pile of Wraith to test their bio-weapon on, and Rodney for the first time starts to see the toll this entire thing is taking on Carson. But they test it, send the Wraith to the alpha site and make their little lie work. At least until some of them start remembering, and then Carson’s been tortured and Rodney’s team has to go in an rescue him, and Rodney thinks that it isn’t worth it, not if he has to watch more of the people he cares about suffer, but there’s no choice anymore.
Things are quiet for a while, which Rodney distrusts completely. Nothing ever stays quiet for long on Atlantis. Sure enough, a while later after a misguided adventure with some guy named Lucius (and really, mature adults should be able to stop themselves from making Harry Potter jokes) and another one chasing after Ronon when he’s abducted offworld, well, then things really get interesting. Because apparently the Wraith weren’t enough to make life interesting, now they’ve discovered Replicators in the Pegasus Galaxy! Rodney really thinks the Ancients should have left some kind of warning about that, but really, since when have the Ancients been any kind of useful? He’s beginning to understand Daniel Jackson’s descension much better, after having lived in Atlantis for three years. Much as he idolizes their science, he’s the first to complain about the lack of any kind of warning system, or any kind of manual for that matter. And really, some of the stuff they’ve discovered? Is just entirely useless, and he can’t figure out why anyone would have invented it in the first place.
But they get out of the mess with the Replicators, and they fix Elizabeth, and things are going quite well for a while until Sheppard gets abducted. If Rodney was superstitious, he’d start panicking at this point, because that’s two teammates abducted offworld in a very short span of time, and what are the odds against his being next? But traumatic as that experience was (and it was. He’d really believed Sheppard would be dead when they found him, and he didn’t have so much family left that he could afford to lose any of it) they got Sheppard back, and learned a thing or two about the Wraith while they were at it. But then Rodney receives the biggest scare of his time in the Pegasus Galaxy when John, newly released from Carson’s voodoo testing, comes to find him to tell him to go back to earth to help with his sister.
His first reaction is 'oh god, Jeannie', but he covers that up well, he thinks, and he’s glad of it when he discovers that she’s fine, just smarter than he ever suspected. And then he’s back on earth, and standing on her front porch, and there’s a small person attached to his legs, and he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself, but this is Jeannie, his little Jeannie, and she takes him in anyway. Despite the fact that he’s an ass, and hasn’t contacted her in four years, and doesn’t know how to make up for that. But he can try, by showing her what she’s done, what he works for, by giving her an opportunity so few people ever get. Letting her see the earth from above, see exactly what it is he’s been fighting all these years to protect.
So now Jeannie’s in Atlantis, and John’s flirting and Rodney wants to kill him, because hello, little sister? But he doesn’t. He tries, really he does, but he just keeps getting it wrong, so wrong, and then there’s Rod. And Rod is everything Rodney isn’t, good with people, perfect uncle, perfect brother, perfect team-mate, friendly and outgoing and charming and in shape, which Rodney will never be even if he’s gotten better these last few years. Rod doesn’t have to eat every few hours to keep himself functioning, he doesn’t have to be afraid of everything he puts in his mouth in case it kills him. And Rodney wishes, looking at Rod, that his life had been just that little bit different, so that he could be that easy with the people around him. But he doesn’t know how. He never learned.
They send Rod home eventually, and Rodney lets Jeannie push the button, and the ZedPM is depleted but that’s okay, really, because Jeannie is smiling at him again, and John doesn’t think he’s a total loser, and his friends are glad to have him there instead of Rod. But then he has to say goodbye to Jeannie, and he tries a little bit harder, or maybe he just remembers what it was like when she was in diapers, and then he’s hugging her for the first time in years, and it feels so good. And then she’s gone, but there are letters and video messages and birthday presents for the little one, even if they’re usually kind of strange and he has to explain that he got them in some market on some forgotten planet, but that they’re kid-safe, really.
~~~
And then they’re all hallucinating, and John’s shot him, and Rodney thinks that that really out to damage their relationship more than it does, but he doesn’t really have time to think about it because shortly after he’s patched back together, they’re all being sent home. Because the Ancients are back. And Rodney is rapidly losing his hero-worship for them, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s also rapidly losing Atlantis, and all his friends and family and he doesn’t know what he’ll do without them. But he goes back to Area 51, and picks up the research which is nowhere near his level, and he has a huge empty lab with minions who’re more moronic than anyone he’s had to deal with in three years (except maybe Kavanagh) and he hates it. The only times he really feels alive anymore are when he visits Jeannie, and when he gets back into Colorado to see John and Carson.
Even that doesn’t last, though, because the Replicators are back, and this time he’s managed to help them override their base code, and they can attack Ancients. The idiots never stand a chance, because they sit there secure in the knowledge that they can’t be harmed. Except they can be, and by the time that simple fact seems to penetrate, they’re dead and there’s no one left to harm except General O’Neill and Richard Woolsey, so Rodney’s helping out on the most insane mission he’s ever been a part of (and he stepped through a wormhole to another galaxy without bothering to think about coming home) and somehow they’re all alive and Rodney’s incredibly glad that Kelly made him take some classes in the fine arts his last year of high school, because apparently that acting prize he won came in useful for something after all.
So they have Atlantis back, and Rodney’s stopped counting first times, because really, every week is a new first here, and there’s no way he could ever remember them all, even if he is a genius. Still, talking whales and solar flares being deflected by the ZedPM-powered shield of a spaceship are unique enough to get a mention, even though he’s pretty sure that he’s now been exposed to sufficient levels of radiation that the chances of his ever procreating have dwindled to zero, even if he could find a willing woman. There’s always Katie Brown, the shy little botanist, but he’s so awkward around her he doubts that’s going anywhere.
Then Harry Potter Guy (as the science department has taken to calling him) is back, and wonder of wonders, Kolya’s finally dead. Rodney should probably not be quite so happy about that, but he has to admit (if only to himself) that he’s been afraid of Kolya deep down for a very long time. And that fear lifting is wonderful. And so maybe Elizabeth is right when she scolds him for doing the Snoopy dance on top of Kolya’s grave, but hey, he’s entitled.
He’s stopped counting the number of times he’s cheated death, but when his brain gets zapped by the Ancient Ascension Machine, he’s pretty sure he’s finally hit the mark. You can’t keep cheating fate; she’s a jealous mistress, by all accounts, and Rodney knows that this time, it’s really all over. For the first time he understands it all, everything that he’s ever wondered about in his life makes perfect sense, and he’s going to lose all of it. But strangely, he’s more upset about the people he’ll leave behind. He knows he’s dying, and he knows that he isn’t Daniel Jackson, and he’s not going to ascend. But at the last minute (pretty much literally) he finally figures it out, and he survives. He’s back to normal Rodney McKay levels of brilliance, but he thinks just maybe he kept some of the things he learned while his brain was expanding. Like how to value the people around him a little bit more.
Rodney’s always been a bit of a gamer. He figures there aren’t too many on the Atlantis expedition who aren’t, what with the high percentage of incredibly geeky people. But when the games turn real, and he discovers that he’s messing with real people’s lives, that he’s become something like a prophet to a real culture - well, he’d be lying if he said that he didn’t find that incredibly cool, up until his people and Sheppard’s nearly went to war. Real war, where real people would end up dying. It put a few things into perspective. When Elizabeth ordered the game room shut down, he didn’t object too hard. Especially when a few weeks later, he had the chance to explore a derelict floating moon that turned out not to be a moon at all. Somehow they lived through that experience, and Rodney’s really starting to wonder which omnipotent being that he doesn’t believe in has taken such a negative interest in the Atlantis expedition, and the flagship gate team in particular. Because it seems like every mission they go on, bad things happen. He’s starting to wish for a nice, quiet market planet, but then those never go well either. Barring that, he’d settle for a long weekend on Atlantis, where he can do some research, catch up on some sleep, and maybe spend a little time being socially awkward with Katie.
He gets his wish, sort of. Kate Heightmeyer orders mandatory downtime one random Sunday for all mission personnel, and they take advantage of it. He doesn’t know what the others are doing, and he doesn’t particularly care; he has plans. If only he can get out of going fishing with Carson. And he does, using Katie as an excuse. Carson goes off to find someone else to fish with, and Rodney goes to baby-sit ferns, something he never would have believed he’d be doing. But then, that describes most of the things he’s done in the past five years or so, so it’s not all that weird, really.
Excepting a minor technical glitch that results in an explosion near the mess hall, it actually is a quiet Sunday, and Rodney enjoys it thoroughly. At least until he enters the infirmary at the end of the day to see how Carson’s doing after treating all the people who came in with variations on the theme of burns when the panel blew, and finds Carson staring blankly at his laptop. Rodney asks him what’s wrong, and Carson looks up, eyes wide and bright and shocked. “Me mum’s in a bad way,” he says quietly. “I’ve got to go. And I may not be back.”
Rodney, like everyone who knows Carson at all, knows how much his sainted mother means to him. And so his quiet Sunday ends with another first for him; saying a possibly permanent (because none of them know how long he’ll be gone, or if they’ll still be there when he’s able to come back) goodbye to one of the only men he’s ever considered his friend, one of the only people he’d ever loved at all. And he thinks this is a first, because he’s never actually been able to say goodbye before. He’s not sure if he likes it, but as he watches Carson walk through the rippling blue event horizon and back to earth, he knows he’s going to miss him. And he resolves to stop befriending doctors, because they’re the ones who always have to go when others need them, no matter how much Rodney needs them to stay.
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