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1character2025-10-10 09:17 pm
escriveine) wrote in 1character2025-10-10 09:17 pm
Stereoscopic Glimpses of Rodney (50 Sentences about Rodney McKay)
Title: Stereoscopic Glimpses of Rodney | on AO3
Character: Rodney McKay
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Theme set: Alpha
Rating: Teen
Wordcount: ~4500
Warnings: Implied/References to canonical minor character death
Summary: 50 sentences, twinned like the natural phenomenon of your choice, providing roughly chronological stereoscopic glimpses into the life of Rodney McKay.
wind & moth
A storm was blustering around their grandmother’s house, making the wooden floors and doors creak and groan in ways that were clearly scaring Jeannie, especially once the lights went out, but that Rodney himself was much too mature, and grounded in reality, and, and logical to be even the tiniest bit worried by.
Even after the rain stopped pelting the windows, his little sister nearly jumped out of her skin when a bark-colored moth started flailing against an interior pane, so he distracted her by leading it in a wobbly dance across the walls and ceiling with the beam of his flashlight until the power finally came back on.
candy & smoke
Rodney always appreciated that Aunt Dot not only kept a few wrapped candies in her pocket, but that contrary to what you might expect from a professional chocolatier, they were the spicy clove pillows that nobody else in the family seemed to care for at all.
Come to think of it, he also associated the scent of cloves with his older aunt, Ethel, the one with the knowing, slanted grin and a whole collection of practical housedresses that always carried at least a whiff of the earthy, clove-accented pipe tobacco Uncle Bill would smoke on the back porch when the family visited (ever since that time Rodney had an asthma attack from the secondhand smoke in the front parlor, anyway).
mask & refrain
Rodney closed his eyes as his fingers moved across the keys with absolute precision, envisioning the action responding to his touch, sending hammers against the strings in a flurry of sound barely loud enough to cover the raised voices coming from the back room.
Note after note climbed and cascaded in time to the ineluctable refrain ticking in his mind — not yet, not yet, not yet — until a cool touch on his left forearm made him freeze, and he heard his mother say, “Quit that, Meredith.”
two & photograph
It wasn’t until middle school that he’d had what could be called a real friend, and of course it had to be the sandy-haired Army brat who showed up out of nowhere and everybody else shunned because, well, kids are generally speaking awful, but Bailey was something quietly special, and in just two years Rodney learned intricacies of soccer that non-players shouldn’t need to know, and how to accompany a violin for school auditions, and that AD&D was apparently designed for nerds just like them to play together, and how saying goodbye when someone moved hundreds of miles away could shatter your heart even if you hadn’t realized you’d given it away.
When school restarted, Mr Jones once again granted Rodney after hours access to the woodshop — though most other people were surprised that he excelled at making things, as if a math and science prodigy couldn’t follow plans and use checklists to create stuff you could hold in your hands — where he’d designed and built a freestanding hourglass-shaped picture holder with a pair of 3” brass rings to serve as frames for cut-down wallet-size school pictures, yet after taking it home, Rodney could only bring himself to set Bailey’s photo in the top one, leaving the space intended for his own face empty.
crossroad & ways and means
The husky Agent darted a glance from Rodney to his Science Fair model and back again like he was wondering which one might finally explode on him, saying, “Son, you’re lucky enough to have a pretty important choice here, so listen up: either you quit with all the mad science stuff — and I mean you quit that like your life depends on it — or you sign up with us and start putting that big brain to work for the good guys.”
After six hours of frankly ham-fisted interrogation that had no possibility of going anywhere, this abrupt pivot crystallized his immediate future — rather than having to evade at least one government’s negative interest while he continued his studies, he could gain access to what was probably the biggest brain trust in the world right now, even if the gatekeepers were a bunch of crypto-fascists — so Rodney immediately stuck out his hand and snapped his fingers for the Agent’s pen.
summer & shine
There had only been one summer in his teenage years that he’d been sorry to reach the end of: when he had just turned 15 and this skinny girl who was honestly as awkward and strangely intense as he was showed up to babysit the random brat next door, and for some reason was interested in listening to him wax rhapsodic about astronomy, and could keep up in quoting worthwhile movie scenes, and punctuated every kiss with another quick one like an exclamation point.
What he remembered most about that summer romance — or puppy love, or whatever — was one sultry night when they were out stargazing, and somehow the darkness of the new moon combined with the skirl of crickets and drone of cicadas to make him either brave or stupid, because he asked — actually asked! — her why she was with him, and without missing a beat, she turned from the telescope and laid a starlight-limned hand on his cheek, and said right into his lips, “Because you shine,” sealing it with a double kiss.
touch & drunk
After a week of her typically relentless pestering post-funeral, Rodney finally found the words to text back to Jeannie about the damn piano: Keep it, sell it, junk it, nuke it from high orbit, whatever — you know I quit playing decades ago and I’m never touching it again, end of discussion, full stop.
Late that night, he extracted a pair of dusty items from the back of a crowded bookshelf, then played the antique cassette of his one and only piano recital while drinking down the remainder of the Talisker he’d liberated from his parents’ not-so-secret stash so very long ago like he was trying to find closure at the bottom of the bottle.
belief & error
“Look, it’s not that religion and science are fundamentally opposed to each other, it’s that people don’t seem to have the sense to realize that they’re different, non-intersecting realms of inquiry — it’s not like the people in, in an airplane have to believe in aerodynamics, or clap their hands for the wings to provide lift when thrust is correctly applied any more than people can set out formal logic to not only prove that some vaunted deity exists but that we mere mortals have some kind of obligation to worship them, especially in oddly ritualistic ways — and unless, contrary to past experience and current expectations, that tract,” Rodney said, pointing to the pamphlet that the young woman in front of him had been earnestly holding out, but now gripped like it was her only tether to sanity, “contains the pithy musings of a modern successor to David Hume, I would suggest that you not even start with me.”
A few moments after the young woman had backed behind a handy telephone pole, then fully fled down the sidewalk, Rodney shook his head, reflecting that perhaps the words “Ask me about The Triple Path to Heaven” was a poor choice for her to have on the front of her T-shirt, leaving the far more helpful “The café with good books, fine coffee, and adoptable cats!” for the back.
rope & fresh
He’d been having a perfectly lovely dream before a multi-footed bowling ball landed on his bladder, causing him to jerk upright, squinting into the sliver of streetlight that somehow evaded the curtains at what his hindbrain was urgently signalling was not merely a bowling ball with feet, but one that was dragging a snake into his bed, and after giving a totally justified manly shriek, he managed to turn on a light, revealing his stripey defender of hearth and home viciously mauling a sisal rope that had apparently finally parted ways with the scratching post out in the living room.
Rodney carefully wrapped a new length of sisal around the scratching post’s vertical tube, musing vaguely about how he’d made an electromagnet with a similar technique as a kid, when two things occurred to him in quick succession: first, that maybe traversing a great distance couldn’t be done instantaneously like bringing two ends of a rope together might imply, but that there might be a way to, to, to break through to a “tube” connecting the endpoints, possibly in way that could make use of the gravity effects of the distance itself to motivate whatever was traveling within/through it; and second, that if he got a Nobel for this, he’d have to come up with a much better origin story for his breakthrough idea.
coup de foudre & pulse
Rodney ran pell mell into the Chair room, and it was a damn good thing he wasn’t holding anything because he would’ve dropped whatever it might have been when he saw a lanky, perplexed-looking military type reclining on top of his Ancient Chair, which was now thrumming with power and an eager blue glow, which was intriguing, yes, but didn’t really explain why the hairs on the back of his neck and arms were lifting, and it felt like his scalp and face were tingling, and he suddenly found his feet were absolutely rooted to the floor as a huge thump right in the center of his sternum insisted that he Recognized this, this interloper — and why the hell was his brain dishing up obscure references to a graphic novel he’d last read in middle school?! — as he heard himself saying, very calmly, given the circumstances, “Major, think about where we are in the solar system,” and that beautiful brunet bastard conjured up a schematic of the heavens for him, and as Rodney stared at it and him, he became aware of a roaring filling his ears, his mind, and he had to tear his eyes away because he finally realized that the last time he’d felt like this was when he’d nearly been struck by lightning, and goddamn it, he absolutely hated turning into a living cliché.
Time raced by, as time does, and then it was John who was getting struck by lightning — artificial, theoretically life-giving lightning — but Rodney felt it all the same: that endless moment where there wasn’t even the possibility of breathing because, well, John wasn’t breathing, wasn’t anything, and after four shocks, Rodney thought there was no way his heart could take more, but it wasn’t like he could move away, or would even willingly look away, not until he heard the monitor warbling semi-rhythmically and Carson saying there was a pulse again, at which point whatever force had galvanized him drained away, and he found himself staggering out of the Jumper and back again, shoulders sagging under the weight of knowing with unforgiving precision how very, very thin the knife’s edge they’d been traversing over the last hour had truly been.
memory & appetite
The red recording light blinked out, and Rodney slumped back in his chair, the whole notion of Leadership banished by somewhat random recollections of personal firsts: being the first successfully ATA-gene-hacked human, which led directly to physically wading into a freakish shadow monster to save literally everyone on Atlantis for the first time; proving to a seven-year-old Jeannie that there was actually no such things as monsters by rigging up motion-activated cameras under her bed and in her closet; being the first to discover a living, breathing, and ultimately annoying Ancient who couldn’t keep her hands or lips off a certain messy-haired Major; kissing, or rather, getting kissed for the first time by another lean, messy-haired boy in, of all places, a church — not the sanctuary, but a common room, which wasn’t so strange when you took into consideration that the boy was the preacher’s kid who lived in the attached manse.
God, he’d had a thing for that son of a preacher man for ages — another boy who went by his middle name and routinely proclaimed his crush on a conventionally pretty girl in their group, yet kept catching Rodney’s eye with darting glances they both seemed to hope the others wouldn’t notice — so when they ended up alone in that church basement, and that boy offered to make out with him, Rodney simply offered up his mouth and body to the devouring lips and tongue and, oh yes, the teeth that moved in counterpoint to those big, roving hands, and found his rather straightforward lust suddenly transformed into abject, greedy hunger for more than he could possibly receive in the paltry 15 minutes before his ride showed up and blared a discordant, interrupting horn.
spoon & perfect
Back in his apartment on Earth, Rodney would occasionally wake during the night to find himself curled around a pillow — on top of which, more often than not, JC would have tucked himself into a stripey bun of fur — and he couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to get to spoon with an actual human bed partner.
Of course, any time his thoughts strayed into maudlin longings for something other than solo sleeping, he sternly reminded himself that the cat never complained that he snored, or sometimes slept in his clothes, or sprawled on top of the covers in an effort to find the optimal sleeping position and temperature on any given night.
tea & mirror
Even after his third shower, Rodney still felt the grit of exploding sand on his scoured skin, and the ghastly tang of blood and ozone scratching at his throat — so much so that the pot of tea he made solely because he felt he owed it to Brendan went down harsh and bitter in yet another reminder that only one of his team had come home unscathed.
Sunlight streamed into his room, offensively bright, and Rodney woke to find himself looking searchingly into his mirror with absolutely no recollection of falling asleep, or even dreaming, really, just an impression of enduring an endless series of gunshots, things blowing up, and bodies thumping to the ground.
venom & need
Rodney dropped his head into one hand, and as he shielded his eyes heard himself saying, “It doesn’t matter, Cadman,” in surprisingly quiet, even tones untainted by the venom he’d more or less expected to surface when speaking yet again to the woman who’d used his body to lock lips with his best friend, who he definitely didn’t feel that way about and absolutely had zero consent from in any event, so even though he understood the urge to at least have at least one meaningful kiss goodbye before potentially dying messily, he resented right down to his boots that he hadn’t, he couldn’t—that there was no possibility of him getting to indulge himself like that, probably ever, but at least she wasn’t inside his head to hear this particular tangent, and that was such a relief that he forgot whatever he might have been willing to add out loud and just walked away instead.
As much as he’d expected the silence of his quarters to be soothing, it seemed that his brain needed to hear the mundane sounds of other people chatting in that curiously muted way they tended to do in public spaces at night, so he settled himself in a shadowed corner of the mess hall with a datapad for defensive cover, and finally relaxed into the familiar feeling of being alone in in a crowd.
archway & forest
Sheppard stalked — and that was the only possible word for what the burlap-swathed figure did: stalked — out from the shadowed archway through the Gateroom, silently cutting through Rodney’s automatic stream of hopeless babble in a way that made Rodney feel both relieved and gutted for not taking Elizabeth up on her suggestion of saying a private goodbye earlier.
Waiting at the edge of the forest that now seemed downright homey compared to the creeping horror he knew for certain was inside the cave, Rodney reflected that Carson’s “one last hour of lucidity” looked a lot more like interminable cruelty for the team, and unspeakably worse for Sheppard himself.
family & rose
As Rodney slid into the stasis pod, he tried to distract himself from the claustrophobia sending tendrils of quicksilver terror down his spine by reflecting that at least he knew where that particular fear came from, the precise event that taught his body that enclosed spaces should be avoided wherever humanly possible, especially when the only family that mattered was in very real trouble, even when his being trapped along with them was their best chance at getting out again, and, and, and no over-achieving survival reaction, regardless of its overall past evolutionary success for humanity as a whole, was going keep him from getting to John right the hell now.
It turned out that when your baby sister decided she looked just like Drew Barrymore, and that somehow led to her wanting to re-enact the closet scene from E.T., but with her tucked into Grandma’s hall closet packed not with stuffed animals, but shoe boxes and old coats and an overwhelming smell of camphor and crumbling rose petals, you went along with it, because it certainly seemed harmless enough until one of the heavy woolen things fell on her, and out of nowhere she had her first epileptic seizure, bringing still more clothing down on both of you, and kicking the door shut with an extra click that didn’t actually register until after you’d gotten her face free and wedged a tweed sleeve into her mouth, but whose meaning became dismayingly evident when you tried turning the doorknob to get help and found it totally, undeniably locked.
vapor & vine
Rodney stared at the Ancient wreckage, at the shockingly clean line where the ship’s nose had been sheared off or vaporized or, or something, and was forcibly reminded of the most haunting accident aftermath he’d ever personally glimpsed one afternoon as his own car crawled along a scenic interstate past the wide shoulder where a single drone hovered, sunlight glinting on its black shell, above a powder-blue minivan that was pointing the wrong way, but looked perfectly intact except for how the front end all the way back to the windshield was completely, neatly gone, and the only other indication of whatever cataclysmic event had taken place on the far side of the lone emergency-type vehicle parked well away from the scene being a pink blanket puddled into what almost looked like a fluffy little nest in the middle of untouched green grass beyond where the front bumper should have been.
As the team pelted through the underbrush, dodging ridiculously low branches and the treacherous vines or possibly creepers hanging off them while seemingly endless energy bolts exploded loose debris on all sides, Rodney thought rather bitterly that whoever said limited knowledge wasn’t nearly as dangerous as unlimited ignorance just didn’t know the half of it.
chocolate & medicine
It wasn’t so much that the chocolate was old enough to be called vintage, or that he knew it would taste like incipient heartburn and disappointment — no, the emergency squares stayed sealed in their foil wrapper in one of his innumerable vest pockets because sense memories were powerful things, and the one of him eating some because he’d needed to, because he was desperate to make the fact that Sheppard was laying half-dead and suffering on the floor of a pinioned Jumper not be the end of something that had yet to really begin because Rodney was too hypoglycemic to find the necessary solution was not something he cared to revisit, preferably ever, but there was also no way he was going to rely on dumb luck to bring him back from teetering on a similar brink ever again.
The inner vest pocket behind the chocolate held the real emergency supplies, though: injectables in slim hard cases that he could readily distinguish by touch, each carefully checked somewhere private before going on a mission to ensure that they were fresh enough to use should more-than-usually certain doom befall — anaphylaxis was no joke, whatever other people might think, and as Rodney unfortunately had reason to know, even brilliant scientists could get backed into a corner where they had to take the most idiotic and desperate of measures.
gloves & cold
Packing up Carson’s stuff, his pitifully few personal possessions, Rodney had the inexplicable feeling that he should really be wearing gloves — not nitrile medical things, but the pristine white gloves an archivist would don to protect important objects from the unintentional damage even a thoughtful, reverent touch would inflict — but if he hadn’t been anywhere near careful enough with his friend in life, what could it possibly matter how he handled his relics now?
During the funeral tea, every story told by Carson’s vast collection of kith and kin brimmed over with love — the real, rough-hewn kind that didn’t rely on fancy words or grand gestures, but came through in the glint of an eye, the bray of a laugh, or even the nod of a head — washing generously over him and his own Lantean family until their grief didn’t exactly disappear, but melted into the shared remembrance of a life well-lived right up til the end, and that managed to impart at least a little warmth to the cold pit that had been gnawing at his gut since that terrible, godforsaken Sunday.
butterfly & speak
Rodney managed to open one recalcitrant eye and could just make out a smudgy gray-blue sky above swirling skeins of nearly-white butterflies, or, or, no, maybe they were moths, or, or, or something that fluttered, anyway, wobbling around on the unpleasantly acrid breeze assaulting him with fumes, and noxious as that was, it had probably woken him up, even though for some reason he couldn’t really move, but he could track the floaty things, only now they were descending all around him until one landed right on his forehead, and his next thought was that it was snow—warm snow—but then another landed on his lips and, oh shit, oh shit, those weren’t butterflies, those were flakes of ash, and that meant they were monumentally screwed.
For the longest time there was no sound at all, then there was a hint of… something, like faint crackling, but underwater, and only on his left side, and he spent a while wondering if he could be partially submerged without knowing it and hearing echoes of whatever went on below the tide line here, but he remembered that wherever he was—no, wherever they were—he and his team were in serious trouble, and that meant the curious, dim sound was static on his headset, but he didn’t have time to worry that it was just static because just then he heard John’s voice saying Rodney, talk to me, still in that same distant, underwater way, and he really, really wanted to answer, but the ash was piling up and not even the terror of being buried probably alive in dangerous detritus was enough to engage his vocal cords, so he laid there, watching the sky falling on him, and hoped against hope that John could make out his uncontrollably rapid, shallow breaths over the comms.
linger & remain / grieve & fate
If I die before you wake
Don’t linger in this place
Don’t wonder if
My last sight
Was of your sleeping face
If I fall and you remain
Don’t look back on our days
And just forget
Nights now lost
Because you never stayed
If you leave without me now
Don’t let it slow you down
Just save them all
And go on
Abandon grief to drown
But if I too wake again
These words were never said
Don’t wonder what
Haunts my heart
Just soldier on instead
vanilla & bribe
“No, you little heathen,” Rodney said, slapping a clean wooden spoon on the counter in front of Madison, “that is real vanilla extract, and real vanilla doesn’t go into anything about to be baked in the oven because the heat destroys the complexity and richness derived from an orchid pod that took as long to gestate as you did, and, and—nonono, don’t start crying—and we can make some real vanilla frosting to put on the cake after it’s completely cool, how about that?”
In the end, Rodney had to make the miniature extortionist real vanilla frosting, real vanilla custard, and literally pinky-swear to make real vanilla ice cream at some unspecified future date to keep his niece from telling her parents about the whole birthday cake-making episode.
luminance & ornament
A colorful glare swept across Rodney’s datapad, making him look up in irritation only to discover that multi-hued light wasn’t so much dancing over John’s skin as it was stroking it: sunset colors drifting down his face and neck, seeming to disappear under his black shirt collar then re-emerge to continue their languid journey from forearm to wristband, and—oh, that’s… that’s… so that’s what all the fuss over luminance is about.
Trudging back into the Ancient lab, datapad fried into so much garbage, Rodney wondered why the Ancients couldn’t leave behind something nice for a change — like, like, say, a Christmas ornament that maybe lit up with pretty colors, but in no way mangled your DNA, or gave you the screaming meemies, or set the room on fire, or any of the thousand other profoundly disturbing things their artifacts tended to do with an unforgivable lack of warning signs or manuals on how to avoid the nigh-inevitable harrowing outcomes.
balloon & envelope
“You know, this may very well combine the worst aspects of both claustrophobia and agoraphobia — not that I actually have that one — but I can already tell you’ve got your heart set on this, even though it can’t — it better not — go anywhere near 200 miles per hour, or however you want to measure hot air balloon speeds, since that would require a jet stream, but I know you’re not gonna budge on going, not even if I tell you about the, the, well, let’s just call it an incident, I once had on one of these things very high above a very different fairground, so fine — fine! — I’m getting in the glorified picnic hamper with the centrally installed critical burn hazard, so you can just stop looking so put upon and give the nice carney over there whatever wad of tickets is required for us to go on this, this, this… ride.”
As they rose in the air, the multicolored envelope belled out quite beautifully against the deepening sky and nearly motionless, drowsing clouds, but that was nothing compared to the light in John’s eyes as he, too, looked up, and out to the unreachable curve of the horizon, then over to Rodney, who suddenly only had eyes for the ebullient flyboy who leaned in and said with as much hushed joy as was possible with the burner firing and the wind tugging playfully at the words, “Rodney, we’re in the sky!”
Character: Rodney McKay
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Theme set: Alpha
Rating: Teen
Wordcount: ~4500
Warnings: Implied/References to canonical minor character death
Summary: 50 sentences, twinned like the natural phenomenon of your choice, providing roughly chronological stereoscopic glimpses into the life of Rodney McKay.
wind & moth
A storm was blustering around their grandmother’s house, making the wooden floors and doors creak and groan in ways that were clearly scaring Jeannie, especially once the lights went out, but that Rodney himself was much too mature, and grounded in reality, and, and logical to be even the tiniest bit worried by.
Even after the rain stopped pelting the windows, his little sister nearly jumped out of her skin when a bark-colored moth started flailing against an interior pane, so he distracted her by leading it in a wobbly dance across the walls and ceiling with the beam of his flashlight until the power finally came back on.
candy & smoke
Rodney always appreciated that Aunt Dot not only kept a few wrapped candies in her pocket, but that contrary to what you might expect from a professional chocolatier, they were the spicy clove pillows that nobody else in the family seemed to care for at all.
Come to think of it, he also associated the scent of cloves with his older aunt, Ethel, the one with the knowing, slanted grin and a whole collection of practical housedresses that always carried at least a whiff of the earthy, clove-accented pipe tobacco Uncle Bill would smoke on the back porch when the family visited (ever since that time Rodney had an asthma attack from the secondhand smoke in the front parlor, anyway).
mask & refrain
Rodney closed his eyes as his fingers moved across the keys with absolute precision, envisioning the action responding to his touch, sending hammers against the strings in a flurry of sound barely loud enough to cover the raised voices coming from the back room.
Note after note climbed and cascaded in time to the ineluctable refrain ticking in his mind — not yet, not yet, not yet — until a cool touch on his left forearm made him freeze, and he heard his mother say, “Quit that, Meredith.”
two & photograph
It wasn’t until middle school that he’d had what could be called a real friend, and of course it had to be the sandy-haired Army brat who showed up out of nowhere and everybody else shunned because, well, kids are generally speaking awful, but Bailey was something quietly special, and in just two years Rodney learned intricacies of soccer that non-players shouldn’t need to know, and how to accompany a violin for school auditions, and that AD&D was apparently designed for nerds just like them to play together, and how saying goodbye when someone moved hundreds of miles away could shatter your heart even if you hadn’t realized you’d given it away.
When school restarted, Mr Jones once again granted Rodney after hours access to the woodshop — though most other people were surprised that he excelled at making things, as if a math and science prodigy couldn’t follow plans and use checklists to create stuff you could hold in your hands — where he’d designed and built a freestanding hourglass-shaped picture holder with a pair of 3” brass rings to serve as frames for cut-down wallet-size school pictures, yet after taking it home, Rodney could only bring himself to set Bailey’s photo in the top one, leaving the space intended for his own face empty.
crossroad & ways and means
The husky Agent darted a glance from Rodney to his Science Fair model and back again like he was wondering which one might finally explode on him, saying, “Son, you’re lucky enough to have a pretty important choice here, so listen up: either you quit with all the mad science stuff — and I mean you quit that like your life depends on it — or you sign up with us and start putting that big brain to work for the good guys.”
After six hours of frankly ham-fisted interrogation that had no possibility of going anywhere, this abrupt pivot crystallized his immediate future — rather than having to evade at least one government’s negative interest while he continued his studies, he could gain access to what was probably the biggest brain trust in the world right now, even if the gatekeepers were a bunch of crypto-fascists — so Rodney immediately stuck out his hand and snapped his fingers for the Agent’s pen.
summer & shine
There had only been one summer in his teenage years that he’d been sorry to reach the end of: when he had just turned 15 and this skinny girl who was honestly as awkward and strangely intense as he was showed up to babysit the random brat next door, and for some reason was interested in listening to him wax rhapsodic about astronomy, and could keep up in quoting worthwhile movie scenes, and punctuated every kiss with another quick one like an exclamation point.
What he remembered most about that summer romance — or puppy love, or whatever — was one sultry night when they were out stargazing, and somehow the darkness of the new moon combined with the skirl of crickets and drone of cicadas to make him either brave or stupid, because he asked — actually asked! — her why she was with him, and without missing a beat, she turned from the telescope and laid a starlight-limned hand on his cheek, and said right into his lips, “Because you shine,” sealing it with a double kiss.
touch & drunk
After a week of her typically relentless pestering post-funeral, Rodney finally found the words to text back to Jeannie about the damn piano: Keep it, sell it, junk it, nuke it from high orbit, whatever — you know I quit playing decades ago and I’m never touching it again, end of discussion, full stop.
Late that night, he extracted a pair of dusty items from the back of a crowded bookshelf, then played the antique cassette of his one and only piano recital while drinking down the remainder of the Talisker he’d liberated from his parents’ not-so-secret stash so very long ago like he was trying to find closure at the bottom of the bottle.
belief & error
“Look, it’s not that religion and science are fundamentally opposed to each other, it’s that people don’t seem to have the sense to realize that they’re different, non-intersecting realms of inquiry — it’s not like the people in, in an airplane have to believe in aerodynamics, or clap their hands for the wings to provide lift when thrust is correctly applied any more than people can set out formal logic to not only prove that some vaunted deity exists but that we mere mortals have some kind of obligation to worship them, especially in oddly ritualistic ways — and unless, contrary to past experience and current expectations, that tract,” Rodney said, pointing to the pamphlet that the young woman in front of him had been earnestly holding out, but now gripped like it was her only tether to sanity, “contains the pithy musings of a modern successor to David Hume, I would suggest that you not even start with me.”
A few moments after the young woman had backed behind a handy telephone pole, then fully fled down the sidewalk, Rodney shook his head, reflecting that perhaps the words “Ask me about The Triple Path to Heaven” was a poor choice for her to have on the front of her T-shirt, leaving the far more helpful “The café with good books, fine coffee, and adoptable cats!” for the back.
rope & fresh
He’d been having a perfectly lovely dream before a multi-footed bowling ball landed on his bladder, causing him to jerk upright, squinting into the sliver of streetlight that somehow evaded the curtains at what his hindbrain was urgently signalling was not merely a bowling ball with feet, but one that was dragging a snake into his bed, and after giving a totally justified manly shriek, he managed to turn on a light, revealing his stripey defender of hearth and home viciously mauling a sisal rope that had apparently finally parted ways with the scratching post out in the living room.
Rodney carefully wrapped a new length of sisal around the scratching post’s vertical tube, musing vaguely about how he’d made an electromagnet with a similar technique as a kid, when two things occurred to him in quick succession: first, that maybe traversing a great distance couldn’t be done instantaneously like bringing two ends of a rope together might imply, but that there might be a way to, to, to break through to a “tube” connecting the endpoints, possibly in way that could make use of the gravity effects of the distance itself to motivate whatever was traveling within/through it; and second, that if he got a Nobel for this, he’d have to come up with a much better origin story for his breakthrough idea.
coup de foudre & pulse
Rodney ran pell mell into the Chair room, and it was a damn good thing he wasn’t holding anything because he would’ve dropped whatever it might have been when he saw a lanky, perplexed-looking military type reclining on top of his Ancient Chair, which was now thrumming with power and an eager blue glow, which was intriguing, yes, but didn’t really explain why the hairs on the back of his neck and arms were lifting, and it felt like his scalp and face were tingling, and he suddenly found his feet were absolutely rooted to the floor as a huge thump right in the center of his sternum insisted that he Recognized this, this interloper — and why the hell was his brain dishing up obscure references to a graphic novel he’d last read in middle school?! — as he heard himself saying, very calmly, given the circumstances, “Major, think about where we are in the solar system,” and that beautiful brunet bastard conjured up a schematic of the heavens for him, and as Rodney stared at it and him, he became aware of a roaring filling his ears, his mind, and he had to tear his eyes away because he finally realized that the last time he’d felt like this was when he’d nearly been struck by lightning, and goddamn it, he absolutely hated turning into a living cliché.
Time raced by, as time does, and then it was John who was getting struck by lightning — artificial, theoretically life-giving lightning — but Rodney felt it all the same: that endless moment where there wasn’t even the possibility of breathing because, well, John wasn’t breathing, wasn’t anything, and after four shocks, Rodney thought there was no way his heart could take more, but it wasn’t like he could move away, or would even willingly look away, not until he heard the monitor warbling semi-rhythmically and Carson saying there was a pulse again, at which point whatever force had galvanized him drained away, and he found himself staggering out of the Jumper and back again, shoulders sagging under the weight of knowing with unforgiving precision how very, very thin the knife’s edge they’d been traversing over the last hour had truly been.
memory & appetite
The red recording light blinked out, and Rodney slumped back in his chair, the whole notion of Leadership banished by somewhat random recollections of personal firsts: being the first successfully ATA-gene-hacked human, which led directly to physically wading into a freakish shadow monster to save literally everyone on Atlantis for the first time; proving to a seven-year-old Jeannie that there was actually no such things as monsters by rigging up motion-activated cameras under her bed and in her closet; being the first to discover a living, breathing, and ultimately annoying Ancient who couldn’t keep her hands or lips off a certain messy-haired Major; kissing, or rather, getting kissed for the first time by another lean, messy-haired boy in, of all places, a church — not the sanctuary, but a common room, which wasn’t so strange when you took into consideration that the boy was the preacher’s kid who lived in the attached manse.
God, he’d had a thing for that son of a preacher man for ages — another boy who went by his middle name and routinely proclaimed his crush on a conventionally pretty girl in their group, yet kept catching Rodney’s eye with darting glances they both seemed to hope the others wouldn’t notice — so when they ended up alone in that church basement, and that boy offered to make out with him, Rodney simply offered up his mouth and body to the devouring lips and tongue and, oh yes, the teeth that moved in counterpoint to those big, roving hands, and found his rather straightforward lust suddenly transformed into abject, greedy hunger for more than he could possibly receive in the paltry 15 minutes before his ride showed up and blared a discordant, interrupting horn.
spoon & perfect
Back in his apartment on Earth, Rodney would occasionally wake during the night to find himself curled around a pillow — on top of which, more often than not, JC would have tucked himself into a stripey bun of fur — and he couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to get to spoon with an actual human bed partner.
Of course, any time his thoughts strayed into maudlin longings for something other than solo sleeping, he sternly reminded himself that the cat never complained that he snored, or sometimes slept in his clothes, or sprawled on top of the covers in an effort to find the optimal sleeping position and temperature on any given night.
tea & mirror
Even after his third shower, Rodney still felt the grit of exploding sand on his scoured skin, and the ghastly tang of blood and ozone scratching at his throat — so much so that the pot of tea he made solely because he felt he owed it to Brendan went down harsh and bitter in yet another reminder that only one of his team had come home unscathed.
Sunlight streamed into his room, offensively bright, and Rodney woke to find himself looking searchingly into his mirror with absolutely no recollection of falling asleep, or even dreaming, really, just an impression of enduring an endless series of gunshots, things blowing up, and bodies thumping to the ground.
venom & need
Rodney dropped his head into one hand, and as he shielded his eyes heard himself saying, “It doesn’t matter, Cadman,” in surprisingly quiet, even tones untainted by the venom he’d more or less expected to surface when speaking yet again to the woman who’d used his body to lock lips with his best friend, who he definitely didn’t feel that way about and absolutely had zero consent from in any event, so even though he understood the urge to at least have at least one meaningful kiss goodbye before potentially dying messily, he resented right down to his boots that he hadn’t, he couldn’t—that there was no possibility of him getting to indulge himself like that, probably ever, but at least she wasn’t inside his head to hear this particular tangent, and that was such a relief that he forgot whatever he might have been willing to add out loud and just walked away instead.
As much as he’d expected the silence of his quarters to be soothing, it seemed that his brain needed to hear the mundane sounds of other people chatting in that curiously muted way they tended to do in public spaces at night, so he settled himself in a shadowed corner of the mess hall with a datapad for defensive cover, and finally relaxed into the familiar feeling of being alone in in a crowd.
archway & forest
Sheppard stalked — and that was the only possible word for what the burlap-swathed figure did: stalked — out from the shadowed archway through the Gateroom, silently cutting through Rodney’s automatic stream of hopeless babble in a way that made Rodney feel both relieved and gutted for not taking Elizabeth up on her suggestion of saying a private goodbye earlier.
Waiting at the edge of the forest that now seemed downright homey compared to the creeping horror he knew for certain was inside the cave, Rodney reflected that Carson’s “one last hour of lucidity” looked a lot more like interminable cruelty for the team, and unspeakably worse for Sheppard himself.
family & rose
As Rodney slid into the stasis pod, he tried to distract himself from the claustrophobia sending tendrils of quicksilver terror down his spine by reflecting that at least he knew where that particular fear came from, the precise event that taught his body that enclosed spaces should be avoided wherever humanly possible, especially when the only family that mattered was in very real trouble, even when his being trapped along with them was their best chance at getting out again, and, and, and no over-achieving survival reaction, regardless of its overall past evolutionary success for humanity as a whole, was going keep him from getting to John right the hell now.
It turned out that when your baby sister decided she looked just like Drew Barrymore, and that somehow led to her wanting to re-enact the closet scene from E.T., but with her tucked into Grandma’s hall closet packed not with stuffed animals, but shoe boxes and old coats and an overwhelming smell of camphor and crumbling rose petals, you went along with it, because it certainly seemed harmless enough until one of the heavy woolen things fell on her, and out of nowhere she had her first epileptic seizure, bringing still more clothing down on both of you, and kicking the door shut with an extra click that didn’t actually register until after you’d gotten her face free and wedged a tweed sleeve into her mouth, but whose meaning became dismayingly evident when you tried turning the doorknob to get help and found it totally, undeniably locked.
vapor & vine
Rodney stared at the Ancient wreckage, at the shockingly clean line where the ship’s nose had been sheared off or vaporized or, or something, and was forcibly reminded of the most haunting accident aftermath he’d ever personally glimpsed one afternoon as his own car crawled along a scenic interstate past the wide shoulder where a single drone hovered, sunlight glinting on its black shell, above a powder-blue minivan that was pointing the wrong way, but looked perfectly intact except for how the front end all the way back to the windshield was completely, neatly gone, and the only other indication of whatever cataclysmic event had taken place on the far side of the lone emergency-type vehicle parked well away from the scene being a pink blanket puddled into what almost looked like a fluffy little nest in the middle of untouched green grass beyond where the front bumper should have been.
As the team pelted through the underbrush, dodging ridiculously low branches and the treacherous vines or possibly creepers hanging off them while seemingly endless energy bolts exploded loose debris on all sides, Rodney thought rather bitterly that whoever said limited knowledge wasn’t nearly as dangerous as unlimited ignorance just didn’t know the half of it.
chocolate & medicine
It wasn’t so much that the chocolate was old enough to be called vintage, or that he knew it would taste like incipient heartburn and disappointment — no, the emergency squares stayed sealed in their foil wrapper in one of his innumerable vest pockets because sense memories were powerful things, and the one of him eating some because he’d needed to, because he was desperate to make the fact that Sheppard was laying half-dead and suffering on the floor of a pinioned Jumper not be the end of something that had yet to really begin because Rodney was too hypoglycemic to find the necessary solution was not something he cared to revisit, preferably ever, but there was also no way he was going to rely on dumb luck to bring him back from teetering on a similar brink ever again.
The inner vest pocket behind the chocolate held the real emergency supplies, though: injectables in slim hard cases that he could readily distinguish by touch, each carefully checked somewhere private before going on a mission to ensure that they were fresh enough to use should more-than-usually certain doom befall — anaphylaxis was no joke, whatever other people might think, and as Rodney unfortunately had reason to know, even brilliant scientists could get backed into a corner where they had to take the most idiotic and desperate of measures.
gloves & cold
Packing up Carson’s stuff, his pitifully few personal possessions, Rodney had the inexplicable feeling that he should really be wearing gloves — not nitrile medical things, but the pristine white gloves an archivist would don to protect important objects from the unintentional damage even a thoughtful, reverent touch would inflict — but if he hadn’t been anywhere near careful enough with his friend in life, what could it possibly matter how he handled his relics now?
During the funeral tea, every story told by Carson’s vast collection of kith and kin brimmed over with love — the real, rough-hewn kind that didn’t rely on fancy words or grand gestures, but came through in the glint of an eye, the bray of a laugh, or even the nod of a head — washing generously over him and his own Lantean family until their grief didn’t exactly disappear, but melted into the shared remembrance of a life well-lived right up til the end, and that managed to impart at least a little warmth to the cold pit that had been gnawing at his gut since that terrible, godforsaken Sunday.
butterfly & speak
Rodney managed to open one recalcitrant eye and could just make out a smudgy gray-blue sky above swirling skeins of nearly-white butterflies, or, or, no, maybe they were moths, or, or, or something that fluttered, anyway, wobbling around on the unpleasantly acrid breeze assaulting him with fumes, and noxious as that was, it had probably woken him up, even though for some reason he couldn’t really move, but he could track the floaty things, only now they were descending all around him until one landed right on his forehead, and his next thought was that it was snow—warm snow—but then another landed on his lips and, oh shit, oh shit, those weren’t butterflies, those were flakes of ash, and that meant they were monumentally screwed.
For the longest time there was no sound at all, then there was a hint of… something, like faint crackling, but underwater, and only on his left side, and he spent a while wondering if he could be partially submerged without knowing it and hearing echoes of whatever went on below the tide line here, but he remembered that wherever he was—no, wherever they were—he and his team were in serious trouble, and that meant the curious, dim sound was static on his headset, but he didn’t have time to worry that it was just static because just then he heard John’s voice saying Rodney, talk to me, still in that same distant, underwater way, and he really, really wanted to answer, but the ash was piling up and not even the terror of being buried probably alive in dangerous detritus was enough to engage his vocal cords, so he laid there, watching the sky falling on him, and hoped against hope that John could make out his uncontrollably rapid, shallow breaths over the comms.
linger & remain / grieve & fate
If I die before you wake
Don’t linger in this place
Don’t wonder if
My last sight
Was of your sleeping face
If I fall and you remain
Don’t look back on our days
And just forget
Nights now lost
Because you never stayed
If you leave without me now
Don’t let it slow you down
Just save them all
And go on
Abandon grief to drown
But if I too wake again
These words were never said
Don’t wonder what
Haunts my heart
Just soldier on instead
vanilla & bribe
“No, you little heathen,” Rodney said, slapping a clean wooden spoon on the counter in front of Madison, “that is real vanilla extract, and real vanilla doesn’t go into anything about to be baked in the oven because the heat destroys the complexity and richness derived from an orchid pod that took as long to gestate as you did, and, and—nonono, don’t start crying—and we can make some real vanilla frosting to put on the cake after it’s completely cool, how about that?”
In the end, Rodney had to make the miniature extortionist real vanilla frosting, real vanilla custard, and literally pinky-swear to make real vanilla ice cream at some unspecified future date to keep his niece from telling her parents about the whole birthday cake-making episode.
luminance & ornament
A colorful glare swept across Rodney’s datapad, making him look up in irritation only to discover that multi-hued light wasn’t so much dancing over John’s skin as it was stroking it: sunset colors drifting down his face and neck, seeming to disappear under his black shirt collar then re-emerge to continue their languid journey from forearm to wristband, and—oh, that’s… that’s… so that’s what all the fuss over luminance is about.
Trudging back into the Ancient lab, datapad fried into so much garbage, Rodney wondered why the Ancients couldn’t leave behind something nice for a change — like, like, say, a Christmas ornament that maybe lit up with pretty colors, but in no way mangled your DNA, or gave you the screaming meemies, or set the room on fire, or any of the thousand other profoundly disturbing things their artifacts tended to do with an unforgivable lack of warning signs or manuals on how to avoid the nigh-inevitable harrowing outcomes.
balloon & envelope
“You know, this may very well combine the worst aspects of both claustrophobia and agoraphobia — not that I actually have that one — but I can already tell you’ve got your heart set on this, even though it can’t — it better not — go anywhere near 200 miles per hour, or however you want to measure hot air balloon speeds, since that would require a jet stream, but I know you’re not gonna budge on going, not even if I tell you about the, the, well, let’s just call it an incident, I once had on one of these things very high above a very different fairground, so fine — fine! — I’m getting in the glorified picnic hamper with the centrally installed critical burn hazard, so you can just stop looking so put upon and give the nice carney over there whatever wad of tickets is required for us to go on this, this, this… ride.”
As they rose in the air, the multicolored envelope belled out quite beautifully against the deepening sky and nearly motionless, drowsing clouds, but that was nothing compared to the light in John’s eyes as he, too, looked up, and out to the unreachable curve of the horizon, then over to Rodney, who suddenly only had eyes for the ebullient flyboy who leaned in and said with as much hushed joy as was possible with the burner firing and the wind tugging playfully at the words, “Rodney, we’re in the sky!”