Chapter Text
The Kulber-Ross model theorizes that there are five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and then finally, Acceptance. In high school Rodney McKay wrote a paper on the model, attempting to disprove it. He’d done it as a kind of joke. A bit of a fuck you to his pretentious psychology teacher. The soft sciences, after all, were just that to him: a joke, and hardly worth his time.
It’s not until the third round of torture, when blood is dripping from his chin and he knows he’s screaming loud enough to be heard by John, who’s still back in the small cell they’ve been sharing for going on two days now, that he realizes perhaps there is more to this Kulber-Ross model than meets the eye. And that perhaps it has further applications than just grief. Which is just as abstract an idea to him as that whole empathy thing people are always accusing him of not having. When something stabs into his arm, right through the bones of his wrist and into the chair arm beneath it and he makes some inhuman noise he’s never heard himself make before, and reality splinters into a million pieces and he finds some quiet place between the shards to think for a moment, a theory starts to form.
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Stage One: Denial
The first thing that happens when their party walks through the gate, is an ambush. The blue of the event horizon dissolves, he recoporializes, and suddenly there’s a gun in his face. A real crude one, too. Like someone had scavenged several different technologies from several different planets and soldered it all together into a rather dangerous looking mash-up of P90 and slingshot. It was Rodney and John and a handful of scientists, and not even their mission. The planet was deemed uninhabited. Rodney was there to check out some rock formations the scans had picked up that may or may not have been ancient ruins. John was there to... well Rodney wasn’t really sure why he had tagged along. He was bored? Needed a break from the mounds of paperwork he was preparing for the next scheduled data burst to Earth? Whatever the reason, he was there, too. Not that Rodney really minded. He only pretended to despise Sheppard. He actually found the man quite fascinating. Like a science project. Especially now that they were apparently sorta dating.
But back to the gun. It’s in his face and before Rodney can even protest, the butt of said gun is slamming into the side of his head. He crumples, stinging remarks about their welcoming party’s lack of decorum dying on his lips before he can even set them free. He loses track of everything until it all finally knits back together sometime later and he discovers he’s tied to a chair.
It reminds him of a scene from one of those horror movies his sister used to make him watch when they were kids. Dirty, crumbling walls. Water trickling down from huge brown stains in the ceiling and eroding the plaster and forming canyons in the walls. Each trench sporting its own little ecosystem of mold and tree roots. There’s one solitary light bulb swinging slightly from its wire above his head and only one way in or out of the room: an ominous looking metal door with a place to slide a food tray through that looks to be made more of rust than of metal. There's a slit of a window, too, but it's high up and appears to be covered up from the outside. It is, truly, worthy of B movie horror flick status and just happens to contain all of Rodney McKay’s worst nightmares. So. Many. Germs.
His skin is crawling even as their captors throw back the bolts on the door and enter the room. They want the usual information: Where is he from? How did they find this place? How did they get the ring of the ancients to activate? The same ignorance from the same locals Rodney has faced since the day he arrived in Pegasus with a bigger brain and more toys.
He is a compliant guest. Even though he has questions of his own - like how in the hell did these people avoid detection when they scanned every inch of this planet - and is more than willing to give them all the answers they want. It’s just… they don’t believe him and that’s when the first blow lands. It’s not a love tap. It’s vicious and knocks all the air out of Rodney’s lungs in a rush. His eyes water as he wheezes it all back in again. He doesn’t understand. He gave them what they wanted. He answered all their questions. And yet they still hit him.
This can’t be happening, he decides. It must be a dream, he convinces himself. Any moment now he’s going to wake up and find himself asleep in his bed. Or maybe even Sheppard’s bed, because they’re apparently doing that now, too. Yes. Civilized people don’t go around beating up other civilized people who have just given them all the answers to the questions they asked. So it all just has to be a dream.
Right?