What, Are Your Fingers Broken? by omgmetoo (phone calls challenge)
“Hey, it's Rodney. Tell me you're not still in debriefing. They grilled me for hours, and didn't even feed me. Honestly, you'd think they'd be trying to protect their investment. Idiots. Call me. (719) 555-5555.”
Rodney hung up and wandered off to the kitchen, the TV blaring faintly in the background, more for noise than anything else, since after two and a half years in Atlantis, the sound of no one else around was a little... disconcerting. But while Pegasus might have had too many people sharing too small a space thanks to the "let's not deplete the power more than necessary principle" and while it certainly had too many "friendly-oh-just-kidding" natives and rabid nanite-men and life-sucking space vampires and new and alarming ways of inducing anaphylactic shock in the unwary, the galaxy had, at least, offered a blessed lack of bureaucrats. At least until recently, he thought, digging into the half-full bag of Cheetos left over from his last stint at home and, he decided after a pensive test crunch, not yet inedibly stale.
As far as he was concerned, bureaucrats basically existed to take uncomfortable truths and reduce them into palatable pap for the masses by injecting a massive dose of the passive voice. In academia, Rodney had simply rolled his eyes and kept on doing whatever the hell he pleased, working on the theory that if they wanted his grant money, someone else could fill in the damn block print. Once he'd filled out the eighteen quadrillion stacks of paper required to let him in to the SGC's little secret circle - and he was so sure that two sixteen-hour days of paperwork was incredibly unnecessary in a day and age where a child could hack that information out of any government database and that the strain on his wrist had left him permanently at risk for carpal tunnel - once the initial paperwork had been done, he'd been far enough from in-charge that anything else had been someone else's problem. Or he'd been in Siberia, and no one cared.
In Atlantis, Sheppard had been in charge of the mission reports, and Rodney'd managed to pawn the rest of it off on Zelenka, at the cost of a pound of carefully hoarded coffee, which hurt, a lot, but was unquestionably worth it since the normally sly little Czech had forgotten to set a time limit on the trade. Rodney chalked it up to the mood-altering qualities of 100% pure Kona. Coffee actually sounded pretty appealing right now. Fortunately, the Tanzania Peaberry was still hidden under the bag of curly fries in the back of the freezer, and was a nicely acceptable solution, if not the French Roast he'd been hoping for and where was he going to go at one AM for something better. He spooned in twice the recommended amount of grounds, halved the water, grabbed the Cheetos, and went back to the couch and Mystery Science 3000 while the coffee brewed.
Clearly it was only that precious liquid that kept Rodney sane, since the longer he stayed in Atlantis and the more of the database they'd managed to comb through - usually thanks to some imminent crisis set in motion by the Ancients' utter failure to even mention the potentially harmful results of their experiments, because God, what did they have against basic warning signage or the occasional "do not open or evil creatures will escape and eat your power source" picture - the longer he stayed, the more Rodney was becoming convinced that the Ancients had taken ethically questionable paper-pushing to a whole new level. Fortunately for Rodney, the Ancients might have been bureaucrats ten thousand years ago, but until, well, now, it hadn't been as if he had to put up with them. Woolsey was probably in heaven.
The fact that Elizabeth was - had been, he grimaced - in charge had helped, he thought. Most diplomats anyone had ever allowed Rodney to get close enough to meet before the issuance of the inevitable restraining order seemed to have an unreasoning insistence on ridiculous protocols designed, he swore, mostly to make the uninitiated look like socially retarded orangutans for the amusement of the purportedly higher-level primates in the know. Something beeped, startling the hell out of him, and he glared at his phone and prepared a diatribe for Elizabeth about returning phone calls at ungodly hours when he was either asleep or being a genius about something and should not, either way, be disturbed, until he realized it was the coffee maker and went off to find a clean mug.
Elizabeth, at least, had the good sense to only insist on rules - or the following of rules, anyway - when she had a good reason for it, by which Rodney meant something a little more intelligent than the "because they told us to" on which most modern bureaucracy seemed to thrive. So when she talked, he tended to listen. Mostly. At least more than he would to someone else, except maybe Sheppard, but Sheppard's SOP was basically to ignore the rules in crisis situations and even when things were quiet he still managed to pawn most of the paperwork off on Lorne, and really it was a marvel how Sheppard had survived in the military at all since the man's hair -alone- constituted a perpetual and flagrant breach of regulation, so really, the question never came up in that neck of the woods, unless Elizabeth was calling them both out together. And ever since the horrible mind-exploding nano-virus incident, Rodney had noticed that when Elizabeth talked about rules, it wasn't just him paying more-than-perfunctory attention, even if he and/or Sheppard didn't really like what she was saying.
Of course - he thought as he settled back on the couch with the mug, flipping channels for something a little less insane than Boa v. Python because really, he didn’t need to herniate something swearing at the special effects - of course, that was probably why Elizabeth had still been stuck in her debriefing when he and Carson and Sheppard had all staggered out of their individual sessions, all of them looking exhausted and uncertain, with a little "please-God-I'll-tell-you-anything-just-don't-take-my-thumbnails" around the edges. They’d waited around for her for awhile, just sort of generally regrouping and not really meeting each other’s eyes, but she hadn’t shown, and then Landry had marched up with a package in his hands for Sheppard that turned out to be a toy plane from O’Neill and they went off to find Sheppard’s new space. They left Rodney and Carson, bickering relatively amicably about nothing much, until some short, timid, wispy individual had interfered and offered, with a stammer, to show Carson his new infirmary and Carson, the soft touch, had agreed if only to spare the peon any further emotional strain. That left Rodney, destined for Area 51 in the next few days, staring at cinderblock walls until he decided the hell with it, he’d just leave her a phone message later, and went requisition transportation back to his apartment, by which he really meant, make someone’s life intentional hell until they got desperate enough to let him out of there for the night.
He hadn’t done too badly, either, he thought, glancing out the window into the parking lot. Of course, Woolsey would have kittens when he found out that Rodney’d cowed the staff sergeant in charge of the motor pool into giving him one of the fully appointed sedans reserved for senior visiting diplomats. But Woolsey wasn’t here, Rodney thought with a not-exactly-petulant shrug, and besides, that’s what they got for putting the easily bludgeoned in positions of influence - which was also how he’d ended up with the cell phone so fast. Whatever. The kid would recover. And if he didn’t, he was in the wrong career anyway, and Rodney’d just done him a major favor. It wasn’t like he’d made him cry. Much.
Speaking of felines and blunt force, the sun was up, so it was probably late enough in the day to go over and force his neighbor to hand the cat back over. Although his fingers were orange, and he was pretty sure that coffee-stained boxers weren’t the best for making a forceful impression, so maybe he should shower first. Rodney stood up with a sigh and went to start the day, leaving the empty mug next to his phone, which was hiding out among the coffee rings on the side table. He’d grab it and check his messages again before he left the house.
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"Hey, Elizabeth. This is your number, right? I mean, I know it's the number the government has for you, because their personnel files are woefully poorly protected, I mean, I'm horrified to think that anyone could get to my information so easily. Being a genius earns you a lot of enemies, and anyone who had it out for me could just read the file and know exactly where to… *beep*"
"Hi, me again, sorry - you really need a machine with a longer tape. Anyway, I'm leaving tomorrow for Nevada. Call me. (fake number)"
Rodney scowled down at his phone. Elizabeth’s apparent inability to pick up a phone was already irritating, and was rapidly progressing into the land of hacking phone company records to track outgoing calls, just to make sure the ridiculously antiquated systems at the SGC actually had the right phone numbers. Hard to trust a program so old the base coding was in C++. He flopped backwards onto the bed. A stack of pretty-much-clean and basically-folded t-shirts toppled onto his face and he shoved them onto the floor to join the rest of the detritus. He’d deal with it tonight - which meant basically shoving it all haphazardly into a bag before he walked out the door, because who cared about t-shirts? The important stuff had already gone - he’d boxed up the DVDs and books and random pieces of computer hardware and shipped it off with his lab equipment, since, hello, temperature control? Some of those Doctor Who episodes couldn’t be had for love or money. The coffee - the good stuff, bought in vast, vacuum-sealed quantities - was coming with him on the plane. Rodney had a feeling that the wilds of Area 51 would prove just as hostile to a regular supply of quality caffeine as Atlantis.
In Atlantis, at least, they’d had the jumpers, and regular supply trips from the Daedalus with personal shipments. The thought was just an additional aggravation. What were they thinking, giving the ‘jumper project to Dr. Lee? That mousey-haired, glasses-wearing cretin didn’t have the faintest idea of their capabilities - after two and a half years they’d be starting the project over from scratch, and wasn’t that just a ridiculous waste of time. Even Carter had agreed, for crying out loud.
But no, they had his notes, and they’d take it from there, and they’d rather have the jumper near the gate for test flights. He rolled over and buried his face in the pillow with a groan. There were so many things wrong with that statement he hardly knew where to start. Because as if Bill Lee was ever going to voluntarily pick up someone else’s notes when he could screw things up perfectly well on his own, the arrogant, project-stealing, self-aggrandizing little… little… gnome. Rodney didn’t even play Warcraft, not really, except for one misguided experience in Siberia when that really hot chemist had talked him into playing. He caved, but with huge misgivings, mostly because he couldn’t be bothered to put up with the idiocy of real people and they only acted dumber when they thought they were hidden behind pixels, and just a little thanks to an early traumatic RPG experience in which he’d hacked a game only to find out that the allegedly svelte, blonde elf on whom he’d had a text-based crush was in fact a large, greasy man named Dexter. The game in Siberia had pretty worked out as predicted: over dinner, Rodney casually mentioned to Dr. Ivanova that her online "team members" were idiots and the game was obviously some kind of haven for the mentally and socially backwards of the world; she promptly dumped him; and he never logged on again, which, for Rodney, was almost worth the related decline in sexual activity. Still, he knew enough to find it a sign of Lee’s complete lack of utility that the man was only a level 75 Mage despite snooping his way into the beta of the expansion pack. And who used the LOTR Elven name generator to name a gnome? What a cretin.
Furthermore, he thought, shifting around to find the comfortable spot on the mattress, who thought it was a brilliant idea to take a completely untested jumper that no one knew how to use and fly it through the gate on the first try? Ok, yes, that was pretty much what they’d done in Atlantis, but in Atlantis they’d had multiple jumpers and were cut off from Earth in an underwater city with failing shields, so it’s not like they’d had a lot of time and/or options. If taking the jumper through the gate for its initial flights wasn’t the plan, Rodney didn’t even want to know how they thought flying a puddle jumper through Colorado Springs was going to maintain the top-secret nature of the SGC. It’s not like everyone who flew the thing instinctively understood how to fly the thing in a straight line, let alone raise and lower the cloak. Sure, they had Sheppard, but at dinner with Carson and Rodney and Zelenka, who was about to leave for Prague before taking up a research post at some university, Sheppard had told them he’d been assigned an off-world team, and wasn’t being allowed near the jumper project, which was just a phenomenal waste of resources, and Rodney knew all about that kind of nonsense. He’d said as much to Sheppard.
“Not my call, McKay,” was all he’d said, and shrugged. Rodney had glared at him, ready to launch into a diatribe about the stupid tendency of certain members of the U.S. military to follow orders without at least thinking about them first. In a rare moment of discretion, arriving via a swift kick to the knee, c/o Zelenka, Rodney’d managed to cut himself off before he opened his mouth: Sheppard’s mouth was smiling, but his jaw was tight and his eyes had gone flat. Rodney thought of Sumner, and of Everett, and of half-overhead conversations between Sheppard and Teyla on the planet of the evil, mind-altering Wraith EM device about a Captain Holland, and of the look on Sheppard’s face every single time he took control of a jumper. He wondered, not for the first time, what it was about military institutions that decided to stick someone like Sheppard underground and then turned around and claimed innocence when the inevitable occurred, leaving the man himself to shoulder the blame. Rodney wasn’t emotionally gifted, but nor was he blind, and he’d wondered briefly just how much more Sheppard would willingly take. By then, however, the conversation had shifted to other topics and he let the thought go, distracted by the need to explain to Zelenka about the proper care and feeding - by which Rodney meant sleep deprivation, psychological abuse, and over-caffeination - of new lab assistants.
He hadn’t forgotten about it, though - just sort of shunted it off to one side with the rest of the ideas he put aside to think about “later” - which, apparently, had been meant “today”. It had been part of the reason he’d been calling Elizabeth in the first place - to see if he could argue her into dropping a word in O’Neill’s ear - a far from purely philanthropic gesture, because if they could get Sheppard in a jumper, Sheppard could convince the brass that Rodney needed to be there too, not stuck in the wilds of Nevada. Not that he’d heard back from Elizabeth yet, which is why he’d hacked the phone records again, to double-check the number, but her recording was starting to irk him. It wasn’t as if he could just leave a message saying “Rodney here. I think Sheppard’s about to crack, and couldn’t you just convince O’Neill to had him - and me - the jumper project?” Elizabeth, at least, had learned how to manage Sheppard - or the two of them had managed each other. Rodney wasn’t really sure. He did know that Sheppard never walled himself off to contain his opinions around Elizabeth, even if he disagreed with her, and that Elizabeth relied on the perpetual-motion-machine that was Lt. Col. John Sheppard to keep her natural caution from becoming stagnation. While the observation might’ve astounded the not inconsiderable number of people who thought Rodney the emotionally stunted stepchild of the Wicked Witch of the West, again, not blind. It was a product of basic Newtonian physics - actions and reactions - and Rodney had realized long ago the value of a little reconnaissance in manipulating the hell out of funding and tenure committees, even if the information wasn’t wielded with, say, finesse.
Except. Rodney sat up, startled. Except that Elizabeth had come away from her last talk with O’Neill in Atlantis looking a lot like Sheppard had looked over dinner the night before. She hadn’t looked like that when he and Sheppard had been waiting in there with her - then she’d been mad as hell, focused, planning arguments and lines of attack in her head while he and Sheppard bickered. Afterwards, though - she'd looked... different, was the only way he could describe it, and had said little. He’d only seen her a few times, and briefly at that, so really, who knew. Still, he thought in frustration, feeling like he was missing a piece of something important, he wished he could remember more clearly, but there hadn’t been much time to talk, between and running around trying to make sure this so-called Captain Helia didn’t screw up all the work they’d done getting the city running and plowing through the labs trying to smuggle a few more bits and pieces out past the watchful glares of her putative crew and packing… and packing!
Rodney stared at the clock on the nightstand and scrambled off the bed, tripping over the t-shirts, which, after unknotting them from his ankles, he started to throw into his bag. He only had a few more hours before the SGC sent a car to take him to the airport, and he still had to go terrorize the new tenant next door into telling him where the former resident had moved to. Not that he held anything against the new woman, although really, people should not be allowed to answer the door in a pink robe and blue curlers and a green facemask, even if it was 6 AM, because seriously, he could’ve had a heart attack, particularly because she was not the person who had lived there before, and more importantly, who had apparently absconded with his cat without leaving any contact information. His (new) neighbor had scowled at him, told him off for yelling (and he so did not “shriek like a girl”), and handed him a note from his (catnapping) former neighbor. When Rodney had started to remonstrate, the new (accomplice) neighbor had shut the door in his face, and for the last three days, refused to answer. Elizabeth, Sheppard, and the rest of it could wait. He had only three hours to make sure he had everything for the plane and then cow the ogre next door into revealing enough information to allow him to mount a remote rescue operation. Rodney threw the last of the clothes in the bag and went to check that he hadn’t forgotten to pack the coffee.
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"Um, Elizabeth, hi. It's Rodney. McKay. Rodney McKay. Not that you probably know a lot of Rodneys or anything, so...anyway, Colonel Sheppard and Carson and I are getting together for lunch on Tuesday, and you should come. Let me know - I'm at (719) 555-5555."
Rodney dropped his head down onto the desk - which is why when the Barbie currently employed as his secretary poked her vacuous, wide-eyed, face around the barely-open door, Rodney was sitting back in his Aeron chair holding his forehead and running through the warning signs of concussion. “Doctor McKay?” she quavered, “Is everything all right? Only, I thought I heard….” He grimaced at her, and she shrunk back behind the shelter of the door.
“It’s fine - I’m fine. Go put your daddy’s liberal arts degree to work and get me an ice pack.” He scowled, and shouted to her fleeing back, “And a cup of coffee. MY coffee, not the god awful break room sludge like you pawned off on me last time!” Rodney sighed, sat forward, and scrubbed at his eyes. This was not good.
Last week, fed up with the most recent displays of spectacular insanity perpetrated by his staff, he’d locked himself in his office and spent the day calming himself down by testing the security perimeters on as many different secure systems as he could find. There was something pretty Zen-like about the exercise, and usually, it worked pretty quickly. Last week had been a series of near-disasters, culminating in Majurek’s attempt to blow them all through the wrong end of a black hole, so he ran out of his normal targets well before he ran out of steam. Which is how Rodney found himself trying to break into things like Sheppard’s email account and Elizabeth’s voicemail account. To his credit, Sheppard had installed some pretty tight protocols, even though Rodney’d broken them in the end, but it meant Rodney was letting Sheppard off the hook for the snarky “it’s only cool if the target doesn’t know it was you” email that came moments after he’d gotten through.
Elizabeth’s voicemail was another story. Rodney had started off by sending her an irate email about proper security and protection of top secret information. He’d still been poking around the system as he drafted his screed and revised it for proper emphasis, and had stopped mid-participle when he realized that she hadn’t even -checked- her messages for what, weeks? He’d already hacked her email, so he knew that she hadn’t been checking that, but he’d chalked it up to meetings and conferences and consultations and whatnot. Plus, it’s not like she hadn’t been in the habit of not checking email for stretches of time in Atlantis - they all had, because, hey, they all had radios and talked constantly and also, crazy space vampires vs. the latest “a priest, a nun, and a monkey” forward? Easy victory for the life-sucking monsters. They might be back on Earth, but some old habits came back slower than others. They did come back, though, and there was a lot Rodney missed about Earth and was happy to reclaim when he wasn’t trying to keep Area 51 from finding new ways to threaten humankind. He hadn’t thought about whether it was the same way for everybody.
Not that he hadn’t found Elizabeth’s complete failure to return phone calls a little weird, but he’d figured everybody had their own cat-stealing ex-neighbor to stalk. Or something like that, anyway - plus a new job and new morons and new protocols to ignore or at least manipulate, so he’s just figured she was busy and hadn’t spent a lot of time dwelling. His interest had been piqued, though, and he’d started to shuffle through the voice messages - and then, when a disturbing pattern emerged, he pulled up her email, purely for the sake of cross-correlation. Elizabeth wasn’t in meetings. She wasn’t consulting. If Sheppard hadn’t mentioned that he’d run into her by total chance at the Chinese take-out, Rodney would’ve called it even odds that she even existed. And that was just weird, in a way that Rodney couldn’t quite describe and that made him sad and worried and just a little angry, because Jesus, it wasn’t like the rest of them had had to transition back as well, and where did she get off that it was ok for her to go and hide when the rest of them had to get up and go to whatever passed for work that day? That just made it worse though, didn’t it, he realized. Carson, Sheppard, Rodney - they all had positions they could fill, roles they could play, even if they weren’t quite the same, they were close enough to get by, some of the time. What the hell would Elizabeth be now, if she didn’t have Atlantis?
Faced with questions he was, for once, not qualified to answer, Rodney took the only possible avenue he could think of. He called Carson. Which, he quickly came to realize, was an incredible, incredible mistake. The man might be the most touchy-feely of the bunch, but he was also an over-reactive worrywart with no sense of perspective and who couldn’t let anyone get a word in edgewise. (“Dear God, Rodney, you hacked her voice mail? Does she know?” “No, Carson, of course she doesn’t know, because I haven’t told her, and you won’t either, and that is so not the point here!”) After forty-five minutes of the verbal equivalent of blunt trauma, Rodney thought he’d managed to get Carson to understand (“Rodney, I’m not Heightmeyer, but… yes, I’ll see what I can find out.”), and he’d hung up the phone, exhausted.
All of which meant that he’d started this week just as tired as he’d finished the last, and even coffee wasn’t helping. This week, frankly, was even worse, because he was trying to push things into some semblance of sanity before he left for Colorado, so that he didn’t actually have to go back in time and literally reinvent the wheel because some buffoon got the input parameters wrong on the time-dilation field in Bay Eight. The door creaked open and he groaned as Majurek crept in. He’d worry about Elizabeth later. Right now he had to get through this “negative evaluation” without throwing pencils at the man point-first. HR had made him promise.
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Rodney wasn’t sure he was ever going to get used to flying in a regular plane again. Everything felt wrong. Without the inertial dampeners he was so accustomed to on the ‘jumpers, the plane felt like it was going to shake apart during takeoff. He had gripped the armrests so hard his knuckles turned white, muttering about commercial pilots who were only flying this jet because they were too damn blind to fly real jets and how he was too young to die. Rodney realized later that his muttering might have been something more along the lines of really loud bitching when one of the flight attendants (who looked disturbingly like Cadman and was therefore already a little scary) leaned over him with a saccharine smile on her face and death in her eyes (oh yeah, just like Cadman), and murmured that both of the pilots of this jet had flown Tomcats for the Navy for decades before retiring, and maybe he’d like to keep his commentary to himself during landing? Biting back a snide comment he’d heard Sheppard make once about Navy pilots, Rodney just rolled his eyes and flipped open his laptop, silently fuming about how unfair it was that Nobels weren’t awarded posthumously, the way his life was going.
After another near-death experience upon landing (seriously, they do not award them posthumously, people!), Rodney barreled past the scary flight attendant, through the baggage claim and out into the crisp Colorado air. Of course, crisp Colorado air meant lovely pine allergies, but whatever. He was just glad to get out of that godforsaken desert for a few days, allergens or no. All the scientists at Area 51 were idiots, as usual, and whenever he left the lab to go to his hovel of an apartment (because all the money in the world couldn’t buy decent housing in that hellhole), he had to deal with all the nutjobs in their tinfoil hats. Every day, he fought the desire to roll down his car window and shout “It’s not the little green men you should be worried about - they’re on our side! It’s the goddamn space vampires that should be keeping you up nights!” God, If the Asgards ever saw that fake alien autopsy crap, well, Rodney didn’t want to be around for the aftermath. Pants or no pants, Hermiod would be pissed.
Glancing around, Rodney saw Carson striding toward him, grinning. Looking past Carson, he could see Sheppard leaning against the car like some kind of aviator-wearing James Dean wannabe, and he felt the corners of his mouth tugging up.
“Colonel, I was kind of hoping being back at SGC, you might start, oh, I don’t know, standing like you don’t have a slinky for a spine for once?” Rodney shouted over Carson’s shoulder. “Hey, Carson. Still doing that voodoo that you do so well?”
Carson wrapped Rodney up in a bear hug, clapping him hard on the back.
“Not breathing! Are you trying to kill me?”
“Aye, I missed you too, Rodney.”
“Hey, are we gonna eat sometime today?” Sheppard called out, jangling the keys to the SGC’s government-issue Taurus.
“Oh, food! Yes, yes, let’s go,” Rodney slapped Sheppard on the shoulder and flopped into the shotgun seat before Carson could get back to the car. Sheppard drives, he sit shotgun. Different galaxy, same shotgun rules.
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“I don’t know, I kinda miss the Pegasus food.”
“Colonel, you have got to be kidding me. Nothing was the right color, everything tasted kinda weird, and there was no coffee, and no chocolate. I practically lived on these things,” Rodney mumbled around a mouthful of chocolate peanut butter PowerBar. They really weren’t that great, but he’d gotten used to them and now he couldn’t seem to give them up.
“Didn’t seem to slow you down much in the mess, Rodney,” Sheppard smirked as he whipped around another car. Rodney didn’t even know Tauruses could go that fast, and wondered feverishly (between frantic grabs for the door handle) if Sheppard had modified it somehow after picking it up from the motor pool.
“Oh, very funny, Colonel. It was food. I’m not picky, but I do have preferences, and I prefer the obviously superior Earth foods. Plus, here I know what all the citrus looks like.”
“You know what I keep doing?” piped up Carson from the back. “I’ve run out of gas a couple of times because I keep forgetting to fill up the car.”
“Me too. Can I tell you how totally embarrassing it was to have to call one of my completely incompetent lab assistants and make them bring me a can of gas? I spent an hour in the damn desert, and all of the weirdos around the lab site kept trying to talk to me,” Rodney groused.
“Aw, Rodney, did you get a sunburn? I bet you looked like a grumpy lobster.”
“Colonel, it is not funny. I’m probably going to get skin cancer now, because your stupid government won’t buy fuel-efficient vehicles.” God, that had been a miserable week. He had been completely sunburned, and it might have manifested itself in a slightly less-than-usually affable demeanor toward his staff. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to have the appropriate level of respect for the genius that kept them from blowing themselves up in his shiny new lab. He kept discovering salt in his coffee and all of the markers missing from his lab’s whiteboard until the sunburn finally peeled off and his attitude improved. They were like children, honestly. Really stupid, overpaid children. He should introduce them to the midgets from Planet KidKill and see if they could do a repeat of their patented Zelenka full-face-and-hair makeover.
“…thank you, Colonel, right here is fine.” Carson hopped out of the car and jogged into an apartment complex Rodney didn’t recognize.
“Hey, where’s he going?” Rodney craned his neck to see where the doctor had disappeared to.
“Dunno, said he needed to check on something.”
“Oh.” Rodney leaned back in his seat. It was nice to just be able to hang out with Sheppard again. He hadn’t been lonely at Area 51, exactly, but he meant it when he said he missed certain people. While he was working, he was way too wrapped up in his projects to notice that no one was bothering him for answers all the time; if he missed anyone during work hours, it was Zelenka, even though they emailed a few times a week. The nights were worse. Talking to Sheppard on the phone was all well and good, but it didn’t replace Team Night, or sitting with Sheppard and Teyla and Ronon at meals.
“So,” Rodney heard himself saying, “how’s your new team?” Apparently he’d turned into a masochist; like it wasn’t hard enough knowing abstractly that you’d been replaced.
“Eh. It’s not the old team,” Sheppard shrugged.
“Yeah?” Unreasonably cheered by that, Rodney pressed on. “How’s that?”
“Well, I don’t really know any of them. I’m the best diplomat on the team - “ (Rodney snorted at that; it was a wonder the SGC hadn’t been traded for magic beans, if Sheppard was their negotiator) “- and our scientist keeps getting in trouble and getting hurt.” Sheppard grinned, and looked pointedly at Rodney over his aviators.
“Yes, well, not everyone is as eminently suited to field work as I am,” Rodney conceded, not even bothering to hide a grin of his own as he turned to watch Carson come back from wherever he’d gone with…
…Elizabeth. Oh.
Jogging down the stairs after Carson, she looked fragile somehow, and sad, even as she smiled and waved at Rodney and Sheppard. That was something she and Sheppard shared; that infuriating ability to almost hide what they were really feeling. Enough so Rodney couldn’t actually say anything about it to them, but not enough that he didn’t worry.
“Huh. Didn’t expect to see her.” Rodney vaguely heard Sheppard talking beside him, but he was too busy deciding which gut reaction to go with to pay much attention. He was worried about the hesitation he could see behind her smile. He was furious that she’d blown him off for six weeks. He was jealous that she’d obviously talked to Carson, but not him. Since, unlike Elizabeth and Sheppard, his face hid precisely nothing and he knew it, he covered by scrambling out of the passenger seat and offering it to Elizabeth.
“Hello, Rodney! It’s good to see you. I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner, but I’ve just been so busy.” Elizabeth kissed Rodney’s cheek quickly and ducked into the car before he could respond. Well, that just added "confusion about being lied to" to the quagmire roiling around in his gut. He'd know if she'd taken a new job; she wasn't busy at all. Rodney realized with some horror that he wasn’t really that hungry anymore.
The entire fifteen-minute trip to the restaurant passed with Rodney staring at the back of Elizabeth’s head and trying to get his composure (and his appetite) back, Sheppard recklessly endangering all of their lives with his maniac driving (Jesus, who taught him to drive, Mario Andretti?), and Carson yammering on at Elizabeth about whatever witch doctor crap he was working on this week at the SGC.
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Walking into the restaurant was awkward. Rodney ended up walking with Elizabeth, and discovered that, after six weeks of trying to talk to her, he suddenly couldn’t think of a thing to say besides “What, are your fingers broken?” Since he was half-afraid that even saying the wrong something nice might break her like a china doll, he decided that discretion was the better part of valor and spent the walk into the restaurant staring at his shoes.
Thankfully, Sheppard had casually commented as they were seated that Kavanaugh seemed to be doing really well at his new post at CalTech, and that allowed Rodney to start off into a rant the likes of which Colorado Springs had not seen since…well, probably since the last time he was in town, honestly. In any case, the ice had been broken, and dinner was mostly spent catching up on the gossip about other ex-pats and their current activities.
What Rodney didn’t say during dinner was how much he missed Atlantis. He missed it so much he felt like he would turn inside out with it sometimes. Being with Carson, Sheppard, and Elizabeth was both better and worse; it was like another hit of a drug he knew he had to wean himself off of. He knew that he felt great tonight - everything was laughter and fun and reminiscing - but tomorrow he’d wake up more miserable than he’d been before he left Nevada.
Rodney felt like none of his work mattered to anyone anymore, not really. He was pretty sure Elizabeth felt the same, but magnified by a factor of 10, but he had no idea how to tell her that she wasn’t alone in feeling so, well, alone. Out-of-his-depth was not somewhere Rodney liked to be, so he stuck to what he knew. He bitched about work, laughed at Sheppard’s jokes and Carson’s embarrassment at them, and ate. And watched Elizabeth.
They had just finished discussing Cadman and Carson and the kiss-which-shall-not-be-discussed (Rodney almost lost his appetite just thinking about it) when Elizabeth started to excuse herself. Rodney felt a desperate desire to jump up and tie her to the chair so she couldn’t run away again - oh, hey, homing device, not a bad idea - when all of their phones started ringing at once. Which was when, of course, life suddenly got interesting again.
Rodney hung up and wandered off to the kitchen, the TV blaring faintly in the background, more for noise than anything else, since after two and a half years in Atlantis, the sound of no one else around was a little... disconcerting. But while Pegasus might have had too many people sharing too small a space thanks to the "let's not deplete the power more than necessary principle" and while it certainly had too many "friendly-oh-just-kidding" natives and rabid nanite-men and life-sucking space vampires and new and alarming ways of inducing anaphylactic shock in the unwary, the galaxy had, at least, offered a blessed lack of bureaucrats. At least until recently, he thought, digging into the half-full bag of Cheetos left over from his last stint at home and, he decided after a pensive test crunch, not yet inedibly stale.
As far as he was concerned, bureaucrats basically existed to take uncomfortable truths and reduce them into palatable pap for the masses by injecting a massive dose of the passive voice. In academia, Rodney had simply rolled his eyes and kept on doing whatever the hell he pleased, working on the theory that if they wanted his grant money, someone else could fill in the damn block print. Once he'd filled out the eighteen quadrillion stacks of paper required to let him in to the SGC's little secret circle - and he was so sure that two sixteen-hour days of paperwork was incredibly unnecessary in a day and age where a child could hack that information out of any government database and that the strain on his wrist had left him permanently at risk for carpal tunnel - once the initial paperwork had been done, he'd been far enough from in-charge that anything else had been someone else's problem. Or he'd been in Siberia, and no one cared.
In Atlantis, Sheppard had been in charge of the mission reports, and Rodney'd managed to pawn the rest of it off on Zelenka, at the cost of a pound of carefully hoarded coffee, which hurt, a lot, but was unquestionably worth it since the normally sly little Czech had forgotten to set a time limit on the trade. Rodney chalked it up to the mood-altering qualities of 100% pure Kona. Coffee actually sounded pretty appealing right now. Fortunately, the Tanzania Peaberry was still hidden under the bag of curly fries in the back of the freezer, and was a nicely acceptable solution, if not the French Roast he'd been hoping for and where was he going to go at one AM for something better. He spooned in twice the recommended amount of grounds, halved the water, grabbed the Cheetos, and went back to the couch and Mystery Science 3000 while the coffee brewed.
Clearly it was only that precious liquid that kept Rodney sane, since the longer he stayed in Atlantis and the more of the database they'd managed to comb through - usually thanks to some imminent crisis set in motion by the Ancients' utter failure to even mention the potentially harmful results of their experiments, because God, what did they have against basic warning signage or the occasional "do not open or evil creatures will escape and eat your power source" picture - the longer he stayed, the more Rodney was becoming convinced that the Ancients had taken ethically questionable paper-pushing to a whole new level. Fortunately for Rodney, the Ancients might have been bureaucrats ten thousand years ago, but until, well, now, it hadn't been as if he had to put up with them. Woolsey was probably in heaven.
The fact that Elizabeth was - had been, he grimaced - in charge had helped, he thought. Most diplomats anyone had ever allowed Rodney to get close enough to meet before the issuance of the inevitable restraining order seemed to have an unreasoning insistence on ridiculous protocols designed, he swore, mostly to make the uninitiated look like socially retarded orangutans for the amusement of the purportedly higher-level primates in the know. Something beeped, startling the hell out of him, and he glared at his phone and prepared a diatribe for Elizabeth about returning phone calls at ungodly hours when he was either asleep or being a genius about something and should not, either way, be disturbed, until he realized it was the coffee maker and went off to find a clean mug.
Elizabeth, at least, had the good sense to only insist on rules - or the following of rules, anyway - when she had a good reason for it, by which Rodney meant something a little more intelligent than the "because they told us to" on which most modern bureaucracy seemed to thrive. So when she talked, he tended to listen. Mostly. At least more than he would to someone else, except maybe Sheppard, but Sheppard's SOP was basically to ignore the rules in crisis situations and even when things were quiet he still managed to pawn most of the paperwork off on Lorne, and really it was a marvel how Sheppard had survived in the military at all since the man's hair -alone- constituted a perpetual and flagrant breach of regulation, so really, the question never came up in that neck of the woods, unless Elizabeth was calling them both out together. And ever since the horrible mind-exploding nano-virus incident, Rodney had noticed that when Elizabeth talked about rules, it wasn't just him paying more-than-perfunctory attention, even if he and/or Sheppard didn't really like what she was saying.
Of course - he thought as he settled back on the couch with the mug, flipping channels for something a little less insane than Boa v. Python because really, he didn’t need to herniate something swearing at the special effects - of course, that was probably why Elizabeth had still been stuck in her debriefing when he and Carson and Sheppard had all staggered out of their individual sessions, all of them looking exhausted and uncertain, with a little "please-God-I'll-tell-you-anything-just-don't-take-my-thumbnails" around the edges. They’d waited around for her for awhile, just sort of generally regrouping and not really meeting each other’s eyes, but she hadn’t shown, and then Landry had marched up with a package in his hands for Sheppard that turned out to be a toy plane from O’Neill and they went off to find Sheppard’s new space. They left Rodney and Carson, bickering relatively amicably about nothing much, until some short, timid, wispy individual had interfered and offered, with a stammer, to show Carson his new infirmary and Carson, the soft touch, had agreed if only to spare the peon any further emotional strain. That left Rodney, destined for Area 51 in the next few days, staring at cinderblock walls until he decided the hell with it, he’d just leave her a phone message later, and went requisition transportation back to his apartment, by which he really meant, make someone’s life intentional hell until they got desperate enough to let him out of there for the night.
He hadn’t done too badly, either, he thought, glancing out the window into the parking lot. Of course, Woolsey would have kittens when he found out that Rodney’d cowed the staff sergeant in charge of the motor pool into giving him one of the fully appointed sedans reserved for senior visiting diplomats. But Woolsey wasn’t here, Rodney thought with a not-exactly-petulant shrug, and besides, that’s what they got for putting the easily bludgeoned in positions of influence - which was also how he’d ended up with the cell phone so fast. Whatever. The kid would recover. And if he didn’t, he was in the wrong career anyway, and Rodney’d just done him a major favor. It wasn’t like he’d made him cry. Much.
Speaking of felines and blunt force, the sun was up, so it was probably late enough in the day to go over and force his neighbor to hand the cat back over. Although his fingers were orange, and he was pretty sure that coffee-stained boxers weren’t the best for making a forceful impression, so maybe he should shower first. Rodney stood up with a sigh and went to start the day, leaving the empty mug next to his phone, which was hiding out among the coffee rings on the side table. He’d grab it and check his messages again before he left the house.
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"Hey, Elizabeth. This is your number, right? I mean, I know it's the number the government has for you, because their personnel files are woefully poorly protected, I mean, I'm horrified to think that anyone could get to my information so easily. Being a genius earns you a lot of enemies, and anyone who had it out for me could just read the file and know exactly where to… *beep*"
"Hi, me again, sorry - you really need a machine with a longer tape. Anyway, I'm leaving tomorrow for Nevada. Call me. (fake number)"
Rodney scowled down at his phone. Elizabeth’s apparent inability to pick up a phone was already irritating, and was rapidly progressing into the land of hacking phone company records to track outgoing calls, just to make sure the ridiculously antiquated systems at the SGC actually had the right phone numbers. Hard to trust a program so old the base coding was in C++. He flopped backwards onto the bed. A stack of pretty-much-clean and basically-folded t-shirts toppled onto his face and he shoved them onto the floor to join the rest of the detritus. He’d deal with it tonight - which meant basically shoving it all haphazardly into a bag before he walked out the door, because who cared about t-shirts? The important stuff had already gone - he’d boxed up the DVDs and books and random pieces of computer hardware and shipped it off with his lab equipment, since, hello, temperature control? Some of those Doctor Who episodes couldn’t be had for love or money. The coffee - the good stuff, bought in vast, vacuum-sealed quantities - was coming with him on the plane. Rodney had a feeling that the wilds of Area 51 would prove just as hostile to a regular supply of quality caffeine as Atlantis.
In Atlantis, at least, they’d had the jumpers, and regular supply trips from the Daedalus with personal shipments. The thought was just an additional aggravation. What were they thinking, giving the ‘jumper project to Dr. Lee? That mousey-haired, glasses-wearing cretin didn’t have the faintest idea of their capabilities - after two and a half years they’d be starting the project over from scratch, and wasn’t that just a ridiculous waste of time. Even Carter had agreed, for crying out loud.
But no, they had his notes, and they’d take it from there, and they’d rather have the jumper near the gate for test flights. He rolled over and buried his face in the pillow with a groan. There were so many things wrong with that statement he hardly knew where to start. Because as if Bill Lee was ever going to voluntarily pick up someone else’s notes when he could screw things up perfectly well on his own, the arrogant, project-stealing, self-aggrandizing little… little… gnome. Rodney didn’t even play Warcraft, not really, except for one misguided experience in Siberia when that really hot chemist had talked him into playing. He caved, but with huge misgivings, mostly because he couldn’t be bothered to put up with the idiocy of real people and they only acted dumber when they thought they were hidden behind pixels, and just a little thanks to an early traumatic RPG experience in which he’d hacked a game only to find out that the allegedly svelte, blonde elf on whom he’d had a text-based crush was in fact a large, greasy man named Dexter. The game in Siberia had pretty worked out as predicted: over dinner, Rodney casually mentioned to Dr. Ivanova that her online "team members" were idiots and the game was obviously some kind of haven for the mentally and socially backwards of the world; she promptly dumped him; and he never logged on again, which, for Rodney, was almost worth the related decline in sexual activity. Still, he knew enough to find it a sign of Lee’s complete lack of utility that the man was only a level 75 Mage despite snooping his way into the beta of the expansion pack. And who used the LOTR Elven name generator to name a gnome? What a cretin.
Furthermore, he thought, shifting around to find the comfortable spot on the mattress, who thought it was a brilliant idea to take a completely untested jumper that no one knew how to use and fly it through the gate on the first try? Ok, yes, that was pretty much what they’d done in Atlantis, but in Atlantis they’d had multiple jumpers and were cut off from Earth in an underwater city with failing shields, so it’s not like they’d had a lot of time and/or options. If taking the jumper through the gate for its initial flights wasn’t the plan, Rodney didn’t even want to know how they thought flying a puddle jumper through Colorado Springs was going to maintain the top-secret nature of the SGC. It’s not like everyone who flew the thing instinctively understood how to fly the thing in a straight line, let alone raise and lower the cloak. Sure, they had Sheppard, but at dinner with Carson and Rodney and Zelenka, who was about to leave for Prague before taking up a research post at some university, Sheppard had told them he’d been assigned an off-world team, and wasn’t being allowed near the jumper project, which was just a phenomenal waste of resources, and Rodney knew all about that kind of nonsense. He’d said as much to Sheppard.
“Not my call, McKay,” was all he’d said, and shrugged. Rodney had glared at him, ready to launch into a diatribe about the stupid tendency of certain members of the U.S. military to follow orders without at least thinking about them first. In a rare moment of discretion, arriving via a swift kick to the knee, c/o Zelenka, Rodney’d managed to cut himself off before he opened his mouth: Sheppard’s mouth was smiling, but his jaw was tight and his eyes had gone flat. Rodney thought of Sumner, and of Everett, and of half-overhead conversations between Sheppard and Teyla on the planet of the evil, mind-altering Wraith EM device about a Captain Holland, and of the look on Sheppard’s face every single time he took control of a jumper. He wondered, not for the first time, what it was about military institutions that decided to stick someone like Sheppard underground and then turned around and claimed innocence when the inevitable occurred, leaving the man himself to shoulder the blame. Rodney wasn’t emotionally gifted, but nor was he blind, and he’d wondered briefly just how much more Sheppard would willingly take. By then, however, the conversation had shifted to other topics and he let the thought go, distracted by the need to explain to Zelenka about the proper care and feeding - by which Rodney meant sleep deprivation, psychological abuse, and over-caffeination - of new lab assistants.
He hadn’t forgotten about it, though - just sort of shunted it off to one side with the rest of the ideas he put aside to think about “later” - which, apparently, had been meant “today”. It had been part of the reason he’d been calling Elizabeth in the first place - to see if he could argue her into dropping a word in O’Neill’s ear - a far from purely philanthropic gesture, because if they could get Sheppard in a jumper, Sheppard could convince the brass that Rodney needed to be there too, not stuck in the wilds of Nevada. Not that he’d heard back from Elizabeth yet, which is why he’d hacked the phone records again, to double-check the number, but her recording was starting to irk him. It wasn’t as if he could just leave a message saying “Rodney here. I think Sheppard’s about to crack, and couldn’t you just convince O’Neill to had him - and me - the jumper project?” Elizabeth, at least, had learned how to manage Sheppard - or the two of them had managed each other. Rodney wasn’t really sure. He did know that Sheppard never walled himself off to contain his opinions around Elizabeth, even if he disagreed with her, and that Elizabeth relied on the perpetual-motion-machine that was Lt. Col. John Sheppard to keep her natural caution from becoming stagnation. While the observation might’ve astounded the not inconsiderable number of people who thought Rodney the emotionally stunted stepchild of the Wicked Witch of the West, again, not blind. It was a product of basic Newtonian physics - actions and reactions - and Rodney had realized long ago the value of a little reconnaissance in manipulating the hell out of funding and tenure committees, even if the information wasn’t wielded with, say, finesse.
Except. Rodney sat up, startled. Except that Elizabeth had come away from her last talk with O’Neill in Atlantis looking a lot like Sheppard had looked over dinner the night before. She hadn’t looked like that when he and Sheppard had been waiting in there with her - then she’d been mad as hell, focused, planning arguments and lines of attack in her head while he and Sheppard bickered. Afterwards, though - she'd looked... different, was the only way he could describe it, and had said little. He’d only seen her a few times, and briefly at that, so really, who knew. Still, he thought in frustration, feeling like he was missing a piece of something important, he wished he could remember more clearly, but there hadn’t been much time to talk, between and running around trying to make sure this so-called Captain Helia didn’t screw up all the work they’d done getting the city running and plowing through the labs trying to smuggle a few more bits and pieces out past the watchful glares of her putative crew and packing… and packing!
Rodney stared at the clock on the nightstand and scrambled off the bed, tripping over the t-shirts, which, after unknotting them from his ankles, he started to throw into his bag. He only had a few more hours before the SGC sent a car to take him to the airport, and he still had to go terrorize the new tenant next door into telling him where the former resident had moved to. Not that he held anything against the new woman, although really, people should not be allowed to answer the door in a pink robe and blue curlers and a green facemask, even if it was 6 AM, because seriously, he could’ve had a heart attack, particularly because she was not the person who had lived there before, and more importantly, who had apparently absconded with his cat without leaving any contact information. His (new) neighbor had scowled at him, told him off for yelling (and he so did not “shriek like a girl”), and handed him a note from his (catnapping) former neighbor. When Rodney had started to remonstrate, the new (accomplice) neighbor had shut the door in his face, and for the last three days, refused to answer. Elizabeth, Sheppard, and the rest of it could wait. He had only three hours to make sure he had everything for the plane and then cow the ogre next door into revealing enough information to allow him to mount a remote rescue operation. Rodney threw the last of the clothes in the bag and went to check that he hadn’t forgotten to pack the coffee.
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"Um, Elizabeth, hi. It's Rodney. McKay. Rodney McKay. Not that you probably know a lot of Rodneys or anything, so...anyway, Colonel Sheppard and Carson and I are getting together for lunch on Tuesday, and you should come. Let me know - I'm at (719) 555-5555."
Rodney dropped his head down onto the desk - which is why when the Barbie currently employed as his secretary poked her vacuous, wide-eyed, face around the barely-open door, Rodney was sitting back in his Aeron chair holding his forehead and running through the warning signs of concussion. “Doctor McKay?” she quavered, “Is everything all right? Only, I thought I heard….” He grimaced at her, and she shrunk back behind the shelter of the door.
“It’s fine - I’m fine. Go put your daddy’s liberal arts degree to work and get me an ice pack.” He scowled, and shouted to her fleeing back, “And a cup of coffee. MY coffee, not the god awful break room sludge like you pawned off on me last time!” Rodney sighed, sat forward, and scrubbed at his eyes. This was not good.
Last week, fed up with the most recent displays of spectacular insanity perpetrated by his staff, he’d locked himself in his office and spent the day calming himself down by testing the security perimeters on as many different secure systems as he could find. There was something pretty Zen-like about the exercise, and usually, it worked pretty quickly. Last week had been a series of near-disasters, culminating in Majurek’s attempt to blow them all through the wrong end of a black hole, so he ran out of his normal targets well before he ran out of steam. Which is how Rodney found himself trying to break into things like Sheppard’s email account and Elizabeth’s voicemail account. To his credit, Sheppard had installed some pretty tight protocols, even though Rodney’d broken them in the end, but it meant Rodney was letting Sheppard off the hook for the snarky “it’s only cool if the target doesn’t know it was you” email that came moments after he’d gotten through.
Elizabeth’s voicemail was another story. Rodney had started off by sending her an irate email about proper security and protection of top secret information. He’d still been poking around the system as he drafted his screed and revised it for proper emphasis, and had stopped mid-participle when he realized that she hadn’t even -checked- her messages for what, weeks? He’d already hacked her email, so he knew that she hadn’t been checking that, but he’d chalked it up to meetings and conferences and consultations and whatnot. Plus, it’s not like she hadn’t been in the habit of not checking email for stretches of time in Atlantis - they all had, because, hey, they all had radios and talked constantly and also, crazy space vampires vs. the latest “a priest, a nun, and a monkey” forward? Easy victory for the life-sucking monsters. They might be back on Earth, but some old habits came back slower than others. They did come back, though, and there was a lot Rodney missed about Earth and was happy to reclaim when he wasn’t trying to keep Area 51 from finding new ways to threaten humankind. He hadn’t thought about whether it was the same way for everybody.
Not that he hadn’t found Elizabeth’s complete failure to return phone calls a little weird, but he’d figured everybody had their own cat-stealing ex-neighbor to stalk. Or something like that, anyway - plus a new job and new morons and new protocols to ignore or at least manipulate, so he’s just figured she was busy and hadn’t spent a lot of time dwelling. His interest had been piqued, though, and he’d started to shuffle through the voice messages - and then, when a disturbing pattern emerged, he pulled up her email, purely for the sake of cross-correlation. Elizabeth wasn’t in meetings. She wasn’t consulting. If Sheppard hadn’t mentioned that he’d run into her by total chance at the Chinese take-out, Rodney would’ve called it even odds that she even existed. And that was just weird, in a way that Rodney couldn’t quite describe and that made him sad and worried and just a little angry, because Jesus, it wasn’t like the rest of them had had to transition back as well, and where did she get off that it was ok for her to go and hide when the rest of them had to get up and go to whatever passed for work that day? That just made it worse though, didn’t it, he realized. Carson, Sheppard, Rodney - they all had positions they could fill, roles they could play, even if they weren’t quite the same, they were close enough to get by, some of the time. What the hell would Elizabeth be now, if she didn’t have Atlantis?
Faced with questions he was, for once, not qualified to answer, Rodney took the only possible avenue he could think of. He called Carson. Which, he quickly came to realize, was an incredible, incredible mistake. The man might be the most touchy-feely of the bunch, but he was also an over-reactive worrywart with no sense of perspective and who couldn’t let anyone get a word in edgewise. (“Dear God, Rodney, you hacked her voice mail? Does she know?” “No, Carson, of course she doesn’t know, because I haven’t told her, and you won’t either, and that is so not the point here!”) After forty-five minutes of the verbal equivalent of blunt trauma, Rodney thought he’d managed to get Carson to understand (“Rodney, I’m not Heightmeyer, but… yes, I’ll see what I can find out.”), and he’d hung up the phone, exhausted.
All of which meant that he’d started this week just as tired as he’d finished the last, and even coffee wasn’t helping. This week, frankly, was even worse, because he was trying to push things into some semblance of sanity before he left for Colorado, so that he didn’t actually have to go back in time and literally reinvent the wheel because some buffoon got the input parameters wrong on the time-dilation field in Bay Eight. The door creaked open and he groaned as Majurek crept in. He’d worry about Elizabeth later. Right now he had to get through this “negative evaluation” without throwing pencils at the man point-first. HR had made him promise.
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Rodney wasn’t sure he was ever going to get used to flying in a regular plane again. Everything felt wrong. Without the inertial dampeners he was so accustomed to on the ‘jumpers, the plane felt like it was going to shake apart during takeoff. He had gripped the armrests so hard his knuckles turned white, muttering about commercial pilots who were only flying this jet because they were too damn blind to fly real jets and how he was too young to die. Rodney realized later that his muttering might have been something more along the lines of really loud bitching when one of the flight attendants (who looked disturbingly like Cadman and was therefore already a little scary) leaned over him with a saccharine smile on her face and death in her eyes (oh yeah, just like Cadman), and murmured that both of the pilots of this jet had flown Tomcats for the Navy for decades before retiring, and maybe he’d like to keep his commentary to himself during landing? Biting back a snide comment he’d heard Sheppard make once about Navy pilots, Rodney just rolled his eyes and flipped open his laptop, silently fuming about how unfair it was that Nobels weren’t awarded posthumously, the way his life was going.
After another near-death experience upon landing (seriously, they do not award them posthumously, people!), Rodney barreled past the scary flight attendant, through the baggage claim and out into the crisp Colorado air. Of course, crisp Colorado air meant lovely pine allergies, but whatever. He was just glad to get out of that godforsaken desert for a few days, allergens or no. All the scientists at Area 51 were idiots, as usual, and whenever he left the lab to go to his hovel of an apartment (because all the money in the world couldn’t buy decent housing in that hellhole), he had to deal with all the nutjobs in their tinfoil hats. Every day, he fought the desire to roll down his car window and shout “It’s not the little green men you should be worried about - they’re on our side! It’s the goddamn space vampires that should be keeping you up nights!” God, If the Asgards ever saw that fake alien autopsy crap, well, Rodney didn’t want to be around for the aftermath. Pants or no pants, Hermiod would be pissed.
Glancing around, Rodney saw Carson striding toward him, grinning. Looking past Carson, he could see Sheppard leaning against the car like some kind of aviator-wearing James Dean wannabe, and he felt the corners of his mouth tugging up.
“Colonel, I was kind of hoping being back at SGC, you might start, oh, I don’t know, standing like you don’t have a slinky for a spine for once?” Rodney shouted over Carson’s shoulder. “Hey, Carson. Still doing that voodoo that you do so well?”
Carson wrapped Rodney up in a bear hug, clapping him hard on the back.
“Not breathing! Are you trying to kill me?”
“Aye, I missed you too, Rodney.”
“Hey, are we gonna eat sometime today?” Sheppard called out, jangling the keys to the SGC’s government-issue Taurus.
“Oh, food! Yes, yes, let’s go,” Rodney slapped Sheppard on the shoulder and flopped into the shotgun seat before Carson could get back to the car. Sheppard drives, he sit shotgun. Different galaxy, same shotgun rules.
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“I don’t know, I kinda miss the Pegasus food.”
“Colonel, you have got to be kidding me. Nothing was the right color, everything tasted kinda weird, and there was no coffee, and no chocolate. I practically lived on these things,” Rodney mumbled around a mouthful of chocolate peanut butter PowerBar. They really weren’t that great, but he’d gotten used to them and now he couldn’t seem to give them up.
“Didn’t seem to slow you down much in the mess, Rodney,” Sheppard smirked as he whipped around another car. Rodney didn’t even know Tauruses could go that fast, and wondered feverishly (between frantic grabs for the door handle) if Sheppard had modified it somehow after picking it up from the motor pool.
“Oh, very funny, Colonel. It was food. I’m not picky, but I do have preferences, and I prefer the obviously superior Earth foods. Plus, here I know what all the citrus looks like.”
“You know what I keep doing?” piped up Carson from the back. “I’ve run out of gas a couple of times because I keep forgetting to fill up the car.”
“Me too. Can I tell you how totally embarrassing it was to have to call one of my completely incompetent lab assistants and make them bring me a can of gas? I spent an hour in the damn desert, and all of the weirdos around the lab site kept trying to talk to me,” Rodney groused.
“Aw, Rodney, did you get a sunburn? I bet you looked like a grumpy lobster.”
“Colonel, it is not funny. I’m probably going to get skin cancer now, because your stupid government won’t buy fuel-efficient vehicles.” God, that had been a miserable week. He had been completely sunburned, and it might have manifested itself in a slightly less-than-usually affable demeanor toward his staff. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to have the appropriate level of respect for the genius that kept them from blowing themselves up in his shiny new lab. He kept discovering salt in his coffee and all of the markers missing from his lab’s whiteboard until the sunburn finally peeled off and his attitude improved. They were like children, honestly. Really stupid, overpaid children. He should introduce them to the midgets from Planet KidKill and see if they could do a repeat of their patented Zelenka full-face-and-hair makeover.
“…thank you, Colonel, right here is fine.” Carson hopped out of the car and jogged into an apartment complex Rodney didn’t recognize.
“Hey, where’s he going?” Rodney craned his neck to see where the doctor had disappeared to.
“Dunno, said he needed to check on something.”
“Oh.” Rodney leaned back in his seat. It was nice to just be able to hang out with Sheppard again. He hadn’t been lonely at Area 51, exactly, but he meant it when he said he missed certain people. While he was working, he was way too wrapped up in his projects to notice that no one was bothering him for answers all the time; if he missed anyone during work hours, it was Zelenka, even though they emailed a few times a week. The nights were worse. Talking to Sheppard on the phone was all well and good, but it didn’t replace Team Night, or sitting with Sheppard and Teyla and Ronon at meals.
“So,” Rodney heard himself saying, “how’s your new team?” Apparently he’d turned into a masochist; like it wasn’t hard enough knowing abstractly that you’d been replaced.
“Eh. It’s not the old team,” Sheppard shrugged.
“Yeah?” Unreasonably cheered by that, Rodney pressed on. “How’s that?”
“Well, I don’t really know any of them. I’m the best diplomat on the team - “ (Rodney snorted at that; it was a wonder the SGC hadn’t been traded for magic beans, if Sheppard was their negotiator) “- and our scientist keeps getting in trouble and getting hurt.” Sheppard grinned, and looked pointedly at Rodney over his aviators.
“Yes, well, not everyone is as eminently suited to field work as I am,” Rodney conceded, not even bothering to hide a grin of his own as he turned to watch Carson come back from wherever he’d gone with…
…Elizabeth. Oh.
Jogging down the stairs after Carson, she looked fragile somehow, and sad, even as she smiled and waved at Rodney and Sheppard. That was something she and Sheppard shared; that infuriating ability to almost hide what they were really feeling. Enough so Rodney couldn’t actually say anything about it to them, but not enough that he didn’t worry.
“Huh. Didn’t expect to see her.” Rodney vaguely heard Sheppard talking beside him, but he was too busy deciding which gut reaction to go with to pay much attention. He was worried about the hesitation he could see behind her smile. He was furious that she’d blown him off for six weeks. He was jealous that she’d obviously talked to Carson, but not him. Since, unlike Elizabeth and Sheppard, his face hid precisely nothing and he knew it, he covered by scrambling out of the passenger seat and offering it to Elizabeth.
“Hello, Rodney! It’s good to see you. I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner, but I’ve just been so busy.” Elizabeth kissed Rodney’s cheek quickly and ducked into the car before he could respond. Well, that just added "confusion about being lied to" to the quagmire roiling around in his gut. He'd know if she'd taken a new job; she wasn't busy at all. Rodney realized with some horror that he wasn’t really that hungry anymore.
The entire fifteen-minute trip to the restaurant passed with Rodney staring at the back of Elizabeth’s head and trying to get his composure (and his appetite) back, Sheppard recklessly endangering all of their lives with his maniac driving (Jesus, who taught him to drive, Mario Andretti?), and Carson yammering on at Elizabeth about whatever witch doctor crap he was working on this week at the SGC.
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Walking into the restaurant was awkward. Rodney ended up walking with Elizabeth, and discovered that, after six weeks of trying to talk to her, he suddenly couldn’t think of a thing to say besides “What, are your fingers broken?” Since he was half-afraid that even saying the wrong something nice might break her like a china doll, he decided that discretion was the better part of valor and spent the walk into the restaurant staring at his shoes.
Thankfully, Sheppard had casually commented as they were seated that Kavanaugh seemed to be doing really well at his new post at CalTech, and that allowed Rodney to start off into a rant the likes of which Colorado Springs had not seen since…well, probably since the last time he was in town, honestly. In any case, the ice had been broken, and dinner was mostly spent catching up on the gossip about other ex-pats and their current activities.
What Rodney didn’t say during dinner was how much he missed Atlantis. He missed it so much he felt like he would turn inside out with it sometimes. Being with Carson, Sheppard, and Elizabeth was both better and worse; it was like another hit of a drug he knew he had to wean himself off of. He knew that he felt great tonight - everything was laughter and fun and reminiscing - but tomorrow he’d wake up more miserable than he’d been before he left Nevada.
Rodney felt like none of his work mattered to anyone anymore, not really. He was pretty sure Elizabeth felt the same, but magnified by a factor of 10, but he had no idea how to tell her that she wasn’t alone in feeling so, well, alone. Out-of-his-depth was not somewhere Rodney liked to be, so he stuck to what he knew. He bitched about work, laughed at Sheppard’s jokes and Carson’s embarrassment at them, and ate. And watched Elizabeth.
They had just finished discussing Cadman and Carson and the kiss-which-shall-not-be-discussed (Rodney almost lost his appetite just thinking about it) when Elizabeth started to excuse herself. Rodney felt a desperate desire to jump up and tie her to the chair so she couldn’t run away again - oh, hey, homing device, not a bad idea - when all of their phones started ringing at once. Which was when, of course, life suddenly got interesting again.