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.fic: Lazybones - McKay/Sheppard (PG13) 1.1
Title: Lazybones
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Rating/Warning: PG/PG13. Weird.
Spoilers: References to "Aurora."
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Advertisements: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
wordclaim50 challenge #19, "Mystery."
Notes: Extremely odd. I can't explain the premise because that sort of... gives away the mystery, if you will. Notes at the end, though.
Many thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
semielliptical for reading this over and verifying that it makes some kind of sense *hugs*
LAZYBONES
John wakes up in the strange time between afternoon and the evening, when the sun still makes the air heavy and lazy, but coolness still hovers in the shade. He likes how the air feels on his body, alive or, like John, coming awake, and he dresses reluctantly, and the air dies trapped between fabric and skin.
Not much to do this evening, but in a small town there never is, so he takes a walk like he always does, through the evening-slow streets – not many people, it’s surprising to see someone, and when he does they’re always walking too, out to the empty place beyond the town limits, the dam and waterfall that mark its boundary.
Few of them cross the dam. One man, a doctor – what kind of practice he has here, John has no idea – goes occasionally and stands safely back from the rail as though afraid to touch it. Two others: a solid-looking man with cropped hair, a girl with tilted eyes who stands on the far side of the bridge and peers into the distance as though looking for something. But John doesn’t see them very often. He’s really the only one who heads out that way a lot, so far as he can tell.
He wanders out past the fences at the edge of town, down an incline and out toward the dam. An abandoned security station hunches alongside the path, and empty eyes watch him as he walks by.
Nothingness greets him. Good morning, Colonel, it says, and John nods back.
He walks on and on, over a bridge that hangs suspended in midair, glittering red gold, past gardens with palm trees and bright flowers. A woman calls to him from a bench where she sits with a man.
Are you going out today? the woman wants to know. She’s brushing tumbled brown hair from her eyes as though embarrassed, either by the question or by being caught in so private a place with a man, and the man next to her laughs and says something that sounds like again, again he goes.
“Yeah, again” John answers. And walks on, leaves the garden behind.
The path takes him up a tidy gravel road, then down an older one with pits and ruts, past a rusty, forsaken Mustang and toward the cataract and the dam that straddles it. He stands at the top of a hill, looking down, and he can see no movement on the bridge today.
The dam powers the entire town, John supposes, assertion of blue-veined rock, and he can feel the omnipresent thunder of the waterfall, beneath his feet, in the air, the spray that coats his hair and skin, that fills him and pulses along with his heartbeat. He stands along the curving bridge and watches the water pour away into the abyss, down and down and down into the mouth of the rock, and the river – he doesn’t know its name – swallows it.
A breeze coming up through the cut blows spray back into his face. Fresh, almost chilly against the air, the sun paradoxically warm on his back. And he can stay here he thinks, drinking up the spray and drifting with the eternal pounding of the water, maybe lying down on the curve of concrete and staring up at the stars, rhythm of water and sky, planets, day and night.
But he has places to be, and in a few steps he makes his way back onto the dirt, and the path is knotty and tricky, his mind water-drugged and his body slow with that slow, eternal roar.
Out past the dam the hills flatten out like running horses and race on and on past the horizon, only a few trees here and there to break it, and those are dwarfed by the grove of power stations and their cats-cradle of wires. Much colder here, and the rocks along the path wear lichen and frost. John pulls his coat more tightly around himself and trudges on.
He doesn’t know why he comes out here, where the raw power of the water from the dam becomes electric, tingle and rush of it all along his skin, lifting his hair, his neurons quickening, recognizing that familiar language.
There’s a fence he walks by, gate hanging off hinges and held only by loops of twine passed around the fence post, like the person who’d put it up could no longer be bothered maintaining it. That hadn’t always been the case, John remembers; he’d had to jump the gate a few times his first trips out here.
Wind blisters him with cold and rocks the gate. It creaks like old bones, sawing back and forth. John walks a bit faster, in part because of the chill and in part because he can see the house now, a ramshackle thing like the security station, but all the wires from the power stations in the field run down into it like veins.
The crackle of electricity grows, grows, grows until the power of the waterfall is nothing but memory. Channeled, purposeful, the wires bringing it to heel and focusing it, and how that old house can stand, John doesn’t know. But stand it does, has been standing here at least as long as John’s been coming, however long ago that’s been.
He thinks briefly about a chill cloud-place, fog and fog and more fog, dim memories wrapped up in it, but that… Maybe a dream, he decides, although he can’t remember ever actually dreaming. But if it’s memory it’s all he can recall of the place, and he knows that must have happened before he’d started coming here, but he’s been coming here, to this house, to the man inside it, ever since he can remember.
And how far back that is… he’s forgotten. He’s come, he knows that, but he can’t remember the man’s name, conjure the ghost of his face in memory.
The porch protests his weight as he steps onto it, the screen door whines. Predictably the door behind it is locked, but John opens it anyway.
“Hello?” he shouts into the dust and the silence.
The dust sighs. Silence stirs a bit, curls in on itself and sleeps again.
“Hello?” John tries a second time. Sometimes he needs a few tries to answer.
“It’s you.”
And there he is, thinning brown hair and blue eyes that hold puzzlement and irritation. Familiar both these things, and the light behind them is familiar too.
The humming is stronger now, forcing the pace, forcing John to rush along with it. Wind shakes the house, calms, then shakes the house again, a cat with a mouse in its teeth. Behind the dusty window, John can see the light remain steadily late afternoon, early evening, though it takes hours for John to get here.
“I don’t know why you keep coming here – it’s too far for any sane person to walk,” the man says, turning away from him. “I suppose you want food.”
“Not hungry.” John never really is.
“Too bad, because I don’t – ” The man blinks, wrong-footed, and scowls. Dust decorates one shoulder; the light lingers on it like a kiss, like John wants to linger on it. “Well, are you coming? I have work to do.”
“You always have work,” John observes. This is true; there’s never been a time when the man isn’t doing something squirreled away in that back room of his.
“There’s too much time,” the man says, unexpectedly plaintive. “Why’s there so much of it?”
John shrugs. He has no idea.
“It’s fortunate for you that was rhetorical.” The man stomps into the back, past raggedy furniture and piles and piles of magazines, books that look medieval, untouched kitchen brewing dust, and through a door into a hallucination of wires.
“So what’cha working on?” John finds a chair – his chair, this rickety thing shoved into a corner – and wheels it over next to the desk.
“Same thing I’m always working on.” The man does something mysterious with a pair of wires, watching in satisfaction as something sparks. The momentary brightness spreads over his face, slanted mouth, catches in his eyes where something metallic and unliving glows. “Don’t you have, like, better places to be or something? It’s a crappy day to come out.”
The wind shakes the building again in reminder.
“It always is.”
“Ever since we left Atlantis – ” the man begins.
The wind falls silent to listen.
The man falls silent too and the wind picks up again, its protest rattling the windows. The wires overhead quiver and zing, and John’s body shudders in response.
“You think they’ll find us?” Who’s they? John doesn’t know why he’s asking either of these questions, of this man or of himself.
“They won’t,” the man tells him. His name flickers on the edge of what John knows, there with hands that do more than obsess with wires, hands that know John flesh and bone, and a mouth that knows him too. ‘They can’t; I’ve made sure of that.”
“So what do we do?”
“We wait,” Rodney says positively. Rodney, that was it, sharp as the power in those wires.
“You ever think about doing something else, Rodney?” John asks. Rodney’s fingers braid themselves into wires once more, pausing for a heartbeat as though John’s surprised him.
Rodney looks away from his wires. Light flares again, brightening the room into brilliance and he vanishes into them like a spirit. When it fades only sunlight remains, afternoon, evening, and the man’s face has lines again, and his eyes have their own spiderwebs, filaments of worry. John wonders why he’s so tired, if the man ever sleeps.
“Not really. Need to keep this place going.”
John thinks of the doctor, the girl, the dark-haired man, and thinks about pointing out that any of them could do it – he could do it – but the man – the man – the – Rodney, that’s his name – seems to read his mind and scoffs, says something about I wouldn’t trust them – or you – with a transistor radio. Now shut up and let me work. These subroutines are complicated.
Knowledge hums in the wires, secrets whispered just out of hearing, and John leans closer to where Rodney’s buried in them, into the warmth of flesh, and Rodney’s breath races along in words, words that sound familiar, incantory, mysterious: neural masking subroutines operating at maximum capacity, life support optimal, sensory interface and matrices aligned, schedule next diagnostic.
“Think you’ll ever get out of here?” John asks, not sure where the question came from.
“You think you could stop distracting me? This is important.” Rodney turns to look at him, cold glitter of metal and annoyance in his eyes. “Don’t make me kick you out.”
“I’ll just jump the gate again,” John tells him. Rodney’d exiled him from the house a few times before he’d realized John just keeps coming back.
“You would.” Rodney sniffs, turning back to his work. Next scheduled diagnostic for 0978 Hyperion time.
John has the sudden sense of metal, corridors and metal, and light that isn’t the light of the sun. A window in the corner of his vision: stars beyond it, endless endless stars.
You’re distracting me, Rodney snaps, and the vision dissipates.
“You need a break,” John tells him. “A vacation.”
“Some other time.” Rodney extracts himself from the wires and maneuvers over to a panel of blinking lights. Not much room in here, desks with dangerous corners and wires wires everywhere making it hard to think, but Rodney manages it, graceful in the small space. “I don’t think you realize how important my work is.”
“Rearranging wires?”
“Precisely.” Rodney eels around a desk, another chair, and slides back up to John. He buries his hands in the wires again, but pauses. “It was easier before you started coming.”
John just looks.
“It was.” Rodney’s voice has the petulance of a five-year-old’s. “It was easier, I didn’t have to think… I didn’t have to know.” Anger now, vaguely familiar, like either they’ve had this fight before or John knows Rodney well enough to know that anger is how he deals with most things. “But now I do, now I know – I remember, and you…”
His hands shake, and the wires along with them.
“It was okay, being alone. Really.”
“You say that like you kind of don’t believe it.”
Rodney scowls at him. “Well, I kind of do. Now shut up and let me work.”
“You can let it go for a while,” John says. “You should – you’re exhausted. Let me take over for a bit.”
“Like hell.” The wires twine around Rodney, possessive. John thinks, oddly, of the man and woman in the garden, the man’s disordered blond hair and the woman’s darker and also disheveled, as though they’d been kissing. He glances up at Rodney’s brown hair, which manages to be messy despite its shortness, thinks about wrapping his own fingers in it, thinks about Rodney doing the same to him, that they must have done this once, or more than once.
“Then take a break at least. This’ll all still be here when you get back five whole minutes from now.”
“Actually, that’s debatable.” Rodney straightens, eyeing John doubtfully. His mouth slants downward, querulous, familiar, and John wants to kiss that mouth, distract it from sarcasm and the perpetual frown that preoccupies it. “I don’t think you fully appreciate how delicate and exacting this work is. One wrong connection, one missed diagnostic…”
“It’s risky, but it’s the only way. It’s the only way we can survive long enough to get back to the city, and even then it’s not a guarantee.” Rodney pauses. “But at least if we die, we won’t know it.”
“We never perfected the Hyperion’s VR interfaces with the stasis chambers.” Radek, voice of reason, not the one they need right now. They need Rodney’s brilliance, the boldness Rodney doesn’t know he possesses most of the time. But this is the only way and he’s the only one who knows it, and so he’s the one who has to convince them. “That could cause complications,” Radek adds.
“Not if one of us stays hooked into the mainframe and the program that controls the matrix with the VR environment,” Rodney tells him. “I’ll do it.”
“Rodney…” Elizabeth’s turn at it now. “Rodney, that could kill you. Or drive you crazy. We should wait, see if the wormhole reforms.”
“I’ll try not to let it happen. And Elizabeth – ” Rodney leans heavily on the ‘a’ – “even traveling at top speed we’re two hundred years from Atlantis. That wormhole isn’t coming back.”
His argument is simple: the Hyperion’s stasis chambers have been designed to work with VR interfaces, like those on the Aurora, and a precaution Rodney himself invented: the ship’s computer uploads the consciousness, preserves it like other data, leaving nothing – no memories, no knowledge – nothing for the Wraith to take if they take the ship. They need the stasis chambers so they need the VR, calibrated or not, but he’ll be the one to stay in the mainframe, a ghost in electronic memory, keeping watch, because he’s the only one who can.
Elizabeth agrees at last.
He turns to John.
“It’s your turn to try to talk me out of it,” he says. “And I really, really hope you try.”
John only smiles, tilts his head just so and says, “Sounds like a plan, Rodney.”
It’s almost a dream to Rodney, that life. He remembers it all like he remembers dreams: Atlantis, Antarctica, Siberia, Jeannie, college, his street in Hamilton. His cat, the sere brownness of Groom Lake, Carson, Elizabeth his ally, John…
John for whom Atlantis doesn’t really exist anymore, who comes here, drawn by the gene and by something too tenuous to be called memory. Rodney has the sense of Carson, Miko, and Lorne hovering on the dam sometimes, the gene pulling them too, but they’re too hesitant to walk across.
John, not even knowing it, barges in.
It really isn’t safe; Rodney doesn’t know how well the mainframe tolerates this sort of travel back and forth. He set up the VR like this, a hybrid of their memories: Elizabeth’s garden at home, John’s apartment in San Francisco, the town Carson grew up in, this hydroelectric field Rodney remembers driving by as a kid, the place where he’d watched wires weave together something mysterious and felt the crackle of energy across his six-year-old self and thought that was the coolest thing in the world.
He’s made the approach to his place, the interface between the VR world and the computer’s mainframe, as forbidding as possible: across a river, a canyon, something like the Siberian tundra, down uncomfortable paths, and still John comes to annoy him into rest.
Maybe he could take a break for a while. The Hyperion is running fine, has been for the past sixty-three years. Not even halfway there, and he hasn’t stopped, though time doesn’t really exist here for him, or for any of them. He can count though, and John’s come exactly forty-five times since Rodney had kissed him good-bye and shut the stasis chamber.
John doesn’t remember that, of course.
John knows but doesn’t, Rodney thinks as he lets John lead him back out into the living room with its leather couch and National Geographics, almost tripping over Planck the Cat (whom Rodney had to magic in), through the front door and onto the porch where the light stays stuck at the edge between afternoon and evening.
“Nice,” John whispers, and somehow he’s behind Rodney, warm and solid, and Rodney knows John remembers the two of them in the hazy way that dreams have of being remembered, knows it’s the interface’s fault, that it diffuses memory accumulated in the VR the way it does – and this was Radek’s risk, that they would all forget in here, so each time John walks back across that dam, goes home and goes to sleep it’s a new forgetting.
And this always happens: John comes and drags him away for a bit and holds him, kisses his neck and then turns him to kiss him on the mouth, to pull up his t-shirt and his tongue licks the dust away from Rodney’s skin.
And John always forgets.
And Rodney always remembers.
Half-memories, Rodney tells himself as John’s hands spider their way up his skin, pulling him close. John half-remembers, enough to keep him coming back.
One hundred thirty-seven years left, he reminds himself, touching John’s hair, his shoulders, flesh warm and hard and real, sensation sharp and unblurred, kissing him like he can kiss memory back into John, the memory the VR’s robbed from him.
One hundred thirty-seven years until he can kiss John, and they can both remember it.
-end-
Notes: The fic sort of got spawned by my iPod Shuffle, which played Beck's "Jackass" and BNL's "Light Up My Room" consecutively. I started imagining Rodney as this crazed genius living among power stations and transformers, and John somehow wandering out his way to see what was going on. And then I apparently ingested some kind of mind-altering drug, because this is what happened.
This was going to be a fic for the sga_santa exchange, but it ended up being too contrary and weird and not fitting the request. Sigh. Back to the drawing board.
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Rating/Warning: PG/PG13. Weird.
Spoilers: References to "Aurora."
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Advertisements: For
wordclaim50 challenge #19, "Mystery."Notes: Extremely odd. I can't explain the premise because that sort of... gives away the mystery, if you will. Notes at the end, though.
Many thanks to
semielliptical for reading this over and verifying that it makes some kind of sense *hugs*LAZYBONES
John wakes up in the strange time between afternoon and the evening, when the sun still makes the air heavy and lazy, but coolness still hovers in the shade. He likes how the air feels on his body, alive or, like John, coming awake, and he dresses reluctantly, and the air dies trapped between fabric and skin.
Not much to do this evening, but in a small town there never is, so he takes a walk like he always does, through the evening-slow streets – not many people, it’s surprising to see someone, and when he does they’re always walking too, out to the empty place beyond the town limits, the dam and waterfall that mark its boundary.
Few of them cross the dam. One man, a doctor – what kind of practice he has here, John has no idea – goes occasionally and stands safely back from the rail as though afraid to touch it. Two others: a solid-looking man with cropped hair, a girl with tilted eyes who stands on the far side of the bridge and peers into the distance as though looking for something. But John doesn’t see them very often. He’s really the only one who heads out that way a lot, so far as he can tell.
He wanders out past the fences at the edge of town, down an incline and out toward the dam. An abandoned security station hunches alongside the path, and empty eyes watch him as he walks by.
Nothingness greets him. Good morning, Colonel, it says, and John nods back.
He walks on and on, over a bridge that hangs suspended in midair, glittering red gold, past gardens with palm trees and bright flowers. A woman calls to him from a bench where she sits with a man.
Are you going out today? the woman wants to know. She’s brushing tumbled brown hair from her eyes as though embarrassed, either by the question or by being caught in so private a place with a man, and the man next to her laughs and says something that sounds like again, again he goes.
“Yeah, again” John answers. And walks on, leaves the garden behind.
The path takes him up a tidy gravel road, then down an older one with pits and ruts, past a rusty, forsaken Mustang and toward the cataract and the dam that straddles it. He stands at the top of a hill, looking down, and he can see no movement on the bridge today.
The dam powers the entire town, John supposes, assertion of blue-veined rock, and he can feel the omnipresent thunder of the waterfall, beneath his feet, in the air, the spray that coats his hair and skin, that fills him and pulses along with his heartbeat. He stands along the curving bridge and watches the water pour away into the abyss, down and down and down into the mouth of the rock, and the river – he doesn’t know its name – swallows it.
A breeze coming up through the cut blows spray back into his face. Fresh, almost chilly against the air, the sun paradoxically warm on his back. And he can stay here he thinks, drinking up the spray and drifting with the eternal pounding of the water, maybe lying down on the curve of concrete and staring up at the stars, rhythm of water and sky, planets, day and night.
But he has places to be, and in a few steps he makes his way back onto the dirt, and the path is knotty and tricky, his mind water-drugged and his body slow with that slow, eternal roar.
Out past the dam the hills flatten out like running horses and race on and on past the horizon, only a few trees here and there to break it, and those are dwarfed by the grove of power stations and their cats-cradle of wires. Much colder here, and the rocks along the path wear lichen and frost. John pulls his coat more tightly around himself and trudges on.
He doesn’t know why he comes out here, where the raw power of the water from the dam becomes electric, tingle and rush of it all along his skin, lifting his hair, his neurons quickening, recognizing that familiar language.
There’s a fence he walks by, gate hanging off hinges and held only by loops of twine passed around the fence post, like the person who’d put it up could no longer be bothered maintaining it. That hadn’t always been the case, John remembers; he’d had to jump the gate a few times his first trips out here.
Wind blisters him with cold and rocks the gate. It creaks like old bones, sawing back and forth. John walks a bit faster, in part because of the chill and in part because he can see the house now, a ramshackle thing like the security station, but all the wires from the power stations in the field run down into it like veins.
The crackle of electricity grows, grows, grows until the power of the waterfall is nothing but memory. Channeled, purposeful, the wires bringing it to heel and focusing it, and how that old house can stand, John doesn’t know. But stand it does, has been standing here at least as long as John’s been coming, however long ago that’s been.
He thinks briefly about a chill cloud-place, fog and fog and more fog, dim memories wrapped up in it, but that… Maybe a dream, he decides, although he can’t remember ever actually dreaming. But if it’s memory it’s all he can recall of the place, and he knows that must have happened before he’d started coming here, but he’s been coming here, to this house, to the man inside it, ever since he can remember.
And how far back that is… he’s forgotten. He’s come, he knows that, but he can’t remember the man’s name, conjure the ghost of his face in memory.
The porch protests his weight as he steps onto it, the screen door whines. Predictably the door behind it is locked, but John opens it anyway.
“Hello?” he shouts into the dust and the silence.
The dust sighs. Silence stirs a bit, curls in on itself and sleeps again.
“Hello?” John tries a second time. Sometimes he needs a few tries to answer.
“It’s you.”
And there he is, thinning brown hair and blue eyes that hold puzzlement and irritation. Familiar both these things, and the light behind them is familiar too.
The humming is stronger now, forcing the pace, forcing John to rush along with it. Wind shakes the house, calms, then shakes the house again, a cat with a mouse in its teeth. Behind the dusty window, John can see the light remain steadily late afternoon, early evening, though it takes hours for John to get here.
“I don’t know why you keep coming here – it’s too far for any sane person to walk,” the man says, turning away from him. “I suppose you want food.”
“Not hungry.” John never really is.
“Too bad, because I don’t – ” The man blinks, wrong-footed, and scowls. Dust decorates one shoulder; the light lingers on it like a kiss, like John wants to linger on it. “Well, are you coming? I have work to do.”
“You always have work,” John observes. This is true; there’s never been a time when the man isn’t doing something squirreled away in that back room of his.
“There’s too much time,” the man says, unexpectedly plaintive. “Why’s there so much of it?”
John shrugs. He has no idea.
“It’s fortunate for you that was rhetorical.” The man stomps into the back, past raggedy furniture and piles and piles of magazines, books that look medieval, untouched kitchen brewing dust, and through a door into a hallucination of wires.
“So what’cha working on?” John finds a chair – his chair, this rickety thing shoved into a corner – and wheels it over next to the desk.
“Same thing I’m always working on.” The man does something mysterious with a pair of wires, watching in satisfaction as something sparks. The momentary brightness spreads over his face, slanted mouth, catches in his eyes where something metallic and unliving glows. “Don’t you have, like, better places to be or something? It’s a crappy day to come out.”
The wind shakes the building again in reminder.
“It always is.”
“Ever since we left Atlantis – ” the man begins.
The wind falls silent to listen.
The man falls silent too and the wind picks up again, its protest rattling the windows. The wires overhead quiver and zing, and John’s body shudders in response.
“You think they’ll find us?” Who’s they? John doesn’t know why he’s asking either of these questions, of this man or of himself.
“They won’t,” the man tells him. His name flickers on the edge of what John knows, there with hands that do more than obsess with wires, hands that know John flesh and bone, and a mouth that knows him too. ‘They can’t; I’ve made sure of that.”
“So what do we do?”
“We wait,” Rodney says positively. Rodney, that was it, sharp as the power in those wires.
“You ever think about doing something else, Rodney?” John asks. Rodney’s fingers braid themselves into wires once more, pausing for a heartbeat as though John’s surprised him.
Rodney looks away from his wires. Light flares again, brightening the room into brilliance and he vanishes into them like a spirit. When it fades only sunlight remains, afternoon, evening, and the man’s face has lines again, and his eyes have their own spiderwebs, filaments of worry. John wonders why he’s so tired, if the man ever sleeps.
“Not really. Need to keep this place going.”
John thinks of the doctor, the girl, the dark-haired man, and thinks about pointing out that any of them could do it – he could do it – but the man – the man – the – Rodney, that’s his name – seems to read his mind and scoffs, says something about I wouldn’t trust them – or you – with a transistor radio. Now shut up and let me work. These subroutines are complicated.
Knowledge hums in the wires, secrets whispered just out of hearing, and John leans closer to where Rodney’s buried in them, into the warmth of flesh, and Rodney’s breath races along in words, words that sound familiar, incantory, mysterious: neural masking subroutines operating at maximum capacity, life support optimal, sensory interface and matrices aligned, schedule next diagnostic.
“Think you’ll ever get out of here?” John asks, not sure where the question came from.
“You think you could stop distracting me? This is important.” Rodney turns to look at him, cold glitter of metal and annoyance in his eyes. “Don’t make me kick you out.”
“I’ll just jump the gate again,” John tells him. Rodney’d exiled him from the house a few times before he’d realized John just keeps coming back.
“You would.” Rodney sniffs, turning back to his work. Next scheduled diagnostic for 0978 Hyperion time.
John has the sudden sense of metal, corridors and metal, and light that isn’t the light of the sun. A window in the corner of his vision: stars beyond it, endless endless stars.
You’re distracting me, Rodney snaps, and the vision dissipates.
“You need a break,” John tells him. “A vacation.”
“Some other time.” Rodney extracts himself from the wires and maneuvers over to a panel of blinking lights. Not much room in here, desks with dangerous corners and wires wires everywhere making it hard to think, but Rodney manages it, graceful in the small space. “I don’t think you realize how important my work is.”
“Rearranging wires?”
“Precisely.” Rodney eels around a desk, another chair, and slides back up to John. He buries his hands in the wires again, but pauses. “It was easier before you started coming.”
John just looks.
“It was.” Rodney’s voice has the petulance of a five-year-old’s. “It was easier, I didn’t have to think… I didn’t have to know.” Anger now, vaguely familiar, like either they’ve had this fight before or John knows Rodney well enough to know that anger is how he deals with most things. “But now I do, now I know – I remember, and you…”
His hands shake, and the wires along with them.
“It was okay, being alone. Really.”
“You say that like you kind of don’t believe it.”
Rodney scowls at him. “Well, I kind of do. Now shut up and let me work.”
“You can let it go for a while,” John says. “You should – you’re exhausted. Let me take over for a bit.”
“Like hell.” The wires twine around Rodney, possessive. John thinks, oddly, of the man and woman in the garden, the man’s disordered blond hair and the woman’s darker and also disheveled, as though they’d been kissing. He glances up at Rodney’s brown hair, which manages to be messy despite its shortness, thinks about wrapping his own fingers in it, thinks about Rodney doing the same to him, that they must have done this once, or more than once.
“Then take a break at least. This’ll all still be here when you get back five whole minutes from now.”
“Actually, that’s debatable.” Rodney straightens, eyeing John doubtfully. His mouth slants downward, querulous, familiar, and John wants to kiss that mouth, distract it from sarcasm and the perpetual frown that preoccupies it. “I don’t think you fully appreciate how delicate and exacting this work is. One wrong connection, one missed diagnostic…”
“It’s risky, but it’s the only way. It’s the only way we can survive long enough to get back to the city, and even then it’s not a guarantee.” Rodney pauses. “But at least if we die, we won’t know it.”
“We never perfected the Hyperion’s VR interfaces with the stasis chambers.” Radek, voice of reason, not the one they need right now. They need Rodney’s brilliance, the boldness Rodney doesn’t know he possesses most of the time. But this is the only way and he’s the only one who knows it, and so he’s the one who has to convince them. “That could cause complications,” Radek adds.
“Not if one of us stays hooked into the mainframe and the program that controls the matrix with the VR environment,” Rodney tells him. “I’ll do it.”
“Rodney…” Elizabeth’s turn at it now. “Rodney, that could kill you. Or drive you crazy. We should wait, see if the wormhole reforms.”
“I’ll try not to let it happen. And Elizabeth – ” Rodney leans heavily on the ‘a’ – “even traveling at top speed we’re two hundred years from Atlantis. That wormhole isn’t coming back.”
His argument is simple: the Hyperion’s stasis chambers have been designed to work with VR interfaces, like those on the Aurora, and a precaution Rodney himself invented: the ship’s computer uploads the consciousness, preserves it like other data, leaving nothing – no memories, no knowledge – nothing for the Wraith to take if they take the ship. They need the stasis chambers so they need the VR, calibrated or not, but he’ll be the one to stay in the mainframe, a ghost in electronic memory, keeping watch, because he’s the only one who can.
Elizabeth agrees at last.
He turns to John.
“It’s your turn to try to talk me out of it,” he says. “And I really, really hope you try.”
John only smiles, tilts his head just so and says, “Sounds like a plan, Rodney.”
It’s almost a dream to Rodney, that life. He remembers it all like he remembers dreams: Atlantis, Antarctica, Siberia, Jeannie, college, his street in Hamilton. His cat, the sere brownness of Groom Lake, Carson, Elizabeth his ally, John…
John for whom Atlantis doesn’t really exist anymore, who comes here, drawn by the gene and by something too tenuous to be called memory. Rodney has the sense of Carson, Miko, and Lorne hovering on the dam sometimes, the gene pulling them too, but they’re too hesitant to walk across.
John, not even knowing it, barges in.
It really isn’t safe; Rodney doesn’t know how well the mainframe tolerates this sort of travel back and forth. He set up the VR like this, a hybrid of their memories: Elizabeth’s garden at home, John’s apartment in San Francisco, the town Carson grew up in, this hydroelectric field Rodney remembers driving by as a kid, the place where he’d watched wires weave together something mysterious and felt the crackle of energy across his six-year-old self and thought that was the coolest thing in the world.
He’s made the approach to his place, the interface between the VR world and the computer’s mainframe, as forbidding as possible: across a river, a canyon, something like the Siberian tundra, down uncomfortable paths, and still John comes to annoy him into rest.
Maybe he could take a break for a while. The Hyperion is running fine, has been for the past sixty-three years. Not even halfway there, and he hasn’t stopped, though time doesn’t really exist here for him, or for any of them. He can count though, and John’s come exactly forty-five times since Rodney had kissed him good-bye and shut the stasis chamber.
John doesn’t remember that, of course.
John knows but doesn’t, Rodney thinks as he lets John lead him back out into the living room with its leather couch and National Geographics, almost tripping over Planck the Cat (whom Rodney had to magic in), through the front door and onto the porch where the light stays stuck at the edge between afternoon and evening.
“Nice,” John whispers, and somehow he’s behind Rodney, warm and solid, and Rodney knows John remembers the two of them in the hazy way that dreams have of being remembered, knows it’s the interface’s fault, that it diffuses memory accumulated in the VR the way it does – and this was Radek’s risk, that they would all forget in here, so each time John walks back across that dam, goes home and goes to sleep it’s a new forgetting.
And this always happens: John comes and drags him away for a bit and holds him, kisses his neck and then turns him to kiss him on the mouth, to pull up his t-shirt and his tongue licks the dust away from Rodney’s skin.
And John always forgets.
And Rodney always remembers.
Half-memories, Rodney tells himself as John’s hands spider their way up his skin, pulling him close. John half-remembers, enough to keep him coming back.
One hundred thirty-seven years left, he reminds himself, touching John’s hair, his shoulders, flesh warm and hard and real, sensation sharp and unblurred, kissing him like he can kiss memory back into John, the memory the VR’s robbed from him.
One hundred thirty-seven years until he can kiss John, and they can both remember it.
-end-
Notes: The fic sort of got spawned by my iPod Shuffle, which played Beck's "Jackass" and BNL's "Light Up My Room" consecutively. I started imagining Rodney as this crazed genius living among power stations and transformers, and John somehow wandering out his way to see what was going on. And then I apparently ingested some kind of mind-altering drug, because this is what happened.
This was going to be a fic for the sga_santa exchange, but it ended up being too contrary and weird and not fitting the request. Sigh. Back to the drawing board.
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Poor Rodney. He always, always remembers, and John forgets every time.
I usually don't depress myself writing things, but I felt terrible here. Paradoxically, I think "Echoes" made me think about what Rodney would do if John weren't around in any meaningful way for him to snark to/make/geek out with, and that depressed the hell right out of me.