Commentary on rageprufrock's Fine
Herein lies the commentary track for rageprufrock's Stargate: Atlantis fic Fine.
Join me, won't you, although it'll make more sense and probably be less distracting if you read the story first.
author: rageprufrock
disclaimer:
Stargate: Atlantis is property of its creators, its use in this original work of fiction generates no profit and no infringement is intended.
rating: R
summary: Rodney and John are fine.
Ah, good evening, and welcome to the commentary track for rageprufrock's Stargate: Atlantis fic Fine. While the credits roll, I should probably say something about myself.
I first got into SGA fandom late in the summer of 2005, before Season Two started. There are probably a million reasons why it sucked me in, but one of them must be that the ratio of good fanfic to crap is much, much higher than I would have expected--also, there are lovely dedicated reccers and the members of sga_flashfic continually produce wonderful stuff. So there's a lot of very good fic out there, literally at your fingertips.
What was I talking about? Right. The fact that I was so very engrossed in this fandom yet did not see a single episode until last week, midway through December, so almost everything I know about SGA and the characters has been derived from the fanfiction, and I know there must be an actual essay about that waiting to be written.
Fine was one of the first SGA fics I read; probably somewhere in the first five or so, and while I loved it then, every time I reread it I get a little bit more out of it. Which is what should happen with good literature. (Oh noes! you say. She compared a clearly inferior derivative work to Literature With A Capital Ell! To which I say, bugger off. This is my canon.)
I'd call this fic episodic--because of both the length of the piece and the size of the story, containing as it does an entire little plot and not just a character-study snapshot; this could easily be filmed and slotted into Season One and no one would be the wiser.
Pru's good like that; the best authors are. She writes stuff like On the Road that, if I had never heard of the source material, I would have been hard-pressed to say whether her story or Korman's derived from the other. But I digress. My point was that for the longest time I actually did think that the original event that got Rodney so shaken was canon, and only on re-reading it did I realize differently.
Fine
Rodney still shakes himself to sleep at night.
He doesn't understand why Sheppard seems so composed, so easy, so loose-limbed and ordinary--when underneath his ubiquitous cargo pants and black shirts is a network of interlacing scars, lines of raised flesh where knives drew across his skin.
But Rodney knows the laws of physics better than Sheppard, and for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and even if Sheppard's shakes and night terrors and bouts of sobbing and vomiting are going to be diverted to Rodney, hell if he's going to fight the very fucking fabric of reality.
I love Rodney. I love how his arrogance and his sheer force of personality make him a force of nature, how it doesn't even cross his mind that he's having a problem with What Happened, because obviously if it happened to John, John should be the one with the reaction. And how since he believes he can fix everything, he knows he can fix John.
*
The planet had been beautiful and lush and white-beached, and Sheppard had looked at the rolling blue waves with a crushing sort of longing that made Rodney almost want to say, "I'm brilliant enough that given a short description of a surfboard and the most basic understanding of its schematics, I could probably fashion one with my clever, clever hands." But he wasn't, you know, out of his God damn mind or anything, so he hadn't.
Instead, he’d said, "I'm aware that its been too, too long since you've had the opportunity to expose yourself unnecessarily to harmful ultraviolet radiation and swallow sea water--though, hello, we're living on Atlantis--but could we please put a little more focus on finding the Zero Point Module and a little less on staring gape-mouthed at this piddly little ocean?"
And Sheppard had grinned, lazy like his intentional drawl and said, "Look at those breakers."
Rodney runs to italics. John grins. Really, that's the only thing you need to know about their relationship.
*
In the most detached, clinical sense, Rodney understands that he and Sheppard do not feel the same way about What Happened. He thinks about it in all capital letters because if he tries to couch it in any other euphemistic terms the whole thing sounds like weird, voyeuristic, dungeon porn, and he had only been into that for a brief period in the early-nineties.
Also What Happened was not sexy and Rodney throws up Too Fucking Much because of it.
Sheppard seems to think that What Happened is par for the course and carries on with the same casual, crashing grace he always had.
Sheppard is good at repressing. He's good at doing terrible stuff and then blinking and getting on with his life, at least on the outside. It's very military and it's creepy as hell because we really don't know much about him. There's a very intriguing undercurrent of dark!Sheppard in fandom that explores this.
It makes Rodney look at the rest of the military personnel in Atlantis with naked, horrified curiosity, because Rodney thinks that What Happened will never be all right, and that because of What Happened nothing will ever be all right again. He can't help but theorize horrifying, top-secret training practices utilized by the United States Air Force that would make the Wraith lurch. He wants to ask somebody about it but none of the soldiers are talking to him.
"Why are your men all ignoring me?" Rodney whines.
Sheppard is sprawled out in a seat in the control room because Dr. Beckett still has him grounded and he is reading the latest mission briefing from a very excited Ford, who is somewhere boring and Amish--because all developed nations in the Pegasus Galaxy are monastic, evil, or Amish.
. . . and all undeveloped societies have a lot of harvest festivals and want to make the alien visitors have sex.
"Because you're looking at them funny," Sheppard says, distracted.
"What?" Rodney says, high-pitched.
"And because I told them they weren't allowed to hit you on the head. I assume they're all steering clear to avoid temptation."
Later, Teyla and Ford and Zelenka and some Large, Nameless Military Guy--"His name is Benson, Rodney."--radio in to tell mission command that the trip went well, was boring, and in a surprise twist, included visits to monastic and Amish communities.
Rodney doesn't know how Sheppard can laugh and say, "99, Ford--divisible by three!" like he didn't almost die on some filthy floor on a filthy God damn planet with the most beautiful beaches Rodney has ever seen.
I love juxtaposition like this: sometimes it rains on the happiest days of your life, and sometimes things like What Happened happen on planets that would totally screw over your experience of beaches. (Um. Except for the whole surfing thing that we're totally already thinking about because all you have to do is mention surfing and John Sheppard and most of us go to a happy place and don't come out for a while.
*
"There's something wrong," Rodney posits.
Elizabeth raises one eyebrow, glances at where Sheppard is leaning up against a wall to make it light up for him, changing colors from blue to green to some luminous, heartbreaking pale.
"He seems fine to me," she says dryly.
"He's flirting with the drywall!" Rodney argues. "It's a sure sign of some lingering trauma!"
OMG SHEPPARD/ATLANTIS OTP!!!!
I never said I was going to be mature about this.
Elizabeth's eyes go all soft, and before she can suggest something like "Do you want to talk, Rodney?" or "I know it was very difficult for you, too, Rodney, perhaps you need a break from field work, just until Major Sheppard is on his feet again, ," like last time--Rodney does the heroic thing and makes up an incomprehensible science excuse so he can run away.
Two hours later, when he gets back, Sheppard's cheating on the God damned wall with a spinning, circular thing that is playing beautiful, haunting music. Rodney's going to find whoever keeps giving Sheppard unidentified Ancient shit to seduce and beat them to death.
"He's just bored, Rodney," Elizabeth chides him gently.
"He's molesting the city," Rodney sulks.
He doesn't get why nobody else gets that this is wrong, that Major John Sheppard is curling his hands around spindly glass poles and smoothing his thumbs over warm walls and grinning when less than a month ago Rodney watched him almost bleed to death, saying, "It's fine--it's fine."
Elizabeth smiles and puts her hand on Rodney's shoulder. "I think the city likes it."
"Of course the city likes it," Rodney complains. "He's Kirk. Atlantis is the dirty, pouty--"
"Rodney."
"I'm going to find some driftwood," Rodney says suddenly, and stalks off.
*
They'd been in the middle of what Rodney had thought were trade talks and Rodney had been impressing them with his vast and formidable mental resources while Sheppard stared out of one of the generous windows to the beach when everything had gone to hell.
I like that the mission is told in this way: condensed, flashbacked, Rodney remembering but not really wanting to; it's very shortened and only alluded to. You see why I would have thought this was a reaction to a canon event?
The Crellians had been frightened, driven sick by it, and Rodney, before he'd known what they'd do to them, before he'd seen What Happened, had been nearly ill for them--their wild-eyed, unrelenting fear, the broken chaos.
They had not had the graceful tragedy of other worlds culled by the Wraith, they were new to the fold, at the far reach of a spiral galaxy, having lost for the first time three thousand people in one crushing swoop. The echoing absence of bodies still made the streets seem hollow and Teyla had murmured her prayers as Ford had said his. Sheppard had set his mouth in a straight line and looked for stuff to shoot. Rodney thought about prime numbers.
Though Rodney and Sheppard and Ford and Teyla had come with knowledge and offers of friendship the Crellians had said, "No, no, no" and been so frightened and grieved and irrational they'd tried to raze everything.
Later, when it was dark and cold and Rodney had woken up with a screaming headache in the basement of some extremely poorly ventilated building, Sheppard had said:
"Sons of bitches. Shame about those beaches, though."
. . . and another mention because we're still on the beach theme, because it was something beautiful that was perverted and ruined and Rodney has to try and reclaim that for John.
*
Beckett gives him a weird look when Rodney walks into the medical bay.
"All right, I'll bite," Beckett says, half an hour later. There is a small mountain--"It's four splinters, Rodney, stop crying like a wee girl!"--of wood shards in a metal bowl next to Beckett's hand, which is still wielding the evil, hateful tweezers of unending agony and doom.
Black humor is necessary to my continued existence. And probably that of Rodney.
"Well, it couldn't hurt any more than your ham-fisted, snake-oil, un-anaesthetized extraction technique there, buddy!" Rodney snaps, cradling his hand.
He tries not to think about what it must be like when somebody's not saying, "Sorry, I'm trying my best to make this relatively painless, you big fat baby."
"And that's a tragedy and a crime and you should report me to the proper authorities as soon as possible," Beckett says glibly, clearly unconcerned to a degree that makes Rodney want to hit him with his little metal bowl. "Now, are you going to tell me why you have splinters or should I just tell everybody you were having improper relations with a tree?"
"I was doing some carpentry," Rodney scowls. The Atlantis crew is evil. All of them.
"Carpentry," Beckett says flatly.
"I'm making a surfboard," Rodney explains. "Major Sheppard is displaying acute signs of cabin fever--which, thanks for not backing me up on my suggestion to have him under further observation or something since he is totally and obviously going crazy--and I thought I'd do something to stave off the inevitable madness and wailing and gnashing of teeth." Rodney looks at Beckett charitably. "Don't worry, just because you couldn't save him doesn't mean my huge intellect, unparalleled ingenuity, and the shop classes I took in high school to impress women can't salvage something of his broken mind."
Beckett raises his eyebrows. "Rodney, Major Sheppard is fine, and yes you watched him live through something horrible that you shouldn't have had to--"
Rodney stands up really fast. "I have to go make sandpaper now."
Beckett says, "Oh, Lord have mercy," rolling his eyes.
*
Several hours later, Rodney comes to the conclusion that making sandpaper is really hard.
"It's sand and glue and paper!" Rodney shouts, letting Beckett patch up his rubbed-raw palms. "It's absolutely against all reason that it should be so difficult!"
"You're a strange, irritable little man, Rodney McKay," Beckett tells him gently, patting him on the knee. "Now, how about you go to that nice man working as the quartermaster and ask him for some sandpaper."
"We brought sandpaper? To Atlantis?" Rodney asks, stupefied.
"It's the United States military--we bring everything," Sheppard deadpans, walking into the room.
"Yes, well, sandpaper," Rodney says, and then asks, "What are you doing here, anyway?"
"Requisite check-up," Sheppard says, and hops up onto an examining table, nodding hello to Dr. Beckett and dutifully starts to tug up his shirt.
And Rodney only sees the barest suggestion of scars on the Major's stomach before he darts out of the medical center and onto the nearest balcony, gulping in fresh air and saying to himself, "Sandpaper--sandpaper. Quartermaster."
Rodney McKay freaks out better than absolutely anybody in the history of the world.
Rodney's ripped up three of his knuckles smoothing all the sharp edges out of this really crappy approximation of a surfboard he's made when he realizes what he's really trying to do.
It's all been building kind of slowly, what with Rodney being in denial and all, and now we get the BAM!BAM!BAM! of Rodney's freakout, his realization, and then the memory of the actual event.
He's glad he's making this damn thing in his room, because if anybody ever saw him clinging to a phallic-shaped piece of flat wood shaking and muttering, "Major, Major," he'd have to kill himself and then everybody in Atlantis would die without his eminent brilliance.
Rodney is nothing if not a philanthropist.
*
At first, they'd just threatened them, then, they'd started hitting. After that, knives, long cuts and low grooves that had made Rodney's encounter with the Genii look like a playground scrape.
"Don't get jealous now," John had slurred, delirious from blood-loss and cold and God knows what else, "they just had more time with me. I'm sure you would have done the--"
Also, this is the first time in this story that Rodney refers to him as John--he's seeing him not as a soldier, but as a human being and as his friend. Cue freakout.
"Major, shut the fuck up!" Rodney had said, and tried to stem the bleeding with his jacket.
About two days later, Ford had essentially blown up half of the small settlement and started to pour out a large, repeating message to the villagers about why the Atlanteans had started to attack. Ford had chosen spots that were carefully unoccupied, which contained necessities, which exploded with real flair. The villagers were scared, they were pissed--they stormed the jail.
Rodney remembers the way the Marines came and rescued them, composed and respectful and silent, and how Ford fell to his knees and pulled a blanket around Sheppard, who'd been unconscious--passed out--asleep by then, and how he and Rodney had helped carry him to a jumper. Nobody talked on the way home.
Then, Rodney had burned his jacket, with all its dark, telling stains, while Carson was in the infirmary cursing a storm, saying how could anybody do this--how?
I believe that the level of detail in a scene involving sex or violence should be directly proportional to the importance of that scene to the story. The issue in this piece isn't the torture of John; it's Rodney's reaction to the incident. Describing it in any more detail would have shifted the focus. Besides, it's a million times creepier to just show John delirious from blood loss and let us imagine.
*
The thing that pisses Rodney off almost as much as the fact that they were captured and Major Sheppard was tortured is that now John claims he doesn't remember most of it.
In Stargate: Atlantis: The Musical, John Sheppard will have a song titled "Repress, Repress, Repress."
Rodney knows that people can block out traumatic experiences but this is fucking ridiculous, and when John levels that guileless hazel gaze at Rodney's face Rodney feels so completely alone that it swallows him up like the ocean water.
It's selfish and Rodney hates himself more than a little bit when he thinks that he wants somebody to be as miserable about this as he is. But then he sees the scars across John's stomach and he never, never wants John to remember, or to pretend to stop forgetting, how they got there, because there are some things that can never be fixed--not even by Rodney's hands.
Especially not if he keeps ripping them up making this God damn surfboard.
GLORIOUS segue from the internal thoughts to the physical present.
When he finally finishes it and sands it and drags it down the hall, to the right, and down a level to John's room, the look on John's face--wonder, surprise, mischief, excitement--is almost enough to make up for all those embarrassing trips to the infirmary.
"Hey, Rodney," John says, when Rodney's about to leave, with a completely plausible excuse about moronic, hippie scientists and blowing up the labs.
Rodney stops, shifts his weight from one foot to the other, says, "Yes?"
John opens his mouth but closes it, seems to decide something, and then he picks up the surfboard, and starts walking into the hall, all elbows and knees and giant, phallic board, jabbing Rodney in the stomach and then shoving him toward a transporter, with Rodney saying, "Hey! Watch it! Ow! Wait--I have that science team…thing! Major!" Rodney's doing something really undignified that might count as batting at John's big, brown hand on his arm, but he'd never admit to it.
HEE.
Somehow, with a lot of whining and a whole bunch of dragging, they end up in a puddlejumper, toward the south point of the Atlantean mainland.
Where they should end up, obviously, because beaches.
*
Despite threats of sedation, mild physical confrontations and twenty-four hour babysitting, Rodney had persisted on sitting up with John the entire time he was unconscious in the infirmary after they had gotten back to Atlantis. Long after the first tense nights, the whole first week.
Rodney just couldn't shake the shattering thought that every time they had taken John a little less of him came back and eventually they'd open the door and throw down all the little leftover pieces and it wouldn't be enough for him to gather into his palms.
That sentence just completely shatters me.
Everybody kept telling Rodney that everything would be fine now that they were back in Atlantis.
Only, Rodney thinks now, watching John in ripped up beach-bum shorts wiping out in the waves off the coast, maybe it's not about where they are--it's about what they are.
Because they are on the Atlantis mainland, at home, and it is probably the most beautiful day ever, with shockingly blue skies and lazy, fat clouds rolling across the sky and a breeze off the ocean that makes Rodney feel young and crazy and he's still so fucked up.
And it must be insanity that makes him push himself to his feet, to start waving at John, who's just fallen off his damn surfboard again and rush into the water like a suicide girl on a rocky Cape Cod night. But John stops, starts wading up the surf to meet him halfway and when Rodney's feet hit the cold, water-logged sand, sink in between the grains and then the water pools around his ankles, up his calves, soaks his rolled up trousers and John's eyes go wide and worried because Rodney's rushing out to him, running through the water.
If anybody ever asks Rodney anything about this he will deny it with his every breath, but what he actually does that day on the beach is tackle Major John Sheppard into the water and hold him tight, like it was okay to do when they were both dying in that horrible cell.
"Hey, hey," Rodney hears over the roar of the water, over the roar of the sun, over the roar of everything in his head, "hey, it's okay, Rodney. We'll be fine."
Now, I'm not sure if this is supposed to be read as slash or not; I choose to read it as gen, as the best kind of ampersand, because Rodney doesn't have to be in love with John; because if your best friend in the universe, your rock, was hurt like that, like hell you'd be okay.
So there's no moment of catharsis, and Rodney knows now that John remembers, but that he has hidden it away, underneath many stones and dead castles and abandoned houses, the rubble from the broken-up Afghanistan that must still be in John's head. These are things that Rodney knows now, because Rodney has told John that even if John 'doesn't remember,' he can damn well tell Rodney everything he isn't remembering.
John says, "It's not something I discuss," and "Jesus, Rodney, who are you, Heightmeyer?" and "Fucking Christ, Rodney! Get out of my room before I convince the city to turn off your hot water!" and "I'll kill you. I'm serious."
This is the only mention of Heightmeyer in the piece, which is a little odd, since the way Rodney's been reacting (and not in private, either), he probably should have been discussing this with her. Although of course we wouldn't have had the story if that had happened, so I'm willing to pretend that she, like, had TB or was on the mainland or something like that.
Rodney says, "It's not discussing. You're just talking at me," and "I wouldn't be so worried if you didn't look like death warmed over hiding behind a facade of expensive, salon-styled, artfully-tossed hair!" and "That is so petty. That is so petty. Just because I did it once," and "Hah! You wouldn't dare! I'm far too valuable! And don't think I don't know about Elizabeth's crush on me."
Also, I love this dialogue style; a standard back-and-forth format would have thrown the mood of the story, and frankly I like that the reader's given enough credit to make sense of it.
One of the things that I noticed when I finally did see the show was that no, it's not just fanon, John and Rodney really do talk like that with each other. Given the caliber of most SGA authors, I don't know why that would have surprised me. It was exactly what I expected, and I don't think the backward approach I took would have necessarily worked in any other fandom. So, you know, thanks, guys. You're really great and I would give you ice cream if I could.
*
When they go back to Atlantis, hours later, horribly sunburned and still dripping wet, slopping into the gate room, Elizabeth only berates them a little bit for dripping on Ancient consoles. John pouts at her and Rodney makes lame excuses about exploring for the sake of science and Elizabeth's smile is so bright it's nearly blinding.
They're home, Rodney realizes finally, with a thud, John's right: they're going to be fine.
And when he sleeps that night, he's still beneath his blankets, hands sore from carpentry and skin aching from sunburn and he smells like the ocean, and nothing like blood at all.
Ah. It's just such a beautiful, satisfying ending. And the reader is left with the knowledge that no matter what happens, even if really bad stuff goes down, everything will be okay.
The end.
Join me, won't you, although it'll make more sense and probably be less distracting if you read the story first.
author: rageprufrock
disclaimer:
Stargate: Atlantis is property of its creators, its use in this original work of fiction generates no profit and no infringement is intended.
rating: R
summary: Rodney and John are fine.
Ah, good evening, and welcome to the commentary track for rageprufrock's Stargate: Atlantis fic Fine. While the credits roll, I should probably say something about myself.
I first got into SGA fandom late in the summer of 2005, before Season Two started. There are probably a million reasons why it sucked me in, but one of them must be that the ratio of good fanfic to crap is much, much higher than I would have expected--also, there are lovely dedicated reccers and the members of sga_flashfic continually produce wonderful stuff. So there's a lot of very good fic out there, literally at your fingertips.
What was I talking about? Right. The fact that I was so very engrossed in this fandom yet did not see a single episode until last week, midway through December, so almost everything I know about SGA and the characters has been derived from the fanfiction, and I know there must be an actual essay about that waiting to be written.
Fine was one of the first SGA fics I read; probably somewhere in the first five or so, and while I loved it then, every time I reread it I get a little bit more out of it. Which is what should happen with good literature. (Oh noes! you say. She compared a clearly inferior derivative work to Literature With A Capital Ell! To which I say, bugger off. This is my canon.)
I'd call this fic episodic--because of both the length of the piece and the size of the story, containing as it does an entire little plot and not just a character-study snapshot; this could easily be filmed and slotted into Season One and no one would be the wiser.
Pru's good like that; the best authors are. She writes stuff like On the Road that, if I had never heard of the source material, I would have been hard-pressed to say whether her story or Korman's derived from the other. But I digress. My point was that for the longest time I actually did think that the original event that got Rodney so shaken was canon, and only on re-reading it did I realize differently.
Fine
Rodney still shakes himself to sleep at night.
He doesn't understand why Sheppard seems so composed, so easy, so loose-limbed and ordinary--when underneath his ubiquitous cargo pants and black shirts is a network of interlacing scars, lines of raised flesh where knives drew across his skin.
But Rodney knows the laws of physics better than Sheppard, and for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and even if Sheppard's shakes and night terrors and bouts of sobbing and vomiting are going to be diverted to Rodney, hell if he's going to fight the very fucking fabric of reality.
I love Rodney. I love how his arrogance and his sheer force of personality make him a force of nature, how it doesn't even cross his mind that he's having a problem with What Happened, because obviously if it happened to John, John should be the one with the reaction. And how since he believes he can fix everything, he knows he can fix John.
*
The planet had been beautiful and lush and white-beached, and Sheppard had looked at the rolling blue waves with a crushing sort of longing that made Rodney almost want to say, "I'm brilliant enough that given a short description of a surfboard and the most basic understanding of its schematics, I could probably fashion one with my clever, clever hands." But he wasn't, you know, out of his God damn mind or anything, so he hadn't.
Instead, he’d said, "I'm aware that its been too, too long since you've had the opportunity to expose yourself unnecessarily to harmful ultraviolet radiation and swallow sea water--though, hello, we're living on Atlantis--but could we please put a little more focus on finding the Zero Point Module and a little less on staring gape-mouthed at this piddly little ocean?"
And Sheppard had grinned, lazy like his intentional drawl and said, "Look at those breakers."
Rodney runs to italics. John grins. Really, that's the only thing you need to know about their relationship.
*
In the most detached, clinical sense, Rodney understands that he and Sheppard do not feel the same way about What Happened. He thinks about it in all capital letters because if he tries to couch it in any other euphemistic terms the whole thing sounds like weird, voyeuristic, dungeon porn, and he had only been into that for a brief period in the early-nineties.
Also What Happened was not sexy and Rodney throws up Too Fucking Much because of it.
Sheppard seems to think that What Happened is par for the course and carries on with the same casual, crashing grace he always had.
Sheppard is good at repressing. He's good at doing terrible stuff and then blinking and getting on with his life, at least on the outside. It's very military and it's creepy as hell because we really don't know much about him. There's a very intriguing undercurrent of dark!Sheppard in fandom that explores this.
It makes Rodney look at the rest of the military personnel in Atlantis with naked, horrified curiosity, because Rodney thinks that What Happened will never be all right, and that because of What Happened nothing will ever be all right again. He can't help but theorize horrifying, top-secret training practices utilized by the United States Air Force that would make the Wraith lurch. He wants to ask somebody about it but none of the soldiers are talking to him.
"Why are your men all ignoring me?" Rodney whines.
Sheppard is sprawled out in a seat in the control room because Dr. Beckett still has him grounded and he is reading the latest mission briefing from a very excited Ford, who is somewhere boring and Amish--because all developed nations in the Pegasus Galaxy are monastic, evil, or Amish.
. . . and all undeveloped societies have a lot of harvest festivals and want to make the alien visitors have sex.
"Because you're looking at them funny," Sheppard says, distracted.
"What?" Rodney says, high-pitched.
"And because I told them they weren't allowed to hit you on the head. I assume they're all steering clear to avoid temptation."
Later, Teyla and Ford and Zelenka and some Large, Nameless Military Guy--"His name is Benson, Rodney."--radio in to tell mission command that the trip went well, was boring, and in a surprise twist, included visits to monastic and Amish communities.
Rodney doesn't know how Sheppard can laugh and say, "99, Ford--divisible by three!" like he didn't almost die on some filthy floor on a filthy God damn planet with the most beautiful beaches Rodney has ever seen.
I love juxtaposition like this: sometimes it rains on the happiest days of your life, and sometimes things like What Happened happen on planets that would totally screw over your experience of beaches. (Um. Except for the whole surfing thing that we're totally already thinking about because all you have to do is mention surfing and John Sheppard and most of us go to a happy place and don't come out for a while.
*
"There's something wrong," Rodney posits.
Elizabeth raises one eyebrow, glances at where Sheppard is leaning up against a wall to make it light up for him, changing colors from blue to green to some luminous, heartbreaking pale.
"He seems fine to me," she says dryly.
"He's flirting with the drywall!" Rodney argues. "It's a sure sign of some lingering trauma!"
OMG SHEPPARD/ATLANTIS OTP!!!!
I never said I was going to be mature about this.
Elizabeth's eyes go all soft, and before she can suggest something like "Do you want to talk, Rodney?" or "I know it was very difficult for you, too, Rodney, perhaps you need a break from field work, just until Major Sheppard is on his feet again, ," like last time--Rodney does the heroic thing and makes up an incomprehensible science excuse so he can run away.
Two hours later, when he gets back, Sheppard's cheating on the God damned wall with a spinning, circular thing that is playing beautiful, haunting music. Rodney's going to find whoever keeps giving Sheppard unidentified Ancient shit to seduce and beat them to death.
"He's just bored, Rodney," Elizabeth chides him gently.
"He's molesting the city," Rodney sulks.
He doesn't get why nobody else gets that this is wrong, that Major John Sheppard is curling his hands around spindly glass poles and smoothing his thumbs over warm walls and grinning when less than a month ago Rodney watched him almost bleed to death, saying, "It's fine--it's fine."
Elizabeth smiles and puts her hand on Rodney's shoulder. "I think the city likes it."
"Of course the city likes it," Rodney complains. "He's Kirk. Atlantis is the dirty, pouty--"
"Rodney."
"I'm going to find some driftwood," Rodney says suddenly, and stalks off.
*
They'd been in the middle of what Rodney had thought were trade talks and Rodney had been impressing them with his vast and formidable mental resources while Sheppard stared out of one of the generous windows to the beach when everything had gone to hell.
I like that the mission is told in this way: condensed, flashbacked, Rodney remembering but not really wanting to; it's very shortened and only alluded to. You see why I would have thought this was a reaction to a canon event?
The Crellians had been frightened, driven sick by it, and Rodney, before he'd known what they'd do to them, before he'd seen What Happened, had been nearly ill for them--their wild-eyed, unrelenting fear, the broken chaos.
They had not had the graceful tragedy of other worlds culled by the Wraith, they were new to the fold, at the far reach of a spiral galaxy, having lost for the first time three thousand people in one crushing swoop. The echoing absence of bodies still made the streets seem hollow and Teyla had murmured her prayers as Ford had said his. Sheppard had set his mouth in a straight line and looked for stuff to shoot. Rodney thought about prime numbers.
Though Rodney and Sheppard and Ford and Teyla had come with knowledge and offers of friendship the Crellians had said, "No, no, no" and been so frightened and grieved and irrational they'd tried to raze everything.
Later, when it was dark and cold and Rodney had woken up with a screaming headache in the basement of some extremely poorly ventilated building, Sheppard had said:
"Sons of bitches. Shame about those beaches, though."
. . . and another mention because we're still on the beach theme, because it was something beautiful that was perverted and ruined and Rodney has to try and reclaim that for John.
*
Beckett gives him a weird look when Rodney walks into the medical bay.
"All right, I'll bite," Beckett says, half an hour later. There is a small mountain--"It's four splinters, Rodney, stop crying like a wee girl!"--of wood shards in a metal bowl next to Beckett's hand, which is still wielding the evil, hateful tweezers of unending agony and doom.
Black humor is necessary to my continued existence. And probably that of Rodney.
"Well, it couldn't hurt any more than your ham-fisted, snake-oil, un-anaesthetized extraction technique there, buddy!" Rodney snaps, cradling his hand.
He tries not to think about what it must be like when somebody's not saying, "Sorry, I'm trying my best to make this relatively painless, you big fat baby."
"And that's a tragedy and a crime and you should report me to the proper authorities as soon as possible," Beckett says glibly, clearly unconcerned to a degree that makes Rodney want to hit him with his little metal bowl. "Now, are you going to tell me why you have splinters or should I just tell everybody you were having improper relations with a tree?"
"I was doing some carpentry," Rodney scowls. The Atlantis crew is evil. All of them.
"Carpentry," Beckett says flatly.
"I'm making a surfboard," Rodney explains. "Major Sheppard is displaying acute signs of cabin fever--which, thanks for not backing me up on my suggestion to have him under further observation or something since he is totally and obviously going crazy--and I thought I'd do something to stave off the inevitable madness and wailing and gnashing of teeth." Rodney looks at Beckett charitably. "Don't worry, just because you couldn't save him doesn't mean my huge intellect, unparalleled ingenuity, and the shop classes I took in high school to impress women can't salvage something of his broken mind."
Beckett raises his eyebrows. "Rodney, Major Sheppard is fine, and yes you watched him live through something horrible that you shouldn't have had to--"
Rodney stands up really fast. "I have to go make sandpaper now."
Beckett says, "Oh, Lord have mercy," rolling his eyes.
*
Several hours later, Rodney comes to the conclusion that making sandpaper is really hard.
"It's sand and glue and paper!" Rodney shouts, letting Beckett patch up his rubbed-raw palms. "It's absolutely against all reason that it should be so difficult!"
"You're a strange, irritable little man, Rodney McKay," Beckett tells him gently, patting him on the knee. "Now, how about you go to that nice man working as the quartermaster and ask him for some sandpaper."
"We brought sandpaper? To Atlantis?" Rodney asks, stupefied.
"It's the United States military--we bring everything," Sheppard deadpans, walking into the room.
"Yes, well, sandpaper," Rodney says, and then asks, "What are you doing here, anyway?"
"Requisite check-up," Sheppard says, and hops up onto an examining table, nodding hello to Dr. Beckett and dutifully starts to tug up his shirt.
And Rodney only sees the barest suggestion of scars on the Major's stomach before he darts out of the medical center and onto the nearest balcony, gulping in fresh air and saying to himself, "Sandpaper--sandpaper. Quartermaster."
Rodney McKay freaks out better than absolutely anybody in the history of the world.
Rodney's ripped up three of his knuckles smoothing all the sharp edges out of this really crappy approximation of a surfboard he's made when he realizes what he's really trying to do.
It's all been building kind of slowly, what with Rodney being in denial and all, and now we get the BAM!BAM!BAM! of Rodney's freakout, his realization, and then the memory of the actual event.
He's glad he's making this damn thing in his room, because if anybody ever saw him clinging to a phallic-shaped piece of flat wood shaking and muttering, "Major, Major," he'd have to kill himself and then everybody in Atlantis would die without his eminent brilliance.
Rodney is nothing if not a philanthropist.
*
At first, they'd just threatened them, then, they'd started hitting. After that, knives, long cuts and low grooves that had made Rodney's encounter with the Genii look like a playground scrape.
"Don't get jealous now," John had slurred, delirious from blood-loss and cold and God knows what else, "they just had more time with me. I'm sure you would have done the--"
Also, this is the first time in this story that Rodney refers to him as John--he's seeing him not as a soldier, but as a human being and as his friend. Cue freakout.
"Major, shut the fuck up!" Rodney had said, and tried to stem the bleeding with his jacket.
About two days later, Ford had essentially blown up half of the small settlement and started to pour out a large, repeating message to the villagers about why the Atlanteans had started to attack. Ford had chosen spots that were carefully unoccupied, which contained necessities, which exploded with real flair. The villagers were scared, they were pissed--they stormed the jail.
Rodney remembers the way the Marines came and rescued them, composed and respectful and silent, and how Ford fell to his knees and pulled a blanket around Sheppard, who'd been unconscious--passed out--asleep by then, and how he and Rodney had helped carry him to a jumper. Nobody talked on the way home.
Then, Rodney had burned his jacket, with all its dark, telling stains, while Carson was in the infirmary cursing a storm, saying how could anybody do this--how?
I believe that the level of detail in a scene involving sex or violence should be directly proportional to the importance of that scene to the story. The issue in this piece isn't the torture of John; it's Rodney's reaction to the incident. Describing it in any more detail would have shifted the focus. Besides, it's a million times creepier to just show John delirious from blood loss and let us imagine.
*
The thing that pisses Rodney off almost as much as the fact that they were captured and Major Sheppard was tortured is that now John claims he doesn't remember most of it.
In Stargate: Atlantis: The Musical, John Sheppard will have a song titled "Repress, Repress, Repress."
Rodney knows that people can block out traumatic experiences but this is fucking ridiculous, and when John levels that guileless hazel gaze at Rodney's face Rodney feels so completely alone that it swallows him up like the ocean water.
It's selfish and Rodney hates himself more than a little bit when he thinks that he wants somebody to be as miserable about this as he is. But then he sees the scars across John's stomach and he never, never wants John to remember, or to pretend to stop forgetting, how they got there, because there are some things that can never be fixed--not even by Rodney's hands.
Especially not if he keeps ripping them up making this God damn surfboard.
GLORIOUS segue from the internal thoughts to the physical present.
When he finally finishes it and sands it and drags it down the hall, to the right, and down a level to John's room, the look on John's face--wonder, surprise, mischief, excitement--is almost enough to make up for all those embarrassing trips to the infirmary.
"Hey, Rodney," John says, when Rodney's about to leave, with a completely plausible excuse about moronic, hippie scientists and blowing up the labs.
Rodney stops, shifts his weight from one foot to the other, says, "Yes?"
John opens his mouth but closes it, seems to decide something, and then he picks up the surfboard, and starts walking into the hall, all elbows and knees and giant, phallic board, jabbing Rodney in the stomach and then shoving him toward a transporter, with Rodney saying, "Hey! Watch it! Ow! Wait--I have that science team…thing! Major!" Rodney's doing something really undignified that might count as batting at John's big, brown hand on his arm, but he'd never admit to it.
HEE.
Somehow, with a lot of whining and a whole bunch of dragging, they end up in a puddlejumper, toward the south point of the Atlantean mainland.
Where they should end up, obviously, because beaches.
*
Despite threats of sedation, mild physical confrontations and twenty-four hour babysitting, Rodney had persisted on sitting up with John the entire time he was unconscious in the infirmary after they had gotten back to Atlantis. Long after the first tense nights, the whole first week.
Rodney just couldn't shake the shattering thought that every time they had taken John a little less of him came back and eventually they'd open the door and throw down all the little leftover pieces and it wouldn't be enough for him to gather into his palms.
That sentence just completely shatters me.
Everybody kept telling Rodney that everything would be fine now that they were back in Atlantis.
Only, Rodney thinks now, watching John in ripped up beach-bum shorts wiping out in the waves off the coast, maybe it's not about where they are--it's about what they are.
Because they are on the Atlantis mainland, at home, and it is probably the most beautiful day ever, with shockingly blue skies and lazy, fat clouds rolling across the sky and a breeze off the ocean that makes Rodney feel young and crazy and he's still so fucked up.
And it must be insanity that makes him push himself to his feet, to start waving at John, who's just fallen off his damn surfboard again and rush into the water like a suicide girl on a rocky Cape Cod night. But John stops, starts wading up the surf to meet him halfway and when Rodney's feet hit the cold, water-logged sand, sink in between the grains and then the water pools around his ankles, up his calves, soaks his rolled up trousers and John's eyes go wide and worried because Rodney's rushing out to him, running through the water.
If anybody ever asks Rodney anything about this he will deny it with his every breath, but what he actually does that day on the beach is tackle Major John Sheppard into the water and hold him tight, like it was okay to do when they were both dying in that horrible cell.
"Hey, hey," Rodney hears over the roar of the water, over the roar of the sun, over the roar of everything in his head, "hey, it's okay, Rodney. We'll be fine."
Now, I'm not sure if this is supposed to be read as slash or not; I choose to read it as gen, as the best kind of ampersand, because Rodney doesn't have to be in love with John; because if your best friend in the universe, your rock, was hurt like that, like hell you'd be okay.
So there's no moment of catharsis, and Rodney knows now that John remembers, but that he has hidden it away, underneath many stones and dead castles and abandoned houses, the rubble from the broken-up Afghanistan that must still be in John's head. These are things that Rodney knows now, because Rodney has told John that even if John 'doesn't remember,' he can damn well tell Rodney everything he isn't remembering.
John says, "It's not something I discuss," and "Jesus, Rodney, who are you, Heightmeyer?" and "Fucking Christ, Rodney! Get out of my room before I convince the city to turn off your hot water!" and "I'll kill you. I'm serious."
This is the only mention of Heightmeyer in the piece, which is a little odd, since the way Rodney's been reacting (and not in private, either), he probably should have been discussing this with her. Although of course we wouldn't have had the story if that had happened, so I'm willing to pretend that she, like, had TB or was on the mainland or something like that.
Rodney says, "It's not discussing. You're just talking at me," and "I wouldn't be so worried if you didn't look like death warmed over hiding behind a facade of expensive, salon-styled, artfully-tossed hair!" and "That is so petty. That is so petty. Just because I did it once," and "Hah! You wouldn't dare! I'm far too valuable! And don't think I don't know about Elizabeth's crush on me."
Also, I love this dialogue style; a standard back-and-forth format would have thrown the mood of the story, and frankly I like that the reader's given enough credit to make sense of it.
One of the things that I noticed when I finally did see the show was that no, it's not just fanon, John and Rodney really do talk like that with each other. Given the caliber of most SGA authors, I don't know why that would have surprised me. It was exactly what I expected, and I don't think the backward approach I took would have necessarily worked in any other fandom. So, you know, thanks, guys. You're really great and I would give you ice cream if I could.
*
When they go back to Atlantis, hours later, horribly sunburned and still dripping wet, slopping into the gate room, Elizabeth only berates them a little bit for dripping on Ancient consoles. John pouts at her and Rodney makes lame excuses about exploring for the sake of science and Elizabeth's smile is so bright it's nearly blinding.
They're home, Rodney realizes finally, with a thud, John's right: they're going to be fine.
And when he sleeps that night, he's still beneath his blankets, hands sore from carpentry and skin aching from sunburn and he smells like the ocean, and nothing like blood at all.
Ah. It's just such a beautiful, satisfying ending. And the reader is left with the knowledge that no matter what happens, even if really bad stuff goes down, everything will be okay.
The end.