(no subject)
Primum Mobile
(SG:A au, John/Rodney, reel_sga challenge, 2093 words)
Thank you, as ever, to mcee for the wonderful beta. Challenge prompt: The Cross of Lorraine.
***
There was math scrawled on the walls beside his bunk, frantic phrases of numbers and symbols scratched into the rough wood. Other men traded for cigarettes; Rodney traded for pencils, pens, paper. He filed his work away in careful order beneath his mattress.
His equations were beautiful--complex and simple in equal parts. They described an infinitely complex, infinitely simple universe. They defined the edges of Rodney's sanity.
Somewhere in the world, people with labs and colleagues and research assistants were doing really, really good work. Rodney, though, with his flaking walls and nubs of pencils and scraps of paper, was doing great work. He was going to rewrite the fabric of reality by the end of the war. The Neutonian Universe was on its way out and the McKay Universe was taking shape in bits and scraps beneath his fingers.
Then--
Then.
A creak from the bunk above his, a shuddering of the bed frame as the man sleeping there rolled over. The tip of Rodney's pencil stuttered on the page and snapped and just like that, he'd lost it. Theories that, moments before, were knitting themselves euphorically in Rodney's mind began to unravel instead.
With a muttered curse, Rodney pitched the useless remains of the pencil to the floor and tucked his notes back into the space between the bed and the wall before rolling over to go to sleep himself.
The McKay Universe was shaping up to be fundamentally flawed, anyway. No great loss, really.
*
There were fences in every direction but up, so that was the direction John spent most of his time looking towards. He spent long hours each day staring at the sky and longer hours each night dreaming about it. He memorised the infinite shapes of the clouds against infinite shades of blue. He watched birds wing their way across his expanse of sky.
He spent so much time looking up that he could barely recognise his fellow prisoners on those rare occasions that he tilted his chin down and had a look around at the view from ground level. Their faces were so unfamiliar that he might never have seen them before in his life, even though John had been in residence four months, one week, and three days.
Still.
Always, always, in his peripheral vision, there were fences.
It was a kind of defeat--one that had nothing to do with the well-remembered feeling of having his plane shot out from under him--the day John first made unflinching eye contact with the yards of barbed wire that sketched the new boundaries of his world.
*
Rodney's life was full of significant numbers that lent meaning to all the insignificant detritus that filled his days. Rodney loved--loved--his ID number. It was marked, along with his last name, on the breast of his POW-grey shirt.
McKay - 5050.
It was a good number, an elegant number. Not as flashy as some, but graceful and solid. 5050: the sum of all the numbers from one to a hundred. Added in reducing pairs (1 + 100, 2 + 99) all sets equalled 101. Fifty pairs between one and a hundred, multiplied by 101, equalled 5050.
He loved his dorm assignment, too. Men's Dorm 3. Three: prime number, triangular number, Fibonacci number.
There were currently exactly 360 people living in the camp, counting both prisoners and guards, but excluding the population of the associated work camp next door. He didn't count them because he couldn't count them; there were a great many, all very thin and dressed precisely alike. He could never be sure if he were counting each person once or one person four times and seven people not at all, so he left them out of his population calculations altogether.
Three hundred and sixty--the number of degrees in a circle. It was perfect, improbably so, and Rodney lived in fear of the day a new influx of population would arrive and ruin everything.
*
It took John a week to find a piece of wood big enough to suit his purposes, then another week to find someone willing to trade their rare and highly prized pen knife for all the cigarettes John had been rationed since getting to the camp. Folding knives were forbidden to prisoners and, although the guards were inclined towards wilful ignorance on such matters, they were still hard to lay hands on.
Stackhouse--John never had bothered to learn his first name and probably wouldn't know the last if it had not been carefully stitched across the breast of his uniform jacket--looked torn as he handed the dull little blade over. He had probably made all kinds of profit renting the thing out, but John's plans required an unrestricted monopoly on the knife. Feeling glad he'd never started smoking, he passed the mass of cigarettes to the other man. He'd been keeping them in a sock--the only one he had left with no holes in it.
Catching the morose turn of Stackhouse's mouth as he watched his knife disappear into John's pocket, John added, "Keep the sock."
*
Rodney realised, most days, how fortunate he was. He could have been one of the emaciated Eastern European nationals and home-grown political dissenters that were dragged out each day to break large rocks into small rocks and small rocks into pebbles. It was an endless cycle; each night, the piles of gravel were hauled off and each morning a new pile of rocks waited.
Sometimes, Rodney stood at the fence and watched the thin figures in ragged clothing work. They were pared down to spare muscle stretched over too-visible bone. He watched them lose parts of themselves they could scarcely afford, having lost too much already, and thought about how very lucky he was.
Other days, Rodney couldn't see his luck for his misfortune. On those days, he didn't walk the perimeter of the camp, didn't work on his equations, didn't do anything but sit in the shade of the bunkhouse and think about all the things he missed and was missing out on.
*
The little block of wood was taking shape beneath John's fingers--slowly, slowly, in minutes stolen out from beneath the watchful eyes of the patrolling guards. In the shade behind one of the bunkhouses, he chipped and sliced at the wood until rough wings, a lopsided tail, and a stubby little cockpit emerged.
"It's pi."
John started, dropped the knife, and cursed. A vaguely familiar man stood propped against the corner of the dorm building, leaning forward to see over John's shoulder. John hadn't heard him walk up; so much for being careful.
"What?"
The man cocked his head to the side. The fingers of his right hand twitched, started to reach across the space between them, then fluttered back to pick at a loose thread on the hem of his shirt.
He didn't answer John's question, but began to ask, "Can I-- ", and pulled a pen out of his pocket. John didn't move as the other man crouched down and reached out to carefully press a tiny dot of ink between two of the digits in John's ID number.
Sheppard - 3141 became Sheppard - 3.141.
The man--John tossed a look at the tag on his chest, which read McKay-- huffed contentedly and sat back on his heels.
"Pi," he said again, tucking the pen back into his pocket. "The--"
"--ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. I know."
McKay blinked and smiled--or maybe it had just been a twitch of his lips, John couldn't quite tell. He rubbed his fingers fitfully against the pocket into which the pen had disappeared and the resulting rustle of paper was familiar. For weeks, John had been falling asleep to the sound of those fingers against scraps of paper rising from the bunk beneath his own.
"Yes," McKay said, still smiling or twitching or whatever it was his lips were doing beneath the scruff of his beard. "A circle. Exactly."
*
Two was better than one, Rodney was learning, much to his surprise.
Two: the only even prime number. "Fourth Fibonacci number," John added when Rodney mentioned it. "If you count both ones separately, and the zero."
Rodney twisted his fingers in the grass on the ground next to him and nodded and smiled. As John lay on his back and stared up at the sky, Rodney watched the decimal point in his ID number rise and fall with each breath.
*
They made plans in careful whispers at night, over Rodney's numerical description of their small, contained universe. John pored over the notes written in Rodney's chicken-scratch--area of the compound, number of guards, patterns of patrol, all broken into tidy lines of numbers and tables of values--while Rodney leaned over his shoulder to point out this pertinent fact or that minor calculation. John even understood most of it.
There were other pages, numbers and symbols, front, back, and sideways in the margin; complicated, beautiful numbers that were way beyond John's understanding. Rodney sifted them out quickly, out of the piles he handed John and back beneath the mattress before John could ever get a good look at them.
During the day, they paced the yard, watching, measuring. The guards, the inmates, schedules, distances, everything. And when that was done, they paced the yard again, silently, and John watched as Rodney trailed two fingers along the wire of the fence. The little wooden plane, awkward and lopsided and as finished as it would ever be, made a heavy lump in his pocket.
*
The one commodity even more highly valued than the precious nicotine fix of rationed cigarettes was privacy. In that, like everyone else, Rodney and John were paupers.
Close quarters made for close company; men in bunks above and below, lounging in packs against walls, laughing as they shuffled around the yard in great collectives. And the guards, watching everything.
Rodney was going nuts with it. The constant noise, the constant weight of company against his skin.
With a frown, he shifted closer to John, knocking into his shoulder.
*
They lived in shameless opposition to the rest of the camp, stealing space and silence where they could. John watched the tense lines of Rodney's face relax as they walked in concentric circles, expanding out and away from the flagpole at the center of the yard, under the heat of the direct summer sun.
Rodney's nose was sunburnt and peeling, but his hands had let loose the stray threads and hems and pockets that usually bound them and flew free around his head. The peaks of Rodney's voice got some flickers of dull interest from the men lounging in the indolent heat. Mostly, though, John and Rodney were ignored as they baked their heads in the noon sun.
Later, when the other men fled inside, John pressed Rodney back against the splintered wood wall of the dorm, back into the concealing shadows behind the building, and kissed him while the rain plastered their hair to their foreheads and ran in cold streams down their necks.
*
Rodney scratched equations into the taut, sweaty skin of John's back, defining him in temporary red numbers drawn in awkwardly lilting lines across the terrain of muscle and bone.
*
John tasted atmosphere, sharp and clean, where the curve of Rodney's neck met his shoulder. He chased the taste with tongue and teeth across the ridge of Rodney's collarbone, over the sharp arcs of his ribs, then up again.
No one seemed to care, or perhaps they just didn't notice, that the upper bunk was almost always empty these days.
*
Freedom, when it came, was unexpected and nothing like they'd planned.
The planes that swooped low over the camp, dropping bombs that whined as they plummeted through the air, were painted with the Union Jack. Mostly they hit the guard towers.
Sometimes they missed.
John had to wrap both arms around Rodney to keep him from running back into the burning shell of Men's Dorm 3.
"My work", he whispered into the skin of John's arm, wrapped over his shoulder and across his chest. "My work."
John pressed his face into the curve at the back of Rodney's neck and held on.
*
There wasn't, Rodney thought, anything special or nice about the number 1945.
End.
(SG:A au, John/Rodney, reel_sga challenge, 2093 words)
Thank you, as ever, to mcee for the wonderful beta. Challenge prompt: The Cross of Lorraine.
***
There was math scrawled on the walls beside his bunk, frantic phrases of numbers and symbols scratched into the rough wood. Other men traded for cigarettes; Rodney traded for pencils, pens, paper. He filed his work away in careful order beneath his mattress.
His equations were beautiful--complex and simple in equal parts. They described an infinitely complex, infinitely simple universe. They defined the edges of Rodney's sanity.
Somewhere in the world, people with labs and colleagues and research assistants were doing really, really good work. Rodney, though, with his flaking walls and nubs of pencils and scraps of paper, was doing great work. He was going to rewrite the fabric of reality by the end of the war. The Neutonian Universe was on its way out and the McKay Universe was taking shape in bits and scraps beneath his fingers.
Then--
Then.
A creak from the bunk above his, a shuddering of the bed frame as the man sleeping there rolled over. The tip of Rodney's pencil stuttered on the page and snapped and just like that, he'd lost it. Theories that, moments before, were knitting themselves euphorically in Rodney's mind began to unravel instead.
With a muttered curse, Rodney pitched the useless remains of the pencil to the floor and tucked his notes back into the space between the bed and the wall before rolling over to go to sleep himself.
The McKay Universe was shaping up to be fundamentally flawed, anyway. No great loss, really.
*
There were fences in every direction but up, so that was the direction John spent most of his time looking towards. He spent long hours each day staring at the sky and longer hours each night dreaming about it. He memorised the infinite shapes of the clouds against infinite shades of blue. He watched birds wing their way across his expanse of sky.
He spent so much time looking up that he could barely recognise his fellow prisoners on those rare occasions that he tilted his chin down and had a look around at the view from ground level. Their faces were so unfamiliar that he might never have seen them before in his life, even though John had been in residence four months, one week, and three days.
Still.
Always, always, in his peripheral vision, there were fences.
It was a kind of defeat--one that had nothing to do with the well-remembered feeling of having his plane shot out from under him--the day John first made unflinching eye contact with the yards of barbed wire that sketched the new boundaries of his world.
*
Rodney's life was full of significant numbers that lent meaning to all the insignificant detritus that filled his days. Rodney loved--loved--his ID number. It was marked, along with his last name, on the breast of his POW-grey shirt.
McKay - 5050.
It was a good number, an elegant number. Not as flashy as some, but graceful and solid. 5050: the sum of all the numbers from one to a hundred. Added in reducing pairs (1 + 100, 2 + 99) all sets equalled 101. Fifty pairs between one and a hundred, multiplied by 101, equalled 5050.
He loved his dorm assignment, too. Men's Dorm 3. Three: prime number, triangular number, Fibonacci number.
There were currently exactly 360 people living in the camp, counting both prisoners and guards, but excluding the population of the associated work camp next door. He didn't count them because he couldn't count them; there were a great many, all very thin and dressed precisely alike. He could never be sure if he were counting each person once or one person four times and seven people not at all, so he left them out of his population calculations altogether.
Three hundred and sixty--the number of degrees in a circle. It was perfect, improbably so, and Rodney lived in fear of the day a new influx of population would arrive and ruin everything.
*
It took John a week to find a piece of wood big enough to suit his purposes, then another week to find someone willing to trade their rare and highly prized pen knife for all the cigarettes John had been rationed since getting to the camp. Folding knives were forbidden to prisoners and, although the guards were inclined towards wilful ignorance on such matters, they were still hard to lay hands on.
Stackhouse--John never had bothered to learn his first name and probably wouldn't know the last if it had not been carefully stitched across the breast of his uniform jacket--looked torn as he handed the dull little blade over. He had probably made all kinds of profit renting the thing out, but John's plans required an unrestricted monopoly on the knife. Feeling glad he'd never started smoking, he passed the mass of cigarettes to the other man. He'd been keeping them in a sock--the only one he had left with no holes in it.
Catching the morose turn of Stackhouse's mouth as he watched his knife disappear into John's pocket, John added, "Keep the sock."
*
Rodney realised, most days, how fortunate he was. He could have been one of the emaciated Eastern European nationals and home-grown political dissenters that were dragged out each day to break large rocks into small rocks and small rocks into pebbles. It was an endless cycle; each night, the piles of gravel were hauled off and each morning a new pile of rocks waited.
Sometimes, Rodney stood at the fence and watched the thin figures in ragged clothing work. They were pared down to spare muscle stretched over too-visible bone. He watched them lose parts of themselves they could scarcely afford, having lost too much already, and thought about how very lucky he was.
Other days, Rodney couldn't see his luck for his misfortune. On those days, he didn't walk the perimeter of the camp, didn't work on his equations, didn't do anything but sit in the shade of the bunkhouse and think about all the things he missed and was missing out on.
*
The little block of wood was taking shape beneath John's fingers--slowly, slowly, in minutes stolen out from beneath the watchful eyes of the patrolling guards. In the shade behind one of the bunkhouses, he chipped and sliced at the wood until rough wings, a lopsided tail, and a stubby little cockpit emerged.
"It's pi."
John started, dropped the knife, and cursed. A vaguely familiar man stood propped against the corner of the dorm building, leaning forward to see over John's shoulder. John hadn't heard him walk up; so much for being careful.
"What?"
The man cocked his head to the side. The fingers of his right hand twitched, started to reach across the space between them, then fluttered back to pick at a loose thread on the hem of his shirt.
He didn't answer John's question, but began to ask, "Can I-- ", and pulled a pen out of his pocket. John didn't move as the other man crouched down and reached out to carefully press a tiny dot of ink between two of the digits in John's ID number.
Sheppard - 3141 became Sheppard - 3.141.
The man--John tossed a look at the tag on his chest, which read McKay-- huffed contentedly and sat back on his heels.
"Pi," he said again, tucking the pen back into his pocket. "The--"
"--ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. I know."
McKay blinked and smiled--or maybe it had just been a twitch of his lips, John couldn't quite tell. He rubbed his fingers fitfully against the pocket into which the pen had disappeared and the resulting rustle of paper was familiar. For weeks, John had been falling asleep to the sound of those fingers against scraps of paper rising from the bunk beneath his own.
"Yes," McKay said, still smiling or twitching or whatever it was his lips were doing beneath the scruff of his beard. "A circle. Exactly."
*
Two was better than one, Rodney was learning, much to his surprise.
Two: the only even prime number. "Fourth Fibonacci number," John added when Rodney mentioned it. "If you count both ones separately, and the zero."
Rodney twisted his fingers in the grass on the ground next to him and nodded and smiled. As John lay on his back and stared up at the sky, Rodney watched the decimal point in his ID number rise and fall with each breath.
*
They made plans in careful whispers at night, over Rodney's numerical description of their small, contained universe. John pored over the notes written in Rodney's chicken-scratch--area of the compound, number of guards, patterns of patrol, all broken into tidy lines of numbers and tables of values--while Rodney leaned over his shoulder to point out this pertinent fact or that minor calculation. John even understood most of it.
There were other pages, numbers and symbols, front, back, and sideways in the margin; complicated, beautiful numbers that were way beyond John's understanding. Rodney sifted them out quickly, out of the piles he handed John and back beneath the mattress before John could ever get a good look at them.
During the day, they paced the yard, watching, measuring. The guards, the inmates, schedules, distances, everything. And when that was done, they paced the yard again, silently, and John watched as Rodney trailed two fingers along the wire of the fence. The little wooden plane, awkward and lopsided and as finished as it would ever be, made a heavy lump in his pocket.
*
The one commodity even more highly valued than the precious nicotine fix of rationed cigarettes was privacy. In that, like everyone else, Rodney and John were paupers.
Close quarters made for close company; men in bunks above and below, lounging in packs against walls, laughing as they shuffled around the yard in great collectives. And the guards, watching everything.
Rodney was going nuts with it. The constant noise, the constant weight of company against his skin.
With a frown, he shifted closer to John, knocking into his shoulder.
*
They lived in shameless opposition to the rest of the camp, stealing space and silence where they could. John watched the tense lines of Rodney's face relax as they walked in concentric circles, expanding out and away from the flagpole at the center of the yard, under the heat of the direct summer sun.
Rodney's nose was sunburnt and peeling, but his hands had let loose the stray threads and hems and pockets that usually bound them and flew free around his head. The peaks of Rodney's voice got some flickers of dull interest from the men lounging in the indolent heat. Mostly, though, John and Rodney were ignored as they baked their heads in the noon sun.
Later, when the other men fled inside, John pressed Rodney back against the splintered wood wall of the dorm, back into the concealing shadows behind the building, and kissed him while the rain plastered their hair to their foreheads and ran in cold streams down their necks.
*
Rodney scratched equations into the taut, sweaty skin of John's back, defining him in temporary red numbers drawn in awkwardly lilting lines across the terrain of muscle and bone.
*
John tasted atmosphere, sharp and clean, where the curve of Rodney's neck met his shoulder. He chased the taste with tongue and teeth across the ridge of Rodney's collarbone, over the sharp arcs of his ribs, then up again.
No one seemed to care, or perhaps they just didn't notice, that the upper bunk was almost always empty these days.
*
Freedom, when it came, was unexpected and nothing like they'd planned.
The planes that swooped low over the camp, dropping bombs that whined as they plummeted through the air, were painted with the Union Jack. Mostly they hit the guard towers.
Sometimes they missed.
John had to wrap both arms around Rodney to keep him from running back into the burning shell of Men's Dorm 3.
"My work", he whispered into the skin of John's arm, wrapped over his shoulder and across his chest. "My work."
John pressed his face into the curve at the back of Rodney's neck and held on.
*
There wasn't, Rodney thought, anything special or nice about the number 1945.
End.