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Theory of
Everything Fandom: Stargate
Atlantis There is a DVD commentary track for this fic here.
Later, John was able to tell himself that at least he'd known it was a bad idea the second Rodney suggested it. "No," he said as soon as McKay finished outlining his plan. "No way. Not a chance. Absolutely not." "Fifty minutes remaining to impact," Zelenka said, possibly in the mistaken belief that reminding everyone exactly how long they had until the complete destruction of Atlantis was conducive to creating an atmosphere of zen-like calm in which to consider the available options. The available options, as usual, were limited. "Fine," Rodney snapped. "Let's recap the situation for the intellectually challenged Colonel here, shall we?" John said, "We really don't have time for this --" "No, we don't!" Rodney said. "That is the point! There are currently six ten-thousand year old Ancient probes heading straight for us. We've already established we can't shoot them down and we can't intercept them, so the only thing left is to reprogram their guidance systems from here. I'm the only person who can do it but I can't work that fast." "And if you fry your brain you won't be able to do it at all!" John yelled. "Gentlemen!" Elizabeth raised her hands and glared at both of them until they shut up. Then she turned to McKay. "We have a whole team of people who do nothing but work on Ancient computer code. What about them?" "The best of them is still only about half as good as I am," Rodney said. John looked at Zelenka, who shrugged. "This is unfortunately correct. Although I am sure they take comfort in the knowledge they are all far less arrogant than him also." "Okay," Elizabeth said. "So you want to use this thing you think is an Ancient intelligence augmentation device --" John interrupted, "No, we know it's an augmentation device, what we don't know is if it works." "If it doesn't work, we'll all die anyway," Rodney said. "If it does work, there's a chance -- just a chance -- that I might be able to reprogram the six harbingers of death currently hurtling toward us at a little less than light speed within the next -- Radek?" "Forty-eight minutes twenty seconds." "Or you might just fry your brain!" John shouted. "The test subjects showed no ill effects --" "The test subjects were rats, McKay!" "-- and the device's effects were only temporary. Believe me, Colonel, my brain is my favorite part of me, and I have no intention of doing it any permanent damage." John turned to Elizabeth in entreaty. "You make him see sense." Then his heart sank when he saw she was wearing her let's-not-rule-anything-out face. "The last time Ancient technology altered your brain, you nearly died," she said to Rodney. "This is completely different," Rodney said. "The ascension device activated dormant sections of my DNA, and the increased intelligence and funky mental powers were largely a side effect. The augmentation device, as far as we can tell, doesn't make any permanent changes to the body's genetic code -- it just gives the brain a temporary boost. The Ancients probably used it the same way we'd take vitamins." "Am I the only one who thinks the key phrase there was, 'as far as we can tell'?" John asked the room at large. Elizabeth pursed her lips for a moment, then said, "If Rodney considers the risks acceptable and is willing to do it, then I'm willing to let him." "Thank you, Elizabeth," Rodney said, and while his expression was superficially noble and self-sacrificing, John could see him trying to hide his glee. It figured -- John knew Rodney had spent time trying to follow up on the work he'd done while he'd been nearly-ascended, without much success. McKay had been dying to try out the augmentation device ever since they'd found it and figured out what it was for; now he had the perfect excuse to find out if it could actually increase human intelligence by the same factor it did in lab rats without leaving himself open to accusations of intellectual vanity. "If this goes horribly wrong, I'm not spoon-feeding you," John said. Rodney was already half-way out the door. "Your support is noted." "You're the most stupid genius I've ever met!" John yelled after him. Later, he really regretted saying that. In the event, it turned out that the augmentation device didn't work as well on humans as it had on rats. It worked even better. After a short exposure to the energy-field the augmentation device generated when activated -- less than a minute, barely half the dosage the rats had been given -- McKay blinked twice, stood up and said, "Wow." "Rodney?" John said. "Are you okay?" "Yeah," Rodney said. He looked around. "Wow. This is… wow." "So, do you feel any, you know, smarter?" Rodney was gazing into the middle distance, wearing a vaguely distracted expression. "Hmmm?" Zelenka caught John's eye and pointedly tapped his watch. In a voice which he thought came out sounding impressively calm, given the circumstances, John said, "McKay: did it work?" Rodney turned around and smiled beatifically at him. "Oh yes. I think we can safely say that it worked." "Great," John said tightly. "Terrific. Now would you like to maybe save our lives? Because we only have --" "Thirty minutes to impact," Zelenka finished for him. "That long?" Rodney said. "Oh good. I won't
need to hurry, then." Rodney looked at the Ancient code for more than ten minutes ("I'm thinking," he said indignantly when John felt obliged to remind him again of the pressing nature of the situation) before cracking his knuckles and making a series of sweeping changes to the program. At first Zelenka kept up a running commentary on what he was doing, but then McKay started rewriting portions of the base code and Zelenka fell silent, the look on his face one of awe. "All done," Rodney said, and about ten seconds later Elizabeth radioed from the Gate Room to tell them that all the probes had simultaneously adjusted their courses and were now in stable orbits around the planet. "How did you do that?" Zelenka asked. "It's really very straightforward when you understand it," Rodney said smugly, and launched into an explanation of such mind-bending complexity that John had to leave after the first couple of sentences in case his brain started bleeding out his ears. For the next couple of days, Rodney embarked on something that John could only think to describe as a math bender, refusing to stop work for meetings, off-world missions, sleep or even -- incredibly for Rodney -- meals. It wasn't exactly healthy, but he seemed to be happy and he was burning through problems which had been stumping the science department for months at a rate which promised to deliver some pretty spectacular results, once everyone else slowly caught up with what he was doing. The next scheduled mission had to be postponed -- Rodney refused to go, and no amount of cajoling, bribery or actual threats would change his mind -- which left John with large gaps in his schedule. He filled them by spending time down in the science labs. Other than being more manic than usual, Rodney seemed to be fine, but John had learned the hard way that it was always a good idea to maintain a healthy wariness of Ancient tech. So he hung around the science section with the intention of keeping an eye on Rodney, even if it meant spending several boring days watching McKay do math. What surprised John was that it wasn't boring at all. Most of the time he had no idea what Rodney was working on, but, strangely, it didn't matter. Rodney worked with a sheer, exuberant delight that was exhilarating to watch even if the detail was completely lost on John. After a while, it hit him that the reason McKay seemed so different wasn't so much the augmentation as the fact that John most often got to see Rodney's genius on display in the middle of a crisis, when lives depended on his problem-solving abilities, whereas right now he was just working for the joy of it. It was like watching the world's fastest racecar being driven by the world's best driver, outpacing everything else on the track with consummate ease. This was what nature had built Rodney to do, and he was having the time of his life doing it. John, meanwhile, found he was happy to be along for the ride, if only as a spectator. Late in the evening of the second day, while Rodney was taking a micro-break to wolf down a couple of power bars, he said, "You know, in my field you have to accept that your best work -- the stuff you're going to get remembered for -- is behind you at thirty. Don't get me wrong, even at my normal intellect I'm still stupendously accomplished, but the fact is I'm not that far off forty and, well, as time goes on you start relying more on experience and less on creativity. Even me. Ascension devices notwithstanding, I haven't worked like this since I was twenty-five, and I didn't think I was going to again." Then, wistfully, he added, "God, I wish you could see this." John waved a hand at the multiple whiteboards lined up all around the lab. "I can see it, Rodney. It's kind of hard to avoid." "I mean see it," Rodney said. "The math is so perfect, so pure, it's like… a kind of poetry. Better than poetry, because symbols are more precise than words. I know it must all look like squiggles to you, but when it comes together and you know what it's saying -- it's so right it's actually beautiful and it just seems unfair that I can't…" he broke off for a moment and then finished, "that I can't share it with someone." "Give Zelenka a couple of months to catch up and I'm sure he'll be able to appreciate this stuff like it should be," John said. "I wasn't thinking of Zelenka," Rodney said. John shot him a glance, but the look on Rodney's face was unreadable. He wanted to tell McKay that it was okay, that he did understand, maybe not completely but enough. He just wasn't sure how to -- that kind of directness wasn't part of their shared vocabulary. He thought for a long time, and then finally he said, "The first time I ever flew a helicopter… I remember sitting there, right in the center of a million pieces of metal and plastic and circuitry all bolted together, and then the blades started going round and suddenly it did this amazing thing, took off, defied gravity, and knowing I was the one who'd made it do that… that was kind of incredible." Rodney snorted, but there was no mockery in it. "Surely you've seen more impressive things than helicopters in the last couple of years." "Yeah," John said, "but I loved helicopters first." Rodney was quiet for a second, and then he smiled. "You do get it, don't you? That's good. I'm glad." John looked at him, but Rodney didn't meet his gaze: he had gone back to studying the whiteboards. His skin was sallow and he looked tired -- hardly unexpected, since he hadn't slept in a couple of days -- but his eyes shone with the clear, sharp light of intelligence, and John found he didn't want to look at anything else.
It was at that point that John had a quiet conversation with Elizabeth and suggested an intervention might be in order. Luckily, it didn't come to that. By the time John went to the labs, bringing Carson and a syringe full of sedative with him, the situation had resolved itself. Zelenka was waiting for them, and when they walked in he lifted a finger to his lips and pointed. Rodney was lying slumped at his workstation, bits of the augmentation device strewn around him. He was snoring lightly and his face was completely peaceful. John helped Carson roll Rodney on to a gurney, and watched with some relief as Rodney was wheeled off in the direction of the infirmary and, he hoped, many hours of sleep. Zelenka, meanwhile, was frowning at the partially disassembled augmentation device. "What shall we do with it?" "I guess you can't throw it in the ocean," John said. "Deliberate destruction of Ancient technology is against mission guidelines," Zelenka pointed out. "Deliberately hiding it from McKay isn't, though," John said. "That's not an order or anything. I'm just saying." Zelenka nodded, and John left the labs feeling happy that they'd reached an understanding and confident that they'd seen the last of the augmentation device. He was a little regretful when he thought about how happy Rodney had been, but John knew he couldn't have kept pace up for much longer without doing himself real harm and, anyway, McKay had gotten through so much in the past few days that he'd have plenty to be getting on with for the next six or eight months. And if John had to live with Rodney being snippy and pissed for the next while, until he came down off the intellectual high -- well, he'd put up with worse from Rodney before. Give it a week, John figured, and Rodney would have forgotten
all about this.
John finished the last of his food and wondered when they could get back to talking about other things at mealtimes. It had been a week and a half, and Rodney was just as annoyed as he had been when he'd woken up from his eighteen-hour nap and discovered he was back to being only a regular genius again. "Would you please give it a rest? If you thought of it once, you'll think of it again. You've got the notes you made, right?" "Oh yes. I have the notes I made when I was so brilliant I could omit two steps out of every three in my reasoning because the logic was so obvious to me. It'll take me years to reconstruct even the basic principles." "Then look on bright side. Now you've got something to do on those long, boring winter evenings." "McKay's Theory," Rodney said. He had a far-away look in his eyes. "They would have given me a Nobel for it." "You're going to get a whole shelf-full of Nobels when the program gets declassified," John pointed out reasonably. "But not for this," Rodney insisted, reminding John of nothing so much as a small child proclaiming that the only the ice-cream worth eating was the one that had just fallen on the ground. "You know what the worst part is?" John did know what the worst part was, because Rodney had told him every time they'd had this conversation. Unfortunately, he didn't think pointing that out was going to stop Rodney telling him again. "The worst part," Rodney said, "is that it was all so clear when I thought of it. It was so simple. I couldn't believe no one had seen it before. I had it, I understood it completely, and then when I woke up it had just… slipped away. And every time I try to get it back I just can't make my mind stretch that far, and it's making me feel stupid." He actually sounded kind of down about it, and John's irritation gave way to sympathy for a moment. "As you never tire of reminding me, you're a genius. The only stupid thing here is that you're letting this get to you." He pushed away his empty plate and sat back in his chair. "See, this is just another reason why using that machine was a bad idea." "I hate not understanding things," Rodney said. "I mean, I'm practically pathological about it. The trouble is, I'm so smart that there's usually nothing I can't get my head around if I really want to. Knowing that there's something that's actually beyond my capabilities is a novel and deeply unpleasant experience for me." "Everyone has an upper limit, McKay. Even you." "I suppose," Rodney said. He stood up and lifted his tray, and John followed him over to the hatch where they deposited their lunch dishes. "It's a pity, though. I mean, when I think of the knowledge I could have given to humanity -- I could have single-handedly advanced our entire civilization by decades. We could've taken a quantum leap forward." "Mmm," John said, stacking his tray on top of the others and not really listening. It wasn't until he was thinking about the conversation again
later that he realized what Rodney had said. Teyla lowered the fighting sticks she was holding and shook her head. "Forgive me, but I do not understand. If Rodney did say that, why is this cause for concern?" Already John was starting to regret trying to explain it to her. The Ancients' universal-translation technology worked so well that it was easy to forget that Teyla didn't actually speak English, and it had taken John a while to figure out how to make it clear what he was talking about. The problem was, once he said it out loud, it sounded so trivial as to be completely ridiculous. But he'd started telling her now, so it was too late to drop it. "It's an expression people use sometimes. If something's a really significant advancement, you'd call it a quantum leap." Teyla furrowed her brow in a way that John guessed meant she was concentrating on listening to what he was actually saying, rather than allowing the translation field to replace it with whatever the Athosian equivalent idiom was. "And that is the context in which Rodney used the phrase," she said. "Therefore he was correct." "Yeah, but the word 'quantum' actually means something really tiny. People say 'quantum leap' to mean one thing when it really should mean the exact opposite." Teyla was looking at him, and John knew what the inevitable next question was going to be. "Please don't ask me why, because I have no idea. English is full of weird stuff like that." "And this is the language you think in," she said, sounding amused. John grinned. "Yeah. Explains a lot, doesn't it? Anyway, the point is, Rodney hates that kind of thing. One time, not long after we got here, I made the mistake of using the word 'decimate' in a conversation with him." Teyla frowned. "To reduce something to one tenth of its original quantity?" John rolled his eyes. "Everyone's a nitpicker." She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "I see now why what you describe would be a strange mistake for him to make." "Maybe I'm making a big deal out of nothing," John said. "I'm just a little nervous given that he's been playing with the settings on his brain lately. I did that with my laptop once, and I couldn't get the little menu bar back for weeks." Teyla smiled. "We are very fortunate to have Rodney and his enormous brain. It is only natural you do not wish anything to happen to him or it." "But I should quit fussing." "I did not say that," she said kindly. "You were thinking it," John said. "Yes, but in Athosian, which is clearly superior to English." Then she went on to demonstrate her all-around superiority by beating John easily in their next round of sparring. By the time they'd finished and he'd showered and changed and investigated the brand new bruises Teyla had given him, John had convinced himself he was overreacting after all. He was less sure he was overreacting after Rodney almost blew up the city. One of the fruits of the several days Rodney had spent as an ultra-genius had been a plan to make the city's power consumption more efficient by an order of several magnitudes. John didn't understand the detail of it -- no one did, apart from McKay -- but it involved fundamentally changing the Ancient programs which ran Atlantis in a way that made John ever so slightly nervous. He wasn't the only one. When Elizabeth asked Zelenka for his opinion at the weekly planning meeting, he looked briefly uncomfortable and then said, "It is not that I do not think we should do it, only that we should not do it yet." "Judas," Rodney hissed across the table at him. John usually tried to remain neutral in Rodney's frequent disagreements with the rest of the science department, but this time he felt he had to weigh in on the side of common sense. "He's right, McKay. We can't make wholesale changes to the Ancient software that no one except you understands." Petulantly, Rodney said, "I don't see why not, since I'm the only one who understands most of it anyway." "And how do we know it's even going to work, if no one else has checked it?" "Because I've checked it," Rodney said. "I did 99% of the work when I was super-super-intelligent, and I've spent the last couple of days crossing the T's and dotting the I's. The difference between super-genius me and regular-genius me is enough that it's practically like having two different people look at it." "Nevertheless, I'd feel more comfortable if Dr. Zelenka made an independent assessment," Elizabeth said. "We'll take a complete system backup before applying the changes anyway," Rodney said. "Worst case scenario, we switch to the naquadah generators for a couple of hours while I restore everything." "That's fine," Elizabeth said, "but I still want a second opinion." Rodney grumbled and groused and at one point accused the room at large of 'intellectual victimization', but Elizabeth had the enviable ability to project rock-like steadfastness in the face of a full-blown McKay tantrum and didn't budge. In the end Rodney agreed to let Zelenka check his work, and they moved on to the next item on the agenda. Two nights later, John was woken up by the noise of an explosion somewhere in the city. He sat bolt upright, grabbed his radio from beside the bed and called the Gate Room. "This is Sheppard. What just happened?" "We're not sure, sir," said the night shift tech who answered. "There was a huge power spike and the east pier power router blew out." An ugly suspicion was starting to form in John's mind. "Is McKay doing something?" "As a matter of fact, Dr McKay called in about an hour ago to say he needed to run a few diagnostics and not to worry if we noticed any unusual activity --" "Yeah, like things blowing up unexpectedly," John said. "Where is he now?" "In the main power control room at the base of the control tower --" The voice broke off for a second and then said worriedly, "Uh, I'm reading another power spike, Colonel, and it's coming from that location." Fuck. The east pier wasn't inhabited, but an explosion right underneath the control tower would cripple the whole mission and almost certainly mean loss of life. "Raise Zelenka and tell him to meet me down there," John said as he got up and clipped the radio on to his ear. "Then call Carson and let him know we might have casualties. And then evacuate the control tower. Sheppard out." There wasn't time to dress and the power fluctuations meant that John couldn't risk taking a transporter, so he ran all the way from his quarters to the lower levels in the shorts and t-shirt he'd been sleeping in, trying and failing to raise McKay on the radio the whole time. He really hoped Rodney hadn't gone and gotten himself killed, if only because that would mean John wouldn't have the chance to kill him himself. He hadn't been this angry with Rodney since the Arcturus debacle, and that had been the direct result of Rodney's hubris, too. Hadn't he fucking learned? Then he raced down the last length of corridor and into the power control room, and for a second forgot to be furious. The room was dominated by a central control console which was mushroom shaped and covered with all kinds of Ancient instruments and readouts. It was emitting sparks and John could see flames starting to lick up from underneath one side of its rim. Rodney's laptop -- its screen dark and its hard drive presumably fused -- was connected to it by a cable, and Rodney himself was on the floor on the other side of the room, holding his burned hands out in front of himself and staring at the growing conflagration in stupefied horror. John coughed; the room was rapidly filling with smoke. They probably didn't have long before the same thing happened here as had happened on the east pier. "Whatever you did, you have to undo it now," John ordered, "or that thing's going to blow up and take the control tower with it." Rodney looked at him, but distractedly. "It should have worked," he said. "I don't understand. I was sure it would work." "McKay! Never mind that -- just fix it!" But Rodney was shaking his head. "I can't," he said. Then he started to repeat it under his breath, like an anti-confidence mantra -- I can't, I can't, I can't -- and it hit John that McKay was panicking. For a second he simply didn't know how to react, because he'd never seen Rodney freeze like this before. He was used to Rodney's own particular brand of crisis-induced verbal diarrhea, but fundamentally John had come to expect that when things got really serious, Rodney would still be able to call on every last one of those brilliant gray cells of his to produce the solution. John didn't have a response to what was happening now, because it simply wasn't in the manual. Then, just as John was standing there and beginning to wonder what the fuck they were going to do without the control tower and the Gate, Zelenka ran in like a tiny Czech superhero, carrying not one but two laptops as well as several more pieces of Ancient tech that John couldn't identify. "Out of my way, please," he said, and without waiting for a response dived underneath the control console. John ran over to McKay and hauled him to his feet. "Come on." Rodney blinked and watched Zelenka working for a second, like he wasn't sure why he wasn't the one doing that. John would have liked an answer to that as well. "I don't understand," McKay said again. "You can figure out why it didn't work later," John said, pulling him in the direction of the door. "No, no, you don't get it," Rodney said. He had a weird expression on his face, horrified and confused and filled with a degree of self-loathing John had never seen there before, even after Arcturus. "You don't get it," McKay repeated, and the next words came out as if they'd just been extracted under torture. Maybe, from Rodney's perspective, they had. "I don't understand."
"Can you explain it to us?" Elizabeth asked. "It would be difficult," Zelenka said. "The math is very complex. The error was one that many very brilliant people might have made." John heard the implied exception in that sentence. "But not McKay." "Rodney has the most exceptional mind I have ever encountered," Radek said. "He is a genius." "Or he was," John said, his voice heavy. Elizabeth looked at him questioningly. John hesitated. "I've had the feeling that McKay's been a little… off his game lately. I thought maybe I was imagining it, but now I'm not so sure. And it started not long after he used the augmentation device." "You think it's harmed him in some way?" "I really hope not," John said, "but we don't how that thing worked. What if -- I don't know, what if it didn't really make him smarter, it just forced his brain to work harder than it was meant to for a short while?" "Like burning a light bulb extra bright at the cost of reducing its lifespan," Elizabeth said, and John wished she hadn't put it like that -- it gave him an unpleasant mental image of Rodney's mind suddenly popping and going dark. "If anyone knows whether Rodney's mental faculties have been damaged, it will be Rodney," Zelenka said. Elizabeth folded her arms and looked worried. John didn't blame her: the fact that his private doubts about McKay's state of mind had suddenly become something they were entertaining as a serious possibility was unsettling him a lot more than he wanted to admit. And if there really was something wrong with Rodney's brain -- well, given how much they depended on him, they were all in serious trouble. "Even if he knows, getting him to admit it might be a whole other problem," Elizabeth said. "Actually, no," Rodney's voice said. "Consider this a full and frank disclosure." John turned around just as McKay walked into Elizabeth's office. He looked dreadful, with dark circles under his eyes and, like Zelenka, dressings on his hands. He collapsed into the remaining empty chair and pushed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets in a gesture of weariness. When he lowered them, he said quietly, "I guess the first thing I need to do is apologize." "You were supposed to wait for Radek to finish checking your work," Elizabeth said. She sounded more disappointed than angry, which John thought was somehow worse. "I know," Rodney said, "and I'm sorry." "The error was not obvious," Zelenka said, sounding as if he was trying to offer what little comfort he could. "I myself might have missed it, and the situation would have arisen anyway." Rodney shook his head. "It was all so simple to me when I first thought of it. It just seemed inconceivable that any of it was wrong. And I didn't want to wait to put it live because I wanted to see it working. I wanted to show that it worked because…" He stopped, looked at them all in turn and then finished, "…because I knew there was something wrong with me and I was trying to prove to myself there wasn't. Hey, everyone, didn't that go well?" Quietly, Elizabeth said, "Tell us what's wrong, Rodney." "We do not know that," Zelenka said. "It could be a temporary diminution caused by the extra strain the augmentation device placed on your brain." "Maybe it's just regular, good old fashioned burnout," John suggested, although he knew in his heart he was clutching at straws. "Maybe all you need is a vacation." "'Maybe all you need is a vacation'," Rodney parroted. "Please. I'm not stupid, you know." Then he looked stricken. "I'm not stupid yet." Zelenka was thoughtful. "We did not observe these after-effects with the rats which were exposed to the augmentation device." "Yeah, but they were rats," John said. If scientists were so smart, how come they couldn't get their heads around the idea that a small rodent wasn't the same thing as a human being? "How are you going to know if a rat gets dumber?" "There are ways," Zelenka said. "For example, you might teach the rat how to solve a maze before exposing it to the augmentation device, and then observe whether it can still solve the maze after the device's effects wore off." "And did you do that?" "No," Rodney admitted. "We observed that the rat didn't die or become catatonic, and pretty much chalked that up as a win." He looked at John. "You have my permission to say 'I told you so'." "Let's not start that," Elizabeth said firmly. "Our time would be more productively spent working out how we fix this." "Fix this…" Rodney groaned. "Oh, no." "What?" John asked. "The augmentation device. I started fixing it, didn't I? I took it to pieces." John looked at Zelenka in alarm. "You knew I was joking about throwing it into the sea, right?" Rodney yelped, "What?!" just as Zelenka held up his hands, cutting him off. "Of course I knew the Colonel was joking. What do you take me for?" His scowl softened into a frown. "However, I did not make any attempt to reassemble the device. I boxed it and put it in the store room at the end of the west pier." "Why there?" Rodney asked. "We don't keep anything there. No one even goes there." Zelenka glanced at John and shrugged. "A momentary lapse." "Which is what I'm going to be having a lot more of if we can't reverse this," Rodney said. "Okay, we need to put the augmentation device back together, figure out exactly how it works and what it did to me, and then somehow alter it so that we can use it to repair the damage it's done to my brain." He exhaled. "That's a pretty tall order, isn't it?" "It'll be fine," John said, forcing himself to sound completely confident. "Look, when weird shit happens around here, most of the time what takes us longest is finding out what's causing it. We've got a head start on this one." "Right," Rodney said, looking marginally more positive. He turned to Elizabeth. "I'm still the best person to work on this. But I don't know how long that's going to be the case." She nodded. "As of right now, that's your only priority. I'll reassign your other duties." McKay nodded. "Thanks." He looked around the room in silence for a moment and then said, "It won't have escaped anyone's notice that this is absolutely the scariest thing that could possibly happen to me. I mean, I know there's a lot of stuff I'm on record as not being hugely keen on -- Wraith and Replicators and nanoviruses and what have you -- but at least all of those things are specific to the wild and crazy fun park which is the Pegasus Galaxy. Losing my mind is -- well, that's my own personal extra-special nightmare. It comes with me wherever I go. And here I am, living it." Zelenka, who was sitting closest to McKay, leaned over and touched his arm reassuringly. "We're all here for you, Rodney," Elizabeth said. "You can depend on us," John added. Rodney smiled, but there was something very sad and very fragile about it. "I know. But what do I do if can't depend on myself anymore?"
Rodney told Elizabeth that he'd prefer it if the 'situation', as he referred to it, didn't become public knowledge, and she agreed. The only exceptions he made were for Teyla, Ronon and Carson. As far as the rest of Atlantis was concerned, Dr McKay was working on a secret and extremely high priority project, and would be unavailable in the short term. The very short term, John hoped. The first thing Beckett did was to ask Rodney to take an IQ test every day, so they could at least gauge how fast the degeneration was progressing. The results weren't encouraging. John was no scientist, but the graph Carson showed him wasn't hard to interpret -- a wobbly line sloping inexorably downward. "IQ is a very crude measure of overall intelligence," Carson said. "The human mind is a complex, marvelous thing, and reducing it to a number -- well, it's like giving a sunset marks out of ten. You can do it, but it's arguable how useful it is." He was trying to be reassuring, but John wasn't buying it. Even if the usefulness of IQ as an indication of intelligence was debatable, the one thing that was beyond dispute was that Rodney's was going down, down, down. The human mind is a complex, amazing thing. Yeah, John thought sourly, it was until you fucked it up. "How long has he got?" Beckett shook his head. "Well, the degeneration's not accelerating, which is something. But as for where or whether it'll level off, I have no way of telling." He tapped the graph. "Assuming his intelligence continues to decline at a steady rate, he'll have an IQ of about 100 -- average -- in a couple of weeks." Average, John thought. It was almost impossible to conceive of an average Rodney McKay. "And after that?" "Down to ninety is still within the parameters of normal intelligence, although it's on the dull side. Eighty to ninety is borderline impaired. Anything under seventy would mean definite mental retardation." "But it's not going to come to that, because we're going to figure out how to fix it." Carson looked unhappy. "If it were being caused by a biological agent, I'd at least know where to start. But Ancient hardware isn't my area of expertise." He paused. "We may be able to slow it down using drugs. I've been reading up on what they're using these days to inhibit the progress of Alzheimer's." Alzheimer's. Christ. Dealing with weird alien shit was basically John's entire job description and hardly phased him anymore, but the idea of Rodney falling victim to something as real as Alzheimer's was somehow more disturbing. "Fine. Then start giving them to him." "It's not just as easy as that, Colonel. The average age of the expedition is thirty-five, and our supply of pharmaceuticals reflects that. I'm going to have to order what we need from Earth." "So do it," John snapped at him and then, because
he didn't think he could handle this conversation for much longer, he
left.
But the difference between 160 and, say, 140… that was noticeable. "The SGC's dialing us later today," John said as he came into the isolated lab Rodney had made his home from home for the past days. "They're opening a Gate from Earth specially to send through the drugs Carson's ordered for you." "Intergalactic prescription deliveries -- the healthcare benefits in this job really are amazing," Rodney said, looking up from the screen of his laptop. "Of course, it has to be, given the extremely high chance of dying horribly." The augmentation device was sitting near his elbow. It was still mostly in pieces and if John was being completely honest with himself, he'd have to admit it didn't look very different to when Rodney had started working on it. "I brought you lunch," he said, clearing a space on the tabletop and putting a sandwich in a paper bag down in it. Rodney picked up the bag and investigated the contents. "What is it?" "Tuna. Don't pull that face at me, McKay, it's brain food." "Right, like that's going to significantly help me," Rodney said, but he started eating the sandwich anyway. Then, as John turned to go, he said, "You're not staying?" John stopped, surprised. "Only if you want a break. I don't want to hold you back." "No, I -- I could use the company." "Sure," John said. He came back to the workbench and sat down on the opposite side to McKay. "Did the Air Force ever make you take an IQ test?" Rodney asked after a second, his tone too light. "Yeah, a few times," John said, equally easily. "What'd you get?" "They never told me," John lied. "It's just a number; it doesn't mean anything. I didn't care as long as they let me fly." "Right," Rodney said. He looked at John. "And what if you woke up one morning and suddenly you didn't know how to anymore?" John stared at Rodney for a second in silence. Then he reached across the bench and spun McKay's laptop around. The only application open on it was a game of FreeCell. "How long?" John asked. Rodney shook his head. "Just since this morning, really. I was doing fine until last night, and then I started struggling. I thought I was just tired, but it's more than that. I'm losing -- I've lost the basic concepts that underpin Ancient technology." His voice was very quiet, almost inaudible, as he finished, "I'm not going to be the one who solves this." "Zelenka can take over," John said. "He can work from your notes. He's almost as smart as you are." "As I was," Rodney said, his voice hollow. He looked across at John and said, "Although I'm not completely dumb yet. What is your IQ, Colonel? And please be honest, because I have system administrator privileges, and I can hack your file later." John could hardly meet his eyes as he said, "About 140." "I always knew you were smarter than you liked people to think." McKay smiled tightly. "Right now, there's probably not much difference between us." "I guess this is my chance to take you on at speed sudoku," John said. He meant it as a joke, and wasn't prepared for the reaction he got. McKay's face crumpled into misery. "I'd wait a couple of days if I were you," he said.
John stared at her. "I'm sorry, are you getting dumber too? Because I thought I just heard you suggesting we should stop trying to help McKay." "That's not what I'm saying at all," Elizabeth said. "If Rodney is permanently incapacitated, Dr Zelenka will have to step up to be head of science. We have to start thinking about handover." Stubbornly, John said, "We're not going to lose him." "I think we have to start considering what happens if we do." "What about, We're all here for you Rodney?" "Hear me out," she said. "We've all let ourselves get too used to Rodney being the only one who understands -- who really understands -- too many things about Atlantis. There are any number of mission protocols about documenting what we've learned, but with everything that happens around here, we don't exactly keep up to date on that. Rodney least of all." "I can't believe you've decided now is a good time to kick up a stink over some missing paperwork," John said angrily. "I'm not being trivial," Elizabeth replied, her voice sharp. "I don't have the luxury of only worrying about what happens to Rodney. The survival of the whole mission is my responsibility. That means thinking about what we do if we have to continue on without him." "Yeah, well, you should've thought about that when you let him pull that crazy stunt in the first place," John shot back at her. Elizabeth's face froze. She was silent for what felt like a long time, and then she said, stiffly, "Yes, I gave him permission. Please remember, Colonel, I'm the one who'll have to live with that." As she finished speaking her expression flickered and, just for an instant, John saw the full measure of her grief and guilt. Then it was gone again, successfully covered up by the carefully cultivated mask of a leader and a diplomat. It was too late, though. Slowly, he said, "I'm sorry. That was… unfair. He wanted to try that thing out -- he probably would've done it even if you'd said no. And it did work. We didn't get pulverized by ten thousand year old malfunctioning probes." Elizabeth smiled faintly. "He complains and he bitches, but he always comes through for us, doesn't he?" "And now we have to come through for him." Elizabeth laced her fingers together like she had to do something with her hands to stop herself hitting the table top, or maybe even John. "We simply can't afford to lose the things that Rodney knows that nobody else does, and Radek's the best one -- the only one -- who can take over from him. If I let Radek do nothing but work on the augmentation device, then I'm gambling his success against the very real chance that we'll all be dead next month when something happens that no one knows how to fix. That is the choice, John. So help me out here. Give me options. Work with me." She looked frustrated, and for the first time in a long time he remembered that their approaches were fundamentally different. She was a negotiator and wanted to compromise until they reached an acceptable solution; John just wanted a clear set of instructions he could follow which would save Rodney. Ruefully, he allowed himself to acknowledge it wasn't Elizabeth's fault if she couldn't provide that. Right now, none of them could. "Let Zelenka take over working on the augmentation device," he said, "and tell Rodney to start documenting the really important stuff he knows in case he -- well. In case." "Given that the really important stuff means the things Rodney knows which are too complex for anyone else to follow, that knowledge may already be lost." "Even if he's forgotten the detail, he can still -- I don't know -- give us pointers," John said. He wasn't one hundred per cent sure how that would work: maybe it'd be something along the lines of, 'Next time the Wraith turn up and you need to boost shield efficiency by a factor of ten, try fiddling with the big red box in the lower labs -- that's what I did and it worked although I can't remember why'. But Elizabeth was nodding. It wasn't a great compromise but, he realized suddenly, in spite of all that stuff about needing to place the mission's survival above Rodney's, she really was just as desperate as John was to help him. "And Radek can review Rodney's notes as he makes them." "That'll work." Well, it would work for a little while. But John hoped a little while was all they needed. Just a little more time.
But Rodney just said, "Yes, I'll do that. I'll start by documenting the changes I made to the ZPM interface." It wasn't until after he'd walked away that John realized he'd wanted Rodney to argue about it, because if he recognized it was necessary, that meant he was starting to think he wasn't going to come back from this. After that, John started spending more time with Rodney. He told himself this was because Rodney's morale was suffering in the wake of his failure to solve his problem himself, and if he was going to hold himself together long enough for Zelenka to find a solution, he would need all the support he could get. It absolutely wasn't because Rodney was running out of time and John knew it. But he did know it, because now the signs were unavoidable. There were Rodney's emails, for example. Rodney emailed the same way he talked -- constantly, fluidly and at great length. One of the small things that defined normality in Atlantis was that on any given day there would be at least two or three emails from McKayR to Atlantis_All, each one a minimum of several paragraphs long and with subject headers such as, "Care of your laptop - i.e. look after the damn thing because I don't have time to fix it for you" and "ATA gene users: for the love of all that is holy THINK before you TOUCH things". Elizabeth had joked that if the Atlantis expedition was ever declassified, the first thing she was going to do was publish Rodney's emails in a multi-volume set, collectively entitled Epistles From Pegasus. Even when Rodney had been squirreled away in a lab working on the augmentation device, he'd still found time to write a couple of emails each day. But then they became more irregular, and their content slowly changed too. At first, the messages were just a little less focused, a little more rambling than they should have been. And then John noticed small mistakes in spelling and grammar creeping in -- errors Rodney would never have made before -- until one day there was an email which contained a sentence John couldn't make sense of at all, until he realized that Rodney had written 'circumscribe' where he should have used 'circumvent'. Rodney stopped sending global emails after that. A day or two later, he stopped sending emails completely. John stepped up his efforts to keep Rodney engaged and positive when he wasn't busy documenting what he knew for Zelenka. He hunted down copies of movies Rodney hadn't seen -- difficult enough in Atlantis -- and watched them with him. When Rodney wouldn't play him at chess any more, John persuaded him to play checkers instead. He made Rodney go for long walks with him into the parts of the city they still hadn't fully explored, which was, okay, more than a little risky, but John felt it was justified if it helped McKay hold on to his joy in exploration and discovery. And when he couldn't think of anything else to do, he just turned up at Rodney's quarters and talked to him until his throat was sore. That was hardest, because John was the one doing most of the talking now. Rodney was getting quieter as the days wore on, withdrawing into himself, no longer offering his opinion on every subject in the firm belief that the world could only benefit from sharing in his immense wisdom. And when he did talk, his conversation was duller and -- John hated to admit it, but it was true -- increasingly tedious. But John made himself listen. It was an upside-down, surreal situation. The very last thing John had ever thought he'd need to do was find ways of bolstering McKay's self-confidence. And, anyway, unless Zelenka found an answer, whatever John did wasn't going to be enough.
As soon as he walked into the lab he realized how hopelessly optimistic that had been. There were at least half a dozen empty coffee cups sitting around Zelenka's workstation; his eyes were red-rimmed behind his glasses and he looked like he was running on caffeine, adrenalin and not much else. The augmentation device, which was at least now mostly back in one piece, squatted malignantly nearby. Okay, maybe it wasn't squatting malignantly so much as just sitting there, but by this stage John loathed the thing more than enough to be able to view it as the technological equivalent of a Wraith. It was sucking the life and vitality out of Rodney just as successfully as a Wraith would have. "No, I have not found the answer yet," Zelenka said tiredly when he looked up and saw John standing there. "I am sorry to disappoint." It was more than a disappointment, and although it wasn't Zelenka's fault, John couldn't help but feel an irrational stab of anger at him for not fixing it already. "You're making progress, though, right?" "Some," Zelenka said. "Rebuilding the augmentation device was difficult because Rodney made a number of modifications to it while he was a genius-squared, and he did not finish them or make notes on what he had done. There was much work in simply identifying the changes, and Rodney did not complete the task before he had to stop. It has taken me this long simply to return the device to the state it was in when he used it." So it had taken the best part of two weeks just to get back to exactly where they'd started, John thought. Fuck. Just… fuck. "Okay, but now you know how it works. How long is it going to take to fix it?" "I do not know." "That's not good enough," John said, unable to keep the edge out of his voice. "Then perhaps I am not good enough," Zelenka said bitingly. "I am no super-genius. I am merely trying to run the science department and learn all Rodney knows in an impossibly short time and cure him of a problem he inflicted on himself and ready myself to mourn him if I cannot!" Then he blinked behind his glasses and said, more quietly, "Forgive me. These are difficult days for us all, I know." "No one's going to be mourning anyone," John said. Zelenka didn't say anything for a few seconds. Then he lifted a plain manila folder and handed it to John. John looked at him, then opened the folder. It was filled with loose pages covered in Rodney's handwriting. There were a lot of places where workings had been scored out and corrected, frequently several times over. John flicked through the file, then lifted his eyes and looked at Zelenka. "His latest handover notes," Zelenka said, shaking his head. "They are useless. Too many errors, too little detail. Useless." John closed the folder and handed it back. "I'll tell him he can stop. I'll say you know everything you need to know now." Zelenka laughed without humor. "If only it were true." The doors to John's quarters chimed, and when he opened them Rodney was standing outside. "Congratulate me, I've reached a milestone," he said as he came in. "I scored 98 on this morning's test. Double digits. I'm now officially stupid." "No, you're not. That's still normal." "It's normal if you're a, a postal worker," Rodney said. "Hey," John said mildly, "I had an uncle who worked for the post office." "You know what I mean. It isn't normal for Atlantis. Every scientist here is a genius at something. Even the marines are smart. The kitchen guys probably all have degrees in, in…" he stopped, apparently stumped for a way to end the sentence. "Something hard. I don't know. God, listen to me." "It's okay," John said. "It's not okay," Rodney said, a note of something close to anguish in his voice. "It's not okay! It's all just… going. It's all slipping away from me, and I can't hold on to it. I know what calculus is but I can't follow it anymore. I used to, ah, I used to…" He trailed off, then looked to John in appeal. "I can't remember what I was going to say." "Calculus," John prompted him gently. "Right. Right." He sat down in the desk chair and said, quietly, "I used to be able to think in math, you know. It was beautiful. At least, I remember it felt beautiful to me." "You have to hang in there," John told him. "Zelenka's still working on it. No one's given up yet." "I'm turning into someone else," Rodney said. "This is not who I am. This is not me." "No. You're not just what you know, Rodney. You're more than that." "No, I'm not. Take away the genius and what's left? Just some guy with an unpleasant personality." "I wouldn't have said unpleasant," John said. "Neurotic, pompous and irascible at times, but not unpleasant." He smiled, but Rodney didn't smile back or answer and after a couple of seconds the silence started to stretch out. Suddenly John knew what was wrong: he'd spoken without thinking, setting McKay up to shoot back with a cutting remark of his own about John's personality flaws. He'd done that because he still expected that he and Rodney could talk to each other the way they always had, using words to amuse and insult each other, saying things without ever having to actually say them. Except that wasn't going to work anymore, because Rodney was no longer capable of sustaining a conversation at the same level John was. Rodney looked at him and moistened his lips nervously. "I don't… Irascible?" "It means irritable," John said, appalled at having to explain to Rodney how he'd insulted him. "I'm sorry, I was joking." He stopped. "I'm sorry." Rodney looked down for a few seconds. Then he said, "I don't want to do the tests anymore. Every time there's just more stuff I can't do and more I don't understand. It's not helping." "Sure," John said, soothingly. "I'll talk to Carson. You won't have to." At that, Rodney looked up and smiled faintly. "Thanks. You're a -- you've been a good friend." "No," John said. "Stop that. Don't start saying goodbye to me." "I'm trying to do this with dignity," Rodney said. Bitterly, he added, "I still know what that means, at least. Please, just let me, okay?" "No," John said again. Rodney swallowed. "Look, I don't want to have an argument with you because -- well, mostly because you're a lot smarter than me now, so you'd win. But also because this is probably the last real conversation we're going to have, and I don't want whatever this is to end that way." "You're not on your deathbed, McKay!" John said, surprising himself with how angry he sounded. "This is not the last time you're ever going to talk to me. It's just -- it's not, okay?" Rodney squeezed his eyes tightly shut for a moment, then opened them again. "Right. I'm sure we'll have lots of conversations, nice ones about whether I want to color in with the blue crayon or the green one. But it won't be long now until I won't be able to find the right words for things anymore. I used to take it for granted that I'd open my mouth and all my thoughts would just come flooding out. Now… I don't have the words, and pretty soon I won't… I won't have the thoughts either..." His brow was knitted in concentration, and it hit John that all the talking was actually wearing McKay out. Then he looked straight at John and said, "If there's anything really important you want to say to me, you should tell me now while I can still understand it." John opened his mouth and then shut it without saying anything, and the silence started to drag out again, and he was almost relieved when his radio buzzed and Elizabeth said she needed him in the Gate Room immediately. Lorne and his men had run into trouble on what should have been a routine trading mission to Derrerra, a world they'd visited before. They'd been taken prisoner, and the only team available to go after them was three-quarters of SGA-1. The look on Elizabeth's face told John she hated sending him as much as he hated to go, but there were lives at stake and they had no choice. So he went through the Gate with Ronon and Teyla and spent the next three days running around in a damp forest while the formerly-friendly Derrerrans fired crossbows at them. Apparently there'd been a change of leadership since the last time anyone from Atlantis had visited, and the new guy wasn't nearly as open-minded as his predecessor. On the fourth day, they finally freed Lorne's team and retreated back to the Gate as fast as exhaustion and their various injuries allowed. Ronon had taken a crossbow bolt to the thigh, and Teyla had a gash on her upper arm that was showing signs of infection. John hovered next to them in the Gate Room while they waited for the medical team to arrive, torn between needing to know they'd be okay and needing to know if Rodney was. "Go," Teyla said. "We will be fine." He shuffled guiltily. "That obvious, huh?" "You are not the only one who is concerned for him," she said. John nodded gratefully, and went. He found Rodney in his quarters, sitting in a chair by the window and -- well, just sitting in a chair by the window. That in itself was just plain wrong. Unless Rodney was asleep or unconscious, he was always doing something. He wasn't by nature a still person; he had the lowest boredom threshold of anyone John had ever met. He didn't seem to notice John coming in, so after a second John said, "Hey, buddy," softly to catch his attention. Rodney turned round. He looked -- different, somehow. It was as if his face had become strangely less defined, his features slacker and less animated. But then he said, "Hey, Sheppard," and John immediately started to relax a little, because at least McKay still sounded like himself. There, he told himself. See? Not as bad as you thought. "You want to grab lunch?" he asked. Rodney stood up eagerly. "Sure." John had intended to use the walk up there to take some time with Rodney and figure out how far he'd deteriorated since John had seen him last, but he'd been away from Atlantis for nearly four days. That meant every other person they passed needed to stop him and launch into some variation on, 'Colonel, I'm glad you're back, I need to talk to you about supply requisitions / mission plans / other dull administrative matters I could deal with perfectly well by myself but won't without external validation from an authority figure'. In fact, John was so busy fending off attempts to pull him into impromptu meetings that he didn't notice that no one was trying to stop Rodney and talk to him. No one at all. The penny didn't drop until they were inside the cafeteria. The mess was busy: there were few free tables and the buzz of several dozen noisy conversations was loud. A few people at the tables near the door looked up automatically as they came in but, when they saw Rodney, they looked away again quickly. John suddenly had that feeling in the pit of his stomach -- the feeling you got when you knew, you just knew, a mission was about to get FUBAR. And yet, like all the worst missions, he was committed now, and couldn't turn back. "Come on," he said with forced cheer, and joined the end of the queue. Rodney followed him meekly and silently. "Stew or lasagna, Colonel?" John didn't really care either way, but the stew looked marginally more appetizing, and a couple of seconds later he was moving along with a bowl of something brown and lumpy on his tray. "Stew or lasagna, Doctor?" There was a pause, then: "Doctor McKay? Stew or lasagna?" John glanced back, and saw that Rodney was standing frozen, like a deer in headlamps. The catering guy serving him -- a bluff Australian called Mackenzie who'd once told John that he'd volunteered for Atlantis because he'd run out of dangerous places on Earth to bake potatoes -- was holding out a metal ladle over the two dishes, waiting for a really simple answer to a really simple question. Which Rodney was apparently not able to give him. "McKay, tell him what you want," John said. Rodney blinked, stared, blinked again. They were holding up the queue now; John could hear vaguely dissatisfied murmurings coming from further along it, as hungry scientists and soldiers wondered out loud what the issue was up front. John moved back to where Rodney stood and said roughly, "Stew. Just give him the stew, dammit." Mackenzie looked relieved and doled out another bowl. John -- who made a point of acknowledging Atlantis's support personnel wherever possible -- didn't stop to say thanks. He bypassed the selection of fruits and the desserts and piloted McKay to the most distant corner of the mess, to a small table which was almost hidden from view in a corner behind a pillar. Once there he sat down and dug a fork mindlessly into his stew. He didn't want it, but they were here to eat lunch, so by God John was going to eat his lunch. Rodney sat opposite him and stared down at his food like he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do with it. "Come on, Rodney, eat," John said. He was trying to sound encouraging, but it came out more annoyed than anything else. "Eat your lunch." Rodney picked up a fork and turned it round in his hand. He looked uncertainly at the bowl, and then at John. John exploded, "Would you just fucking eat it!" Rodney started to cry. His face collapsed like John had punched him in the gut, and he started to sob with great, heaving gasps that were pitiful to watch. "Oh, Jesus, no, I'm sorry," John said. "Don't -- shit. Please don't do that. I'm not -- I'm not angry with you." As he said it, he knew he was being truthful. Whatever he
was feeling toward Rodney right now -- and the long list included words
like 'dismayed' and 'horrified' and, God help him, 'repulsed' -- anger
wasn't part of it. At least, not anger at Rodney. No, all John's anger
was reserved for himself. Fucked up beyond all repair didn't even begin to cover it.
Elizabeth was sitting with John, Ronon and Teyla -- both freshly bandaged -- and Carson in Carson's office. Somewhere else in the infirmary, Rodney was sleeping, drugged and vacant. John was trying not to think about that. "Does everyone know?" Ronon asked. John thought of the scene in the mess. If they hadn't known before, they sure as hell did now. Elizabeth's expression was pained. "Rumors were starting to circulate. I had no choice." "What about the drugs?" John asked. "I thought they were supposed to slow it down." Gently, Carson said, "They did. They gave him a couple of extra days." "So we're using the past tense already?" John asked dangerously. Carson looked stung, and Teyla punctured the awkwardness of the moment by asking, "Is he still getting worse, Dr Beckett?" "He seems to have stabilized, although at a low level." Ronon raised an eyebrow. "Low?" Quietly, Carson said, "He needs help to get dressed." John looked down, because he didn't want to have to meet the gaze of anyone else in the room right then. Instead he found himself looking at his boots, still muddied from tramping around in a damp forest for four days. The laces were done up, and John realized he couldn't even remember the last time he'd tied them. It had been so simple and effortless that he hadn't even needed to think about doing it. "What now?" Ronon asked. Before anyone else could answer, John said, "Zelenka will keep looking for an answer, and we'll take care of Rodney until he does. Nothing's changed." But everything had changed, and from the looks on the faces of the others, John knew he wasn't fooling them any more than he was fooling himself. Before, the goal had been to stop this happening to Rodney -- well, too late now, because it had happened. They'd cruised right past the turning signposted Crisis and were now accelerating toward Worst Case Scenario territory. Rodney was gone, and John didn't even really know where to, much less if they could bring him back. This is probably the last real conversation we'll ever have, Rodney had said, and wasn't that just the definition of irony, because Rodney had been right. Rodney with below average intelligence had still been smarter than John, had known what was coming and had been trying to tell him -- to tell him what? I don't want whatever this is to end that way, he'd said. What had that meant? Whatever what was? At the time John had been too busy practicing his own particular brand of denial to really listen to what Rodney was trying to tell him, and now John was starting to think there'd been a whole other layer in that (last, whispered his brain) conversation that he'd missed completely. And now he might never know what it was, because Rodney couldn't tell him anymore. "Now is not the time to talk about this," Elizabeth said, in a tone of voice which seemed aimed at communicating to John that they would need to talk about it, and soon. They rose to leave, but Carson put his hand on John's arm, holding him back for a moment. When they were alone, he said, "Rodney asked for you a lot when you weren't here, you know. I think he managed to convince himself that everything would be all right when you came back. That's why he got so upset earlier." "Because I didn't charge in like the Lone Ranger and fix everything?" John asked resentfully. "Gee, thanks for making me feel better." Beckett's tone was stern. "I'm not telling you this to make you feel guilty, Colonel. I'm telling you that you're a big part of what kept him holding on as long as he did. And he needs you just as much now. Maybe more." He looked at John. "He's still Rodney." "Is he?" John asked. "Really?" He left without waiting for a reply.
At first, he had valid reasons. After four days spent running around a forest and not resting for more than half an hour at a stretch he was exhausted, and the first thing he did was sleep for twelve hours straight. Then there was the postponed mission debrief -- a lengthy affair that necessarily had to cover how they'd managed to misread the local political climate so badly in the first place -- and then John had to catch up on the backlog of emails which invariably built up in his absence, even though when he was offworld he always turned on an automated response which he considered to be very clear and specific in its instruction to "go bug Weir instead". And then, some time on the afternoon of the third day, he admitted to himself that he didn't want to go and see Rodney. No -- that wasn't exactly right. He wanted very badly to see Rodney. He wanted to swing by the lab at lunchtime and pull him away from whatever new Ancient toy was currently fascinating him. He wanted to listen to Rodney yammer non-stop about his new theory that the Ancients had worked out how to express ascension as an equation and that the very act of doing so had triggered the transition in those who understood the math. Then he wanted to listen to Rodney go on at great length about his other theory, which was that R2D2 was the real hero of the original Star Wars trilogy ("No, I'm serious, think about it: R2D2 makes everything happen in those films. Everything.") And he wanted to mock Rodney for all of it, while all the time thinking that the ascension-by-numbers thing sounded quite cool and that Rodney might actually be on to something about R2D2. Buried somewhere in the middle of it all there would be, as always, a quiet sense of gratitude for ten minutes in the day when he didn't have to be the guy with all the answers. And maybe that had been part of the attraction for Rodney too. But that Rodney was gone, and the Rodney he'd left behind in his place -- the drooling simpleton who couldn't pull on his pants without help -- was an insult to who he'd been. John hated himself for feeling that way, but he couldn't help it. If he thought of smart-Rodney and dumb-Rodney as two different people, then his revulsion at least made a kind of sense. I'm turning into someone else, the real Rodney had whispered just before he'd vanished completely and, fuck it, he'd been right about that too. John missed Rodney being right about everything. On the evening of the fifth day after his return from the Derrerra mission, John was going from the Gate Room to his quarters when he found himself outside the infirmary. That wasn't in itself weird, since the infirmary was located almost exactly half-way between the two places. What was weird was that John suddenly realized he hadn't passed this way for days. Had he really been taking long detours for the best part of a week, without even noticing he was doing it? Christ, was he that shitty a human being? He was standing there thinking the answer to that one was probably an emphatic yes when he heard Teyla's voice coming from inside the infirmary. She was singing softly. She sounded different, and after a second he figured out why: she was singing in English, pronouncing the unfamiliar syllables of Row, Row, Row Your Boat awkwardly but clearly. John stood where he was, outside the door, listening to the whole thing, and when she got to the last line he had to close his eyes and swallow hard to force down the painful lump he felt forming in his chest. Life is but a dream. For Rodney it was, now: a strange and incomprehensible dream he couldn't wake up from. When he opened his eyes again, Teyla was standing in front of him. She didn't say anything and so, to break the silence, he asked, "Aren't there any Athosian nursery rhymes?" "Many," she said. "But I asked Elizabeth to teach me some which would be familiar to him." "That was... thoughtful," John said. It was so much more than thoughtful that he didn't think he had the words to express it, but Teyla seemed to understand what he meant, because she inclined her head in gracious acknowledgement. "He is asleep now," she said. She paused. "He asks me where you are." John looked away. "I have told him you will come soon. Do not make a liar of me, John." Then she walked away, leaving him alone in the corridor outside the infirmary, the lights of Atlantis burning just for him.
"I need every bed we've got for the next couple of hours," Beckett told John over the radio. John could hear people coughing in the background. "And Rodney is…" He trailed off, but John didn't need to hear the end of the sentence to know where it had been heading. Rodney was getting in the way. "I'm sorry, Colonel," Carson finished. "I'd ask Teyla, but she's gone to the mainland for the day." "That's fine," John said sharply, feeling a little annoyed that Teyla seemed to have become Beckett's first point of contact for matters relating to Rodney's care. Okay, he could hardly deny she was spending the most time with Rodney, but, Jesus, since when did Carson feel he had to apologize to John for even talking to him about McKay? Since now, apparently. "I'll be right there," John said. Rodney was happy to see him -- in fact, 'happy' was an inadequate description: 'overjoyed' was more like it. "Sheppard!" he said, and the last time John had seen him smile like that was right after the siege when he'd discovered that one of the things the Daedalus had brought from Earth was a fresh supply of coffee. "Keep him occupied and try to stay positive in front of him -- he's been having depressive episodes," Carson advised, before he had to get back to dealing with one of the many wheezing botanists. Then John was left alone with Rodney, who was looking at him expectantly. "Hey," John said, feeling guilty and awkward and deeply ashamed of himself. "You want to, ah, hang out for a bit?" "Okay," Rodney said, somehow loading that one word with the sense that that would be the best thing in the history of the universe ever. "So… what do you want to do?" John asked after a second. Rodney looked unsure and shook his head. "Okay, then," John said. "I'll guess I'll… think of something." But thinking of something was even harder than he'd expected it to be. Rodney didn't have the concentration to watch a movie or play even a simple game of cards, and although John thought he'd enjoy taking a walk, that felt like putting Rodney's inadequacies on display for the whole city to see. Even if everyone they met was kind and sympathetic, John didn't want to think about the way they would look at Rodney, and what they'd say after John was out of earshot. In the end John took Rodney back to his quarters, where he gave him an out of date copy of the security roster and some pens and suggested he color it in. The pens dated back to their first year in Atlantis, when they'd been cut off from Earth and had started running out of everything, including stationery. John had traded a belt for a collection of multicolored styluses in a market on a world Teyla had taken them to, and although at the time he'd wondered if he'd paid over the odds, he guessed he must've got a bargain, because nearly two years later the pens were working as well as the day he'd got them. Rodney -- a stationery connoisseur -- had never said anything, but John had always suspected he was slightly jealous he hadn't traded for some himself. And now, seeing the look of delight on Rodney's face, he knew he'd been right. For the next couple of hours Rodney sat on the floor, hunched over but seemingly comfortable, while John sat on the bed with his laptop balanced on his knees and got on with some work. In a lot of ways, it wasn't an unpleasant afternoon. Once, when he was concentrating on putting together a training plan for the marines, John almost succeeded in kidding himself that the scritch-scratch noises of pencil on paper coming from next to the bed were the sounds of Rodney working on some fiendishly complex puzzle of Ancient science, and not the sounds of Rodney struggling to color inside the lines. When the security roster had been sufficiently decorated, John decided to try something more ambitious. He gave Rodney a blank sheet of paper and, bearing in mind what Beckett had said, told him to draw something that made him feel happy. Rodney appeared to devote actual thought to that, and John felt pretty pleased with himself. "Done," Rodney said about an hour later, and presented the finished drawing to John with a flourish which was pure McKay ego. The picture was blocky and childlike, and was of a poorer quality than something a bright six year old might have produced. John couldn't tell at first what it was supposed to be. Most of the page was taken up by a wonky oval shape; two thick diagonal lines crossed over just above it, and there was another pair of parallel lines beneath the oval shape. Then it hit him: it was supposed to be a helicopter. For a couple of seconds, he couldn't figure out why a helicopter -- it wasn't as if Rodney had any particular affinity for things that flew. That was John's passion. Draw something that makes you happy, he'd said. What made Rodney happy? Physics and Ancient technology and figuring stuff out and solving problems that no one else could. But all of that had been taken away from him, so Rodney had drawn something that made John happy, because in the small and simple world he now inhabited, what made John happy made him happy too. Rodney was wearing a small, hopeful smile, and John had to say something, so he said, "That's good. That's really good." He tried to give the picture back to Rodney, but Rodney kept pushing it back at him, until he got the message. "For me, huh? Well, thanks." Rodney smiled again and ducked his head, as if John's approval really meant something to him, and John wondered, yet again, how everything had gotten this fucked up. Something of what he was feeling must have bled through into his face, because Rodney asked, "What's the matter, Sheppard?" Shit, John thought. Stay positive. Stay upbeat. He smiled and said quickly, "Nothing. Everything's fine." "Fine," Rodney repeated. Then, sadly, he said, "Not me. I'm not fine." John felt suddenly sick to his stomach, because Rodney knew. Somewhere, way down deep inside, a tiny little kernel of the old Rodney McKay had survived, just enough so that the man who was left had some sense of the magnitude of what had been stolen from him. As terrible as this whole thing was, somehow that made it even worse. No wonder Rodney was having 'depressive episodes'. Christ, John thought, the only surprising thing was that he wasn't screaming all the fucking time. John put the picture and his laptop to one side and slid off the bed and on to the floor, so he was sitting next to Rodney, their shoulders touching. They were both silent for a while, and then John said, "I'm sorry I haven't been around much lately. I'm gonna make that up to you." Rodney looked at him, and John wasn't sure if he'd understood what he'd said or not, so he reached over and clasped his hands around Rodney's. "I'm not going to leave you again. Not ever." Rodney looked down at their joined hands and said, "Sheppard." It didn't sound to John like a question; Rodney was saying his name like it was a talisman, something he could cling to and draw comfort from. "Yeah," John said. "I'm right here, Rodney. Right here."
"Please take a seat, Colonel Sheppard," Elizabeth said, with careful formality which was itself a Very Bad Sign. "Thank you, Doctor Weir," John said pointedly, and sat. "Doctor Zelenka," Elizabeth said. "Your report, please." Zelenka looked unhappy, but he nodded and started to speak. "I have completed my study of the Ancient augmentation device. It works by creating a field which enhances the efficiency of the brain's synaptic activity. It is not my area, but Dr Beckett confirms that such enhancement would greatly increase the capacity of the mind." He let out a small sigh. "The problem is not with the device, but with the brain it acts upon." John looked at him. "You're saying Rodney's brain couldn't handle it?" "I am saying no one's brain could handle it. The device was designed by the Ancients for use on near-ascension Ancient brains. I cannot fix it, because it is not broken. There is nothing we can do for Rodney." "Wait," John said. "After Rodney zapped himself with that thing, he said he knew how to improve it, to keep him smart. Why can't we do something like that?" "Because I do not know how," Zelenka said, his voice rough with tiredness and frustration. "Perhaps if I were a genius genius, as Rodney was when he used it on himself, I might understand as he did. But the device will only work on gene carriers and, even if I could use it, there is no guarantee I would be able to reproduce what he started to do before my mind began to deteriorate as well." "I won't let anyone else use that thing," Elizabeth said. "There has to be something we've missed," John said. "Something we haven't tried --" "Colonel," Elizabeth said. "-- Something we haven't thought of --" "Colonel --" "Don't say it," John spat. "Do not fucking say it." Zelenka blinked and Beckett actually looked shocked. There went his reputation for being unflappable. "I'm sending him back to Earth," Elizabeth said. And there it was: undeniable and inevitable, the ending that John had known was coming weeks ago. It still hurt more than he could have imagined to hear Rodney's life sentence spoken out loud. "He could stay here," John said. "We could look after him…" He meant, I could look after him. But he couldn't, of course. What was he going to do, dress Rodney every morning before heading off through the Gate? Maybe they'd find him a job mopping floors, until gradually people stopped remembering he was Dr. Rodney McKay, holder of multiple degrees and formerly the expedition's Head of Science, and started just thinking of him as Rodney, the mentally challenged janitor who came when they spilled something. Carson said, "He'll get more help back home than we can give him here. The SGC has a lot of resources and a lot of alien technology at its disposal. Who knows, in a couple of months Rodney might be back with us again, right as rain." "Yeah," John said bleakly. "Who knows?" "This isn't easy for any of us," Elizabeth said. And then, as if she felt he needed reminding that he wasn't the only one who cared about Rodney, she said, "I sent a message to his sister via the databurst." It had been decided days ago, John realized. Elizabeth had been quietly putting the pieces in place, and had made a conscious decision not to tell him until the last possible moment. He understood why -- he would have done exactly the same thing in her position -- but right then he fucking hated her. "When does he leave?" he asked. "Tomorrow," Elizabeth said. "Now that the decision has been made, I felt it was best not to delay." "How did Rodney take it?" John asked. Then he looked around the room and he realized, "No one's told him." Of course they hadn't told Rodney. Why would they? He probably wouldn't understand anyway. Rodney, who'd known everything there was to know about Atlantis, who had taken not understanding even the smallest thing as a personal affront, was going to be shipped back to Earth like a piece of malfunctioning equipment. Sorry, this genius isn't working anymore -- can you send us another? "Do you want to be the one to talk to him?" Elizabeth asked. "No, I don't," John said, "but I will."
Ruthlessly, John shut down the memory. He couldn't go there right now. There'd been a time when he'd thought bad memories were the ones that were hardest to carry around with you. Now he knew better. Rodney was standing placidly next to him, waiting for whatever John was going to do next. He didn't even look particularly curious about why he'd been brought up here. Rodney McKay without curiosity -- it was so wrong it was beyond wrong, straight through wrong and out the other side. He was also silent, and that was the worst thing of all. John had long ago lost count of the number of times he'd said shut up McKay with varying degrees of annoyance, either real or feigned, but the truth was that he'd grown used to Rodney's endless stream of chatter. He'd come to realize it was how Rodney calmed himself, and after a while it had started to calm John as well. When Rodney was talking, it meant he was okay and that the situation, no matter how weird, serious or life-threatening, was resolvable. And now Rodney had no words left, and John, who'd never been a talker, found that he didn't have anything he could use to fill the vast and smothering silence between them. "So," he said at last. "Nice view, huh?" It was, in fact, a pretty amazing view, which was why John had brought Rodney up here. The platform's position, and the lack of anything nearby to obstruct its outlook, meant that they had a perfect panoramic outlook over the city and the ocean. It was even more memorable at night, when the lights of the city below and the myriad stars of Pegasus above competed with each other for the title of 'most glorious spectacle'. "Pretty," Rodney said after a minute. He wasn't really looking around, though, and John thought he was only saying it to please him. "See the stars?" he said, pointing upwards. The directness of the prompt made Rodney look up. "They're really bright, aren't they?" "Yes," Rodney said. Then: "Different." In spite of himself, John felt a leap of something like hope. "Different from what? What are they different from, Rodney?" Rodney just looked scared. "I, I don't know," he mumbled. He looked down at his feet. "Just… different." "It's okay," John said. "It's okay, I'm sorry. You don't have to answer that." He hadn't even started, and already this was going badly. "Rodney, you remember Jeannie, right? Your sister, Jeannie?" "Jeannie," Rodney said, with a small smile. "Is Jeannie here?" "No, she's not. You'd like to see her, wouldn't you?" Rodney nodded, still smiling. John made himself smile back and carried on, "She'd like to see you too. If you went back to Earth you could. Wouldn't that be great?" Rodney nodded again, but he didn't look just as sure now. "Jeannie here?" he repeated. "No," John said. "She's back home, on Earth. That's where you're going. Jeannie's really looking forward to seeing you again. You're going home." "Going home," Rodney said. He frowned. "Leaving here." John could practically see the gears in his brain grinding hard against each other as he slowly equated the two ideas. "Yes," John said. "You're going to leave here." Maybe he should be sugaring the pill more, but if he couldn't do anything else for Rodney, John had decided he'd try to let him keep what little dignity he had left intact. If Rodney was going to have to leave Atlantis -- the city he loved, the place he'd risked his life for over and over again -- then the least, the very least, John could do was make sure Rodney understood he was going. He deserved the chance to say goodbye, in whatever way he still could. "No," Rodney said. "You have to. I'm sorry, Rodney, but you have to." "No," he said again, more vehemently and with just the faintest shadow of the old Rodney's passion. "No, no, no! Stay here." "You can't." Forget about Wraith and Replicators and Genii, John thought. This was the hardest fucking thing he'd ever had to do. Rodney was quiet for a long time. He almost spoke a couple of times then stopped. John waited, because it was clear that whatever Rodney was working up to, he was stretching himself to the absolute limits of whatever meager mental resources remained to him in order to get it out. Rodney looked at John. "I want to stay. Here. With you." "You can't," John told him. Rodney said, "I love you." "You can't," John said again, and then he had to stop because his voice was breaking. He swallowed hard, trying to stop the sob that was threatening to rise up from somewhere deep down inside him and swallow him up. Part of him, stupidly, was actually angry with Rodney. All this time, they'd left so much unsaid because that was how it worked -- you felt things, but you didn't say them, because that way you could face each new crisis and somehow get through it and then clap each other on the back and joke about it and pretend you hadn't just had your heart in your mouth for the last twenty minutes because the radios were dead and you knew there was a possibility the person you cared most about in the whole universe was too. And now Rodney, stripped of the defense of intellect, had gone and broken the first goddamn rule that you didn't say it. Rodney was looking right at him, smiling a small, hopeful smile, like he thought that everything would be all right now, and John wasn't going to send him away after all. After a second or two, when he trusted himself to speak again, John went over to him and put his hands on Rodney's shoulders. "It shouldn't be ending like this," he said, "and if there was any way -- any way -- I could make this right or fix you, I would, believe me I would. You know, I spent so long convincing myself that things were complicated and messy and delicate, and I was wrong, because it's simple, isn't it? It's so simple to you now. But everything always was simple for you. I guess you're still a genius, in a way. You're still you. And I do, I really do -- " He stopped there, because it was clear that Rodney hadn't followed even the smallest part of that. The irony wasn't lost on John: he'd finally figured out what he needed to say to Rodney, except Rodney wasn't able to understand him anymore. He swallowed hard, because this didn't come easily to him and he'd spent far too much time obfuscating and complicating things inside his head, but simplicity was all Rodney understood now, and John needed him to understand this, if nothing else. "I love you," he said. He closed his eyes and tightened his hands on Rodney's shoulders. He was standing like that when he felt Rodney's hands on his back, drawing him closer, into an embrace. And then Rodney kissed him. It was so unexpected that for a second John just froze, hardly able to process what was happening. His eyes were still closed; he could feel Rodney's arms encircling him, Rodney's solid torso pushing against him, Rodney's mouth -- Jesus, Rodney's mouth -- on his. The kiss was hardly expert, but what it lacked in technique it more than made up for in desire, because John could tell Rodney wanted him. He was making small groans which originated somewhere deep in his chest and which John felt as vibrations transmitted through their joined lips. And that was enough -- more than enough -- to make John start to respond, to kiss him back. John lifted one hand from Rodney's shoulder and put it instead on Rodney's jaw, gently tilting his head, guiding him into a better position. He dragged his thumb roughly down the side of Rodney's face. The effect was instant and electric: Rodney shuddered -- actually shuddered -- and he made a tiny whimpering sound, and then he started to move his hands over John's back and shoulders and up to the nape of his neck, like he couldn't get enough of touching John. His hands were broad and flat and so clumsy with need that they were shaking, and the more he touched John the more John craved it. He wanted Rodney to touch him like that everywhere, and never ever stop for anything. With a kind of wild joy he realized suddenly that even though the intellect was gone the instincts were still good; Rodney wanted him. And he wanted Rodney. John felt himself getting hard. It would be easy, so easy, to do this, and, after all, it wasn't as if you needed to be smart to have sex. Then John opened his eyes, met Rodney's gaze, and stopped. The look on Rodney's face was aroused and there was an impatience in his expression that John knew well; the voice that went with it would have right now been chiding him, Come on, come on, can we keep going, here? For the first time since his return from Derrerra he looked at the person in front of him and saw Rodney there, not some simple-minded stranger. And it was that, weirdly, that stopped him dead, because while he might have convinced himself that what he was doing was okay with someone who was a blurred and imperfect copy of Rodney, there was no chance of that now. There was a huge gulf between wanting something and choosing it, and Rodney couldn't even choose what to eat for lunch anymore. John realized he was the one making the choices here, for both of them, and anything he did -- any decision he made that was based on what he thought Rodney wanted or, worse, on what John wanted -- was taking advantage, nothing else. Not like this, he thought. And if that meant, not ever, then that was how it had to be. He broke contact with Rodney and took a step back. The night air felt even colder in the sudden absence of the warmth of Rodney's body and his touch. It took almost all the willpower John possessed not to crack right then and go straight back to him. Rodney made a wordless sound of incomprehension and regret. "I know, I'm sorry," John said. His voice strained, he said, "If I were smarter, I'd figure out how to fix you." And then it was as if a spark of Rodney's old genius had been floating around, loose in the ether, and had settled on John for a moment, because a bright light came on in his head and he knew exactly what he had to do.
Elizabeth looked dubious, but she hadn't actually thrown him out of her quarters yet. Since it was the middle of the night and she was currently sitting on the edge of her bed wearing red pajamas, John was going to take that as a positive sign. "I want to use the augmentation device on myself --" "No," Elizabeth said at once. All right, maybe it wasn't such a positive sign after all. "Dammit, I said hear me out before saying no." She sighed, crossed her arms and waited. "The device works on gene carriers. It probably works better where the gene's stronger. I'm the strongest gene carrier here, so I should get even more of a boost from it than McKay did." "And then you'd start to deteriorate, probably even faster than him." "Yes, but Rodney had nearly three days of being a super-genius before that happened. If he hadn't wasted his time messing about with grand unification theories, he might've finished making those changes to the augmentation device before he crested the hill and started to slide down the other side." "So your brilliant plan is to use the device on yourself, and then hope you can figure out how to fix both of you before you end up the same way as Rodney." John paused. "In my head, it sounded a lot more persuasive than that." "You're not even a scientist. You'd lose most of your augmented time learning what you needed to know before you could even start working on the actual problem." "Yeah, but if I was that smart, I could do it. I could learn physics in a day." "No," Elizabeth said. She sounded tired. "No, John. I've already lost Rodney. I can't lose you as well." "If you don't let me do this," John said, "you're going to lose me anyway. I'll resign my commission and go back to Earth with Rodney." Elizabeth tilted her head and looked at him, clearly trying to figure out if he was bluffing or not. Actually, John wasn't sure either. He hadn't planned to say that; the words had just popped out, like some kind of post-hypnotic suggestion. Was he serious? Up until tonight, John had believed that Atlantis mattered more to him than anything else he'd ever had. Atlantis was where he belonged, a whole city that literally lit up at his touch, where he had friends and a purpose -- the kind of life he'd spent years trying to convince himself wasn't meant for him and which he didn't want anyway. But he had wanted it, and now that he'd actually had the chance to live it, he knew that the loss would be almost unbearable. But now he was beginning to think he hadn't really understood what it was he'd had. Because if it was a question of giving up Atlantis or giving up Rodney… John knew now which one he could live without. "See, the thing is, I promised I'd stay with him," he said. Elizabeth was silent for a long time. Then she said, "Do what you have to do, John." "Thank you," he said sincerely, and went to wake up Zelenka.
They were as ready as they'd ever be. "Now," Zelenka said, "you must listen to me carefully. After you do this, you will be very, very smart, but still you will not know the math you need to fix that infernal device. Intelligence without tools is useless, yes? I will teach you what you need to know, but you will think I am a very slow little man. You will probably want to invent a whole new kind of mathematics just to solve this one problem. Do not do that. We do not have time. You must be patient with me." John nodded. "There is one other thing." Zelenka paused. "If the correlation between the strength of the gene and the magnitude of the effect is as we believe, then you will be the most intelligent human being who has ever lived. Please try to remember what it feels like, because I would very much like to know." What it felt like, John discovered very quickly, was flying. The feeling he had when he was flying was one of complete freedom united with complete control. He could go anywhere, do anything, and all he had to do was will it. He felt the same now, except the thing he was flying was his own mind. Physics was simple. Absurdly simple, so much so that Zelenka barely needed to tell him the broadest outline of a concept before John had leapt straight to the inevitable conclusion and its implications. Then there was the math. Christ, the math. The math was fucking gorgeous. John had always been good at math -- you needed to be, to fly anything -- but now he realized it was a complete language in its own right, a language of such precision and beauty that he never wanted to speak anything else. He could lose himself in this and never come back again. But every time he found himself caught up in something fascinating but tangential, Zelenka would say, quietly, "Remember Rodney," and John would snap back to the problem at hand. They kept working. At the end of the second day, Zelenka nodded and put down his pen and, his voice hoarse with over-use, said, "That is all. Now you know everything I do about Ancient technology. Well done. You are my most brilliant student. A gold star for the Colonel." "What now?" John asked. Zelenka waved a hand at the whiteboard, now
densely covered with workings and theories. "Now you will take over,
and I will try to keep up with you." He made a couple of false starts, because now he was trying to out-think the Ancients, and that was the first thing he'd hit that was actually difficult. Even once he had a handle on what he needed to do, he found his progress slowed down considerably by the requirement to bring Zelenka along with him, explaining what he was doing as he went. It would have been much faster just to work until he found the answer, but that was what had gone wrong for Rodney the first time. John understood what he'd felt, though: his understanding was so complete that he couldn't believe he'd ever forget any of it. No wonder Rodney hadn't bothered to make many notes. In the end, it was just a question of whether he'd make it before he ran out of time. "That's it," John said at some point late on the third day as he finished scrawling a row of symbols at the bottom of a cramped whiteboard. "That's it!" Next to him, Zelenka frowned. "I do not see it. Your logic is flawed, here --" he tapped the board. "No, no, no," John said. "Come on, I just left out a couple of steps because they're so obvious." "They are not obvious to me," Zelenka said. "You must state them." "I don't have time," John said, trying and failing to keep the note of petulance and frustration out of his voice. God, he almost sounded like Rodney. Or like Rodney had sounded, before -- The thought sobered him, reminded him what he was supposed to be doing, and why. He turned back to the whiteboard and started to write. But it wasn't as easy as it should have been. The flow of math and symbols just wasn't as fluid now, and he found himself hesitating, writing and then scrawling out his workings. He stepped back from the board, and when he looked at everything he'd written on it for an instant he didn't know what any of it meant. Then it snapped back into focus again, but it was too late -- the absolute confidence he'd had just seconds before was gone, shattered. "It's going," he said. "I'm losing it. I can't --" "We are nearly there," Zelenka said, his voice soft and reassuring. "You are nearly there. Please, just a moment longer. Tell me what you are doing here." He pointed at a single expression. "Forget all else. Just explain this to me." "It's a, uh --" It had all been so simple a moment earlier. And then, in one quick flash, understanding returned, and John grabbed on to it and desperately sought the right words to express the idea before it evaporated for good. "It's a function that maps the waveform into a five-dimensional shape." Almost before the words were out of his mouth, John realized that the concept behind them had faded away. He had, literally, no idea what he was talking about. But Zelenka was nodding, his expression gradually filling with excitement. "And this is necessary because the natural waveform is seven-dimensional and -- Yes. Yes, I see it! The missing piece. I can finish this!" "Are you sure?" John asked. The scribblings on the whiteboard collapsed into gibberish in front of him. He felt vaguely panicky, like he was just about to come down off a massive dose of stimulants. "Radek, are you sure?" "I am sure," Zelenka said. He smiled, and gently pried the marker pen out of John's stiff fingers. "You have done well, for a temporary genius. Everything will be all right." "Thank God for that," John said, and that was the last thing he said for a while, because right then he forgot how to speak.
There were six lights in the ceiling above him: one, two, three, four, five, six. John wasn't sure why counting them pleased him so much, but it did, so he did it again. Then for the grand finale, he did it out loud. "Ah, sweet numeracy," said a voice beside him. "How I missed you." John craned his head around. Rodney was in the next bed over. He was sitting up with a book propped up against his knees. Rodney looked at John for a short while, then he put the book aside, threw off the blankets and came to sit in the chair next to John's cot. "How do you feel?" he asked. "Weird," John said after a moment's consideration. He thought some more before adding, "Slow." "That's okay," Rodney said. "You crashed a lot harder than I did. It's taking you a little longer to get back to where you should be, and you're probably not even up to average yet. It feels to you like your brain's steeped in maple syrup because right now you're experiencing a bad case of cognitive jet lag." John had followed about half of that, but he'd grasped the
most important point, which was that Rodney was okay again. He grinned
and said happily, "You're a genius." "Sucks," John said. "Yes, well, it's a better place to be than where I was, by a wide margin." Rodney stopped. "And, uh, about that. Are you up to having a conversation now? Because there are things I need to say to you." John considered that for a while. He was tired and his head felt like it was stuffed with marshmallows. But just listening to Rodney talking -- and sounding like himself, even if for the moment John wasn't really following most of what he was saying -- was comforting in a way he couldn't even have begun to express right then. Plus, he was far enough along the bell curve to understand that when Rodney was determined to talk, it was almost impossible to stop him. "Okay. But don't talk so fast. And no big words." "Check and check." Rodney put his hands together, lacing his fingers between each other like he was thinking hard about something. John decided he could spend the rest of his life lying right where he was, watching Rodney think, and be perfectly, utterly content. After a while Rodney said, "They told me what you did. For me. And I want you to know that -- okay, there's saving someone's life, which is obviously necessary and almost all the time an unambiguously good thing --" "Big words," John reminded him. "Sorry, right. I've saved your life, you've saved mine, and that should a huge deal, but somewhere along the line I think it somehow turned into just what we do out here. But what you did for me -- it means more to me than saving my life. And I know that's counterintuitive -- sorry, I'll rephrase that -- I know that doesn't make sense, because if you're dead you can't think anyway, so what does it matter? But it does matter, and I can't even really articulate -- sorry, sorry -- I can't even tell you why." He paused. "Maybe I'll be able to tomorrow, when I'm back at my regular levels of geniusness. Actually, I'm not even sure that's a real word." John shrugged, in a you're-asking-the-wrong-guy kind of way. "Did you understand all that?" Rodney asked. He sounded earnest. "It's just that this is really important, and if you want me to tell you again when you're up to dealing with polysyllables, I can do that." John thought for a long time. "You said thank you." "Close enough," Rodney said.
In a crazy way, it was almost a relief to get back to the usual routine of situation-emergency-solution. It didn't escape John's notice that during the rampant fungus crisis Rodney only once expressed his annoyance at having to step in to save the city yet again from the practitioners of other so-called scientific disciplines. John suspected that Rodney hadn't been able to entirely believe he was back to normal again until he'd proved afresh to himself -- and everyone else -- that he was smarter than whatever Pegasus could throw at him. The next day, when John checked his email, the message at the top of his inbox was from McKayR to Atlantis_All. The subject line was, "Oh, look, a new way to get killed; or, how nice Dr McKay will personally decapitate the next idiot who ignores biohazard protocols". John read the entire email with a wide grin on his face, and went back to picking little bits of dead mold off his clothes and out of his food. And that, it seemed, was that. Rodney was fine again, and everyone -- Elizabeth, Carson, Zelenka and most of all Rodney himself -- seemed more than happy to let the whole episode fade as rapidly as possible into a distant memory. The only person who couldn't let it go was John, and he couldn't figure out why. After all, he had Rodney back, as annoying and funny and arrogant and brilliant and exasperating and himself as he'd ever been. John no longer had to struggle to hold up the conversation with him; a simple, "What's up, McKay?" was enough to provoke a ten minute diatribe during which all John had to do was nod and throw in the occasional dry witticism. Everything was just the way it had been before, and wasn't that what he'd wanted? He didn't figure it out until the next time it was his turn to host team movie night. They worked on a rotational basis, and John's turn meant his movie choice, his quarters and his responsibility to source snacks. They watched Pulp Fiction on John's laptop -- he was steadily introducing Ronon to all the modern classics -- and then they spent the rest of the evening reconstructing the chronological order of the story using Post-It notes. Or John and Rodney did; Ronon only stayed as long as the snacks lasted, and Teyla drifted off to bed not long after him. By that stage the Post-It note network of Pulp Fiction scenes covered most of the available floor space in John's quarters. "You know what?" Rodney said, looking down at the dozens of small bits of paper. "This should be color-coded. Throw me a pen." He scooted down on to the floor so he was sitting with his back against the side of the bed. John leaned over to the desk, lifted a couple of pens and handed them to Rodney. Just as Rodney took them from him, John froze, because they'd done this before, recently, only then everything had been so different and bleak. Rodney looked at the pens John had given him, an oddly pensive expression on his face. "Something up?" John asked, keeping his voice carefully neutral. They hadn't talked about what had happened, not since the conversation in the infirmary that John sort-of remembered. Neither of them had broached the subject again; John wasn't sure if that was because Rodney didn't want to talk about it, or because he'd successfully put the whole thing behind him. John sat on the bed, very still, waiting for what Rodney was going to say next. What Rodney said was: "You got a really good deal on these pens. We should go back to that planet -- now we've got the Daedalus making supply runs, I could happily give up a couple of belts for some good quality stationery." Rodney didn't remember. He didn't remember a goddamned thing. There was John's answer, and, he realized now, his problem. They were right back where they'd been, and while that had been a good place, it wasn't where John wanted to be anymore. He remembered Rodney's simple, heartfelt I love you, and he remembered what it had felt like to say it back, to mean it in a way he wasn't sure he ever had before. He remembered Rodney's mouth on his, Rodney's hands touching him, how hard it had been not to let it go any further. Now it was never going to go any further, and John wasn't sure if he could live with that. But since, unlike Rodney, he didn't have the option of forgetting, it looked like he was stuck where he was. He didn't know what to do next. So he took the path of least resistance, and didn't do anything. It wasn't a terrific strategy, he knew that, but he didn't know how to break the habit of a lifetime and, anyway, he didn't have any better ideas. And then, one day while he was trying to bring some order to the piles of papers lying about his quarters he found the picture of the helicopter that Rodney had drawn for him while his intelligence had been impaired. He remembered Rodney's simple pride in the picture, how he'd drawn it for John. And then he remembered the conversation they'd had while Rodney had been augmented, when John had described the most beautiful thing he could think of -- a helicopter taking off, as much a symbol of perfection to John as Rodney's math was to him -- and McKay had looked at him and smiled and said, You do get it. John got it. Finally, at long last, John got it. He picked up the picture and then went into the bathroom to get a couple of other things he hoped he might need, and then he left his paperwork no more complete than when he'd started. It had been waiting long enough and could wait longer. John, on the other hand, had just realized that he couldn't. "Okay," Rodney said when the transporter opened up on to the roof of the south-pier platform. "Would you mind explaining what exactly it is that's so important that you have to tell me, one, face to face instead of over the radio and, two, way up here?" The slight breeze ruffled Rodney's hair as he spoke. The nights came on fast here, and in the ten or fifteen minutes which had passed while John had been waiting for him to arrive, the sky had changed from dusky-red to a deep indigo peppered all over with bright stars. "What do you remember?" John asked. "About what?" Rodney asked impatiently. "Quantum physics, string theory, breakfast? Be specific." John handed Rodney the picture. Rodney squinted at it. "What's this supposed to be?" "It's a helicopter," John told him. "It looks nothing like a --" Rodney broke off abruptly. His face changed and then he said, almost conversationally, "You know, I've been trying really hard not to think about this, and I've mostly been doing pretty well." "I need to know what you remember," John said. Rodney didn't say anything for a long time. Then: "The first couple of weeks -- that's pretty clear. And then things get disjointed. When you were a very little kid, did you ever get separated from your parents?" When John nodded, he said, "Well, it was a lot like that. It felt like standing in a supermarket aisle, watching all these strange adults walking by and not knowing how to ask them for help, and just wanting someone to come and hold my hand. I remember feeling confused and scared and -- very, very alone." He stopped, and his expression became oddly distant. "You went away." "I came back," John said. "It took me too long, I know that, I'm sorry, but I came back." "You came back," Rodney said. He sounded thoughtful. Then he looked around the platform and frowned. "We were up here before." John nodded. "You were standing -- right there, actually. And I was here, and you were telling me…" Rodney trailed off, and John could tell he was replaying the broken fragments of that conversation in his head, using his genius intellect to fit them together and make sense of them. Come on, Rodney, he thought. Come on, come on. "Oh," Rodney said. John waited. "Oh," Rodney said again. He touched his fingers to his mouth, then let his hand fall again. He looked straight at John and asked, "Why did you stop me? I didn't want to stop." "I didn't want to either," John said, "but it would've been -- wrong." "Funny, that's what I always used to tell myself. It'd be wrong, I can't, it'd screw up everything." He smiled thinly. "Apparently, all I needed was to stop thinking for a while. Now there's a thing." "It had to be your choice as well as mine," John said. "I didn't know if it was." Then Rodney took a breath and said, very quickly, "Well, yes, it was. Is. So before my extremely great intellect manages to talk me out of this, why don't we try that again?" Then, when John didn't move, he added, "How much more explicit would you like me to be, here? Seriously, come and jump my bones already," and then John started laughing, and within seconds he was laughing so hard he'd doubled over. Rodney looked annoyed. "All right, so that wasn't the most sophisticated come-on ever. But since subtlety clearly hasn't been working very well for us --" "It's not that," John said, when he could breathe again. "It's you. Jesus, I missed you. I missed you so much." And then Rodney was saying, "I'm back, I'm here, I'm not going anywhere, I'm right here," and then somehow the distance between them had closed completely and he was holding John, his arms locked around John in a tight embrace, and John knew that the only definition of where he needed to be was where Rodney was. "So, where did we get to before?" Rodney asked. "Because I'm a little hazy on the detail." "Well, first we did this," John said, cupping his hands on either side of Rodney's face and drawing him closer, into a kiss. Rodney was stiff and awkward at first, self-conscious now in a way he hadn't been before. With a touch of frustration, he realized this had been easier when Rodney hadn't been thinking about it. "Then we did this," he said, loosening his shirt and placing Rodney's hands on to his body, encouraging him to move them over his skin. Rodney's breath caught -- he liked it -- but he was still holding back. "God, you're bony," Rodney said, when his hands found John's shoulder blades. "You know, most people try to say nice things about their lover's body." Rodney went very still, and for a second John was sure he'd just screwed up really badly. Then Rodney said, "Lover. Okay. New concept." He took a slow, shaky breath. "I'm good with new concepts." "No one better," John agreed. He remembered something. "Hey, I meant to tell you -- you were right about the math. I saw it. It was beautiful." They were leaning against each other, so he could feel Rodney's smile tickling his cheek. "Hmmm, you know how to turn on a physicist, don't you?" He was definitely relaxing now, and Rodney's fingertips were running freely over John's back, touching and exploring and leaving his skin strangely sensitized in their wake, like every one of his nerve endings was a separate trip-switch and Rodney was flipping all of them to on. John shuddered; he couldn't help it. "Is that me? Am I doing that?" Rodney's voice was a mixture of delight and curiosity, like he'd just discovered a brand new experiment with a particularly exciting outcome. "Hey, would you --?" And then, before John could say yes, of course, Rodney was shucking off his jacket and t-shirt, and John was touching him, and then kissing him, in the hollow beneath his Adam's Apple, and then lower, catching a nipple between his lips and running his tongue around it, thrilling at the gasp of amazed pleasure the action provoked. "Oh, oh, that is -- wow, yes --" Rodney gasped. He was grinding his hips a little against John now, making small, unthinking thrusting actions. Each time he pushed, John could feel the swell growing between Rodney's legs; knowing he was the one making that happen kicked off a sympathetic reaction in his own dick, and his breathing grew faster. "Did you ever do this before?" Rodney asked. John had moved across and was working hard on the other nipple; Rodney had bent down and was sucking on the top of his ear and God that felt so good, just that tiny little patch of sensation right there. "You mean with a guy?" John said. He was breathless now, almost panting with desire. "Yeah. Not for a long time, though. Before the Air Force." "Well, I haven't, so you need to, you know, show me," Rodney said. "But it's okay, because I learn really fast." "Really fast, huh?" "Really fast," Rodney said. "For example --" And he went down on to his knees so he was level with John instead of above him, reached his hand down the front of John's pants and took hold of him. It felt amazing; Rodney's hand on his dick, Rodney's mouth on his, and for the next while it was all John could do to let Rodney touch him, let him explore and possess and own him. Then he remembered he hadn't come up here unprepared. "Wait," he gasped. "Wait, wait, use this --" and dug into a pocket and shoved the lube into Rodney's free hand. Then it got even better, because now he could work himself against the hot, slick inside of Rodney's fist, thrusting and moaning until he could feel himself teetering on the brink, balancing precariously in that tiny hitched breath between pressure and release. Then, in the split second before he came, he looked into Rodney's eyes and, yes, there he was, his gaze curious and animated and so very, very intelligent. He came so hard that afterward he just sagged against Rodney, wrapping his arms around him and resting his chin on Rodney's shoulder. Rodney held him up for a second, and then they sank together on to the platform, first kneeling and then lying together, side by side. "What do you want?" John asked, when he could talk. "Seriously, just say it." "Honestly, I don't know," Rodney said. "New at this, remember?" "I have a suggestion," John said. Roughly, he said, "You could fuck me." He felt Rodney's whole body stiffen a little next to him. Then Rodney said in a low, urgent voice, "Yes. Yes, I want to do that." John rolled over and undid Rodney's belt first, then his own. It was a cool Lantean night, and the contrast between the fresh breeze and the heat coming off Rodney's skin and from between his legs made John's flesh rise in goose bumps. He squeezed a generous dollop of lube into his palm and applied it liberally to Rodney's cock, relishing the small shudders of pleasure each stroke produced. Already Rodney was semi-hard. "Okay," Rodney now. "What now?" "I'll turn round," John said, "and you'll -- well, you're smart. You'll figure it out." Rodney did, and surprisingly quickly. John braced himself on his hands and knees against the platform, shivering a little in the night chill, and then he felt Rodney pressing against his ass, Rodney's heat and hardness penetrating him. He gasped out loud, because it really had been a long time, but it was the good kind of hurting, the burning that came with needing someone. "Yes," he said, "yes, please, yes, harder, yes --" Rodney gave a sudden jolt and cried out, his hands on John's shoulder blades, grabbing the cloth of his shirt in handfuls, and John could feel him shaking as body and mind were overcome with the force of his orgasm. The knowledge that he'd done that -- his body, his ass -- sent John right up to the edge and then over it, and when the white-hot bolt fired its way up from the base of his spine and straight into the pleasure centers of his brain, he just let go and rode it out. When it was over, Rodney withdrew from him with a soft sigh and a small wet sound, then John felt him lean forward and kiss John on the back of his neck. Then they lay down together, shared body heat keeping them warm. John looked out over the spires and towers of Atlantis, and Rodney looked up at the stars overhead, and John took a second just to marvel that it was possible to be so different from someone but so much the same. He wondered vaguely what had happened to the helicopter picture. He lifted his head to look around, and when he couldn't see it anywhere on the platform, he figured it must have blown away on the breeze while they'd been otherwise occupied. That seemed right, somehow. "I do love you," Rodney said. "I mean, I know I said before, but I feel it bears repeating with the full weight of my considerable intellect behind it." He gave a groan of perfect satisfaction. "My God, how did we not do that long ago?" "I think," John said, "we were both over-thinking things." "I over-think everything," Rodney said. "I mean, right now, I should be zoned out in post-coital bliss, but I'm actually devoting mental energy to wondering whether I need to start using your first name from now on." "Whatever works for you," John said. "Sheppard. John. Sheppard. Huh. I like Sheppard, I'm sticking to that," Rodney said definitively. Then he grunted in discomfort and reached down to retrieve the tube of lube from under his thigh. He gave it back to John and said, "Yours, I believe." "Thanks. I wouldn't want to lose that. It's not that easy to get hold of that stuff around here." "Well, I'm grateful you happened to have it with you --" Rodney broke off abruptly. His eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Wait, wait, wait. Not even you would carry lube around with you everywhere on the off chance of an opportunity arising to have amazingly hot gay sex. Did you lure me up here to seduce me?" He sounded so outraged than John had to laugh. Then he kissed Rodney and put his head on Rodney's warm shoulder and said, "You know, for a genius, you really can be pretty stupid sometimes." "Oh, shut up," Rodney said. "I know you only want me for my mind." |