Work Text:
“How do you feel today?” Kate Heightmeyer said for the first time.
Rodney said nothing, just blinked his eyes a few times, scratched his nose. Sniffed. There was a painting on the opposite wall of two overripe avocados. One of them was sliced open, showing the pit inside. The other had already begun to oxidize, which was strange because why anyone would choose to record something that had already begun to decay was beyond him.
-
John Sheppard died on September 28, 2005. His body was sent back to earth in a mahogany casket and buried in a small plot of land in Massachusetts.
Rodney always knew that John would never be an old man.
-
The day of the funeral, it was a beautiful day. The sun came out for the first time in days and a warm breeze ruffled the mourners’ collared shirts and dresses.
The funeral was quiet, somber. Ronon was there, so was Teyla; they’d been given special passes to come to Earth, and no one argued otherwise out of respect.
Colonel Samantha Carter came to pay her respects that day, and so did General Jack O’Neill and Doctor Daniel Jackson. Even Teal’c put on a hat and stood in the back, watching. Cameron Mitchell was there too, along with Vala Mal Doran, who wore solid black without any accessories. Walter was off to the side, cleaning his glasses.
The Atlantis crew was there too, and only a skeleton crew stayed behind to man the city. Woosley, Bates, Novak, and his incompetent, annoying, precious scientists. Radek stayed behind, but three hours ago he cried tears that fogged up his circular lenses and hugged Rodney roughly, once and quickly, before shoving him through the gate.
The absence of Elizabeth was tangible.
Rodney stood alone at the side, not wanting to talk to anyone. Still, Teyla and Ronon flanked him on either side, leaving a few feet of space. They were silent, for which Rodney was thankful. He fiddled with his cuffs and adjusted them once, twice, three times, checked the buttons of his suit jacket, and repeated the sequence over again, despite not having done that in years, even with the stresses of Atlantis.
(If he thought back to when he really stopped, he remembered orange fleece and an elegant silver chair and the Pegasus galaxy, stretching endlessly between them, stretching, glittering, endlessly reaching.)
-
When the service was done, Rodney stared at the soft overturned dirt and ignored everyone around him as they patted his back and murmured condolences.
Jeannie came by his side, he didn’t know how much later, and stood there next to him. She said nothing, and quiet stretched between them. A moment of silence.
“How are you?” she said gently. He was done adjusting his cuffs, instead running his fingers through his thinning hair, touching the seam of his dress shirt. She knew by now not to touch him when he was like this and she didn’t, and for that he was absurdly grateful.
Rodney cleared his throat, not having spoken at all that day. “It… it feels like there’s a part of me missing.” Jeannie looked at him sympathetically. “This isn’t like when Mom died. It hurts so much more. Why does it hurt more?”
“Oh, Meredith,” Jeannie said.
-
“How did you feel today?” Kate Heightmeyer said for the second time.
“Like nothing I ever do will be good enough,” Rodney said.
Kate waited. Rodney didn’t elaborate.
-
When Rodney learned that John was dead, he’d been told that he’d gone batshit insane.
Rodney was the one who figured it out, of course. There’s nothing worse than the feeling of waiting to see if someone survived, that moment of radio silence that stretched on and on between Woosley’s voice asking, “Sheppard? Are you there?” and the response.
The static droned in his ears, flat and lifeless. He’d slapped his radio, mouthed, John, John, and wasn’t able to hear his anything but the blood thundering in his ears, smacked open the life signs detector and frantically pressed buttons with shaking fingers.
He was the one who saw John Sheppard die, the white dot flickering out and disappearing like a candle blown out by a whisper of wind.
He dropped the life signs detector. Then, he took his computer and threw it on the floor, ran two steps forward, ripped a pipe out of the wall, and proceeded to destroy the room. The scientists tried to stop him, and he knocked two of them unconscious and given the other three in the room concussions. Simpson had a broken arm. Three expensive machines shattered, and one more was completely destroyed: he knew this was equipment that they couldn’t bear to lose, so he broke it beyond all repair. FUBAR.
He didn’t remember any of it.
-
Rodney walked Atlantis. Fog drifted and swirled in the corridors, and the water flowed through the walls and glimmered, painting the floor in shimmering colors of lavender and aquamarine.
He didn’t have a purpose, so he wandered. Eventually, he came to John’s room and held up his hand to unlock it. When the door didn’t open, he tried again. A feeling of frustration drifted through him, but it was cloudy and vague and he didn’t try to pin it down.
Boots echoed through the hallway, and Rodney turned around to see John sauntering towards him. “You don’t really think I’m gone, do you?”
“But you are,” Rodney said stupidly, his thoughts slow. “I know you’re dead.”
John stopped in front of him, held both of his palms out; not knowing why, Rodney mirrored the gesture and pressed his hands to John’s. The sensation was like touching live wires; prickly, electrifying, cutting through the haze and mist.
“No, you don’t,” John said, smiling that infuriating smirk of his. “Did you see me die?”
Rodney snapped awake, still gasping as he fumbled for the glass of water by his bedside with sweaty, shaking hands.
-
Sometimes Rodney went to John’s old room with a chess set tucked under his arm and paused with his fist above the metal, ready to let himself into the room. When the door opened for him, he saw the empty room inside with its neatly made bed and geek paraphernalia scattered across the floor. Old military habits die hard, but Rodney taught John the benefits of a pigsty on the floor. It was easier to find things, for one, and when John told him about the first time he stepped on something sharp in the middle of the night and hopped around the room cursing, they both howled with laughter until Teyla politely told them that they were disturbing the peace.
No one touched John’s personal artifacts, assuming Rodney would pack them away. Rodney wanted to, he did; it was a way of showing respect, but he just… couldn’t. The first time he accidentally walked in the room, he saw Batman Issue #34 laid open on the bedspread and was overcome with a wave of sadness so powerful that he crumpled to his knees beside the headboard and sobbed uncontrollably.
Sometimes Rodney still saved a seat for John at their table for four, but they weren’t the same four anymore. They had a new team member, some military lieutenant, and Rodney couldn’t even make the joke of lieutenant colonel. In the dense jungles of P8X-320, when Rodney bitched and moaned about the mosquitos, he waited for the retaliation of “Shut up, McKay” that never came. It caught him off guard, like taking a step forward with the wrong foot, and his complaints rang a dissonant chord in the air.
The lieutenant, whose name Rodney couldn’t be bothered to learn, was nice enough. He didn’t have black hair, didn’t like to lean on every available vertical surface, but his eyes were so green that sometimes when Rodney looked at him, his breath caught in his chest.
Sometimes Rodney forgot and turned around, about to snap his fingers and call out to John, only to stop with his hand outstretched. Everyone around him knew it too and quickly found something else to occupy their attention, leaving Rodney with his mouth open and something that ached deep inside.
Those were the worst days.
-
“How do you feel today?” Kate Heightmeyer said for the third time.
Rodney tried for a bitter chuckle, but it got caught in his throat. When it finally forced itself free, he couldn’t stop. It was a snicker which turned into a giggle to a chortle, and then he laughed and laughed until he couldn’t breathe, until tears streamed from his eyes and he heaved deep, gasping breaths that turned into wails that shook his whole body.
Kate put a hand on his shoulder and he didn’t shrug it away.
-
When Rodney finally found him, John’s face was burned, his clothes charred. Rodney slapped his cheek, and when he got no response from John, he clutched John’s dirty face and held it. He heard a voice desperately crying, “John, John,” and it was only when Ronon stepped forward and gently removed his hands from John’s face that Rodney realized that it was his.
-
Rodney threw himself into his work. He spent countless hours in the lab working on present projects, past projects, projects too far beneath and above him to merit any attention. He didn’t care, he had enough time to spare.
It was truly astonishing how much free time he had. To think that so much time used to be wasted racing those RC cars that were sitting in a dust-covered cardboard box in the third shelf on the left side of his closet.
He didn’t like being in his room anymore, preferring the lab. At least in the lab, he could compulsively rearrange items around the room that had no significance to him.
“McKay, are you leaving soon?” Zelenka asked him on the way out of the door, but it was half-hearted. Rodney tended to work to the early hours of the morning until he passed out facedown on the table. There wasn’t someone who would cover his prone form in a blanket when that someone wandered around the halls unable to sleep, but Rodney never expected the gesture even when it happened on a fairly regular basis.
“No,” he said, and Zelenka’s reply as he turned off nonessential lights of the lab of “Okay, goodnight then,” was disappointed.
-
“How do you feel today?” Kate Heightmeyer said for the fourth time.
“Why him?” Rodney whispered. “Out of everyone, why him?”
Kate sat back and folded her hands in her lap. “When you go to a garden, which flowers do you pick?”
“Oh, no,” and Rodney was suddenly on his feet, the chair was on the floor, and he was shouting. “Not this-- this, this metaphorical bullshit. He wasn’t the prettiest or the smartest. He wasn’t the best goddamn anything. There’s no reason, absolutely no reason--” he choked. “I always knew that he would die before me. I always knew that he was a doomed, idiotic martyr. I fucking knew from the start that John Sheppard was a goddamn dead man walking. I just didn’t know it was going to be this early!” He snatched a book next to him and threw it on the opposite wall, and to her credit, Kate didn’t even flinch.
“Why are you angry?” she said, and Rodney laughed incredulously.
“Why am I angry? Why are you even asking? Isn’t it obvious? I’m angry because he’s dead. He’s fucking dead and I can’t do shit about it. I’m angry at that fucking asshole for dying. I’m angry at what killed him. I’m angry at the fact that no matter what I do, no matter how long I work or how many hours I stay up, nothing will bring him back. I’m angry that we think that we have time, and then we don’t; we get swept away to a better place and leave everyone you love behind you to suffer in the aftermath.
“I’m angry that every time I turned to look over my shoulder, he isn’t there. I’m angry that when I wake up at night, I can still see the afterimage of his face, looking at me, just fucking looking--”
-
After the death, Atlantis wouldn’t work anymore. Well, it would work, but not as well, and the situation worsened with every passing day. Even when all of Zelenka’s cajoling deteriorated to hitting the control console with a wrench and maniacal cursing, the city stubbornly refused to function correctly. Her lights flickered and the water no longer ran hot; at night, the walls creaked alarmingly. Some of the skittish new recruits requisitioned transition forms back to Earth, and even Woolsey began looking at the ‘gate fondly.
Rodney just ran his hand along her walls and thought, I know. And he thought that Atlantis glowed a little brighter in response.
-
High up in the command tower, the control chair remained empty. Someone eventually covered it with a sheet, and its careless drapes were gracefully reminiscent of the presence that used to occupy it.
Rodney tried to sit in the chair, once. He reached out his hand to remove the cloth and paused with his fingers mere inches away.
He couldn’t do it-- it was just like emptying John’s personals, just like looking at the new lieutenant in the eyes-- and left the room in disgust, without bothering to turn off the plethora of glowing laptops and disconnect the wires that covered the floor like vines. This time, there wouldn’t be anyone to kiss the prince awake.
-
“How do you feel today?” Kate Heightmeyer said for the fifth time.
“Like I’m in a fairy tale,” Rodney said miserably, rubbing at the dark circles under his eyes. “Everything is dreamy and unreal except when it fucking isn’t. It’s a nightmare. I think I’m going to wake up any second but when I count my fingers and check the clock everything makes sense. Except it doesn’t, it doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes any fucking sense anymore,” and he sighed and put his head in his hands.
-
“How do you feel today?” Kate Heightmeyer said for the sixth time.
“Like I hate everything.”
“Hm.”
“It’s more than your normal hatred,” Rodney offered. “I want to kill every person here twice over. Turn them into ashes with my disintegrator beam.”
“How nice,” Kate said placidly.
-
Atlantis was burning. Flames licked her walls and melted her core, electrical circuits sparking and shorting out, the database corrupted and the data lost, so much information: the vastest recording of the most advanced civilization to ever grace the galaxy.
John ran towards him, his hair sticking in all directions, ash smudged on his face. “We can’t have Atlantis like this,” he said, and when he approached Rodney, John smelled like the sea.
Rodney didn’t ask how, didn’t ask why, because this was John and he’d always listen to what John had to say.
“Okay,” Rodney said, and woke up.
He sat upright and almost fell out of his lab chair, head pounding, because Atlantis was calling him to destroy the city, and because it was Atlantis, he did.
-
Zelenka managed to defuse the bomb in time, but not before calling Keller and having her shoot Rodney full of sedatives as Rodney kicked and screamed for the ocean and Atlantis and John.
-
When Rodney bothered to look up, the majority of the population wouldn’t meet his eyes. While he lay in the hospital bed he heard words such as delirious and hysteria and overexhaustion, but that couldn’t be true, because the visions were real. Well, obviously they couldn’t be real, but they were the last piece of John that remained, and didn’t that mean something? He didn’t know why, but it was the first time Atlantis spoke to him.
John, when plied with good Canadian beer, spoke of Atlantis’ voice and her instructions and the feel of her in his mind, and Rodney always leaned forward eagerly and drank every word. His closest connection to Atlantis was through machinery, but with John, it was natural and ideological and pure. Atlantis sung under his fingers and praised him as the prodigal, and she was the one who mourned the hardest at his loss.
-
When he was released from the infirmary with strict instructions to stay away from his lab and return to his room immediately, Rodney decided to visit John’s room, probably for the last time before he was sent back to Earth for being ‘mentally unfit’ for the position of CSO.
He walked the familiar path through the hallways, ignoring the bitter feeling of familiarity, and hovered outside the door; closed his eyes enough time for him to think I’m sorry, and entered.
And immediately stopped. The room was overgrown with plants, and the flora was varied and exquisite. There were ferns and moss and long grasses, but most impressive were the flowers that covered every available surface. They seemed to be in various stages of fruition, but they were dying from the lack of sun, so Rodney stepped inside past the geek paraphernalia and the not-so-neat-anymore bed, drew aside the curtains and opened the windows, and let fresh sea air and light flowing into the room. All at once, the plants gently turned towards him and ever so slightly and began to open.
Rodney’s eyes suddenly stung and he took a quick breath and sunk to his knees, hands helplessly extended towards them: the flowers were green.
-
“How do you feel today?” Kate Heightmeyer said for the seventh and final time.
“I know he’s gone,” Rodney dully said from the couch, knees pulled up to his chest. “I was the one who watched him die, and I never processed it.”
“Hm.”
“The thing about losing someone,” he said, lifting a hand and weakly gesturing because he was so incredibly tired but the words poured out of him, “is that you really can never get them back. You can yell and cry and swear curses that would put Zelenka to shame and break the entire contents of a multimillion dollar lab and it won’t change anything.
“When someone dies, they leave a hole that can’t be filled. You’ll never recover from it. The thing to do, really the only thing left to do, is to keep on living despite the gaps in your soul. The wound won’t ever heal. But if you continue staying alive and pass on their story, that respects the dead more than anything you can otherwise do. If their memory is alive, then somehow they are never truly dead.”
He pulled out a small ceramic pot filled with dirt and a small green flower from his jacket and offered it to her.
“Oh,” said Kate, her voice choked. Rodney looked up, and she was crying.
-
Back on Earth, Rodney returned to that small plot of land were John resided. Grass finally managed to grow in the dirt, and the flowers he held in his hand were closed, but he could see through the buds and knew that when they opened, they’d be bright and brilliant and beautiful. It’d rained recently, so the mud squished under his shoes and smudged on his jeans when he bent down to plant them in the soft brown dirt, but Rodney didn’t care.
“Bye, John,” he said, settling further on his knees, and gently traced the flowers with a careful finger: they bloomed under his touch.