26 June 2005
Stargate Atlantis
McKay & Zelenka
Post-Siege

They couldn't run on stimulants and adrenaline forever.

Not mine.  Belongs to SciFi.

Sheila audienced and suggested and fed me.  I love her like a mad thing.




They've both been awake for . . . Rodney has no idea.  A long time.  He has no idea how long Radek's been awake, but he's lost track of his own life, too.  He must have slept at some point.  But that was a long time ago, when he had hours together when nobody needed him so urgently that his sleeping would kill people.

There's a part of his brain that keeps reviewing the last week or so, noting moments when he could have curled up for five or ten minutes of sleep.  But it's all abstract.  He vibrates

/shakes/

whenever he stands still.  Twitches all the time.  For a long time, Carson was doling out the stimulants, but then there were carved-up bodies, and Carson had more important things to do, so Rodney and Radek just helped themselves.  Beautifully medical amphetamines and what he thinks was probably pure adrenaline.  Jump-start the heart, or keep two miserable bastards of scientists on their feet another six hours.

When Rodney tries to steady himself, the space around him shakes instead.

He hasn't been this bad in years.  Not since university, when he was still young enough to believe that sleep was optional and that his body could take everything he threw at it, and also he was really fucking stupid then.  And in those days it was just Jolt and pep pills and no one's life was on the line.

Radek's there in the corner of his eye, bouncing without actually lifting off the floor.  All his edges are blurry.

The whole world smells like smoke and dead things.  They're going to be rebuilding Atlantis for . . . another indefinite period of time.  Things are already crackling apart, and he'll have to deal with that as soon as his hands stop shaking.

It feels like he's walked into a wall.





Rodney's memory is damn near perfect, so it worries him that he has no genuine recall of the confrontation.  Just fragments of conversation and the cold, crawling fear that's all over him.

. . . under control, even if you can't currently grasp . . . reports you have both been on duty continuously for something in excess of one hundred twenty hours . . .

. . . clinically insane . . .

He can't even remember who it was, or what authority they have to lock him up.

God damn locked door.

He isn't hungry anymore.

So he paces.  Back and forth and up and down and hands all over the walls.  He can get out of here.  It's a simple electronic lock.

"The man on the other side is armed."

"I don't care."

His teeth are chattering.

Radek's more cooperative with authority.  His knees gave a while ago.  He's not asleep, though.  Just curled up in a corner staring at Rodney and sometimes he grits his teeth enough to comment.

He remembers that they're under guard.  Both in one room because they could only spare one guard for the mad scientists.

He doesn't have any skin left around his fingernails.  That doesn't stop him from biting them.





Down.

He's going to be dead for years.





. . . wakes up dressed and hurting all over.  Kicks his pants off and his shoes, and takes his watch off.

The time/date shows thirty-two hours later than the last time he remembers, but that doesn't mean anything, because right now there are huge things he doesn't remember.

Water.  Sleep.





Hurts more vividly when he wakes up again.  Like maybe he didn't move at all while he slept, just lay in what's not really a very comfortable position.  And his brain's screaming that it wasn't real sleep, not the kind he needs, but his eyes are jacked open and he's not going back down right away.

He needs water.  He needs to get rid of water.

He's been leaning against the wall in the bathroom for a couple of minutes before he registers that the shower's running.

When he's pulled himself together enough to ease back the shower door and look, he finds Radek sitting on the floor with his head on his knees.  Awake and not exactly crying, but not moving, either.  Not something he remembers seeing since one of his housemates, a million years ago when Rodney was still an undergrad, just lost it and stopped wearing clothes and burned an entire semester's research and then went away to live in a cabin in the Manitoba bush, somewhere you have to fly in, where there isn't any technology at all and you have to kill all your food with your own hands.  Sometimes the guy'd hike a hundred kilometres or so and send Rodney a postcard through the Hudson Bay Company.  Just a quick message: not dead. killed a woodchuck and ate it last week
 
Spray on his face.  Vague thoughts in his head that naked, even naked-and-miserable, has to be more comfortable than these remaining clothes that he's had on since a week before the world ended.

He should say something.  "Go back to bed."

"Can't move."

"I'd offer you a hand, but."  He waves and almost falls down.

"Thank you, Rodney.  I will be up in a minute."

It's actually more live five minutes.  Rodney's crawled back to bed.  His head hurts from exhaustion and too much sleep and wild dehydration, and he's going back to sleep as soon as the room stops spinning enough for him to finish this bottle of water.  So he hears Radek fall back into bed more than he sees him.

"You okay?"

"My body believes that we are back in graduate school."

"We?"

"Me and it."

Rodney nods, then regrets it.  He's fairly sure Radek can't see him anyway.

"My project . . . we were very . . . we were close to a new conducting system.  My advisor, his project."  Something Czech like 'fuck'.  "He was doing the math.  And then his wife killed herself.

"So I did it instead.

"Two months.  I didn't sleep very often."

Rodney hears him curl in on himself.  Disturbing how juvenile this all feels.  Like they're still students, still boys. 

Rodney says, "I don't remember what I did."

"You screamed at Colonel Everett.  I was impressed at your vocabulary."

"Alright.  Why did they lock you up?"

"I bit a marine."

"I have a new respect for you."

"Thank you.  I currently have very little for myself."

Drift.





"First time you lost it."

"Thank you, Rodney.  I was starting to have self-respect again."

"I'm bored.  Tell me yours and I'll tell you mine."  He's not biting his fingernails.  He won't.

The ends of his fingers are bloody from the last time he woke up biting them. 

His body wants sleep/coffee/glorious under-the-counter amphetamines they used to synthesize in one of the less-used labs while he was in grad school.  He wants to wake up.

Sigh from across the room.  Someday they'll both be able to deal having the lights on at the same time.  "I was sixteen."

"Early."

"I was a nervous child.  Also, it was approximately then that I realized I would have to perform military service unless I could prove my value elsewhere."

Quiet.

"I needed to find a university that would vouch for me.  I needed an impressive record to get that.  I was not the only young man looking for a way out."

"I take it we're not talking about your doing research for the army."

"No.  We."  Pause.  "Are talking about two years of marching, hiking through the mud, winters in the snow, did I mention mud?"

"Yes.  You did."

"And no education at all."

"If you were in university . . ."

"It did not matter.  Unless I had been declared necessary to a research project valuable to national security."

"We you?"

"Eventually, yes.  But not then.  No, then I locked myself in my closet for a week.  My parents were worried."

"You got better."

"There is very little like the threat of state psychiatry to induce recovery."

"Good point."





He wakes up again and there's a light on in the bathroom.  Radek's curled up in the bed opposite his, knot-tight and apparently dead.

The bathroom mirror's covered with writing.

The box of dry-erase markers, when he finds it, is next to the food, by the door.  He gets a footful of tuna, looking for it in the dark.  There is a god.  And it's erasable math.

One wet towel gets rid of Radek's work.  It isn't important.  It's just set theory problems, probably random.  Trying to kick his brain back into gear.

Rodney manages three quarters of an hour doing progressively more difficult functions before nausea hits him.  He goes back to bed.





"Forget it, Dr. McKay."

"I need to talk to Dr Weir."

"I bet.  No way."

"It's important."

"You're just bored."

"And of course you'd know that, because you're both a doctor and an expert on Atlantis."

"No.  I know that because Dr Beckett told me you'd say that.  He said to tell you there's no way you're cleared for duty."

"Carson hasn't seen me in a week."

"Dr Beckett was here two hours ago.  It's not his fault you were asleep.  He also said if you don't steal drugs from him next time, he'll be more inclined to give you Valium."

"How would that help?"

"I'm not a doctor.  Sir."

From behind him, "Rodney, shut up.  The poor corporal is not going to tell you anything and you are giving me a headache."

He goes back to writing on the bathroom mirror.  He can stay on his feet almost seventy minutes, now.





"Second time."

"Rodney."

"What?"

"You have two stories from me.  It's your turn to talk."

"I talk."

"You rant.  It has no meaningful content."

"That's not true!"

"If you gave out personal information every time you were furious, you would have no secrets left."

"Touché.  Well.

"I was on my high school debate team.  I made a point of being good at it -- of being good at everything, in fact, because I hadn't learned to specialize yet.  I spent a lot of time trying not to be a disaster in wood shop, and I had to sew a stuffed animal in home economics, which was really a waste of time, and aren't you going to cut me off at some point?"

"We are sharing.  Think of it as group therapy.  Group of two."

"I think that's a heart-to-heart."

"Imagine we are drunk."

"I wish I was drunk."

"When they let us out, we can resume the moonshine project.  Talk."

"We used to get these information packages on upcoming debate topics, because most of the students were too lazy to do their own research, I guess.  It was pretty standard stuff, and they had to go to some pretty dubious sources sometimes to cover both sides equally, but the point was that you got some numbers to play with, some arguments to learn, and then if you were on the side for the resolution, you proposed a plan to make it work, and if you were on the other side, you took that plan apart.  And you could pretty much figure out what the plan was going to be, based on the material.

"I put some effort into it.  Went to the public library, got my own numbers.  This was before the Internet, so I went to the newspapers on microfilm."

"I never enjoyed social research.  You have to trust other people's numbers."

"Yes, I'm getting to that.  And you really did.  I'm telling you, if you were arguing the conservative side, you had to make do with numbers from the Fraser Institute and Alberta Report."

"This means nothing to me."

"Nobody in his right mind would call them unbiased sources.  Anyway.  I put some real effort into it.  And I did pretty well.  I had to work with a partner, because we debated in teams of two -- Minister and backbencher versus Leader of the Opposition and backbencher.  And as long as I wrote all our arguments, we won pretty much all our debates, I got major speaker's points, and we came home with a box full of hardware.

"I liked trophies.  I used to have a lot of them."

"Anyway.  Be it resolved that the Canadian system of federal government be changed.  It was pretty standard stuff.  And there were two possible plans I'd mapped out.  One was based on ascending regional councils.  The other argued for an elected senate."

"Again.  No meaning."

"The Canadian senate is appointed.  It doesn't matter; they don't do anything much.

"In the first round, we came up against this pair of scruffy little fat kids from out in the country somewhere.  They kept poking each other.  And they came out with the argument that regional representation was obsolete.  Presented all this research on the rise of values systems and the need for representation by voting bloc.

"I hadn't researched that.

"Shut up.  I don't know everything."

"I didn't say anything."

"I, um.  I panicked.  I might also possibly have cried."  Yes.  There's that flashback.  He must be in worse shape than he thought if the nasty little things from his adolescence can jump him like this.

He's not crying.  Not at his age.

Sigh.  He's glad the lights are off.  His head hurts.

"It is not exactly a surprise to me that you dislike looking stupid."

"And being ambushed.  I really don't like that."

So, really, this is better.  He's in terrible shape, but at least he knows exactly how it happened.

They deserve a trophy of some kind for this.  Just something small, to go with the plaque that can belong to the station: Award for Saving Our Asses.  2005 -- Rodney McKay.

Fine.  Rodney McKay, Radek Zelenka.  He can share space on the hardware.  Give him a couple more days to sleep and he might even be gracious about it.





They won't let him out.

"I wonder sometimes what I could have accomplished if I'd specialized sooner.  I wasted years in high school doing a bit of everything.  If I hadn't had to take, say, social studies, I could have put a lot more time into the organic chemistry olympiate tests.  School isn't really set up for the gifted, you know?  They design it so that everybody feels special and equal, but that isn't useful.  It just means we wound up being marked on things that didn't matter, like the artistic impression of my poster of the inside of a frog.  They only gave me 81% on that!  It was a perfectly scientific image, but they said my colouring was uneven."

"I'm afraid to ask what grade you're talking about."

"Grade eight, if you can believe it!  I'd already built an atomic weapon, and I had to make posters of frog intestines."

"Of all the things you could harbour resentment about . . ."

"In case you hadn't noticed, I'm perfectly capable of harbouring resentment about everything."

"It makes you unpleasant."

"Yes.  Well.  I didn't say you had to like me."

Quiet.

Zelenka says, "I do."

"What?"

"In case you were wondering."

"Oh.  Thank you."

Quiet.

"I like you too."





Beckett's a man without mercy.  A man with a perverse sense of humour.

He won't let them out until they stop screaming.

Every so often, he throws them another box of tongue depressors and another bottle of crazy glue.  Doesn't comment on the thing taking shape in the middle of the room.

So Rodney doesn't have to tell him it doesn't have a purpose.  It's just a skeletal, repeating pattern, and maybe if they'd conferred when they started it could be a molecule, but they weren't really planning.  Too twitchy.  It's insane; they're making him detox off every stimulant he's ever taken, and he's been running on caffeine since he was twelve.

A more artistic person would say the thing in the middle of the room is a reflection of the state of their nerves.

Zelenka's shredding tongue depressors.  He needs to stop; Rodney needs those.

Gentle fist to Zelenka's forehead.  Up close, he can hear Radek grinding his teeth.

"Yeah.  Me too."





He wakes up.  Again.

Two compulsive men, one room, arts-and-crafts materials for the mentally retarded.  They've caged themselves.  Dragged all their bedding into the floor and nested and closed the frame around themselves.  Rodney has no memory of it at all.

Radek's curled up on the other side of the cage.  Slightly smaller than a double bed, but a different shape.  And only Rodney sprawls.  Radek's behind his knees, sort of.

This moment in which Radek sits up and scratches at his head and all his hair stands on end.

And then they start taking the cage apart.





The note with their food says, Usually tweakers just kill toasters.  U R freaks

It's not news.





The nest stays.  Rodney decides he likes sleeping on the floor.  It reminds him of periods when his work was spread out on his bed and he had to sleep elsewhere.

He wakes up sometimes with his head pillowed on Radek's knee.  They don't mention it to each other.





And eventually, Beckett tells them to "go outside and play."

Rodney's never been so grateful for an order to exercise in his whole life.  He goes looking for a place on Atlantis that doesn't smell like blood or other people.

He even runs part of the way.

Then he goes back to his apartment, showers, and finds new clothes.  Shaves.

Wanders down to the mess and makes himself a sandwich.  The Daedalus brought them canned tuna.  It goes pretty well with the greens they traded for.  Crunchy.

Right.  Lab.

It's a mess.  Big, ugly things were killed in here.  Several important items were blown up.  It doesn't matter

/it matters.  later/

He clears a space and goes to work.

He's been working for a while when Zelenka comes in, clears a space on the other side of the room, and starts in on his own project.  It's just background noise.  Rodney's been bored for way too long.  He didn't deserve to suffer like that.  He

/they/

made sure nobody died.  People should be grateful.

They probably are.  He knows that.  They're just busy.

He slides back up into paying attention to things around him when Zelenka touches him.  Just a hand on his shoulder from the guy standing behind him.

Forehead against the back of his head.

He says, "Yeah.  Me too."

Zelenka goes back to work.

Atlantis ticks and whispers around them.




jane
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