Day 11: Harlequin Week (SGA), by Minnow, 1 of 2
Title: Fair
Author: minnow1212
Prompt: To anthropologist Zeke Kendall, the idea that the heir to the Fairy throne had been watching him, falling in love with him, for years was laughable. Then he met Nuala and lost his heart to her dangerous beauty.
Eldest daughter of the Fairy Queen, Nuala must marry among her own kind to keep the line pure, but her heart has long been possessed by the handsome mortal. Now she will do anything-even align herself with humankind against the terrifying power of her own people-to make him hers
McKay/Sheppard, Spoilers through The Return, Part I. Please don't spoil me for anything after that.
Word count: ~18,500. (Yes. I know.)
Please do not archive.
Summary: Once upon a time, there were two boys. And, of course, a wish.
The story begins: Once upon a time, there were two boys.
There were many other starting points, of course. The story could easily begin: Once upon a time, there was a dastardly plan and a foiled kidnapping. Or: Once upon a time, the son of the Fairy Queen was very bored. Or: Once upon a time, there was a memory device.
But this part of the story goes: Once upon a time, there were two boys.
And, of course, a wish.
Part I
In which Rodney’s aversion to nature is discussed, a name is given, John’s capacity to lie is severely overestimated, a cupcake produces unexpected revelations, and a wish is made.
Many years after the wish, but a good six months before the memory device, Rodney's sister Jeannie sat with his team, teasing him in absentia. "But it honestly is flabbergasting," Jeannie finished, after their laughter had died down from the story of ten-year-old Rodney and the war he had waged with their parents to avoid being sent to summer camp, "that he goes out with you. Exploring! Mer! He hates nature!"
"So he tells us," John said wryly. "But he keeps up okay."
"Couple of missions ago, he said that one field was nice," Ronon offered.
"For those who liked that sort of thing," Teyla clarified gently.
"These flowers that were all the size of sunflowers, only all different colors, and they were all arranged and stuff," John explained to Jeannie.
"Still, voluntarily going outside," Jeannie said. "He’s never been the sort. No, wait, I remember my dad saying once that Mer actually liked playing outside when he was young. There was a park next door to our house--I was really young, I don’t remember it--but Mer begged Mom and Dad to go play there all the time. But he stopped, somewhere along the line." She smiled. "Maybe when he got older, he didn't think playing in the dirt was scientific enough."
"Maybe that’s just Earth dirt that isn’t exciting enough," John said. "Pegasus galaxy dirt, on the other hand…"
"Is so much cooler?" Jeannie finished, just a touch of friendly mockery in her voice.
"Is so much cooler," John agreed, of course joking--but he had a certain tone in his voice, like maybe it was he, not Rodney, who secretly felt Pegasus galaxy dirt was decidedly more special than any other kind.
From there they segued to a discussion of cool places in the Pegasus galaxy, because Jeannie shared the trait of curiosity with her brother and wanted to know more more more about this galaxy, and the discussion was forgotten by the time Rodney huffed over to join them. So he never did get to correct her, which he would have done; he would have explained that he hadn’t gone to the park because of some since-outgrown predilection for sand and dirt and bugs but because of Jeannie herself, because when he had been five she had been two, and she had been terrible, a horrible, whining screamer of a child.
He wouldn’t have even been exaggerating: Jeannie did scream an awful lot as a child, until Jeannie’s mother started calling her, "Screaming Jeannie-Mimi" for a while. But in truth, Jeannie’s brattiness was not the only reason Rodney went to the park--though he wouldn’t remember the other reason for some time to come.
***
After Jeannie grew out of her bassinette, the apartment the McKays had lived in was too small, and they eventually moved into a nice old house in a nice old neighborhood the summer after Mer went to kindergarten. The McKays enjoyed the thought of being right next to a small park, envisioning a convenient meeting place for their children’s friends, and only noticed too late that no other children ever played there. It turned out the neighborhood wasn’t only old in terms of houses but of people. Mostly those people were aging with rather less dignity than their stately, elegant houses. "Not the sort of sweet old people with cookies and milk who acted as substitute grandparents. They were," Rodney would say later, rolling out the word with relish, "curmudgeons." Mer’s mother endured no fewer than six "welcome" visits where people said, "I hope your children aren’t rambunctious."
So first there was Jeannie, who had learned the word "No" and was bent on employing it as often as possible, and then there was the miasma of crankiness that seemed to hover over the entire neighborhood, infecting Mer’s parents as well, and then there was Mer’s father, who took a proprietary and smug delight in his son’s obvious intelligence, who wanted to bond over it and, worse, teach, and who didn’t seem to understand that Mer wanted to work things out for himself. "I’m going outside," Mer would yell to his mother over Jeannie’s clamor, and escape to the lot next door.
He didn’t usually go there to use the playground equipment--or at least not to use it as it was intended. On windy days the area underneath the slide was good for reading, and on clear days he could spread out toys, paper, and crayons on the middle of the merry-go-ground in order to draw robots or strew out bits of the radio he was taking apart. Sometimes he would push off from the ground to make the merry-go-round spin, making a game of it: solve this or that puzzle by the time the merry-go-round stopped. He thought he might be an astronaut someday, and he would have to work under deadlines and strange conditions, and this was practice.
Occasionally Mer would have to deal with an incursion from someone else walking by, or pausing on their daily walk to sit on the bench near the sidewalk: there was the one old lady who always called him a hooligan, and the old man who once sneezed out his dentures and made Mer scrabble around in the sand to help find them. (That incident was horrifying beyond belief, and made the later period when Mer was losing his baby teeth rather more fraught with anxiety than it should have been.) Mostly, though, Mer was left alone or simply waved at from afar, and so he came to think of the park as his.
Thus he was surprised the first day he looked up from a set of math problems his father had assigned him to see someone else there, not an old person on the outskirts of the park, but a boy about his own age on the playground equipment itself. Mer hadn’t heard him arrive, but the boy was swinging vigorously, legs pumping--he was maybe older than Mer, then, who still needed a push to get started. The boy was wearing a blue t-shirt like Mer’s, and jeans like Mer’s, and gym shoes that were bright neon green.
Mer scowled at the intruder, and as if sensing the attention, the boy looked over at him and grinned widely before jumping off the swing to run over to the merry-go-round, settling on it with a push of his foot that sent them spinning gently. "Hi," he said. "You want to play?"
Kindergarten had taught Mer already that this was a tricky question. He clutched his pencil a little tighter and said, "I am playing," and waited for the response of, "but that’s not any fun," or the grab at his paper to see what he was doing.
But the other boy just craned his head to examine the paper and then said, "Come play on the teeter-totter next, okay?" He hopped off the merry-go-round and said, hands resting on the bars, "You want a push before I leave?"
It was true that you could get yourself going on the merry-go-round with a little effort, but you couldn’t go fast, so Mer pinned down his paper with his knee and said, "yes, please," closing his eyes to feel the whoosh of air on his face. By the time the merry-go-round stopped, the other boy was already over near the monkey bars, apparently testing to see if he could make a running jump that could get him high enough to grab the bars straight from the ground.
When he next looked up, the other boy had either succeeded or given in and used the ladder to reach the bars. When he saw Mer watching him, he dropped mid-swing to the ground and said impatiently, "Come on, already," and they went to the teeter-totter. Somehow the afternoon passed that way, because after the teeter-totter the other boy wanted to see what was the fastest method for climbing up the slide, and so on and so forth until all of a sudden the boy squinted at the sun and said, "Uh oh. I gotta go home," waving as he ran away.
"Who was your friend?" Mer's mom asked when he went inside. She had a whole barrage of questions, in fact--did the other boy live around here, and what was his name, and how old was he? Because maybe she could get in touch with his mom so he and Mer could play together again.
"He likes going fast down the slide," Mer offered in lieu of answers. "He told me a joke about a goblin and his horse, and it was really funny, but it wasn't really a horse, it was only pretending to be."
Mer's mom sighed and said, "Well, I hope you had fun together," and Mer, drinking a glass of water thirstily, nodded his agreement to that.
Two days later, he and the other boy were sprawled on the merry-go-round, drawing a massive robot on eight pieces of paper they'd taped together, when Mer remembered and said, "I'm Meredith. Mer." (He said it easily, as he was still eight months away from beginning to hate his name: that would start with the teacher who made them each recite a nursery rhyme or poem, and decided it would be cute if Mer did, "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.") "What's your name?"
The other boy glanced up from where he was diligently filling in the robot's foot with the purple crayon. "Oh," he said matter-of-factly, "I can't tell you."
"Okay," Mer said, more interested in the hand that he was drawing, which had eight fingers, although really the eighth finger was a knife for slicing apart enemy robots or killer octopi. Then, "How come?"
"My mom won't let me tell people," the other boy said. "You wouldn't be able to say it anyway."
"I would too!" Mer said indignantly, momentarily abandoning his drawing. "I'm gifted."
The other boy just shrugged and returned to giving his robot antennae on his toes, for feeling things ahead of him. Mer said, "If you can pronounce your name, then I could. I'm smarter than you."
"My mom said," the other boy said, with an air of explaining something patiently. "I got in trouble for coming here before, and she's only letting me keep coming if I'm really careful, and I want to keep coming, and telling your name to people is really dumb."
"That's just stupid," Mer said with a scowl, because it was. Then he thought he spotted the problem. "Wait, my mom says the same thing, about not telling your name to strangers. But that means you can tell me," he finished triumphantly. "Because we're not strangers. We're friends." Then he stopped, and bit his lip, because even if his mom had referred to the other boy as his friend, and even if the other boy had greeted him with happiness today when Mer had come out of the house, this was tricky ground; in school Mara had promised to be his friend if he'd give up his turn with the coveted bouncy horse in the corner, but then she hadn't been. "Right?"
The other boy smiled--a quick shy smile not quite like his usual wide grin--and said apologetically, "Yeah, but, I still need to keep my true name a secret."
"Fine," Mer said, a little hurt in addition to being angered by the persistent lack of logic, and drew a serrated edge on his robot's knife finger, the crayon digging into the page. "But you and your mom are being stupid."
The other boy flushed, and he sat up straight. "We are not."
"Are too."
"Are not."
"Are too. Stupid stupid stupid."
"Shut up!"
They glared at each other, and Mer said, "If you’re not going to tell me your name, maybe I should just call you that. Stupid. Please pass the green crayon, Stupid."
The other boy threw the green crayon at him before he hopped off the merry-go-round and ran to the swings, and Mer huffed and called, "Stupid!" after him.
Mer drew the robot’s other hand, but somehow it wasn’t as fun without someone to say, "Yeah, yeah, good," when he proposed making one finger into a skeleton key that would open any door, and also when he thought back, the other boy hadn’t only looked angry but maybe a little bit hurt. Mer kept sneaking glances at where the other boy was swinging, facing away from the park. After a while Mer trudged over and sat on the swing next to him, kicking the ground with his feet until the other boy finally slowed, still staring ahead of him.
"Sorry and I won’t call you Stupid," Mer said in a grudging rush. "And I finished the robot’s hand so you need to come and color it."
"Okay," the other boy said, but he didn’t get off the swing. Instead he started twisting around and around on his swing, so that the two chains began to wind together into a double helix. He stopped when he’d put seven or eight twists into the chains and glanced over at Mer. "You could name me," he said. He sounded, for someone who was generally happy and outgoing and even sort of bossy, surprisingly shy. "I need a name to use here, and you could give it to me."
Mer pondered this, thinking of characters from books and kids in kindergarten and, finally, his father’s boss, a big man with a red beard who talked to Mer as if he were a fellow adult, and never said cloying things like, "You’re a smart kid, aren’t you?" "How about John?" Mer suggested, and the other boy said it once, meditatively, and then nodded sharply.
"All right," he said, and all of a sudden the usual easy grin was back. "C’mon," he said, "do this, it’ll be fun." Mer turned in slow circles until the chains of his swing were spiraled like John’s. Then they took their feet off the ground, so that the chains unspooled all at once, and crowed with laughter as they spun.
***
John didn’t show up every day to play, but he showed up most days that summer. Mrs. McKay went out a few times to meet her son’s new friend, silently pleased that her son had a friend; she had started worrying a bit about him as soon as it became apparent that Mer wasn’t just smart for his age but a prodigy. She had concerns that her son would grow up isolated and arrogant and lacking in respect for others who had different strengths; in short, that he would grow up to be too much like his father. She and her husband were already arguing bitterly about using the terms "gifted" or "genius" in front of her son, about pushing him too hard versus keeping him adequately challenged, about the very real possibility that he would be offered the chance to skip grades, about his developing scorn for things he deemed stupidity.
She liked John, who was polite and friendly; she had hopes that the friendship was helping her son develop the social skills he would need. Mer had said that he thought John was smart, which was unusual, although apparently warranted; Mrs. McKay had seen handwriting that wasn’t her son’s on some of the math worksheets her husband gave Mer, and the answers were always correct--and, like Mer, John didn’t need to show his work.
She did think Mer might be coaching him, though, as John didn’t come across as all that bright in conversation. His answers tended to be vague, and he didn’t always seem to grasp what Mrs. McKay was asking, even when she was as straightforward as possible. When she’d asked where he lived, John had said, "By the Tree and the River."
There wasn’t a river around, or streets of that name, so she’d persisted, "No, sweetie, where’s your house? Is it on this street, or on another one nearby? What’s the address?"
"I don’t live around here," he’d said. "I’m just visiting."
His grandparents, she assumed, though he looked blank when she asked if that was the case--but that would explain why she hadn’t seen another young couple around the neighborhood. She thought it too bad and not very safe that his grandparents hadn’t even impressed upon him the need to memorize his temporary address.
He was also very unclear on his father’s location and occupation, although she supposed that lack of clarity might come from lack of adult explanation for a dodgy situation. He didn’t even know how old he was; he cheerfully said, "Older than Mer," but when asked straight out if he was six, then, or when his birthday was, he said that he didn’t count his age in years, and then got into a discussion with Meredith about counting in base six.
To Mer, his mother’s questions were irrelevant to the important things about John. John liked to draw and to do math, and was slightly bitter that he hadn’t been born with wings, and had a younger sister and therefore could sympathize about the Jeanie situation. John liked to go fast and to jump down from high things; he rarely disembarked off the swings by any other method than a giant soaring leap; he easily shrugged off any pain he incurred from scraped hands or knees; he liked listening to Mer talk even though he fidgeted like crazy if he sat still for too long. The only time he sat still was when Mer sang or hummed to him a piece from the piano lessons Mer also started that summer: John quietly drank in music, any music, and the day Mer brought a radio outside proved to be a hit.
John seemed to believe that Mer was capable of anything--that he too could jump off swings from great heights or scramble up the slide by the time John counted to five--but on the occasions where Mer couldn’t do something because he wasn’t big or strong enough, John only said, "Better this time!" And John only gloated a little over the fact that his paper airplanes always went further than Mer’s.
John was also, Mer learned gradually, a big fat liar, but that wasn’t entirely a bad quality; it meant he told excellent stories, often scary in a pleasantly thrilling way, even if sometimes their conversations were a little strange. For instance, on the day Mer was talking about his dreams of being an astronaut and asked John what he would be when he grew up, John let out a heavy sigh and said, "King."
"You can’t be a king," Mer said in a superior tone, and added kindly, "Canada doesn’t have kings."
Mer had a certain smug smile for those times when he knew something someone else didn’t, but John had one as well, as he said, "I’m not Canadian."
Mer’s forehead wrinkled. "Americans don’t have kings either," he said, although he wasn’t quite as sure about that one.
"I’m not American either," John said. He leaned in close and conspiratorial and said, "I’m not talking about a human country, you know."
"Oh," Mer said in realization. More of that nonsense, like when John had told an awesome story about a fairy who could expand three times his size (except he’d gotten stuck in his own house because he’d eaten something that prevented him from returning to normal), and then insisted he’d seen it himself. Mer had come flat out and called John a liar that time, but John hadn’t taken offence, only said wistfully, "I’d like to be. That’d be so much easier." Usually Mer played along as much as he was able--he’d gotten scolded in kindergarten for disillusioning another child about the existence of Santa Claus--which meant he’d express his skepticism to John to make it clear that he wasn’t believing the story but didn’t quarrel about it, especially since John didn’t seem offended by his disbelief.
"Not a king," Mer said. "Come up with something else you want to be."
John perked up at that. "What I want to be is a pilot," he said promptly. "I’d fly really fast all around the world."
"You could be an astronaut too," Mer said. "We’d go up really high and fly fast."
"But you can’t do it all the time," John objected.
"By the time we’re older space travel might be more frequent," Mer insisted.
"Maybe," John said, but not as if he believed it. "Anyway, I’d go with you for your trips, but between trips I’d fly regular planes." His eyes lit up. "And the little ones that go upside down."
So John was a liar, but that was okay. The only time Mer had gotten upset had been the one time John had involved Mer in one of his lies; Mer had said something about how he wished sometimes that someone would come and take him away from his family, and John had gone pale and bitten his lip and been very insistent that Mer should not, should not, should not say such things.
"With most people it wouldn’t matter," John said firmly, "but you have to be careful not to draw attention like that. It’s just asking for trouble." Then he went into a ridiculous story, watching over his shoulder the whole time because he claimed he wasn’t supposed to be telling Mer this, about how an evil fairy had almost stolen Mer away once and replaced him with a changeling, only the fairy queen (John’s mother) had found out about it in time.
"That’s how I knew about you," John said. "And then I came to see you because I was curious, because he was going to steal you because he knew you’d turn out to be smart, and I wanted to see how smart, and besides I want to see what humans were like anyway. But other people, bad ones, might get curious, and you can’t give them openings like that, you can’t."
They got in a shouting match over that one, because John wouldn’t take it back even though there were no such things as changelings and fairies. They didn’t speak for two days after, playing on opposite ends of the playground. On the third day Mer was at a birthday party--and then at the hospital, with the first allergic reaction he was old enough to understand and remember, courtesy of an evil and deceptive slice of cake.
On the fourth day he was curled up on a sofa, still feeling wiped out, when Mer’s mom came into the room with John trailing her. "Look who I saw playing outside," she said in a determinedly cheerful voice; she was as pale and scared as he was. "John looked like he was wondering where you were, so I said he could come in and say hello and visit a while, as long as he doesn’t tire you out too much."
John smiled tentatively, as if not sure of his welcome. When Mer’s mom left them alone to go get cookies, Mer said crossly, "It was an allergic reaction. Not…sprites or something."
John shook his head, eyes downcast, fiddling with the tassel on the sofa cushion. "If it had been," he said miserably. "I could have squished them." He pinched his thumb and forefinger together in illustration.
"Well, it wasn’t," Mer said a little belligerently, and John nodded in agreement, still tense and worried. Mer regarded this as victory enough and said magnanimously, "You can stay and watch TV, if you want."
They watched TV, and after a time Mer said almost in a whisper, "I couldn’t breathe. It was scary. And it hurt."
"Are you okay now?" John whispered back.
"Uh huh," Mer whispered. "But…it really hurt. And astronauts are...astronauts don’t...you have to be healthy."
"It won’t matter. You’ll be fine as long as there aren’t any lemons on your trip," John said practically. Then he smiled a little, inviting Mer to share the joke. "Or you don’t run into any flying space lemon aliens."
Mer was a little soothed. "There are no flying space lemons."
"Nope," John agreed. "See, you’ll be fine."
After that they’d sometimes go into Mer’s house to play board games or watch TV, although usually John ended up nagging Mer into playing the piano. Not that John had to prod hard; Mer liked to show off a little. Jeannie was also fond of the sound of the piano, and when Mer would see them both on the floor watching him, rapt with wonder and respect, he nearly burst with pride.
***
Summer ended and school began; it cut down on the time Mer spent on the playground, but he still saw John frequently after school. John wasn’t in the same school as Mer, which was a disappointment to both him and his mom. John’s school, Mer incautiously told his mother, taught fencing and military strategy as well as math and science--and their science program sounded much more advanced than his. Mrs. McKay’s forehead wrinkled with disapproval. "Telling tales? I expected better of him," she said, and Mer shut up quickly; he’d known all along that John’s wilder flights of fancy were better kept a secret from his mother. Still, this was a small bump only, and things continued smoothly until the day after Mer turned six, where they fell apart.
His birthday itself was very cool: a chocolate cupcake at lunch, and when he got home Jeannie behaved for once, and his parents’ attention was all on him, and he got many good presents. He got to choose what they would eat that night, and to control the remote on the TV, and to stay up an extra hour.
The following day was a Saturday, and Mer went out to the playground early, new toy car in hand. John ran up when he was testing its speed down the slide, both with and without the little parachute he’d made from a napkin. "I have something for your birthday," John said breathlessly. His hands were clasped behind his back. "Sorta."
"Sorta?" Mer said.
"Sorta like I only have it until the end of the day but we can play with it now," John said.
"Let me see," Mer said, and John took one hand behind his back to reveal a remote control, and another to reveal a small robot, and cool.
The sand in the playground was treacherous to robot feet, but it could manage the metal slide superbly. John and Mer played for hours, maneuvering it across playground equipment and sidewalk, saving it from an old man in a walker who came by and tried to spear it as it whirred ahead of him, and giggling wildly as they made the robot turn in confused circles.
John waved goodbye as usual when it got later, and it was only when Mer went into the house that he remembered that, in telling John about his birthday, he’d promised John a cupcake as a snack. He hastily grabbed one and went back outside, trotting in the direction John had gone.
John had walked away, and Mer was jogging, so he saw John in the distance fairly soon, approaching the yard of a long-empty house at the end of the street. Mer stopped when he saw him, panting, and was about to call after him to wait when John walked onto the property, stopped near a large tree, and bent to put the robot and the remote down on the ground. John made a gesture, a quick pass of his hands, and suddenly Mer didn’t see the robot and its remote but a heap of brown things that looks like sticks and leaves. John scattered them apart with a kick, and then he walked right up to the tree, and there was a shimmer of some sort, and…
Mer started running again then, because it looked like John had disappeared inside the white shimmery light, inside the tree. Though when he reached it, he found no convenient hollow--but John wasn’t hiding behind the tree, hadn’t climbed up into it. Mer called for him, in case he’d somehow found a place to hide, but John didn’t respond, and he couldn’t have gotten out of the reach of Mer’s voice, not that fast. Which meant he’d…he’d really…he was really…
When Mer burst into his house, he was in near hysterics, terrified into incoherence, and his parents alternated between hugging him and chiding him to calm down and tell them what was wrong. He was clutching twigs and leaves in his hands, which he wouldn’t let go of. Mer's parents gleaned (incorrectly) that he’d gotten a little lost attempting to follow John, that he’d approached an empty house out of curiosity and then gotten scared by shadows.
After he'd stopped sobbing enough to talk clearly, he didn't correct their misapprehensions--it was too much to put in words, and his father wouldn’t believe him, his father was a scientist. They’d think he was crazy; they’d talk about him in the whispered hush that his mom used to talk about her brother with schizophrenia. They wouldn’t believe him because this was impossible.
***
The next day, when John arrived, Mer was sitting in the middle of the merry-go-round, knees drawn up and arms curled around them. A collection of twigs and leaves were laid in front of him, evidence to support a hypothesis that he didn’t want to believe.
"Why are you just sitting…" John said as he came running up. He checked when he saw the twigs, and consternation spread over his face. "Oh boy."
"I followed you yesterday," Mer said. "And I saw…" Just like that, Mer was on the verge of tears and terror again, because he’d hoped, he’d hoped that he’d gotten it wrong, that his eyes had been wrong, that he’d missed something. John didn’t look any different, but he was. Everything was. "I saw! The robot wasn’t real. Neither are you."
"Oh boy," John said ruefully. "I am going to be in so much trouble with my mom." He frowned at Mer. "I am too real."
Mer glared at him. "You’re--you’re not…"
"Not human," John finished for him. "So much trouble," he murmured quietly, and sat on the edge of the merry-go-round. Mer swallowed hard, pulled his knees closer to himself, and tilted his chin up.
"You’re not supposed to be possible," he said flatly. "People can’t walk into trees. It’s not scientific."
John opened his mouth to protest, and then apparently thought better of it and shrugged instead. "I can’t explain it," John said. "I’m not allowed. I mean, I could only tell you some things before because you didn’t really believe me." He reached out for one of the twigs, and Mer scooched back a little instinctively. Not a lot, but John dropped his hand and stared in disbelief. "Are you…you’re scared of me?" he said, half-question and half-bewilderment.
"No," Mer said haughtily, but it was a lie. He’d listened to John’s stories all along, after all. He had learned from John himself that fairies were often either monsters or monstrous, that even if they found it difficult to lie outright they couldn’t be trusted, that John’s world was full of violence and trickery. John had known of Mer because one of John’s people had wanted to kidnap him: Mer had wakened in the middle of the night remembering that. The only reason he hadn’t called for his parents or ran to their room was because he’d been paralyzed with fear.
He could tell John was upset now, the seriousness of this sinking in, and was meanly glad of it. "I wouldn’t hurt you," John stammered, and then amended, "Not on purpose, ever. You’re my friend."
"We’re not friends," Mer said, latching onto anger because it quelled the fear. "That was a lie."
"No, it wasn’t," John protested, sounding panicky, like Mer had felt last night when his world had gone topsy-turvy. Good. "We’re friends. We…you said you liked me. And you know I don’t have--you said." It was true John had confided once that Mer was his first true friend, because children were rare among the fairy, and also John was isolated by his mother’s position. At the time Mer had been pleased and proud that his friendship was worth something to John.
"I don’t like you," Mer said. A tiny portion of his mind told him that this might not be the smartest choice, angering someone who could, quite possibly, do magic, but the words spilled out anyway: Mer never would stop mouthing off to someone who might hurt him. But John didn’t shoot flames from his fingers or anything like that. Instead, he clumsily stepped back off the merry-go-round, looking shocked. "I don't know you and it was all a lie and it wasn't fair and I don’t like you," Mer finished in a rush, while John backed up step by step.
"Oh," John said in a small, stunned voice.
They regarded each other for a moment, and Mer opened his mouth to say something to fill the silence. He wasn't sure what he was going to say: he might have yelled at John to go away, and he might have asked him how one turned twigs into robots anyway. But it was John who spoke, drawing himself up to his full height, squaring his shoulders, and clasping his hands behind him. "I apologize," he said, and his voice was formal and crisp and strange. "I had not in-intended to behave with dishonor, or to, to cause you difficulty. I pledge as truth that you have no cause to fear me. I, I’ll," He took a few more steps backwards before turning around with a soft, "Bye."
Arms crossed, Mer watched him walk away. When John was almost at the end of the street, Mer scrambled off the merry-go-round and followed him, his heart pounding. He didn't want to see John walk into a tree again, defying everything Mer knew about the way the world worked, but at the same time he did. But John paused halfway to the empty house and turned around, watching Mer warily. Mer kept approaching him, feeling foolish until he saw that John's eyes were red.
"Were you crying?" he demanded incredulously, because John never cried.
John crossed his arms. "I had something in my eyes," he said defiantly.
Mer narrowed his own eyes at that. That might be true, but that didn't mean it was the whole truth, and the way John squirmed under his scrutiny confirmed that. That made it into a puzzle, and Mer was good at puzzles. It only took a moment before he said, "Something in your eyes. What, tears?" John's flushed face told him he'd hit the mark, and he continued, spitefully pleased about having the upper hand, "Is that who you are really? A crybaby?"
John’s fists clenched at that. "I said I was sorry, okay? And I’m going away, and you don’t need to be mean."
"Sorry," Mer muttered, because that had been kind of mean, and his fear was starting to ebb away anyway, faced with the solidity of John. Even if that was the biggest lie of all. He didn’t know what John looked like; "fairies put on glamours to blend in when they travel the human world, John had once said, and that meant John’s t-shirt and jeans and bright green sneakers were false.
"Why’d you follow me?" John asked. His face turned hopeful. "Did you, um, we could--"
"To see you go into the tree," Mer said.
John’s face became downcast again, and he said, "I can’t go through while you’re there. I’m already going to be in way too much trouble for being careless and letting you see me the first time."
Suddenly Mer was scared again, but for John this time. "Trouble, like…are they going to hurt you?"
John gave him a puzzled frown and said, "Trouble, like, with my mom."
This didn’t relieve Mer’s fear, because John hadn’t answered with a straight negative, which meant he might be avoiding the question. "You can’t go back if your mom’s going to hurt you!" he said; he was angry with John, but that didn’t mean he wanted…
John was taken aback. "She’s not going to hurt me," he said, and when Mer didn’t respond quickly enough because he was breathing out a sigh of relief, "She’s my mom."
"You made her sound all dangerous and scary!" Mer said defensively.
"Not dangerous to me," John said. "And she’s not even…" he eyed his toe, which was tracing a crack in the sidewalk. "I like scary stories," he said, a little sheepishly. "And you liked them too, so that was what I told you, but that’s not…not everything’s scary. It’s not scarier than your world." He tilted his head to consider this claim, and then added, "Well, not much scarier."
Mer remembered the story of the war between the phouka and the selkie, which had involved big sharp teeth and claws, and doubted that. "So she won’t throw you in a dungeon or something?"
"She’ll probably ground me," John said gloomily. "For a long time." His face crumpled a little. "And she’ll make me stay away from the human world, too. Probably for years."
"Oh," Mer said. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not. "That’s not so bad." Compared to chains and dungeons and being tossed to dragons.
"But I like your world," John said, scuffing the toe of his sneaker against the ground. "And I’ll miss, um, you."
Mer didn’t say it in return, but he thought it. "I wish you were really human," he blurted out instead. "I wish we could be friends for real," and John looked up with a sudden, wild hope in his face.
"Really?" he said. "You really wish that?"
Before Mer could reply, there was a sound like a loud crack of thunder, and John craned his head over his shoulder. When he looked back at Mer he was pale. "That’s my mom. She must have found out. I have to go." He run a few steps, spun around again, darted back to Mer and said urgently, "What you wished, you meant it, right?"
"Yeah," Mer admitted, a little unnerved by the crack of thunder.
John grinned. "Okay, right, plus you named me--not a true name, but it counts for something…I can work with that." Then he was running towards the empty house, feet pounding on the pavement, waving behind him as he went.
Part of Mer wanted to run behind him, to see what happened, but most of him was very scared of that thunder sound and what it might mean, and by the time he worked up the courage John was long gone.
***
Mer wondered, for a time, if John would come back. He kept expecting to see him, or to see some other fanciful or nightmarish creature. But John didn’t come, that day or the next or the one after that. "He’s grounded," Mer told his mother, and later, when she asked why she didn’t see John anymore, if his stay with his grandparents had ended, Mer said truthfully, "He said he had to go see his mother."
As time passed, Mer started to doubt what he’d seen. He’d never had proof of the truth, had he? Only what John said--and John had always told stories--and what could have been an optical illusion. He tentatively brought the question of alternate realms that bordered their own to his father one day, couched in hypothetical terms, and was firmly shot down. "I’m disappointed in you, talking about make-believe," his father said. "You’re smart enough to know better."
His mom was making him spend more time on the piano, because she wanted him to be well-rounded. His father loaded him up with more and harder problems after school and bought him a desk to work at. He didn’t have time to go to the playground anymore. The memory of the months he’d spent with John became hazy, incidents blurring together, until eventually even the end of it seemed more like a dream than anything. He’d had a friend named…something like James or John or Jack; they’d had a fight over…something; his friend had moved away.
Not too long after that, Mer’s parents made the decision to move to a house near a school with a system of study Mer’s father deemed challenging enough for his children.
By the time Jeannie was old enough to think of her older brother as a person with his own likes and dislikes, some things were obvious truths: Mer didn’t like scary books or movies. Mer didn’t make friends easily. Mer had better things to do with his time than play around in the dirt.
Jeannie was young: she assumed that because these things were true now, they had always been true. Though perhaps she could be forgiven for that assumption, since Mer himself forgot he’d ever been any different.
Part II
In which a sprained wrist results in the discovery of a plot memory device, a trip is taken, a tan line is examined, and coitus is cruelly interrupted not once but twice.
Much later, when Rodney reflected on how a particular life-changing set of events had transpired, he’d start with his use of the memory device (or possibly just a little bit before). His recollections certainly wouldn’t include a thought of the Stupid Orange Spotted Fuzzballs of P89-X45. Yet one SOSF was, if not ultimately responsible for the discovery of the memory device, at least responsible for the timing.
Captain Wexler’s team had been to P89 before. They liked it there, in fact: an uninhabited planet with a lake right near the Gate that supplied plentiful fish, and trees full of something like blueberries. Every few weeks a team would get to go through and go fishing and berry-picking for the day. Most people considered it informal R&R, and would come back with lips berry-blue, a touch of sunburn, and smiles on their faces from witnessing the antics of the SOSFs.
The SOSFs were cute polka-dotted fluffballs, about the size of basketballs, very docile and extremely stupid. Their main joy in life was to roll about like tumbleweeds, and they often rolled into each other, whereupon they’d make kazoo-like noises of happiness. (A not unpopular pastime on the planet was temporarily to pen a few SOSFs so that they'd drift into each other, providing both a living illustration of Brownian motion and an impromptu concert.) They were both durable and buoyant, which was fortunate for them, as they had a tendency to roll off cliffs or into streams.
"This is the life, doc," Wexler was saying to Patrice Jenkins, a brilliant mechanical engineer who was currently dangling her bare feet in the water and wearing an oversized straw hat. "Sun, sand, fish jumping on the line." He absently scooped up a handful of berries from the basket at his side, the one they’d collected early for their eating pleasure while they fished. This was the first time his team had been sent to P89 since the expedition’s return to the city after the defeat of the Asurans three months ago, and Wexler was pleased as punch to be back on this planet he’d come to know, one of the hundred sights of the Pegasus galaxy that he hadn't known he would see again.
"Glad we pulled this mission," Patrice agreed. They’d been a last-minute substitution for Sheppard’s gate team, when Atlantis had received word that an ally who would only negotiate with Teyla had some Ancient tech to trade.
"You gonna have to pay?" Radisson asked from Patrice’s other side, and the corners of Patrice’s mouth curled into a grin.
"Should get off scot free," she said. "McKay thinks berrying’s a waste of time--he was happy with getting bumped."
They all shook their heads and scoffed at the whims of Rodney McKay, who would be happy with turning down a day like this in favor of tricky trade negotiations. "Not so smart in some things," Radisson said, daring in McKay’s absence.
"Tempting fate there," Wexler said, standing up to go and take a leak, and it was then that he tripped over a SOSF (it kazooed with happiness), fell awkwardly, and sprained his wrist.
***
(At this moment in time, Rodney was on M56-34R, desperately trying to keep his extreme joy at the prospect of buying the crystals the merchant was offering from being so visible that it would wreck Teyla’s negotiations. He leaned in towards Sheppard and hissed, "Stop me from smiling!"
Sheppard obliged, whispering back, "PhD's in English receive exactly the same title as you have. PhD's in sociology have the right to be called doctors."
"Okay, that's working, keep going," Rodney said, a little breathlessly because Sheppard was leaning in close. Behind them, Ronon was snickering, probably at him, but Rodney was so filled with goodwill he didn't care. Teyla turned away--with crystals in hand! Hurray!
With a heroic effort, Rodney refrained from grabbing the crystals from her and crooning over them until after the trader was gone from sight, whereupon Teyla smiled at him indulgently and told him he'd done well, and Ronon offered to carry some of his stuff back to the Gate for him since his hands were full. Rodney beamed at them.)
***
Wexler’s team was grounded for offworld travel, but his injury wasn’t bad enough to stop them from city inventory duty. They were directed to a residential zone in the city that had been cursorily explored and deemed safe but uninteresting from a scientific point of view. Wexler and his team set to scavenging for useful furniture, replacement lamps, and so forth. Boring duty, although some teams had found useful things on their rounds, and the exploring team did have first dibs on any pieces of furniture or knickknacks. Radisson found a data tablet that had acted as a diary for a teenager, which proved that melodrama was a universal constant; Patrice scored one of the really good shower caddies; Lee found a pretty vase that he thought might serve as a small gift for a nurse he was shyly courting.
Wexler was the one who found, fallen behind a sofa, the device. It looked like a set of night vision goggles, with a small square block of material affixed to the side of the headband. The small square had a button on it. Wexler snapped a picture of them in situ, then drew them out carefully with gloved hands. "What do you think these are?" he asked his team. "Anyone seen anything like them before?"
"Put ‘em on and see," Patrice suggested, not seriously. "Could be they poke your eyes out."
"VR porn," Radisson said.
"Binoculars?" Lee said. "Vision repairers?"
Wexler shrugged, said, "One for the database review team," and put the goggles in the cart they were using for prizes that they would bring back to the city immediately. Radisson entered a note into the data pad they were carrying to indicate what sector they’d found it in.
The goggles ended up on Simpson’s desk; she was better than anyone else at determining what descriptors the Ancients might have used to enter any given device in their database. She entered some search terms, focusing not on the goggles but on the small square box that would likely be the control mechanism, and came up with 112 results, which wasn’t bad at all. Before she could sift through them looking for a visual match, she was called to the Gateroom for an emergency.
Conclusion
Author: minnow1212
Prompt: To anthropologist Zeke Kendall, the idea that the heir to the Fairy throne had been watching him, falling in love with him, for years was laughable. Then he met Nuala and lost his heart to her dangerous beauty.
Eldest daughter of the Fairy Queen, Nuala must marry among her own kind to keep the line pure, but her heart has long been possessed by the handsome mortal. Now she will do anything-even align herself with humankind against the terrifying power of her own people-to make him hers
McKay/Sheppard, Spoilers through The Return, Part I. Please don't spoil me for anything after that.
Word count: ~18,500. (Yes. I know.)
Please do not archive.
Summary: Once upon a time, there were two boys. And, of course, a wish.
The story begins: Once upon a time, there were two boys.
There were many other starting points, of course. The story could easily begin: Once upon a time, there was a dastardly plan and a foiled kidnapping. Or: Once upon a time, the son of the Fairy Queen was very bored. Or: Once upon a time, there was a memory device.
But this part of the story goes: Once upon a time, there were two boys.
And, of course, a wish.
Part I
In which Rodney’s aversion to nature is discussed, a name is given, John’s capacity to lie is severely overestimated, a cupcake produces unexpected revelations, and a wish is made.
Many years after the wish, but a good six months before the memory device, Rodney's sister Jeannie sat with his team, teasing him in absentia. "But it honestly is flabbergasting," Jeannie finished, after their laughter had died down from the story of ten-year-old Rodney and the war he had waged with their parents to avoid being sent to summer camp, "that he goes out with you. Exploring! Mer! He hates nature!"
"So he tells us," John said wryly. "But he keeps up okay."
"Couple of missions ago, he said that one field was nice," Ronon offered.
"For those who liked that sort of thing," Teyla clarified gently.
"These flowers that were all the size of sunflowers, only all different colors, and they were all arranged and stuff," John explained to Jeannie.
"Still, voluntarily going outside," Jeannie said. "He’s never been the sort. No, wait, I remember my dad saying once that Mer actually liked playing outside when he was young. There was a park next door to our house--I was really young, I don’t remember it--but Mer begged Mom and Dad to go play there all the time. But he stopped, somewhere along the line." She smiled. "Maybe when he got older, he didn't think playing in the dirt was scientific enough."
"Maybe that’s just Earth dirt that isn’t exciting enough," John said. "Pegasus galaxy dirt, on the other hand…"
"Is so much cooler?" Jeannie finished, just a touch of friendly mockery in her voice.
"Is so much cooler," John agreed, of course joking--but he had a certain tone in his voice, like maybe it was he, not Rodney, who secretly felt Pegasus galaxy dirt was decidedly more special than any other kind.
From there they segued to a discussion of cool places in the Pegasus galaxy, because Jeannie shared the trait of curiosity with her brother and wanted to know more more more about this galaxy, and the discussion was forgotten by the time Rodney huffed over to join them. So he never did get to correct her, which he would have done; he would have explained that he hadn’t gone to the park because of some since-outgrown predilection for sand and dirt and bugs but because of Jeannie herself, because when he had been five she had been two, and she had been terrible, a horrible, whining screamer of a child.
He wouldn’t have even been exaggerating: Jeannie did scream an awful lot as a child, until Jeannie’s mother started calling her, "Screaming Jeannie-Mimi" for a while. But in truth, Jeannie’s brattiness was not the only reason Rodney went to the park--though he wouldn’t remember the other reason for some time to come.
***
After Jeannie grew out of her bassinette, the apartment the McKays had lived in was too small, and they eventually moved into a nice old house in a nice old neighborhood the summer after Mer went to kindergarten. The McKays enjoyed the thought of being right next to a small park, envisioning a convenient meeting place for their children’s friends, and only noticed too late that no other children ever played there. It turned out the neighborhood wasn’t only old in terms of houses but of people. Mostly those people were aging with rather less dignity than their stately, elegant houses. "Not the sort of sweet old people with cookies and milk who acted as substitute grandparents. They were," Rodney would say later, rolling out the word with relish, "curmudgeons." Mer’s mother endured no fewer than six "welcome" visits where people said, "I hope your children aren’t rambunctious."
So first there was Jeannie, who had learned the word "No" and was bent on employing it as often as possible, and then there was the miasma of crankiness that seemed to hover over the entire neighborhood, infecting Mer’s parents as well, and then there was Mer’s father, who took a proprietary and smug delight in his son’s obvious intelligence, who wanted to bond over it and, worse, teach, and who didn’t seem to understand that Mer wanted to work things out for himself. "I’m going outside," Mer would yell to his mother over Jeannie’s clamor, and escape to the lot next door.
He didn’t usually go there to use the playground equipment--or at least not to use it as it was intended. On windy days the area underneath the slide was good for reading, and on clear days he could spread out toys, paper, and crayons on the middle of the merry-go-ground in order to draw robots or strew out bits of the radio he was taking apart. Sometimes he would push off from the ground to make the merry-go-round spin, making a game of it: solve this or that puzzle by the time the merry-go-round stopped. He thought he might be an astronaut someday, and he would have to work under deadlines and strange conditions, and this was practice.
Occasionally Mer would have to deal with an incursion from someone else walking by, or pausing on their daily walk to sit on the bench near the sidewalk: there was the one old lady who always called him a hooligan, and the old man who once sneezed out his dentures and made Mer scrabble around in the sand to help find them. (That incident was horrifying beyond belief, and made the later period when Mer was losing his baby teeth rather more fraught with anxiety than it should have been.) Mostly, though, Mer was left alone or simply waved at from afar, and so he came to think of the park as his.
Thus he was surprised the first day he looked up from a set of math problems his father had assigned him to see someone else there, not an old person on the outskirts of the park, but a boy about his own age on the playground equipment itself. Mer hadn’t heard him arrive, but the boy was swinging vigorously, legs pumping--he was maybe older than Mer, then, who still needed a push to get started. The boy was wearing a blue t-shirt like Mer’s, and jeans like Mer’s, and gym shoes that were bright neon green.
Mer scowled at the intruder, and as if sensing the attention, the boy looked over at him and grinned widely before jumping off the swing to run over to the merry-go-round, settling on it with a push of his foot that sent them spinning gently. "Hi," he said. "You want to play?"
Kindergarten had taught Mer already that this was a tricky question. He clutched his pencil a little tighter and said, "I am playing," and waited for the response of, "but that’s not any fun," or the grab at his paper to see what he was doing.
But the other boy just craned his head to examine the paper and then said, "Come play on the teeter-totter next, okay?" He hopped off the merry-go-round and said, hands resting on the bars, "You want a push before I leave?"
It was true that you could get yourself going on the merry-go-round with a little effort, but you couldn’t go fast, so Mer pinned down his paper with his knee and said, "yes, please," closing his eyes to feel the whoosh of air on his face. By the time the merry-go-round stopped, the other boy was already over near the monkey bars, apparently testing to see if he could make a running jump that could get him high enough to grab the bars straight from the ground.
When he next looked up, the other boy had either succeeded or given in and used the ladder to reach the bars. When he saw Mer watching him, he dropped mid-swing to the ground and said impatiently, "Come on, already," and they went to the teeter-totter. Somehow the afternoon passed that way, because after the teeter-totter the other boy wanted to see what was the fastest method for climbing up the slide, and so on and so forth until all of a sudden the boy squinted at the sun and said, "Uh oh. I gotta go home," waving as he ran away.
"Who was your friend?" Mer's mom asked when he went inside. She had a whole barrage of questions, in fact--did the other boy live around here, and what was his name, and how old was he? Because maybe she could get in touch with his mom so he and Mer could play together again.
"He likes going fast down the slide," Mer offered in lieu of answers. "He told me a joke about a goblin and his horse, and it was really funny, but it wasn't really a horse, it was only pretending to be."
Mer's mom sighed and said, "Well, I hope you had fun together," and Mer, drinking a glass of water thirstily, nodded his agreement to that.
Two days later, he and the other boy were sprawled on the merry-go-round, drawing a massive robot on eight pieces of paper they'd taped together, when Mer remembered and said, "I'm Meredith. Mer." (He said it easily, as he was still eight months away from beginning to hate his name: that would start with the teacher who made them each recite a nursery rhyme or poem, and decided it would be cute if Mer did, "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.") "What's your name?"
The other boy glanced up from where he was diligently filling in the robot's foot with the purple crayon. "Oh," he said matter-of-factly, "I can't tell you."
"Okay," Mer said, more interested in the hand that he was drawing, which had eight fingers, although really the eighth finger was a knife for slicing apart enemy robots or killer octopi. Then, "How come?"
"My mom won't let me tell people," the other boy said. "You wouldn't be able to say it anyway."
"I would too!" Mer said indignantly, momentarily abandoning his drawing. "I'm gifted."
The other boy just shrugged and returned to giving his robot antennae on his toes, for feeling things ahead of him. Mer said, "If you can pronounce your name, then I could. I'm smarter than you."
"My mom said," the other boy said, with an air of explaining something patiently. "I got in trouble for coming here before, and she's only letting me keep coming if I'm really careful, and I want to keep coming, and telling your name to people is really dumb."
"That's just stupid," Mer said with a scowl, because it was. Then he thought he spotted the problem. "Wait, my mom says the same thing, about not telling your name to strangers. But that means you can tell me," he finished triumphantly. "Because we're not strangers. We're friends." Then he stopped, and bit his lip, because even if his mom had referred to the other boy as his friend, and even if the other boy had greeted him with happiness today when Mer had come out of the house, this was tricky ground; in school Mara had promised to be his friend if he'd give up his turn with the coveted bouncy horse in the corner, but then she hadn't been. "Right?"
The other boy smiled--a quick shy smile not quite like his usual wide grin--and said apologetically, "Yeah, but, I still need to keep my true name a secret."
"Fine," Mer said, a little hurt in addition to being angered by the persistent lack of logic, and drew a serrated edge on his robot's knife finger, the crayon digging into the page. "But you and your mom are being stupid."
The other boy flushed, and he sat up straight. "We are not."
"Are too."
"Are not."
"Are too. Stupid stupid stupid."
"Shut up!"
They glared at each other, and Mer said, "If you’re not going to tell me your name, maybe I should just call you that. Stupid. Please pass the green crayon, Stupid."
The other boy threw the green crayon at him before he hopped off the merry-go-round and ran to the swings, and Mer huffed and called, "Stupid!" after him.
Mer drew the robot’s other hand, but somehow it wasn’t as fun without someone to say, "Yeah, yeah, good," when he proposed making one finger into a skeleton key that would open any door, and also when he thought back, the other boy hadn’t only looked angry but maybe a little bit hurt. Mer kept sneaking glances at where the other boy was swinging, facing away from the park. After a while Mer trudged over and sat on the swing next to him, kicking the ground with his feet until the other boy finally slowed, still staring ahead of him.
"Sorry and I won’t call you Stupid," Mer said in a grudging rush. "And I finished the robot’s hand so you need to come and color it."
"Okay," the other boy said, but he didn’t get off the swing. Instead he started twisting around and around on his swing, so that the two chains began to wind together into a double helix. He stopped when he’d put seven or eight twists into the chains and glanced over at Mer. "You could name me," he said. He sounded, for someone who was generally happy and outgoing and even sort of bossy, surprisingly shy. "I need a name to use here, and you could give it to me."
Mer pondered this, thinking of characters from books and kids in kindergarten and, finally, his father’s boss, a big man with a red beard who talked to Mer as if he were a fellow adult, and never said cloying things like, "You’re a smart kid, aren’t you?" "How about John?" Mer suggested, and the other boy said it once, meditatively, and then nodded sharply.
"All right," he said, and all of a sudden the usual easy grin was back. "C’mon," he said, "do this, it’ll be fun." Mer turned in slow circles until the chains of his swing were spiraled like John’s. Then they took their feet off the ground, so that the chains unspooled all at once, and crowed with laughter as they spun.
***
John didn’t show up every day to play, but he showed up most days that summer. Mrs. McKay went out a few times to meet her son’s new friend, silently pleased that her son had a friend; she had started worrying a bit about him as soon as it became apparent that Mer wasn’t just smart for his age but a prodigy. She had concerns that her son would grow up isolated and arrogant and lacking in respect for others who had different strengths; in short, that he would grow up to be too much like his father. She and her husband were already arguing bitterly about using the terms "gifted" or "genius" in front of her son, about pushing him too hard versus keeping him adequately challenged, about the very real possibility that he would be offered the chance to skip grades, about his developing scorn for things he deemed stupidity.
She liked John, who was polite and friendly; she had hopes that the friendship was helping her son develop the social skills he would need. Mer had said that he thought John was smart, which was unusual, although apparently warranted; Mrs. McKay had seen handwriting that wasn’t her son’s on some of the math worksheets her husband gave Mer, and the answers were always correct--and, like Mer, John didn’t need to show his work.
She did think Mer might be coaching him, though, as John didn’t come across as all that bright in conversation. His answers tended to be vague, and he didn’t always seem to grasp what Mrs. McKay was asking, even when she was as straightforward as possible. When she’d asked where he lived, John had said, "By the Tree and the River."
There wasn’t a river around, or streets of that name, so she’d persisted, "No, sweetie, where’s your house? Is it on this street, or on another one nearby? What’s the address?"
"I don’t live around here," he’d said. "I’m just visiting."
His grandparents, she assumed, though he looked blank when she asked if that was the case--but that would explain why she hadn’t seen another young couple around the neighborhood. She thought it too bad and not very safe that his grandparents hadn’t even impressed upon him the need to memorize his temporary address.
He was also very unclear on his father’s location and occupation, although she supposed that lack of clarity might come from lack of adult explanation for a dodgy situation. He didn’t even know how old he was; he cheerfully said, "Older than Mer," but when asked straight out if he was six, then, or when his birthday was, he said that he didn’t count his age in years, and then got into a discussion with Meredith about counting in base six.
To Mer, his mother’s questions were irrelevant to the important things about John. John liked to draw and to do math, and was slightly bitter that he hadn’t been born with wings, and had a younger sister and therefore could sympathize about the Jeanie situation. John liked to go fast and to jump down from high things; he rarely disembarked off the swings by any other method than a giant soaring leap; he easily shrugged off any pain he incurred from scraped hands or knees; he liked listening to Mer talk even though he fidgeted like crazy if he sat still for too long. The only time he sat still was when Mer sang or hummed to him a piece from the piano lessons Mer also started that summer: John quietly drank in music, any music, and the day Mer brought a radio outside proved to be a hit.
John seemed to believe that Mer was capable of anything--that he too could jump off swings from great heights or scramble up the slide by the time John counted to five--but on the occasions where Mer couldn’t do something because he wasn’t big or strong enough, John only said, "Better this time!" And John only gloated a little over the fact that his paper airplanes always went further than Mer’s.
John was also, Mer learned gradually, a big fat liar, but that wasn’t entirely a bad quality; it meant he told excellent stories, often scary in a pleasantly thrilling way, even if sometimes their conversations were a little strange. For instance, on the day Mer was talking about his dreams of being an astronaut and asked John what he would be when he grew up, John let out a heavy sigh and said, "King."
"You can’t be a king," Mer said in a superior tone, and added kindly, "Canada doesn’t have kings."
Mer had a certain smug smile for those times when he knew something someone else didn’t, but John had one as well, as he said, "I’m not Canadian."
Mer’s forehead wrinkled. "Americans don’t have kings either," he said, although he wasn’t quite as sure about that one.
"I’m not American either," John said. He leaned in close and conspiratorial and said, "I’m not talking about a human country, you know."
"Oh," Mer said in realization. More of that nonsense, like when John had told an awesome story about a fairy who could expand three times his size (except he’d gotten stuck in his own house because he’d eaten something that prevented him from returning to normal), and then insisted he’d seen it himself. Mer had come flat out and called John a liar that time, but John hadn’t taken offence, only said wistfully, "I’d like to be. That’d be so much easier." Usually Mer played along as much as he was able--he’d gotten scolded in kindergarten for disillusioning another child about the existence of Santa Claus--which meant he’d express his skepticism to John to make it clear that he wasn’t believing the story but didn’t quarrel about it, especially since John didn’t seem offended by his disbelief.
"Not a king," Mer said. "Come up with something else you want to be."
John perked up at that. "What I want to be is a pilot," he said promptly. "I’d fly really fast all around the world."
"You could be an astronaut too," Mer said. "We’d go up really high and fly fast."
"But you can’t do it all the time," John objected.
"By the time we’re older space travel might be more frequent," Mer insisted.
"Maybe," John said, but not as if he believed it. "Anyway, I’d go with you for your trips, but between trips I’d fly regular planes." His eyes lit up. "And the little ones that go upside down."
So John was a liar, but that was okay. The only time Mer had gotten upset had been the one time John had involved Mer in one of his lies; Mer had said something about how he wished sometimes that someone would come and take him away from his family, and John had gone pale and bitten his lip and been very insistent that Mer should not, should not, should not say such things.
"With most people it wouldn’t matter," John said firmly, "but you have to be careful not to draw attention like that. It’s just asking for trouble." Then he went into a ridiculous story, watching over his shoulder the whole time because he claimed he wasn’t supposed to be telling Mer this, about how an evil fairy had almost stolen Mer away once and replaced him with a changeling, only the fairy queen (John’s mother) had found out about it in time.
"That’s how I knew about you," John said. "And then I came to see you because I was curious, because he was going to steal you because he knew you’d turn out to be smart, and I wanted to see how smart, and besides I want to see what humans were like anyway. But other people, bad ones, might get curious, and you can’t give them openings like that, you can’t."
They got in a shouting match over that one, because John wouldn’t take it back even though there were no such things as changelings and fairies. They didn’t speak for two days after, playing on opposite ends of the playground. On the third day Mer was at a birthday party--and then at the hospital, with the first allergic reaction he was old enough to understand and remember, courtesy of an evil and deceptive slice of cake.
On the fourth day he was curled up on a sofa, still feeling wiped out, when Mer’s mom came into the room with John trailing her. "Look who I saw playing outside," she said in a determinedly cheerful voice; she was as pale and scared as he was. "John looked like he was wondering where you were, so I said he could come in and say hello and visit a while, as long as he doesn’t tire you out too much."
John smiled tentatively, as if not sure of his welcome. When Mer’s mom left them alone to go get cookies, Mer said crossly, "It was an allergic reaction. Not…sprites or something."
John shook his head, eyes downcast, fiddling with the tassel on the sofa cushion. "If it had been," he said miserably. "I could have squished them." He pinched his thumb and forefinger together in illustration.
"Well, it wasn’t," Mer said a little belligerently, and John nodded in agreement, still tense and worried. Mer regarded this as victory enough and said magnanimously, "You can stay and watch TV, if you want."
They watched TV, and after a time Mer said almost in a whisper, "I couldn’t breathe. It was scary. And it hurt."
"Are you okay now?" John whispered back.
"Uh huh," Mer whispered. "But…it really hurt. And astronauts are...astronauts don’t...you have to be healthy."
"It won’t matter. You’ll be fine as long as there aren’t any lemons on your trip," John said practically. Then he smiled a little, inviting Mer to share the joke. "Or you don’t run into any flying space lemon aliens."
Mer was a little soothed. "There are no flying space lemons."
"Nope," John agreed. "See, you’ll be fine."
After that they’d sometimes go into Mer’s house to play board games or watch TV, although usually John ended up nagging Mer into playing the piano. Not that John had to prod hard; Mer liked to show off a little. Jeannie was also fond of the sound of the piano, and when Mer would see them both on the floor watching him, rapt with wonder and respect, he nearly burst with pride.
***
Summer ended and school began; it cut down on the time Mer spent on the playground, but he still saw John frequently after school. John wasn’t in the same school as Mer, which was a disappointment to both him and his mom. John’s school, Mer incautiously told his mother, taught fencing and military strategy as well as math and science--and their science program sounded much more advanced than his. Mrs. McKay’s forehead wrinkled with disapproval. "Telling tales? I expected better of him," she said, and Mer shut up quickly; he’d known all along that John’s wilder flights of fancy were better kept a secret from his mother. Still, this was a small bump only, and things continued smoothly until the day after Mer turned six, where they fell apart.
His birthday itself was very cool: a chocolate cupcake at lunch, and when he got home Jeannie behaved for once, and his parents’ attention was all on him, and he got many good presents. He got to choose what they would eat that night, and to control the remote on the TV, and to stay up an extra hour.
The following day was a Saturday, and Mer went out to the playground early, new toy car in hand. John ran up when he was testing its speed down the slide, both with and without the little parachute he’d made from a napkin. "I have something for your birthday," John said breathlessly. His hands were clasped behind his back. "Sorta."
"Sorta?" Mer said.
"Sorta like I only have it until the end of the day but we can play with it now," John said.
"Let me see," Mer said, and John took one hand behind his back to reveal a remote control, and another to reveal a small robot, and cool.
The sand in the playground was treacherous to robot feet, but it could manage the metal slide superbly. John and Mer played for hours, maneuvering it across playground equipment and sidewalk, saving it from an old man in a walker who came by and tried to spear it as it whirred ahead of him, and giggling wildly as they made the robot turn in confused circles.
John waved goodbye as usual when it got later, and it was only when Mer went into the house that he remembered that, in telling John about his birthday, he’d promised John a cupcake as a snack. He hastily grabbed one and went back outside, trotting in the direction John had gone.
John had walked away, and Mer was jogging, so he saw John in the distance fairly soon, approaching the yard of a long-empty house at the end of the street. Mer stopped when he saw him, panting, and was about to call after him to wait when John walked onto the property, stopped near a large tree, and bent to put the robot and the remote down on the ground. John made a gesture, a quick pass of his hands, and suddenly Mer didn’t see the robot and its remote but a heap of brown things that looks like sticks and leaves. John scattered them apart with a kick, and then he walked right up to the tree, and there was a shimmer of some sort, and…
Mer started running again then, because it looked like John had disappeared inside the white shimmery light, inside the tree. Though when he reached it, he found no convenient hollow--but John wasn’t hiding behind the tree, hadn’t climbed up into it. Mer called for him, in case he’d somehow found a place to hide, but John didn’t respond, and he couldn’t have gotten out of the reach of Mer’s voice, not that fast. Which meant he’d…he’d really…he was really…
When Mer burst into his house, he was in near hysterics, terrified into incoherence, and his parents alternated between hugging him and chiding him to calm down and tell them what was wrong. He was clutching twigs and leaves in his hands, which he wouldn’t let go of. Mer's parents gleaned (incorrectly) that he’d gotten a little lost attempting to follow John, that he’d approached an empty house out of curiosity and then gotten scared by shadows.
After he'd stopped sobbing enough to talk clearly, he didn't correct their misapprehensions--it was too much to put in words, and his father wouldn’t believe him, his father was a scientist. They’d think he was crazy; they’d talk about him in the whispered hush that his mom used to talk about her brother with schizophrenia. They wouldn’t believe him because this was impossible.
***
The next day, when John arrived, Mer was sitting in the middle of the merry-go-round, knees drawn up and arms curled around them. A collection of twigs and leaves were laid in front of him, evidence to support a hypothesis that he didn’t want to believe.
"Why are you just sitting…" John said as he came running up. He checked when he saw the twigs, and consternation spread over his face. "Oh boy."
"I followed you yesterday," Mer said. "And I saw…" Just like that, Mer was on the verge of tears and terror again, because he’d hoped, he’d hoped that he’d gotten it wrong, that his eyes had been wrong, that he’d missed something. John didn’t look any different, but he was. Everything was. "I saw! The robot wasn’t real. Neither are you."
"Oh boy," John said ruefully. "I am going to be in so much trouble with my mom." He frowned at Mer. "I am too real."
Mer glared at him. "You’re--you’re not…"
"Not human," John finished for him. "So much trouble," he murmured quietly, and sat on the edge of the merry-go-round. Mer swallowed hard, pulled his knees closer to himself, and tilted his chin up.
"You’re not supposed to be possible," he said flatly. "People can’t walk into trees. It’s not scientific."
John opened his mouth to protest, and then apparently thought better of it and shrugged instead. "I can’t explain it," John said. "I’m not allowed. I mean, I could only tell you some things before because you didn’t really believe me." He reached out for one of the twigs, and Mer scooched back a little instinctively. Not a lot, but John dropped his hand and stared in disbelief. "Are you…you’re scared of me?" he said, half-question and half-bewilderment.
"No," Mer said haughtily, but it was a lie. He’d listened to John’s stories all along, after all. He had learned from John himself that fairies were often either monsters or monstrous, that even if they found it difficult to lie outright they couldn’t be trusted, that John’s world was full of violence and trickery. John had known of Mer because one of John’s people had wanted to kidnap him: Mer had wakened in the middle of the night remembering that. The only reason he hadn’t called for his parents or ran to their room was because he’d been paralyzed with fear.
He could tell John was upset now, the seriousness of this sinking in, and was meanly glad of it. "I wouldn’t hurt you," John stammered, and then amended, "Not on purpose, ever. You’re my friend."
"We’re not friends," Mer said, latching onto anger because it quelled the fear. "That was a lie."
"No, it wasn’t," John protested, sounding panicky, like Mer had felt last night when his world had gone topsy-turvy. Good. "We’re friends. We…you said you liked me. And you know I don’t have--you said." It was true John had confided once that Mer was his first true friend, because children were rare among the fairy, and also John was isolated by his mother’s position. At the time Mer had been pleased and proud that his friendship was worth something to John.
"I don’t like you," Mer said. A tiny portion of his mind told him that this might not be the smartest choice, angering someone who could, quite possibly, do magic, but the words spilled out anyway: Mer never would stop mouthing off to someone who might hurt him. But John didn’t shoot flames from his fingers or anything like that. Instead, he clumsily stepped back off the merry-go-round, looking shocked. "I don't know you and it was all a lie and it wasn't fair and I don’t like you," Mer finished in a rush, while John backed up step by step.
"Oh," John said in a small, stunned voice.
They regarded each other for a moment, and Mer opened his mouth to say something to fill the silence. He wasn't sure what he was going to say: he might have yelled at John to go away, and he might have asked him how one turned twigs into robots anyway. But it was John who spoke, drawing himself up to his full height, squaring his shoulders, and clasping his hands behind him. "I apologize," he said, and his voice was formal and crisp and strange. "I had not in-intended to behave with dishonor, or to, to cause you difficulty. I pledge as truth that you have no cause to fear me. I, I’ll," He took a few more steps backwards before turning around with a soft, "Bye."
Arms crossed, Mer watched him walk away. When John was almost at the end of the street, Mer scrambled off the merry-go-round and followed him, his heart pounding. He didn't want to see John walk into a tree again, defying everything Mer knew about the way the world worked, but at the same time he did. But John paused halfway to the empty house and turned around, watching Mer warily. Mer kept approaching him, feeling foolish until he saw that John's eyes were red.
"Were you crying?" he demanded incredulously, because John never cried.
John crossed his arms. "I had something in my eyes," he said defiantly.
Mer narrowed his own eyes at that. That might be true, but that didn't mean it was the whole truth, and the way John squirmed under his scrutiny confirmed that. That made it into a puzzle, and Mer was good at puzzles. It only took a moment before he said, "Something in your eyes. What, tears?" John's flushed face told him he'd hit the mark, and he continued, spitefully pleased about having the upper hand, "Is that who you are really? A crybaby?"
John’s fists clenched at that. "I said I was sorry, okay? And I’m going away, and you don’t need to be mean."
"Sorry," Mer muttered, because that had been kind of mean, and his fear was starting to ebb away anyway, faced with the solidity of John. Even if that was the biggest lie of all. He didn’t know what John looked like; "fairies put on glamours to blend in when they travel the human world, John had once said, and that meant John’s t-shirt and jeans and bright green sneakers were false.
"Why’d you follow me?" John asked. His face turned hopeful. "Did you, um, we could--"
"To see you go into the tree," Mer said.
John’s face became downcast again, and he said, "I can’t go through while you’re there. I’m already going to be in way too much trouble for being careless and letting you see me the first time."
Suddenly Mer was scared again, but for John this time. "Trouble, like…are they going to hurt you?"
John gave him a puzzled frown and said, "Trouble, like, with my mom."
This didn’t relieve Mer’s fear, because John hadn’t answered with a straight negative, which meant he might be avoiding the question. "You can’t go back if your mom’s going to hurt you!" he said; he was angry with John, but that didn’t mean he wanted…
John was taken aback. "She’s not going to hurt me," he said, and when Mer didn’t respond quickly enough because he was breathing out a sigh of relief, "She’s my mom."
"You made her sound all dangerous and scary!" Mer said defensively.
"Not dangerous to me," John said. "And she’s not even…" he eyed his toe, which was tracing a crack in the sidewalk. "I like scary stories," he said, a little sheepishly. "And you liked them too, so that was what I told you, but that’s not…not everything’s scary. It’s not scarier than your world." He tilted his head to consider this claim, and then added, "Well, not much scarier."
Mer remembered the story of the war between the phouka and the selkie, which had involved big sharp teeth and claws, and doubted that. "So she won’t throw you in a dungeon or something?"
"She’ll probably ground me," John said gloomily. "For a long time." His face crumpled a little. "And she’ll make me stay away from the human world, too. Probably for years."
"Oh," Mer said. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not. "That’s not so bad." Compared to chains and dungeons and being tossed to dragons.
"But I like your world," John said, scuffing the toe of his sneaker against the ground. "And I’ll miss, um, you."
Mer didn’t say it in return, but he thought it. "I wish you were really human," he blurted out instead. "I wish we could be friends for real," and John looked up with a sudden, wild hope in his face.
"Really?" he said. "You really wish that?"
Before Mer could reply, there was a sound like a loud crack of thunder, and John craned his head over his shoulder. When he looked back at Mer he was pale. "That’s my mom. She must have found out. I have to go." He run a few steps, spun around again, darted back to Mer and said urgently, "What you wished, you meant it, right?"
"Yeah," Mer admitted, a little unnerved by the crack of thunder.
John grinned. "Okay, right, plus you named me--not a true name, but it counts for something…I can work with that." Then he was running towards the empty house, feet pounding on the pavement, waving behind him as he went.
Part of Mer wanted to run behind him, to see what happened, but most of him was very scared of that thunder sound and what it might mean, and by the time he worked up the courage John was long gone.
***
Mer wondered, for a time, if John would come back. He kept expecting to see him, or to see some other fanciful or nightmarish creature. But John didn’t come, that day or the next or the one after that. "He’s grounded," Mer told his mother, and later, when she asked why she didn’t see John anymore, if his stay with his grandparents had ended, Mer said truthfully, "He said he had to go see his mother."
As time passed, Mer started to doubt what he’d seen. He’d never had proof of the truth, had he? Only what John said--and John had always told stories--and what could have been an optical illusion. He tentatively brought the question of alternate realms that bordered their own to his father one day, couched in hypothetical terms, and was firmly shot down. "I’m disappointed in you, talking about make-believe," his father said. "You’re smart enough to know better."
His mom was making him spend more time on the piano, because she wanted him to be well-rounded. His father loaded him up with more and harder problems after school and bought him a desk to work at. He didn’t have time to go to the playground anymore. The memory of the months he’d spent with John became hazy, incidents blurring together, until eventually even the end of it seemed more like a dream than anything. He’d had a friend named…something like James or John or Jack; they’d had a fight over…something; his friend had moved away.
Not too long after that, Mer’s parents made the decision to move to a house near a school with a system of study Mer’s father deemed challenging enough for his children.
By the time Jeannie was old enough to think of her older brother as a person with his own likes and dislikes, some things were obvious truths: Mer didn’t like scary books or movies. Mer didn’t make friends easily. Mer had better things to do with his time than play around in the dirt.
Jeannie was young: she assumed that because these things were true now, they had always been true. Though perhaps she could be forgiven for that assumption, since Mer himself forgot he’d ever been any different.
Part II
In which a sprained wrist results in the discovery of a plot memory device, a trip is taken, a tan line is examined, and coitus is cruelly interrupted not once but twice.
Much later, when Rodney reflected on how a particular life-changing set of events had transpired, he’d start with his use of the memory device (or possibly just a little bit before). His recollections certainly wouldn’t include a thought of the Stupid Orange Spotted Fuzzballs of P89-X45. Yet one SOSF was, if not ultimately responsible for the discovery of the memory device, at least responsible for the timing.
Captain Wexler’s team had been to P89 before. They liked it there, in fact: an uninhabited planet with a lake right near the Gate that supplied plentiful fish, and trees full of something like blueberries. Every few weeks a team would get to go through and go fishing and berry-picking for the day. Most people considered it informal R&R, and would come back with lips berry-blue, a touch of sunburn, and smiles on their faces from witnessing the antics of the SOSFs.
The SOSFs were cute polka-dotted fluffballs, about the size of basketballs, very docile and extremely stupid. Their main joy in life was to roll about like tumbleweeds, and they often rolled into each other, whereupon they’d make kazoo-like noises of happiness. (A not unpopular pastime on the planet was temporarily to pen a few SOSFs so that they'd drift into each other, providing both a living illustration of Brownian motion and an impromptu concert.) They were both durable and buoyant, which was fortunate for them, as they had a tendency to roll off cliffs or into streams.
"This is the life, doc," Wexler was saying to Patrice Jenkins, a brilliant mechanical engineer who was currently dangling her bare feet in the water and wearing an oversized straw hat. "Sun, sand, fish jumping on the line." He absently scooped up a handful of berries from the basket at his side, the one they’d collected early for their eating pleasure while they fished. This was the first time his team had been sent to P89 since the expedition’s return to the city after the defeat of the Asurans three months ago, and Wexler was pleased as punch to be back on this planet he’d come to know, one of the hundred sights of the Pegasus galaxy that he hadn't known he would see again.
"Glad we pulled this mission," Patrice agreed. They’d been a last-minute substitution for Sheppard’s gate team, when Atlantis had received word that an ally who would only negotiate with Teyla had some Ancient tech to trade.
"You gonna have to pay?" Radisson asked from Patrice’s other side, and the corners of Patrice’s mouth curled into a grin.
"Should get off scot free," she said. "McKay thinks berrying’s a waste of time--he was happy with getting bumped."
They all shook their heads and scoffed at the whims of Rodney McKay, who would be happy with turning down a day like this in favor of tricky trade negotiations. "Not so smart in some things," Radisson said, daring in McKay’s absence.
"Tempting fate there," Wexler said, standing up to go and take a leak, and it was then that he tripped over a SOSF (it kazooed with happiness), fell awkwardly, and sprained his wrist.
***
(At this moment in time, Rodney was on M56-34R, desperately trying to keep his extreme joy at the prospect of buying the crystals the merchant was offering from being so visible that it would wreck Teyla’s negotiations. He leaned in towards Sheppard and hissed, "Stop me from smiling!"
Sheppard obliged, whispering back, "PhD's in English receive exactly the same title as you have. PhD's in sociology have the right to be called doctors."
"Okay, that's working, keep going," Rodney said, a little breathlessly because Sheppard was leaning in close. Behind them, Ronon was snickering, probably at him, but Rodney was so filled with goodwill he didn't care. Teyla turned away--with crystals in hand! Hurray!
With a heroic effort, Rodney refrained from grabbing the crystals from her and crooning over them until after the trader was gone from sight, whereupon Teyla smiled at him indulgently and told him he'd done well, and Ronon offered to carry some of his stuff back to the Gate for him since his hands were full. Rodney beamed at them.)
***
Wexler’s team was grounded for offworld travel, but his injury wasn’t bad enough to stop them from city inventory duty. They were directed to a residential zone in the city that had been cursorily explored and deemed safe but uninteresting from a scientific point of view. Wexler and his team set to scavenging for useful furniture, replacement lamps, and so forth. Boring duty, although some teams had found useful things on their rounds, and the exploring team did have first dibs on any pieces of furniture or knickknacks. Radisson found a data tablet that had acted as a diary for a teenager, which proved that melodrama was a universal constant; Patrice scored one of the really good shower caddies; Lee found a pretty vase that he thought might serve as a small gift for a nurse he was shyly courting.
Wexler was the one who found, fallen behind a sofa, the device. It looked like a set of night vision goggles, with a small square block of material affixed to the side of the headband. The small square had a button on it. Wexler snapped a picture of them in situ, then drew them out carefully with gloved hands. "What do you think these are?" he asked his team. "Anyone seen anything like them before?"
"Put ‘em on and see," Patrice suggested, not seriously. "Could be they poke your eyes out."
"VR porn," Radisson said.
"Binoculars?" Lee said. "Vision repairers?"
Wexler shrugged, said, "One for the database review team," and put the goggles in the cart they were using for prizes that they would bring back to the city immediately. Radisson entered a note into the data pad they were carrying to indicate what sector they’d found it in.
The goggles ended up on Simpson’s desk; she was better than anyone else at determining what descriptors the Ancients might have used to enter any given device in their database. She entered some search terms, focusing not on the goggles but on the small square box that would likely be the control mechanism, and came up with 112 results, which wasn’t bad at all. Before she could sift through them looking for a visual match, she was called to the Gateroom for an emergency.
Conclusion