Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first day after it’s all over, after twenty-five years of work - what has become The Work in Rodney’s mind - is all said and done and there’s nothing left to figure out, Rodney doesn’t do much of anything. It’s evening by the time he gets home to his apartment from his trip to Colorado Springs - his very last, he suspects - and at a loss for other options, he goes to bed.

It’s been a very long time since he’s gotten a remotely appropriate amount of sleep. That habit, apparently, is not going to be broken that night. Rodney lays on his side, old bones aching, eyes fixed on the sliver of his living-room-turned-workspace that he can make out from his bedroom, and he wonders. He thinks about Jen, and Sam, and Teyla, and Ronon. He thinks about John. He doesn’t sleep.

On the second day, out of some half-hearted assumption that it’s what he probably should do at this point, Rodney begins to clean his apartment. Fresh new start, right? Ha. He fishes out beer bottles and chip packets from under his couch, gingerly scoops up the steadily growing collection of dead flies on his windowsill with a tissue, and casts a disheartened glance at the veritable science experiment that’s been carrying on in his fridge under his nose before emptying all its meagre contents into a trash bag. Newton, his rotund tabby, watches on, unimpressed. Her litter is the only thing in the apartment that has remained consistently clean, the spoiled brat.

He doesn’t wipe his digital notes, or clean off his whiteboards. He just dismantles them and shuffles them off into one of the more disused corners of the living room so that he can technically say he’s made an effort. He’d stood there, whiteboard eraser in hand and fully intending to do the deed - there's no need for it anymore, The Work is over, this is irrational, he knows this is irrational - but in the end, the paranoia that something will happen, that he’ll need to carry on exactly where he’d left off, wins out.

He doesn’t call Jeannie either. Once again, he knows it’s something that he really should do - she worries, after all, has made an Olympic sport of it over the last couple of decades, and she’ll want to know that this project of his has finally been laid to rest. But Rodney knows that the moment he rings her up and tells her, she’ll fuss, which he’s not exactly eager for. And, worse than that, she’ll start asking questions like what now? Rodney doesn’t know when he’ll even be able to start tackling that particular question, so he’s happy to put it off for a day or fifty.

Just as the sun begins to set on the third day - which Rodney has largely spent watching the cooking channel in a numb, paralysed sort of haze - he hears a knock on his door. He casts a glance at the cat tower as he forces himself off the couch: Newton is perched on top, blinking nonchalantly, so the knock isn’t from anyone lugging her back to his apartment after yet another one of her grand escapes. It could be Ashley, the single mum from room 204 who sometimes cooks him dinner in exchange for him occasionally taking five minutes to fix her faulty holo-television. It could even be Jeannie, who tends to have a sixth sense about these sorts of things even though Rodney still hasn’t contacted her. At a stretch, Rodney might’ve even guessed Lorne, who’s dutifully sent him a Christmas card every one of the last twenty-five years and who had given him a particularly charged look of concern and an extra long handshake once he’d re-emerged from the Gate to Atlantis. 

Not once, not even if he’d been given twenty-five more years to guess, would Rodney have expected to open his door and come face to face with Radek Zelenka.

Rodney freezes. Zelenka, despite being the one to show up here, startles as well, as if he’d maybe expected Rodney to take one look through the peephole and ignore him completely. Maybe he’s just shocked at just how much Rodney has aged. A frankly ridiculous thing to be surprised by, considering this is how the chronological passage of time works, and even Zelenka isn’t that hopeless, but Rodney will admit, he’s a little thrown as well. The Radek Zelenka standing in front of him, wearing new, thick-rimmed glasses, face lined with wrinkles and age spots and hair grey and almost doubly receded - though still impressively flyaway - does not compute with the image of him that Rodney has had stowed away in his brain from the last time they’d laid eyes on each other, more than twenty-five years ago. The only reason Rodney had even known that Zelenka hadn’t died was that Lorne certainly would have called to let him know, doggedly sentimental sap that he is.

A simple hello seems a bit passé, considering the circumstances, and besides, Rodney isn’t the one who made this house call. He settles for: “You’ve aged terribly.”

The sigh that Zelenka lets out at that is gut-wrenching for how familiar it is. So is the patient, put-upon smile tugging at his lips. “Rodney, please,” he says. “Aren’t we too old for this now?”

Probably, but Rodney can’t fault himself for falling back into old habits, not when this is so unprecedented. They stare at each other for a few more long moments, Rodney’s hand is heavy on the doorknob, and Zelenka is fiddling with a maroon beanie speckled with the snow that Rodney hasn’t even realised is falling. The question - what are you doing here? - hangs heavy in the air, so obvious that Rodney doesn’t bother asking it, and Zelenka doesn’t need him to.

“Evan gave me your address,” he says. “He told me what you have been doing. What you did. ”

Which isn’t really an answer, not in Rodney’s mind - he’d explained everything to Lorne; if Zelenka wanted answers, he could’ve gotten them from him - but Zelenka seems to think it’s good enough, and he falls into an expectant silence.

Rodney weighs his options. It may be twenty-five years since he and Zelenka had last laid eyes on each other, but it’s been longer still since they’ve been on good terms. He knows Zelenka is probably expecting him to slam the door in his face right about now, and truthfully, Rodney is kind of expecting the same - old habits are hard to shake, and Rodney lost the script for any other way to interact with Zelenka a long time ago. But, really, what does he have waiting for him inside except for more cooking shows, an empty fridge, and a jailbreaking cat? 

And the thing is, Zelenka is right. Rodney is old. He’s old, and he’s tired.

He doesn’t invite Zelenka in, exactly, but he leaves the door open as he returns to his couch. Zelenka figures out the rest.

Rodney is long past the point of being self-conscious about the state of his apartment, if he ever had been. He hasn’t exactly been in the mind of entertaining guests for the last two and a half decades, after all, so what about it? It’s relatively clean (since a couple of days ago) and it keeps out the bite of Canadian winter, so in Rodney’s mind, it doesn’t matter that all his furniture is all second-hand, the paint on the walls is long since faded, the bottoms of his curtains have been eviscerated by Newton’s claws, and he has exactly one fork in his cutlery drawer. 

In the moment after Rodney lets Zelenka in and shuts the door behind him, he sticks his chin up, ready to rebut any snide remarks about his shitty two-roomer with the exact excuses that he’s perfected in his head, but as Zelenka shakes out his beanie and scarf, letting snowflakes drop and evaporate instantly on the carpeted floor, and runs a hand over his greyed scruff, Rodney remembers that this isn’t a man who has ever cared about a controlled mess. 

It’s startling, the reminder that Rodney knows this faded, stooped figure standing in his living room. He supposes it’s fair that he’d forgotten; he and Zelenka have been strangers far longer than they’ve been friends, after all. 

Still, it’s an odd relief when Zelenka immediately undermines his expectations. Newton is sitting up on her cat tower now, ears perked as she sizes up this interloper, and Zelenka’s face instantly lights up in a small, soft smile when he spots her. He abandons his scarf and beanie on the rickety dinner table, makes his way over until he’s a safe distance away from her and then holds out his hand for her to sniff, which she does with an air of consternation that has Rodney feeling proud.

“Dobrý den, nádhera. Můžeme být přátelé?” Zelenka murmurs. After a few seconds, Newton rears her head back, but Zelenka just hums under her breath. “Ne? To je v pořádku. Možná vám příště přinesu nějaké speciální lahůdky. Myslím, že mě pak budeš mít radši.” 

Even after all these years, Rodney still doesn’t know more than a smattering of Czech, but he can still pick up the fond tone in Zelenka’s voice, and his brows bunch together. He hadn’t thought that Zelenka liked cats. Not for any particular reason - maybe because Zelenka had been a known ornithophile, or maybe just because Rodney himself loves cats, and Zelenka had always so loved to play the contrarian to him. He has half a mind to make some kind of comment about it, but that feels far too risky; too close to slipping back into their old back-and-forth, one that is now far past its use-by-date. It would feel akin to pretending that nothing has changed, but that’s just not true. So much has changed. Too much.

Instead, for a lack of better options, he says: “Do you want a … drink or something?” He passes his mind over the paltry contents of his fridge that he’s half restocked in the last day. “I have, uh, water. Coffee. Beer.”

Zelenka’s eyes go wide and surprised behind his glasses. “Oh, no, no,” he says hurriedly. “I do not need anything, thank you.”

“Okay.” Rodney hasn’t even realised how frayed his patience already is until now. “What is it that you actually want, then? You already know what I did. I can hardly tell you whether or not it worked. Did you honestly fly all the way here from the Czech Republic - “ he flounders a bit on those words, realising as he says them that he actually has no idea where Zelenka lives nowadays - “just to, what, say hi?”

Zelenka gets that pursed-lipped, slightly chiding look he always used to wear around Rodney that had always driven him kind of nuts. “Is it so hard to believe that I would want to see how you are?” 

“After twenty-five years? Yes, actually, it kind of is.”

It doesn’t come out as angry as it probably should. That would require more effort than Rodney feels he is presently capable of. More than anything, he’s genuinely confused.

Zelenka, for his part, looks fully sincere. “I can only imagine what these last years have been like,” he says, and Rodney resists the urge to roll his eyes.  Oh, sure. 

Zelenka hesitates a second. “I know you don’t…” He doesn’t drop his gaze, but he does lace his fingers together over his stomach. “I still consider you my friend. I wish to see that you are well.”

What does Zelenka want from him? “I’m here, aren’t I?” Rodney says.

“Yes,” Zelenka replies quietly, and he is utterly unreadable, except for the sneaking suspicion Rodney has that he feels slightly let down.

Maybe Zelenka has come here looking for forgiveness, now that the spectre of everything that went down twenty-five years ago has once again reared its ugly head. But something like that would require them to actually discuss what happened, and Rodney can’t. Not tonight. Not so soon after … He shoots the tiniest of glances over at the corner of the room where his whiteboards are still stacked up. 

It would require feeling anything at all, and right now, Rodney is fresh out.

He imagines he says all of that, or something like it, in his lingering silence, and Zelenka seems to take the hint. He turns slowly on the spot, drinking in the whole sorry sight that is Rodney’s apartment, and when he comes full circle he has resignation weighing down his brows. “Well,” he says cautiously. “Now you know I am here. I am staying nearby.”

He trails off. He might be expecting something to follow that, but Rodney has nothing to give except a bland stare. Zelenka nods once, short and stiff, and shuffles back towards the door. “I will leave you be,” he says. “Was good to see you again.” And before Rodney can even begin to imagine how he’s supposed to respond to that, Zelenka is out the door and back into the cold night. 

The whole thing had honestly been surreal. Rodney doesn’t get to sleep for a long time that night, legitimately rattled, and by the time he wakes up the next morning, part of him is convinced that the entire thing had been some bizarre dream.

That is, until he shuffles into his living room and finds a maroon beanie abandoned on his table. Typical.

Chapter Text

It had taken Rodney over a week to figure out what had happened, scouring through Gate diagnostics every minute of every day, held together by a toxic sludge of black coffee and sheer, desperate willpower. All that time, as far-reaching and pathetic as it seemed looking back on it, Rodney had genuinely believed that whatever had happened to John would be fixable. Maybe spending four years in Pegasus and somehow managing to survive every one of them had made him into some perverse optimist. Maybe it was a scientific conviction in tried and true results - how many times had John Sheppard skirted certain death with nothing but a smirk and an even more tousled head of hair? Why should this time be any different? Maybe, beneath all of that, beneath all rationality, he was somehow convinced that if something irrevocable had happened, he would know. John was a force all of his own, after all. If he was dead, then surely the electromagnetic balance in the air would shift, the axis of the universe would tilt, something deep inside Rodney’s chest would sever completely. 

But that wasn’t how the world worked, obviously. On the afternoon that Rodney discovered the solar flare that had caused one of those pesky space-time distortions, he didn’t feel anything. He still dared to hope. Maybe John had been deposited somewhere a few months from now, or even a few years. But when he finally determined that the flare had flung John no less than forty-eight thousand years into the future - then he felt everything.

Sam was there, scouring logs right along with him, and when Rodney went ramrod stiff she knew immediately that he’d found something. Peering over his shoulder, the way she stifled a gasp told Rodney that she’d spotted it too.

“Oh my god,” she breathed. Rodney knew that she didn’t need him to tell her what this meant. “Why didn’t the Gate’s failsafe prevent the wormhole from locking?”

Right then, Rodney was finding it difficult to keep his lungs working. In his head, all he could see was John, stepping through the Gate into a world no longer his. Had Atlantis been abandoned by then? Would he be completely alone? Would he have enough supplies to have lived even this long? Or was he already -?

“We’ve -” he forced out, stopping that thought in his tracks. He refused to even contemplate it. “We’ve been having some glitches since we updated the system.”

Sam’s frown looked so very far away. Rodney wasn’t there; he was four hundred and six thousand years away. If John was alive - he was, he had to be - he’d be trying to get back to them, right? Right. Stupid question. But, really, how much good could that possibly do him? This wasn’t some scary monster for him to shoot, and Mensa candidate though he may be, this was still several light years above his pay grade. Hell, this was above Rodney’s pay grade. Rodney -

Rodney couldn’t fix this.

“...mentioned those in your report,” Sam was saying, her voice echoing from down a long, dark tunnel. “They were a top priority. I’d assigned you to fix them.”

As Rodney turned away from the console screen, his eyes didn’t even pause on Sam. Radek was also there, had also been slaving away over the Gate logs, and when Rodney turned to look at him he was frozen in the middle of the Control room balcony. All of a sudden, the solid lump of dread in his throat, the treacherous heat behind his eyes, the scream of disbelief building silently in his chest, paled in comparison to one emotion, clear as crystal: fury. “I delegated,” he growled. “I thought my skill set was better suited to narrowing down possible locations for Michael to have taken Teyla, and I figured that, at the very least, Zelenka would be competent enough to handle this one simple task. Apparently, I was wrong.”

Everyone was staring at Radek now. His eyes were wide, his fingers laced together in front of him the way he always did when he was anxious. Fuck him. Fuck him, fuck him, fuck him. John was gone,  and he was upset?

“I -” Radek began, then paused, took a deep breath, flicked his tongue across his bottom lip. “I-I honestly thought I had fixed it. All the tests had come back clear,” he said helplessly, but still with a hint of that petulant tone he always took whenever Rodney questioned his intelligence. “I thought -”

“You thought?” Rodney echoed savagely, starting forward towards him. “You thought? ”

Radek glanced nervously at Sam. His mouth spasmodically opened, then closed, then opened again. “Rodney -” 

Rodney lunged, seizing Radek’s arm and dragging him forward with a force that made him stumble. “McKay,” he heard Sam say sharply. He didn’t care.

“Look,” he snarled, wrenching Radek into place in front of the screen holding the incriminating data. It came out guttural and raw; Rodney barely recognised his own voice. “There it is, the glitch you fixed. Do you get it, or are you so fucking stupid that you need me to lay it out for you?” He didn’t wait for Radek’s answer. “The solar flare Sheppard’s wormhole intersected with caused a space-time fluctuation. It sent him forty-eight thousand years into the future.” Even in the haze of his panic, Rodney had been able to calculate that number pretty quickly. Judging by Radek’s suddenly pallid face, he had too. Good for him. “Solar flares like that don’t just happen every day. To get back, we’d have to wait, I don’t know, ten thousand years, at - at least!”

Those words hit Rodney, real and deadly as a bullet, as he said them. It didn’t matter if John had enough food and water to last him the rest of his life. He was never going to see any of them again. Rodney was never going to see John again. The realisation had bile rising thick and fast in his throat.

“God, I should have known this would happen eventually,” Rodney continued, volume rocketing with every syllable. “It’s always something with you, isn’t it? You nearly killed Cadman when your fuckup got her stuck in my head, you killed Griffin when you approved that Jumper for flight - yeah, you remember that? That was all you.” The words fired out as unstoppable and destructive as bullets from Rodney’s mouth. Things Rodney had forgiven Radek for long ago, things that weren't even strictly true. Right now, he would say anything if it meant that Radek would feel the same way he was now: like his chest was caving in on itself and crushing everything inside.

Radek’s face blanched, emotions tucking themselves neatly away in his expression where Rodney couldn’t find them - that was how Rodney knew he’d really gotten to him, and the thought let loose a thrill of dark satisfaction deep in his belly. “Is it sinking in yet?” he spat acidly. “Sheppard is gone, Zelenka. He’s never coming back, and it’s your fault.”

Radek hadn’t moved an inch from where Rodney had manhandled him in front of the console. His hands were gripping the edge of the desk like he was trying to snap chunks of it off, or maybe snap his own fingers. He wouldn’t stop staring at the numbers on the screen.

“Rodney,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry.”

Out of all the things he could’ve said, that was the one that made Rodney see red. Sorry? Sorry wasn’t good enough. Sorry wasn’t making John walk back through that Gate. Sorry was fucking useless. Rodney might’ve said - well, screamed - that. He wasn’t sure; those next few moments were a blur of solid, black rage that let nothing else in. The only thing he remembered with any sort of clarity was the way Radek had just stood there, taking it all in with a ducked head and drawn-up shoulders. For some reason, that had only spurred Rodney on. He wasn’t exactly what you’d call a violent guy, but god, right then he could’ve punched Zelenka. Maybe, if things had been allowed to go on longer, he would’ve. Rodney certainly was ready and willing to take a swing when he felt a hand on his shoulder, spinning him around. He only stopped - stopped flailing, stopped yelling, stopped damn near everything - when he saw that the person who’d grabbed him was Ronon.

He didn’t know when Ronon had arrived. Maybe someone had called him when things had started to get ugly. With Teyla missing, Carson frozen, and John gone, Rodney thought bitterly - mind still stuttering over that last part - maybe they figured Ronon was the only McKay-Whisperer they had left. Well, screw that. Rodney wasn’t going to give any of them the satisfaction of making this situation more fucking palatable for them.

“C’mon, McKay,” Ronon said, voice low. “C’mon. Not here.”

“No,” Rodney croaked, and to his horror, felt his voice wobble a bit. “No, I’m not fucking -”

In response, Ronon wrapped one huge arm around his shoulders and quite literally dragged him out of the Gate room. It was gentler than the way Rodney had grabbed Radek just a few minutes before - with Ronon’s strength, he could afford to be - but that didn’t stop Rodney from loudly protesting the entire way. If he was done in there, then that meant he was  done.  The moment of realisation would be over, and they would have to move into the ‘After’ portion of this nightmare. After-John. Rodney wasn’t ready for that. He didn’t think he’d ever be ready.

They didn’t walk - or, in Rodney’s case, get half-carried - for long. Ronon hustled them into some room; an office for one of the less important department heads, maybe? Rodney didn’t know; all he knew was that it was empty. Ronon kicked the door shut and then, turning to a still cursing and spluttering Rodney, said: “Okay.”

That was all the permission Rodney realised he needed to completely and utterly break.

He screamed more, louder, until his throat was hoarse. He landed a few pathetic punches against Ronon’s unflinching chest, because Rodney needed some of the suffocating pressure swelling up inside his body to exist outside of it, and he knew damn well that those hits were hurting him more than they’d ever hurt Ronon. At some point that he couldn’t quite place, he’d begun sobbing, fat, hot tears rolling down his face and soaking into Ronon’s shirt as Ronon, silent and steady, pulled Rodney into him, arms bracketing him and promising not to let go, not ever.

It reminded Rodney, in a burst of dizzying pain, of the moments after the explosion that had killed the first Carson. He, Ronon, and John had skidded into the closest corridor, but John had reached the corner first, seeing everything before Rodney could. After that, Rodney just remembered how John had pinned him against the wall, not letting him go any further even as Rodney had yelled until he was blue in the face. “You don’t need to see that,” he’d said, voice barely audible in Rodney’s ear. “He’s gone, okay? He’s gone.” Those words had taken all the fight out of Rodney, and he’d slumped forward, forehead colliding with John’s shoulder, John taking the whole of his weight and not hesitating with it for a second.

John wasn’t here to hold him up this time, Rodney realised dully. He already knew that, of course, but this was the first moment it had hit him in a tangible way. His first moment of After-John.

He fell into Ronon’s chest, pressing his wet cheek against Ronon’s sodden shirt. Ronon’s hands travelled up and down his back, trying to find a solid place to land. “Is it true, what you said back there?” he said after a moment’s silence. “We can’t get Sheppard back?”

Rodney didn’t bother moving his face, letting Ronon’s chest muffle his words. He didn’t want to hear them either. “It’s true,” he whispered tonelessly. “He’s gone. He’s gone.”

Chapter Text

Rodney leaves the stupid beanie sitting on his kitchen table for over a week. He’d like to think it’s because it completely slips his mind, but after a while, it gets hard to deny the way his eyes gravitate towards it every time he enters the room. 

Stupid, so stupid. He should throw the damn thing out and be done with it.

Instead, on the eighth day, he rings up General Lorne.

“I need Zelenka’s phone number,” he says in lieu of a greeting. Best to cut to the chase: Lorne’s a busy man, he knows. And Rodney very much is not, but it’s always nice to keep Lorne guessing.

“...As in Radek Zelenka?” is his reply. Because Rodney is alone in his apartment, and since this is hardly a huge favour to be wheedled out with politeness, he doesn’t need to resist the urge to roll his eyes.

“The very same. I have something of his I need to return. You have the number, right? I happen to know you two have been chatting.”

The two of them could have been corresponding over email, Rodney supposes, but Lorne, especially as he settles into old age, has always preferred the personal touch. 

Rodney thanks everything good and sane in the world that Lorne doesn’t make some big fuss about how happy he is that Rodney and Radek have ‘reconnected’ or some such nonsense. It’s enough to hear the smile in Lorne’s voice as he passes through the number. “Tell Radek I said hi, would you?” he says once he’s done. "And, hey, take care, Rodney."

“Uh huh,” Rodney says flatly, then manages to feel a little bad. Lorne has been nothing but good to him, particularly this last week. “You too, General. And thanks.”

After hanging up and plugging the number under his phone under ‘RZ,’ Rodney decides to indulge in one last bout of procrastination and brews himself some coffee. Sitting down at the table and wrapping his aching hands around the mug of steaming black liquid, he finds himself thinking, quite unintentionally, about Teyla. He’d never met anyone who’d appreciated coffee quite so much. While Rodney and the other scientists had treated it akin to pure fuel, she had approached each cup with the delighted determination of an artist. She’d liked the proper stuff too: straight black, not like John, who’d needed to drink his with milk like a child, or Ronon, who refused to even touch the stuff unless he’d filled half the cup with sugar first. Rodney had initially been sceptical - anybody would be after seeing the dinky little teas she always drank. That was until Rodney had actually tasted a cup. That stuff had nearly blown his head off.

They’d made a kind of habit out of it. Most mornings, while John and Ronon were off doing their manly jogs, the two of them would find some sun-soaked spot on the outer balcony of the cafeteria. They’d drink, Rodney hunching protectively over his cup until Teyla inevitably coaxed him into swapping and trying not to show just how much he enjoyed whichever tea she’d brewed up that morning. They’d talk too, sometimes.

Rodney knows what Teyla would say to him now. She’d never had much sympathy for “pointless feuds” as she’d called them, even if she did have the patience to talk Rodney through all the ones he stumbled into. He can picture her now, gently nudging his coffee mug away from him and coaching him into picking up the phone, giving him an encouraging smile, and then stealing a sip of his coffee when she thinks he isn’t looking. 

It’s funny; he can picture Teyla growing into old age easier than John, or Ronon, or any of the rest of them, even Jen. He can see the auburn hair fading into grey, age spots, and crow’s feet around her eyes. Maybe it’s because Rodney had always been so subconsciously convinced that she would reach that age. She’d been so full of life; had so much to live for.

That's another counter in Rodney’s head that he’s never been able to shut off for the last two decades: Teyla’s baby, who would’ve been around twenty-seven today. Nearly the same age as Aiden Ford when they’d lost him, actually.

Unsteadily, Rodney places his mug down and reaches for his phone.

I have your beanie. Meet me at Gigi’s Cafe at 3pm today or it goes to the thrift store.

He doesn’t include an address. If Zelenka wants his hat back that badly, he can use Google Maps. As he sends it off, it strikes Rodney that the message has the bizarre undertones of a ransom note. He rather likes the comparison.

He sets the phone back down and is immediately annoyed with himself when he realises he’s tensed with anticipation for a return message. A large part of him isn’t even expecting one. Now that he’s sent the message, he can admit to himself that the reason he’d delayed it for so long was the hope that Zelenka would make the decision for him: that, after a week, he’d have already gone back home and wouldn’t bother returning for some ratty hat.

But, because life has never been that easy on him, his phone dings a minute later. Rodney reluctantly checks the screen. 

Understood.

Gigi’s Cafe, thanks to its steep prices and staunch refusal to give into all the latte trends that the kids are into these days, is notoriously unpopular with anyone under the age of eighteen. That, plus its free WiFi - a rare commodity these days - and its exceptionally good coffee makes it a favourite spot of Rodney’s on the few times he’s forced to do an outdoor coffee run.

He has a cup of said excellent coffee in front of him now - his fifth today, but who’s counting? It isn’t like he has to worry about keeping himself alive and healthy anymore. He alternates between taking calculated, incremental sips and restlessly rapping his fingernails on the table, right beside where the ransomed beanie lays. Rodney checks the clock on the wall. 2:57. He takes another sip of coffee. He taps out the first six digits of Pi on the table.

Right as the clock ticks over to 3:00, the motion-activated chime above the door rings out as the door swings open, letting in a stab of Canadian winter air and a pink-nosed Radek Zelenka. He’s so comically on time that Rodney wonders if he’s been waiting outside for the last ten minutes, checking his watch just like Rodney has been, to be blamelessly punctual.

His eyes roam the cafe for quite a bit longer than he should have needed before they finally land on Rodney, and he gives him a wide-fingered wave and a smile; small and uncommitted, but still present. It had started snowing about five minutes after Rodney had arrived at Gigi’s, and it shows in the snowflakes powdering Zelenka’s uncovered head, turning his wreck of hair more salt than pepper. 

“Thank you for this,” he says once he sits across from Rodney in the squeaky chair, taking the beanie that Rodney nudges forward and making a show of stuffing it into the inside pocket of his distinctly nicer-looking long coat. Patched in places, and with mismatching buttons that had clearly been sewn on after purchase, but still of durable make. That’s one thing that Rodney does remember from Atlantis: Zelenka had despised wastage. Some things never change, apparently.

Rodney doesn’t like thinking about Zelenka on Atlantis. He doesn’t like thinking about Atlantis, period, no matter that it’s practically all he’s been doing for the last twenty-five years.

He takes refuge in his half-empty coffee as Zelenka squints over the QR code he needs to scan to make his order. He’d chosen to have them meet at a nice, safe, neutral location to protect himself from Zelenka cataloguing the stark barrenness of his life and drawing some kind of conclusion from it, but he’s remembering the contract of sociability that cafes hold, and he’s wondering if he’s made a mistake. He should’ve just had Zelenka meet him in the parking lot of the Safeway down the block and let the whole thing go down like a drug deal.

Of course, nobody made Zelenka order a coffee as well. Rodney narrows his eyes suspiciously across the table, where Zelenka is sitting with his hands folded neatly in front of him, staring mildly at Rodney like he’s waiting for something. All of a sudden, Rodney wonders exactly how it is that he’s ended up here.

“Did you leave your hat at my apartment on purpose?” he asks bluntly. “So I’d have a reason to reach out to you?”

“Of course not,” Zelenka replies quickly. Too quickly. “That would be childish.” 

Rodney narrows his eyes at the inscrutably neutral expression Zelenka is so valiantly maintaining. “Unbelievable,” he mutters. How is it, exactly, that John had always accused him of being the childish one of the pair of them?

Not thinking about that.

Rodney busies himself with finishing his coffee. A few minutes later, Zelenka’s drink arrives, and Rodney watches him tear open a packet of Stevia with minutely trembling fingers, unsteadily tapping the contents into his coffee and giving it a thorough stir. The Zelenka of his memory, when he cares to resurface - always of his own volition and without asking, as per usual - has steady, purposeful fingers, perfectly suited for the most fiddly aspects of machinery repair.

“Do you have arthritis?” Rodney asks.

Zelenka is busy sucking coffee foam off his spoon, and his mouth makes an incredulous shape around the metal head. “We have not talked in twenty-five years, and this is the first thing you ask me?”

Rodney shrugs. “Since when was there a checklist for this sort of thing?” He wants to know. He wants to firmly delineate between memory-Zelenka and current-Zelenka so that he can finally put memory-Zelenka in his grave.

Zelenka blinks, but stretches out his twitching hands and answers anyway. “Yes. Rheumatoid.”

With that, they’ve officially crossed the line, and Rodney lets the floodgates of his interrogation open. “Where are you staying?”

“Hotel. Is fifteen minutes train ride from here.”

“Where are you actually living?”

“I moved back to Prague after…” Zelenka’s eyes flick down. “I have been living there for last twenty-five years.”

“How long are you staying?” Rodney regrets asking that the moment he spies the shifty look crossing Zelenka’s face. Too close to dangerous territory.

“I am not sure yet,” Zelenka says. “Another week, maybe.” Part of Rodney had hoped that his barrage of questions would throw Zelenka off, fluster him out of this stalwart placidity he’s been wearing since their reunion. But, irritatingly, Zelenka seems to be taking it all in good nature, like they’re a couple of kids playing Twenty Questions.

“Where are you working?”

“Masaryk University. Research, mostly. Sometimes I lecture. Is only part-time, though. I cut back to focus more time on breeding my pigeons.”

“You - what?” Rodney asks, before remembering he’s not supposed to care; not really. He only needs to build a cursory profile. “Of course you did.”

Zelenka takes a sip of his coffee, humming in satisfaction. “How is your sister?” he asks suddenly.

“Jeannie?” Rodney asks with alarm, rearing back in his seat, even though, yes, obviously Jeannie. He’s startled - both that Zelenka is breaking from the script Rodney has formulated in his head by asking questions back, and also that Zelenka remembers that he has a sister. Just because Zelenka has, against all efforts against it, persisted in Rodney’s memory, doesn’t mean Rodney knows how to feel about him, apparently, doing the same in Zelenka’s. “She’s … fine. Good. She and Kaleb are still going strong, somehow.” Rodney likes Kaleb perfectly well now. It’s just that he’s sceptical of marriage in general. He thinks he’s earned the right to be.

“You see her often?”

Rodney bristles slightly at the reminder of all the things he probably should have been doing these last two decades and hasn’t. “When I have the time,” he says, which isn’t technically a lie. It’s just that time isn’t something he’s had a lot of. Until recently, anyway.

Zelenka nods approvingly. “A good thing. I try to visit my sister as often as I can. Easier now, with her boy out of the house.” He pauses only to take another sip of coffee before smiling at Rodney over the rim. “What is your cat’s name?”

“Okay, seriously?” Zelenka had to be messing with him. Revenge for the arthritis question, maybe. 

But Zelenka just shrugs his bony shoulders. “I want to know of your life,” he says. “There does not seem to be much to it.” 

The way that comes out, Rodney knows Zelenka isn’t trying to be mean - maybe it’s even supposed to be kind, what with the little furrow of concern carved between Zelenka’s brows - but it has Rodney’s hackles rising regardless. “I've had quite a lot going on the last twenty-five years, actually,” he says coldly. “You must have missed it.”

Instead of making Zelenka draw back and stare mousily into his cup, the comment makes him lean forward. “Alright,” he says. “What was your plan to save Colonel Sheppard?”

No, no, that isn’t how they’re playing this game. “My cat’s name is Newton.”

For the first time, a look of genuine consternation crosses Zelenka’s weathered face, and Rodney feels like he’s won a game he hadn’t quite realised he’d been playing. “You will not talk about it?”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Rodney says with an air of finality. “It’s done. It’s over. Nothing we say now will make a difference.” He scrabbles to find his verbal advantage again - he wants to regain slippery control of this conversation, and quite frankly, he’s tired of whatever charade Zelenka’s putting on here. “What are you doing here, Zelenka?”

Zelenka wraps his hands around his cup, lips quirked ever so slightly like he still thinks they’re playing a game. “I am here to collect my hat.”

“Stop. I thought you said we were too old for this.”

Zelenka flattens his lips. “I already told you, Rodney,” he says patiently, and it makes Rodney’s eye twitch. “I am here because it has been a very long time, and I wish to see you again.”

“I -” Rodney’s fingers tighten around his empty cup. “I don’t believe you.”

The words come out before he can fully think them through, but they’re true enough. He doesn’t believe that’s all there is to it - because this has to be about forgiveness, right? Twenty-five years is a long time for mistakes to fester. Rodney has finished patching the gaping hole in their lives as best he can, and now Zelenka reappears seeking absolution. Rodney just wishes he would just come out and say it, and then they can both move on with their lives.

Zelenka doesn’t flinch. He slowly sinks back into his seat, like he’s a deflating balloon, and the look on his face throws Rodney for a loop. He looks like Rodney has just said something utterly tragic. He doesn’t look hurt, he looks sympathetic.

“I am sorry to hear this,” he says softly. “Truly, Rodney.”

They don’t talk much after that. Rodney waits until Zelenka drains the last of his coffee, and then he stands up, ready to leave. Zelenka stays seated, but he does turn his head up to look at Rodney. The amber light from the vintage hanging lamps is exploding into twin flames in the reflection of his glasses, obscuring his eyes. “I would like to see you again,” he says. There’s no urgency to his tone, but Rodney thinks there may be a little trace of hopefulness enmeshed in there somewhere.

Rodney rolls his shoulders. He doesn’t say yes, but he doesn’t say no either, just makes a noncommittal sound at the back of his throat and turns, walking out the door. All the way home, that image is burnt into his mind: Zelenka, drowning in his overcoat, looking small and impossible to read as he peers up at him, waiting patiently for an answer that Rodney can’t give.

“I think it’s nice,” Jeannie says over the phone when Rodney, with the nagging reminder of obligation hanging over him after his conversation with Zelenka, calls her that evening and fills her in on the last two weeks.

She’d reacted pretty much exactly as he’d expected: first, elation that he’d managed to do the impossible and actually complete the calculations John would need to - hopefully - get home, then endless concern. “Have you been eating? What about work? It’s been nearly two weeks, Mer, why didn’t you say something sooner?”

“I’ve been busy,” he’d said, which was a stupid lie that she’d immediately called out with a disbelieving huff of air into the speaker. So, in a desperate attempt to legitimise himself, he tells her about Zelenka.

“Of course you think it’s nice,” he scoffs without any real heat in it. 

“I like Radek.”

“You only met him once, and you liked him because he was a suck-up.”

“He was friendly, Mer. There’s a difference.”

Rodney snorts. He’s laying on his couch, Newton purring like an engine on his stomach, and he scratches behind her ears so he has something to occupy his phone-free hand with. He has so little to do with his hands these days. “It’s weird. I don’t know what he expects from me.” Or, he does, but he doesn’t know what to do with that expectation; doesn’t know where to lay it down.

“Have you considered for a second that maybe he doesn’t want anything from you?” Jeannie says, always the devil’s advocate. He can hear running water faintly in the background. Maybe he’d called right in the middle of her and Kaleb washing up after dinner. The thought summons a pointed growl in his stomach, one that he courageously tries to ignore. “Maybe he really does just want to reconnect.”

“Yeah, I find that hard to believe. I mean, I don’t even like him. He knows that I don’t like him. He can’t have come all this way expecting a hug. What he wants is for me to tell him that it’s all in the past, that I’ve moved on, kumbaya and all that, and then he can go back to Prague and his pigeons with a clear conscience.” Rodney chooses his words carefully as he speaks, turning each one around in his head and carefully setting down one after another, trying to find the combination that will sound suitably convincing to his own mind and give him the confidence that he’s got this right. When he’s finished, he nods in satisfaction; that sounds, he thinks, like it ought to.

There’s a long silence from the other end of the phone, broken only by the gurgle of a sink being drained and a broken-off cough that might have been Kaleb. “I wonder,” Jeannie begins with a contemplative tone that Rodney doesn’t like at all. “Maybe, if this is less about you hating him and you telling yourself that you do because you think it’s how you’re supposed to feel.”

Rodney is offended by the implication that he’s incapable of maintaining a sincere grudge. He tries to focus on that, and not the inconceivable sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.”

“It means that you’ve spent half a lifetime denying yourself the ability to move on.” Rodney’s mouth snaps open, but Jeannie hurries on before he can eke a sound out. “And that’s not - I’m not saying you made a mistake, that you shouldn’t have done what you did. God knows it’s too late for that conversation anyway.” She huffs out a sigh, and there’s a shuffling sound like she’s switching the phone from one ear to another. “And - I don’t know, maybe you needed to hold onto everything that happened to get the work done. I get that. But it’s over now, and I really just - Mer, I don’t buy that you hate him. I really don’t. Not when you went to meet him for basically no reason in what I’m guessing was the first time you’ve left your apartment since Colorado.”

Rodney considers protesting and telling her that, actually, he’s been out to pick up cat food and fresh litter for Newton, before deciding that it would quite possibly sound more pathetic than the alternative. Instead, he gnaws on the inside of his cheek. He tries to put his last two meetings with Zelenka under a microscope, examining exactly what he’s been feeling. He can’t say, exactly; only that it’s an amalgamation in his chest that’s more charged than anything he’s felt in the last … he’s not quite sure. A while. He’s been working in greyscale, this last decade, keeping his eyes steadfastly on the prize instead of letting them turn inward, into that dangerous hole within him where he might well crawl in and never find his way back out. Seeing Zelenka at his door had been like a flare on the lens, bright and startling. Is that hate? Rodney isn’t sure.

“What am I supposed to…” he finds himself saying, not remembering beginning to speak and unsure where the sentence is supposed to lead. “It’s been twenty-six years, Jeannie. ”

“I know, Mer. I know.” 

Jeannie sounds sad. She sounds like Zelenka had when he’d told Rodney he wanted to be friends again and Rodney said that he didn’t believe him. The sound of it crawls under his skin, sucking like a tic, and Rodney tries to shake it off. “How’re the kids?” he pivots, regretting bringing Zelenka up at all.

Jeannie sighs, but she indulges him. “They’re good. Jonah’s been MIA for the last two months, getting stuck into his thesis, but I’ve made him message me at least once a week so I know he’s still alive.”

“His thesis, it’s on…” Rodney wracks his brain. “Horror movies? How stressed can he be?”

“It’s on post-apocalyptic motifs in twentieth to twenty-first-century Western literature, and that’s exactly what I don’t want you to say when you call him next. You will call him, right? Maddie too. Especially Maddie. She hasn’t gotten an RSVP from you for the wedding, which isn’t exactly unexpected, but what with the new job and Nina’s third trimester coming up, it’d just be one load off her mind.”

“Okay,” Rodney says, guilt making its slow crawl up his throat. “Alright, I’ll call both of them.”

“You are coming, right?” Jeannie asked. “I mean - sorry. You don’t have to if you’re not feeling up to it, but she would love it if you were there. We all would.”

“I want to come.”

“Alright.” Jeannie doesn’t sound convinced, and Rodney would be annoyed, except he figures that’s pretty well deserved. He’s not exactly been a regular figure in his family’s life over the last two decades.

“It’s just -” Jeannie starts, then cuts herself off. The line is silent for a few seconds. Rodney imagines Jeannie on the other end, all the way in Vancouver, anxiously chewing her fingernails the way she always does. “You really get me scared sometimes, Mer.”

There’s a catch in her voice that has Rodney’s eyes sinking closed. “I’m -” Sorry?  “I really am doing fine, Jeannie. You don’t have to … to worry.”

“I know, I know. You’re fine. You’re always fine,” Jeannie says resignedly. There’s a whisper of Kaleb’s voice in the background, and Jeannie sighs again. “Okay, I have to go,” she says apologetically. “But, listen - invite Radek to dinner, alright?”

Rodney’s eyes snap back open. “Oh god, why are we still talking about this?”

“Because somebody has to give a damn about your life,” she replies firmly. “I really think it’ll be good for you. At the very least, you two have unresolved business, right?.” Rodney makes a weak, protesting sound at the back of his throat, but Jeannie powers on, undeterred. “You don’t have to go out, or even cook. Just order something in.”

Rodney exhales through his nose, staring sullenly up at the ceiling. “I don’t know what he likes,” he says.

“Oh my god,” Jeannie says, and he can practically hear the way she’s shaking her head at him. “Just consider it, would you? Please?” Probably knowing that she isn’t going to get a response, Jeannie doesn’t wait for one. “Shit, now I really have to go. Okay, bye. I love you.”

“Bye,” Rodney replies, and the call ends. He drops the phone on his chest, blinking wearily at Newton. “I suppose you have something to say about this as well?” he asks. Big green eyes blink back, providing no helpful answers. 

Night has well and truly fallen, and despite not doing much of anything except going out for a coffee with an ex-friend, Rodney is exhausted. Even though he knows his back will punish him severely for it in the morning, he lets himself be lulled to sleep by the rhythmic rumble of Newton’s purrs. 

He hopes he doesn’t dream tonight. He knows what'll be waiting for him.

Chapter Text

“You can’t fire him, McKay.”

Rodney stood, arms crossed, in front of Sam’s desk. “I’m this expedition’s Chief Science Officer. Getting rid of dead weight to make my department run smoother is quite literally part of my job description.”

Sam fixed him with a sharply dubious look. “Doctor Zelenka is eighty percent of the reason why half your staff doesn’t have regular nervous breakdowns and you know it,” she said. Rodney sniffed contemptuously - they also both knew that there was far more at stake here than job satisfaction - and Sam leaned forward, eyes going soft in a way that Rodney did not care for at all. “What happened to Colonel Sheppard was a terrible mistake -” Rodney scoffed loudly - “but it was a mistake any of us could’ve made. I’ve reviewed the data myself. The glitch was minuscule. The only reason we spotted it was that we were able to work backward.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it.”

Sam forced out a sigh through her nostrils. “Not to mention…” she steamrolled on, then paused, looking like she was rolling her words around in her mouth like a marble. “Doctor Zelenka had been exceptionally overworked that week -”

Rodney’s blood boiled. That weaselly little - “Did he tell you that?” 

“No, he didn’t. Everybody else in your department did.”

“Oh, fuck everybody else in the department,” Rodney said hotly. “So, what, you’re saying this is my fault, then?” His voice couldn’t help but break on those words. Stupid, stupid, stupid question. It didn’t matter what Sam thought, not really, because Rodney  knew.  If only he hadn’t entrusted this task to Radek, if only he’d checked over the systems himself, if only he’d gone with John on that mission, so they might’ve had the slightest hope of getting themselves back. If only a hundred thousand other things that he had or hadn’t done. Maybe Rodney hadn’t been the one to miss the glitch, but he’d been the one to pass the buck to Zelenka of all people. At the end of the day, that was just as bad.

Who said that blame had to be an all-or-nothing situation? Radek wasn’t the only cog in the machine here, he was just the one that Rodney could actually do something about.

“You know that I don’t,” Sam said firmly - and it was true, Rodney couldn’t detect a smidge of blame in her tone. It deflated him more than an Elizabeth-style dressing down ever could have.

“You don’t even like him,” Rodney retorted. It was a weak shot and he knew it. At this point, it didn’t even come across as vindictive or triumphant, just petulant. “You said so yourself.”

“Rodney…” His name came out as a long exhale. Sam … didn’t look pitying. That was good, Rodney couldn’t handle pity right now; he had a feeling he would fly right off the handle again. She just looked, all of a sudden, so incredibly tired. “I know what this is, okay? I … I know what it’s like when someone you love doesn’t come back through the Gate.” 

Rodney didn’t say anything, certainly not to the L word. He just stared stubbornly past Sam’s shoulder over at the photos lining the table behind her. General O’Neill he recognised, of course. Doctor Daniel Jackson. Teal’c. And a woman he vaguely remembered as Doctor Janet Frasier. Rodney squeezed his eyes closed and briefly fought off the urge to be sick all over Sam’s desk.

“You want so badly to find something to - to pour all your rage into, so you can feel like somebody has paid for what happened,” Sam continued. “But it doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes, things just … happen. I don’t want you to rake yourself over the coals for it, but I’m not going to let you make Zelenka your scapegoat either.  Especially  not right now. We need all hands on deck.” She shook her head wearily. “If this had happened any other time, I’d give you more time -”

“I don’t need more time,” Rodney bit out, but there was no real edge to it. She’d called his bluff, the one thing he would never, not in a million years, risk: Teyla. “I need to be able to do my job without worrying that this is going to happen again.” I need you to make me a promise I know you can’t keep. I need to know I’m not going to lose anybody else.

In the end, Sam - true to her word - vetoed Rodney’s attempt to ship Radek back to earth, but she removed him as Rodney’s deputy department head. Rodney wasn’t sure if it was for his sake or Radek’s, and to him, it didn’t matter. 

Of course, none of it really mattered in the end, but he didn’t know that yet. 

It was enough that Rodney didn’t have to speak to Radek unless strictly required to. Radek, for his part, was good at making himself scarce. Rodney had almost managed to go for an entire week without seeing more than the back of his head, until his streak was broken by, of all things, John’s funeral. 

An awfully nice affair for a man who they didn’t even know was dead, although Rodney couldn’t say he thought John would have liked it. For one, it was back on Earth, in some swanky chapel that oozed old money, all chintz wallpaper and gossamer white roses. John’s brother Dave Sheppard, had apparently organised it. He was wirier and fairer than John, and a whole lot less handsome too. Rodney didn’t know if he always carried around that paper-thin expression or those rigid shoulders; he’d never met the guy, after all. He watched as Dave and Ronon exchanged a few cursory words, no introductions needed, and felt his throat grow sticky with the reminder of the times when he could have been by John’s side but wasn’t. It was swiftly chased by - of all things - jealousy of Ronon and those small moments he’d shared with John, specific memories that Rodney didn’t have and never would. He swallowed the feeling, and it went down bitter.

Ronon hadn’t unstitched himself from Rodney’s side since they’d reached Earth, so once Dave had finished greeting him, he turned immediately to Rodney. From what Rodney had seen, Dave had been approaching every single person in attendance. Probably an etiquette thing, but there was this odd tinge of desperation in the way he asked: “How did you know my brother?” Like he was trying to find something he’d misplaced and desperately needed to get back.

“I -” Rodney started, and nearly choked on the sheer impossibility of the question. He’d known John across planets and galaxies and universes, at his best and his worst and on the knife’s edge between life and death. He didn’t think a black-letter answer was really going to cut it. “We, um ... we work together,” he said, tongue heavy in his mouth. “I’m his - his friend.”

The slow torture of introductions was quickly swapped out for the even more glacial agony of the ceremony itself. Rodney’s body almost physically jerked from shock the moment he spotted Radek standing a few rows behind him, staring steadfastly at the empty casket in front of them. Lorne, standing beside Zelenka, had carefully angled himself to take the brunt of Rodney’s burning stare, and Ronon’s looming form beside Rodney served as good a warning as any other to keep things contained, but neither of them needed to worry. Rodney was a petty man, a vindictive man, a man of plenty more unsavoury attributes, he was sure - but one thing he would never do was ruin John’s funeral.

Though, truthfully, Rodney could never properly bring himself to call it that. The word had an air of finality that, even if it was wholly appropriate, he just couldn’t swallow. Funerals were for the dead, and the fact was that they had no way of knowing whether John actually was dead or not. Part of him was infuriated at the sight of all these people ‘saying their goodbyes’ to a man who was still out there, who still needed their help - but with those stabs of rage always came the aftershock when Rodney remembered that help wasn’t possible. So he shut up, stood back, and let the day continue without him.

It was after Teyla that the dominoes really began to fall. Rodney and Ronon gave themselves one night, just one, to let themselves rage and weep and shake apart before they had to tape themselves back together again and carry on. They’d convened in Teyla’s room, left undisturbed all this time. Rodney had wrapped himself in one of Teyla’s furs like it was any substitute for her warmth, and he watched as Ronon sat on the floor and burned a whittled carving she had gifted him a year or so back: some kind of Satedan mourning ritual. “It releases them,” Ronon had explained when Rodney had given him an odd look. “Their memory. Releases you too.”

There was a knock on the door. Before Rodney could even try to bully himself into shucking off his blanket and going to answer it, Ronon was already up and moving. Rodney didn’t look over to the door, but his ears did prick up at the sound of murmuring voices in the entryway. The other voice was almost a whisper, but Rodney could make out Ronon’s with ease.

“Not a good idea,” he was saying to their visitor.

“...thought as much…” the other voice said in audible snatches, and Rodney’s shoulders went rigid at the sound of that accent. “Could … tell him from me…?”

“He won’t care,” Ronon replied, but it came out shockingly gentle. Finally, Rodney twisted his head around. Radek was there, standing just outside the doorway, mouth set in a resigned line, with Ronon mostly obscuring him from view. That didn’t hide the way his hand, for the briefest second, clasped Radek’s shoulder, dwarfing Radek with just the span of his palm - was it Rodney’s imagination, or had he lost weight?

Who cares.

Ronon turned, catching Rodney’s baleful, bloodshot gaze, and he gave Radek a stiff shake of the head. He stepped back, and the door closed with a light hiss.

As Ronon lumbered back over, Rodney couldn’t quite help himself, masochist that he was. “What did he want?”

“You know,” Ronon said shortly, settling back down in front of his bowl. The flames were contentedly licking its sides, shrivelling the wooden figurine inside to a lump of ash. Rodney’s shoulders twitched, and Ronon gave him a long, long look. “He didn’t kill Sheppard,” he finally said.

No. Nope. They weren’t doing this. Not tonight of all nights. “Yeah, and what exactly would you know?” Rodney snapped.

Ronon didn’t say anything to that, and Rodney instantly regretted it. All at once, all the fight he had in him - not just about Radek; every fucking scrap of it - drained out of him, and he slumped forward onto the mattress, wrapping Teyla’s blanket constrictor-tight around him as he buried his face in her pillows. “M’sorry,” he breathed into them.

He couldn’t see Ronon anymore, but he heard him getting back up, and he felt him as he collapsed down next to Rodney, not caring that the bed wasn’t nearly big enough for the two of them. Rodney didn’t protest as Ronon pulled him in close. He just listened, squeezing his eyes shut as Ronon’s breathing hiccupped and shook behind him.

“You’re leaving.”

It wasn’t a question, because Rodney already knew the answer; the deconstructed mess that used to be Ronon’s quarters was clue enough. He threw the words out anyway just to see how they would land.

Ronon finished cramming a leatherbound book into his satchel before looking up at Rodney. “Felt like the right time,” he said simply. He might as well have sucker-punched Rodney in the nose.

“Two weeks after we put Teyla in the ground is the right time? ” Rodney couldn’t come up with any time that would be right for Ronon to leave Atlantis, but when the proverbial ashes of Teyla’s funeral pyre were still warm was categorically not fucking it. Rodney was still barely holding himself together most days. He wasn’t exactly sure how much of his thready composure he could credit to the steady ballast of Ronon’s presence, and he really didn’t want to find out.

Ronon’s expression flattened out from Regular Tough Guy Stoic to Special Stoic. He fastened the straps on his satchel and tossed it irreverently on his bed. That part of the room, at least, had remained untouched. All things considered, Ronon wasn’t bringing much with him; nothing but what he seemed to consider bare essentials. There was an ominous ring to that fact. “You really think it’s gonna hurt less if I wait?” Ronon asked.

Rodney floundered for a second. “That’s precisely my point. Why leave at all?”

Ronon fixed him with an unwavering stare. “C’mon, McKay,” he said eventually. For a moment he said nothing else, as if he thought those two words had magically imparted some grand wisdom that would leave Rodney nodding in understanding and wishing him well on his journey. Except of fucking course they didn’t, and as Rodney gestured impatiently, Ronon squared his shoulders. “I don’t belong here anymore.”

“What the hell is that even supposed to mean?” Rodney asked, but it was rhetorical and they both knew it; Rodney knew exactly what that meant. John had been Ronon’s ticket to Atlantis, and Teyla had been the one to convince him to stay. They were his people, the ones who related to him on a critical level that Rodney wasn't designed to reach. And now they were both gone. 

He fought valiantly not to show how that realisation felt like Ronon had taken a melon scooper to his chest and ripped out some vital organs. Judging by the look of regret - he thought, Ronon’s face was always an especially tricky one for him to read - leaking across Ronon’s features, he hadn’t been particularly successful. Ronon took a couple of gargantuan steps forward until he was all in Rodney’s space, but not in a threatening way. It reminded Rodney of how Ronon had held onto him after they lost John, so close he’d felt incapable of letting go. So much for that.

“I can’t help here anymore, but I can out there,” Ronon said gruffly. “That’s how we’re gonna win this. Isn’t about anything else.”

That, at least, was a grudgingly good point. Atlantis’ approach to this fight was swiftly becoming dominated by aerial assaults using new weapons cooked up in Rodney’s labs. That was, to make a grand understatement of it, not Ronon’s area of expertise. Rodney wasn’t exactly a battle tactician, but even he could acknowledge that a ground offensive would come in handy right about now, and he couldn’t think of anybody better than Ronon to lead it.

Those were the facts, but that didn’t mean Rodney had to like them. It did mean that he couldn’t ignore them, not when a galaxy was at stake.

He nodded tightly, throat clogged with all the things that he wanted to say but didn’t know how to shape his mouth around. Things like I can’t lose you too. What was the point, though? Ronon wouldn’t be any better protected here on Atlantis than he would be in the wilds of Pegasus. Even their own Gate wasn’t safe.

“Hey,” Ronon said, softer this time, and suddenly there were arms squeezing the breath out of Rodney, lifting him off his feet as Ronon brought him in for the hug of his life. “Don’t get yourself killed while I’m gone,” he said, and clapped Rodney on the back so hard that it left him coughing.

“Yeah, yeah,” Rodney replied. It wasn’t as if either of them could make any promises, after all.

Sam’s funeral was, to put it plainly, fucking awful. Oh, it had every expense the SGC could spare, of course, and the room was crammed with people, but the whole affair had Rodney wanting to phase through the walls and stay there. There was an impossibility around Sam’s death, more even than John’s, that Rodney couldn’t wrap his head around. She was Colonel Samantha Carter, the only person in two galaxies who could be considered smarter than Rodney, and now she was an empty casket and a handful of eulogies. 

The destruction of the Phoenix had shifted the scales of the war, but Sam’s death had shifted something within him. She had survived the Goa’uld and the Ori, but Michael fucking Kenmore and his ragtag gang of little Frankensteins had been enough to take her down. Rodney had never been an optimistic person as a rule, but pessimism took on a new, more weighted meaning that day.

Rodney stood to the side at the wake, content to slink behind Ronon’s mass - there was one silver lining to all this, he thought bitterly; he got to see Ronon again for the first time in literal months. He spoke less now, if that was even possible, and his arms and face were littered with fresh new scars, but the weight of his hand on Rodney’s back was just as he remembered it.

Busying himself with Ronon meant that it was easier to make excuses for not approaching the remains of SG-1. Daniel Jackson, Colonel Mitchell, and Teal’c were bad enough, but Rodney hadn’t even been able to look General O’Neill in the goddamn eye. Their mistakes, their war, their fucked up galaxy: that’s what had taken her from him. It wasn’t exactly a state secret anymore that Carter and O’Neill had been involved in some way or another. Even if the rumour mill hadn’t been working on overdrive, O’Neill’s face as he stared out into the middle distance with Teal’c and Jackson fast at his shoulders said just about everything. Rodney hardly knew O’Neill, all things considered, but he knew that look: he had loved Sam, Rodney suspected, in the same awful way that Rodney had loved John, and now he had lost her too.

That thought was enough to send Rodney sprinting into the nearest bathroom to throw up the entire plate of finger foods he’d scarfed down. When he finally re-emerged, pale and sweating, Ronon was waiting outside the door. He handed Rodney a glass of water and said nothing.

It was three days later, back on Atlantis with Rodney slumped against one of the many balconies for a few blissful minutes of letting his mind go completely blank when Radek approached him again. He’d been around, of course. Rodney knew that Sam had enlisted him to help get the Phoenix into working order, and there had been several times when Rodney would glance up from whatever systems he’d been trying to browbeat into compliance to find a steaming cup of coffee at his elbow. In all that time, though, the two of them had never spoken.

“I am sorry about Colonel Carter,” Radek said, hovering at the entrance to the balcony. “I know you two were…” There was a pause like he was parsing his words carefully. “I know you cared for her,” he said finally. “She cared for you also.”

Rodney didn’t bother turning around, much less responding. He cast his mind back to a few days ago, trying to remember if Radek had even been at Sam’s funeral. He would have been, surely, but Rodney couldn’t remember seeing him once.

Light footsteps behind him; Radek was creeping closer. “I will miss her too, you know.”

That got an eye roll out of Rodney. Oh, please. “You know she didn’t even like you, right?” he said, still looking out across the calm ocean. “She told me herself. She thought you were creepy.”

There was a growling sigh from behind him. “Oh, dej mi kurva pauzu,” Radek muttered under his breath, and Rodney whirled around. He hadn’t heard back talk from Zelenka in a long time now, not since John, and it hit his ears like an electric shock.

Radek had his arms folded tightly across his chest, and he was giving Rodney an honest to god glare. Rodney was caught off-guard by the sheer audacity of it. “What was that?” 

“This.” Radek gestured wildly between the two of them. “It has to stop. I understand that you cannot forgive me for Colonel Sheppard -” Rodney reared back, fixing Radek with a warning glower of his own, and Radek stumbled on his words a little - “but the whole galaxy is at stake now. With Colonel Carter gone, we need to be able to work together again. This feud helps nobody.”

Rodney was silent for a long moment. He watched Radek’s face, watched as a sliver of tension began to ease from it as Rodney slowly nodded his head. 

“Let me put your mind at ease, Radek. I can guarantee you that no contribution of yours will ever make or break the future of this galaxy,” he said, and he watched as that fraction of hope in Radek’s eyes dimmed. “We don’t need to work together. As far as I’m concerned, we’ll all be better off if you stay as far away from my work as possible.” He took a step closer to Radek. “Let’s make another thing clear. You and I?” He oscillated his finger between himself and Radek. “We’re done. Unless catastrophe is about to strike and you need me to put out another one of your fires, there’s no reason for you to ever talk to me again. Got it?”

There was a beat where Rodney honestly thought Radek was going to cause a scene. It wasn’t his usual style, apart from the few times when Rodney had managed to push him all the way over the edge and he’d start yelling obscenities in Czech in the middle of the labs - or, memorably, the time when he’d spilled lukewarm coffee all over Rodney’s lap in a fit of pique. But right now, Radek looked mutinous. Part of Rodney wanted him to cross that line; the burn of losing both Teyla and Sam on top of John was building to nuclear proportions inside his lungs, and he needed some way to get it out.

But Radek, apparently, wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. “I have it, Rodney,” he said stiffly, and walked away. Rodney watched him go and chalked the hollow feeling in his chest up to not getting his chance to wipe that glare off of Radek’s face.

There were always going to be more funerals. Rodney had accepted that a long time ago, far before they’d lost John. In Pegasus - in any galaxy, really - it was just a fact of life.

Ronon’s, though -

God. God.

Truth be told, Rodney didn’t remember much of it at all. He didn’t speak, and he didn’t remember who spoke, if there was anyone. He was too numb to care anymore if he was letting down Ronon’s memory. He was too numb to feel anything at all until later that night, alone in his quarters, sitting cross-legged on the floor as he watched a woven bracelet turn to ash in a small clay pot. The smoke rose, but once it had trailed off into nothing the memory of finding out that Ronon was gone still bore down on him as breathtakingly heavy as it had before, and suddenly nothing turned into everything.

Rodney screamed wordlessly into his pillow, hunched shoulders quivering as life forced reality down his protesting throat yet again. There was nobody to hold him close this time around.

Simmering beneath the white-hot agony of thinking about Ronon was a quieter, colder wave of pain that kept lapping at his consciousness: the frustration of his mind betraying him, again and again. Because goddamnit, but he didn’t want to be alone, and in a cycle of treacherous moments, a memory kept resurfacing. 

After Elizabeth died, Rodney had been relentless in his pursuit of blissful distraction, and there was a point where he’d managed to work himself all the way to near collapse with the flu. John and Teyla and Ronon had been tag-teaming his maintenance, of course, but that night it was Radek who had found him slumped and shivering over his desk, half-delirious with sleep deprivation. It was Radek who had manhandled him back to his quarters and ushered him into bed, wrapping him up in blankets. Rodney remembered so little of that night, but he did remember the way time had dipped and swerved, speeding up in some moments and turning glacial in others. He remembered how in the five seconds it would have taken for Radek to reach the doorway to leave, he had become gripped with a sudden terror that he had been alone for hours, days even, and that it was going to continue on and on and on. 

“Radek!” he’d called out, rocketing up in bed and blinking woozily as his breaths hopped and skipped out of him. He legitimately remembered nothing else - it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that he’d passed out then and there - but when he woke up the next morning, it was to the sight of Radek laid out on the floor beside his bed, curled around a pillow and glasses askew.

Rodney hadn’t wanted to be alone then, and he didn’t want to be alone now, and he fucking hated himself for those milliseconds where he’d forget that Radek wasn’t a name he could call out anymore and he'd catch himself with his finger on his radio, ready to pour all their bad blood down the sink if it meant he could breathe a little easier.

But John's memory didn't mean so little to him. Rodney kept his silence, and nobody came to his door.

It was at some point in the foggy eternity of that night that Rodney made the decision to leave, even if the idea didn’t quite make it to full consciousness yet. He knew that Ronon would probably be furious that Rodney was using his death as an excuse to turn tail and run, but he was the one who’d left, and he was the one who got himself blown up, so he didn’t fucking get to make Rodney feel bad about doing the only thing that felt like survival anymore.

By then, he only had one person to say his goodbyes to. A few hours before the time when the Daedalus was scheduled to pick up him and Jennifer, Rodney slipped into the room housing the stasis chambers. He stopped dead, though, when he saw Radek standing in front of Carson’s pod, forehead pressed against the glass as he murmured words Rodney didn’t have a hope of making out.

This was bad. He didn’t want Radek - scratch that, he didn’t want  anyone  hearing his goodbye to Carson, or his useless fucking apologies. Not even Carson would even get to hear them. But it turned out he didn’t have to worry: Radek must have heard him because he turned on his heel to face the door. They stared at each other for a long, silent moment. Then, without a word, Radek slipped past Rodney and disappeared out the doorway. Rodney didn’t watch him go.

Chapter Text

As a concession to himself, Rodney waits three more days before messaging Zelenka again. He’d said he’ll be in Canada for another week, right? It’s a reasonable space of time.

He texts: My place, tonight, 7pm

Then: Dinner

Then: Takeout

Zelenka takes an hour to respond. He writes: What treats your cat enjoys?

Which, Rodney notes, isn’t even technically an affirmative. Typical.

Unsurprisingly, Zelenka still shows up at 7pm on the dot. Under one arm he has a packet of Rodney-approved cat treats, and under the other, he has a brown paper bag. For some reason, Rodney gets it into his head that it’ll be some kind of gentle red - in his defence, the only gatherings he’s been to in the last two and a half decades have been occasional visits forced upon him by Jeannie and Kaleb, and his expectations have been well and truly set. But he realises quickly that he shouldn’t be surprised when Zelenka pulls out a bottle of Stolichnaya. When he sees it, Rodney surprises himself with an honest chuckle.

“You realise this is why everyone thought you were Russian,” he says as Zelenka sets it down on the kitchen counter with a thunk, and laughs even harder at the dark look that crosses Zelenka’s face.

They order Chinese. Between the egg rolls, chow mein, and chicken fried rice, they sip vodka from the first clean cups that Rodney could find: a chipped mug for Rodney, and a wine glass for Zelenka. Rodney waters his down with orange juice he dug out from the back of the fridge because he isn’t a young man anymore, but Zelenka sips his straight like he has something to prove. 

Maybe Zelenka hoped it would ease the nerves, soften both their edges and grease the wheel of the night. It might just be working. Zelenka had been polite enough not to ask what had inspired the impromptu invitation, but Rodney tells him about the suggestion from Jeannie anyway - sans all the armchair psychoanalysis, of course. Zelenka smiles like a shy child when he hears that it had been her idea.

“I always liked that woman,” he says demurely. See? Total suck-up.

They talk about inconsequential matters, things that they both know the other doesn’t really care all that much about. Rodney tells Zelenka about Maddie and Jonah, and the story of how he’d rescued a stray Newton after she’d tumbled into a dumpster behind his apartment six years ago. Zelenka tells Rodney about his current clutch of training pigeons, and about his younger sister, who Rodney finds out for the first time is named Evzenie - no mention of the pyromaniac brother, though, which Rodney notes but doesn’t mention. 

It’s wholly bizarre, actually. Thinking back, Rodney can’t recall a single time when he’d engaged in this kind of small talk with - well, anyone, really - but especially Zelenka, who’d had a knack for cutting straight to the heart of a matter in a way that Rodney had always (privately) appreciated. He keeps bracing himself for the inevitable shift, for when Radek will start asking questions he can’t answer, but so far he’s been left hanging.

They manage to find some common ground when Rodney mentions the podunk little college he lectures at. Zelenka’s eyes light up fiendishly, and almost immediately, they’re swapping stories about their stupidest students from over the years. Before Rodney knows it, they’re actually kind of laughing together. There’s a bizarre edge of panic in Rodney’s mind as he reminds himself that this isn’t how this is supposed to be happening. He isn’t supposed to be enjoying himself. But the vodka has already begun to blur the edges of his best intentions. And, okay, maybe this strange, stilted conversation has helped a bit. Right now, the Zelenka sitting in front of him is cobbled together from different parts: all the softer parts of him that Rodney had tried to make himself forget, the parts that make his chest ache with regret whenever he thinks too much about them, but none of the parts that he’s forced himself to remember instead. Those parts - the razor-sharp edges from the end of their friendship - have been replaced with the stories of this new stranger. There’s a relief in that, an easing of pressure.

Maybe Jeannie had been right. Maybe Radek is just here for old-time’s sake. Maybe Rodney can ride this one out after all.

After they finish eating, Rodney makes a beeline for the coffee pot - yes, it’s 8:30 at night, but he’s also just had two atrociously mixed screwdrivers and his constitution isn’t what it used to be - and Zelenka heads straight for the cat tower. Newton is perched on top of it, as per usual, surveying her domain. In a mirror of their last meeting, Zelenka stops a respectful distance away. This time though, after the plastic hiss of the packet of freezer-dried turkey jerky opening, Newton strains her head forward right away, pupils dilated and tongue already flicking out.

Rodney can make out the knowing smirk on Zelenka’s face from his side profile. “Ach ano, teď mě máš rád, viď?” Newton snaps up the sliver of jerky dangling from Zelenka’s fingers, and he chuckles softly. “Řekl jsem vám, že se vrátím se zvláštním lahůdkem. Nikdy bych ti nelhal, krásko. Můj bože, podívej se, jak jíš! Jsi jako tvůj otec.”

While Zelenka spoils his cat, Rodney busies himself making coffee. In a fit of charity, he pulls out a second mug. He, very vaguely, remembers how Zelenka takes his coffee, and he makes his best pass at it while the lull of Czech chatter fades into the background. It’s only after he adds the splash of milk to Zelenka’s cup that he realises the murmurs from behind him have stopped.

He turns around and freezes. Zelenka has abandoned the cat tower, leaving Newton contentedly chewing on a fingernail-sized treat. Instead, he’s standing in the far corner of the living room, the one where Rodney has stowed his notes from The Work. He still hasn’t wiped those whiteboards down. He’d nestled them behind the back of his single armchair and a floor lamp, but that, apparently, hadn’t been enough. He sees the curve of Zelenka’s spine as he hunches over as best he can to read the scribbled numbers, one trembling hand reaching out with its fingertips hovering a hair’s breadth away from the whiteboard’s surface.

“Don’t!” 

The word bursts out of Rodney, a force all of its own. If the coffees hadn’t been safely on the countertop, he might’ve dropped them. The sight of Zelenka so close to his precious work might as well have been a cattle prod to his chest. He knows, rationally, that it wouldn’t matter if Zelenka had meddled with anything: the most important notes, the ones that had cracked the proverbial case, are safely stored on his holo-screen drive. But it doesn’t matter; the thought of any of his writings being altered, being lost, the thought that Rodney might not be able to get back to where he’d been - it fills him with such an unspeakable terror that for a second he can’t expand his lungs. 

He storms over, the sudden burst of movement startling Newton from her tower and sending her speeding under the couch in a long streak of grey. Zelenka has already taken three steps back, but Rodney still puts himself bodily between him and the boards. His legs creak and pop in loud protest as he crouches down, but he ignores them, absorbed in inspecting boards. Has anything been changed? Is anything rubbed out or smudged? Everything looks the same as he remembers it - but that just brings on a new, even more darkly terrifying thought. Rodney would know, right? He’d spent so long staring at these numbers, he’d have to notice if something was different. He’s sure he would, he thinks he’s sure, but that sick doubt is lodged in his mind now and refuses to get out. He needs to know. He needs to know he can trust himself to remember. The fate of their world depends on it.

“Did you touch anything?” It comes out in a garbled, high pitch, peaked with a touch of hysteria. Rodney realises with a burst of horror that if he doesn’t get an answer, and quickly, he might actually start crying. He hasn’t done that in years, but he can feel that sticky heat building in his throat as he scans the same lines of calculations over and over. “God, Zelenka, if you touched anything, you need to -”

“I did not touch,” Zelenka says from behind, sounding muffled and subdued. Rodney forces himself to twist around, still rocking on his bent knees. Zelenka is standing back, hand pressed to his mouth and head shaking like he’s still answering Rodney’s question. 

“Rodney…” he whispers, voice so low it might have been meant just for himself. “You … All of this -” He cuts himself off. Rodney realises with a jolt that the skin beneath Zelenka's eyes is wet.

“What?” Rodney snaps. His voice is just barely back under control, but he feels anything but. He feels a flashpoint has been reached in his chest, something he can no longer contain. He staggers to his feet, swaying wildly at the upward heave. Zelenka reaches out a hand to help steady him, and Rodney ignores it. “No, seriously, what?” He gestures furiously back to the whiteboards he stands protectively in front of. “You’re surprised? You knew all of this.”

“It is one thing to know,” Zelenka says quietly. “It … is another to see.” He ducks his head, swiping at the moisture beneath his glasses. Then he’s shaking his head again, wagging it side to side like a dog, his faded hair snapping across the sides of his face. “Můj bože. All these years, Rodney. Why? ” Rodney stares, uncomprehending, and Zelenka takes a step forward. “Why did you not reach out to me?” He thrusts out a hand towards the boards, and in one fluid motion, it turns into him pulling back to rake a hand through his wild, thinning hair. It’s a gesture so achingly familiar that it’s dizzying to watch. “You did not have to do this alone. I could have helped!”

Rodney stands, arms stiff at his sides. Despite steadying himself, he still feels off-balance. “...What?” he says again helplessly, and Zelenka lets out a despairing little sound.

“Do you truly hate me so much?” he asks. “Tell me, please. Why would you do this to yourself? I could have helped.” He repeats the last part with a steely underbar of conviction, the shadow of a challenge, and suddenly they’re twenty-six years in the past, in the Gateroom with a solar flare swallowing their screens. 

Rodney looks away, compelled to meet anything but that probing gaze. That question had been easy enough to dance around when it was being posed by Jeannie, or even himself. When it’s Zelenka standing here though, asking do you truly hate me, it takes on a more tangible form that can’t be sidestepped quite so easily. If he was answering years ago, then it might have been clearer. But now Rodney thinks he might be starting to understand what Jeannie had meant, just a bit: he’s been carried along by inertia for a long time now, and not much else. To hate Zelenka, to truly hate him, Rodney would have to be capable of real anger. He would have to feel anything at all, beyond the steady undercurrent of fear in his bloodstream - there’s grief too, of course, but it’s the fear that has propelled him onward. 

And it had been fear that had held him back. He knows now, with a grim clarity that he isn’t sure he even had at the time, that he never would have been able to ask Zelenka for help. Zelenka had been many things to Rodney during their time on Atlantis, but one thing he’d always been without fail was a reliable sounding board and a staunch supporter - of only his viable ideas. If after everything and everyone they’d lost, Zelenka had looked at Rodney’s plan and told him that he didn’t believe…

But Rodney doesn’t say that. Even if he’d wanted to, he doesn’t think he’d know how. Not anymore. “Honestly?” he says. “It never even occurred to me to ask you.”

Zelenka stiffens, eyes glittering behind his glasses. “Now I am one who does not believe,” he replies.

Rodney turns away. It had been a bald-faced lie, one he hadn’t really expected Zelenka to buy. Really, it had been a long-buried instinct kicking in: lashing out and digging deep. Incredible, how easy old habits are to fall back into. Right now, this is the only script Rodney remembers. “Well, what about you?” he spits out. “You never reached out either. You say I didn’t have to be alone - where the hell were you, then? What were you doing while I spent twenty-five years fixing your mistake?”

The words jump out before they even cross Rodney’s mind, a line that’s so familiar that it’s become muscle memory.

For a second, Zelenka flinches, and it really is like they’re caught in a replay. But then he steadies himself, shoulders determinedly set, and his eyes darken.“I will not do this again,” he says tensely. “I will not let you continue to punish me for this. You think I do not know? You think I have not paid for my mistake? What do you know of my life, hmm?”

“I know that you’ve moved on with it,” Rodney retorts hotly. “You’ve been hiding out in Prague with your stupid pigeons because you were too guilty to face up to what you’d done, and now you’ve come back when there’s nothing left for you to do. You don’t get to make that my problem.”

It’s unfair, Rodney knows it’s unfair, but right now he doesn’t care. 

The words churning from Rodney’s mouth strike something deep within his core. It’s clawing and bitter and feels an awful lot like betrayal. What has he done for the last two decades except give, and give, and give, and now Zelenka is here to try and pry forgiveness from him too.

Zelenka is so still it’s like he’s not really there at all, just an afterimage on the back of Rodney’s eyelids. “No,” he says, and his voice is trembling, but it’s not a close-to-tears quaver. He sounds like he’s forcibly holding himself back. “No.”

“No?” Rodney bleats back. He says it mockingly, but truthfully, all of his fight had drained from him almost as soon as it began. It hurts too much to sustain, and he is far too tired.

“This is what you have been thinking all these years?” Zelenka continues in a low, incredulous voice. “That I have been so ashamed that I could not face you? You did not think, for one second, that I was angry too?”

Rodney blinks. He shakes his head - not as a negative, just an unconscious movement as he tries to parse the question. The gesture makes Zelenka’s nostrils flare, though. “You are the only one who suffered, hmm?” he hisses. “You are the only one who lost? Yes, I was angry. For years, I was angry. I had every right to be. After Carson -”

This time it’s Rodney who flinches as if Zelenka has just slapped him. “Don’t,” he says, voice catching ever so slightly. He can feel a cold sweat creeping up the back of his neck. Not that. He doesn’t want to think about that.

Zelenka doesn’t listen, or he just doesn’t care. Right now, he’s transformed; the fury written into his face takes years off. “It was only Evan and I,” he says, eyes squeezing shut as he speaks. His breathing is coming out fast and choppy now. “We were all he had, at the end, and it was not enough. He needed you, and -”

“What difference would it have made?” The words taste like vomit as they come up. “You being there didn’t change a damn thing. It didn’t change his mind. It didn’t - it didn’t matter.”

“Of course it mattered! How can you say these things? He was your friend!”

Radek’s yell shocks them both into silence. Rodney turns his head away, molasses-slow, and presses a curled hand against his own cheek like he’s holding in the entire extent of his emotions. “Stop,” he rasps out. The thickening in his throat is back. It’s all he can do to even form words. “Stop, Radek. Stop.”

Rodney isn’t sure if it’s the broken pleading in his tone that does it, or if it’s the fact that, for the first time in god knows how long, Rodney has addressed Zelenka by his first name, but Zelenka does, in fact, stop. His furious breathing splutters into an exhale that morphs further into a sigh, and Rodney watches in real time as Zelenka deflates. He staggers back until he bumps the chair he’d been sitting on to eat not too long ago, and grips its back. He looks down, lank hair obscuring half his eyes. Then his other hand comes up and covers the rest.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. He presses the heel of his palm against his lips. “I … I did not want it to go like this.”

Rodney can’t help but laugh, a humourless wisp of a sound. “We should’ve done this years ago,” he tells Zelenka; he means it, but doesn’t intend the way Zelenka’s shoulders curl in on themselves, making him seem impossibly smaller. “At least I know why you’re really here.”

Zelenka shakes his head wordlessly. “I forgave you long ago,” he says after a beat of silence. He reluctantly tugs his head up to meet Rodney’s eyes. “He forgave you too.”

Rodney thinks he would’ve preferred it if Zelenka had hit him. He can’t look at him anymore. He crosses the apartment, back into the safety of the kitchen and the countertop where the two mugs of coffee are still sitting. He listens as Zelenka quietly lets himself out, and then he tips the coffee into the sink, watching the brown liquid swirl and splutter and disappear. His hands don’t stop shaking the entire time.

Chapter Text

This was how it happened, as far as Rodney could figure.

After nearly three years of fighting a losing battle against Michael’s scourge, the Atlantis expedition was being stripped, and aggressively so. Unwilling to commit the resources to fighting a battle in another galaxy, and unable to continue any kind of meaningful exploration and research within the current state of Pegasus, the IOA finished what it had begun in Rodney and Jen’s last year on Atlantis. All non-essential personnel was recalled back to Earth, with only a bare-bones military and scientific contingent left behind to monitor any potential attacks being mounted against Earth. Given that, in the IOA’s eyes, he was not only non-essential personnel but an unnecessary drain on the city’s power, this recall meant that Carson Beckett finally got to go back to Earth.

Earth did have stasis chambers tucked away in the Antarctic outpost - but since when had any of this been that simple?

Carson had always been quick on the uptake. After he was woken from stasis and had the situation explained to him, he would have realised that the Antarctic outpost was his only option, but he also would have realised that finding a cure for him would be at the very bottom of the SGC’s priority list. It would probably be years until they managed it, if they ever did, and even then, he’d still never be allowed to set foot on Earth proper. With nowhere to go in this galaxy, and nothing in Pegasus to return to, the most he had to look forward to was a life cooped up under Cheyenne Mountain. Carson would have weighed up all those facts, minutes after finding out that most of his friends were dead and gone, and he’d apparently made the decision that the fight wasn’t worth it.

Faced with that decision, the best that the SGC could offer was a trip back to Earth through the Gate so that Carson could die on his home planet instead of in an empty city.

That was what Lorne - Colonel Lorne, by that point - had told Rodney, anyway. The decision had been made six months after Jen’s funeral, when Rodney was already neck deep in The Work, and he was so lost in calculations that he didn’t see the email for a whole day. And it was an email - even right in the moment, Rodney remembered a part in the back of his mind being grateful that Lorne had known him well enough to not box him in with a phone call, instead opting to use his SGC magic to get his personal email address. 

Lorne had left his own phone number at the bottom of the email, with an added addendum that he was going to be on Earth for the next month - until the end, was the unspoken implication - and that during that time, Rodney could reach him there, day or night. Rodney hadn’t noticed any of that upon his first reading, though. As soon as he read that Carson was in the infirmary in Cheyenne Mountain, Rodney abandoned his laptop, leaping to his feet and scrambling through unsorted drawers in his bedroom for his passport. This was his chance to actually save someone - not in another timeline that he’d never be able to touch, but in the here and now. He would march up to Carson’s infirmary bed and yell at him until he agreed to put himself back into stasis, no matter how long it would take to find a cure.

He’d finally found his passport, stuffed into a pair of lemon-adorned socks that Jen had bought him as a joke gift, and he was standing there, staring at the stupid lemons with their cartoon smiley faces and stick-figure waving arms, when he froze. 

His fingers clenched tighter and tighter around the cotton-wrapped edges of his passport, and he couldn’t move. He wasn’t sure how long he stood there, but he did know that, eventually, he slowly tucked the socks back into his drawer, plodded back into his living room and to his whiteboards, and got back to work.

He told himself that he couldn’t spare the time, that there were - somehow, impossibly - bigger things at stake. If he could get this right, then maybe in some world, in some time, Carson wouldn’t even have to go through this, and that had to be worth the sacrifice, right? This was larger than any one of them. This was about the fate of an entire galaxy. That had to be worth it.

None of that was a lie. But there was another truth, one he could only admit to himself at night, during those rare hours in which he tried to sleep and inevitably failed. The truth was that if Rodney had to face his friend and tell him from his own mouth that he’d failed him and everyone else, if he had to watch another friend die, if he had to watch the same friend die for the second time, he wouldn’t be able to handle it. If he had to stand there and beg his best friend not to kill himself, not to leave Rodney standing over another empty grave, and have Carson still not agree to stasis - if that happened, then Rodney was terrified that he would break, completely and utterly, and all of this would have been for nothing.

And Rodney knew Carson far, far too well. Once he was set on an idea, there was nobody in the world who could sway him from it. Not even Rodney.

This is not goodbye, it’s see you later. One of the last things Rodney had said to Carson. The last promise he’d made to him, and now he was breaking it - but Christ, there were only so many promises he could hold in his two hands.

So, Rodney worked and worked, he hit dead ends and broke through them, and he told himself that it was for the best over and over again until the line had enmeshed into his grey matter. A couple of days later, he caught himself reading Lorne’s email again, which was when he read the section with the phone number, and it was also when he read that Radek Zelenka had also returned to Earth and that he was here to stay. It certainly explained the slew of voice messages he began to receive. 

The first one had the advantage of surprise. “Hello, Rodney,” said a voice that Rodney had honestly never expected to hear again, and it made him freeze with his phone pressed to his ear. “Colonel Lorne gave me your number. Um.” There was the sound of an awkwardly cleared throat. “This is, er Radek Zelenka. I am only calling about Car -”

Jolted out of his paralysis, Rodney hung up the phone and deleted the message. Then he’d gotten back to work. Zelenka called back every day for the next week. Occasionally, Rodney would torture himself with the first few seconds of the message. The first few were anxious. The next couple began to sound angry. The last one that Rodney listened to before finally blocking the number, Zelenka just sounded exhausted, with a voice creaky from crying.

Lorne never called Rodney, or even sent a follow-up email. Rodney would always be grateful for that. It had struck him as strange, admittedly. During their time on Atlantis, Lorne had never shown much patience for Rodney’s … well, Rodney-ness, and he’d cared about Carson as much as any of them. Rodney had expected him to be offended on their friend’s behalf, maybe exert some of that military bluntness to try and push Rodney into coming for at least one visit, but it never happened. Maybe it was out of a latent sense of loyalty to John that Lorne had let Rodney be. Or maybe that last year of Lorne being forced to witness the fallout of Rodney losing friend after friend had made more of an impression than Rodney had realised.

Without updates from Lorne, with Zelenka’s number blocked and resolutely ignored on his phone, and without stepping a foot inside the SGC, Rodney could only construct rough sketches of what must have happened within those eighteen days. Lorne would’ve come and gone, called by duty, but Zelenka - steadfast, incorrigible, immovable Zelenka - would have never left Carson’s side. He would’ve been there when Carson woke up on Atlantis too, ready to explain what happened, and why nobody else was waiting at his bedside. 

Carson was a crier. Rodney wanted to believe that even after everything Michael had put him through, he hadn’t taken that from him. So, in Rodney’s mind, Carson would’ve cried. Zelenka had never been great with big shows of emotion, never seeming to know where to put his gaze or his hands, always searching out the most graceful exit. But for Carson, Rodney knew, he’d have made the effort. He’d have sat at his bedside, and he would have held Carson’s hand. He wouldn’t have said that everything would be okay, because Zelenka wasn’t the type to make false promises, but he would tell Carson that he wasn’t alone, and he would make that a promise to keep, right up to the end.

He would’ve transcribed the letters that Carson wanted to send to the few people there were left to send any to. Rodney knew that because a week after the only phone call from Lorne - the one where Lorne broke the news of Carson’s passing, the one that left Rodney numb and shaking on the floor of his bedroom, silent in the disbelief that this was happening again  - he received a letter in the mail. There was writing on the front of the envelope, presumably to protect it from being dismissed as junk. To RM, from CB. Addressed from Carson but in Radek’s blocky handwriting.

Rodney never opened it.

Chapter Text

Rockville College is a stone’s throw away from the train station. Rodney likes it that way, it means he hasn’t had to bother with a car. He can’t say there’s much else going for the place, though. The campus has the look of a spilled box of LEGOs: a collection of boxy buildings of various sizes and garish colours, spaced about with no apparent appeal to intuitive design, and broken up every now and then with a handful of anaemic-looking trees to make sure everybody knows that it’s an eco-friendly campus. The students drowsily buzz around between classrooms like swarms of flaccidly lethargic flies, about as eager to be there as the professors are to teach. The professors are the ones that Rodney despises the most. They’re a group of professional idiots, seemingly embroiled in some conspiracy to make the next generation of disadvantaged and hopeless youth even more gormless than they currently are. A cabal of washouts and pseudo-intellectuals who never made the cut in the first place.

Of course, from everyone else’s perspective, Rodney is the ultimate example of a has-been drowning a slow death in the sad puddle of his own irrelevance, so he probably can’t talk all that much.

The leave Rodney took to get him over the final hump of The Work had spilled over into winter break, but his reprieve has finally ended as the January semester rolls in. Rodney had deeply and genuinely considered just calling up and quitting right on the spot that morning, but he still has to do all those pesky things like eating and paying the electricity bill, so here he is. 

He peers out at the sea of faces filling up the lecture hall for his first class of the day. A roomful of twittering twenty-somethings stare back at him. Some of them look curious, even awestruck. Most just look scared. It kind of takes him back to the good old days, actually: running the science department on Atlantis and corralling his minions. Except, of course, back then his reputation had been something to be proud of. Rodney’s not sure exactly what his students think of him - he’s never actually bothered to read those feedback surveys that the college administration requires them to send out - but he’s heard the whispers, the ones that flit around the staffroom just as surely as they do the campus halls. Doctor Rodney McKay: insane genius and complete asshole. Used to work for the CIA or the US Air Force or something, but then he had a nervous breakdown and now he’s here. God help you if you end up in his class.

Another difference is that back on Atlantis, Rodney had Zelenka to help with things like administrative duties and communicating with people without making them cry too much. He’d had a lot of things he doesn’t have anymore, back then.

Compulsively, he digs out his phone and surreptitiously checks his notifications. It’s been three days since his and Zelenka’s ill-fated dinner, and since then he’s heard absolutely nothing from the other man. He doesn’t know what it is he’s expecting, exactly. This hadn’t been a case of Rodney screaming until he was blue in the face and Zelenka standing there and taking it - Zelenka had been as angry at him at the height of their fight; angrier, even. More likely than not, he’s already back in the Czech Republic, and Rodney will never see or hear from him again.

On paper, that thought should be a relief. But … Rodney isn’t sure how to articulate it, except that learning that Zelenka has been living with as much rage as he had all this time had been a shock to the system, a realisation that his own pain hasn’t been as cosmically isolated as he’d lulled himself into thinking. If Rodney was Jeannie, he might’ve called it something inane like a wake-up call. He isn’t Jeannie, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that Zelenka has become a splinter in his mind that he can’t dislodge.

But Zelenka still hasn’t messaged, and neither has Rodney. A week ago, he might’ve put it down to stubborn pride on his own part, but their fight had evidently been a Pandora’s Box of sorts, and now Rodney’s finding it a lot harder to hide from uglier truths. This time, the truth is that every time he glances at his phone, he feels like he’s staring down the mountain of The Work again the way he had been twenty-five years ago, and wondering whether he should bite the bullet and ask Zelenka for help. He feels that same paralysing terror that if he calls, Zelenka won’t come, and he knows that would be worse than any uncertainty.

So, he puts his phone away.

With a flick of his hand, he activates his holographic projector board - amazing how far technology has come in the last twenty-five years, but it still has nothing on the Ancients - and taps his foot impatiently until the lecture hall falls silent. Showtime. Yet again.

“Welcome to Introductory Mathematical Physics,” he says on rote, already exhausted by the routine. “First thing’s first: there is, in fact, such a thing as a stupid question. Ask one, and I will ignore it. Ask a second one, and you’re welcome to leave and stop wasting my and everyone else’s time. Got it?”

The hall suddenly becomes a sea of bobbleheads as everyone silently nods. “Good,” Rodney says wearily. It hits him right there, violent as a sledgehammer, that there is nowhere else to go from where he’s standing right now. No longer is this job just a means to an end, keeping him afloat while he works on bigger and better things. Now, with The Work over, this is literally the focal point of his existence.

Welcome to the rest of your life, Rodney.

Doctor Kerrigan catches Rodney just as he’s about to enter the STEM faculty staffroom.

“Doctor McKay!” she calls, and he turns around to see her hurrying down the bland, fluorescent-lit corridor with two styrofoam cups of takeaway coffee in her hands. “Glad I caught you before you had to find out for yourself,” she says, grimacing. “The coffee machine is broken. Again.”

Slowly, Rodney swings around to peer through the open staffroom door. Sure enough, the area around the coffee machine - the single reason he’d deigned to visit this dump - is conspicuously empty. Just as slowly, he turns back to face Kerrigan, who is fixing him with a commiserating scowl. 

“...It’s the first day of semester,” he says disbelievingly.

“Wonders never cease here at Rockville Palace,” Kerrigan says dryly, and proffers one of the coffee cups to him. “Here. Figured I’d save you the inevitable trip.”

Rodney eyes the cup dubiously. According to the logo on the cup, it’s from True Brew, one of the campuses’ many egregiously overpriced cafes. Still: caffeine, now, please. “How much?” he asks as he takes the cup, already savouring the warmth bleeding into his palms.

Kerrigan shakes her head. “Consider it a welcome back gift.” Her lips twitch sheepishly. “And … maybe a bribe?”

Rodney sighs and leads the way into the staffroom. This is far from the first time their shitty, outdated coffee maker has broken, and everyone has quickly come to accept that letting Rodney tinker around with it himself is twice as fast and easily ten times as effective as calling one of the maintenance guys to do it. Putting his coffee down at a free table, he finds the mini toolkit he’d stowed in the kitchenette’s bottom drawer for this exact reason, then unplugs the clunky machine from the wall, lugging it over to his table and setting the piece of shit down. He sits down to get to work, and Kerrigan joins him.

Doctor Wendy Kerrigan is the only other person at Rockville that Rodney can honestly say he respects. An organic chemistry professor in her mid sixties, she’d gotten both her PhDs at the University of Toronto and had been a leading researcher in her field before her husband had gotten in a car crash and suffered catastrophic brain damage ten years ago. From how she tells it, they’d decided to move back here so that her in-laws could lend their support, and the combination of financial demands and the need to have a flexible work schedule to attend to his needs had forced her to give up her research and settle for a comparatively more stable position as a lecturer here. The moment they’d met, they’d each recognised a kindred spirit of sorts, and so they’ve been quietly rotting together ever since. 

Rodney might even go so far as to say that he likes her. She’s intelligent, competent, and exudes both a  dedication to her work despite all its indignities and a polite, inconspicuous disdain for the administration they both labour under that reminds Rodney, startlingly and fondly, of Elizabeth Weir. It also helps that, as far as he knows, she’s never taken part in the staff rumour mill that surrounds him.

“Dare I ask how your break was?” Kerrigan asks, sipping her drink as she watches him disassemble the coffee maker.

“Uh…” Snapshots filter through Rodney’s brain: finally completing The Work, setting foot back on Atlantis for the last time, seeing Zelenka standing at his doorstep, the fight from three nights ago. “It was, y’know, fine. Standard.” After a few seconds, he remembers decency. “You?”

“Quiet. Greg wasn’t really feeling up to much, so we had a quiet Christmas; just the two of us.” 

A few seconds of silence pass. Rodney lets out a huff of irritation - it looks like the thermostat is malfunctioning - and takes a swig of his coffee before diving in. Then, Kerrigan speaks again. “What about that family emergency you had? Everything okay now?”

“What?” Rodney snaps his head up, before remembering that was the excuse he’d given for his leave request, the one he’d used to finish the last leg of The Work. Apart from HR, Kerrigan had been the only person to question what the sudden departure was for. “Oh. That. Right. Yes, that has been … resolved.”

It’s a good thing, he reminds himself, rather more forcefully than he should need to. His work is done. The thought shouldn’t leave him feeling so goddamn empty inside.

His head goes back down - not quick enough to miss the way Kerrigan’s eyebrow goes up, but she doesn’t push the issue, which he’s grateful for. He’s just about done checking the continuity of the fuse when he feels his phone buzz in his pocket. Rodney most certainly is not proud of the way he unceremoniously drops everything and pulls it out, searching out his notifications with over-eager fingers, but it is what it is.

It’s a message from Jeannie: have u called Maddie yet? x

Fucking Zelenka, you’ve always been a stubborn little shit. Rodney mulishly slams his phone down on the table, rattling the screwdriver he has out and making more than a few people glance over at him. He pointedly ignores them.

“That’s not another crisis, is it?” Kerrigan asks, tone half-joking, and Rodney belatedly realises that he may have said that thought about Zelenka out loud.

“No,” Rodney forces out, biting the inside of his cheek as he does so. “No. Nope. Not a crisis. Just an old … colleague.” 

Kerrigan nods in blessedly silent understanding, and Rodney busies himself with finishing the coffee maker repairs. He slots the back cover back into place and drags the machine back to its home on the counter. He plugs it back in, prepares a test drip, and switches it on. The coffee maker whirs to life. After a minute, steam begins to waft up, carrying with it the promise of sub-par, yes, but hot coffee.

A smattering of applause breaks out in the staffroom, along with a few scattered calls of “Thanks, Rodney" as people shuffle over to begin filling their cups. It’s pathetic, how such a minuscule job can leave Rodney feeling so accomplished. He loathes that he needs this reminder that, after The Work is over, he’s still capable of solving problems. 

He returns to his table, slumping back into his seat and draining another mouthful of coffee as Kerrigan beams at him. “You really earned that drink,” she says.

“Y’know, if you took all the money you’ve spent buying bribery coffee for me, you’d probably have enough to replace the damn machine,” Rodney grouses.

“Maybe I just like putting you to work,” Kerrigan shoots back teasingly, eyes crinkling behind her wire-framed glasses. Rodney huffs, utterly unsure of what to say to that, and he watches warily as Kerrigan leans forward in her seat. “Hey, I was thinking, what would you say to grabbing a couple of drinks after work? Real drinks, I mean. Call it a ‘new semester hurrah.’” Judging by the sardonic slant to her mouth, Rodney can guess exactly how she feels about that sentiment.

He fixes her with a withering look over his cup. “I’d say that comedy really isn’t your calling,” he says. “I’d sooner jam my hand in that coffee maker than suffer through some kind of work ‘do with these people.” He feels, admittedly, a little let down at the notion of their mutually held derision crumbling under the weight of social expectations. He’d expected more from Kerrigan.

Kerrigan’s eyes are twinkling, though. “You wound me, Doctor McKay,” she says, pressing a mocking hand against her chest. Her smile softens out into something coyer. “I was actually thinking more along the lines of just you and I.”

“...Oh.” The rusted cogs in Rodney’s mind, the ones ostensibly in charge of navigating social interactions, are grinding and creaking along. He thinks he might know what’s going on here. He could be wrong, of course - he has a lifetime record of being wrong when it comes to these things - but there’s something, he thinks, in the way Kerrigan is angling her body towards him. Their knees are knocking together under the table, and it feels intentional. 

“That’s, um -” he fumbles as his phone, facedown on the table, vibrates again. Another check-in from Jeannie, no doubt. He has no idea what he’s supposed to say to this. He doesn’t particularly care about Kerrigan’s husband, but he'd gotten the impression that she very much does - and that, somehow, isn’t even the most pressing issue at hand for him. He grasps his phone, grateful for the well-timed distraction. “Er, I think that … I …”

Rodney trails off. The message emblazoned on his screen isn’t from Jeannie. The contact name is RZ.

Meet me? It reads. Below it is another message: a location drop on Google Maps.

Rodney finds himself standing without even realising what he’s doing. “I … need to go,” he says, making the executive decision right then and there to save the embarrassment of how he’s leaping at Zelenka’s call like a well-trained dog for later.

Kerrigan has withdrawn back against the back of her chair, wearing a face of careful composure. “I’m a grown woman, Rodney,” she says wryly. “I can take a simple ‘no.’”

“No, no! That’s not - this isn’t -” He flashes his phone in her face as if that will explain anything. “It’s - my colleague,” he says lamely. “I need to go and meet him.”

Even for Rodney, the amused scepticism - not a crisis, huh? - is glaring like a floodlight from Kerrigan’s face. “Don’t you have a lecture in fifteen minutes?” she asks.

“Oh, fuck the lecture. They don’t listen to anything I say anyway.”

“Not sure the Dean is going to see it that way.”

Rodney is gearing up to say fuck the Dean for good measure. He knows it’s not an attitude he can afford to have - he’s been on thin ice with the administration for years now, likely only kept on board because of the sheer pedigree of his resumé - but right now he truly can’t care less. Before he can get it out, though, Kerrigan sighs, pulling out her own phone. “I can get Anderson to cover for you,” she says. “He owes me a favour - don’t ask.”

Rodney stops short, feet already poised to rush out the door. “What, really?”

Kerrigan shrugs and nods. “Whatever this is, it sounds important,” she says. “Go on. I’ll tell them you were feeling sick.”

Utterly caught off guard by the now foreign notion of somebody sticking out their neck for him, and not sure what to say, Rodney doesn’t say anything at all for a few seconds. The weight of his phone in his pocket drags him back down to reality. “Thank you, Wendy,” he says, really meaning it, before hurrying out the door.

Zelenka has chosen the park near Rodney’s apartment to meet, and if Rodney had thought there was any way he could’ve known better, he’d have chalked it up to a cruel joke.

Rodney hurries along the path that runs beside the duck pond, conscious of the pale patches of ice still crusted along the cracks in the pavement and doing his best not to spend too long looking at the whole of the park, all the trails he and Jen had used to meander along, back before the last structure in Rodney’s life had collapsed completely.

He scans the park benches lining the pond. Midday on a Monday, there aren’t many people here; mostly people in business suits eating their lunch and older people basking in the weak January sun. Rodney is looking for one older person in particular, and after a minute of searching, he spots him. Zelenka is wrapped up in his overcoat and scarf, as per usual, and his pale eyes are gazing out at the water and the ducks that are flocking within.

He looks up when Rodney approaches, though, and those eyes go wide behind his glasses, taking in the sweater-and-blazer combination that Rodney is sporting. It is, Rodney realises, significantly more dressed up than anything Zelenka has seen him wearing in the last two weeks since they’d first met again, and he can tell the moment when Zelenka connects the dots.

“I did not realise you were working,” he says, sounding quietly mortified. “You did not need to come immediately -”

“I’d, uh, finished my classes for the day,” Rodney lies, unsure how convincing it comes off. It doesn’t matter, really. He’s here now. He sits down on the opposite end of the bench as Zelenka, a second bookend. The pond water is grey as it reflects the slated sky above, and the ducks splash about in the dim ripples, warring over a crust that someone has thrown in with them. The few seconds of silence that the two of them spend watching the commotion feel impossibly weighted with things to come, the shape of which Rodney can’t say.

“Thank you for meeting me,” Zelenka finally says. “I was not sure that you would.”

Rodney doesn’t say anything, doesn’t say that he’s fairly certain that he didn’t have a choice in the matter; he hasn’t since Zelenka showed up on his doorstep two weeks ago.

Zelenka exhales slowly, wrinkled hands knotting together on his lap. “I think,” he begins, tone subdued to a near whisper, “that you were right. Perhaps what we said to each other is long overdue. Dirt in a wound, you know? It must be flushed out. I had hoped time had done that for me. Now I am thinking that was not what I needed. Not what either of us needed.” His tongue peeks out, anxiously skimming his lips. “I’m sorry.”

Rodney nods jerkily. He can feel the packed dirt beneath his feet, and he tries to let the sensation ground him. He tries to picture his legs as the sturdy wrought-iron ones holding up the park bench, wills himself to be just as immovable. “Carson,” he says, forcing himself not to flinch as the name leaves his mouth. He goes to continue, but nothing else comes out.

It’s enough for Zelenka to work with. “He felt there was nothing left for him,” he says softly, eyes half-lidded and cloudy with melancholy.

Rodney shakes his head automatically, like arguing can still make a difference here, like Carson is still in the infirmary waiting for Rodney to arrive, not twenty-five years dead and gone. “He had us. He - he had me,” he insists, nearly spitting the words out in sheer, choked desperation, but they emerge as childishly impotent as they sound in his head. How could Carson, left to die with only Zelenka and Lorne at his side, ever have believed that?

“Rodney…” Zelenka murmurs. The amount of kindness wrapped up in those two syllables makes Rodney want to throw himself right into the middle of the freezing lake in front of them and sink down to the bottom. Zelenka is shaking his head, and is it Rodney’s imagination, or has he inched closer? “He had been through so much already,” he continues, still so unbearably soft. “He wanted his death to be on his own terms. I could not take that from him.”

Rodney presses a fist to his mouth, feeling the grooves of his knuckles muffle his breathing as it shivers out of his mouth. He’d never been able to be properly angry at Carson, even if the pain sticking between Rodney’s ribs at the thought of his death still burns like a betrayal on his worse days. Carson had already lost almost everything there was to lose; Rodney can’t condemn him for the fear of being pulled out of stasis years, maybe decades, from then and learning that he was even more alone than he had been when he’d gone in, not when Rodney knows all too well how that feels.

The worst part of all of it is that he knows what his absence must have looked like. Rodney isn’t sure what Radek might have said about it in the heat of the moment, but Carson would have been able to reach his own conclusions. He would have thought that Rodney had been angry, had felt betrayed, and was abandoning him because of it. Or, hell, maybe Carson figured that in the time that had elapsed, Rodney had decided that a clone wasn’t worth fighting for after all. That’s not the kind of thing that Rodney knows how to forgive himself for.

He has a sudden, confessional temptation to spill his guts, to tell Zelenka all the words that have been sleeping behind his teeth ever since he'd gotten the email from Lorne informing him that Carson was back on Earth, everything that he should have told Carson but didn't. That what Carson was and how he'd come to be had never made a difference in the world to Rodney, and two years and the loss of a galaxy hadn't done a damn thing to change that. That Rodney didn't think he could blame him if he tried. That the last thing Rodney had ever wanted was to be the reason Carson was still hurting. But saying all of that now would just lay stark the fact that he'd had the chance to tell them to the right person and had thrown it away.

There are only a few things worth saying now. Rodney finds the focus to start pushing words past his hand. “After he … What did you do with him?”

“We could not bury him,” Zelenka says, and Rodney bites the inside of his cheek hard enough that he can taste the tang of blood. “The SGC had him cremated. Evan and I took the ashes to Scotland and scattered them in the sea beside the town where he grew up. I am … not sure how legal that was.” He lets out a sharp breath that Rodney can almost imagine is a laugh. Zelenka shakes his head. “But it was what he wanted. He wished to go home.”

Rodney presses his tongue against the cut on the inside of his cheek, drawing out tiny pangs of pain. More than the possibly illegal dumping of human remains, or the mention of home that makes Rodney’s chest ache just thinking about it, the detail that snags in his mind is that Evan Lorne had been there. Rodney hasn’t realised until now just what a steady constant the man has been - not just in his life, but in Zelenka’s too, apparently, and even for what little had remained of Carson’s - and it makes guilt grow thick and bitter on his tongue.

“I was…” Every word Rodney says now has to be carefully and deliberately loaded, aimed, and fired from his mouth. “I was scared.”

Zelenka’s voice comes quick and gentle. “I know.”

For a second, Rodney can’t breathe. “I’m sorry.”

There is a flicker of movement in Rodney’s peripheral vision, and he turns just slightly to see Zelenka shaking his head. “It was true what I told you,” he says firmly. “He did not blame you, Rodney. He understood, far better than I did.”

This time it’s Rodney’s turn to shake his head. The motion feels sluggish, like his body is lagging two seconds behind his brain. “Not just for that,” he says hollowly, and lets the rest of what he means to say but can’t lay out in the space between them for Zelenka to pick through at his leisure. He thinks - hopes - it comes through in the silence after his cut-off words, or in the way his body is bending in on itself. That he is sorry for the years, and even what came before those years, and what has come after them as well. That he is sorry, but he is tired. He is tired because he’s sorry, and this is all he can manage.

Zelenka is still as he digests this. Then he looks at Rodney, really looks at him, and his eyes are twenty-six years deep and dark. “I forgave myself for Colonel Sheppard long ago, and for everything that came after him,” he says wearily. “I had to. If I did not, then I would not have been able to go on. It was not easy, but it was necessary. I…" His breath stutters. "I have never been very good at saving people. It was all I could do to save myself.” The words come out quiet, and there’s something about them that makes Rodney feel cold in a way he can’t blame on the weather. Radek shakes his head listlessly, sighing. “You need to put down this weight, Rodney. Nobody can carry so much for so long.” He blinks, long and slow. “What’s done is done. All that is left is life.”

What Rodney can’t help but think, but which he can’t bring himself to say, is that he thinks Zelenka is wrong. Life isn’t what’s left after what’s done has been done. What’s done is life. Otherwise, he thinks desperately, what’s the point? What’s the point of any of this? After so long, setting any of this down feels like the worst kind of betrayal.

Rodney looks away, eyes returning to the ducks. The sodden crust is gone, and there is a group of particularly satisfied-looking birds floating where it used to be. When he looks back, Zelenka is staring out over the water as well.

“I am going home to Prague tonight,” Zelenka says. His mouth twists and he looks, for a second, shamefaced. “I think I have been expecting too much from you. Is not fair of me.”

Rodney imagines opening his mouth and saying don’t leave. You can’t come and cut me open like this and then leave me to bleed out alone. But here it is, back again, the eternal fear: that he will let all of that spill out, and Zelenka will still walk away. That, in the long run, it will be better for both of them. That Rodney has always been meant to end up alone. He misses the person he used to be, who’d say whatever he liked without caring about consequences. That was before he’d learned just how terrible consequences could really be.

Rodney sits there, and he eats his words, and he says nothing. Zelenka stands up and sticks out his hand. “I have enjoyed seeing you again, Rodney,” he says, so earnestly, and all Rodney does is take the offered hand and shake it. Zelenka wraps both his hands around Rodney’s. His skin is cold.

After a few seconds, Zelenka drops his hand. Then, with one final glance, he turns and walks down the path, away from Rodney, moving slowly against the slight wind that has picked up.

Rodney watches him go, is so fixated on the ambling silhouette as it gradually disappears from view, that he doesn’t instantly pick up on the way that his airway is closing up. He sits further back on the park bench, pressing the divots of his spine against the unforgiving wooden slats, and fights to remember the taste of air. His fingers are trembling, and he laces them together so tightly that he can feel his pulse thrumming through his palms. 

He hasn’t had a panic attack in years. Not since Jen, he realises, and that just makes the noose around his throat squeeze tighter. Back then, she’d been the only thing in the world that could calm him, resting a hand lightly between his shoulder blades and walking him through his breaths until he came back to himself. There’s nobody here now, though, so all Rodney can do is squeeze his eyes shut and force the inhales and exhales over and over. There is nobody, because Rodney can’t take anything that’s given to him. He’s alone, just like he has been for the last twenty-five years and just like he will be for the next twenty-five.

He hopes to god that nobody else in the park notices, that they don’t see an old man hunched in on himself and gasping for air and decide to call an ambulance. That, he thinks, would well and truly push him over the edge. Thankfully, there are no Good Samaritans in this particular park, and after ten agonising minutes, Rodney is able to get his breathing back under control. He’s balled up the ache in his chest, scrunched it into something manageable and stowed it behind his ribcage to deal with later. The feeling is nothing new, but it’s fresh, newly remembered, like a cut you don’t notice until somebody points it out to you.

This is how it had felt the days after losing Jen, and Rodney had realised that he had never been more alone. It’s the kind of feeling, he’s come to accept, that never really goes away.

Chapter Text

The irony of it all was that they’d chosen Canada for the healthcare.

It had been a tough decision. Jen was close with her dad - it was a novel concept to Rodney, but it mattered to her, and that mattered to Rodney. But Jen had admitted to Rodney a month after they returned to Earth that she didn’t think she could face practising medicine in the US, not after the brutal austerity of their last year on Atlantis. Rodney, whose patriotism had only strengthened out of sheer spite after more than a decade of working for and alongside Americans, had no argument against that. It felt like a lifetime ago that Rodney had left home in the first place, so Canada felt like a fresh start for the both of them. And, Jen had pointed out brightly, they could go and visit her father whenever they wanted. They had all the time in the world, now.

There was so much about that year that felt so much harsher in hindsight, like a huge, sinister joke holding its breath as it waited to pull the rug out from beneath them. Looking back, it almost seemed impossible that they didn’t see it all coming.

But they didn’t. They really didn’t. They were happy. It was a kind of happiness, anyway. After everything they’d done, everything they’d been through, Rodney wasn’t sure how much they could realistically expect, much less be entitled to. Jen was determined to find some, though, and Rodney was content to follow her lead. 

Jen busied herself getting her Canadian medical licence while Rodney was snatched up by the first aerospace engineering firm that he took an interest in. The way that they slotted into the grooves of their new lives was refreshing in how damn easy it was. For the first time in what felt like forever, there was no urgent need to be doing anything whatsoever. For the first few months, Rodney would wake up at five AM with heart palpitations, convinced that he’d heard somebody radioing him, that if he didn’t fix whatever disaster was falling down on them in the next ten minutes they’d all be dead. When he sat up though, he’d be met with nothing but Jen’s steady hand on his back, telling him that it was okay, to go back to sleep. 

The first morning after Rodney had slept the whole night through, he woke up to Jen languidly stretching her body across his.

“Wanna get drunk and fool around?” she murmured, smiling into his collarbone.

Rodney squinted up at her - or, more accurately, the golden curtain of hair obscuring what should have been her face. “It’s Wednesday,” he said blearily, then turned his head to check the alarm clock. “It’s 7:30. ”

“Don’t care,” she said, hooking her leg around his waist. Rodney called in sick to work that day.

Of course, things weren’t always that picturesque. There were the days that Rodney had panic attacks, bad ones, the kind that left his heart feeling dislodged from his body. It seemed like anything could bring them on: Jen running late on her way home from work, misplacing his car keys, even - humiliatingly - not being able to find the brand of tuna he liked at the Safeway. He let Jen hug his breath back into his lungs, took some Xanax, and carried on with his life. There were the days, too, when Jen would return home from a day at her practice and just … not talk. Not out of anger - though that was what Rodney assumed the first time around, and the second and third times as well. The way she put it, sometimes words were just too much extra effort when it felt like the whole world was crushing your chest.

At first, Rodney hadn’t really understood. She was running a GP clinic; she wasn’t saving - or losing - any lives. It took him a little while to realise that maybe that was the problem. There was such a thing as things being too easy. It made looking back on the hard times that much more difficult.

On those days, the days where all Jen could do was lay in bed with the covers pulled up to her nose, Rodney learned how to handle it. He fixed what could be fixed. He made her tea when she said she was thirsty and didn’t get offended when she didn’t end up drinking it. He brushed her hair slowly, careful to get all the knots out without tugging too much, just like he’d done for Jeannie when they were kids. He talked for the both of them, about anything and everything, just to fill the silence.

He didn’t talk about Atlantis on those days. That was saved for nights - only nights, for some reason - when things seemed a little less bleak, and they were both up to the task of taking that part of their lives and turning it into memories. Over bottles of wine on the living room floor, they talked about Teyla and Sam, Elizabeth and Carson. That grief was easier to unpack, in the sense that it was simpler.

Ronon and John were murkier. Jen talked about Ronon with a quiet wistfulness that belied something deeper, something Rodney didn’t know about and chose - in a truly impressive show of restraint - not to ask about. It seemed only fair, considering Rodney only ever talked about John when Jen brought him up first - and even then, only the surface-level stuff: reruns of funny stories and past missions and saved lives. 

Rodney didn’t tell her about the way his heart used to seize whenever John brushed past him, or the way he used to lie awake when they were on overnight missions, sharing a tent, and listen to the sound of John’s even breathing, imagining how the rise and fall of his chest would feel beneath Rodney’s palm. He definitely didn’t tell her about the way something inside him had cracked in two the moment he’d found out that John was gone forever, that, looking back on it, he was pretty sure a part of him had died that day. Because that meant admitting that there was something of himself that he might not be able to give her, even when it felt like she was handing herself fully over to him. It felt like he was doing something wrong.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he would leave her sleeping in their bed. He would pad over to their shared closet and, as quietly as he could, push past hoodies, blazers, and cardigans to get to the last hanger, the one that held a thick orange fleece. It was a good jacket, serving him well in Russia, then Antarctica, and beyond. Warm, durable, and bulky enough that you could hide another jacket within its folds without attracting notice. 

Rodney would slide his fingers underneath the orange exterior and run them over the leather jacket concealed underneath.

He never did anything as hopelessly sentimental as put the jacket on, or - god forbid - bury his nose in the collar and imagine he could still pick up John’s scent. It was enough just to know it was here, somewhere that he could touch whenever he liked. He would capture the sleeve in between his fingertips, then coast them along the line of the inside pocket where he’d tucked away a leather corded necklace with a bone-carved pendant hanging from it and a creased leaf folded into the shape of an origami-esque bird; the same pocket where, less than a year from now, he would slip in an unsealed and unread letter signed with the initials CB. 

One night, while he was in the middle of this little ritual, he heard sheets rustling behind him. “Rodney?” Jen called groggily, and even where he was frozen with his back turned to her, he could make out the soft patting sounds of her searching his side of the bed for him.

Slowly, he tugged the fleece back over the leather jacket and pushed the whole thing into the dark of the closet before turning around. Jen was sitting up, legs pulled towards her chest and blankets pooling around her feet. Her eyes were wide open and they were fixed on him. “Are you okay?” she asked him.

“Me? I’m fine,” Rodney replied instantly. He stepped away from the closet, shutting it guiltily behind him. “I just thought I heard, um, moths.”

“Moths,” Jen echoed, and Rodney nodded vigorously.

“Mhm. They get into the clothes and eat holes in everything. It’s, uh, it’s a real nuisance.”

Jen’s eyes glinted in the darkness. “Come back to bed, hon,” she said, and Rodney complied. As he slid under the covers, wiggling his toes in the newly discovered warmth, he felt Jen’s gaze on him. “You know you don’t have to hide it away, right?”

Rodney stilled. He didn’t dare turn to face her. “The - the moths?”

Jen huffed out a gentle little laugh and shuffled closer, dropping her chin onto his shoulder. “The jacket,” she said, and Rodney clamped down on his bottom lip. She knew? She’d never said anything.

“How did you…?” he mumbled, and Jen pressed a kiss to his shoulder.

“I found it a few weeks after we moved in,” she admitted. To be fair, it wasn’t the most ingenious hiding spot. Rodney had never made a conscious effort to keep it a secret, though. It just seemed the natural thing to do. “It’s fine if you want to keep it just for yourself, I get that. But I don’t want you to feel like you need to hide it from me. There’s nothing wrong with missing John, with wanting to keep something to remember him by.”

Rodney wondered if she’d somehow recognised John’s old jacket, or if it was just that obvious who it must have belonged to. “I - I miss all of them,” he said, thinking of the other mementos he kept stashed in the jacket pocket. At the same time, though, he knew himself; he knew that the fabric of John’s sleeve was always the first thing he reached for.

Apparently, Jen knew him too, better than he’d realised. “Yeah, but John was different,” she said, like it was the simplest truth in the world. She didn’t say anything else, but Rodney’s heart was still threatening to burst out through the paper-thin skin over his chest. He’d wager she could feel it as well. It felt as damning as a confession.

But Rodney didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. If he ever spoke those words aloud, then they would become real, something he couldn’t take back, and then he wouldn’t just be struggling under the weight of the loss of a friend. It would become the loss of so much more, and god help him, but there was only so much loss Rodney could take.

So, instead, Rodney turned to face Jen, who pulled back questioningly, and buried his face in the crook of her neck. “I love you,” he said fiercely, and hoped with everything within him that it was true. 

The guilt never went away, not really. But that night, and other nights like it, when Jen pressed her body into Rodney’s, when he sank into the warmth of skin on skin and breath on lips, when they would both finish and Jen would snuggle into his side, tracing her fingertips across his chest and settling her hand down over his beating heart, it felt something like forgiveness.

When the other shoe dropped, it did so quietly and without fuss. One minute, Rodney and Jen were slowly and steadily fitting the pieces of their life together, the next she was coughing blood into a tissue. Call it paranoia, or just well-honed instinct, but right at that moment, Rodney hadn’t needed any doctors to tell him that it was the beginning of the end.

Jen was calm about it, all things considered. Too calm. Rodney was the one who jittered around their apartment, calling specialists all across the continent and reminding her to take the medication that wasn’t doing a damn thing. Jen was the one reminding him to take a breath and to please just try and get some sleep. He supposed she had guessed her own prognosis as well, in a more concrete way than Rodney’s own knee-jerk prediction. She was the medical doctor of the two of them, after all. 

To be honest, it pissed Rodney off. It was an ugly feeling, one that he wasn’t particularly proud of, but, hey, he’d never pretended to be a better person than he was. Jen was dying. The last person Rodney had left was dying, and that fucking mattered; he didn’t want them to sit around and pretend that it didn’t. It seemed unbelievably, impossibly unfair that, after everything, they could still stand to lose this much. Not just Jen, but everything that she was. Rodney had known her as the uncertain young woman who hadn’t even wanted the position she inherited. There’d been a time when her hands shook a little every time she got ready to go off-world. Now she sat in calm silence and waited to die. Atlantis had taken away her fear, and somehow, that was the most unfair thing of all.

It all came to a head the night before they left for Colorado to consult with the doctors at the SGC. They’d just come out on the other side of one of Jen’s rib-cracking coughing fits, Rodney standing uselessly with one hand hovering over her heaving back and the other clutching a glass of water as she spluttered and hacked bloody phlegm into their toilet bowl until her eyes streamed. Now, Jen was sitting on the end of their bed, legs crossed beneath her and bags under her jaundiced eyes, and Rodney paced the length of their bedroom in furious strides. “How can you be so - so calm about this?” he yelled; properly yelled. Jen didn’t even blink, just continued to stare dolefully up at him. “Seriously, you do realise what’s happening to you, right? Of course you do, of course you do, but it’s like you don’t even care! I mean, I haven’t even seen you cry once!”

“Is that what you want, Rodney?” Jen asked in a low, level voice. “Do you want me to cry all day and spend whatever time I have left miserable?”

Rodney stopped short. That was the first time either of them had ever vocalised the thought that they both evidently shared: that no matter how many doctors Rodney dragged her to, there was no coming back from this. The frozen shock didn’t last long, though. “You know what? Yeah, maybe I do,” Rodney shot back. “Maybe a bit of misery, just the tiniest bit, would actually be appropriate right about now. Just something, anything, to let me know that this actually matters to you!”

For the first time since their argument began, Jen’s placid expression cracked. “What is that even supposed to mean?” she demanded. “You think I want this? You think I want to die?”

“I don’t know, Jennifer, you tell me!” The words burst out of Rodney like an uncontrollable wave, hanging in the air between them before he even heard them in his own head. The room sank into a stunned silence. Rodney watched, open-mouthed and heart pounding against his ribcage, as Jen slowly shook her head, a series of long, low swings. Then, her chin dropped to her chest.

Her cheeks were glistening. She was crying, Rodney realised numbly. He’d gotten what he wanted. It had never felt worse.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, suddenly frightened of the sound of his own voice, and surged towards the bed and Jen. She was still crying; not making any sound with it, just letting the tears roll endlessly down her cheeks like a tap she couldn’t turn off. “I’m sorry,” he said, and sat down beside her. “I’m sorry,” he said, and threw his arms around her shoulders, pulling her in so that her head fit under his chin. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he babbled, and felt the front of his pyjama shirt grow damp.

“I don’t,” she gasped into his chest. “I - I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. But what else am I supposed to do? What …?”

She shook beneath his touch. Rodney kissed the top of her head. He said “I love you,” and “I’m sorry,” and he didn’t say anything else, because there wasn’t anything else he could say.

What else were they supposed to do? They went through the motions. The next day, they caught the plane to Colorado Springs, back at the SGC less than a year after they left. Once they were there, it felt as inevitable as gravity. Nobody else from the Atlantis expedition had been recalled, at that point, and right then Rodney didn’t think there was a single person he would want to see. They passed General Landry on their way to the infirmary, and Rodney didn’t even look his way.

The doctors ran all their tests, and then Doctor Lam came over to Jen’s corner of the infirmary and gave them the news that both of them had been waiting to hear for the better part of three months now. Complications from repeated exposure to the Hoffan drug. Resistant to any treatment, including Tok’ra healing technology. The best they could do was make Jen comfortable. They gave her about two weeks. They were very sorry.

In the end, Jen gave it as much as she had. Even years later, Rodney would wonder if it was for her sake or for his. She lasted two weeks and four days.

It passed quickly. Rodney had a lot on his mind at the time, after all. He replayed the tattered tape of the last two years over and over, the long line that began the moment John stepped through the Gate and never came out the other side. The idea for The Work came to him like a heart attack. 

Jen asked him not to do it, saying that she had no regrets, something that - no matter how hard he tried for her sake - he couldn’t understand. He made her a promise that he knew, as he said it, he wouldn’t be able to keep. 

That night, Rodney stayed long past visiting hours, a rule that he had decided when they first arrived didn’t apply to him and which he'd forced the infirmary staff to agree with through sheer force of will. He stretched himself out next to Jen in the narrow hospital bed, doing his best not to jostle all the various tubes snaking out of her frail body. The rise and fall of Jen’s chest was shallow and faltering under his heavy hand. Ironically enough, it was at that moment that he thought he understood Jen’s calm the last few months. Even if he tried to cry, he didn’t think anything would come up. The tape in his head had reached its end. There was no room for anything else. 

“I love you,” Jen whispered against his cheek, voice hoarse and nearly unrecognisable. “I need you to remember that, Rodney. It’s important that you remember; so important. Promise me.”

“I promise,” Rodney whispered back. He had a feeling that was a promise he’d be able to keep.

After Jen died, Rodney sat on the floor outside her room as the nurses cleaned her up. It hadn’t been a conscious choice; he’d stepped outside in an ear-ringing haze and the next thing he knew he was there, legs crookedly skewed out in front of him and folded hands pressed loosely against his mouth, looking out at the corridor beyond him but not seeing anything, not really. 

After a few minutes - maybe, he honestly wasn’t sure - a figure approached that was familiar enough to cut through the fog. Daniel Jackson sloped towards him, head down and hands jammed deep in his pockets, mouth stapled in a thin line. He walked slowly past Rodney, whose eyes tracked him the entire time, making it a full five paces past him before stopping. It was like watching a strange, early 20s stop-motion, the way he stiffly swung back around, still with his nose angled at the floor. Rodney blinked up at him.

“So,” Jackson said, voice distant. “There’s nothing I or anybody else can say to you that’s going to make any of this better, but for what it’s worth, I really am sorry.”

It was the kindest thing Rodney could have heard. Yeah, he thought, as he watched Jackson slowly walk away again. Yeah.

Surprising absolutely nobody, Jen’s funeral was packed.

Rodney honestly wasn’t sure how he made it between the points of standing beside Jen’s flatlining body and standing in a church in a crisp funeral suit. Credit where credit was due: none of it would have happened without Jen’s dad. Rodney and Paul Keller had never exactly clicked. The first time they’d met, they’d spent every second that Jen was out of the room staring at each other in ambivalent, clueless silence from their respective armchairs, waiting desperately for Jen to come back and rescue them from each other. From there, things had pretty much plateaued. But maybe there was something to be said about death bringing people together after all. They hardly spent any time on anything as transient as conversation, but when Rodney saw him for the first time after Jen’s death, they shared the same hollow-eyed, shambling look of understated, perpetual disbelief. Both of them had lost everything, and that was an oddly uniting experience. Somehow, stumbling together and dragging each other along, they’d managed to put together a decent funeral between the two of them. They got the works: flowers, music, even a small wake.

Rodney abandoned him at the ceremony though, letting him get sucked into the whirlpool of sobbing aunts and head-shaking college friends and all the other people in Jen’s life that Rodney had never met. He stood in the opposite corner of the church as people slowly bled in and began to take their seats. He was bracketed on either side by Jeannie and Kaleb, with a newborn Jonah fussing quietly in the sling across Kaleb's chest and an uncharacteristically morose Maddie clinging to her mother’s hand. Maddie had taken to Jen the moment she’d met her, and the feeling had been entirely mutual. Maddie had even begun calling her “Aunt Jenny.” It had seemed a bit much to Rodney at the time, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to say anything about it now. Jeannie, too, had been sniffling discreetly behind her hand since they arrived. It was strangely gratifying to know that the tears weren’t just for Rodney’s sake; Jeannie had thought Jen was great. Amazingly out of his league, but great all the same.

There was barely anybody else in the church that Rodney recognised. There were some vaguely familiar faces from Atlantis and the SGC - doctors, mostly - but he couldn’t tell you any of their names, and the most they’d all managed was a quick approach to awkwardly offer their condolences. Jeannie tugged on Rodney’s hand, the signal that it was time for them to begin the long, slow meander over to their pew at the front of the church, when a stocky figure cut through the crowd, making straight for Rodney.

“Hey, Doc,” Evan Lorne said, and Rodney froze. Lorne made quite the figure, decked out as he was in his dress blues. The shiny new Lieutenant Colonel insignia stood out proudly on his chest. Rodney’s eyes lingered on it. His first gut reaction was that it looked wrong, that it belonged on John’s chest, not Lorne’s.

He supposed this was the reward you got for surviving the Pegasus purge.

Finally, Rodney dragged his attention back to Lorne’s face. He looked exhausted, lines already wearing their way across his still-young face. He’d still been posted at Atlantis as of a week ago when Rodney was living in the SGC infirmary. He must have been fresh from Pegasus. “Um, hi. Hi,” Rodney said clumsily. It was the best his brain could come up with. He was still shocked to see Lorne at all.

“I’m really sorry, McKay. Rodney,” Lorne said, actually looking it. “Doctor Keller was a great person.”

“Y-yeah, she was.” Jen and Lorne, as far as Rodney knew, had never had more than casually friendly chit-chats in the halls of Atlantis. It utterly stumbled Rodney, the realisation that Lorne was probably here for him.

Moving so quickly that Rodney barely realised what was coming, Lorne stepped in to give him a hug. It was short but firm; a proper one too, not one of those half-hearted shoulder slaps he’d seen the other Marines give. After a second, Rodney’s hands came up to rest flatly against the expanse of Lorne’s back, drinking in his shocking warmth, and then a moment later it was over.

They weren’t friends, Rodney thought as Lorne pulled away and politely excused himself, heading over to Jen’s father. At least, he was pretty sure that they weren’t. This, he supposed, was what decent people did. He tracked Lorne’s back as he walked across the church, feeling a release of urgent relief that he’d never before have expected to feel at the sight of him, not in a million years. God, he’d never been so grateful to know a decent person.

Rodney and Jeannie and Kaleb and Maddie sat down, and a few minutes later, the service began. To be completely honest, it was hell. Jeannie squeezed his hand the entire time, but Rodney could barely feel it. A few times, he caught himself twisting his head around in a nervous tic, searching out Lorne in the sea of faces behind him. He was sitting a few rows from the back with a couple other Atlantis personnel. The second time Rodney did it, Lorne caught his eye and sent him back a small, sad smile.

It was probably a selfish thought, and more than a little twisted considering he was at his partner’s funeral, but god, Rodney had never wanted John back more than he did right then.

Jen’s father delivered the eulogy. During the preparation stage, he’d asked if Rodney wanted to do it, and Rodney had swiftly rebuffed him. What could he possibly say to this room of people when ninety percent of them didn’t have a security clearance? Next to all the things Jen had accomplished on Atlantis, anything else he could say would just sound trite in comparison. 

Jen was amazing,  Rodney imagined himself saying.  She was intelligent, and beautiful, and a million times better than I deserved. I know that she loved me, which is an achievement in itself. And I loved her too, I know that now. I didn’t just make it up. I loved her, I really, really did.

Chapter Text

There’s nothing that makes a person appreciate Canadian weather more than Colorado Springs in the summer.

Rodney adjusts the collar of his shirt, savouring the last few seconds he has in the air-conditioned shelter of his Uber before his driver politely tells him to fuck off. He’s wearing a light linen button-up, but the fabric still sits suffocatingly close in this dry heat. He wonders if he should’ve just said to hell with it and worn a t-shirt. Come to think of it, is he overdressed now? He’s a bit out of practice when it comes to these things. At least Madison’s wedding had been straightforward enough; just a regular formal affair. Rodney isn’t sure what’s considered de rigueur for senior citizen birthday celebrations.

Oh, who gives a shit. Rodney gives his collar one last miserable tug, scoops up the gift bag from the floor of the car, gives his Uber driver a curt thanks, and hops out, braving the midafternoon sun that's still glaring down unreasonably hard as he makes his way up the driveway to Lorne’s house.

He’s done well for himself, Rodney thinks as he reaches the blessed shade of the front porch and rings the doorbell, casting a cursory glance around at the maintained lawn and the hose coiled up at the end of the drive. It’s the whole nine yards; everything except the literal white picket fence. All he needs now to complete the picture is a -

An explosion of barking erupts from the other side of the screen door, and Rodney just about leaps out of his skin, whipping around to see a yellow monstrosity pawing at the fly screen, a pink tongue approximately the size of Rodney’s palm lolling out and splattering everything in a five foot radius in slobber. Oh, of course. Perfect.

Rodney stares at the dog, and the dog stares at Rodney. It looks like it’s gearing up for a full-on howl of excitement when the thud of approaching footsteps tells Rodney he’s about to be saved. “Who is it, Moose?” a familiar voice calls, and then Rodney’s knight in shining armour appears in the doorway: Evan Lorne, grinning from ear to ear and not looking a minute of his sixty-four years. 

“Rodney!” he exclaims happily, then says: “Oh, get back, c’mon,” which Rodney assumes is meant for the dog. The beast having finally been curtailed, Lorne pulls the door open and ushers Rodney inside. The moment he crosses the threshold, ‘Moose’ is on him again, in a blur of flopping tongue and wagging tail and enough fur to stuff a mattress.

“Moose,” Lorne says, the military-leader voice that Rodney remembers all too well coming out in full force. “Sit.”

Moose sits.

“Very nice,” Rodney says, eyeing the dog up as he would any worthy adversary. “Does he take marching orders too?”

Lorne snorts as he closes and locks the door behind them. “I take it you’re more of a cat person, huh?”

“Oh, you know me so well.”

Finally standing face to face in the hallway, Lorne’s smirk softens into a welcoming smile. “Glad you could make it,” he says, with no mention of the fact that Rodney is about two hours late. He’d been very careful to avoid the awkward song and dance of being one of the first arrivals. “C’mon, everyone’s out back.”

“Right.” Before they can move off into the company of others and Rodney will be forced to endure the torture of introductions and small talk, he shoves the green gift bag into Lorne’s hands. “Uh, happy birthday.”

Lorne’s brows twitch slightly. “Oh, thanks, Doc,” he says, and takes the bag readily. Rodney had expected him to abandon it wherever the pile of other birthday gifts presumably exists and open it later, but instead, he has to just stand and watch as Lorne opens it right then and there.

The moment Lorne pulls the pack of patterned origami paper out of the bag, Rodney feels flushed in a way that has nothing to do with the heat. This was a stupid idea, he’s positive of it the moment he sees the gift in Lorne’s hands. He should’ve just stuck to alcohol like a normal, self-respecting adult -

“Origami paper!” Lorne says brightly, turning the pack over to get a closer look at the pattern guide on the back.

Rodney rubs the back of his neck. “Yes. Well, I just -” he clumsily begins to explain. “I remember you used to like that sort of … stuff, back on…”

Lorne had been an origami fiend, back in the day. Paper planes too, the kind he’d used to make with John to shoot off the cafeteria balcony like the hoodlums they apparently had been, but mostly origami, all different kinds. It would’ve been annoying if his intricate handiwork hadn’t been so admittedly impressive. Well, it had still been a little annoying. Rodney used to find them everywhere. He’s willing to bet that, tens of thousands of years in the future when John steps out of that Stargate and they’re all long dead, he’ll still find a couple of origami birds lying around somewhere. 

“Yeah, yeah, I remember,” Lorne said, nodding enthusiastically. “Miko and I used to spend hours doing that together. Oh man, I haven’t done it in ages.” He looks back up at Rodney, eyes crinkling in what Rodney thinks might actually be genuine delight. “Thanks, McKay.”

Rodney finds this almost more uncomfortable than if Lorne had laughed in his face. “Uh, you’re welcome,” he says, and Lorne claps him on the shoulder, guiding him through the short hallway into a large open-plan house, dining room and kitchen feeding into one another and divided from the living room with a deliberately placed bookshelf. The glass sliding doors that line the back of the kitchen are wide open, spilling out onto a wide wooden deck and grassy backyard where about fifteen other people are chatting and milling around. Moose, the monster dog, trails demurely behind them. He sneaks a lick at Rodney’s dangling fingers, and Rodney stuffs them into his pocket.

“Hey, Dave, look who showed up!” Lorne calls over to the figure Rodney has just noticed adding nuts to a charcuterie board on the kitchen island. “You remember Dave, right?” he asks back over his shoulder at Rodney. “David Parrish? Doctor Parrish?”

Parrish turns around. Rodney takes a brief moment to appreciate the fact that he’s aged worse than both of them. He has barely any hair, for one. “Oh. Sure,” he says.

“Doctor McKay!” Parrish exclaims, sticking out a hand and shaking Rodney’s so vigorously he can feel his teeth rattling a bit. The guy had always been a bit intense. “Now there’s a face I haven’t seen in a long time!”

The handshake finally ends. “You - I … Yeah,” Rodney replies spectacularly. He’s not seen or heard from David fucking Parrish from the Atlantis botany department once in more than twenty-six years, and he’s thought about him just as often. At least Rodney remembered that he and Lorne had gotten married. He’d gotten a wedding invitation and everything. He hadn’t gone, obviously, but he’s pretty sure he’d sent them a toaster or something like that.

But apparently, he’s been making Lorne happy all this time, so that’s … nice. It really is actually quite nice. Wonders never cease.

“Can I offer you a drink?” Parrish asks.

“Yes,” Rodney says quickly. Then: “Please.”

“I’ve got it,” Lorne cuts in, pressing his hand to the small of Parrish’s back as he leans in. “Looks like you’ve got your hands full.” He steals a wedge of brie from the board, bouncing his eyebrows cheekily. Parrish lets out a gasp of mock offence, and Lorne responds by pressing a quick kiss to his forehead, right above his left eyebrow. It’s all so incredibly domestic. Rodney looks away. 

But then Lorne is pulling away and crossing to the fridge. “Beer?” he calls over his shoulder at Rodney.

“That’ll work,” Rodney says.

That elicits a snort from Lorne, whose head is still buried in the fridge. “Don’t worry, there’s stronger stuff on the menu.” He straightens up with a low groan and pops the cap off the bottle of some American-brand beer that Rodney doesn’t recognise, handing it over. “We’re just keeping it kosher til the kids go home.”

Rodney, holding the cool glass of the bottle tight in his palm, feels the way that his face visibly blanches at that. There Lorne goes again, smirking the same way he had as a man twenty-six years younger. “Our grandkids,” he explains. “Don’t worry, they’re more scared of you than you are of them, I promise.” He shakes his head wryly. “You and Radek both, I swear.”

Rodney tries not to react at all to that. He knows Zelenka is here. Lorne knows that he knows Zelenka is here. He’d made sure to specifically tell Rodney so when he’d first messaged him today’s invitation, in a way that couldn’t have been more pointed if he’d tried. The very fact that Rodney had been invited to this birthday, which is a first in nearly three decades, can only be because Lorne knows that he and Zelenka have … reconnected? Reconciled? Finally aired their grievances without outright murdering each other? Whatever you want to call it.

Still, he can’t stop the way his eyes immediately begin searching through the small gathering in the backyard. Plenty of faces he doesn’t recognise - and there are the children, oh Christ - and then, standing slightly apart from the others on the edge of the lawn with a drink in hand, is Zelenka.

Lorne follows his gaze, not even blinking at where it’s settled. “Like I said, everyone’s out there,” he says, then eyes Rodney up knowingly. “I’ll leave you to it, then?”

Rodney knows what that means. That means that Parrish had been the first and only mandatory greeting, and Lorne won’t be subjecting him to the special torture that is dragging him around and introducing him to every single person at the party. God, he thinks Lorne might be his favourite person in the whole world.

Lorne has gone back to Parrish, murmuring something in his ear while resting a broad hand on the back of his neck, so Rodney makes a quick escape outside. The heat hits as sharp and brutal as a slap across the face, and Rodney takes a sip of cold beer to fortify himself before squaring his shoulders and embarking on his mission. He knows Zelenka has noticed him - he’d seen the way the man had straightened abruptly when he’d stepped out onto the deck - and he’s resolved to be entirely normal and mature about it. He’s going to go up and say hello, like it hasn’t been close to three months since they’d last laid eyes on each other, and like Zelenka blowing in and out of his life those two weeks hadn’t nearly sent him into a mental breakdown of truly epic proportions.

With that in mind, a birthday party for a mutual friend seems like the perfect place for them to meet again. They’ve dealt with all the messy, personal stuff, and now they can embark on a new era of distant amicability. All Rodney has to do now is prove that he’s capable of that.

He walks down the three steps leading from the deck to the lawn, then marches across the grass until he’s right in front of Zelenka. For a second, they stare at each other in mutually bewildered silence, an odd, sweat-soaked mirror of the night that Zelenka had shown up unannounced on his doorstep, and then Rodney thrusts his hand out. “Hi,” he says.

“Hello,” Zelenka says eventually, giving Rodney’s hand a slow shake. He’s wearing one of those hideous flannel lumberjack-style outfits, the ones he’d always sported whenever they were permitted casual wear on Atlantis. It definitely makes Rodney feel overdressed in comparison - but judging by everybody else at the party, he’d actually been closer to the mark. Zelenka, apparently, just hadn’t cared about dress codes. Rodney wishes he’d remembered that was an option. Christ, he’s really out of practice. 

“Is good to see you,” Zelenka says, rolling his beer bottle between his palms. “Evan was not sure if you would come.”

“Neither was I,” Rodney replies honestly, and that makes Zelenka smile. As if to prove his point, a child suddenly begins to wail behind him, and the both of them wince in unison. Rodney wheels around, unconsciously stepping back to stand by Zelenka’s side as two of whom he assumes are the famed grandchildren, the little ones, begin sloppily shoving each other into the grass. An adult swiftly steps in, taking the taller, pudgier child of the two inside for some literal and metaphorical cooldown time, and Rodney heaves a sigh of relief. Instantly, he’s gratified to remember that Zelenka isn’t going to give him crap for it.

“Why did you come?” Zelenka asks as the noise dies back down.

Rodney cocks an eyebrow, more out of habit than genuine offence. “What, I’m not allowed to be sociable?”

Zelenka doesn’t rise to the bait. “Allowed? Yes. But is not exactly your style.”  Not in the last two decades, anyway,  is the unspoken addendum.

It’s a fair question, one that has more than one answer. There’s the fact that he’s pretty sure, after all these years, he and Lorne have become friends, and after everything Lorne has done for him, Rodney feels like he owes him at least a paltry effort. Another part of the truth - which Rodney can at least somewhat admit to himself even if he doesn’t dare say it out loud - is that learning that Zelenka would be in attendance had been a firm and unshakeable pull, even if Rodney had no idea what that would actually mean for him once he saw him again. There had been a vague, stubborn notion that the way they’d left things had felt unfinished, but Rodney can’t say what else they have left for each other. Their last meeting had been tacit permission for both of them to move on with their lives. Maybe that’s what had been tugging at Rodney: a desire to show that he can.

Instead, Rodney goes for the easiest truth. “My sister is being pretty insistent about me having some kind of a life now,” he says. “Now that I don’t have work of timeline-altering importance to be doing, being an ageing recluse just doesn’t have the same charm, apparently.”

The smile that Zelenka gives him at that is quite possibly the brightest, most incandescent thing he’s ever seen pass over the man’s face. It freaks Rodney out a little, like Zelenka’s seeing something that Rodney hadn’t opened up for him to see.

He gives the yard around them an uneasy glance. All at once, the heat punching down on his face is that much more unbearable, the sweat gathering around his collar is stickier, his new shoes are too tight around his feet. He’s pretty sure he’s collecting stares too; curious glances from other partygoers that are dogging him like summer flies. 

That had been an excellent question from Zelenka, actually. Why has he done this to himself?

“Hey, would you just - here -” Rodney mutters, and slams his beer bottle into Zelenka’s free hand, already backing away towards the deck and the house waiting beyond.

“Rodney?” Zelenka asks, concerned routine all warmed up and ready to go, but Rodney just shakes his head.

“I’ll, um, I’ll be back - don’t touch my drink! I’ll know.”

He’s not sure, but he’s pretty sure those stares from the yard follow him into the house. 

The cool air of the kitchen is a welcome relief, but Rodney still feels tightly wound. He regrets abandoning his beer with Zelenka; he could really use a drink right this second to loosen up his throat. Parrish is still in the kitchen, arranging little rounds of salami on his board, and he gives Rodney a curious look. What a grand way to re-make his acquaintance after all these years.

“Bathroom?” Rodney asks lamely, and Parrish points out the way with an easy smile.

Once inside, Rodney shuts the door and shuffles over to the sink, leaning against the vanity with a sigh. The bathroom is decked out in black and white tile, very hotel-room-chic, and the water is blissfully cold as Rodney runs the tap and splashes his face, trying to get a grip on himself. He dries himself off with a hand towel and lifts his head to meet his own eyes in the mirror. God, he looks like somebody’s grandfather. Not even a fun, genial grandfather in the way Lorne seems to be; he looks like the spectre that hunches in the corner of every family gathering, hoarding the olive bowl and grumbling to himself while all the children pull faces when he isn’t looking. He looks like his own grandfather had, actually - and god, isn’t that a grim thought?

He runs an experimental hand through his grey hair. To be fair, he’d been perfectly content being the family ghoul at Madison’s wedding. Of course, it had helped that nobody had held any expectations for him then: he’d shown his face, given Madison a kiss on the forehead and a fumbling compliment on her new wife who he’d never met but who had done the job of affixing a permanent smile on his niece’s face, and polished off a healthy slice of cake before calling it a night. 

Is Lorne expecting anything from him today? Is Zelenka? Rodney doesn’t think so, but he can’t be certain, not with all the baggage he’s carried into this house. At the wedding, he’d been nothing but Jeannie’s cranky older brother and Madison’s kooky uncle. Here - at least to the people who matter - he’s Doctor Rodney McKay, survivor of Atlantis.

Maybe he’s paid his dues already. He’s shown up, wished Lorne a happy birthday, and given him his present; maybe he can get away with making up some excuse calling him away and then go hide at Jeannie’s for a day or two so he doesn’t completely waste a plane ticket. Oh, he can imagine what Jeannie would think about that, he muses wryly. She’s already made it pretty clear just how unimpressed she is with how he’d handled Zelenka’s visit. If he’d ever let his sister’s disapproval dictate his life though, he’d have never gotten very far at all, so that thought doesn’t phase him too much.

But he really doesn’t want to find out if Lorne can pull off that kicked-puppy look as well as he could back in the day, especially not on his birthday. And besides, Zelenka is still out there, holding his beer. Even as he considers making a run for it, Rodney flinches away from the thought of leaving Zelenka thinking that it was because of him. Rodney isn’t sure if that’s a matter of pride or of compassion, but he decides it doesn’t matter as long as he doesn’t think about it too much.

Feeling sufficiently resigned to - if not fortified in - his decision, Rodney exits the bathroom and braves the heat of the backyard once again. Instantly, his eyes are searching out Zelenka, feet already pulling him back to the place they’d greeted each other, but before he can make heads or tails of the shifted guest arrangements or even get a foot away from the deck’s stairs, he notices a decidedly not-Zelenka-looking figure pulling away from the main group and making a beeline for him.

Fuck .

“Doctor McKay?” the vaguely familiar-looking young man asks eagerly, eyes bright. Stocky, fair, all dimples and blue eyes - he looks, Rodney realises, almost exactly like a younger Evan Lorne. It doesn’t do much to ease his apprehension. 

“Uh.” He shoots another desperate glance around him for Zelenka. “Yes?”

The man’s smile grows, somehow, wider. “Oh, wow. It’s an honour to finally meet you.” He sticks out his hand, which Rodney bemusedly takes. “I’m Johnathan Lorne; Evan and Dave’s son. My dads have told me a lot about you. Well, as much as they’re allowed to, anyway.” He chuckles, smiling expectantly.

Whatever it is exactly that the kid is expecting, he isn’t going to get it, because all Rodney can manage right now is a slack-jawed stare. “Johnathan,” he says flatly. “Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

Johnathan’s smile falters. It’s at that moment that Zelenka blows in out of nowhere, appearing at Rodney’s shoulder and giving Johnathan a warm smile before handing Rodney’s beer bottle back to him. Rodney clutches onto it like a goddamn lifeline. “I see you have met Doctor McKay,” Zelenka says and lays a reassuring hand on ‘Johnathan’s’ arm. “Is okay,” he continues in an affected tone. “Rodney is not how he used to be, you know?” He taps the mouth of his beer bottle against his temple, lowering his voice to a stage whisper. “Senile.”

Rodney swiftly turns his glare on Zelenka. “How did I forget how annoying you are?” he says snippily, though he can’t deny that he’s not relieved at the rescue. Zelenka beams.

“Well, um - like I said, it’s nice to meet you,” Johnathan stammers out, and then makes a quick escape. Rodney watches him go, still shaking his head in disbelief, then immediately rounds on Zelenka.

“Seriously?”

Zelenka continues to smile his not-so-innocent smile. “Would you rather I say you are terribly antisocial instead? That was Evan’s boy you just embarrassed, you know.”

“No, I -” Rodney takes a second to feel mildly guilty about that. He honestly hadn’t come here intending to make his host’s children uncomfortable. “I’m talking about - Lorne named his kid John? ”

Zelenka slants his mouth. “He has an uncle called Johnathan, I think.”

“Oh, sure he does.” Rodney shakes his head. He tries to imagine how John would’ve reacted to finding out that his 2IC named his kid after him, and as he pictures it - the flustered, disastrous amalgamation of confused pride and on-the-spot mortification that John’s stupid, stunted self would’ve barely been able to form into words - Rodney can’t help but begin to laugh. It bubbles out of him as he envisions the exact pinched look John would get between his eyebrows while staring down at baby Johnathan, and soon he’s nearly shaking with it.

Zelenka looks a little alarmed, and that only makes Rodney laugh harder. What can he say? His nerves are already jangled; might as well lean into the crazy. “Oh my god, can you - can you imagine his - his face -” he wheezes, and Zelenka’s lips begin to twitch upward.

“Leave Johnathan alone,” he says, voice catching on his own barely suppressed mirth. “He is good boy.”

“I’m sure John is just great,” Rodney says, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He looks back out at the people in the garden, scanning the sea of faces - more than a few of whom are sending curious looks his way. “Alright, where are the rest of the little fuckers. I know he had more than one - aha!” He spots a woman with those same unmistakable Lorne genes, holding the hand of one of the little boys who’d gotten into a squabble earlier. “There’s Teyla!” he cackles. “He just needs to get them to call one of the grandkids ‘Ronon’ and the whole gang’ll be here!”

Zelenka is full-body laughing now too, hiding his mouth in his sleeve as his shoulders jerk up and down. “You have gone senile,” he says affectionately. “Completely mad.”

It catches Rodney by surprise, the realisation that he's sharing a laugh with Zelenka, and it's enough to calm him down a little. At some point during this exchange however, Lorne and Parrish came outside, and now Lorne sidles up to them, the original dimples on full display as he shoots them a crooked grin. “What’s so funny?” he asks, and all Rodney and Zelenka can do is exchange a wordless glance before they’re laughing again.

As promised, once afternoon fades into evening and then further into night, the guests with children begin to take their leave and Lorne and Parrish break out the hard liquor. Consequently, the night becomes a lot more bearable. Rodney is sitting at the long table on the deck, a slice of mud cake and a glass of bourbon and coke in front of him, and Zelenka next to him. Zelenka has come and gone throughout the night, occasionally drifting off to talk to Lorne, or Parrish, or one of their children, but he always seems to find his way back to Rodney's side, or else Rodney finds his way to his, certain as a fish at the end of a hook. Rodney won’t admit it to anybody, and he certainly isn’t going to examine it himself, but he can’t deny that the proximity is a strange comfort. Right now, they’re watching Parrish on the other side of the deck, where he’s passing what looks like a freshly rolled blunt around to the huddle of people around him. Fucking botanists.

They haven’t fought, he and Zelenka. Nothing overtly tumultuous has passed between them, even after Lorne made a passing reference to Carson earlier. There’s a lingering unease, caught in the way Zelenka always seems to hesitate when Rodney steps up to his side, an element of stiltedness in their back and forth that makes it feel a bit like rehearsing lines from a play you last performed in high school. Compared to where they have been, though, it’s a breeze. Rodney keeps expecting Zelenka to say something that will put the bite back into his mouth, or for it to rise unprovoked; three months of fresh loneliness curdling into bitterness at the sight of him. But it’s starting to seem like their last meeting had well and truly burst that twenty-six-year-old blister. The pus has drained away, and now only broken skin and a tender scab remains behind.

“Your husband is getting stoned,” Zelenka says airily as Lorne shuffles over to them, setting down a bottle of single malt whiskey on the table and taking a seat across from the two of them. Rodney drains the dregs of his bourbon, chases it with a sheath of chocolate icing, and lets Lorne fill his glass with the dusky amber liquid. 

Lorne looks up at Parrish, who gives them all a cheery wave. The person taking the joint from him, Rodney realises with abject bewilderment, is his college-aged daughter. He briefly entertains the notion of sharing any sort of illicit substance with his father back when he was still alive, and he comes up laughably empty. 

“Typical,” Lorne mutters with no small amount of fondness. “I hope he offered to share it with you two, at least.”

“Oh, please don’t give him any ideas,” Rodney says, alarmed. “I hate that stuff. It makes me cough, and - and I get all paranoid.”

“More paranoid, you mean?” Lorne says playfully, balancing his filled glass against his lips.

“Oh, ha ha ha. Still a paragon of wit, I see.”

As one, they drink from their glasses. The whiskey hits the back of Rodney’s throat, heady and dazzling, and he only splutters a bit as it sizzles its way down into his belly. He’s not really a spirit guy, generally speaking, but he knows when to make an exception. This is some top-notch stuff.

Judging by the way he’s thrown his back, sinking back into his chair in pure satisfaction, Lorne agrees. Zelenka swirls his drink around, looking smug. “I told you this one is good,” he says, and Lorne, who has just set his glass back down, throws his hands into the air.

“Alright, yes, you were right.” He levels a stern finger in Zelenka’s direction. “But I maintain that you bought this for your own benefit, not mine.”

“Is it so bad that I have taste?”

“You? Taste?” Rodney scoffs. “I remember the radioactive piss you used to brew up on Atlantis.” He’s so caught up in the rush of making fun of Zelenka that it takes him a second to realise that this is, he thinks, the first time he’s ever willingly been the first to broach the topic of Atlantis, much less in such a casual way. He waits for that old, familiar dread to coil up inside his lungs, and finds himself releasing a curious exhale when he realises it isn’t coming. There’s just a faint ache, like the sensitive skin of a healing sunburn.

“Both of you liked my radioactive piss,” Zelenka replies loftily, putting on an atrocious Canadian accent for the last part. “Everybody did. It made good bartering chip.”

It’s true. Zelenka’s swill had always been making the rounds in the trade of Atlantis contraband. It helped that nothing in the galaxy - except possibly Athosian wine - could get you more quickly and uproariously drunk; on Atlantis, that had been a prized commodity.

“Should’ve made me some of that for my birthday,” Lorne says with a loose and lazy grin.

“Next year - if you are nice enough to me.”

“Hmmph.”

Everything passes easily between the two of them. It reminds Rodney of - well, he would say himself and John, but he’s still not quite willing to go there, and he’s certainly not picking up any latent sexual frustration from either one of them. He and Carson, maybe. It’s a little disorienting. Had they always been like this? Rodney doesn’t think so. Rodney doesn’t even really remember Zelenka and Lorne being friends. It’s hard to pull apart what’s fact and what’s memory coloured by Rodney’s own biases. So much of what Rodney remembers of Zelenka is through the lens of that last, awful year; all the moments he’d forced himself to replay again and again until he can’t even say how accurate they are anymore. Rodney is, quite abruptly, furious at himself for this, for tainting such sensitive, finite data.

He sips his whiskey and lets it burn.

Someone slides open the glass door from the kitchen, stepping out into the lamplight of the deck. It’s Johnathan. He heads to the group smoking by the stairs first, exchanging words and handshakes and hugs. Then he makes for the table. Rodney bites the inside of his cheek.

“Hey, we’re actually gonna head off,” Johnathan says to Lorne, whose grey eyebrows come down.

“I thought you were going to stay the night?”

“Yeah, I know, but Rachel’s feeling a bit sick and she’d really just prefer to sleep in her own bed, y’know? She’s getting Luna into the car at the moment. Sorry, I know it’s…”

“No, no.” Lorne is standing up. “Thanks for coming. I’ll see you Saturday.” Father and son embrace. Then, as Johnathan pulls away, Zelenka stands up.

He pulls Johnathan in for a quick hug as well, which Rodney isn’t expecting, but it’s the: “Good to see you, Uncle Radek,” from Johnathan that really catches him off guard. Zelenka smiles, patting him fondly on the cheek, and then Johnathan is turning to Rodney. Rodney hasn’t stood up, obviously, and he freezes with his glass halfway to his lips when Johnathan gives him an awkward smile. “Um, it was nice to meet you, Doctor McKay.”

Rodney is not at all confident that he’ll be able to keep himself from laughing again if he opens his mouth, so he settles for raising his glass in an inexplicable little toast. Johnathan blinks a couple of times, but thankfully he’s seemingly not simple, because he takes that as his cue to leave.

Immediately, Rodney snaps his head around to Zelenka, who has retaken his seat and is contently nursing his drink. “Uncle Radek?” He feels almost betrayed. “You hate kids!”

‘Uncle Radek’ just shrugs his shoulders, like this isn’t an utterly dumbfounding revelation. “Like I say, he is good boy.”

Lorne chuckles into his glass. “Johnny and Liv adored him from day dot. Eventually, they wore him down.”

In an inexcusably sentimental moment that makes Rodney want to down the rest of his glass in one go, he wonders for a split second if Teyla’s child would’ve called him Uncle Rodney. God, John would’ve gotten such a kick out of that. He shakes himself out of the stupid thought. “So you two have actually been…” he vaguely waves at the space between the two of them. “..Doing the whole friend thing this entire time?”

“The whole friend thing?” Lorne echoes, the corner of his mouth lifting up into a craggy grin as Zelenka chuckles into his drink. “Yeah, I s’pose you could call it that. Radek somehow conned me into being best man at his wedding, if you consider that a friend thing.”

That vital tidbit of information is nearly lost in the sarcasm, but Rodney catches it, and his eyes practically bulge out of his skull. “What? You weren’t married.” He stares Zelenka down with a burning gaze. “You were married? ”

Lorne’s jaw has dropped too. “Wait, you didn’t know?” He turns to Zelenka. “I thought you said you caught him up on everything those two weeks in Toronto. How did you forget an entire marriage ?”

“Details,” Zelenka scoffs. 

“It was three years, you maniac.”

“We had more important things to talk about!” Zelenka says, waving a hand dismissively. “I don’t think Rodney was wanting to know these things then.”

Okay, in all fairness, if Zelenka had dropped this on him when they’d first reconnected, he’d have probably given him a very long and definitive list of the reasons why he didn’t care. That time has passed, however, and now Rodney has about fifty thousand questions. As he digests the use of past tense, his eyes automatically go to Zelenka’s ring finger, which is conspicuously bare. “Oh my god,” he says, stomach lurching. “She - she didn’t die, did she?”

Zelenka’s eyes go wild before a startled laugh stutters out of him. “No, no,” he says hurriedly. “Matej is not dead. He is in Liberec, doing quite well I think.”

Rodney lets himself slump back into his chair for half a second before curiosity starts rearing its insistent little head again. The ‘he’ reveal doesn’t surprise Rodney as much as it maybe should, considering he’d known Zelenka for five years and never seen him with a man - but he’d never seen him with women either, to be fair. Truthfully, Zelenka could’ve fucked half the men on Atlantis and Rodney probably wouldn’t have noticed. 

The confirmation of all this leaves a heavy feeling draping over Rodney’s back. Zelenka hadn’t just been existing outside of Rodney’s memory all these years; he’d had a life. He’d gotten married and then divorced. He’d been having barbecues with Lorne and getting called ‘uncle’ by his kids. He’d done all those things that people their age are supposed to have done so that they can talk about it when they’re sitting around drinking whiskey with their friends. Rodney feels, stronger than ever before, the distant hollowness of realising that something has slipped through his hands that he’ll never be able to get back.

He’d gotten something far better in return, he reminds himself sternly. He’d gotten to save a timeline.

“Okay, so - well, what happened?” Rodney asks, shaking off the weighted blanket of his own thoughts. “What, he didn’t like the pigeons?”

Zelenka huffs. “Matej loved my pigeons, actually,” he says with an affronted sniff. When Lorne gives him an inscrutable look across the table, Zelenka sighs, turning his palms up on the table. “No, Matej was decent man. He did his best with me. It is just … He did not understand my troubles. How could he? I could not tell him even if I wished to.” He shakes his head forlornly. “After everything that we went through, how can a marriage survive with someone who knows none of it? I do not think it is possible.”

A sombre silence blankets the table, each of them gazing into their drinks as if the whiskey might hold the answers. Lorne, Rodney realises ruefully, is one of the lucky ones. Dave Parrish had been his ticket out of loneliness. Rodney thinks of Jen, and then - treacherously but inevitably - of John. Maybe, in a different life, he might’ve been considered lucky too.

“God,” Lorne says in a hushed voice. “It’ll be twenty-eight years soon.” The words hang viscous and ugly in the dim light between them. Twenty-eight years. Not counting back to when the Atlantis expedition was abandoned, but to when they’d lost John. Rodney doesn’t think he could count it any other way, and he feels a visceral stab of gratitude that Lorne is the same. 

Lorne shakes his head, letting out a shaky breath, and as his weathered fingers wrap snugly around his glass, for the first time that night Rodney thinks that he’s showing his age. “It’s really just us left,” he says, so softly that for a moment Rodney thinks it’s just his own thoughts echoing in his head. “It’s just us.”

Ford, Elizabeth, John, Teyla, Sam, Ronon, Jen, Carson. There are others, of course, who scattered to the winds when the expedition had been disbanded and who are presumably still out there somewhere - but everybody that had ever formed the true foundations of Atlantis in Rodney’s head is gone, all gone. Everyone except for the three of them.

Zelenka is silent, head bowed into his glass, and the heels of Rodney’s palms are numb from where he’s driven them into the tabletop. Lorne shakes his head once more, heaves out a sigh, and then, with an achingly slow hand, raises his glass. “To Atlantis,” he says quietly.

Rodney can barely hear the subdued clinking of their glasses over the painful thudding of his own heart.

The night has taken a decidedly chilly turn, which Rodney would be grateful for if it weren't for the fact that he isn’t dressed for it. The few stragglers who haven’t yet said their goodbyes have begun migrating inside, and Rodney follows suit, fruitlessly tugging the sleeves of his shirt down. The ground is languidly treadmilling under his feet as he makes the slow shuffle from the deck to the kitchen, leaving a cushiony feeling beneath his shoes. He’s drunk, he realises, properly drunk, for the first time in … God, he doesn’t even know how long.

He braces himself against the kitchen island for a woozy second, feeling a little lost in the suddenly quiet house. Lorne’s daughter is there, rooting around in their fridge, so Rodney only has mere moments to make his escape before she looks up and realises he’s there. Eventually, he decides to amble towards what he remembers being the living room. From where he’s standing, he can’t see anybody else in there.

Rodney is proven wrong the second he steps past the divider into the room and sees Zelenka scrunched into the corner of one of the chestnut-coloured sofas. He’s reclined against the cushions, gazing drowsily at the mantlepiece in front of him. Moose is wedged in between the sofa and the coffee table, standing up with his head resting on Zelenka’s knee, chocolate brown eyes gazing dolefully up at him like Zelenka is his best friend in the entire world.

Making as little noise as possible and walking as straight as he can, Rodney takes a seat on the other edge of the sofa. Some distant part of him is aware that being drunk and alone in a room with Zelenka is a dangerous idea, but the living room has a cosy warmth to it that is tugging Rodney’s eyelids and bones down with the weight of gravity, and besides, Zelenka doesn’t look in the mood to engage in any sort of confrontation. 

The sofa is deliciously soft, and Rodney lets out an inadvertent sigh of satisfaction as he sinks back into it. Zelenka glances over at the sound, the first indication that he’s noticed Rodney’s presence, and offers him a sleepy half-smile. Rodney rolls his head to meet his gaze. Moose had twitched in his direction for a second as well, but now his focus is solely back on Zelenka.

“You like dogs too, then,” Rodney says.

Zelenka lets out a derisive huff. “I have not much choice in the matter,” he says. Even so, his fingers are slowly carding through the fur on Moose’s ears, massaging them in lazy circles. “Nice night, hmm?”

“Mmm,” Rodney hums in agreement, fingers coursing over the leather of the couch. “Who has birthday parties in their sixties, anyway?”

Zelenka makes a thoughtful sound. “People who had good childhoods, I think.”

Rodney finds himself chuckling. His gaze wanders, flitting across the room. What he recognises as Lorne’s art decorates most of the walls. Tight-ass security protocols have presumably stopped him from hanging up anything as blatantly otherworldly as Atlantis herself, which Rodney remembers being one of Lorne’s favoured subjects, but there are still traces of Pegasus that only the trained eye would recognise: the landscape artwork on the far wall is dotted with the purple-speckled peony-type flowers that had been native to PX2-973, and the more abstract piece hanging over the mantle is framed with an irregular blossoming of multi-coloured shapes that Rodney remembers from some of the stained glass windows in the central tower.

The room is absolutely choking on photographs as well. Frames clutter every available surface. Most are of the Lorne-Parrish children at varying ages, as well as ones of them all with people who look like they could be the rest of Lorne and Parrish’s respective families. A few others jump out at him though: some of a far younger Parrish with various members of the Atlantis botany department, and a couple of Lorne with whom Rodney vaguely recognises as the other members of AR-2. On a sideboard near the entrance of the living room is one of Lorne and Zelenka, younger than they are now but both with the beginnings of grey in their hair. Lorne has his arm wrapped tight around Zelenka’s shoulders, and Zelenka is wearing a crooked smile as he leans in close.

It occurs to Rodney right then that there may well be a photo or two of John in this house. Carson too. Maybe even Ronon, who used to spend a surprising amount of time silently painting with Lorne. He decides to stop looking. That’s not something he can face with this much booze in his system.

Instead, he lets his eyes return to Zelenka. The other man looks about ready to fall asleep right there. The sight of it shakes loose another memory from the vault, one that Rodney hadn’t even realised he had. It had been common practice back on Atlantis for the scientists to sleep in the labs when they were working overtime on particularly arduous projects, or else when the trip back to their living quarters seemed like too much of an ask. They’d had foldable cots set up for that exact reason, with stacks of spare pillows and blankets ready to go. Rodney had spent more nights than he can remember dozing to the rhythmic beeping of various instruments; he’d taken sleep wherever he could get it in those days, even if he’d much preferred his own bed. 

Not Zelenka though, who’d had a whole complex about sleeping around other people. If there was ever a time that he couldn’t make it back to his own quarters at a reasonable hour, he’d hole up in his office with the door locked, or else prop himself up against one of the benches, blinking hazily and shivering with exhaustion until Kusanagi or someone else took pity on him and shepherded him back to his own room. Rodney is pretty sure Zelenka would have sooner curled up in one of the vents than willingly slept in full view of the other scientists.

Rodney had never given it much thought, chalking it up to just another Zelenka idiosyncrasy. In those moments, Zelenka had reminded Rodney of a cat. The thing about cats is they don’t sleep just anywhere, but choose places where they feel familiar and comfortable. Safe. That comparison had left Rodney feeling a lot of indecipherable things when one night, somewhere in the middle of their fourth year on Atlantis, he and Zelenka had found themselves alone in the labs - Zelenka, swaying on his feet, had feebly asked if Rodney would be staying to work through the rest of the night and, when Rodney had nodded, made a small noise of contentment before immediately dropping his head onto his folded arms, slumping over the desk and falling asleep within seconds.

Zelenka looks like he’s fighting to stay awake now, and despite his blinking and yawning he still manages to catch Rodney’s gaze. Another smile crosses his face: smaller, shyer. “I really am glad you came,” he says softly, and Rodney feels his cheek pinken a little as he shrugs. Zelenka blinks slowly behind his glasses. “I had … I had worried that I had made a mistake by coming to see you. That I had hurt you more, and … you would never want to see me again.”

Rodney’s eyes briefly slip closed. Their last meetings had hurt, of course they had, but all of that is relative, isn’t it? Parts of it, he thinks, might have been a good kind of hurt. What was it Zelenka had said? Like flushing dirt from a wound. “I don’t regret seeing you again,” he answers after a long moment and opens his eyes to see Zelenka’s lashes flutter. “It was … good, I guess. Or, I mean, it needed to happen. Something like that.” He thinks about sitting on that bench, watching Zelenka walk away for what he’d thought might have been the last ever time, and he tips his head to stare up at the ceiling. He’s too drunk to stop himself from speaking, but he can’t look at Zelenka’s face while he says this. “I didn’t think you’d … not want me to never want to see you again.” He frowns. That hadn’t come out right, he’s pretty sure. Judging by Zelenka’s silence, he’s busy trying to parse it as well. “You left,” he tries to clarify. “You … you went back home after we …You left.”

For years, it’s felt like only sharp-edged things know how to come out of Rodney’s mouth, but these words are nothing if not plaintively soft; they feel like they’re flinching embarrassedly back on themselves the moment they emerge. For a moment, Rodney misses the anger. Being angry at Zelenka had been, at the very least, soothing in its simplicity. But every time he fishes around for that spark, memories - of Zelenka shaking in his living room while he screamed that Rodney had walked away too, or of Zelenka on a park bench on a pale afternoon, whispering that he was sorry - emerge to douse it.

When he finally forces himself to turn back, he sees the strange look on Zelenka’s face: somewhere between a frown and a smile. “Ah, Rodney,” he murmurs. “I am never knowing what you want from me.” Rodney squints. Zelenka flashes forlorn, hound-dog eyes at him in return. “I was giving you space. I thought is what you wanted.” 

Rodney shrugs moodily, looking away as he fidgets self-consciously with the tassels of the cushion he's pulled against his stomach. Who the hell knows what he wants anymore? Certainly not him. His head swivels right back around, though, when he catches sight of Zelenka quietly shooing Moose away and leaning forward, elbows on knees, to look right at Rodney. “Listen to me,” he says with an intensity entirely unmatched by the volume he’s speaking at. “You know that -” His tongue darts out over his carefully pursed lips. “I am not gone. I am here. You are understanding me?”

It comes out almost like an offering; or, at least, that’s what it sounds like to Rodney.

“Right,” Rodney says, carefully turning the words over in his head. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Zelenka echoes in a whisper.

They’re left staring at each other for a few long seconds. The moment is broken by a quiet commotion behind them, and Rodney twists around to see Lorne crossing the room on his way to the stairs, one arm wrapped around Parrish’s waist as he drags his husband along. Lorne flashes the two of them a fondly put-upon smile. “Liv just left, so I’d say this thing is officially wrapped up,” he says. “I’m putting the great lug to bed.” Parrish mumbles something incomprehensible at that, wriggling closer to smush his face into the crook of Lorne’s neck, and Lorne’s eyes crinkle with naked affection. “Your room’s all sorted, Radek.”

“Thank you, Váňa,” Zelenka mumbles sleepily, melting back into the couch cushions with his eyes half closed.

“That goes for you too, Rodney. Second guest bedroom is first left on the landing.”

Rodney blinks. “I, um - I was going to get a hotel room.” Of course, that plan had been made before he’d found himself tipsy and half asleep on his host’s couch.

Lorne seems to read his mind, smirking. “Don’t be stupid, McKay.” Then he continues on to the staircase. As they make their way up, Rodney can hear him murmuring soft reassurances in Parrish’s ear.

Rodney sinks back against the sofa, still blinking in belated surprise. Zelenka lets out an amused huff. “So bossy, isn’t he?”

“Military,” Rodney remarks darkly. From the other side of the couch, he hears a muffled laugh.

Rodney’s guest room - which, judging by the conspicuously adolescent shade of blue it’s painted, had probably been Johnathon’s actual bedroom once upon a time - ends up being worlds more comfortable than anything that cheap-ass hotel probably could’ve offered up, which erases any lingering doubts he might have had about accepting Lorne’s invitation. A far more important factor in removing any regret, however, is that when he wakes up the next morning, it’s to the smell of pancakes. 

He savours the twofold sensory combination of the scent of frying pancake batter and hypnotizingly soft sheets in a rare moment of pure, unadulterated bliss before deciding that getting to actually eat said pancakes outweighs lazing on this plush mattress for another half an hour. He eases himself up, immediately regretting it when he’s struck with the double whammy of a thunderous twinge in his back and an ice-pick-through-the-brain-style headache throbbing in his temples. God, sometimes he really regrets not investing some quality time in developing some robust anti-aging technology.

It’s almost enough to convince him to lay back down and not move again for approximately five hours, but for the sake of pancakes, he must persevere. Tugging dismally at his waistband - Lorne had lent him some clothes to sleep in: a sweatshirt with WICHITA WIND SURGE emblazoned on the front and track pants that are maybe a size too tight - Rodney shuffles over to open the bedroom door.

He’s greeted instantly by a pair of huge chocolate eyes and a lolling grin. Moose, who has apparently been sitting in front of his closed door like some kind of canine psychopath, thumps his tail against the floor at the sight of him.

Rodney stares. Dogs, apparently, have the same insatiable urge as children to insert themselves where they are clearly not wanted. “What do you want from me?” he finally asks, to which Moose lets out a loud yawn in reply.

Whatever. Rodney is far too hungover to argue with a dog. He pads across the short upstairs hall, down the stairs, and into the kitchen, where the smell of pancakes grows more alluring by the second. Moose trails behind him the entire time. Lorne is there, working the stovetop, and when he looks around he's sporting an altogether too-bright smile.

“Morning, sunshine!” he says, smiling even wider and twice as devilishly when Rodney groans at the volume, pressing a hand to his forehead.

“How are you like this?” he groans as he takes a seat at the kitchen island. “You’re not that much younger than me, you know. Don’t tell me you’re one of those freaks who doesn’t get hangovers.”

“Actually, it’s this revolutionary technique called ‘pacing myself and drinking water before bed.’” Lorne expertly flips a pancake in the pan. It’s fat and golden brown and about as big as his face, and Rodney’s mouth is already watering. “You want in on these?” he asks. “Birthday pancakes.”

“Yes, obviously, please.” Rodney credits his hangover for the fact that he doesn’t nitpick over it no longer being Lorne’s birthday. Celebratory pancakes are a thing Rodney remembers Lorne going big with back on Atlantis - not the subpar mess hall ones either; he’d make his own in the communal kitchens. John in particular had been quite the enthusiast for the tradition, second only to Rodney himself.

Lorne doesn’t have to ask about the coffee, and with his free hand he passes over the pot for Rodney to pour himself a steaming cup. As he takes a sip, he picks up the bottle of maple syrup ready and waiting on the island. Pearl Milling Company. Imitation syrup. He holds the bottle up. “Inferior,” he gravely informs Lorne.

Lorne snorts. “You want the pancakes or not, McKay?”

Rodney shuts up, and Lorne piles three gloriously thick pancakes onto a plate, setting it down in front of him. Rodney waits for Lorne to turn back around and plate up his own before squirting a generous helping of the shitty American syrup all over his stack, then digs in. Fuck. He’d forgotten how good these are.

Craving satisfied, Rodney deigns to open up his tunnel fraction from his plate to the rest of the kitchen, properly registering for the first time that he and Lorne are the only ones in here. He swallows down his heaping mouthful. “Where’s Zelenka?” Then, as an afterthought even though it really shouldn’t be: “And Parrish?”

“Dave is still asleep,” Lorne says with an eye roll that still comes across as unspeakably fond. “His hangover is even worse than yours, surprise surprise.” He takes a seat across from Rodney and chews his own syrup-soaked forkful of pancake. “And Radek left for the airport around seven. He has a work thing he has to get back for, apparently. Some conference.”

“Conference. Right.” There it is again, that feeling that Rodney’s life has drifted past him while he hadn’t been looking. He hasn’t been invited to a conference in decades now. He wonders if all his old associates, Malcolm Tunney and Neil Degrasse Tyson and the rest of them, ever sit around and swap stories about crazy old Rodney McKay from back in the day, laughing about how the mighty have fallen.

Lorne portions off a sliver of pancake and feeds it to Moose, who’s been sitting expectantly at his feet the whole time. He suddenly seems incredibly interested in the contents of his plate, and when he finally looks up at Rodney, it’s with a kind of reticence that Rodney doesn’t remember ever seeing on him before. “Hey, listen,” he says, and Rodney freezes mid-chew, not liking this confessional tone at all. “I, uh … wanted to thank you for giving Radek the time of day, back when he first reached out to you.”

“Ah didem -” Rodney swallows and tries again. “I didn’t have much of a choice. You gave him my address.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t have to let him talk, or meet him again. I know you, McKay - you could’ve told him to fuck off a thousand different ways if you wanted to. And Radek would’ve listened.” He nods decisively. “But being able to talk to you about everything that happened; it helped him, probably more than you realise.” 

Rodney chases an errant stream of syrup around his plate with a wedge of pancake. “It doesn’t seem like he needs much help,” he says. Lorne makes an abrupt sound at the back of his throat, and Rodney shakes his head sharply. “I mean - I know. I know. He told me about Carson -” Lorne’s face pinches, and the pancake Rodney has eaten suddenly feels like concrete in his stomach. “And everybody else - he had to grieve too; I get it. But he’s got you and Parrish, and your kids too apparently, and he’s going to work conferences - he got married!”

“He also got divorced.”

“Eh, who doesn’t?” Lorne raises an eyebrow, fiddling with the gold ring on his finger, and Rodney gives an apologetic little wave of his fork. “Present company excluded.”

Lorne lets out a low sigh through his nose. “Man, the way he was talking about Matej last night, like it didn’t even matter … That’s Radek all over. You know he didn’t even tell me they’d separated until a couple months in? I knew how much he’d thrown into that relationship. I knew that it not being enough to get him out from under everything that had happened was killing him, but he just kept brushing me off, telling me he was dealing with it and that everything was fine.” Lorne shakes his head. “Then after his brother died -”

“What?” Rodney’s fork drops from his mouth. “His brother died? ”

“He didn’t tell you about that either, huh? Of course.” Lorne stabs morosely at his pancakes, no longer eating. “It’s not my place to talk about it. My point is, Radek doesn’t like to linger. He left everything behind after Atlantis. Hell, I think the only reason he kept up with me after he left the SGC was because I was there, y’know, for Beckett. But I think he…” He trails off, then chuckles slightly to himself. “You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die?”

“Not sharks who breathe using buccal pumping,” Rodney says quickly. Lorne gives him a flat stare and he feels his cheeks go pink. “I, um, had a bit of a marine creature fixation when I was a kid. Know your enemy and all that.” Lorne continues staring, and Rodney waves his fork. “Uh, go on.”

Lorne huffs. “Well, Radek’s like that. He just pushes through everything. The last time I saw him actually, properly break down was after we scattered Carson’s ashes. After that - God, it was weird; it was like he’d flicked a switch, decided he couldn’t do it anymore. And - hell, it’s not like I don’t get it. If it wasn’t for Dave, I don’t know what…” Lorne seems to crumple for a second, in a way that has Rodney going tense and alarmed at the possibility that he might be about to do something like cry, but then he builds himself back up just as quickly with a long inhale. “I’m just saying, it was a goddamn struggle dealing with it all. The grief. The guilt.”

Rodney’s stomach dips and swoops. “Survivor’s guilt is a psychological scam,” he grumbles in a ham-fisted attempt to somehow lighten the moment.

Bizarrely, it actually kind of seems to work. Lorne breathes out a laugh, but then he shakes his head. “Not just that,” he says quietly, staring down at his plate. “Teyla was taken on my watch.”

“Wh -” In all this time, it somehow hasn’t even occurred to Rodney that Lorne has been holding himself responsible for that - although now that he thinks about it, that had been a pretty stupid assumption. Still, there’s something about Lorne that just screams well-adjusted. Maybe, in their field, ‘well-adjusted’ just means ‘better at hiding your neuroses.’

It’s sobering, the realisation that not a single one of them has escaped from this unscathed. At the same time, though, there’s something morbidly comforting about it as well. Misery and bedfellows and all that.

It’s not enough to make this revelation sit right with Rodney, though. Even in the first atomic blast of panic that had come with Teyla’s disappearance, Rodney hadn’t even considered blaming Lorne. In the last few months since seeing Zelenka, Rodney has slowly and tentatively begun to interrogate why he’d never granted the same leniency to Zelenka’s oversight. He’s in the process of swallowing down the suspicion that hating Zelenka had been the closest and easiest alternative to hating himself. Lorne had the advantage of enough degrees of separation to escape that particular psychological horror show.

“That Worshipper got the jump on the both of you,” Rodney insists. “There was nothing you could have done!”

“That’s exactly what Colonel Sheppard said,” Lorne replies, and there’s almost a smile in his voice as he says it. “I knew it here -” he taps his temple with the hand clutching his fork, and a pearlescent drop of maple syrup bungee-jumps down from one of the tines to his plate. “And eventually I actually began to accept it. I mean, if we want to play the blame game, where do we stop? We can blame Carson for the experiment with Michael, and Doctor Weir for approving it in the first place, and Colonel Sheppard for waking the Wraith, and the Wraith for existing, and the Ancients for letting them take over the galaxy - at the end of the day, what difference does it really make?” He stares moodily at his plate. “And that’s exactly my point. I tell Radek this, but I don’t think he really hears me. He just keeps on keeping on. He pushed through what happened in Pegasus, he pushed through Matej leaving him, he pushed through Miloš dying. He goes about his life, he spends time with me and my family, he’s there for me when I need him - but he doesn’t talk about any of his own shit. Just pretends like it’s all history. Won’t let me help him, even when I know he’s -” Lorne cuts himself off, giving an abrupt shake of his head as he forcefully skewers a piece of pancake. “He runs himself ragged just trying to keep his head above water, and all I can do is watch.”

There’s an undercurrent of grief catching at those words, and for the second time, Rodney is reminded of Lorne’s age. Right now he looks old - but more than that, he looks weary. Rodney wonders if that’s how he looks to everybody else. But then there’s a glimmer of a small smile as Lorne looks at Rodney. “But as soon as I told him about what you did, he went to you. Never in a million years did I think he’d put himself in that position, to have to relive everything that went down between you two, and what came after - but he did. And I know he did it because he thought it would help you -” Rodney’s chest tightens at that - “but since then, he seems, I don’t know … Lighter, or something like that. Like when he says he’s doing alright, I’m actually starting to believe him.”

“Oh,” Rodney says quietly, fork clenched tightly in his hand. “I … I didn’t know any of that.”

Lorne heaves his broad shoulders up and down. “So, it’s like I said. Thank you for … for doing what I haven’t been able to do, I guess.”

“I didn’t even do anything,” Rodney insists, suddenly and bizarrely feeling the need to defend Lorne from himself. “Nothing productive, anyway. We met for coffee, then for dinner, then I yelled at him until he yelled back.”

The skin around Lorne’s eyes crinkles. “Whatever works,” he says. “You’ve both always been kind of nuts. But whatever was said, I think he needed to hear it from you.”

Rodney cannot think of a single sincere counterargument to that, so he goes back to eating his pancakes instead. So does Lorne. After they finish, Lorne begins loading the dishwasher while Rodney dresses and calls an Uber to take him to the airport, and while he waits he sits and stares long and hard at his phone, turning over and over in his head the notion that Zelenka could be doing better because of him of all people.

Just as the Uber pulls up in the street, Rodney makes a decision. He pulls up RZ in his contacts and types out his personal email address. 

You can stop making Lorne give you my personal details, he sends underneath. Then: International roaming fees are outrageous.

Then he gets a passive-aggressive message from his Uber driver, and he figures it’s time to take his leave.

“Good to see you, Rodney,” Lorne says, walking him to the doorway. “Seriously.”

“Good to see you too, General,” Rodney says, and is pleasantly surprised by how much he means it.

Lorne laughs and shakes his head. “It’s been thirty years, Rodney,” he says chidingly. “Call me Evan, for Christ’s sake.”

Rodney stares at him, at his wrinkled face and his dimpled grin that still looks the same as they did when they first met. “Fine. Good to see you, Evan. Buy some better syrup.”

The unimpressed look he gets for that is the exact same as well.

Chapter Text

Roughly six years before The Work was completed, Rodney found himself caught in one of the worst storms of the winter season on his walk home from the station. There was no snowfall - small mercies - but the icy sheets of rain made quick work of the frosted banks already piling up on the streets from the night before, turning it into a soupy, grimy slush that was working its way into Rodney’s shoes and making him curse every deity that he didn’t believe in as he staggered towards his apartment block. 

Fucking rain, he thought savagely. Fucking snow. Fucking Ubers who were completely missing from the road because of said rain and snow. Fucking -

His righteous internal tirade was cut off as he passed by the alley where they kept the dumpsters and, presumably, all the accumulated sick from drunken passersby on their way home from the bar a few streets away. Some moron had forgotten to close the lid of the dumpster closest to the alley entrance, and over the hiss of rain striking down on the plastic of the garbage bags, Rodney could hear a faint eep.

He slowed his pace by a fraction, cocking his head. His ears were nowhere near as good as they used to be, but that was definitely a distinctive animal squeak he was hearing, and it was coming from the direction of the dumpster.

“Oh, goddamnit,” he muttered. His eyes were still on the welcoming silhouette of his apartment building and his mind was already imagining the warmth of a mug of coffee cradled between his hands, but he still found himself pivoting towards the alleyway. He began trudging over, hunching his shoulders against the angry rain and stepping carefully to avoid skidding on sleet. Who left a dumpster open in this weather anyway? That was just asking for trouble, and judging by the sheer incompetence of it, nobody else was going to be investigating the pitiful meowing anytime soon.

The stench of waterlogged, days-old rubbish got even more pungent as Rodney drew closer, and he gagged, tugging up his scarf to protect his delicate senses as, with no small amount of trepidation, he strained his neck and leaned forward to peer over the lip of the dumpster.

A pair of bright green eyes blinked back at him.

“Oh, great. Great.” The cat was well and truly an adult, judging by its size, though its scrawny appearance didn't make it all that much to look at. Its charcoal grey fur was completely drenched by the rain, giving it a distinctly rat-like look, and its ears were flattened tight against its skull as it peered up at Rodney and let out another solitary meep of distress. It was tucked into the corner of the dumpster, in a tiny wedge between the garbage bags and the wall. “What exactly were you hoping to accomplish in the dumpster?” Rodney asked the cat, who didn’t respond. “Alright, come on, look, you can use the garbage bags to climb out.” He pointed at the stack of lumpy black plastic for emphasis. “See?”

The wet ball of fur gave him a baleful look before releasing a far louder, far more demanding meow.

A violent shiver wracked Rodney’s body and he blinked water out of his eyes. Well, the cat was too far down for him to be able to reach, and he wasn’t climbing in there; that was categorically not happening. Throwing one last despairing look at the stacks of wafting garbage, Rodney tugged at his scarf, gagging as it opened his nose and mouth to the mercy of the stench. Grimacing, and hoping beyond hope that this would work, Rodney gingerly lowered one end of the scarf down into the depths, wiggling it just slightly.

The cat swished its tail, twitched its left ear, and Rodney knew the game was afoot. After a few more seconds of careful consideration, it pounced, fixing its claws deep into the wool and beginning to scramble up the length of the fabric. Rodney winced at the sheer weight pulling at his scarf and hoped it would survive this operation. “Okay, okay, okay,” he said, gently easing the scarf upwards until he could safely reach in and grab the mewling grey blob. It wriggled in his grasp, clearly not expecting to be snatched like that, but once he had it safely bundled up in the scarf - which he would be throwing out the moment this ordeal was over - and tucked into the folds of his jacket it seemed to calm down a little, seeming to appreciate the warmth. 

Rodney, who was now soaked head to toe and probably stank of dumpster, couldn’t quite say he felt the same.

Thankfully, the apartment complex Rodney lived in was pet friendly, so no subterfuge was needed to get the cat inside. More strategy was required, however, to dry her: the cat, who had proven to be a she after a cursory inspection, wasn’t fond of Rodney’s ‘hand towel scrubbing’ method. After a few minutes of squirming and yowling, Rodney gave it up as a bad job and went to have a hot shower of his own. When he came back, she was contentedly licking herself clean while perched on the pile of clean laundry he hadn’t gotten around to putting away.

Rodney glanced out the window at the concrete sky. The rain didn’t look as though it would be letting up anytime soon. He could take the cat to the vet tomorrow. He sighed, portioned out some leftover rotisserie chicken on a saucer for his hungry guest, and went back to work with melody of purring in the background.

“Well, she isn’t chipped,” the vet said. “And she’s looking a little rough around the edges. I’d wager that nobody’s looking for her.”

Rodney nodded, drumming his fingers against the metal check-up table where Dumpster Cat was inelegantly sprawled, blinking lazily up at him and the vet and apparently completely unbothered by the change of scenery. It was a relief. His last cat, Toby, had viewed vet appointments with the same ferocious antipathy that Rodney reserved for performance review meetings, and he had the scars to prove it. 

“It’s possible that her owners dumped her when they were moving house, or once she’d outgrown the cute kitty stage,” the vet said, chirpy voice entirely at odds with what she was saying. Her name tag read ‘Carly,’ and she had a tattoo of a Siamese cat creeping out across her neck, which seemed a bit on the nose. She kept scratching behind the cat’s ears, seemingly without thought. “It happens more than you think. We get so many of those poor darlings here.”

“Right,” Rodney replied. “So, do you have a no-kill shelter you can send her to? Or can you just keep her here?”

Carly’s lips pursed. “Well,” she said, drawing out the sound. “We can give her to the shelter, but the truth is that cats her age don’t have much chance of being adopted. Like I said, kittens are all the rage.” She gave him a sly look. Rodney missed the days when he might have misinterpreted that expression as one of interest in him. He was nowhere near stupid enough for that now though. “Honestly, I was hoping you’d say that you’d take her. She seems pretty content with you.”

As if to prove the point, the cat craned her neck up to rub her cheek against Rodney’s awkwardly hovering hands. Instinctively, Rodney gave her a scratch behind the ears, even as he stiffly shook his head. “I can’t take her. I have - things. Work. I won’t be able to look after her.” He considered it, the notion of having to keep another creature alive and well in his shitty apartment for the next who-knew-how-long, and his heart did a two-step panic stutter.

“Oh, cats are super independent,” Carly said airily. “As long as they have food and water and somewhere to do their business, they can pretty much take care of themselves.”

“I know,” Rodney groused, unable to help himself. “I’ve had cats before.”

“Perfect!” Carly gave him a winning smile. “You know, they’re great companions for older folks.”

Rodney’s hand went right up to the crown of his head, confirming for himself that he did indeed still have hair there. “I’m - I’m fifty-seven,” he bit out, the protest sounding feeble to his own ears. Carly just smiled wider, not a drop of self-admonishment in her expression. 

His eyes dropped, despite his best intentions, to the cat. She was sitting fully upright now, blinking up at him with her dinner plate eyes like she was waiting for a response. Cats really were such demanding creatures.

Rodney sighed internally. Goddamnit.

In their third year on Atlantis, Rodney and Teyla had found an injured cat on an uninhabited planet. Actually, it had been called a seksit, according to Teyla, but it looked like a cat to Rodney, if a slightly odd one. It had a tawny coat that was dotted all over with black and white spots, like a child’s finger painting, and it bleated mournfully as it cowered away from them in the small grove they’d found it in, tucking its injured paw against its chest.

“It is against procedure,” Teyla had said the moment Rodney had let out an involuntary coo at the sight of it. But this was Teyla, who had an ardent love of animals and followed rules with gumption until she personally disagreed with them, so all it took was a Look from Rodney and another little mewl from the alien cat for her to cave like paper mache. She beckoned over Ronon, who agreed to their plan without a word from either of them, and that was how John had found them all, trying to coax the poor thing over with snapped-off pieces of jerky from their packs.

John had said that it looked like a hyena, and laughed when Rodney scowled. Rodney shot back that he laughed like a hyena, and that just made his obnoxious honking louder. He was no match against the threefold power of his entire team’s puppy dog eyes though, or cute kitties for that matter, so he took point on Operation Smuggle An Alien Animal Onto Atlantis. They might have succeeded if Lorne - that goody-two-shoes traitor - hadn’t asked why Ronon’s jacket was hissing as they passed him in the Gate room.

A few minutes later, they were in the conference room, getting stared down by a stern-faced Elizabeth as the seksit limped cautiously around the table. Elizabeth had also called Carson in, presumably so he could give them a lecture about the risk of communicable diseases brought in by unknown fauna, but he was too busy looking at the cat with an utterly lovesick expression to be very effective at that. Feeling the energy of the room shifting in his favour, Rodney smirked triumphantly at Elizabeth. “What exactly is the problem here?” he’d said, beginning to scratch the seksit behind the ears. “Look at how happy she is! See, she’s purr -”

Seksits, as it turned out, purred at a frequency that was veritable agony to the human ear. They couldn’t get out of the conference room fast enough.

Elizabeth had authorised the medical staff to treat the seksit’s injury - with earplugs to go around, of course - but they were ordered to drop her back as soon as she was declared fit and ready. Rodney had sulked for nearly a week afterwards - he hadn’t even been allowed to search for ways to accommodate the purring! That was what he’d complained about to John when he found him staring moodily into his eggs at breakfast five days later. 

“Aww, c’mon, McKay,” John had said, dropping into the seat in front of him and stealing a piece of his toast. “We’ll get you a cat someday.”

“Oh yeah, is that a promise?” Rodney shot back petulantly.

John had been in a good mood that day, and the slightest hint of toothy grin he’d flashed Rodney’s way had made his stomach lose touch with gravity, just a little. “Sure, Rodney,” he’d said. “I promise.”

Carly, as it turned out, was a damn good upseller. Not only did Rodney leave the vet clinic with a cat under his arm, but with a bag of premium cat food and with an order lodged for a litter box with all the supplementals to boot.

Back in the apartment, the cat padded around the living room as if she already owned the place. She didn’t have a name yet. Rodney felt marginally bad about that, but he was still too busy trying to process how she’d ended up here to give it too much thought. He sat down heavily on the couch, next to his pile of cat hair-infused laundry, and stared despondently at the dish he’d left out the night before. This was stupid. He absolutely did not have time for this. Maybe Ashley-something-something and her two-year-old down the hall would want a cat. Pets were good for kids, right? He could’ve sworn he’d read that somewhere. Or maybe Jeannie and Kaleb could take her off his hands.

His attention was unceremoniously torn back to his newest burden, who had found the trailing cord for his blinds and was pursuing it with the vigour of a cat years younger. There was a random white blotch on the back of her head, just behind her ears, that was completely out of place amongst the sea of grey fur. Rodney found himself utterly fixated on it. Not really like a hyena at all, he decided. John probably would’ve found it charming.

Double goddamnit.

Moving on auto-pilot, Rodney stood up. Then he walked over to where he’d dumped the bag of cat food by the door. Then he scooped it up. Then he went to the pantry and tucked it away on the bottom shelf. At every step of the process, Rodney reminded himself of The Work that was waiting for him, and every second after he tried to imagine going back to having a completely empty apartment, haunted by nobody but himself.

Cat food safely stowed, Rodney turned back around to face his living room. The cat had jumped onto his coffee table, blinking curiously at an apple Rodney had meant to eat for breakfast this morning before he’d promptly forgotten about it. Her tail swished once, twice, three times, and then with a precision strike, she batted the innocent piece of fruit onto the floor.

Rodney stared despondently at her. “You seem awfully familiar all of a sudden,” he informed her. He probably imagined it, but he could have sworn that he got a flash of long feline teeth in response.

Grocery shopping was an ordeal that Rodney strived to eliminate from his life. He didn’t have the time between lecture work and The Work, and quite frankly, he didn’t have the patience for it. Thankfully, the modern world seemed to be on his side in this regard, and Rodney could get everything he needed delivered to his doorstep through an app. 

He was stacking cans of baked beans in his pantry when he noticed that something was off. In the last three weeks since his accidental cat acquisition, he’d grown accustomed to a constant low-level amount of background noise. His new roommate was a curious creature, and at any given time she could be counted on to be batting around an empty toilet roll or trying to eat the curtains, or just purring contentedly. Right now, though, Rodney couldn’t hear a single thing.

He turned around, already on high alert - in his experience, a quiet cat meant a cat that was Up To Something. But all thoughts of feline mischief dissolved in his mind when he noticed that his front door was slightly ajar.

Oh god, oh fuck. She must have slipped out between his legs while he was grabbing the groceries and he hadn’t noticed. Rodney scanned his eyes across his apartment just to make sure that she wasn’t just tucked away in some corner to have a nap, but there was no cat in sight, and his panic mode officially set in. What if she managed to get all the way down to the foyer and out of the building? There was a road outside the apartment complex; she could get hit by a car! Some people walked their dogs too, massive hulking beasts that might take one look at her and decide she was a particularly fuzzy tennis ball.

Abandoning the beans, Rodney raced out the door, heart pounding as he skidded out into the hallway. He looked to his right, in the direction of the stairs: no cat. He looked to his left -

“KITTY!!!!!”

Rodney barely restrained himself from clapping his hands over his ears as he spun around. Down the hall, happy as could be, was his damn cat, making muffins on the puke-coloured carpet. At least, she had been, until the door to Apartment 204 had swung open and Ashley walked out with her small child in her arms, nearly tripping over her.

“KITTY!” the little girl screeched again, straining furiously to free herself from her mother’s clutches and get to the poor cat, whose ears were pressed firmly against the sides of her head. “Mama! Kitty!” 

“That’s right, it’s a kitty cat,” Ashley said, bouncing her deafening spawn up and down, presumably trying to calm her down. “Where did you come from…?”

Right on cue, Rodney hurried over. He scooped up the cat, who went willingly, burrowing into his chest as she stared at the toddler with undisguised antipathy. Rodney had never felt so much kinship with another living creature.

“Mr. McKay!” Ashley exclaimed, face breaking out into a smile. Rodney had long since given up on correcting her use of that title. “I didn’t know you had a cat!”

“She’s, uh, new,” Rodney said. Ashley’s daughter was still throwing her chubby hands out, trying to grab the cat’s tail, and Rodney took a sizable step back. For a brief second, he considered clarifying: she’s a stray I found in my dumpster who I was then guilt-tripped into keeping by a vet even though I really don’t have the time for any pets right now, but with the cat snuggled securely in his arms, it felt like a rather moot point.  He had actually been considering asking Ashley if she wanted to take her off his hands. Now that he’d come face to face with how her child interacted with animals, though, he was swiftly rethinking that.

“Aww, she’s such a cutie,” Ashley cooed. “We had a cat up until just recently, actually. He passed away, poor thing.” Her smile dimmed for just a few seconds before reigniting. “I think I still have some of his old cat toys stashed away if you want them? I was going to throw them out otherwise.”

“Oh.” Buying cat food and litter and other essentials was one thing, but actively accepting cat toys seemed like something only someone intended to keep said cat would do. But … Rodney glanced down at the creature in his arms, recalling how his heart had nearly dropped from his chest when he’d realised she was missing. Maybe there was something to be said for constant background noise after all. “Yes, actually. Thanks.”

“Great! I’ll run them over this afternoon. Right now, we’ve gotta go, though, don’t we? We’ve gotta go to the shops!” She directed that last part to her kid, speaking in that nauseatingly high-pitched sing-song tone that adults always seemed to whip out for small children. There was apparently something to it, though, because the little girl let out a delighted giggle and clapped her hands. Oh, to be that easily entertained. Ashley glanced back up at Rodney. “What’s her name?”

“Um.” Three weeks in, and Rodney still hadn’t officially given his cat a name. He sure as hell wasn’t going to admit that, though. He wracked his brains. Weirdly, the first thing that came to mind was a memory of when he’d first brought the cat home from the vet, and she’d delightedly knocked an apple off the table. Looking back, it had set the tone for her character quite well. “Newton,” Rodney said.

“Aww,” Ashley cooed again, but with a bit more of a puzzled tinge this time. “That’s adorable. Well, anyway, I better run. Say bye-bye to Mr. McKay and the kitty, baby!”

“Bu-bye mistah ‘Kay,” the toddler burbled. “Bu-bye kitty.”

Rodney did not “bu-bye” back, but he did give Ashley a nod and a fleeting smile. Then, hefting the weight of his official new pet in his arms, Rodney turned around and took Newton back home.

Chapter Text

The first clue Rodney gets is that when he finally gets home around 8pm, held up by an evening class, some last-minute grading he needed to submit, and a whole boatload of train delays, he isn’t met by a screaming Newton at the door. His cat, accustomed to the luxury of living with a shut-in of an owner, is used to a very particular schedule, and if he’s late in giving her dinner, well, he’s in for it. Usually, that is. Tonight though, as he drops his keys on the kitchen table and kicks off his shoes, he doesn’t so much as hear the padding of little feet, much less yowls of fury.

“What, are you giving me the silent treatment now?” he calls out into the silence of his apartment. The silence doesn’t answer. He glances over to the cat tower, then to the kitchen counter, and then to the couch. There’s no sign of Newton at all.

Immediately, Rodney feels a trickle of unease running down his spine. She hasn’t gotten out again, has she? She’s proven herself to be a proper little Houdini over the years, but she’s never gotten farther than the outside hallway. On the few occasions when she’s escaped beneath his nose on his way out for work, she’s always been scooped up by a neighbour who would hand her back over the moment he got home.

“Newton?” he calls, heading towards his bedroom. “Pspspspspspsps…..”

When he flips on the light and pokes his head through the door, he immediately lets out a breath. A pair of big green eyes are blinking back at him. The relief only lasts a half-second before Rodney’s frowning again, though, because Newton isn’t curled up in the centre of the bed like she usually chooses to be when she’s in here. She isn’t on the bed at all, but stretched out sideways across the rug, right at the foot of his bedside table.

“Oh,” Rodney says, more exhalation than speech. Newton is creeping up on eleven years old, after all; maybe she’s beginning to feel her age and couldn’t make the jump. It might be a good time to invest in those cat stairs he’s seen on the internet. He pulls off his jacket, draping it across the end of his bed before clumsily lowering himself down onto the floor beside Newton, resting a hand on the arch of her back and feeling the way her fur is beginning to clump, how her spine bites back into his palm. 

“Aren’t you hungry?” he murmurs. She lets out a diminutive meep, but that’s about as much as Rodney gets. He continues stroking a steady rhythm down her side, stretching out his own aching legs as he leans back against his bed frame. He’s trying to clamp down on the apprehension bubbling up inside of him. He isn’t having much luck. “Getting old is terrible,” he says. “Everybody warns you, but we don’t really listen, and then it’s too late.”

Newton, usually such a conversationalist, doesn’t reply.

Rodney bites down on the inside of his cheek. Alright, maybe she is getting old, but her cat instincts must still be going strong inside her. He eases himself back up, giving Newton one last anxious look before creeping out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. He makes sure to make as much clattering noise as is humanly possible as he pulls her dish out of the overhead cupboard, and clears his throat loudly before dramatically peeling open the tin of cat food, drawing out the sound for a good five seconds. He tips the revolting mush into the dish, and then he waits.

And waits some more.

“Oh, come on,” Rodney whispers to himself after a minute passes and Newton still hasn’t wandered in. “Come on, come on, come on…” He snatches up the dish and hurries back into his bedroom. Kneeling down, he presents her dinner, practically shoving it right under her nose. Newton’s head lifts a fraction, her whiskers twitch, and that’s it.

Rodney’s heartbeat is thundering in his ears at this point. Cautiously, he reaches out, intending to lift Newton up - and then winces as, within a second of him scooping her up as gently as he can, she lets out a piercing wail. “Oh god,” he stammers out, setting her back down on instinct, and just as he pulls his hands away, Newton stretches her neck out and starts violently yakking on the rug. She barely pulls her head away from the stinking, chunky puddle once she’s done either, just flops back down.

“Okay, okay, okay, you’re okay,” Rodney whispers, heart slamming against his ribcage like it’s trying to break out. He scoops her up again, eyes squeezing shut as she cries out once more. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he tells her. He can feel her quaking in his arms.

The entire Uber drive to the emergency vet, he spares every glance he can for the cat carrier on his lap, and Newton’s huddled, keening form inside. “It’s like I said; you’re just getting old. You’re probably fine. You’ll be totally fine,” Rodney rambles, as if he’s trying to reassure anybody but himself, and as if it actually has a hope of working.

Rodney hadn’t been allowed to accompany Newton when the vets took her for examination, so he’s been banished to the torturous purgatory that is the waiting room, listening to the whining of at least half a dozen dogs. He’d been stupid enough to talk himself into a tentative sort of calm after they’d first taken Newton - cats throw up all the time; probably she’d eaten a dustball or something equally asinine and it would end up costing him nothing but a hefty vet bill. But then the vet assistant had come out and hit him with the words “unclear,” and “blood tests,” and “ultrasound,” so now Rodney’s brain is definitively back on a war footing.

Rodney endures another ten seconds of the canine cacophony before he lurches to his feet and stumbles out the door. The front window spans the entire entrance wall to the waiting room, so he can keep watch for the vet assistant while he stands on the street in the blessed quiet of the night. Not sparing a second to think about what he's doing, he scrolls clumsily through his contact list. Past Jeannie, past Kerrigan, past Lorne, down, down, down to the only person in the world who Rodney's panic-drunk brain thinks will understand the way he feels like the world is about to crack apart and end.

The line rings out for eight devastating seconds before Zelenka answers, voice groggy with confusion. Rodney has never called him before. “Rodney?”

“It’s Newton,” Rodney bursts out before he can even think, before he can properly process how ludicrous this is. “She - I got home tonight and she was just lying on my bedroom floor, and she wouldn’t eat, and she was vomiting and crying, and I’m at the vet now and they’re having to run tests because they don’t know what it could be, but they’ve had to put her on an IV drip because - because she’s dehydrated, but they don’t know why  -”

He cuts himself off for breath, which lets him hear the sounds on the other end of the line: a rustling, and then a creaking, and a low exhale - and suddenly Rodney remembers the time difference between Ontario and Prague.

“Oh,” he says, short and clipped. His face flushes; this has all of a sudden become exponentially more humiliating, as impossible as that sounds. “You were sleeping. I called you about my sick cat and you were - you were sleeping.”

“Is okay,” Zelenka says. It’s not okay, even Rodney has enough social wherewithal to know that. And usually, he wouldn’t care. Years ago, he wouldn’t have cared - but years ago, he wouldn’t have called up Radek Zelenka over a sick pet. There’s a bleeding-wound feeling about this, about the fact that he hadn’t even given calling Zelenka a second thought, and about how the thought of telling him to go back to sleep and hanging up is just about the most terrifying thing Rodney can imagine right now.

“Is okay, Rodney,” Zelenka says again, and Rodney realises that he hasn’t spoken for several seconds. “Talk to me. Do you know what tests they are giving her?”

Rodney swallows thickly. “They -” he begins, and then all of a sudden his vision blurs. He presses his free hand over his eyes, shaking his head furiously. He can’t believe this. When was the last time he’d cried? Not for years. Not since Carson. Abruptly, Rodney longs for something to put his hands and his mind to, something to steal all his thoughts away like he used to do on Atlantis. He wants The Work. He wants to feel something that isn’t helpless. “I didn’t notice anything,” he whispers, unsure if Zelenka can make him out and unsure if it matters. “Not until tonight. There must have been signs. She’s old, she - why wasn’t I paying more attention? It’s my job to take care of her.”

After a few seconds where Rodney furiously regulates his breathing, Zelenka’s gentle patter sounds down the line. “You are taking care of her right now.”

“She could die.”

“Yes,” Zelenka says. “She is old lady, who has lived a long life. If she dies, it will not be your fault.”

Rodney presses his forehead against the glass of the window. It’s funny, considering - well, everything - but he doesn’t think he could have believed that from anybody but Radek. “I can’t…” he says, and falls silent. 

“I know,” Radek says. “Keep talking to me, Rodney.”

And Rodney does. 

The diagnosis is acute feline pancreatitis. Apparently, that’s oftentimes not as alarming as it sounds. But - as the vet had explained once Rodney had finally been allowed to see his damn cat - for Newton, who is a shaky eleven years old, it could have been very dangerous if left untreated. 

The vet had also reassured Rodney that the ‘acute’ part of the diagnosis meant that it’s very likely there were no symptoms for him to miss before that night, which marginally works to ease the churning nausea in his gut. It’s not much help, though, once he’s back in his too-empty apartment, waiting to find out when he can take Newton home. 

He gives sleeping up as a bad joke as soon as the thought crosses his mind, even though it’s close to 12 by the time he gets back home. Staring down the barrel of the purgatory of waiting, Rodney first kills time by sending a preemptive email to his department head and students, letting them know that he won’t be teaching any classes tomorrow. He also shoots a slightly more generous text to Kerrigan, who he wagers will be the only person at Rockville College who’ll actually give half a shit that he isn’t showing up. The rest of his energy he reserves for Radek. 

Their communication has crept into semi-regularity since Lorne’s party. Radek has made use of Rodney’s email address, sending through articles and book recommendations that he thinks Rodney might enjoy. Rodney tries to return the favour, eager to avoid the very accurate impression that his life is nothing but a slow and irrelevant drift through work obligations - though he can’t help but occasionally blow off steam with rants about particularly stupid students and faculty members, wondering all the while if these bitching sessions imbue Radek with the same odd nostalgia that they do Rodney. They probably average correspondence about once or twice a week. Since Rodney’s first call, though, his phone has been buzzing throughout the night as Radek asks for periodic updates.

9:30 PM: Cat?

11:24 PM: Cat?

1:19 AM: Cat?

Rodney will give him this: he knows how to cut to the chase.

Interspersed between the updates, of which Rodney doesn’t have many anyway, the messages mellow out into actual conversations. Radek makes a passing observation about whatever research project he’s working on at the moment, Rodney sends back a snarky takedown of the redundancy of the research area, Radek replies with some sly remark about him getting too old to keep up with new scientific breakthroughs, and on and on they go. It all feels so familiar, but not in a dread-inducing way. With his thoughts so caught up on what’s happening with Newton, Rodney doesn’t bother with the careful sidestepping of potential landmines as he’d done at Lorne’s party, Radek seems to follow suit, and they manage to make it through just fine.

The hours inch by, and by the time the weak light of dawn begins to peek through the bedroom curtains, Rodney is sprawled face down on his bed, cheek pressed against his pillow as he stares lethargically at his dark phone screen and tries not to think about the empty stretch of bed next to him that Newton usually claims as her own. He’s not trying to be maudlin, really. He knows, logically, that she’s going to be fine and that, with any luck, he’ll be picking her up tomorrow. But the terror of her possible death has morphed into a sickly anxiety about what she must be feeling right now. She’s a cat, she doesn’t understand the concept of vets beyond the fact that they stick her with painful needles. She doesn’t know that, by leaving her there, Rodney is helping her. All she knows is that she’s scared and in pain, and the person who’s supposed to take care of her has disappeared. 

The thought of Newton, terrified and all on her own, lands on Rodney’s chest like a dumbbell he can’t shift. Breathing tight in his lungs, Rodney types out a message to Radek. Your coworkers sound like idiots.

For a minute, there’s no response. Then, Radek writes: You should sleep.

Rodney rolls his eyes. Yeah right. I’m fine, he writes back. Truth be told, he’s exhausted, but the thought of sleeping right now just gets him all amped up with anxiety again, so it’s a lost cause anyway.

Another few minutes of silence. Rodney drops his phone onto the mattress and buries his face into his pillow, willing time to go faster, willing the world into a shape where, when he opens his eyes next, his cat will be snuggled up next to him.

Instead, his phone rings. Rodney’s head snaps up as the vibrations snake through the mattress to his hand. With a heart attack jolt, He snatches up his phone. Is it the vet’s office? Are they calling because something’s happened?

No, he realises as he stares incredulously at the screen. It’s fucking Radek.

“Damnit, Zelenka,” Rodney snaps the moment he answers the call. “You scared the shit out of me!”

“Sorry,” Radek says mildly, and Rodney pretends for a second that his burning glare can be seen all the way from Prague.

“Did you think that mothering me over the phone would be more effective than over text?” he asks exasperatedly. 

“Yes,” Radek replies. Rodney rolls his eyes. “I know you are worried, but this is no good. You need to sleep.”

“I don’t need to sleep,” Rodney bites out. “I need to distract myself.”

He hates this, how open and vulnerable all his innermost thoughts and feelings seem to be now. Anxiety pierces right through to the heart now, past any defences he used to have. After all, what does he have to shield himself with? He has nothing in his life to draw his mind away from eating itself alive. He doesn’t even have The Work anymore, a numbing balm that had worked better than anything else he’d ever tried. The thought scuttles through his mind like the shadow of a spider, making the pressure on Rodney’s chest push that little bit harder as he thinks about all his notes still stowed in his living room as if they’re waiting for him. All at once, he can admit that he’s grateful for Radek’s call.

He checks his watch and frowns. It’s around noon in Prague, and Radek has been messaging him this entire time. “You didn’t get any sleep either, did you?”

There’s a short pause. “We are not talking about me right now,” Radek retorts. Rodney can picture the cheeky quirk of his eyebrows, the twitch of his lips as he says something that he knows will rile Rodney up.

It probably would have worked too, if it had been any other time. With a heaving sigh, Rodney rolls onto his back, dropping his free arm across his face. “God,” he says, voice muffled. “I feel like I’m about to have a heart attack. I just need to not think about this for five minutes.” He’d spoken without thinking and now waits for the embarrassment to come crawling up after the words. It doesn’t come.

There’s a long pause on the other end. Then, sighing, Radek speaks again. “Have you seen new Star Trek show?”

“What?”

“Star Trek: New Age. Is a new series they’ve started.”

Rodney knows what Radek is doing. Slipping his eyes closed, he lets himself get taken along for the ride. “No, I haven’t seen it. Is it any good?”

Radek’s voice is full of gleeful scorn. “It is atrocious.”

Rodney exhales out an almost-laugh and lets himself sink into the easy rhythm of listening to Radek ramble on about Spock’s secret child being sent back in time to fix the original timeline, and about how the characterisation is woeful and the dialogue is hackneyed and the plot has more holes than swiss cheese. He tries to fashion together some responses, but there’s something about the placid chatter of Radek’s voice in Rodney’s ear that has his eyelids growing heavier by the second. The quiet rumble of Radek’s laughter is the last thing he hears as he finally drifts off to sleep.

Rodney wakes up at around 2pm, and an hour later, the vet calls to let him know that he can pick up Newton.

The moment he sees her in the vet clinic, Rodney finds himself on the brink of tears once again. She’s curled up on the examination table, blinking drowsily, with the bandage from where they’d inserted the IV drip standing out with ghoulish whiteness against her ashy fur, and she lets out a little chirp when she sees him. Rodney hurries over, hands as careful as they’ve ever been as they rest on her flank and neck. He buries his face in the scruff of her fur. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “You’re such a good girl. I’m so sorry.”

She purrs loudly in response.

He’s still composing himself as he gets her cat carrier - with her grumbling inside - settled on his lap on his Uber ride home, but as the car peels away from the vet clinic and begins to head back towards his home, Rodney feels marginally saner. He snaps a quick photo of a very grumpy-looking Newton and sends it to Radek.

Almost instantly, he gets a reply: 🙂🙂🙂

Rodney catches himself smiling.

He can’t help but smile again a week or so later when, slumped on his couch with a much improved Newton napping on his chest, he gets another message from Radek. Cat?

Since everything that happened with Newton, he and Radek have found themselves messaging every day. Most of the messages aren’t cat related at all, but Radek has been nothing if not dutiful in checking up after Newton’s health.

He takes another photo, one of Newton with her paws tucked over her face as she sleeps, and sends it off in response.

🙂, Radek writes back. It seems to be the only emoji he knows how to use. Give her my kisses.

Rodney huffs a little and resolves not to tell Radek when he does, in fact, drop a kiss on Newton’s head. He keeps his hand splayed across her warm belly, lost in thought as he scrolls back through the exchanges between himself and Radek from the last week. It occurs to him then, with no small pang of guilt, that in the adrenaline rush of that first night that Newton was at the vet, and the fuss of doting over her for the next few days, he doesn’t think he’d ever even mentioned what Radek had done for him. On the one hand, it seems kind of silly; what had they done but talked nonsense about work and Star Trek? But on the other hand, that was exactly the kind of nonsense that Rodney had needed, and Radek had known that. He'd given up sleep and half a day for that. For Rodney, of all people.

After a few moments of consideration where his thumbs hover uncertainly over his screen, Rodney types out a new message. Thank you.

There’s no response for a minute or so. Then bubbles appear on Radek’s end. They disappear, then they reappear, then they disappear again. Rodney almost begins to regret sending the message in the first place. Then, finally, as he scratches behind Newton’s ear, a text comes through.

Have you ever been to Prague?

Chapter Text

Years before Radek Zelenka washed up on his doorstep, Rodney received another unexpected knock on the door. 

Rodney was right in the middle of a particularly trying calculation, one he’d been stuck on for the better part of a week now, so he seriously considered just ignoring whoever it was. The neighbours, on the rare occasions when they came calling, were used to this; if he didn’t respond after ten seconds, it was best to just give up. But ten seconds came and went, and there was a second, slightly louder knock. 

“Uncle Rodney?” a voice called, and Rodney’s head snapped up. “I know you’re home; I can see the light under the door.”

With a painful reluctance, Rodney capped his marker, reminding himself that his notes weren’t going anywhere and it wasn’t like he’d been making much progress anyway. He hurried over to his door, absentmindedly kicking a thoroughly unwashed hoodie underneath his couch as he went, and pulled it open. 

Madison grinned up at him - well, no, not  up.  She was almost as tall as him now.

“Hey, Uncle Rodney!” she exclaimed, and smacked into him for a hug, just like she used to when she was four. At least she’d grown out of badgering him for presents - mostly. Rodney automatically hugged her back, feeling the warmth of the outside sun leeching from the back of her shirt.

“...Hi, Madison,” he replied. Ever since she was old enough to have opinions about this sort of thing and she’d found out that Rodney preferred to go by his middle name, she had refused to call him anything else. So, when she was twelve and announced that Maddie was a  babyish nickname  and she only wanted to be called Madison, he’d been more than happy to return the favour. 

“Can I come in?” Madison asked, and took his bemused silence for an answer, squeezing in past him into his apartment. Rodney had seen his niece and nephew sporadically throughout the years, usually during their family’s annual trips to Canada where Jeannie would drag Rodney out kicking and screaming to eat with them at least twice - Jeannie insisted that she brought her kids here so they could learn about where their mum had grown up, but Rodney suspected that at least part of it was a ploy to make sure that Rodney actually got some sunlight once in a while. Not once during all those trips though, as far as Rodney could recall, had Madison ever actually stepped foot in his apartment. Having it happen now, without warning no less, was beyond strange.

Rodney peeked his head out into the hallway, registering quickly that neither Jeannie nor Kaleb was there, and his bemusement rapidly turned to concern as he realised that Madison had travelled all this way to see him on her own.

“Are you -” he began as he pulled the door closed behind him, but was cut off.

“ Woah, ” Madison gasped, unceremoniously dumping her blue backpack on the floor as she stared, open-mouthed, at the mess of whiteboards forming a rough semi-circle in his living room. She whipped around, fixing him with a manic grin and a devious gleam in her eye. “Holy shit, you really do work for the CIA.”

“The CIA wishes,” Rodney deadpanned. “What are you doing here? Are you okay?”

Madison cocked her head, the curtains of her bob swinging. “Um, yeah? ‘Course I’m okay.”

“Well, it’s just that you show up here on your own, without even calling -”

“I did call,” Madison said. “I also texted you, like, fifty times.”

“What?” Rodney patted his pocket for his phone. It wasn’t in his pocket. After a few seconds of wildly scanning the room, he noticed it half wedged behind his couch cushions. “Oh.”

“Yeah, Mom said that would probably happen, and that I should just come over anyway,” Madison said airily, meandering over to one of the whiteboards and narrowing her eyes at the lines of scrawled numbers. “Either you’d be completely lost in your work or you’d have, like, had a stroke or something and I’d have to call the fire department to do a wellness check.” She reached a finger up to the board.

Rodney blinked. “Okay, so your - please don’t touch that.” Madison slowly pulled her hand away. “So your mom does know that you’re here.”

Madison gave him a quizzical look. “Yeah? My friend’s mum lives here, so a bunch of us are staying for summer vacation. Figured I’d come say hi while I’m in the area.” She smirked a little. “What, did you think I’d run away or something?”

“Well, I don’t know!” Rodney floundered. “I thought maybe it had something to with the, y’know … the lesbian thing, that your parents might have -”

“Oh my god.” Madison shook her head so furiously that her hair was slapping her in the face. “Uncle Rodney,  no.  Mom and Dad have been fine. Seriously, they’ve been almost nauseatingly nice. Dad baked me a rainbow cake and wrote ‘Thank you for being you’ on it in icing.”

“Of course he did,” Rodney said. Another victory for Jeannie in her longstanding battle against generational trauma, he supposed. He heaved  an internal sigh of relief that he wasn’t about to have to call the police - or worse: Jeannie.  “So, you’re just here to…?”

“...See you,” Madison finished slowly. “Like, a visit?”

Madison - moreso than Jonah, from what little Rodney could tell - had always been inordinately excited to see him. According to Jeannie, the whole ‘mysterious genius uncle who used to do Secret Government Work that they only see once a year’ routine lent him a certain mystique that was like crack for nosy, precocious children. Rodney didn’t think that curiosity would extend as far as Madison going out of her way to spend time with him. 

The first insistent throbs of a headache were blossoming behind Rodney’s eyes. Already, he could feel restless tremors running up and down his spine. There was so much work to be done. He couldn’t just drop everything because his niece decided this was the perfect time to drop in for a little tea party. “The thing is that I’m right in the middle of something,” he said. “A very, very important something - the importance of which, actually, I cannot even begin to explain -”

His voice did the thing it tended to do, the thing that Jeannie had scolded him for hundreds of times: he got thrown so deep into his own thought spiral that his tone slipped out of his control, sharpening and harshening in a way that made Madison’s face tuck itself away, eyes dropping to her combat boots. Rodney stopped talking.

“You’re  always  right in the middle of something,” Madison grumbled. “Mom says that’s why you basically never answer your emails, and why you haven’t even called for Christmas for like five years. You know she worries about you, right? She says so all the time now. I want to see what’s  so  important that you have to make her worry like that.” At the end of her spiel, she took a deep, steadying breath, and then nodded resolutely as if to put a stamp of approval on what she’d just said.

“...Oh,” was all Rodney could follow that up with. Madison always had an unassuming conscientiousness about her that had Rodney conclude that she took primarily after her father, but this hard edge, this headstrong demand for answers made Rodney feel like he was looking right at a teenage Jeannie. The comparison was enough to have him rocking back on his heels, not quite sure what to do with himself. He cast a desperate look back at his whiteboards before returning his gaze to Madison, who was blinking expectantly at him, the first dark shadows of uncertainty crossing her face. Clearly, her resolve hadn’t reached her mother’s depths yet.

“I’m sorry,” Madison mumbled, tucking tumbling strands of hair back behind her ear and looking anywhere in the room but Rodney. “This was a dumb idea anyway, I’ll just go.”

The idea of Madison leaving Rodney’s apartment with that same wounded look she was wearing now made Rodney’s chest ache more than any scolding Jeannie could give him. He let out a small noise of protest, and Madison looked up at him with wide eyes.

“...Okay,” he said - then, more definitively: “Okay. A visit. I can do that. Are you - um, are you hungry? I can…” He mentally raced through the contents of his fridge and pantry. “I can make you an omelette? I make a great omelette. The best. I cooked them for your mom all the time when we were little.”

He knew he was rambling, but Madison didn’t seem to care. She smiled broadly at him. “An omelette sounds great.”

“Oh wow,” Madison said after her first forkful of omelette. “This actually is super good. No eggshell or nothin’.”

“You wound me by even suggesting that,” Rodney said, pulling out the chair across from her and setting down his own plate on his rickety kitchen table. He was a master of many things, and the quick and easy meal was one of them. With a mother who’d split and a father who had more important things on his mind than making dinner for his children, he’d had no choice but to learn for both his and Jeannie’s sake. 

It was something he’d had in common with Ronon. Back on Atlantis, during their overnight off-world missions, they’d be the ones in charge of meals. Rodney still remembered the dazzlingly ferocious way Ronon had cubed those alien root vegetables, skinning and chopping and sliding them into the pot so quickly that his knife had been nothing but a silver blur, while Rodney experimented with handfuls of unfamiliar herbs and commissary seasoning packets to create something worth eating. After a few trial runs, Rodney had magnanimously allowed John the privilege of stirring the pot. Teyla hadn’t even been allowed near the fire.

As Rodney chewed contentedly, Madison stared at him like he’d grown a third head. “Why’re you eating that with a spoon?” she asked, sounding supremely scandalised and every bit like her mother.

Rodney raised his eyebrows. “Because you have the fork. I don’t care what your mother’s told you, I am a very considerate host, thank you very much.”

“Okay, but why do you only have one fork?”

“Because I’m one person.” 

Madison squinted at him. “Yeah, but don’t you have, like, friends?”

Rodney opened his mouth, then promptly closed it again. This little shit. “Alright, first of all, I have dedicated my life to the pursuit of something far more important than hosting dinner parties and - and Tupperware parties. But, for your information, yes, I do happen to have friends, thank you very much.”

Madison leaned back in her chair until the front legs lifted off the ground and it creaked ominously, jutting her chin out in a challenge. “Name ‘em.”

Rodney fixed her with a hard stare. “...Jeannie.”

“She’s your sister, she absolutely doesn’t count.”

“Fine. Kaleb.”

“No!” Madison threw her hands up, and the front legs of her chair came crashing back down, nearly throwing her off balance. “Family is off-limits. So you can’t choose me, either.”

“Oh, I wasn’t going to.”

Madison rolled her eyes. “All I’m saying is, it’s weird. How are you gonna find a girlfriend or a boyfriend or whatever?” Rodney’s brain scratched to a halt as Madison returned to her omelette. “Like, imagine if you brought someone you were seeing back to your apartment for the first time, and they opened your cutlery drawer and saw you only had  one  fork and  one  spoon. They’d probably think you were gonna skin ‘em and wear ‘em as a suit.”

Rodney blinked. “Please explain to me the correlation between owning one fork and -”

He couldn’t even begin to explain how his brain possibly could’ve used this conversation as a leaping off point, but by now Rodney had learned it was better not to question these things - so when the answer to the equation he’d been slaving over for five days now suddenly appeared, unbidden, in his brain, he leapt to his feet without a second thought and rushed to the whiteboard.

There was a clatter of cutlery behind him. “Wha - Uncle Rodney, it was a  joke. ”

“Hmm?” Rodney was barely listening as he uncapped his marker and began scribbling. “Oh, yes - no - I mean, this isn’t about -” He waved his other hand dismissively. “Just - eat your omelette.”

Miracle of miracles, Madison did what she was told, and he was left in relative peace and quiet as he scrawled out numbers at lightning speed. By the time he came out of the euphoric haze of a breakthrough, setting down the rapidly fading marker and turning back around, the table had been cleared, there were two plates in the drying rack by the sink, and Madison was sitting back in her chair, chin in her hand and watching him with unabashed fascination.

“This is what mom was helping you ages ago, right?” she asked. Rodney nodded, and she let out a hmph of dissatisfaction. “She never told me what it was for.”

“Good,” Rodney said shortly. He should hope so: Jeannie had sworn to keep this between them - and, inevitably, Kaleb. Just as he was about to turn back to the board and start on the next line of calculations, Madison pinned him down with a prying stare, like she was trying to burn a hole right through into his brain and peek inside. Rodney waggled the marker at her. “No.”

“I swear I won’t tell anyone.”

“It’s still no.”

“Okay, what if I guess? If I get it right, will you tell me?” Rodney promptly turned his back on her, letting the squeak of marker against whiteboard drown out the sound of her contemplative sigh. “Is it some way of tracking UFOs?”

Despite himself, Rodney found himself smirking. “UFOs literally just mean  unidentified flying objects . They’re not as special as you think. A hunk of space debris could be a UFO.”

“Alright, let’s get specific. I’m talking aliens. Is it some kind of way to speak with aliens?”

Rodney breathed a laugh. He wondered if Madison would ever get to find out that her own mother had worked side by side with Asgard in another galaxy. 

Judging by the impatient tapping sound behind him, that hadn’t satisfied Madison. “No,” he said.

“But if you did find a way to talk to aliens, you’d tell me, right?”

He turned around, meeting Madison’s wide, wheedling eyes. There was a smirk dangling at the corner of her lips, but she was leaning forward with undisguised eagerness all the same. With a realisation akin to a stone sinking in his gut, Rodney had a feeling that she and John would’ve gotten on like a house on fire. He could hear John’s voice right now, that unmistakable drawl:  aww, come on, McKay. Who’s gonna believe her?

…Ah, fuck it. “I’m trying to determine the possibility of time travel,” Rodney said. A wild oversimplification, but close enough.

Instantly, Madison brightened. “Epic,” she breathed, eyes sparkling. “Definitely not the worst excuse for ignoring your family.” Rodney tried not to react to that. “Any luck so far?”

Rodney glanced back at his boards. The buzz of achievement had been significantly dampened by the realisation of just how much further he had to go. “...That would be a no.”

“Bummer.” Madison lapsed back into silence for approximately ten seconds. “Maybe it’s ‘cause your working out is wrong.” She pointed to the far left of the board he was currently working on. “Those numbers don’t make sense.”

Rodney rolled his eyes. “They don’t make sense to  you . I’ve devised an entirely new form of math here; you wouldn’t exactly have come across it in your textbooks.”

Madison rolled her eyes right back. “Yeah, I figured that,” she replied sardonically. “But I’m pretty sure in any form of math you shouldn’t be doing that.” She sprung to her feet and pointed emphatically to a specific line of calculations. “See? You’re working in circles.”

Rodney finally deigned to look at the numbers Madison was gesturing to … and then looked closer, squinting. Well, that explained why he’d found himself stuck again. As he rubbed out the defective calculations, he cast a thoughtful sideways glance at an awfully smug-looking Madison. “How old are you again?”

“Fifteen,” she replied, the side of her mouth lifting cockily.  Little shit,  Rodney thought, but with a degree more fondness this time. He made a considering noise in the back of his throat. Maybe Madison was a late bloomer in the genius department, or perhaps Rodney had just never had occasion to notice it before. Still, he supposed, better late than never.

Madison had begun scanning the rest of his work again, lips pursed in concentration; probably looking for more errors to lord over him. “Hey,” she said, still grinning, and looking over at him with star-bright eyes. “Maybe I could help you with all this.”

Rodney’s hesitantly buoyant mood instantly went the way of blimps exposed to open flames. “What?” he snapped, taking a step back from the board. “No. Absolutely not.”

Her eyes widened a fraction, and the quirk of the eyebrows came a second too late to pass off the look as being coolly unimpressed. “Okay then, geez. Not like I helped you out already or anything.”

“It’s not happening,” Rodney said again, allowing no space for argument, though he was sure that Madison would try to wriggle her way through to one anyway. The notion of Madison helping with The Work was a splitting toothache of an idea. First and foremost, Jeannie would kill him, which was not at all conducive to saving John. There was also the pesky little matter of security clearance. Even aside from all of that, though, and the dozens of other logistical reasons that made the idea utterly laughable, the thought of Madison slipping and splashing into the cesspit of what Rodney was trying to do here made him feel viscerally ill. Madison, with all her unfettered enthusiasm and untapped potential and teenage spunk, did not belong in this dingy apartment with Rodney. She didn’t fit into the equation.

Madison turned her nose up slightly at Rodney’s unwavering glare. “Whatever, I was kidding anyway,” she sniffed in a way that Rodney was not particularly convinced by. The point was that she had stopped bugging him about it, so with a satisfied grunt, Rodney turned back to the board and set to work trying to fix his defunct calculation.

Except the next number came out as a sad smudge. His next attempt was even more faded, and he let out a growl of frustration. He tried each of the three markers he had waiting on the whiteboard’s metal lip: a bust, every single one of them. “Alright, you wanna help?”

“Oh, so now I’m good enough to help?” Madison shot back, but she was still standing to attention.

Rodney shot her a dry look. “You’re good enough to fetch my pack of fresh whiteboard markers. They’re on my bedside table.” He kept them alongside a mini whiteboard that fit inside his bedside drawer; that way, if inspiration struck him at the midnight hour, he wouldn’t have to waste precious time stumbling through the dark to his living room to jot it down.

Madison let out a puff of air through her nose. “What’s the magic word?”

Rodney scoffed. Kids these days. “I’ll buy you one of those Starbucks coffees your mom says you waste all your money on.”

His eyes had returned to the board, but he heard Madison pulling away from his side. “I mean, a simple ‘please’ would’ve been cheaper, but sure.”

“So this is why I’m the favourite uncle,” Rodney mused under his breath as the sound of footsteps receded down the short hallway, and he heard a small snicker from Madison. And that was all the sound he heard for the next minute. Rodney tried and failed to eke out anything that wasn’t a grainy smear with his markers, and every few seconds when he glanced around to see Madison with the new ones - but she was still in the bedroom, not even making so much as a clatter. Rodney narrowed his eyes. He swore Jeannie had said something about this years ago: a quiet child was a dangerous child.

He headed down the hall after her, stepping into his cramped bedroom. “Seriously, I didn’t ask you to get those for shits and giggles -” he began, and then cut himself abruptly. Madison was frozen in front of his bedside table, one hand clutching the packet of markers and the other holding up a photograph. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

Madison made an aborted movement to put the photograph down but stilled with her hand midway to the table when Rodney took a step towards her. “I’m sorry!” she exclaimed, eyes wide and white around the edges. “I came to get the markers, and it was just lying here, and - and I got curious. I didn’t mean to snoop. I’m really sorry -”

“You’re having to say that a lot today,” he snapped, and instantly regretted it when Madison drew in on herself, shoulders hunched and bottom lip clenched between her teeth. Rodney dropped his head. “I’m - I’m sorry,” he sighed. “I didn’t mean that. Just - give that here.”

Madison handed the photo over immediately, and Rodney stared down at it. His younger self stared right back, tucked into Ronon’s right side. Carson was on his left, and Ronon had his arms hooked around each of their necks in some loose half-headlock. Next to Carson stood Elizabeth, mouth twisted in a wry smile, and beside her was Teyla, mouth hanging open in a surprisingly unflattering way; she looked like she’d been caught mid-laugh. And there, standing on Rodney’s other side, was John. His hair was swept up and sticking in all directions like he’d just come in from a sand storm, even though he otherwise looked perfectly tidy, and he was only wearing his T-shirt and BDUs. He was wearing a smile too: not his signature crooked smirk, but his real, small smile, the one he only brought out for special occasions. His head was in a three-quarter profile, features slightly blurred, caught while turning to Rodney. He was leaning in, mouth slightly open - he’d been saying something. For the life of him, Rodney couldn’t remember what it was.

He remembered the occasion, though. This was taken on Ronon’s birthday, circa 2006. They’d thrown a party for him - John had insisted on celebrating it, Earth-style, and Ronon had gone along with it with a typically stoic delight. It was about a month before Carson - the first Carson - was killed. Rodney wondered when it was, exactly, that he’d started remembering the timing of events based on their proximity to death.

“I’m sorry,” Rodney said again, voice sounding heavy in his own ears. “I, uh, must’ve forgotten to put it back in the drawer.” He’d been looking at it again last night. He couldn’t even remember for how long.

Slowly, Madison crept towards him, sidling up to him so that they were standing shoulder to shoulder and she could look down at the photo as well. “...Who are they?” she asked.

Rodney swallowed hard. “Friends,” he said. “People I used to work with a long time ago.” What a simple answer. What a patently false one, despite being completely true on paper. It didn’t capture the depth, though. It didn’t explain that these people had been his family.

Madison squinted, bobbing her head in a little closer. Then, with a cautious look toward Rodney, she lifted a finger and pointed at John. “I … think I remember him.”

Rodney looked sharply at her. “What?”

Madison nodded slowly. “Yeah. I was like five, I think? I just remember being really freaked out because mom wasn’t there, and there were all these people in our house - I think you were there too. And there was this guy. Everybody else was talking, and he sat on the couch with me and helped me make a bracelet.” Her mouth curved up into a tiny smile.

Rodney nodded jerkily. “Right,” he said, throat tight. “Yeah - yeah, I remember that.” That was when Jeannie had been kidnapped by Henry Wallace. Rodney had been so caught up in his panic that he hadn’t even noticed John sitting down with Madison. John had never mentioned it.

“What’s his name?” Madison asked, and Rodney’s eyes slipped shut for a second.

“John,” he finally said, feeling like the name had been punched out of his chest. When he opened his eyes again, he looked up to meet Madison’s. She was staring at him thoughtfully, cheeks sucked in like she was gnawing on them.

Her gaze flicked back down to the photo, then back up to him. For a moment, she looked almost shy. It was a foreign look on her. “John,” she began slowly, then trailed off, sucking her bottom lip unsurely. “Was he, like … your boyfriend?” Rodney froze, staring at her with what he could only imagine was an expression of utter panic fixed on his face, and she hurried on. “I dunno, I guess I just thought maybe, ‘cause he was with you at my house back when I was five, and just … the way you’re…” She shrugged, looking away again and scratching the back of her neck. “I dunno.”

Rodney’s grip on the photo tightened, and the beginnings of a bend began to warp his and John’s faces. He hurriedly smoothed it out. “No,” he said after he finally got his throat to start cooperating again. “No, he - he wasn’t my boyfriend. He was…” His eyes fixed on John’s smile and wouldn’t let go. As if he was about to spill his guts to his teenage niece. As if he’d be able to find the words anyway. “We were friends.” Even as he said it out loud, the word sounded so very loaded.

“Oh,” Madison said meekly. “Okay.” Her tongue darted out, wetting her tongue as her eyes roamed the photo. “What happened to him?” she asked. “And the rest of them? Where are they now?”  Why aren’t they coming to your apartment, using your forks?

Rodney stared at the photo, feeling hollow and outside of himself. There was a shape in the top right corner of the photo: a pink blur. He remembered that too. Zelenka had taken the photo. The idiot had got his finger in the shot. “Dead,” Rodney said simply. “They’re all dead.” 

He took a few steps forward, pulling open his bedside table drawer and dropping the photo inside where it belonged. He thought about the waiting whiteboards in the living room, and the packet of markers in Madison’s hand - but right now, his brain felt like a balloon that had been pricked with a needle. To put it plainly, he felt utterly fucking useless. He sighed. “Alright, come on. We’ll go get your Starbucks … whatever.”

He turned around. Madison was still looking at him, but this time it wasn’t with petulance or mortification or awkward curiosity. There was something entirely new on her face, like she was seeing him for the first time; like there was some discovery written all over him that she had just now deciphered.

Rodney didn’t have any idea what to do with that.

Chapter Text

Václav Havel Airport is a scream of sensory overstimulation. The moment Rodney steps out of the boarding area, he’s hit in the face with a sledgehammer of sights and sounds and smells: glaring fluorescent lights, screaming children, and the wafting grease of overpriced hot airport sandwiches. He immediately feels claustrophobic. He’s grown accustomed, over the last two and a half decades, to the comfortable quiet of his apartment’s four walls and the drowsy hum of early morning traffic on his walk from the station to work. This, by comparison, feels like a specially constructed torture chamber in Hell. 

Eyes on the ground and sweaty hands clenched by his sides, Rodney makes quick work of collecting his luggage and making his way through security. By the time he makes it into the terminal proper, he’s about ready to burst. If he has to stand here and wait - shoes pulling against the sticky carpet and being brushed on all sides by the shoulders of people hurrying past him - he thinks he might just be willing to turn right around and buy a ticket home.

Except, as he drags his small suitcase off the escalator and stares down the throng of people awaiting disembarking passengers, he realises that won’t be necessary. Radek is standing at the front of the crowd, eyes roaming hungrily over the masses of people spilling off the escalator. In the two months since Lorne’s get-together, he’s gotten a haircut, and it highlights the grizzled grey streaks sprouting from his temples. When his gaze lands on Rodney, Rodney lifts up his hand in a small wave.

Radek smiles.

They take a cab to Radek’s place. Rodney sits in the back seat and watches the old stone and wide roads of the city centre give way to the boxy apartment complexes and cramped shopfronts of the outer boroughs, with packs of teenagers weaving between lamp posts and women pushing prams down the paved streets. All the while, Radek keeps up a steady stream of conversation with the cabbie in Czech, presumably to stop them from getting clocked as tourists and being overcharged - yeah, Rodney has read the travel warnings. It seems to work: when they pull over, Rodney hands over the cash amount that Radek translates for him, and the driver shoots him a dirty look. Radek gives him a thin, toothless smile in return.

They’ve arrived in front of a row of red brick terrace houses. Dragging his luggage behind him, Rodney follows Radek to the one furthest to the right. It’s smaller than Lorne’s ‘suburban dream’ house, and quite a bit shabbier as well, but considering the shitbox that Rodney is currently living in, he can’t complain. There’s a rattling as Radek struggles with the keys, fingers stiff as he tries to twist them in the lock. He hisses in quiet frustration, head bobbing down, and Rodney shoulders him out of the way, unlocking the door with ease.

“You’re a decrepit old man,” he says. Radek gives his grey hair and wrinkles a pointed stare, mutters his thanks, and pushes the door open. 

“Guest room is down hall,” Radek says, pointing, as they walk through the house. It’s more brick and a little draughty, but considering the cloying warmth outside, it’s more than welcome. “If you like, you can go leave your stuff then come to kitchen. Dinner should be ready, almost.”

Rodney can already smell the aroma wafting out from further in the house. Whatever it is, it’s rich and meaty and is settling tantalisingly on Rodney’s tongue, making his stomach growl. Obligingly, he double-times it down the dimly lit corridor to the door on the left that Radek had pointed out. It’s a sparse room - just a bed, wardrobe, and small nightstand - and the bedcovers are laid out with a military crispness. It looks like it hasn’t been used for a long time. 

Rodney stows his suitcase next to the rickety-looking wardrobe and sits down heavily on the edge of the bed. The smell of dinner is still beckoning him, but he needs a moment to get his thoughts in order. This, he thinks - being in Prague, being in Radek Zelenka’s house - should feel stranger than it is. Less than a year ago, he wouldn’t have believed that he’d ever see Radek again, much less spend a handful of days in his guest bedroom. But staring down the barrel of potential death tends to change one’s priorities - even if said death is your cat’s.

He remembers how thrilled Jeannie had been when he’d told her where he was spending his break, and he rolls his eyes. This holiday better earn him a free pass on lectures about “getting out more” for at least five years.

Rodney stands up, stretching out his aching joints before heading back out into the hall. There’s a door across the corridor from his, just a few paces to the right, and it’s slightly ajar. Rodney figures it must be Radek’s room. Rodney peeks his head in. This room is significantly less tidy: duvet rumpled, papers forming a sluggish trail across his desk, and what looks like an entire closet’s worth of coats thrown over the back of the desk chair. Rodney can only spy one photo frame. There on Radek’s bedside table is a black and white picture of a couple, pressed chest to chest as they smile slyly up at the camera. The woman on the left is tall, with easily an inch or two on the man, and a thick curtain of dark, flyaway curls that frame her hawkish features. The man’s hair is meticulously combed back, and he’s sporting a truly atrocious goatee and an even uglier pair of glasses. Apart from the hair, he’s a spitting image of Radek. The two of them look completely enamoured with each other. Rodney doesn’t think he remembers his parents - these, he assumes, are Radek’s - ever looking at each other like that.

There’s nothing else remotely personal in the room, apart from the degrees mounted on the wall above the desk. Rodney wonders if Radek has any loose photographs of his time on Atlantis stowed away in any desk drawers, and fights back the mighty urge to go snooping. He pulls the door back into its semi-closed state and continues down the hall.

It leads him to the living room, which feels considerably more alive. The curtains are drawn, giving the space a closed-in feel, but with the warm tones of the brown-and-maroon rug and the sofa with the quilted throw, it’s more cosy than claustrophobic. Rodney gives the impressively packed bookshelf on the wall opposite the hall entrance a rudimentary scan - Rodney had vaguely known Radek was a polyglot, but he'd never realised the extent of it; most of the texts are Czech, but amongst those he spots titles in English, Russian, German, Polish, and even Spanish. 

He is, admittedly, more drawn to the photos decorating the place, so different from the sparse bedroom. They’re not as abundant as they’d been at Lorne’s place, and - Rodney noted with a stifled bout of laughter - seem to mostly feature various pigeons. But there’s also one of a much younger Radek standing shoulder to shoulder with Lorne and Parrish in their matching wedding suits perched on the mantle. On the opposite end is one of a woman with what Rodney suspects are the patented Zelenka genes of untameable hair and piercing blue eyes, and a boy who Rodney realises with a beat of amusement must be the infamous nephew - who looks around fifteen in this shot, though, and has therefore presumably grown out of smearing things on furniture.

No photos of anybody Rodney could guess is Matej - although to be fair, it would be pretty fucking weird to display photos of your ex-husband. But there aren’t any photos of people from Atlantis either, aside from Lorne and Parrish, and nobody who looks like they could be Radek’s dead brother.

There’s a clatter and a muttered curse from the next room, so Rodney takes that as his cue to wander on into the kitchen. It’s considerably brighter in here, showcasing the hideous mustard colour of the faded paint on the walls. Radek is slaving away over the stove, ladling something thick and brown onto two plates. The table is already set - two forks! - but there’s nothing to drink, so Rodney gives himself permission to root through the fridge. There’s a bottle of cold water, which Rodney bypasses as soon as he sees the pack of beer. He pulls out two cans and ignores Radek’s amused huff when he sees them. Cracking his open and beginning to drink creates a nice buffer from the awkwardness of waiting for Radek to serve him his food. 

The plate Radek puts down in front of Rodney is steaming. Tender cubed meat and caramelised onions in a luscious-looking gravy, with spongy bread dumplings on the side. Rodney’s mouth is already watering. Just to confirm his suspicions, Rodney skewers a piece of the meat and puts it in his mouth: it’s beef, and it melts like butter in his mouth in an explosion of garlic and juices. Rodney looks over at Radek with naked surprise. “You cook?” he says. “I mean actually cook.”

There’s a shy curve to Radek’s lips, the same smile he’d always worn on the few occasions when he’d earned a genuine compliment from Rodney. “I am man of many talents,” he replies.

“Alright, well, I wouldn’t go quite that far,” Rodney replies automatically. When Radek rolls his eyes this time - well, Rodney might be imagining it, but it comes across as almost fond. 

It’s only towards the end of the meal, when Rodney is busy mopping up his leftover gravy with his dumplings, that he realises that he feels completely relaxed.

Rodney has high expectations for breakfast the next morning - expectations that swiftly plummet when he shuffles into the kitchen the next morning and sees Radek standing at the kitchen counter mixing together what looked like oats, sunflower seeds, peas, and finely diced apples into a Tupperware container. 

“Oh god,” Rodney groans, coming closer. “Is this one of those health bowls? Because, seriously, Kaleb and Jeannie have inflicted enough of that stuff on me for a lifeti - nnnnnnngh!” He chokes off into a horrified squeak as Radek pops open a smaller container and adds from inside it a heaping portion of what looks like honest-to-god earthworms, sluggishly writhing in pink knots, some still with fresh dirt clinging to them. “No. Nope. I don’t care if that’s some kind of traditional delicacy - you are not feeding me that.”

Radek turns around, look of alarm as Rodney presses back against the fridge swiftly morphing into one of amusement as he picks up the container of nightmares and shows it to Rodney. “This?” he says laughingly. “Is for the pigeons.”

“...Oh,” Rodney says, feeling a little stupid and resenting it deeply. “Right. I knew that.”

Radek just smirks. “Would you like to meet them?”

“Not particularly.” But Rodney still follows Radek out the door beside the pantry that leads out into his backyard, driven by an ill-fated curiosity more than anything. The outside barely counts as a backyard, really. It’s more of a courtyard, with cracked and dirty pavers that extend about two third of the way down the boxy space, bordering a sad strip of grass at the end. The whole area is encased by a stone wall, and Rodney can just barely see the bushes from the neighbour’s yard peeking over on the left. 

A decent portion of the view is obscured, however, by a gargantuan loft-looking thing bordering the wall. There’s a mesh-covered aviary extending out the front of it, and the whole thing is big enough for a person to step inside, which explains the door on the side. Already as Radek fiddles with the latch, Rodney can hear the cacophony of coos from inside.

“Wow,” he says. “Your neighbours must hate you.” Radek shoots him a wicked grin over his shoulder.

Reluctantly, Rodney sticks his head into the loft after Radek. It … doesn’t smell as bad as he’d expected, to be honest. There’s a general musty scent that he can only assume is pigeon, but there’s no foul odour of bird shit. There’s none to be seen, either. Ironically, considering the state of his own bedroom, Radek clearly keeps a tight ship.

“Dobré ráno, mé krásky,” Radek sing-songs. The pigeons are beginning to poke their heads out of their little hidey-holes, cooing gently as their beady eyes fix on the container in his hand. “Jste připraveni na snídani?”

Whatever that question meant, the answer is clearly  yes ; as Radek tips most of the contents of his container into the two flat bowls that sit on a ledge beside the hatch that leads out to the aviary, the pigeons flutter out of their coops and swarm to them, pecking away happily. Rodney takes a step back, wincing at the uproarious flapping of wings.

Radek begins pointing out each pigeon. There’s Sisko, Martinù, Archimedes, Uhura, Hrabal, and Váňa - which, considering that pigeon’s comparatively puny size and barrel chest, Rodney guesses is a teasing jab at Lorne’s expense. Apart from that one though, Rodney can’t tell the others apart in the slightest, and he just nods along confusedly as Radek, looking like a proud father, introduces them.

“And there are the chicks,” he continues proudly, pointing into the darkness of one of the nesting holes. Rodney refuses to step further into the loft, so Radek clucks his tongue and sticks his hands inside. There’s the sound of feeble tweeting, and a few seconds later he emerges with two chicks nestled in his cupped palms. They’re terrifyingly tiny, like two wriggling, wrinkly pink mice covered in a sparse layer of downy yellow feathers.

“Ugh,” is Rodney’s knee-jerk response, because they look like alien spawn, and not the sexy human kind. Radek shakes his head scoldingly in response.

“Neposlouchejte, děti. Jsi hezčí než on,” he coos down at the chicks, then bounces his gaze back up to Rodney. “They have no names yet. I must think of the perfect ones.” One of the chicks chirps, and Radek chirps back, eyes all soft. It’s … sweet, Rodney supposes, in a weird way. “The little ones I must feed myself,” he says. “Their parents feed them milk, but I must train them to accept seeds.”

Rodney keeps his eyes on the squirming chicks. “Pigeons produce milk?”

“Eh, is not milk like … savci - er … you know, the other animals that feed their babies. Is called crop milk. The mothers and fathers produce it in base of their neck, and when the squabs hatch they, you know…” Holding the chicks carefully, Radek mimes projectile vomiting. “Into squab’s mouth.”

Rodney wrinkles his nose in disgust. “Yeah, remind me to never ask you anything pigeon related again.”

“You are such a child,” Radek says. Then he holds out his cupped palms. “Would you like to?”

Rodney takes another step back, so he’s halfway out the door. “Absolutely not. Pigeons are basically rats with wings. I might as well stick my hands into a sewage pipe.”

That earns him an affronted gasp as Radek tucks his extended hands back against his chest, protectively cradling the cheeping birds. “My pigeons are not dirty!” he exclaims. “They like to be clean, so long as their environment allows it! The only reason why they are dirty in the cities is because after domesticating their species we abandoned them and they had no choice but to -”

“Oh my god, fine,” Rodney snaps, and he holds his hands, squeamishly flexing his fingers.

“Well, now I am not sure I want you to.”

“Now who’s being a child? Just give me the stupid bird.”

Radek’s wearing a winning smile, and Rodney gets the distinct feeling of being set up. Still, he’s in it now, so he grudgingly keeps his hands extended as Radek carefully deposits one of the chicks into them. It weighs almost nothing in his palms. Then, using his free hand, Radek reaches into the feeding container. “No worms,” he says warningly, and Radek’s lips twitch before he obligingly sprinkles only a fine dusting of seed mix into the free space in his cupped palms.

It’s a strange sensation: the little beak pecking at his hand. Ticklish, but not in a terrible way, so Rodney grits his teeth and bears it. It’s difficult to wrap his head around the way this tiny creature is so willing to trust him, some giant, hulking stranger. Instinctively, Rodney adjusts his grip, making sure his palms are held tightly together so there’s no chance of dropping the bird. Next to him, he sees Radek smile.

“So, do they … do anything?” Rodney asks as he watches his bird slowly peck his way through the pile of seeds.

Radek purses his lips like that’s a strange question. “I race them,” he says. “They are excellent racers. Very fast; good navigators. I am raising the squabs to be too. But mostly they just keep me company.” He glances down at his own cupped hands, where the second chick is nuzzling into his palms in search of crumbs. “It is a good feeling to … to care for something, you know?” he says softly. His face looks almost alight from within, and it smooths out the deep lines in his face, making him look a little younger.

Alright, Rodney decides as he watches his bird eat. Maybe this isn’t so bad.

Radek has to run errands, and Rodney has little else to do but follow him around. They head back to the city centre, and Rodney only does the bare minimum of complaining as Radek picks up some prescriptions, buys a few bags of birdseed, and browses the local markets, weighing up vegetables with a thoughtful frown as he considers what to cook for dinner that night. Radek clucks his tongue at Rodney for walking too slowly, Rodney pokes fun at Radek’s wheelable canvas shopping back that makes him look even older than he is, and they pass the time this way as they let the pavement melt back into old cobblestones beneath their feet, entering the heart of Old Town. 

Rodney tips his head back as they pass the Astronomical Clock, eyes squinting against the sun as he gazes at its impressive face. He can feel the cobblestones vibrating beneath his feet as the clock chime counts out the hour in twelve steady rings. Rodney has never had much passion for architecture in itself, but he is taken by the intricate feat of engineering that must have gone into the clock. Old Town Hall reminds him of Atlantis in that way - objectively, he knows that it’s beautiful, but that isn’t what draws him to it. It’s the technological mastery living and breathing within, working in perfect conjunction together like all the systems in the human body, that makes him fall in love.

Of course, Radek has to ruin the moment by chuckling and calling him a tourist, and Rodney looks away to scowl at him. He hasn’t missed the hazy, guarded nostalgia flitting across Radek’s face all morning. He wonders if he’s been thinking the same thing.

The vibrations from the clock striking twelve chase them to the little strip of boutiques that Rodney is surreptitiously guiding them towards. “I’m not souvenir shopping,” he makes clear before Radek can give him another one of his little looks. “When Jeannie found out I was coming here, she asked me to bring something back. So.”

He’s fairly certain that Jeannie had been joking when she’d said it, but it is her birthday coming up, and Rodney has about twenty-five years of robust neglect to make up for. Despite both their well-established tendencies, Jeannie had never entirely abandoned him while he lost himself in The Work, always at least checking in to make sure he was alive and eating even after she’d given up on helping with the actual calculations. Now that he’s out of his hibernation, he figures that’s a debt that he should probably start paying off. That’s never been something he’s been particularly good at, but he figures a nice scarf or something can’t hurt as a first step.

“Ah.” Radek’s lips curl gently. “In that case, we should not look here. These shops will eat your wallet. Come.” 

Radek guides him down into side streets with a well-worn familiarity, pursing his lips thoughtfully at each shop they pass until they finally turn into the doorway of a dimly lit little place that Rodney probably would’ve walked right past. The shelves are lined with a hodge-podge of assorted knick-knacks and accessory, seemingly without any rhyme or reason, and there’s a heavy scent of incense and cigarette smoke in the air, but the stuff seems to be of respectable quality, and the price tags don’t give Rodney a headache. It’s the kind of place that he and the rest of AR-1 probably would have wasted far too much time in if they found it on another planet, once upon a time. Ronon had a penchant for sniffing out hole-in-the-wall places, and Teyla had had a long-standing love affair with knick-knacks.

“What she likes?” Radek asks as they stand in the middle of the cramped store. The attendant had given them a lazy, disinterested look when they’d first come in and has so far ignored them completely.

“Um,” Rodney replies. He hasn’t gone gift shopping in a long time.

Radek scans the low tables for three seconds before picking up a small, salmon-pink teapot. “This?”

Rodney wrinkles his nose. “No.”

The teapot goes down and a wood-backed hand mirror takes its place. “This?”

Rodney feels comforted by the fact that Radek is apparently as terrible at this as he is. “What is she, a seventeenth-century maiden? No.”

Radek throws up his hands, muttering something in Czech that Rodney can’t make out, and ambles off to look at a wall of scented candles. That’s another hard no from Rodney - and from Jeannie, who he knows hates strong scents as much as he does - so he retreats to the other side of the store, where there’s a small collection of silk scarves. He browses uncertainly, desperately thinking back to try and remember what colours and patterns he’s seen Jeannie wear. He momentarily loses himself in one with a deep ocean colour, rubbing the fluttering fabrics between his fingers, and he hears Radek shuffle up beside him.

“It matches your eyes.”

Rodney feels his cheeks flush. “Oh, very funny.”

Radek just rolls his eyes. “Your eyes are same as your sister’s,” he explains in a put-upon voice. “It matches you, it will match her.”

“Oh.” Now that he thinks about it, he supposes this probably would look quite nice on Jeannie. Rodney chews the inside of his cheek before determinedly snatching the scarf off its hook. “Alright, well, good, we’re done then. Let’s go, this incense is giving me a migraine.”

Slate-coloured clouds are creeping across the sky as they begin the walk back to the Square, holding the promise of rain soon. Rodney tugs his coat more securely around him, and the paper bag with the scarf smacks against his hip. Radek glances over at him. “It is nice,” he says. “That you keep up with your sister.”  Despite everything,  is the unspoken rest of that sentence. Rodney wonders if Radek is surprised that he has. 

Radek’s gaze is still on him when he asks: “What did she think of your work?”

Rodney stiffens, but more out of surprise than displeasure. “Oh. Well, she wasn’t overly impressed with the idea. She tried to talk me out of it, which didn’t work, obviously. Once she realised that, she helped me. For a while.” Rodney shrugs uneasily, remembering the conversation where she’d told him she’d had enough. He has a feeling that she’d wanted it to be an argument, just like old times, where she could drag something furious and genuine out of him and they could really have it out. Maybe she’d thought if there was an argument, then she could actually convince him to stop. But he hadn’t had time for that. She’d told him he was done, he’d nodded and gone right back to work, and she’d had no choice but to leave without another word.

“Eventually she decided that the price was too high, I suppose.” For her, it probably had been. It wasn’t her world she’d been trying to save, after all.

Radek nods. “Perhaps she was worried about what it was doing to you,” he suggested.

“And if I’d listened, then I never would have found the answer, so I’d argue her worry was pretty misplaced.”

“Yes,” Radek allows after a long pause. “I imagine she was not thinking about Pegasus. She was thinking of you. She is your sister. She would have wished to protect you, even from yourself.”

There’s a weighty certainty to Radek’s tone, one that makes something squirm uncomfortably in Rodney’s gut. An impulse itches, too urgent to ignore, and he feels his pace begin to slow, and by the time he speaks, he realises that he’s stopped dead on the pavement. “Lorne … he told me that your brother died.”

Radek, a few steps ahead of him now, freezes in his tracks, and Rodney immediately decides he’s made a mistake. Slowly, he pivots to meet Rodney’s eyes. His expression is unintelligible. “Evan told you that?” he asks, and huffs under his breath, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Yes. Yes, he did.” And before Rodney can say anything in response, he’s walking again.

Rodney scrambles to follow. He doesn’t risk speaking again, for fear that Radek will actually answer, so the only sound between their footfalls is the scrape of Radek’s shopping bag wheels trundling along the cobblestones. It’s a long walk back to the Square in that silence.

Rodney genuinely can’t tell if Radek is angry, or hurt, or anything at all. He doesn’t think so - when Radek Zelenka is truly mad about something, everyone in the general area tends to know about it. But it’s been a long time, and this is a different kind of thing to anything that ever brushed him the wrong way on Atlantis. If he’s being completely honest with himself, Rodney’s impulse to ask about Miloš had been more than a little self-serving: Radek knows the whole, barren, ugly mess that has been Rodney’s life post-Atlantis, and yet it’s becoming increasingly clear how little knowledge Rodney has in return. He wants to feel on an equal footing, to feel a little less exposed - but now he feels more unbalanced than he had before.

It’s midday on a Thursday, so there aren’t too many passersby choking up Old Town Square by the time they get back there. They trace their steps back almost exactly until they’re standing under the shadow of the clock tower again, and then they stop. Rodney looks at Radek uncertainly; he’d led them here with an air of purpose, but now he cuts such a vague figure, staring up at the clock face just like Rodney had been nearly an hour earlier.

“After school, I used to sneak into the factory my father worked at, to visit him,” Radek says, so soft that it takes Rodney a moment to work out whether he’s speaking English or Czech. “I would pass through here on my way. I would get here at four and I would count the clock chimes. It became ritual, I suppose.”

“Why?” Rodney asks, completely lost at this point.

Radek gives him a half-shrug. “I was a child. Children do strange things.” He’s wearing a small, strange smile as he says that: tight at the edges. “I brought Mila with me sometimes, before…” He puffs out his breath and pushes up his glasses again even though they don’t need adjusting. “He died, oh, ten years ago now.”

Rodney is deeply uncomfortable, his eyes continuously skittering between Radek’s profile and the clock face above them, but he had quite literally asked for this, and Radek is at least talking now. “How?”

“Overdose,” Radek replies simply, and that surprises Rodney enough to jerk his stare fully onto Radek. “He liked to take, er … předpis … prescriptions that he did not need. Alcohol too, and other things, I imagine. We are not sure if it was accident, or …” His expression pinches. “Well, by that point, I do not think it makes much difference, you know?”

“Oh,” Rodney says, practically choking on it. His throat suddenly feels too thick, like he needs his Epipen. “I’m - sorry.”

“So am I,” Radek says tiredly, then makes a hesitant sound at the back of his throat. He shakes his head like an old dog. “Truthfully, I had been expecting it for very long time. In a way…” He flashes Rodney a wan smile. “It is awful thing to say, but in many ways, the wait was worse.”

Rodney thinks of Jen, and that last stretch of time in the infirmary hospital, so long and too, too short. He thinks of Carson, choosing to go the same way. He stuffs his curled fists deep into his pockets, chin pressed nearly to his chest. He can feel the way his lips have pulled down into a scowl, and though he’s not meeting Radek’s eyes, busy studying the toes of his shoes instead, he senses the way that Radek is tensing. 

He wonders - is sure that Radek is wondering too - if this is the warning bell of another fight. They’re so very good at it, after all, and all the requisite ingredients are here. It’s a bizarre attack of emotions: Rodney does want to fight, actually, but not with Radek. He wants to fight with whatever or whoever had put that shadow on Radek’s face. It’s a look that Rodney has seen before, during that last fateful year on Atlantis. He’d been the one to put it there. It’s a stupid thought - since when has life ever pulled its punches for anyone? - but the thought that after everything they’ve been through, Radek would still be living through things that could return that look to his face leaves Rodney with a fury that fills him to the brim.

“Why would he do that to you?” he asks, and the words snap out harsh as thunder in the sparse Square. 

Radek is quiet beside him for so long that Rodney risks flicking his gaze up to his face. He catches the tail end of a bewildered frown and sees it morph into the crinkled eyes of a fleeting, tiny, tender smile.

Eventually, Radek speaks. “You know the Prague Spring?”

Finally, Rodney resolves to look at him properly. “What am I, an American? Yes, I know about the Prague Spring.”

“It was before my time, my brother and sister’s too. But my father believed in those ideas, that freedom. Even more after I was born, I think. He wanted a better world for his family, and he did not let the Warsaw invasion stop him. He resisted quietly for many years. But when I was ten years old, his luck ran out. To them he was traitor, and back then, traitors, you know.” Radek makes a vague motion with his hand. “They go away.” His eyes skitter away, his hands suddenly overcome with nervous energy. “They did not know if my mother could be trusted, so they took my siblings and I away too, for our protection.” He laughs, short and loud and bitter.

Another memory flashes in Rodney’s mind like a burst of electricity: Radek, wild-eyed and wild-haired, crowbar in his hands and all his memories stripped away. The soldiers, they shoot you and they take you away. A fear worked right down into his bones.

“We go to state ‘care,’” Radek continues, the last word ringing with a sardonic edge. “Was only for a few months, until my mother managed to make them believe that she had not known what my father had been doing, but…” Radek’s weathered hands are gripping the handle of his shopping bag so tightly that his knuckles are blanched. “Mila was not the same after. I don’t know what -” A sharp breath lances out of him. “It was bad enough for me,” he continues, and there’s something about the toneless way those words fall from his mouth that makes Rodney feel a staticky chill run down his spine. He was only four, you know? Only little.” 

Rodney frowns slightly. He doesn’t know when ten years old had stopped being considered ‘little’ as well. He remembers Maddison and Jonah when they were that age; they’d seemed plenty little to him.

Radek ducks his head a fraction. “Well,” he says softly. “It was difficult, after that. We were together again, but my mother was…” He shrugs slightly. “I tried to look after my family, but to be truthful, I was not very good at it. I thought it would be easier after we freed our country, and it was, in some ways, but we could not shake what had happened to us.” His voice takes on a hollow quality. “Miloš tried his best. He tried for many, many years. I do not blame him for growing tired of it.”

Rodney’s shoulders are rigid. He feels the weight of every single one of his years piling down on top of them. We’re all fucking tired, he’s about to snap. Look at me. Look at yourself. Since when has that ever been an excuse?

When he looks to his left again, though, Radek’s eyes are heavy and half-lidded. He looks like he’s about to be swallowed by his overcoat and the stones beneath him, and the words turn to ash in Rodney’s mouth. 

Not quite knowing himself, he reaches out and touches the crook of Radek’s elbow as the first icy droplets from above begin to splatter down. He can feel Radek shivering through his overcoat, and he isn’t sure if it’s because of the cold or not. Without thinking too much about it, Rodney shifts closer. “Come on,” he says. “It’s starting to rain.”

As they walk, Rodney doesn’t think he’s imagining the way Radek is pressing his shoulder tightly against his.

“So you’re actually going?”

It’s the next evening, Rodney’s final night in the Czech Republic, and he’s sitting in one of the plush armchairs in the living room, nibbling on a slice of challah and watching dispassionately as Radek pulls on his shoes and his coat, getting ready to go to a synagogue of all places.

Radek glances up from where he’s knotting his laces, pushing a few strands of hair out of his face. “Did you think I was joking?”

Rodney just takes another bite of the soft, buttery bread. “Honestly? Yeah.”

Seeing Radek do Shabbat prayers had been surprising enough. Radek had only been loosely observant on Atlantis: he’d helped put together a rough imitation of a Passover Seder in their first year, along with Chuck and Katie and a handful of the other Jewish personnel - Teyla had gone out of cultural curiosity, Rodney had gone because, well, food. But that had been about the extent of it, as far as Rodney can remember. 

He certainly has no complaints about some of the rituals Radek has fallen into the habit of. After Radek had completed what he’d explained to be the Shabbat blessings over his candles, covering his eyes and singing out Hebrew with a rough but un-self-conscious voice, he’d magnanimously allowed Rodney to share the wine and homemade challah with him, and Rodney had happily accepted. But actually going to a synagogue for a service? That had caught Rodney off guard.

“I don’t suppose you want to come?” Radek asks, corners of his mouth twitching.

“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer,” Rodney replies, putting his now empty plate down and returning to his book, thumbing his way to the page he’d left off on. “So you’re Jewish and gay. And a scientist. How does that work?”

“It means I am three times as good at questioning things,” Radek says dryly, and Rodney snorts. “I will be back in, say, hour and a half.” 

Rodney listens to the sound of the front door rattling shut. Alone, he lets his head drop back against the back of the armchair. He wonders - but hasn’t asked, doesn’t think he’ll ever ask - if Radek had started going to synagogue after his brother died, or if it had been the events in Pegasus that had done it.

They haven’t talked about Miloš since yesterday, though their conversation hangs in the quiet spaces between them like a jacket you can’t quite bring yourself to throw away. Radek seems - well, not happy, but satisfied at least with the conclusion he’s drawn from his brother’s death, but Rodney can’t say he is. More than Miloš himself, who Rodney doesn’t know and will never know, it’s Radek’s meek acceptance that what happened to his brother was always going to happen that gets under Rodney’s skin. He’s a firm believer that if the past has led you to a place you don’t want to be, then you go at it with a sledgehammer until it’s the shape that you want. Radek, evidently, does not share that philosophy.

He forces himself not to ruminate on it. He reads. He messages the neighbour he’d enlisted to cat-sit Newton for an update, though he knows he probably won’t get a response until tomorrow. The night passes slowly without somebody to talk to. It’s not like conversation between the two of them has been particularly lively since yesterday’s accidental heart-to-heart, but there’s something to be said for quiet chit-chat over dinner and snappy back and forths about whatever’s playing on the news that night, or even just the sound of another person puttering around in the kitchen. Rodney had been alone for so long that he hadn’t realised he’d been lonely. The contrast is … nice, he supposes. 

It also helps that Radek can cook, Rodney muses as he eyes the remaining challah crumbs.

At some point, he finishes his book. He tucks it under his arm and heaves himself up, shuffling down the hall towards the guest room to dig out the other one he’d packed into his suitcase. 

The hallway is one dark, gaping mouth: Radek, energy freak that he is, insists that every light that isn’t immediately being used be switched off, and there have been multiple times over the last couple of days where Rodney’s been minding his own business in some room of the house when he’ll suddenly be plunged into darkness, either because Radek hadn’t seen him or - as Rodney suspects - had been trying to get Rodney to take a hint. Rodney gropes for the light switch now and finally manages to bathe the hallway in a dim golden light. Radek can complain all he wants; this way, he won’t come back tonight to the sight of Rodney with a broken hip. 

He makes it into his room and out again, new book retrieved, when he glances across the hall at the ajar door to Radek’s bedroom and notices something out of place. The little lamp on Radek’s desk is still on, bathing the room in a warm, dusky light. Rodney smirks - who’s the energy-conscious one now? - and he slips into the bedroom to switch it off, which is when he sees the shoebox sitting on the desk. That in of itself isn’t particularly interesting at all; what catches Rodney’s attention are the photographs spread out beside it.

These definitely hadn’t been there when Rodney had first poked his head into Radek’s room upon his arrival. Rodney has never pretended not to be an asshole, so after only a couple seconds’ consideration, he inches closer. The lid of the shoebox is off to the side, and there are blotches of fresh fingerprints marring the thick layer of dust on top.

The first photo Rodney picks up from the desk is one from Atlantis, a snapshot of one of the science department’s New Year’s parties. Rodney puts it down as quickly as he finds it. The next one is an entirely different breed. Clearly taken many decades ago, it’s the same couple from the photo frame on Radek’s bedside table, but this time, balanced on their pressed together knees, is a little boy - maybe five or six years old - with a shock of messy hair and a radiant smile. The sight of it makes something unidentifiable ache in Rodney’s chest, and he quickly moves on to the next one. 

It’s another old photo. Radek again, but older this time - probably around sixteen, Rodney thinks. He has two younger children tucked under each of his arms. The smallest one is a girl with thick, dark hair pulled back into twin plaits and striking blue eyes. On the other side is a boy who looks very much like Radek: he’s long and lanky where Radek is short and stocky, but they share the same intense gaze, the same canny glint in their eyes. This must be Miloš, Rodney realises. The boy had shadows under his eyes, with skin that looks pulled taut over his skull. Rodney’s gaze can’t help but return to young Radek though, over and over. The teenage boy is smiling in this photo as well, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

It’s a smile, Rodney realises, that he’s seen many times.

He’s about to start minding his own damn business again and leave when one last photo catches his eye. At first, he can’t put his finger on what about it grabs him so much, only that the sight of it makes his stomach plummet like a stone down a well. It’s a group photo with a cluster of children lined up in two rows, decked out in little blue uniforms with red neckerchiefs. It reminds Rodney of his brief stint in Boy Scouts as a child. Did they have Boy Scouts in Czechoslovakia? Radek is in the front row, second from the right, though it takes Rodney a second to spot him. For one, his hair, which Rodney has only ever seen in various stages of unkempt, is unevenly cropped almost to a buzz cut. For another, he’s tiny, dwarfed by the children around him. If Rodney had to guess, he would have pegged him to be seven or eight, but judging by the year he’d seen scribbled on the back of the photo - 1977 - Radek should have been around ten. The same age, Rodney remembers, that Radek said he’d been when his father was arrested and his family fell apart. 

Rodney looks at the photo and thinks: little.

It’s then that the pieces slot together in Rodney’s head: the look on little Radek’s face is that same solemn, vacant-eyed expression that he’d seen time and time again on Pegasus children whose worlds had just been Culled. 

All of a sudden, Rodney honestly feels kind of ill, and he drops the photo onto the desk. He wonders if, on the few times that Radek had seen the wreckage of post-Culling worlds in person, he’d recognised that same expression. He wonders if he’d remembered it every time he’d had to step through the Gate, and suddenly that fear that Rodney had always mocked him for makes a whole lot more sense. 

He wonders how often Radek had seen that expression again staring back at him in the mirror since John disappeared. Rodney tries to imagine beginning the uphill slog of The Work under the weight of that many years, of losing everything he’d ever known that many times. He thinks, now, he might be relieved that he never called Radek for help.

He thinks of Miloš, of Carson, of all the quiet gaps in Radek’s last twenty-five years. Under that kind of weight, maybe it’s easier to just let people go.

Rodney’s about to put the photographs back in the box and make like he’d never stepped foot in here in the first place when he hears an exhale from the doorway. His head shoots up, heart in his throat. Radek is watching him, backlit by the hallway lights, with his eyebrows raised.

“Uh. Radek. Hi,” Rodney manages to get out, very conscious of how this looks. Even for him, this is a gross breach of boundaries. He presses back against the desk like he can somehow hide the evidence of his snooping with his body, but he already knows it’s a lost cause. “Look,” he begins, and then grimaces. “Okay, to be fair, you already know a lot more about my life than I do about yours.”

Slowly, Radek breathes out a laugh. “That is true,” he says, and slowly begins to make his way over to the desk. “I think most of what I have told you is lies, if memory serves.”

Rodney stills. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Instantly, his mind goes back to their conversation in town, about Radek’s brother and the whole nightmare that was his childhood. Radek seems to read his mind because he quickly shakes his head.

“Back on Atlantis,” he clarifies. “Fun little game I used to play.”

“Like - what, when you told me your brother accidentally burnt your house down -?”

Radek flashes him a shark-like grin. “I forgot that. Was a good one!”

“Nutcase,” Rodney mutters but otherwise doesn’t react. He’s too caught up in the way that Radek has stopped next to him, hand reaching out to ghost over the photos scattered across the desk. 

Radek picks up the photo of himself that Rodney had just dropped and studies it for a passing second, but his expression shutters, and he tosses it back into the box, which he grabs and tucks under his arm. For a moment, Rodney assumes he’s about to stash it back in his wardrobe or wherever it is he’s been keeping it, but instead, Radek drifts over to his bed, dropping down on the mattress and settling the box on his lap. Reaching in, his hand emerges with another photo. For a while, Radek is frozen as he stares at it, eyes dark and distant, but eventually, he lets out a long, low sigh, and Rodney spots a softness creeping out from his eyes and across his cheeks.

He tilts the photo Rodney’s way. After a hesitant second, Rodney slowly traverses the few paces between the desk and the bed and tentatively sits down beside Radek. He takes the offered photo.

“Mila got the good genes,” Radek says wryly. “Evzenie too. Like our mother.”

Rodney is inclined to agree. It isn’t that Radek is a bad-looking guy, exactly, but both his brother and sister have the sharp lines and dark palettes that you see in those haughty, Eastern European models. It’s evident even in this photo, where all three of them are fully grown and Radek’s brother is clearly worse for wear, with long scraggly hair brushing his rail-thin shoulders. Both men are sitting at a table with their beaming sister who, from the looks of it, is pregnant.

“...Your sister,” Rodney asks quietly, glancing back up at Radek with his faraway gaze. He shapes his mouth clumsily around the unfamiliar name. “Ev - Evzenie. Is she…?”

“She is well,” Radek says. “Better now that she left that husband of hers. Hajzl.” His face darkens for a moment, but just as quickly it smooths out again. He toes off his shoes, reclining back against the pillows of his bed as he holds the photo up, thumbing wistfully at its surface. Rodney shifts a little, unprepared for the sudden invasion of space, but he doesn’t get off the bed. “We are not as close as we used to be,” Radek continues, sounding lost in thought. He catches Rodney’s eye and smiles ruefully. “Nothing bad. Just life, you know? One day she is little girl always clinging to my hand, next she is grown woman, not wanting her big brother telling her what to do all the time.” He chuckles wryly. “I didn’t get to be fun big brother when I was the one making sure she did her homework and ate her dinner, you know? She thinks I am very bossy.”

God, that sounds awfully familiar. Of course, Jeannie had never been much for hand holding even when she was little, but the point still stands; it had always been her and Rodney against the world, until the day that it wasn’t. Maybe that’s just what happens in families like theirs.

Except Rodney has gotten Jeannie back - in a fashion, anyway. He hasn’t gotten much else out of life, but he’s gotten that. They’d both kicked and scratched and drawn blood in the process, but it had happened all the same. Rodney thinks about the quiet resignation nestled into too many of Radek’s words, and he wonders when exactly he’d become so accustomed to losing people - was it after his brother? Carson? Everyone on Atlantis? Or is this a line that winds all the way back to his father? Probably. Doesn’t it always?

Rodney’s eyes drift to Radek’s bedside, where the photo of Radek’s parents still sits. Disappeared father, distant mother; not quite the same, but still eerily similar in a lot of ways. Aren’t they just two peas in a pod, Rodney thinks humourlessly. 

“I used to make all of Jeannie’s school lunches,” Rodney says suddenly, surprising himself. The words land awkwardly in the dimly lit room, and he feels more than sees Radek shift to look at him. “Dinners, too, a lot of the time. And I’d walk her to school - ‘til she got old enough that she found it too embarrassing, anyway. My mother wasn’t all that interested in raising us either.” Of course, his father hadn’t been much for it either, but he got points for actually sticking around.

When he glances around, Radek is blinking owlishly at him behind his glasses. “Is not the same,” he says almost gently. “I do not know your parents, but my mother loved us very, very much,” he said softly. “She was in very difficult position. When you live like that, you have to make choices you don’t like.” His eyes float back to the photo still clutched in his hand. “Love is not always pretty like you see in the movies. It is … sacrifice.”

Rodney knows that too, of course. How could he not? From the sad smile on Radek’s face as he toys with the corner of his photograph, he knows that Radek knows it too, right down to the deepest parts of himself. What else have they been doing all these years, after all? He thinks, maybe, sacrifice means something very different to each of them. Radek lets people walk away and thanks them for it. Rodney doesn’t think he’s ever let someone go without choking on it first.

He looks down at the narrow space on the bed between them, thinks about the weight of their histories floating in the dark air around them. This, whatever it is that they’re doing, doesn’t feel like letting go. Rodney doesn’t know if he should take that as a warning or not.

Rodney’s flight leaves around noon, so he has time for a leisurely breakfast. Radek, always an early riser, is up before him, and Rodney shuffles into the kitchen to the smell of sizzling onions and wafting cumin. Stifling a yawn, he watches Radek stir diced mushrooms and lightly beaten eggs into the aromatic mixture, the cord of his beaten blue dressing gown trailing as he sways drowsily in front of the stove. Wordlessly, Rodney makes for the coffee grounds. 

Not much conversation passes between them as they unfurl from sleepiness under the gentle light of the early morning sun leaking through the kitchen windows, but it’s not an uncomfortable silence. Radek hums softly along to the songs on the radio, and even after scoffing, Rodney finds he doesn’t much mind the sound. As the steam from the coffee shoots up and moistens Rodney’s eyes, thick, golden slices of leftover challah shoot up from the toaster, and as Radek squeezes past Rodney to heap them onto a waiting plate, his hip bumps lightly against Rodney’s. Rodney surreptitiously - well, as surreptitiously as one can in this cramped kitchen - makes his way over to the stovetop and nibbles at a scrap of fluffy eggs. When Radek turns and catches him sprinkling a dash of salt into the pan, he tries to scold Rodney away with restless hands, and they bicker rhythmically and mindlessly until Rodney sniffs the air and hurries to save the coffee grounds from burning.

Rodney’s body still isn’t used to this sharing of space, this casual, accidental contact. His mind isn’t used to it either. Even after being in this house for three days, even while pouring steaming coffee into Radek’s chipped mugs, he still catches himself by surprise when he glances up and sees Radek blinking blearily back at him. The impossibility of this moment, stark against the backdrop of the last twenty-five years, swells in Rodney’s brain and his chest cavity until he’s nearly breathless with it. But then Radek pushes a plate loaded with toasted bread and eggy mushrooms into his hands, and the press of cool ceramic against his palms snaps him back to the absolute reality of the present. 

He hands Radek a mug of coffee in return, and the trade-off is complete. They take their seats at the kitchen table, and Rodney feels that dizzy, strangely hopeful sheen seep back over him as he watches Radek delicately cut into his toast. Radek glances up, maybe sensing Rodney’s subtle staring, and Rodney quickly buries his nose in his coffee cup.

“Nice weather today,” Radek says, nodding at the window and the clear blue sky peeking through. “Good for your flight.”

The mention of his flight home sets off a wave of despair so viscerally tarry and chilling that Rodney has to grip his fork tighter just to keep hold of it. He takes a long, burning gulp from his mug. He wants his mouth full so he doesn’t accidentally say any of the words bubbling up from his throat, those unbearably childish thoughts of how he doesn’t want to leave the warmth of this kitchen. A scorching moment of clarity strikes Rodney right then: this, he thinks, is the best fragment of what remains of his life. 

That’s all it is, a fragment. But if a fragment is all he gets, then he’ll take it. So Rodney swallows his coffee and nods, muttering something about never being able to sleep on planes to put Radek at ease. Radek twitches out a smile, and they eat their breakfast together in peaceable, all-too-transient silence.

Chapter Text

Rodney completed The Work on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.

It had seemed like all the other Tuesday afternoons that had come before it. Rodney hadn’t started the day feeling like he was on the brink of a breakthrough. Sometimes, the most important things had a way of slipping in through the back door without being noticed until it was right there in your face. Like a knock at the door. Like a squeak of marker against whiteboard. Like the last fading spit of a solar flare. 

With that in mind, it took Rodney the better part of the day to figure out what it was he had in front of him. Once the proverbial clouds cleared, he nearly smacked himself in the face with the speed with which he’d yanked them away from his holo-board. He couldn’t risk making one single alteration, not until he could verify that he was reading these numbers right. He went through them again, line by line, calculation by calculation. He wondered if it was possible that he’d driven himself insane over the last twenty-five years, if this was some kind of mathematical mirage that he’d worked himself up into imagining. 

But the numbers checked out, every single one. Rodney had done it.

Rodney stood, frozen. In the time it had taken him to recheck everything, afternoon had turned into evening, and the fluorescent glare of the holo-screen was the only light in his whole apartment. Newton was weaving between his ankles, grumbling about dinner and utterly unmoved by the weight of what has just transpired in her living room. 

He hadn’t felt this in a long time, this chokehold grip around his ribcage and hot flush spreading down his limbs. How long had it been since he’d felt much of anything at all? No, it took him a few moments to remember what this was. This was terror. 

No more waiting, no more working, no more excuses. This was it. He either had the salvation of the timeline in his hands, or he didn’t. Once he implemented this plan, he’d have no way of knowing whether or not it had been successful, and if it hadn’t -

The white noise crackle of rushing blood roared in Rodney’s ears. No, he couldn’t even consider that. Not after everything. This had to work.

But that, of course, led to the question of what to do next, right now. Rodney had half a mind to call Jeannie, demanding that she drop dinner or whatever it was she was doing right now and catch the next flight over to check his math for him. As soon as the option crossed his mind, though, a part of Rodney’s mind dug in its heels. It wasn’t bitterness at her abandoning The Work altogether - alright, maybe it was a bit of that, but only a smidge. It was just - it was irrational, but Jeannie wasn’t acquainted with this kind of world-breaking fear like he was. Even after all the crap he’d inadvertently dragged her into over the years, she could never come close to understanding that. When the fate of a world, or a galaxy, or a universe was on the line and only the pure logic of science could save the day, Jeannie wasn’t the person who Rodney instinctively turned his head to look for. 

For the first time in a very, very long time, Rodney thought of the name Radek Zelenka. 

But the thing about that was, thinking the name Radek Zelenka meant bringing to mind a dozen other things that brought the bear trap jaws of Rodney’s rational mind snapping closed. That wasn’t an option. That hadn’t been an option for decades, and it would never be an option again. In fact, that name was an ice-cold reminder that Rodney couldn’t rely on anybody but himself for this.

So, Rodney walked into the kitchen and prepared dinner for a still protesting Newton something to get his paralysed hands moving again in preparation for the next stage of his plan. During all that, he dutifully nailed shut and erected hazard tape across the small door in his mind where, from somewhere deep within, he could feel an insidious temptation to pick up his phone and dial a number he didn’t have, to speak the name of a man who he no longer knew.

Chapter Text

Life limps on.

In the months since visiting Radek in Prague, Rodney has allowed a semblance of a normal life to wash over him. He emails back and forth with Radek, and Lorne too on occasion, talking the way regular people might - or as regular as any of them can hope to be, anyway. He invites Jeannie and Kaleb over to his place for his birthday - well, more accurately, Jeannie requests and Rodney capitulates. Regardless, it’s surprisingly pleasant. Madison video calls in to wish him a happy birthday, where she shows off the now seven-month-old Zoe. She flops her daughter’s chubby hand around in front of the camera, and with Jeannie’s encouragement, Rodney bemusedly waves back.

“I don’t get what people expect to happen,” Rodney gripes to Radek the next evening, phone on speaker as he fiddles with his toaster, which has been completely charring his bread for no apparent reason. “Granted, Zoe has McKay blood, so she’s already got a leg up over all the other babies, but when they haven’t even mastered basic motor skills, I struggle to see why we’re supposed to pantomime all these social niceties with them.” He hisses in victory after finally managing to pry off the jammed back of the toaster, then adds thoughtfully: “Parents should really consider keeping their children to themselves until they can at least form words. Start them out with their best foot forward, and all that.”

“Every day I am grateful that you pursued career in physics.”

“Well, that’s -” Rodney furrows his brows. “Oh. You’re no fun, you know that?” He rolls his eyes as he hears Radek chuckle under his breath.

Some days, he catches himself thinking about Prague and Radek, the clamour of his hungry pigeons, the taste of warm challah melting in Rodney’s mouth, his quiet humming in the dozy light of the kitchen, far more than he really ought to. Days when he talks to Radek on the phone only make it worse, even if they make every other conceivable thing just that little bit better. Whenever Rodney hangs up, he finds himself contemplating how nothing about those three days had felt as inorganic as what he’s doing now. But those kinds of thoughts don’t help him get through the day any better, so he tends to push them to the side where they belong. As long as he keeps doing that, he can continue to just get on with it.

It’s easy enough, he supposes. When Jeannie asks him if he’s “doing okay,” he feels like he has all the evidence he needs to say that he is. He is officially Moving On With His Life, even if most of the time it feels more like remembering the steps by rote and moving on autopilot. 

He goes to work, and after a while he actually finds himself putting some effort into it - oh, not to the point of actually liking any of his students, but he finds himself willing to have a very brief window of open office hours for the few of them who actually seem to be putting in a modicum of effort. Most of the mental energy he expends at that place, though, he still reserves for Wendy Kerrigan.

It had been so long since Kerrigan had thrown him the offer of getting drinks together that Rodney had honestly forgotten about it. That is, until the day when they’re in the college staff room again, sitting in commiserating silence as they each tackle the latest batch of exams to mark, and Kerrigan leans back in her seat, stretching with an audible pop of her joints. “I’m about ready to call this one, I think,” she says and shuts her laptop with an air of finality. “At the rate this is going, I’m going to need a drink if I’m going to endure. You game?”

Rodney gives a forlorn look at the paper he’s halfway through: Student #5311044 is going to be lucky if they scrape through with a C-. Then he glances back up at Kerrigan. She’s fixing him with an easy stare over her glasses, and her words had been light, but the suggestion throws Rodney back in time to his last almighty fumble with her, when he’d run out on her offer of maybe-possibly-a-date to instead have one of the most depressing conversations of his life with Radek Zelenka and then promptly have a panic attack in front of a duck pond. There’s a slight curve to his lips that makes him think she remembers it as well. Yet here she is, still asking.

This is exactly the kind of thing that didn’t happen to him in his younger days - or, at least, not nearly enough to satisfy Rodney. Sometimes, he thinks his life has a very twisted sense of humour. But hey, Kerrigan is - here, in front of him, and asking, and likeable enough. In fact, this is precisely the kind of thing a person unhitching himself from the past should be jumping at, gift-wrapped with a neat little bow. And it’s not like he has anything better to spend his evenings doing anymore. 

“A drink,” Rodney says, and the corners of Kerrigan’s eyes crinkle amusedly. “Alright. Yes. That sounds - good.”

Kerrigan picks the bar, which is ideal since Rodney has exactly zero recommendations. It has the double charm of both being close enough to campus that it isn’t a slog, but apparently ‘uncool’ enough that nobody under the age of twenty-five is here. They pick a quiet booth in the far corner, and Rodney nurses a beer while Kerrigan sips a dry martini. Blessedly, they talk about things that aren’t Rockville fucking College. He’s already given her the bare bones of his life, but he adds some meat to them now: telling her about Jeannie and Kaleb, and what Madison and Jonah are up to. She tells him about the research she’d been leading before her husband’s accident; Rodney’s never had much interest in organic chemistry, but it’s several leagues above biology as far as sciences go, and this is also the most intellectually stimulating in-person conversation he’s had since leaving Prague, so he’s willing to dip his toes in. 

Kerrigan’s field of expertise, Rodney thinks with a slightly more gentle ache than he’d expected, would’ve been far more interesting to Carson. Someone like Kerrigan, actually, wouldn’t have been out of place on Atlantis. But, she was never given the chance, so conversational options on Rodney’s end are sorely lacking. 

A few times, the elephant in the room named Greg rears its head. Kerrigan casually mentions taking Greg to physiotherapy the weekend, or how Rodney drinks the kind of beer that Greg prefers, or how Greg had worked in organic chemistry as well before his brain injury. Greg, the husband, the owner of the ring matching the one shining dully on Kerrigan’s hand, who by rights should be the one sharing drinks and conversation with her instead of Rodney. Every time his name is said, Rodney braces himself for the topic to veer into how he factors into this, but it never does.

Since Rodney agreed to this drink, though, he figures he’s owed an explanation. During a lull in the conversation, Rodney pointedly eyes the golden band on Kerrigan’s finger. “So, um, I think some clarification is necessary here,” he says. “What … is this?” 

Kerrigan raises a thoughtful eyebrow. “I’m not sure,” she says eventually, which definitely isn’t the response Rodney had been anticipating. “What do you want it to be?”

Rodney narrows his eyes, wracking his brain for the trick that has to be in there somewhere, because genuinely, what the fuck? “Well, something with fewer cryptic answers would be a good start,” he says, and Kerrigan breathes a laugh into her martini glass. “Your husband -”

“Knows about this,” she finishes for him with gentle firmness. “Knows about you, specifically. He thinks you’re rather handsome, by the way.”

Rodney chokes on his sip of beer, then forces it down anyway: he needs the fortification. “Oh, god. Is this one of those new-age throuple situations? Because my nephew is in one of those and I really don’t know if…”

He trails off as Kerrigan presses her hand - the one with the wedding band - over her mouth, doing a pretty piss poor job at muffling her laughter. “Doctor McKay,” she says, pulling her hand away to press it against her chest. “I swear on my life that I’m not trying to foist my husband on you.” She shakes her head fondly. “Greg and I have an understanding. I love him, and he loves me, but he can’t give me everything I need anymore. He knows that, and God knows he doesn’t want to be the reason I spend the last decades of my life feeling trapped, not when there’s a viable solution out there.”

Rodney’s brow furrows. “So, I’m your … consensual side piece?” He feels like maybe he should be a bit offended, or even maybe slightly disappointed - if nothing else, being desirable enough to warrant a bona fide affair is something of a compliment. Mostly, though, he’s just baffled.

Kerrigan delicately rests her fingers along the sides of her glass. She’s the picture of elegance, with her carefully pinned back hair and precisely knotted scarf and her classy cocktail, and it makes Rodney wonder how on earth she could have gotten herself embroiled in this messy, Lifetime movie of a situation with him of all people. 

“We’re both adults, so I feel like I can be frank,” she says. “I’m not asking for anything serious. I’m not asking for anything at all if you’re not comfortable with this. But I do like you, Rodney. I have for some time now. I like having a conversation with someone who can actually…” 

She lightly presses her knuckles against her lips, glancing away for a moment that feels longer than it probably is. Rodney is briefly terrified that she’s about to cry or something equally as terrible, and he shifts tensely in his seat, but her eyes stay dry.

“This isn’t the life I ever thought I’d have,” she says eventually. “I have a feeling you understand that.” Rodney’s mouth cracks open without a response ready, and he stays helplessly silent. Kerrigan just nods. “No need to look at me like that. It’s obvious to everybody that this isn’t where you’re supposed to be. I don’t know what happened to you, and you don’t need to tell me, but what I do know is that something’s changed, ever since that ‘family emergency’ of yours.”

Now it’s Rodney’s turn to look away. That had been code for the completion of The Work; code that Kerrigan doesn’t know - but she does, apparently, understand more than he’d ever given her credit for.

Kerrigan leans back in her seat, martini stem dangling loosely in her grip. “It’s like I said: neither of us got the life that we were supposed to, but it’s the life we have, and we’ve got the right to do something with it.”

She falls silent, and Rodney can tell that the ball is in his court now, which would be great if he had any idea what he should do with it. To say that this isn’t his forte is a generous understatement. To be clear, it’s not that Wendy Kerrigan isn’t a beautiful woman - she’s exactly his type, actually: blonde, or at least what used to be blonde, and apparently interested in him as a person. And, against all expectations, his libido has not in fact died a slow and quiet death over the last two decades. 

But what Kerrigan is proposing isn’t some academic thought exercise, a fantasy to force himself to sleep. It’s a tangible reality, requiring action from his hands and his mouth and the part of his brain responsible for speech that has nothing to do with detangling the secrets of the universe; all parts of himself that are woefully out of practice.

Rodney attempts to wash away the cobwebs with the remaining dregs of his beer and clears his throat. “Uh,” he begins superbly. “This is - I’m not really … I mean, to - to be clear, you are quite, er, attractive. Very attractive actually. And you’re … interesting?” 

He’s pretty sure that isn’t an appropriate word for this kind of conversation, but what the hell does he know? Kerrigan is still smiling, though, so that’s something. “Careful, Doctor, you’re going to make me blush,” she says teasingly, and Rodney bites down hard on the inside of his cheek. When she continues, her voice drops down into something more confessional, and not at all demanding. “I may be overstepping here, but … was there somebody in your life?”

Rodney thinks of Jen. Then, treacherously, of John. He swallows hard and considers not answering, but somewhere in between ordering their drinks and Kerrigan admitting how lonely she is, Rodney has decided that she doesn’t deserve any more lies than necessary. “...Yes.”

She nods her head. “I understand.”

That’s kind of her to say, because Rodney isn’t entirely sure he does. Or he understands her, but not himself, not what he actually wants - right now or ever, maybe - and that’s just as bad.

When Kerrigan sets her glass back down, Rodney sees that it’s empty, and it feels like a timer that’s run out. “Well,” she says with that same even, unassuming tone from before. “How about you walk me to my car, then, and we can call this a night?”

That seems doable. 

The sun has well and truly set by now, and they make the short walk back to campus beneath the milky light of the streetlamps and the pale moon. From somewhere a few streets away, the thumping sounds of college kids throwing a party drift toward them, and Rodney has never felt more grateful to be old. He keeps his eyes on Kerrigan’s tall frame, feeling something itching under his skin; the whipping winds of yet another thing passing him by as he silently watches.

They reach the parking lot and Kerrigan’s dinky white sedan, and she turns back to him with her hand resting on the door handle, still smiling that gentle, cryptic smile.

“Thank you for tonight,” she says, and there’s an air of finality in her voice that makes Rodney feel restless and impatient - with her, with himself, with the whole goddamn world that so easily left him behind. With the sight of her getting ready to drive away, the notion of manhandling some direction back into his life feels dangerously alluring. Without letting himself think about it too much, he leans forward. He catches Kerrigan in the midst of turning her head away, and his lips end up grazing clumsily against her cheek. He rears back like he’s been burned. 

Kerrigan jerks her head back around. She touches her fingers to her cheek and lets out a low breath of a laugh, ducking her head.

“I - sorry,” Rodney says immediately, cheeks pink and shoulders hunching defensively. “It’s … been a while.”

“I know,” she replies warmly. Then, moving slowly, as if she wants to give Rodney an out, she rests her hand against his cheek. Rodney feels himself go slack and malleable, and he lets her guide them closer together until they’re kissing; a soft, lingering press of the lips.

It’s nothing like it had been with Jen - a comparison Rodney sorely wishes he isn’t making but can’t help no matter how hard he tries. Kissing her had ranged from pecks of relieved familiarity to deep, desperate things; exercises in reminding themselves and each other that they were still alive. Kissing Kerrigan isn’t either of those things. If he’s being honest, it feels more like the memory of a kiss. By the time they’re pulling apart, Rodney is already questioning if it even happened. He can’t say it had been bad, though. Maybe after a certain point, all kisses start to feel like unlived history.

Kerrigan lets out a soft exhale that tickles Rodney’s cheek. “Goodnight, Doctor McKay,” she says. Rodney wonders whether she’s feeling the same way.

“Goodnight,” he echoes, then opens the car door for her, because it seems like the thing to do. She gives him one last smile, then she’s in and driving off into the night. Rodney stands, listless, on the sidewalk, hands dangling unsurely by his sides. “Goodnight,” he says again to nobody at all.

It feels uncharitable to blame Kerrigan for this. There’s the matter of timing, of course, but Rodney has a sneaking suspicion that this has always been inevitable.

His mind won’t stop ticking ever since the night, and the kiss. Everything about it had been an unfamiliar element, and his brain has been working on overdrive to try and reconcile it with all other aspects of his life. It really shouldn’t be this difficult to swallow, he knows this. It’s like Jeannie had said, he finally gets to  live a life  now. This is part of living life, isn’t it? Moving forward. Moving on. 

At night, when he’s trying to fall asleep, he finds himself thinking of Jen, remembering how it had felt to touch her, the way it had made him feel like an actual human being again for as long as it had lasted. Sometimes, he thinks of John. He doesn’t let himself imagine what it would have been like to kiss him - it feels like a betrayal in too many ways, and besides, he knows he could never get it right, and he’s not going to settle for some cheap copy. He only gives himself what he already has: memories of the scant few times John had laid a hand on Rodney’s back or arm, his rare, bright smiles, his hideous cologne. He thinks about what should have been, what could have been, what will be, in another timeline in another universe, if Rodney has managed to get things right.

These thoughts circle each other like sharks in his mind, swimming through the blood-churned waters of recent memory. Kerrigan’s kiss. Jen’s kiss. Kerrigan’s kiss. John’s secret smile. Rodney can’t help the reprimand that rises in his throat like bile. He’s moving on, yes - he’s moving on, and he’s leaving them behind.

It strikes him like a punch in the face that it’s been almost a year since he’d completed The Work, since he’d travelled back to Atlantis and set everything up for John’s arrival a few millennia from now, since he’d packed up all his scribblings and hidden them out of sight. It’s a dizzying thought, lodging in Rodney’s maw like a splintered bone. That’s how, a couple of nights after the one spent at a bar with Wendy Kerrigan, Rodney finds himself drifting out of bed at three AM, digging out his holo-screen projector in the living room, and switching it on.

The sight of that filmy light splashing across his walls and reflecting dimly off his smudged floorboards hits Rodney with a wave of nausea so unexpected that he has to sit down, grasping for the arm of his couch as he lowers himself down. He doesn’t switch the projection off though; lets the numbers float in front of him and imprint themselves onto the backs of his eyelids. He knows he’ll still be seeing them when he goes back to his bedroom to stare, dead-eyed, up at the ceiling, but it turns out he doesn’t have to put that to the test: he falls asleep right there on the couch, the shimmering blue light washing over him, and dreams of stretching, empty city corridors. 

It happens again the next night, and the next, and again and again until Rodney can say it’s a habit. At first, it’s mindless, almost catatonic, without a purpose he can put a name to except just reminding himself that he managed to complete The Work, but Rodney has never been able to be mindless about anything for long. He can’t help but start turning over each individual number in his head. It’s strange: he’d spent twenty-five years working on this, and yet now the calculations seem entirely foreign to him, like he’s reading the work of someone else entirely. 

It must be correct, he tells himself. All strange feelings aside, it had been him - Doctor Rodney goddamn McKay - who had done this work. If there was anybody left in the universe who could solve this problem, it would have been him.

That reassurance works for about two days. On a morning when Rodney knows he should be getting ready for work but has found himself standing in front of his holo-screen, coffee forgotten and growing cold in one hand, he finds himself brooding - he’d never gone through with getting Jeannie to double-check his calculations. At the time, it had felt unthinkable, not to mention unnecessary, but now Rodney can hardly believe he’d been so careless.

Of course, the notion of handing over The Work to anybody else for approval stills gets his hackles rising, but at the very least, those numbers deserve to be looked over with a fresh eye - ones that aren’t surviving on negative amounts of sleep and medically alarming amounts of caffeine. It’s the responsible thing to do, isn’t it?

Rodney sucks in his cheeks. He glances at his watch, then back at his screen. Just one more check, just to be sure. That can’t hurt. He can spend just one day on it.

And another day.

And another day.

And another day.

And another day.

And another day.

And another day.

And another day.

And -

Rodney’s phone rings. He doesn’t answer it.

He’s been getting a lot of calls recently. He hasn’t answered any of them, or even checked who’s been making them, not since his last message to Radek. His knee-jerk decision to spill the beans about his kiss with Kerrigan had paid off; he’d shot off a message about being busy for the next little while on account of his newly crammed dating schedule. If Radek thinks he’s been absorbed by an obsession of the female variety, it’ll buy him at least a week or two. 

As for everyone else … Well, the honest truth is that it hadn’t occurred to create a cover story for anyone else, and now he’s in far too deep to bother. Besides, at this point, he’s not even entirely sure where his phone is. The ringtone sounds muffled, so it might have gotten lost behind one of the couch cushions. Just as well, honestly. He’s got more important things to deal with right now; he doesn’t need any distractions.

Rodney rubs distractedly at his eyes. Being able to use a holo-screen from the beginning this time around has been incredibly handy - for one thing, it’s quicker to get his thoughts down, and his wrists have been aching far less. He’d kept his whiteboards with the old numbers baked into their grimy surfaces, but he’d decided a few days into this that he might as well streamline the job and work with the complete calculations he already has loaded onto the projector. 

On the flip side, though, the glare is murder on the eyes. You win some, you lose some, he supposes. He continues to scroll through line upon line of rewritten calculations, pausing to think over a few numbers that stick out to him? Is that an error, or is he just overthinking it? He’ll have to dwell on it for a bit.

Said dwelling is fractured by a fierce flurry of knocks on his front door. It startles a hiss out of Newton, and she speeds between Rodney’s legs to get away. Rodney glances up, blinking. He hasn’t ordered any food, and besides, he doesn’t think any self-respecting delivery driver would knock like that.

His suspicions are confirmed when he hears a familiar voice through the door. “Meredith!” Jeannie calls, nearly yelling. “Open this door or I swear to God I will call the police.”

Rodney knows his sister well enough to respect that this isn’t an empty threat. Cursing under his breath, he saves the changes he’s made and stalks over to the door, wincing as he moves - his knees don’t appreciate the return to standing for hours on end. He should really invest in a good stool. He unlocks the door and yanks it open, already scowling. “You scared my cat,” he tells Jeannie.

Apparently, Jeannie doesn’t give a fuck about his cat. She shoves her way forward as soon as she sees him, elbowing the door the rest of the way open so she can properly wrap him up in a hug. “Thank Christ,” she mumbles into his shoulder.

Rodney stiffens, too baffled to even give a perfunctory embrace in return, so he just stands there and allows himself to be slowly suffocated. “What - why -?” he begins, then feels his heart stutter. Jeannie is obviously upset - what if something terrible happened and she hadn’t been able to reach him? He gingerly detangles himself, holding her at arm’s length with wide eyes. “What happened? Is Madison okay? Or Jonah? Kaleb?”

But Jeannie is already shaking her head. Her mouth is pinched in a tight, incredulous line, and just as swiftly as she’d grabbed him up in a hug, she reaches out to give him a not-insubstantial shove to the chest. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she demands.

Rodney, rubbing at his ribcage, settles comfortably back into utter confusion. “What -?”

“I don’t hear anything from you in two weeks,” Jeannie snaps. “Dead silence, no responses to my messages, nothing. I figure, ‘okay, it’s Mer, he goes off in his own head sometimes’ - but then I get a call from someone called Wendy Kerrigan -”

“Kerrigan  called you? ” Rodney instantly regrets telling her that he has a sister.

“Yes, she called me, because she was worried too. And she told me that apparently your job has suspended you -”

“Wh - no, I haven’t!” Rodney replies hotly, and Jeannie lets out a bitter laugh.

“How would you know? You haven’t been showing up! And God knows you’ve probably been ignoring those calls and emails too.” Jeannie glares up at him, but the effect is undercut by how her hands are still hovering close to his elbows like she’s an inch away from grabbing him again. “You need to tell me what’s going on.”

Rodney slowly shakes his head. “...Okay, well, first of all, this is a major overreaction -”

“This is a fucking overreaction? After the last two decades?” Jeannie is still half-yelling, but her eyes are shimmering suspiciously. “Christ, Mer, nobody could get a hold of you. I didn’t know if you’d -” She presses her fist to her lips, blinking furiously, and her next words drop down to a shaky near-whisper. “I thought you might have done something really stupid.”

Rodney’s stomach drops along with his gaze. “I - Okay, I’m sorry I stopped taking calls okay? But I didn’t - I haven’t done anything - I’m fine, okay? So -”

Jeannie huffs violently and bodily shoves past him to get into the apartment. Rodney hovers in the doorway for a moment, poking his head out into the corridor with a dull curiosity about whether they’ve caused a veritable scene. Down the hall, Ashley’s daughter - whose name Rodney has never bothered to learn in the nine years they’ve lived on the same floor - is peeking out from behind her door with wide eyes. Rodney gives her a bland smile and retreats back into the apartment.

When he turns back around, it’s to the sight of Jeannie standing frozen in the middle of his living room. He hasn’t really had the perspective to take stock of his current living situation before now: his garbage can is piled high with takeout containers - at least, the ones that made it in there - and dirty clothes are making their home all along his couch. Everything has been shoved to the furthest reaches of the room to make space for the three wide holo-screens blinking away in the centre. Rodney has no room for self-consciousness. He folds his arms, already impatient. The longer Jeannie is here, the longer he’ll be pulled away from what actually matters.

Jeannie is still rooted to the spot, staring at his screens with parted lips. She’s shaking her head slightly, slowly, like she’s barely aware of the motion. “Mer …” she says in a hushed tone. “What is this?”

Rodney lets out a sharp breath through his nose. It seems like an awfully redundant question at this point. “It’s -” he waves a directorial hand at the math adorning his screens. “My work. The work.”

The head shaking is becoming more vigorous now. “No,” Jeannie says. “You’re done with that. You figured it out and set everything up in Atlantis last year. Don’t you remember?”

That elicits an almighty eye roll from him. “Oh, come on. I think we can both agree that this isn’t the work of someone with a failing mind.” He waves again at the screens.

“Then what the fuck is it?”

“A - A -” Rodney flounders for a moment. “A recalibration. The calculations needed to pinpoint the  exact  time and place where there’ll be another supernova that can send John back to the  exact  right moment in history are - are so precise. I can’t risk anything. Originally, I was just going to re-check my final results, but then I realised that if I’d made any mistakes in the initial configuration process then that could skew all my results, so - so I’m just going back through and re-checking everything. If I made any errors, then there’s still time for me to adjust -”

“There were no errors,” Jeannie says immediately. “You checked the math over and over; you told me so yourself. You figured it out, Mer. You saved them.”

Rodney eschews her gaze. “My mind wasn’t clear then. I need to be certain,” he says firmly. “This is important.”

“You’re important too,” Jeannie shoots back. “This needs to stop.” Rodney presses his lips together, ready to brush that comment aside, but then he sees it - Jeannie turns around, and with a wave of her hand she disconnects one of the holo-screens. 

As the screen dissipates into thin air, Rodney’s heart shoots through his chest. He’d saved his work, he knows that, but - but -

“No!” he yells, loud enough that Jeannie whirls back around with wide eyes. “No, you don’t get to touch that!” He pushes past her, quickly re-activating the screen with shaking fingers, but not a second after his work reappears, he feels a hand yanking at his arm, spinning him around.

“Meredith -” Jeannie says, but Rodney steps out of her grasp.

“How are you still not getting this?” he snarls, and deep down he feels the fragile pane of his remaining patience shatter. Jeannie has been on his back to leave The Work behind since he’d started it. From the moment he’d called to let her know it was complete, she’d been pushing him to just move on, get a new life, forget, as if that had ever been possible. “This is so much bigger than me, or you, or anybody else on this godforsaken planet. An entire galaxy is at stake! What don’t you understand about that?” He runs a furious hand through his thinning hair, a bitter bark of a laugh forcing its way out of him. “No, no, how could you understand? You weren’t there. You were here, on Earth, happy with your little family, while I lost everyone -”

“I lost  you!”  Jeannie screams back at him, so loud it pushes all the oxygen out of the room for her anger to make space for itself. “I lost you for twenty-five years to this goddamn  mission  of yours, and I only just got you back, and I am not going to lose you again!” Her voice wavers ominously, and she claps a hand to her mouth, sucking in a stuttering breath while still glaring at him. “This - you need to let this go,” she whispers, and finally dares a glance back at the screens surrounding them. The numbers stare dispassionately back. “It’s going to kill you if you don’t.”

Rodney fixes her with a cold stare. “You already gave up on me once,” he says. Jeannie doesn’t flinch at that, just glares harder. “You’re more than welcome to do it again. Get out.”

Jeannie doesn’t budge. “What happened, Mer?” she says, voice crackling with desperation. “Tell me what happened. You were doing so well. Why…?”

Rodney ignores her, turning back to his screen.

There’s silence for a few moments behind him. When Jeannie speaks again, she sounds marginally more composed. “It’s not just me, you know. Like I said, your friend is worried about you. Wendy.”

He sets his shoulders. Once he knows - knows for sure - that his work is done, then he can have all the time in the world to think about Wendy and anything else.

“Maddie too. And Jonah. They’ve been asking about you. They’ve never understood this, and I don’t know what -”

“Jeannie,” he cuts in, barely hearing himself as the numbers draw him back in, cocooning themselves safely around him. “I need you to leave.”

It’s amazing how life can repeat itself. Rodney might have spent more time pondering that, but by the time he hears the familiar sound of the door clicking closed, he’d already disappeared again.

The next day, when there’s another knock at the door, Rodney wastes no time. He would have happily ignored it, but when he weighs up the hassle of potentially having to deal with the fire department kicking down his door, he figures he can save himself some time.

He’s calling out before he’s even opened the door. “Threats work both ways, Jeannie. Don’t think I won’t call the police for harassment -”

His words die in his throat as he yanks open the door. There’s no Jeannie in sight. Instead, he comes face to face with Radek.

Radek flashes him a coy smile. “May I come in before you call them? My feet ache.”

Wordlessly, Rodney steps aside and lets Radek hobble past him. He thought his Kerrigan-shaped red herring had been more foolproof than this. “How -”

“Your sister,” Radek answers swiftly. He’s still standing just inside the apartment, hasn’t honed in on The Work yet. His eyes are fixed on Rodney.

Rodney narrows his eyes. “My sister doesn’t have your contact details.”

Radek chuckles. “You give her too little credit. Apparently, she had tried to find a way to reach me at the university, but the language barrier was, you know.” He waves a hand dismissively. “So, she contacted the SGC and harasseed them until they put her through to Evan, and Evan gave my number.”

“Evan needs to start keeping his nose out of other people’s business,” Rodney says, but it’s a knee-jerk response. His mind is still stuck on the lengths Jeannie had gone to after he’d unceremoniously kicked her out, and on the long chain of people it involved: Kerrigan to Jeannie to Lorne to Radek - Radek, who must have jumped on the first flight out of Prague available to be here now. In the last twenty-five years, there’s been no precedent for this.

“I suppose she’s sent you to wrangle me, then,” Rodney says, and already he’s reaching behind him for the doorknob, ready to open it back up and invite Radek to kindly leave him the fuck alone. But Radek has finally turned around, lined face enveloped in the dim glow of the holo-screens, and it seems to have caught him in a tractor beam, pulling him in towards the centre of the living room.

“That was the impression I got, yes,” Radek says distantly. His hands are laced together, tucked tightly against his stomach. “Oh, Rodney.”

“Don’t,” Rodney bites out, throat constricting. He can bear the brunt of Jeannie’s anger, but he can’t take pity - not from Radek. “Don’t try to talk me out of this. If that’s what you’re here for, then you can just - just leave.”

The light of the screens is turning supernova in the reflection of Radek’s glasses, so Rodney can’t properly make out his expression when he says: “I am here for you, Rodney.”

“Well, that’s fucking fantastic, but I have no idea what that means.” Rodney is so sick of not knowing things. He spreads his arms wide, fingers stretched far enough to nearly brush the electric buzz of the screens. “This is it for me. I need to go over this work again; all of it. I’ve had time for my head to clear, and I need to make the most of it. I need to  know . I need to know that all of this wasn’t for nothing.”

The enormity of the last twenty-five years swims up from the depths of his mind like some gargantuan, unthinkable creature ready to engulf him in its massive maw, and Rodney nearly chokes on his own words. So much of this is a return to that time - the mess constructing itself around him, the endless drone of the holo-screens, the ache in his head and his heart and his goddamn bones - but this time Radek is here too, and that very fact is sending the water up into Rodney’s lungs, because this is exactly what he hadn’t wanted. He can see it coming: Radek telling him he’s being paranoid, being irrational, to just let it go, and Rodney knows it’s going to break him apart just as easily as it would have when he was embarking on The Work the first time. It’ll be worse, actually, because now he has more than bitterness under his skin; he has memories of sharing drinks, and walking together under the cloudy Prague sky, and Radek’s sleep-coated voice at the other end of the phone talking him through the terror of facing another death. Rodney has so much more to lose again - somehow, he still hasn’t learned his lesson.

He should tell Radek to get out right now, throw up his shields before the hits come. But he’s shaking all over now, and the words are stacking up in his airway to block off his breathing, and god, god, Rodney doesn’t want to do this again. He doesn’t want to be alone again.

“I need -” The words hiccup feebly out, and Rodney can’t stop them now. “I need help. I - I need you to help me.”

He knows he’s being unfair. Shouldn’t he understand by now? The last thing Radek wants is another battle. Rodney closes his eyes and waits for the sound of a slamming door.

It doesn’t come. Instead, there’s the sensation of two hands landing on his elbows, thumbs pressing into his skin like they’re pushing his raging pulse back inside his body. Rodney opens his eyes, and Radek is looking right at him. “Alright,” he says. “We will do it together.”

Chapter Text

Compared to The Work itself, configuring a hologram to - hopefully, if all worked as intended - walk John through the process of returning home and saving the galaxy was a piece of cake. Hologram technology on Earth had made leaps and bounds since Rodney returned (through the covert help of the SGC and their associates, Rodney suspected, though he’d never gotten a confirmation one way or the other), and it was easy enough to patch in a few modifications that would allow his Holo-Sprite to perfectly emulate the knowledge, memories, and characteristics of himself.

Well, almost perfectly.

It was a complicated process, deciding what was and wasn’t necessary for John to know. The easy answer would be everything, but nothing about the last twenty-five years has been easy, and so Rodney had some decisions to make. 

He included all the technical know-how, of course; that was non-negotiable. He included everything that he felt John had already known about him, making sure to mirror the greatest hits of his personality. It wouldn’t do for him to have put in all this work just for John to distrust his hologram because he didn’t seem like the ‘real’ Rodney. He included memories from after John’s disappearance. He wished he didn’t have to - the transferral process meant reliving the damn things, and Rodney had done enough of that over the years, thank you very much - but he knew it was crucial. John would want answers, and besides, the fate of the galaxy might well depend on John knowing exactly what the stakes were.

So, Rodney copied over everything about Atlantis’ new management under Richard Woolsey. He transferred all the details about Teyla and the baby and exactly what Michael had done to them - everything that came after that too, as the Hybrid army spread across the galaxy like cockroaches. He included Sam and Ronon going down in blazes of glory. After some hesitation, he included Jen as well: everything that had gone on between them, right up until the bitter end. Context was important, Rodney reasoned. And besides, he’d already broken his last promise to Jen a million times over; the least he could do was have her death mean something in the grand scheme of things.

He left Carson out. He made that decision quick and easy, like a knife through soft tissue. He couldn’t go there. He didn’t need John to know just how completely Rodney had let their friend down. He - he didn’t need Carson knowing that, if they managed to revive him in this new timeline and John passed the information on. If John was left with questions that couldn’t be answered, then so be it. 

Rodney didn’t include anything about Zelenka either. He really did consider it, but the urge withered and died as quickly as it had appeared. He couldn’t bring himself to tread back through all of that; the memories with the sharpest edges. He didn’t even have enough vindictiveness left in him to relish in the thought of passing on blame all the way to another timeline. He wanted to pack every thought of Radek Zelenka away and seal it under six feet of soil. No, that part of his life was well and truly over, and he intended to keep it that way.

The decision to leave out how Rodney hadn’t been able to manage a full night’s sleep even once after John had disappeared, how every time he’d kissed Jen he’d felt the tiniest, guiltiest bit disappointed, how even now, in the shitty one-bedroom apartment he’d moved into after Jen’s funeral, he still had John’s leather jacket hung up in his closet … Well, some things were better left unknown. Learning anything about that would pry John’s mind from the mission, of course, but that wasn’t the thought that had made Rodney’s blood run cold. It was the notion of the look of horror that would pull down the lines of John’s face. The idea that he would return to his present with that knowledge, and when he’d look at that Rodney, he’d know - 

Rodney figured he owed it to his past self to keep that secret for the both of them. Selfish? Maybe. Probably. But after twenty-five years, Rodney reckoned he’d earned the right to be.

Once the Holo-Sprite was complete, in an impulse of novelty, Rodney powered it up. He needed to make sure it was functioning properly, of course, but there was a morbid curiosity about the whole thing that he couldn’t shake. He took a breath and activated the hologram, and it flickered unsteadily to life in front of him. The energy drain on something like this was immense, and he wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long. That was fine; this wouldn’t take much time.

“Well,” Holo-Rodney said, holding his semi-translucent hands up in front of him and turning them this way and that before turning his ‘eyes’ to real-Rodney. “This is strange.”

“You don’t say.” Rodney was unabashedly staring. God, did he really look that … old? Maybe his looks just didn’t translate very well into hologram form. That had to be it.

Holo-Rodney had all of real-Rodney’s awareness of the importance of The Work, so they blew through the system checks without any resistance. Everything was in working order, and Rodney felt a smidgeon of tension uncurl from his spine. All the pieces were falling into place.

When they were finished, holo-Rodney gave the apartment around him a cursory glance. “So, twenty-five years of work, finally over,” he said, and let out a disturbingly human-like sigh. “I suppose, at the end of the day, it’ll be worth it.”

“Yes,” Rodney replied. He still believed that. It was the only thing he still believed.

His hand hovered in the air, aborted in the motion needed to power the Holo-Sprite down. Holo-Rodney met his gaze with a look of bland curiosity, and Rodney swallowed. It was utterly insane, but he could feel - of all things - jealousy bubbling up in his veins. This copy of him would get to see John again. He would get to speak to him, to hear his voice, while Rodney, the real Rodney, never would again.

Rodney licked his parched lips. “When you see him…” he began - and then stopped himself. He couldn’t let himself say anything. What even was there to say? He shook his head furiously.

“Good luck,” he said instead, and powered the Holo-Sprite down. 

All the preparations were complete. He had a plane he needed to catch.

Chapter Text

The time passes slowly.

In reality, of course, the task of rechecking even twenty-five years of work isn’t an overly long one when split between two geniuses, one of whom is Rodney McKay. It’s not about the work, really - or, it is, just not in ways that can be measured. Apparently, a year is all it takes for Rodney to forget the way standing hunched over screens all day and night like this makes his spine bend so readily to the will of gravity, and how his fingers start to go cold and slack. He hadn’t quite forgotten the hollow, grasping feeling in his chest, but he hadn’t expected it to grow somehow worse the second time around. Rodney’s gotten through it once, though. He can get through it again.

As much as looking through The Work again feels like Rodney’s heart is being yanked from his chest, there’s a certain soothing familiarity to it, and that makes the hours slip away faster. Working with Radek is its own kind of deja vu. It doesn’t take them long until they’ve memorised the grooves of each others’ motions again, and they can effortlessly dance around each other while getting to this screen and that screen without so much as knocking shoulders. 

“Hmm,” Radek says ominously as Rodney squeezes past him to get to the coffee pot in the kitchen. 

It makes Rodney nearly seize up. “What?” he demands, peering over Radek’s shoulder at the equation he’s studying, trying to see what’s bothering him.

“Oh, no, no,” Radek says nonchalantly. “Is fine, the numbers are right.”

“So why hmm?”

“Is, uh … just not how I would have gone about it, is all,” Radek replies as if Rodney can’t see the smile twitching the corners of his mouth. “A bit long-winded, don’t you think?”

Rodney stares at him. “You’re banned from the coffee pot,” he says and passes Radek with a warm burn of familiarity thrumming comfortingly in his chest. In those moments, Rodney almost tricks himself into forgetting that this is The Work at all. Right then, they’re three decades ago and a whole galaxy away. In some moments, it’s like nothing ever happened at all.

In this way, they slip into something of a routine. Radek had ostensibly booked a hotel room after arriving in Ontario, but after they work straight through the first night and seem mutually committed to keeping the pattern going, they agree that it makes more sense for him to just take the pull-out. It’s hardly the most comfortable option - after the nights Rodney has spent out here, he’d know - but Radek has clung to his Soviet stoicism throughout the years and he keeps the bitching at a minimum. He whinges a little about what the springs are doing to his back, but that’s how Rodney knows that he doesn’t really mind. Newton apparently doesn’t mind either. She’s found an instant favourite in Radek, maybe remembering the treats he’d brought her so many months ago, and she’s taken to sleeping at Radek’s feet most nights. Rodney had tried not to be jealous, but then Radek started getting smug about it, so Rodney becomes happy to indulge himself.

The days slip into a blur. As they work, Rodney finds himself glancing over at Radek almost as much as he looks at the screens. Rodney can’t say it’s paranoia; after so long holding his breath and waiting for the next person to leave him, the realisation that, ever since Radek had taken his place beside him in the living room, Rodney hasn’t been afraid of him disappearing again hits like ice water breaking a fever. Rodney’s eyes keep returning to Radek though, and the relief quickly trickles away into concern when it becomes apparent that Radek rarely looks back at him, seeming entirely caught by the numbers in a way that even Rodney isn’t this time around. 

One night, during the period of sleep that they’d both reluctantly agreed was necessary, Rodney stirs awake to a disturbance that he can’t place until he cranes his head slightly and notices the pale light filtering in under his bedroom door from the living room. Rodney frowns sleepily, then grumbles out a curse and stumbles out of bed and out of his room. 

“What are you doing?” he grouses, emerging into the living room to the sight of Radek perched on the end of his pull-out, holo-screens alive and gleaming in front of him. “The point of having two sets of eyes to check this work is that both sets are working at the same time, otherwise it defeats the entire purpose.”

“Am not working,” Radek says listlessly, and Rodney notices that his glasses are off, neatly folded up on the table beside the couch. “Just looking.”

The bleak blue light of the holo-screens filters across Radek’s unshaven face, drawing all the life out of his features and leaving him looking sallow and translucent. Rodney finds himself reminded of the horror movies Jeannie used to dare him to watch as a teenager: the flickering ghost appearing in the house, come to haunt the living. For a moment, Rodney imagines that if he switched on the light right now, Radek would disappear, and he’d discover that none of this had been real. 

Ghosts aren’t real of course, but the uneasiness rustling in the pit of Rodney’s stomach very much is. He casts a glance toward Newton, who is curled up at Radek’s side. The electronic lights are reflecting in her half-lidded as they stare at Rodney, looking completely at ease. “Well, stop it,” Rodney says haltingly. “You’re freaking out Newton.”

Slowly, after a delayed few seconds, Radek nods, and with a wave of his hand, the living room is plunged into darkness.

Crawling back into bed, Rodney can’t help but think about ghosts again. Is that how he’d looked to Jeannie, during that brief period where she’d helped him with The Work? Is that why she’d left?

Well, it doesn’t really matter. Rodney isn’t Jeannie. He has the same stakes in this as Radek, and he’s not leaving him again. Instead, as the days creep into weeks, he keeps the coffee pot full, he throws together meals or orders in when he realises that Radek hasn’t eaten all day, and he never lets his eyes stray far from his stooped profile.

Keeping Radek on track helps Rodney to maintain a grip on himself to a point, but he’s aware - maybe more so than he was the first time around - of the distinct feeling that he’s just bobbing on the surface of the water, and the lead weight of The Work around his ankles is as heavy as it is patient. Rodney has been plagued by nightmares on and off since Teyla went missing, but they’ve come back with a vengeance, jerking him awake in the middle of the night with sweat soaking his back and jittering hands that he can’t calm for what feels like hours.

Rodney keeps his bedroom door closed when he goes to sleep, not needing Radek to know about these nighttime rituals - but one night, he makes the grave mistake of sitting down on the pull-out that Radek has already prepared, just planning on resting his feet for a minute before getting back to work, not realising the dead weight of his tiredness until it has a perfect opportunity to sneak up on him. He doesn’t remember falling asleep, he only remembers a hazy dream about Radek turning to him and scoffing, saying this is all nonsense; you fixed nothing, and when he shudders awake it’s to darkness, to the unforgiving mattress of the pull-out, and to Radek stretched out beside him.

“Shhh,” he hears in a sleep-blurred murmur as he pants against the pillow, furiously blinking tears out of his eyes as the dread of the nightmare crashes over him again and again. “Vraťte se spát. Jste v bezpečí. Jsi v pořádku. Je to jen sen.”

As Rodney comes back to himself inch by inch, he registers an odd tickling sensation on the crown of his head, and he realises that Radek has one arm strewn out across the pillows and is stroking his hair with a feather-light touch. It’s a little weird, admittedly, but Rodney can’t deny the way it calms the pounding in his chest, and besides, judging by the way he can just make out that Radek’s eyes are still closed, he’s probably half-asleep. Maybe this is something he used to do for his little brother and sister when they were children, crawling into his bed so that their big brother could scare the nightmares away. Maybe reaching out and offering comfort is muscle memory for Radek at this point.

The reasonable thing to do would be to head to his own bed now that he’s awake, but for all its faults, the pull-out is big enough to fit them both without making things too awkward, and Rodney can already feel himself slipping back under the blanket of sleep. Too weary to be embarrassed, he rolls over onto his stomach, his nose just barely pressing against Radek’s shoulder as Radek’s hand drops down to rest atop Rodney’s back, still gently stroking with his thumb. The last thought he has before drifting off again is naked in its selfishness: he hopes that checking The Work takes a little longer, just a little, than they were expecting.

The next morning, they disentangle themselves and get back to work without a word about the night before, but Rodney can’t help but think that maybe Radek has been keeping an eye on him too.

Despite Rodney’s most pathetic wishes, they reach the last leg of The Work towards the end of the second week. So far, all the math has checked out, and it’s leaving Rodney feeling lightheaded with uneasy exhilaration so jittering that he’s been able to abandon the coffee, even as the time creeps over into three AM. His heart is rumbling in his throat, and he stares and stares and stares at the screens. The numbers are all he sees. Oh, he remembers this part.

“Let’s keep going,” he says to Radek - at least he thinks he says it. His mind has tunnelled so completely that he may very well have only said it in his own mind. With a distantly disturbing amount of effort, he turns his head to find out.

Radek is standing a foot or so away from him, pale face being devoured by the blue holo light. His hands are curled against his chest, crooked like claws, grasping at nothing. He isn’t even touching the screens, and Rodney realises abruptly that he has no idea how long Radek has been standing there like that. He watches the unsteady rise and fall of Radek’s chest and feels something like dread begin to shiver in his own.

“Radek,” Rodney says, hating how crudely the sound forces its way out of his mouth, abrupt and far too loud in the still silence of the room. Radek twitches slightly, half turning towards the sound of Rodney’s voice. He looks almost like a hologram himself, faded and unsubstantial. 

“Twenty-five years,” he hears Radek murmur. “How long would it have been, do you think, if I had been here?”

“I -” Rodney takes a step towards Radek. He doesn’t want to talk about this, but he wants Radek to act like this even less. “I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?”

“And what about those years,” Radek continues as if Rodney had never spoken, “if it had never - if I had never -” He pushes out a long, slow breath that seems to rattle on and on.

Rodney is close enough to touch him now, but he feels almost scared to. “What are you - is this - are you having a panic attack? Is that what’s happening right now?”

“I am okay,” Radek says in a distant voice as Rodney takes a half-step toward him. “Let’s - let’s continue. We are close.” His unblinking, hazy eyes refuse to leave the screens. The look on his face right now feels grotesquely familiar in a way that Rodney can’t place - until he can. Until he remembers that this is how Radek had looked when he’d realised what had happened to John all those years ago. All of a sudden, Rodney feels a second away from throwing up.

“Okay,” Rodney says, clumsily grasping at Radek’s arm. “Okay, no, we’re gonna-”

Radek goes where Rodney guides him, and soon he’s sitting on the edge of his rumpled pull-out, knees locked together as he continues to stare out into nothing. His hands are still tucked against his chest, and Rodney realises that they’re shaking. Now that he’s looking closely, this doesn’t seem like a panic attack, exactly - at least, not like any of the ones that Rodney’s ever had, which usually involve a lot more gasping and swearing. It doesn’t really feel like any of Jen’s episodes either - her grey days, she’d called them. This is a whole new beast, entirely of Radek’s own, and Rodney doesn’t know how to fucking handle it. 

He presses down on Radek’s shoulders, hard, as if to make sure he isn’t going to go anywhere despite the fact that Radek doesn’t look like he could lift a pinkie by himself right now. Then he snatches up the blanket that had been kicked to the floor at some point last night and bundles it around Radek’s frail form. He has no idea what he’s doing, no idea if this is helping, but he has even less of an idea of what to say, so this seems like the best option available. Radek is still silent, and Rodney bites his lip.

He takes a few cautious steps away, achingly reluctant to leave Radek alone, but eventually, he works up the courage to speed into his bedroom. Newton is napping in the centre of his bed, and Rodney scoops her up, muttering an apology as she lets out a disgruntled “merrrp.” He returns to the living room and, without ceremony or thought, dumps her onto Radek’s lap.

“Here,” he says as Newton pads curiously at Radek’s thighs. “Just - just hold her, okay? And, um, breathe?”

Slowly, Radek’s arms un-pretzel themselves to wrap around Newton, fingers grazing her fur. Newton lets out a loud purr of satisfaction, and Radek blinks, dropping his chin to look down at her fuzzy head. He lets out a long, slow breath.

A minute passes in tenuous silence. Then, tucked away in an exhale, Radek whispers out: “I’m sorry.”

Rodney isn’t sure if Radek’s talking about the present. He isn’t even sure if he’s talking to Rodney. It makes his stomach twist up either way.

He’s still standing over Radek, and his hands are back to hovering uncertainly above Radek’s shoulders. His fingertips are ghosting over the blanket, riding the rise and fall of Radek’s laborious breaths, but he worries that if he lands them properly then he’ll push Radek over the edge somehow. There’s nothing he loathes more than being helpless. Tonight, he decides to close the door in its face.

“Let’s stop,” Rodney hears himself say. “I’m not going to do this to you.”

“I told you I am okay,” Radek replies at a half-whisper. “We are so close. There is no sense in waiting for tomorrow.”

“I’m not talking about tonight.” Rodney can’t quite believe what he’s saying, but he’ll ride it through to the end. “I’m talking about all of it. We don’t need to do this anymore.”

Radek shakes his head, scarecrow hair rustling like dead leaves as it sweeps over the blanket wrapped around his shoulders, tickling Rodney’s hovering fingers. He looks up at Rodney, finally, and this time his eyes are clear. “I do,” he says simply. “I need this. Please, Rodney.”

“I -” Rodney pulls his hands back and wraps his arms around himself. “I don’t want to punish you anymore.”

Radek pulls Newton closer, dropping his chin onto the top of her soft head, but he’s still looking up at Rodney through his glasses. His face is as open as a wound. “What punishment? This is what I have always wanted.”

Rodney can’t argue with that. He sucks in a breath that comes out long and shuddering. Moving slowly, as if through quicksand, Rodney turns around and switches off the holo-screens. “We’ll finish tomorrow,” he tells them.

Without the digital glare, the apartment is plunged into darkness. Fumbling around and desperate not to trip, Rodney feels his way over to the pull-out and sits down heavily beside Radek, letting his whirring thoughts be carried away by the sounds of Newton’s purring and Radek’s slowly steadying breath as their shoulders press together.

Eventually, Radek falls asleep, curled up on the mattress with the knobbly curve of his spine pressed against Rodney’s thigh. It’s a mirror of the other night, except this time Rodney isn’t sleeping. He can’t. He stays sitting there, Newton sprawled across his lap and ears pricked to the sound of Radek’s breathing, for what feels like hours. His mind keeps running over Radek’s words like a broken tape. Of course he’d thought about what the last twenty-five years would have been like if the Gate malfunction hadn’t happened - he played out the lives of his friends almost constantly; the craziest way to keep himself sane that he knows. But he’d never really considered what it would have meant for himself, or for Radek. Would Rodney have stayed on Atlantis? Would Radek have still gotten married and then divorced? Would they have remained friends, or would something else have ripped them apart?

He glances down at Radek’s sleeping form. He’d been right before. It doesn’t really matter anymore. They are what they are right now. Everything else is just memories and dreams.

They finish their checks the next day in a quiet and wholly underwhelming moment. There’s no ‘eureka’ moment to be had, no waves of stark disbelief crashing into them. They’d approved all the steps that had come before it, so when Rodney and Radek reach the final calculations, the numbers that would or would not send John home, all Rodney can do is nod. “It works.”

This time, when he looks to his left, it’s Radek’s gaze that meets his. “Yes,” Radek says, unnameable emotions coiled tight in his voice. “It does.”

Rodney turns his head, heat rushing to his cheeks. This, apparently, is what it feels like when a person happens upon the realisation that they’re insane. All along he’d been right, and it had taken weeks of baking in his own hopeless paranoia to realise it. Jeannie had been correct to try and intervene, he accepts with a flush of shame, and now he owes her a pretty hefty apology. He owes Kerrigan an explanation, and he most likely needs to start shopping around for a new job, and…

He shifts his eyes back towards Radek. Okay, maybe he owes Jeannie a thank you too, because he’d been wrong, actually - it hadn’t just been his own hapless mind that had straightened this relapse out of him, not by a long shot.

Rodney doesn’t think he can stand to look at these screens for another moment, so with a wave of his hands he shuts them down. “I need to get out of this apartment before I chew my own foot off,” he says. “Come on.” He tries to remember how he’d survived this for twenty-five years and comes up completely blank.

Winter is coming in thick and fast, and Radek had apparently packed the bare minimum before jumping on a plane to Canada, so Rodney grabs a spare beanie. Radek is still looking a little faded, and Rodney compensates by jamming the hat over Radek’s flyaway hair with perhaps a little more vigour than necessary. “You always whine so much when you get sick,” he snarks, and Radek cracks a smile.

Despite being the one to bundle them up and get them out of there, Rodney feels the jitters coming on as they spill out into the street, and it isn’t from the nipping cold. He has the distinct, unguarded feeling of having thrown away his last excuse to hide from the world - he’s out now, and he can’t rationalise a way to wriggle back into the agonising comfort of The Work. This time around, though, the thought of stepping into the present and then again into the future doesn’t seem quite so daunting.

Rodney tips his head back and sucks in a lungful of crisp air.

They walk in silence, letting the watery sunlight and vigorous breeze ease out the tension in their muscles, and maybe just to put as much distance between themselves and the apartment as they can. It isn’t until Rodney hears the sound of lethargic quacking that he realises where they’ve ended up: the park. His and Jen’s park. The park where…

Rodney glances over at Radek. Once again, he feels incredulously secure in the confidence that Radek isn't going to bolt and leave Rodney to pick up the pieces again. Maybe it’s just the recognition that there’s no need to: what could he put Radek through that’s worse than what he just did?

“It is good to be out,” Radek says, gaze fixed out on the lake. He seems quietly delighted at the sight of the ducks, and it makes Rodney cock his head.

“Who’s looking after your pigeons?”

Radek looks startled at first, before a sweet smile spreads across his face, one that makes Rodney embarrassedly hunch his shoulders and look away. He doesn’t give a shit about those flying rodents, but he knows that Radek loves them, and for all intents and purposes he seems to have ditched them without warning for two weeks. For Rodney.

“I asked another fancier to check in on them for me,” he says.

“Well,” Rodney says and shuffles his stiff feet. The ducks on the shoreline have realised that they don’t have bread, and after giving them the requisite betrayed looks, have gone back to ignoring the two humans. “I’m sure they’ll be … happy to see you. I guess.” Do pigeons feel things? Rodney isn’t sure. Their brains are surely too small to hold much of anything. “Or you’ll be happy to see them, anyway.”

“Oh yes,” Radek replies. He fixes Rodney with a cautious look. “What about you?”

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Radek, but I haven’t thought about your pigeons once since I last saw them.”

That earns him a magnanimous eye roll. “Vůl,” he says affectionately. “What are you going to do now?”

Well, that's an irritatingly broad question, and not one that Rodney feels particularly excited to ponder right now. He sighs and rubs the back of his neck. “Um, well from the sounds of it, I should probably start looking for a new job. At this point, my chances of getting back into serious academia are slim to none, but maybe…” He sighs, unable to bring himself to even finish the thought. “Oh god, who cares anymore? I’ll figure something out.”

Radek lets out a small noise of contemplation. “There is that woman you spoke of. Wendy. Was all of that a lie?”

Ah, Kerrigan. Rodney’s failed alibi. “The kiss was real, thank you very much,” Rodney huffs. “I think she actually likes me.”

“Well, maybe that is something?”

Rodney bites the inside of his cheek. Assuming that interest hasn’t totally fizzled out in his near-month-long disappearing act… “Maybe,” Rodney allows, and fishes for the enthusiasm that he knows should accompany that statement. “I mean, she’s nice. Attractive. She keeps me occupied.”

It’s not at all flattering, far less than what Wendy deserves, and with that Rodney feels the decision make itself.

Radek scoffs. “So passionate.”

Rodney hardly disagrees, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to let Radek give him shit for it. “Oh, please, like you’re such a romantic. Why’d you marry your ex-husband, then?”

When he turns to give Radek a deadpan look, Radek responds with a sly grin. “He was nice,” he says. “He was attractive. He kept me occupied.”

They both snort out a laugh, and Rodney finishes with a little sigh. “You were right," he says - yes, even he can admit it sometimes. "What you said about marriage - well, relationships. People. What would I even do with someone who doesn’t know about the Stargate program? I’d just be killing time.” He shrugs moodily. “No sense wasting hers too.”

“Well,” Radek responds after a sombre few seconds of staring out across the pond. “Perhaps there is more out there for us than marriage.”

“Like pigeons?”

“Exactly.”

For all Radek’s talk about missing his pigeons, he doesn’t mention anything about a return flight, and Rodney sure as hell isn’t going to be the one to bring it up. Back at Rodney’s apartment, Radek helps him shut down and pack away his holo-screens, and then Radek starts poking around Rodney’s fridge for something more substantial than toast. It seems like he’s dragging his feet as much as Rodney is, and Rodney finds himself bracing himself against the reality of time, the fact that, come tomorrow, Radek will run out of excuses for not leaving. 

But time is a finagling bastard, and the more Rodney begs for it to slow down, the faster it seems to slip away. Soon enough, it’s evening again and Radek is readying the pull-out for the last time. Rodney lumbers into the living room, arms piled high with clean sheets, and he dumps them unceremoniously on the disassembled couch, jostling Newton and making her grumble. 

“Ah.” Radek pushes his tumbling hair back behind his ear. “Thank you.”

“Well, goodnight,” Rodney responds, going to leave. But Radek has glanced up at him, and there’s something in his gaze that gives Rodney pause. It’s a kind of wondrousness, or maybe some sort of realisation. Either way, those soft, moonish eyes, and slightly parted lips feel wildly out of proportion for the act of handing over clean bedding. 

Whatever is actually going on behind Radek’s eyes, though, he doesn’t volunteer it. “Goodnight, Rodney,” he says warmly instead, and Rodney resigns himself to the fact that there are things that even he will never be able to understand.

The next morning, he gets up to find a steaming cup of coffee waiting on the kitchen counter and Radek neatly folding the sheets from the packed-up pull-out. “Good morning,” he says amicably, and then: “I bought a ticket back to Prague. I think your couch is sick of me.” He gives the back of it a firm pat.

“Right,” Rodney says, seizing his coffee and taking shelter in the steady burn of its heat against his palms. He wonders if the bitterness he’s feeling seeped out into the word.

If it had, Radek gives no indication. “The flight leaves at one.”

“Okay.”

Radek fixes him with a bright-eyed smile. “Could we go back to the lake before I leave?”

Rodney downs his coffee in record time. Before they go, he digs out the dwindling bag of stale bread slices from his pantry and stuffs it in the deep pocket of his overcoat. 

Radek seems overcome with nervous energy the whole way to the park. Rodney can only chalk it up to excitement about getting to go home and see his pigeons again. To tide him over, Rodney pulls out the bag of bread once they reach the water’s edge and wordlessly hands it over. Radek lets out a small sound of delight and deftly divides the bread into two stacks: one for him and one for Rodney.

A generous few minutes pass in silence as they toss out chunks of bread to the ravenous horde of ducks that have descended upon them, broken only by obnoxious quacking. Eventually, though, Radek turns to fix him with a piercing look.

“Rodney.”

Rodney stops mid-bread-toss, turning to face Radek. The word sounded as though it had leapt out of Radek’s mouth of his own volition, and the look Rade is pinning him with is far too intense for a conversation happening in front of a duck pond. “...Yes?”

“I am wanting to … to ask you something.” Radek looks taken aback at himself. He pauses with his mouth open, ready to speak but with no words coming out, and Rodney wonders if he might be in the midst of a stroke. Oh god, he can’t think of worse timing. 

“Radek -”

“Come back to Prague with me,” Radek lets out in a rush, then clamps his jaw shut with an audible snap.

Rodney blinks. “I don’t think I can justify taking another holiday when I don’t even have a job to be on holiday from.”

“No holiday.” All the apparent self-consciousness from a few seconds ago has sloughed away, and he juts his chin up now like he’s preparing to ward off mockery. “Come live with me.”

It’s a knee-jerk reflex, but Rodney still means it the tiniest bit when he laughs, out of incredulity if nothing else. “Oh, right, of course.” Radek glowers and the chuckle scurries back down Rodney’s throat. “Wait - you’re serious?”

“Why not?” Radek says heatedly. “What is so ridiculous?”

“Wh - I - Because,"  Rodney protests, with a panic he doesn’t fully understand but feels compelled to honour. “I can’t - I can’t just suddenly immigrate to Prague and move in with you.”

“Give me one reason why.”

Rodney opens his mouth, then closes it again. “My - my job -”

“What job?” Okay, harsh, but fair, Rodney supposes. “Besides, you hated that place. You are Rodney McKay, and you have me as reference. There are places at home that will snatch you away.”

Rodney is too flustered to bother poking fun at Radek’s broken idiom. “Okay, Mr. Fix it, how about this? I don’t speak Czech.”

Radek waves a hand, still clutching a crust of bread. “You are smart man, no? You will learn. In the meantime, you get by with English and Russian.”

“You raise pigeons, and I own the apex predator of the bird. Our lifestyles are fundamentally incompatible.”

“Your old lady is inside cat, and mine are outside pigeons, safe in their loft. There will be no problems.”

Rodney is starting to flag now. “I - but - this is - for fuck’s sake, a year ago we weren’t even on speaking terms! We might end up killing each other for all you know. This is a reckless idea.”

“More reckless than travelling to live in another galaxy?” Rodney’s jaw snaps shut, and Radek crosses his arms. “Rodney, I have been thinking about this for much time now. It will be good for both of us; I believe this.” His gaze softens. “If you truly do not wish it, then say so, and I will never bring it up again, but do not argue just to argue.” His mouth slants downwards as he waits for Rodney’s response. He looks like he’s bracing for a veritable boxing match, but Rodney doesn’t sense one iota of anger from him. He’s not fighting with Rodney, he’s fighting for Rodney, and that realisation has Rodney stop short inside himself.

Rodney tosses his last scraps of bread into the water and wraps his arms around himself, gripping the sleeves of his own sweater between his fingers. The steady pitter-patter of panic is still ringing out in his head, but Radek’s words have managed to cleave a path through to a chance at clear thought. All of the reasons Rodney has thrown at him have been about protecting the weeds of the life that has grown around Rodney while he hadn’t been looking. Not once, since the moment Radek had dropped the question on him, had it ever crossed Rodney’s mind that he didn’t want this. It’s the opposite; an ache so all-encompassing that he hadn’t even been able to name it until now.

He knows all about what happens to the things that he wants, though. He sets his jaw, daring a glance back at Radek, whose face is open and waiting. He swallowed forcefully. “Why?” he eventually manages, and as he speaks he can feel thirty years of history stretching out between them. “Why would you want that?”

Radek’s gaze skitters away like a startled rabbit, escaping to the brown expanse of pond water and tracking the gentle ripples left by bobbing ducks. Rodney doesn’t think it’s too unreasonable of a question, all things considered, but Radek seems to be struggling with his words. “Because,” he says, as quietly as the lapping water. “Every time I leave you, I am so scared that I will never see you again.” 

That statement is enough to knock the wind out of Rodney’s lungs. “I’m not going to be your project, Radek,” he says. “If you think you need to - to save me from myself -”

Radek is already fervently shaking his head. “Is not about saving,” he says. “I told you once, I am not good at saving people. If you want to destroy yourself, I don’t think anybody in the universe could stop you.” He says that last part wryly, and Rodney has to admit, it almost feels like a compliment. “But if you are going to destroy yourself,” Radek continues softly, “then I want to know. If you let yourself have peace, then I want to know. I want to be by your side again. And I -” The words crackle and stutter, a recording with an error, and Radek twists his head back around, pale eyes holding volumes as they glimmer under the sun. “I - I do not want to be alone anymore.”

The weight of twenty-five years is in those words. Rodney knows that weight all too well; his shoulders have been bending under it for so long. He’d never thought there’d be anything harder than holding it, until now that he’s being asked to put it down.

I do not want to be alone anymore.

There’s a solid mass lodged in Rodney’s throat that’s blocking anything from coming out except one word. “Yeah,” he whispers and watches the water glisten. “Yeah.”

Rodney sees Radek off at the airport that afternoon.

There’s hardly any fanfare. Radek only has one carry-on bag with him - Rodney doesn’t know how he managed to make that stretch over two weeks, and quite honestly, he doesn’t want to know. The heaviest thing either of them is lugging around is the lingering expectation from that morning’s conversation.

“Promise me you will think about it,” Radek says, eyes wide and earnest behind his glasses.

Rodney just nods mutedly. As if he’ll be able to do anything else.

Radek smiles crookedly like he can read his mind. Then, just as his flight number is called by the warbling voice over the speaker, he sneaks forward and snakes his arms around Rodney in a hug.

In all the time that they’ve known each other, Rodney doesn’t think he and Radek have ever hugged. If Radek had ever initiated it, then Rodney certainly would have shrugged him off with a scoff and an eye roll. Right at this moment, though, it seems like the most natural thing in the world, and Rodney squeezes him right back, palms pressed tight against his warm back.

“Is good to see you,” Radek mumbles from where his nose is buried in Rodney’s neck.

Rodney’s eyes slip closed, chin digging into Radek's shoulder. “You too.” Then, after a beat has passed during which he could feel his heart crawling up his throat: “Thank you.”

Slowly, more reluctantly than Rodney could ever have imagined, they pull apart, and Radek joins the crowd moving into the terminal. Just as the jostling mass of bodies threatens to swallow him completely, Radek turns back and gives him a smile.

Rodney smiles back.

The nerve-grating rattle of china being set down on the table creates a fitting backing track as Rodney sits across from his sister. When he’d shown up on her Denver doorstep, feet shuffling and a bouquet of lilies awkwardly thrust out in front of him like a shield, Jeannie had embraced him without a word. But now that they’re inside, sitting down to Talk, the underlying tension is hard not to bump shoulders with. 

Kaleb finishes serving their tea, and then graciously decides this ensuing conversation isn’t his lane to drive on. He kisses the crown of Jeannie’s grey head, gives Rodney a genuine smile, and then disappears into the living room, leaving them alone at the dining table. It’s a vaguely terrifying prospect, but Jeannie doesn’t look angry, just resignedly curious.

“So,” she begins. “These last couple of weeks…?”

Rodney laces his fingers together. “Radek came,” he says. “We finished checking The Work together.”

Jeannie lets out a sigh that gets swallowed by the rim of her mug. “I should have known, you’re both as insane as each other.” She takes a long sip, then sets the mug down with a commanding thunk. “And?”

“It’s all correct. I … I had it all right.”

Jeannie nods once, expressionless. “Good,” she says eventually. “I’m glad.”

Acidic guilt is working away at Rodney’s insides. “I’m sorry,” he blurts out. “For what I said to you. I don’t know why I…”

He takes refuge in the contents of his mug, holding it so close to him that his nose nearly dips into the surface of the tea, and he can see his wobbly, distorted reflection in the dark brown liquid. Almost as scary as the fear of failure that had gripped him is the fear of what that anxiety can make him think, make him do. He doesn’t know himself when it has him, and that’s the scariest thing he can imagine considering he is the one thing in his life he’s supposed to have control over.

When he peeks back over the edge of his mug, he sees that the lines of Jeannie’s face have softened. Her hand is snaking out towards the middle of the table. “I don’t need you to be sorry,” she says. “I just … I need to know that you’re going to be okay. How many more times is this going to happen until it’s finally enough?”

Rodney opens his mouth and leaves it hanging uncertainly for a few moments. He hates not having certainties at his disposal. “I think … It feels more complete now. Not like before.”

He’s not sure how coherent that notion is to anybody else, but Jeannie nods, smiling ever so slightly. “Unfinished business, huh?”

Rodney’s mouth twists. Something like that, he supposes, although he can’t say he’s a fan of the trite coinage. It had been more like faulty brakes. Ever since The Work had spat him out, he’s been spinning onwards with no inertia. Is that how addicts feel when they get sober for the first time? It’s hard to be content settling for the scraps of a normal life when the one you had before filled up so much inside of you - even if it had been doing its best to kill you. And so you keep playing the same games with yourself over and over again, trying to win the unwinnable.

He thinks about going through the rigours of The Work but with a familiar figure at his shoulder. You play the same game, that is, until you change the rules.

Jeannie hums quietly, unbothered by Rodney’s silence. “How is Radek, anyway?”

Had he been that transparent? Rodney squirms in his seat. “Er, he’s…” He makes a split-second decision. “He wants me to move in with him.”

The mug thunks back down as Jeannie’s eyebrows fly up. “Oh wow.”

Rodney breathes out a huff of solidarity through his nose. “Yeah, I know.”

“You said yes, right?”

Now it's Rodney’s eyebrows that just about rocket off his face. “Well, that’s incredibly presumptuous of you,” he retorts. “For your information, I said I’d think about it.”

“What’s there to think about?” Jeannie fixes him with a level stare that has an aura of older sister sternness that Rodney can’t help but resent, given the three years he has on her. “Meredith,” she says evenly. “Do you know what Radek said to me on the phone after I told him what was going on with you?” Rodney shakes his head, because obviously not, and Jeannie continues. “Nothing, because he was already booking a flight.” She lets Rodney wallow in his dumbfounded silence for a few seconds before continuing. “I love you so much, Mer, but I’m never going to be able to understand what you went through, what you’re still going through, like he does.”

Rodney pictures Radek in his dusty little townhouse, all alone except for his pigeons, letting the years and the memories and the guilt chew away at him, and his stomach twists and turns and flips around. He knows it’s a funny thing to ascribe to him of all people, but Rodney is pretty sure he’s the only person who can understand that the right way as well.

Jeannie chews on her bottom lip, a habit from her younger days that she’s never managed to kick. “I don’t know,” she says softly. “Everything you’ve been through…” Her eyes look suspiciously bright, and Rodney quickly averts his gaze. His sister crying is a weak spot for him, always has been, always will be. “I just think maybe you don’t feel like you deserve to be happy? Or that you have to earn it back, somehow. But that’s - you don’t owe it to everyone you lost to be miserable, you know? They wouldn’t want that for you. I don’t want that for you. You’ve done right by them, and now you get to be happy.” She grips her mug tightly, and when she speaks next, she sounds almost afraid of his answer. “You do want to be happy, right?”

What a depressing question to be troubled by. A year ago, Rodney’s answer would have been a resounding: who the hell cares?  But that’s a surprisingly exhausting conviction to carry around, as it turns out. Rodney ducks his head, throat sandpaper rough as he swallows. “Yeah,” he murmurs, like he’s embarrassed by it. “Yes.”

Jeannie’s eyes are still glistening, and Rodney can’t help but brace himself as she gets out of her seat and comes around to his side of the table, but there’s nothing but the feel of her cardigan-clad arms around his shoulders and her hair brushing his cheek as she leans over and hugs him from behind, resting her chin on top of his head. Rodney won’t admit it, but he relaxes beneath the touch, and one of his hands comes up to grip her forearm.

“Don’t think this is an excuse for you to skip out on Christmas,” she says with only the tiniest waver in her voice. Rodney is deeply grateful for her restraint. 

“I doubt Radek would let me get away with that,” Rodney replies, voice suspiciously thick. “Nosy bastard.”

Jeannie hums, tightening her grip around him. “I knew there was a reason I liked him.”

“I maintain that he’s a suck-up,” Rodney mutters, and he feels Jeannie smile into his hair.

Chapter Text

Considering the literal lifetime that it had taken Rodney to claw and scratch and pummel The Work into existence, the relative ease with which he convinced Lorne to let him through the Gate one last time hit him like whiplash. Rodney had come with an entire thesis statement primed and ready to go, willing to use every weapon at his disposal: logic, emotional appeals, even good old-fashioned guilt tripping. But Lorne had taken his proposal as steadily as a rock standing tall in a river, hardly even blinking when he heard the sheer scale of Rodney’s plan, and only made the most cursory, ‘check-the-boxes’ counter-arguments before finally giving the go-ahead. 

Of course, getting Lorne’s tick of approval was only one small part of this mission. For Rodney’s plan to work, he’ll need a lot more than just The Work. Atlantis’ system would need power from a source that could survive the forty-eight thousand-year wait until it was needed, plus another thousand to account for the time that John would have to be in stasis to wait for the solar flare that would bring him home. For that mammoth of a task, they were going to need naquadah. 

Rodney gave Lorne a list of the components he needed, and Lorne got to work pulling all the strings he had at his disposal. That left Rodney with some time to kill, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to spend it in the SGC. In the numb haze of finishing The Work, Rodney hadn’t given much thought to where he was stepping into, but it had crashed into him the moment he’d stepped out of Lorne’s office: the realisation that the last time he’d visited Cheyenne Mountain, he’d arrived with Jen at his side and left alone.

As he made his way out of the building, he felt the presence of the infirmary a floor below him - the place where Jen and Carson had both breathed their last - like a physical force, and it propelled him forward fast. He wasn’t able to swallow down his nausea until he was back out in the dry Colorado sunshine. 

He didn’t know how long he was going to be waiting. He strayed back into proper civilisation and wandered into the first diner he found, ordering a truly unholy amount of food: a double cheeseburger, an extra side of onion rings, a slice of blueberry pie topped with whipped cream, and a steaming mug of coffee. He was a kind of starving that was born from needing to fill a lot more gaps inside himself than just hunger. He needed to give his hands something to do that wasn’t fidget. He needed to give his stomach something to do that wasn’t flip over on itself. While he stuffed his face, he googled the nearest motel and made a booking. 

Half an hour later, he was there, stretched out on the unforgiving mattress and staring at the frankly suspicious stains on the ceiling. He hadn’t planned on going to sleep, but almost the second his head hit the pillow, it was as if the last twenty-five years caught up with him all at once, and the next thing he knew, he was being jerked awake by his ringtone, mid-morning sun streaming across his face.

He’d fallen asleep with his phone still jammed in his jacket pocket. He fished it out, taking a second to glance at the alarm clock on the bedside table and marvelling at the fact that he’d slept nearly twenty hours - it was a whole new day. 

When he answered his phone, it was Lorne’s voice that greeted him. “We’re good to go.”

“That was quick,” Rodney said, dumbfounded, and Lorne just chuckled. It was good to be at the top, it seemed. Not even the IOA could get in the way of General Evan Lorne on a mission.

The return to the SGC was marked with a new flavour of anxiety; not the fear of his plan being rejected, but the fear that he now had to actually do it. He hadn’t thrown away the last two and a half decades of his life for nothing though, so he squared his shoulders and sucked it up.

Lorne met him on his way to the Gate room. “I have the team of engineers you requested,” he said as they walked in step past hustling Marines and scientists who gave them cursory looks of curiosity. “The best we’ve got. They’ll get the job done.”

Rodney just grunted in acknowledgement. He’d asked for extra sets of hands out of a practical appreciation of the scale of the task ahead of him, but that didn’t mean he was happy about it. He’d come this far on his own. It seemed almost wrong that he would need anybody else to help him reach the finish line.

“I’m also sending SG-4 through with you to watch your six,” Lorne said. Rodney gave him an exasperated side-eye, and Lorne simply raised an eyebrow in return. “Don’t give me that look. Since the IOA shut down the Atlantis mission for good, we’ve got no idea what’s happened to the city, and a MALP can only tell us so much. I’m not letting a damn thing happen to you on my watch.”

Rodney didn’t have the heart to argue with that, even if he thought that Lorne would be amenable to changing his mind. Still, the thought of walking the halls of his beloved city with a team of randoms who probably had no real understanding of the significance it held was making his hackles raise. “You can still shoot, can’t you?” he said impulsively. “Forget the team; you come with me.”

A small smile flitted across Lorne’s lips. “I would if I could,” he said earnestly, and Rodney sighed internally. That was the best he was going to get. “Listen, I know it’s not ideal, but you don’t have to worry about these guys. I’ve told them that this mission is for you to run a few experiments and that they’re not authorised to know anything else. They won’t hassle you.”

That was hardly the problem, and Rodney suspected that both of them knew it. He didn’t respond, and they walked the rest of the way in silence.

When they stepped into the Gateroom, both the engineers and the Marines were waiting for them, standing to attention as Lorne stepped through the door. Rodney was pretty sure that Lorne was introducing them all to him, but he’d stopped listening to a word coming out of anyone’s mouth the moment he’d laid eyes on the Stargate again. Every day of the last twenty-six years, the Stargate program had felt like a mere breath away, always dragging like a heavy chain from his ankles. It was only now, as he gazed up at the soaring rim of the Gate, did it hit him just how long it had been since he’d stepped through one, and how different the man who’d done it was. He’d never felt his age more than in that moment.

Lorne shot a thumbs up at the Gate techs sitting behind the viewing glass. The sound of the Stargate whirring to life sent shivers running up and down Rodney’s body. He watched, transfixed, as each chevron locked into place with an unearthly golden glow, and then, finally, the explosion of pure energy that leapt out and receded to leave a rippling disk of blue in its wake. 

“I’ll see you on the other side,” Lorne said, but Rodney didn’t respond. He was walking up the ramp like he had a rope tethered to his waist that was reeling him in, pulling him back to where he was supposed to be. He paused at the mouth of the Gate, feeling the hairs on his arms stand up from the proximity to its pull. Then, after one last deep breath, he closed his eyes and stepped through.

Rodney knew with all the certainty he was capable of that, even up until the day he lay on his deathbed, nearly comatose and probably half out of his mind, he would still remember the first time he’d stepped through the Gate into Atlantis. For a brief, beautiful moment, all the anxieties of travelling to an unknown galaxy without the guarantee of a way to return to Earth were wiped away, and he’d been left with nothing but awe, huge and pure and blisteringly raw. A psychic supernova, all wrapped up in the space of a few seconds.

The physical sensation of stepping through the Gate was the same this time around: the gentle pulling and constricting of his skin, cool like a refrigerator blast, and a micro-flash second of unnameable colours before he stepped out through the other side. The smooth landing of his feet on the flagstones of the Gate room, the darkness looming out in all directions - all of that was the same. But this time, as Rodney found himself standing in Atlantis for the first time in twenty-six years, that awe was gone. In its place was a warmth that seeped through his pores and nestled right down between his bones. It was stepping out of a long, cold, night and returning home.

Rodney exhaled slowly, trying to make the moment last as long as he could. Everything was just as he remembered it: the sweeping staircase billowed up to the upper platform, with the grand stained glass windows on the back wall glittering like broken shards of starlight. He took a teetering step forward and watched with giddy delight as the curling Ancient script inscribed along every stair glowed awake in crystalline blue. 

He wondered if, in some abstract, alien way, the city remembered him too.

Mercifully, once they were actually in Atlantis, Rodney was able to keep a safe distance between himself and the tagalongs. He’d assigned the engineers to work on securing the Mark 12 naquadah generator and all the other components necessary for the plan safely within the foundations of one of the outer buildings, while he busied himself with syncing it up with his hologram program and the city’s key systems, so it wasn’t like they were crossing paths every minute. 

Of course, Rodney still monitored their progress like a hawk, and he would catch a few of them giving him sidelong glances and whispering frenetically between themselves - apparently, he still had something of a reputation at the SGC - but they all seemed to have enough self-preservation instincts to avoid approaching him directly.

The Marines, in comparison, were mercifully apathetic- towards him, at least. It was impossible for them to clear the entirety of Atlantis, given the city’s scale, so they’d resorted to patrolling the areas immediately around their various workstations and the Gate room, which they’d designated as their ‘camp,’ flitting through the corridors like shadows with their P-90s at the ready. They’d begun this mission with wide-eyed exhilaration, gaping at what must have surely been the most show-stopping relic of Ancient design they’d ever come across, but the novelty had passed quickly, and now they oscillated between boredom and unease. 

“It’s creepy,” one of the Marines, whose name thoroughly escaped Rodney, said to him on their third night. He had a powdery blonde moustache and cheeks peppered with acne; he barely looked old enough to be in the Air Force Academy, much less a graduate. “Such a huge city, so empty. Kinda makes you believe in ghosts, y’know?” He cast a surreptitious glance at the shadows being cast by the dark pillars. Rodney had decided to work through the night, and this kid was the unfortunate soul who’d been assigned to guard him.

Rodney rolled his eyes. “We did have ghosts once,” he said, not looking up from the crystals he was reconfiguring in the hologram terminal. "Or we thought we did. Turns out they were hallucinations being projected by telepathic whales.”

The kid didn’t respond, probably trying to decide whether Rodney was fucking with him or not, but when Rodney glanced up a few seconds later, he saw the Marine peering out into the dark corridor beyond with an extra high-strung intensity.

Of course, the truth was, they didn’t have to worry about ghosts or any other sort of danger. Rodney realised that the moment they’d stepped through the Gate and seen that Atlantis was still standing, even if SG-4 didn’t. Michael hated this place. If he’d wanted to do damage, he’d have wiped it off the face of the planet, not settled for some plinky booby traps.

It had been an all-too-real concern of Rodney’s. He’d had more than a few nightmares of it: stepping through the Gate to find the city as nothing but a hunk of crumbled debris, with all of John’s hopes of returning home sunk to the bottom of the ocean with the rest of it. Now that that particular fear had been abated, any other anxieties of Rodney’s dribbled away into nothingness. 

He wondered if Michael had been too busy with taking over the rest of the galaxy to bother with a now-defunct Atlantis. Maybe he simply hadn’t been able to figure out how to work the self-destruct. It was entirely possible that he was already dead, taken out by hardy Pegasus natives or his own rabid Hybrids or any of the other countless dangers lurking in this galaxy. Rodney was blindsided by the realisation of how little he cared. The damage that Michael Kenmore had wrought had been so overwhelming that he’d become less of a person and more of a natural disaster in Rodney’s mind, not able to be hated so much as be resigned to. And now he was nothing more than a memory.

Not that that made him any less real. Everything Rodney had done in the last twenty-five years had been in the name of memories, after all.

In the end, it took them five days to get everything set up and sealed away to Rodney’s satisfaction. Technically, they could have been done in three and a half, but Rodney was not about to half-ass this. So, he re-checked that his hologram was properly integrated, he confirmed that all the power systems were fully calibrated, he stored the crystal drive containing all the intel that the Atlantis expedition had managed to gather about Michael into the stasis chamber’s deep storage unit, and then he stood back and basked in the bleak climax of the completion of nearly three decades’ worth of work.

“Doctor McKay?” his nameless Marine escort of the day asked behind him as he stared blankly at the gleaming face of the stasis pod. This was the last place he’d seen Carson alive, he realised distantly, a whole lifetime ago. It had saved Carson then - or, at least, prolonged the inevitable. Hopefully, someday, it would save John too. It would save an entire galaxy. But its role in Rodney’s life was over.

“I’m done here,” Rodney replied, his voice somewhere outside himself. “Go tell everyone to start packing up, will you? I’ll, uh, I’ll be right behind you.”

There was the sound of the hesitant shuffling of boots behind him, and then, finally, the thud of receding footsteps. Rodney waited, counting his breaths until he felt sure that the Marine was well out of the way, and then he made his escape.

He could still navigate this city blind, deaf, and with a raging concussion, which gave him a distinct advantage over the overgrown children he’d been sent here with. He took a roundabout route, drifting through corridors that he knew hadn’t been cleared by SG-4. As predicted, there was nothing: no trip wires, no primed explosives, no Hybrids waiting to pounce on him. Just empty walls upon empty walls upon empty walls.

Rodney walked past endless rooms whose entrances called to him. There, the communal kitchens where he and Ronon had tried to recreate a traditional Satedan dessert while just this side of too tipsy on Athosian wine and ended up sprawled on the floor, eating batter out of a bowl. There, the mess hall where they’d held their annual non-denominational, end-of-year, We Didn’t Die parties, where Carson would gift him with whatever knitting project he’d been working on that year - they were lumpy, and they were hideous, and they were the most effort anyone had ever put into a gift for him in his whole life. There, the gym where Teyla, after learning of the disaster that had been Ronon’s self-defence lessons, took him aside and taught him how to use her bantos instead - his strength, she’d explained, would not be in engaging people with his body but in keeping others as far away as possible, and Rodney would have taken that as a backhanded joke if it had come from anybody else. There, the infirmary, where he’d met Jen for the first time a few hours after she’d been promoted to Chief of Medicine, coming in with a first-degree burn the size of a penny and asking for the strongest pain meds she could give him - she used to retell him that story all the time, and it never ceased to amaze him how she’d managed to sound more and more fond every time.

Memories, ghosts, hounded him with every step like Ancient lights illuminating in time with his movements, leading him on a path that he knew the destination of without having to think about it.

After what felt like seven hours or seven seconds, Rodney felt the crisp, brackish sea air hit his face as he walked out along the length of the East Pier. It stretched far, far out, right to the rim of the city’s perimeter, and Rodney crossed to the familiar edge with legs that didn’t feel the ache running through them. He and John had used to come out here all the time, just the two of them. They’d sit, they’d drink beer, they’d talk - Rodney didn’t think he’d just sat and talked with anybody the way he had with John. It sounded so inane in words, but some weeks, those times ended up being the best thing in Rodney’s day. 

That was all finished now though, turned to dust a long time ago. Maybe in another timeline, another John and another Rodney would get to sit here and talk again, but for him, right here and now, this was the last time he would ever even stand on this pier. 

In its place, he got to look forward to … Rodney cast his mind around for some scrap that he could shape into what his future would look like. Slaving away at a job he hated - or not; he could always quit, and nobody would think twice about it except maybe Wendy Kerrigan, but she’d get over it soon enough. Seeing Jeannie and Kaleb once or twice a year, hovering in the periphery of their lives with no clue how to thread himself in any further. Paying his rent. Buying groceries. Changing Newton’s litter. Living in an apartment filled with holo-screens and whiteboards he no longer had any use for. 

Rodney stared off the edge of the pier where he was perched, all the way down to the glittering surface of the ocean. It was as still and smooth as a sheet of metal, or at least it looked that way from up here. A beautiful indigo. There was something about the ocean that was like peering up into the night sky: a deep, dark stretch of negative space that hid boundless secrets, one that went on, and on, and on, further than you could even imagine. It would swallow you up if you let it.

Rodney rocked on his heels. A thought floated up, unbidden, like it had been waiting for the perfect moment all this time: It wouldn’t take much.

He kept his eyes trained on the water. He was right; it wouldn’t take much. Just one step. Compared to everything he’d put himself through the last twenty-five years, a step was nothing. He wasn’t sure if the height would be enough to finish him off, but that was okay, the water could do the rest. He’d just have to let himself slip below the surface and fall slowly through the underwater cosmos. There was a charming continuity to the whole notion, his whole life wrapped up with a neat little bow. Atlantis was where everything had begun for him. Why not make it the place where it ended as well?

There was no urgency to the thought, no panic or grief or bitterness. Just a calm acceptance. He’d done what he had to do. Now there was just this. It wouldn’t take much.

“...Doctor McKay?”

Rodney blinked once, twice, then slowly eased himself around. Lieutenant Peach Fuzz was standing a few feet from him, looking quietly stricken. His hands were clenching and unclenching around a life signs detector. That must have been how he’d found him. 

“Everyone else is packed up and ready to head through the Gate,” the kid said. His eyes skittered to the edge of the Pier, then back to Rodney’s face. “Um … Are you okay?”

What a novel question. Rodney couldn’t help but chuckle, twisting his head back around to fix his eyes on the horizon. “Sure,” he said loosely. “Why not?”

“Alright, well…” There was the sound of hesitant footsteps closing in on us. “Well, it’s just that … General Lorne’s waiting on us.”

Rodney let out a slow breath. He could still do it - the Marine was nowhere near close enough to catch him in time, and he’d be gone before they could launch any kind of rescue. But … He peered back down into the ocean’s depths. Lorne was waiting on him. He said he’d see him on the other side. Both of them had stood vigil over enough caskets to last them each five lifetimes; it didn’t seem fair to ask Lorne to stand over another one.

Painstakingly, Rodney turned back towards Atlantis, taking enough deliberate steps away from the edge of the pier so that the Marine could stop holding his breath. Together, they began the slow trudge back to the city. Back to the Gate. 

He supposed there was nothing left to do but go and see if there was anything worthwhile waiting on the other side.

Chapter Text

The silhouette of Rockville College is just as loathsome as Rodney remembers it being. Apparently, absence making the heart grow fonder is a load of horseshit - or maybe it just takes longer than a few months. As far as this place is concerned, Rodney wouldn’t hold his breath either way. 

He hasn’t been back since before his minor breakdown. After Radek had returned to Prague, Rodney had looked into the whole ‘suspension’ drama - they had apparently still been in the midst of deliberating, so Rodney had gone ahead and quit to save them the hassle of termination, and he’s had no reason to come back since. Until today.

Rodney adjusts his grip on the hefty shopping bag he’s dragging along with him before pushing open the door to Office G23 of the so-called ‘science block.’ He’d had an office like this too, though he’d never kept anything in it aside from exam papers - anything else would imply that he had wanted to be here, after all. Kerrigan’s office, in comparison, feels much more like a genuine office space and less like a cell. She has texts displayed neatly - and from the looks of it, alphabetically - on a bookcase to the left of the door, and a row of succulents soaking up the sun on the windowsill. There’s a photo frame on her desk, facing towards her: her and Greg, probably.

“My consultation hours are on the door,” Kerrigan says, head still buried in her laptop. “This isn’t -” She finally looks up and pauses mid-sentence when she sees who’s awkwardly hovering in her doorway. “Doctor McKay,” she exclaims, blinking in surprise for only a second at most before gathering her composure and rising to her feet, beckoning. “Come in, please.”

Rodney does as he’s told, closing the door behind him. He hasn’t been avoiding Kerrigan per se. To say he’s been busy is far from a lie: first, it was with losing his mind over The Work, and then, eventually, it was with sorting out his Visa and all the other complications that come with immigrating to another country. But it’s also true that he’s been utterly grateful for the excuse to not have to come up with something to tell her. Given that Kerrigan holds the prestigious title of ‘Only Person In Canada That He Gives A Damn About,’ though, he thinks she’s owed something.

“I’m glad to see that you’re alright,” Kerrigan says. She reeks of professionalism, but there’s an undercurrent of sincerity in those words, Rodney thinks. She smiles wanly. “I messaged your sister again, but all she told me was that you were ‘sorting things out.’”

“Right. Well, that’s … reasonably accurate.” Rodney tightens his fingers around the handles of his shopping bag. “I suppose I should thank you for calling her.”

Kerrigan raises an elegant eyebrow. “You suppose?”

Rodney winces. “I am. Thanking you, that is. It was very considerate of you.” Kerrigan is still fixing him with a probing, scientist’s stare, which Rodney really isn’t a fan of being on the receiving end of, particularly from someone who he’s kissed on the mouth. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you more. It was … messy, especially considering the, uh…” His eyes flick uncontrollably to her lips. “Timing.”

Slowly, a wry smile spreads across Kerrigan’s face. “I wasn’t concerned that my propositioning you had sent you into a mental breakdown if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m good, but I’m not that good.”

Rodney flushes. “No - well - look, I should warn you now that, historically speaking, I’m not very good at this. I once had a girlfriend who broke up with me because I proposed and then, um, un-proposed while being locked in a room together for five hours, and I didn’t even realise she’d dumped me until about a month later.” He watches as Kerrigan’s brows creep steadily up and up her face until they nearly disappear into her hairline. “It was a stressful time in my life.”

“...I can imagine.” Kerrigan comes out from behind her desk to meet Rodney, leaning back against it slightly. “Listen, Rodney, you don’t owe me an explanation. Regardless of what happened between us, I’m not holding you to anything.”

That’s a relief. Rodney can’t imagine how he would have navigated this conversation if Kerrigan was actually upset with him. In saying that, it ruffles him a little to learn that he’s apparently so disposable. “Okay, well - good,” he says stiltedly. “I just wanted to tie up any loose ends, so to speak, considering I … I won’t be here for much longer.”

Instantly, Kerrigan’s face transforms into one of stricken shock. “Oh god,” she breathes. “I’m so sorry. How long do you have, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Her works buffer in Rodney’s brain for a good few seconds before he finally makes the connection. “God, what? No, I’m not dying.”

“Oh!” Kerrigan’s shoulders slacken in relief.

Rodney’s eyes narrow. Given the sparse information that Kerrigan has, combined with his disappearing act, he really should have seen this coming. Still, though. “Okay, seriously, the circumstances of my life are so dire that you immediately jump to terminal illness? ” Kerrigan doesn’t answer with anything apart from a vaguely guilty look, which is probably a good thing. “Well, whatever. No, I’m moving to Prague. I’m going to live with a friend.”

“Oh,” Kerrigan exclaims again and barks out a laugh. “Christ, alright then.” She smiles. “I didn’t know you had any friends … in Prague.”

Nice save. “I’ve mentioned him to you,” he says, flashing back to the day Kerrigan had covered for him so that he could run to meet Radek. “The old … colleague.”

“Ah.” From the glint in Kerrigan’s eye, Rodney suspects that she’s translated ‘old colleague’ into ‘ex-lover,’ but he doesn’t have the heart to refute it, not when the truth is several layers of off-limits and more than likely too difficult to put into words in any case. “Well, I’m happy for you, Rodney. Truly.”

Rodney clears his throat. “Right.” He knots his fingers together. He wishes he’d thought through this conversation more thoroughly. He meets Kerrigan’s patient gaze and feels washed away into a memory of dim bar lights and the taste of beer coating his tongue. “You were right,” he says abruptly, and she tilts her head in question. “We’ve got a right to take what we need in life. It’s just that … what I need, it’s not ….you.”

That feels crass the moment it leaves Rodney’s mouth. He feels, suddenly and perplexingly, guilty: guilty that he’s abandoning Kerrigan here to suffer through on her own, and for taking away the one out she’d been hoping for in the process. But Kerrigan’s eyes are crinkling up amusedly. He imagines she appreciates the honesty. There’s a reason he likes this woman. “In that case,” she says quietly. “I’m glad you found what you were looking for.”

Something inside Rodney eases up. He gives her a tiny, uncertain smile. “I hope you find it too,” he offers her awkwardly, and with a curve of her lips, she accepts it.

Rodney takes a step back but knocks his foot against the shopping bag that he’d completely forgotten about. “Oh, um.” He picks it up and thrusts it toward her. “Here.”

Kerrigan cocks an eyebrow again, but takes the large bag in two hands, setting it on the desk and pulling down the plastic around the box inside. Instantly, she’s laughing, and she runs her hand appreciatively over the brand-new coffee machine.

“Thank you,” she says, still laughing. “Really.”

“Keep it in here,” he advises her. “Those clowns in the staff room don’t deserve it.”

Kerrigan grins at him. “I promise.” Then, smile softening, she takes a step forward. For a split second, Rodney panics, wondering how he could have possibly miscommunicated his intent this time, but when Kerrigan kisses him, it’s on the cheek: soft and chaste and over almost as soon as it’s begun.

“Take care, Doctor McKay,” she says, and Rodney finds himself smiling all the way out of the building.

It’s a little bit depressing, seeing how quickly the last twenty-six years of Rodney’s life can be neatly dismantled and tucked away into a couple of cardboard boxes. On the other hand, Rodney can’t deny the relief wrapping itself around him. This apartment has served its purpose by keeping him dry and - relatively - warm over the decades, and that is about the kindest thing he can say about it. More than anything, it’s existed as a perpetual reminder of all the things he no longer has.

He’s working his way through the contents of his bedroom while Jeannie and Madison tackle the kitchen. There’s really not much in here that he’s committed to: books, mostly, and his clothes. There are his framed degrees too, of course, and photos of his old cat he’s never had the heart to throw away no matter how long he’s had Newton, but all of that disappears into the moving box in a matter of minutes. He hasn’t held onto many keepsakes.

Rodney stares at the older, smaller box tucked far in the back of his closet, accumulating dust all along the lid. Alright, maybe that’s not entirely true.

He only vaguely remembers packing up his and Jen’s apartment after her death. The decision to move had been a no-brainer, and he’d wanted to get it done as quickly as humanly possible. Jen’s father had taken the majority of her belongings, which was a relief in itself. The only thing that Rodney remembers packing with any kind of clarity is this box. It made the cut to come to this new apartment, it’ll make the cut for Prague as well.

“Hey, Mer?” he hears Jeannie call from the living room. “Come here a sec.”

Rodney dutifully slides the small box over beside the larger moving box, then dusts off his hands on his trousers and makes his way into the living room. Madison is taping up another box labelled ‘KITCHEN,’ and stands up as Rodney enters the room, making a beeline for the fridge.

“I made sure to pack your fork,” she tosses over her shoulder with a grin and opens up the fridge door. “Oh, hey, should we take any of this stuff? There’s no sense in just throwing it out if -” She sticks her head inside, and then quickly pulls it out again. “...Never mind.”

Rodney rolls his eyes and turns to Jeannie. “Yes?” he begins, but then freezes when he sees what she’s holding. In one hand is his holo-projector, and in the other is his hard drive, the one that has all of The Work safely stored inside.

“I wasn’t sure what you wanted to do with these,” she says cautiously.

Rodney shifts his weight from foot to foot, swallowing. Thanks to Visa complications and Radek needing to do a fair bit of shopping around to find a place for an ex-pat who doesn’t know a lick of Czech to work, there have been a good few months of twiddling his thumbs and living off of savings between Radek popping the question, so to speak, and Rodney actually being able to begin moving. In all that time, Rodney has done his very best to avoid contemplating this exact dilemma. One part of his mind is screaming at him to snatch the drive from Jeannie’s hands and never let it out of his sight again. It’s not at all a small part. But Rodney tries to imagine falling back into the pit of The Work in Prague, forcing Radek to watch him fade away for another few months - or worse, drag him along again - and the thought exercise feels akin to tying bricks of cement to his feet and trying to take a swim.

Rodney is tired.

“Chuck ‘em,” he forces out before he can change his mind. Mercifully, Jeannie makes no comment, not even so much as a facial twitch, but Rodney still has to look away as she places the drive and projector on the ‘not keeping’ pile. He breathes in, and he breathes out, and he finds that the air comes to him easily.

“Alright,” Jeannie says from behind him. “I think that’s everything.”

Alright then. Alright.

Sunset is fast approaching in Prague.

Rodney has an unobstructed view of the way the sky is beginning to catch alight through the window from where he’s sitting on Radek’s couch. He supposes he shouldn’t call it that anymore: as of a week ago, it can officially be considered  their  couch, in  their  living room, right down from the hall that the room which is no longer the guest room but is instead Rodney’s bedroom. None of that has really sunk in, though. This still feels like a holiday, a temporary breathing space, like in a few days he’ll be back in his apartment in Ontario, alone. Again.

It’s hard to get too carried away in that notion when reminders that he’s now sharing a living space with another person are constantly being thrown his way. Radek, Rodney remembers from the last time he’d stayed here, is not the quietest roommate. He talks aloud to himself while reading or watching the news, and he likes putting on music and half singing-half mumbling along as he goes about his day. Rodney’s a little surprised by how much it doesn’t bother him; he’s spent the last twenty-five years in relative silence, but the constant background noise reminds him fondly of their time on Atlantis, where the city lived and breathed an inescapable tumult of inexhaustible life. 

This time around, it’s the sound of rattling drawers and muttered Czech curse words that startle Rodney out of his reverie. Radek has been combing the house for his lighter. A few seconds later, he emerges from the yellowed light of the kitchen, prize clutched in one hand and the other hand holding a candle. He takes a seat on the far end of the couch, setting the candle on the coffee table and fiddling pitifully with the lighter. After the fifth failed attempt to produce a flame, Rodney holds out his hand with an impatient wiggle of his fingers, but Radek shakes his head.

“No, please,” he says and carries on fumbling. He doesn’t usually refuse Rodney’s help with these sorts of things - the last few days, he’s actually made a habit of handing Rodney stubborn jars to open and cuff buttons to undo. Maybe this is a special candle. Rodney doesn’t know the rules for these sorts of things.

After approximately six more times, Radek finally manages to produce a tongue of fire, and he shakily lights the candle in the centre of the coffee table. Rodney takes a cursory glance around the living room to make sure that Newton isn’t about to leap up and set her tail on fire, but she’s safe on the other side of the room, curled up at the top of her cat tower, watching the flickering flame with wide, unblinking eyes.

“What’s this one?” Rodney asks. There had been candles at the Passover dinner Radek had held on Atlantis, and Rodney remembered him lighting candles on Shabbat when he’d first come to stay with him. It seems to be a whole thing. 

“Yahrzeit candle,” Radek explains. The light of the candle bounces off his glasses and throws the rest of his face into a flickering shadow. “We light them before Yom Kippur. Is to remember the dead.”

“Oh.” Rodney looks at the little flame. With all the death between them, it seems like an awfully big ask for one candle.  

Radek has fallen into a deep silence, eyes slipping closed as the shadows dip and curve around the lines of his face. Rodney feels like he’s walked in on something intimately private, something that isn’t meant for his eyes. As silently as he can with the creaking of his old bones, he gets up from the couch and slips out of the room, leaving Radek to his thoughts.

Rodney ends up in his room. It still looks largely the same as when it had been a guest room. The only things that Rodney has bothered to add so far are his clothes in the wardrobe and his PhDs on the wall; he doesn’t have much to unpack, all things considered, but even his paltry amount is too much of a chore right now, between adjusting to his new living situation and preparing for his new job. Most of it is still in cardboard boxes scattered around the room. He bumps one box in particular as he shuffles through the mess to sit on his bed, and Rodney feels his heart jerk a little in his chest as he glances down and recognises it from his old bedroom.

Remembering the dead, huh? Rodney has his own rituals for that. 

Slowly, carefully, he bends down to pick up the box, setting it down on his lap. He marvels at the weight; there’s really not that much in there, but it demands his focus all the same. Rodney takes a deep breath and pulls back the opening flaps.

John’s leather jacket is folded neatly at the bottom, with various other items resting on top or tucked into its folds. Rodney pulls them out one by one. The necklace that he’d bought Jen when they first returned to Earth, with a stone that ended up not matching her eyes at all but she insisted on wearing every day anyway. A thumb-sized stone carving of a hawk-looking Pegasus creature that he’d filched from Elizabeth’s desk as they were packing up her stuff. A braided leather bracelet of Ronon’s that he’d found in his own quarters a few days after Ronon died - Rodney still isn’t sure how it had ended up there. A tiny brown pouch of tea leaves that, on the rare occasions that he let himself smell it, always reminded him of the brews that Teyla would make each morning. The photo of himself and Carson that he’d found while cleaning out Carson’s quarters after his first death.

Rodney doesn’t go through this stuff often. In a lot of ways, it feels like a rather macabre collection. But he’s never been able to bring himself to get rid of any of it, and he doesn’t think that’s likely to change.

He finally reaches the jacket. The worn, supple leather flexes underneath his hands and Rodney runs his fingers up the arms, along the seams, down the front. Rodney closes his eyes, letting his fingers remember the soft grain of the fabric for him. He crosses the jagged line of the zipper - and then pauses as his fingers catch on something, a slight firmness hidden underneath the leather, where the inside pocket would be. 

Rodney takes a deep breath, opens his eyes, and slips his hand inside to pull out Carson’s letter.

The paper of the envelope is as white as it was the day it arrived in Rodney’s mailbox, thanks to it being promptly hidden away and left that way for twenty-six years now. Rodney turns it over in his hands, fixing his eyes on the initials scrawled on the back: From CB to RM, in Radek’s handwriting. When he’d first seen them, the handwriting had made Rodney feel sick with rage. Now, it just leaves an ache in his chest.

Fingers moving slowly, giving himself an out to change his mind every half-second, Rodney gingerly tears open the envelope. There’s one page inside, folded neatly, covered in that same chicken scratch. As soon as Rodney’s eyes land on the Dear Rodney at the top, he flattens the letter back against his lap, heart hammering in his throat. He gives himself fifteen seconds’ respite before forcing himself to pick it back up again and begin reading.

Dear Rodney,

There's an awful lot to say, but I'll try to keep this short. I'm very tired, and besides, I know how much you hate it when I get all sentamental. 

Rodney can’t help but smile as he reads that. Oh, now he’s sure that Radek had written this - Carson had been such a stickler for spelling, and Radek’s has always been atrocious.

If I know you as well as I think I do, then I know you'll be hurting something awful right now. I think that’s why you aren’t here. After everything you’ve been through, I can’t blame you for that.  I'm sorry I won't be there to help you the way you'v helped me. This wasn’t an easy desision, but I haven’t had choises for a long time now and it's one that I have to make. You don't deserve any of this, but I suppose all of this has proven that not many of us get what we deserve in the end. I also know you'll be blaming yourself for all of this. You'v already done more for me than I could have ever asked for, but I'l ask you for another thing anyway. Please forgive yourself. Most of us aren't here to knock some sense back into you, so you'll have to do it yourself. I’m counting on you to try. It might seem impossible, but aren’t you the one always saying that impossibility is reletive?

Of course, I also know you never lissen to me, but it was worth a go.

Blinking fast and hard, Rodney breathes out sharply through his nose. Alright, that feels well deserved.

I can't say that I don't have any regrets, but being able to see you again for even a short time isn't one of them, no matter that it’s ending like this. I'm going knowing that you, Radek, and Evan are alright. All things consided, that's enough for me.

One last thing. Evan tells me you and Radek have had a falling out, and judging by the look on Radek’s face as he writes this, it was a shocker. I know how stuborn you both are, but whatever happened, it can’t be more important than each other, espesally not now. Please try to sort things out - if not for your own sake, then for mine. I’m dying, after all, so you have to do what I say. I think that's fair enough.

If I was talking to you right now, I know you would be rolling your eyes and trying to run away as I say this, but I really do love you, you great bloody maniac.

Thank you for everything.

-Carson

Rodney finds himself laying back on his bed, staring up at the blurry ceiling without really seeing at all as he presses the letter against his chest. He can see it in his mind: Carson looking small and pale in his infirmary bed, forcing out these words in between catching breaths for Radek to copy down, hoping that Rodney would take it to heart. Dying, hoping that Rodney would be okay without him.

All this time, Rodney had assumed Carson had died thinking that Rodney was angry with him - or worse, that he didn’t even care. He’s never been sorry for The Work, not ever, but that belief is something Rodney has never known how not to be sorry for. The realisation of how wrong he’s been for that belief feels fairly unearned though, considering the fact that he’s been letting Carson down in every other way for the last quarter of a century. 

Rodney tilts his head to the side, staring out into the hallway that he knows leads to Radek. Hopefully, Carson can settle for better late than never.

Slowly, Rodney heaves himself up, cradling Carson’s letter protectively as his eyes run over the words one last time. Then, tucking the page back into the envelope and smoothing it shut, he stands up and drifts back through the dark into the living room.

Radek looks up when he re-enters, questions in his eyes. They only grow more probing when Rodney sits back down next to him on the couch and reaches for the shallow bowl that Radek had pushed to the edge of the coffee table to make ample room for the candle. It’s low-rimmed and made of a pale stone; Radek keeps his keys in there, loose change, other knick knacks that he’s accumulated. Rodney tips all of that out onto the couch cushion next to him, ignoring Radek’s noise of bafflement.

When Rodney pulls the letter out of his pocket, Radek half-flinches. His eyes track Rodney’s gaze, from the creamy front of the envelope to the tiny glowing flame. The candle is still going strong. In a strange way, it reminds Rodney of Ronon: steady, enduring, warm. 

Rodney holds out the letter and lets the flame of the Yahrzeit candle lick at the corner.

“Rodney!” Radek cries out, though his voice feels muted in the darkened room like a fire put out with no oxygen. 

Calmly, Rodney drops the burning letter into the bowl and watches the edges begin to blacken and curl. “It’s a Satedan ritual,” he explains. He closes his eyes and he sees Ronon sitting in Teyla’s room after her funeral, watching her whittled carving burn. He sees himself crouched in Ronon’s quarters after they’d lost him, doing the same. Thin grey smoke, rising into the air and fading away into nothing. “You burn something of a person’s and it … lets the pain go.”

This letter was from Carson. It was written by Radek. It belonged to Rodney. He isn’t sure which one of them he’s freeing right now.

The flames are hungry, and they spread across the paper in no time at all. Rodney wonders, belatedly, if hijacking a Yahrzeit candle for another mourning ritual is considered disrespectful, but Radek hasn’t protested since Rodney’s explanation, just watched with large, thoughtful eyes as their twin fires burn. 

Soon, the envelope is nothing but loose ash at the bottom of the bowl. There’s still a solid weight in Rodney’s chest though, as if the box in his bedroom is pressing down on top of him. He glances sidelong at Radek and feels, at once, embarrassed.

A long breath escapes him. “I don’t get how Ronon did it,” he admits shakily. “I - I don’t feel like I’ve let him go. Any of them. I don’t think I can.”

There’s a rustle of fabric on fabric as Radek shifts imperceptibly closer to him on the couch. “Maybe … maybe is about what we use to hurt ourselves, you know?” he says, and his voice is so small. “Letting go of that, or else that is the only way we can think about them. Is not about letting go of them.” His hair is pooling across the front of his face as he bows his head. “I will never stop missing them. And I will never stop being sorry. When the love is still there, I think, is not possible.”

Rodney squeezes his eyes closed. There’s pressure building behind his sockets, clenching at his throat. The love - that’ll never go away. Rodney knows that with a surety he doesn’t reserve for anything else in the universe. He feels sentimental, a stranger to himself, upside down and inside out, but he’s never been able to deny an objective truth. The love will stay.

Behind closed eyes, all he can see is John. The love will stay.

He opens his eyes again and lets the flame of the Yahrzeit candle dance across his field of vision. “I loved him,” he says, barely recognising his own voice. These are words he never thought he’d hear himself say. “John. I loved him.”

Unable to help himself, he turns his head to meet Radek’s gaze. The blue eyes staring back at him are wide and liquid. “I know,” Radek says gently.

Rodney swallows. It’s like the words have a life of their own. They have roots in his throat and they’re growing out of his mouth, unfurling their leaves in full bloom. “No, I mean … I was - I am … in love with him.”

Slowly, Radek nods. “I know, Rodney,” he whispers, and drags his chin down towards his chest. “Odpusť mi. I know.” 

He touches his face. When his hand comes away, Rodney sees that his cheeks are wet. The sight of it sets off a quiet snap deep in Rodney’s body, and his own eyes blur over. The tears that begin to pour down his face don’t announce themselves, but they don’t make themselves scarce when he tells them to either. Rodney hasn’t felt like this in the entire time since they’d lost John. He’d cried, of course. Sometimes, he’d cried so much that he'd felt sure in the moment that he’d damaged something. But even during his worst breakdowns, he’d been aware of a certain restraint: he could take a few minutes, or a few hours, or even a night, but eventually, he would always have to pull himself back together, because there was always a job to do. There’s nothing waiting on him now though, nothing to stopper up the tears or the shuddering sobs clawing their way out of his throat. They just come and come and come, like they won’t end until he’s all emptied out. Rodney thinks he has a lot of emptying to do.

He can’t see much of anything with his watery vision, but he can feel it when Radek shuffles closer again, when he rests his fragile hand on the back of Rodney’s neck. A small sound escapes Rodney’s throat, one that he hadn’t known he was capable of making, and then he’s reaching out, searching for the warmth of Radek beside him. His own hand finds the side of Radek’s head, downy, thinning hair parting beneath his fingertips, and all of a sudden Radek’s face is pressed against his shoulder, Rodney’s nose connecting with his temple as they collapse into each other. Radek’s glasses dig uncomfortably into Rodney’s neck, and he’s sure his grip on Radek’s hair is far too tight, but Radek doesn’t seem to care, and Rodney doesn’t either. They’re both gasping for air now, shaking violently under the weight of a shared grief that has been amputated for far too long. They don’t let go.

And Rodney can’t place what it is, exactly, but as they search for and find each other like that, again and again every second, something in his chest begins to feel lighter, like smoke drizzling away into the empty air.

Chapter Text

About five or so nights before the beginning of the end, John rocked up to Rodney’s lab with a can of beer in each hand. He’d probably started the intrusion in typical John fashion, leaning against the doorway with a nonchalant expression, pretending like he didn’t know how suave he looked as he waited for Rodney to notice him. 

Rodney assumed this, because he didn’t see any of it: his head was buried in his computer, adjusting the new filtration system he’d devised for their Gate database. He’d cross-referenced planets they knew to be abandoned with ones that had rumours of Hybrid activity attached to them, as well as any that had the kind of infrastructure Michael might be seeking out to house his ‘experiments,’ all in the hope that it would narrow down their search for where he might be hiding out. It had struck out a lot of addresses but qualified just as many, and Rodney was combing through them for the nth time that night, hoping that this time, one might jump out at him. 

After however many hours of mercilessly subjecting his retinas to the glaring light of his screen, Rodney didn’t think he was even capable of seeing anything else; if he looked up, all he’d be able to make out would be floating Gate addresses dancing in white across the room. Obviously, John must have figured that out, because the way Rodney was actually alerted to his presence was through the thunderous thunk of a can on the desk beside his left hand. Rodney nearly fell out of his chair.

“Hmm?” He blearily made out the name emblazoned on the can. It was sitting right next to the empty tray of food that Radek had left for him three hours ago and which Rodney had inhaled in under ten minutes without taking his eyes off his work. Alcohol seemed like an odd choice - Rodney had been sustaining himself on coffee with demonstrable success - but he’d consider chugging gasoline at this point. “Oh. Thanks,” he said distractedly, feeling across the desk to grab it while already returning his aching gaze to the screen - but fingers that should have been wrapping around that sweet, sweet elixir were instead grasping at thin air.

“Ah - ah,” John said in a tone you’d typically reserve for a naughty dog as he dragged the can out of reach. Rodney finally looked up at him properly, letting out a tiny noise of betrayal. “Not here. C’mon, we’re going to the pier.”

Rodney made a grab for the beer anyway, and John stepped lithely out of reach. “In case it’s flown over your spiky head, I’m working,” he said, gesturing needlessly at the laptop. “I’m looking for places where Michael might be keeping Teyla. It’s not the kind of thing that lends itself to a Happy Hour break.”

“Zelenka says you’ve been going over the same addresses for the last hour,” John countered, and Rodney scowled. That little snitch. “C’mon, McKay, that genius brain of yours needs sleep to function.”

“And alcohol, apparently,” Rodney replied flatly, and John wiggled the cans enticingly, letting the liquid slosh around inside. John calling him a genius to his face didn’t spark so much as an ember of smug triumph, or, indeed, love-sick giddiness. Maybe he was burnt out. With a deliberately put-upon sigh, Rodney powered down his laptop. “Fine.”

Rodney had no desire to enjoy the sights of the city’s piers, or throw back a beer, or, really, do anything remotely relaxing. That was the backdoor that his mind used to let in thoughts that he really didn’t want to deal with: thoughts like what Michael could be doing with Teyla right now, and what they’d do if they didn’t get her back. The only reason he agreed was because a stressed-out and guilt-ridden John Sheppard took to rumination just as well, and it was safer to indulge him than to let him marinate in that Pandora’s Box of a mind alone. It didn’t occur to Rodney until months later that John was probably as enthused about the idea of kicking it on the pier as he was, and he’d been doing it solely for Rodney’s sake as well.

It was an unusually warm night, so they didn’t bother rugging up before heading for the East Pier. Sitting down at a spot furthest from the city proper, Rodney dangled his legs off the edge and swung them experimentally in the sea-bitten air as John finally allowed him his beer. Just one each tonight. They couldn’t afford to get drunk, after all, never mind that Rodney could really, really use some good old-fashioned black-out inebriation right about now. 

They drank in silence for a few minutes. John didn’t try to fill the quiet with military-grade assurances that they’d be getting Teyla back, that it was only a matter of time. Rodney was grateful. They’d thrown that conversational ball back and forth countless times already and the words were beginning to ring hollow and meaningless in Rodney’s ears, especially when day after day went by and amounted to absolutely nothing. They wouldn’t mean anything until he saw her step back through the Gate into Atlantis. 

Beside him, John straightened out of his slouch, narrowing his eyes out into the inky dark of the ocean horizon. Rodney startled slightly at the sudden movement - he was primed for danger at the best of times, and the last few weeks hadn’t exactly done wonders for his temperament - but there was no alarm darkening John’s features. Instead, there was the telltale hint of a smile.

“Hey,” he said under his breath and pointed out into the distance. “Check it out.”

Rodney obligingly followed the line of John’s finger, squinting at the expanse of gently rippling water. For a few seconds he saw nothing, and was about to turn back to John and make some kind of comment about the beer getting to his head already and Atlantis turning him into a lightweight - but then there was a flash of green that made Rodney’s eyes go wide, and then another, and another.

“Oh,” he said, a little breathlessly, as about three dozen flitting bodies burst out of the water in tandem, their glowing green forms turning the ocean beneath them into a veritable fireworks display. Rodney had heard the biologists discussing this particular marine specimen before: they were structured similarly to jellyfish, with two metre-long tentacles that ribboned out from behind their fat little heads as they swam. But what made them really interesting, from what he’d been told, were the gelatinous flaps on either side of their bodies that could extend out into a wing-like situation, allowing them to propel themselves out of the water and glide over the surface in short bursts. That, combined with their natural bioluminescence, meant that they could put on quite a show. Rodney had never spared them much thought, aside from brief horror at the concept of flying jellyfish. But now that he was seeing them in person - well, maybe there was something to be said for them after all.

The spectacle continued for quite a few minutes. John seemed utterly transfixed. He was always a fan of the “freaky alien” side of exploring another galaxy, particularly when the alien beings in question didn’t have him on the menu. “We should take a Jumper out there one night,” he said, quietly giddy like a kid planning all the adventures he was going to take on his new dirtbike. “See ‘em up close.”

“You’d scare them off.”

“Nah, not with the cloak on. They wouldn’t even know we were there.”

They lapsed back into silence. John kept his eyes on the jellyfish, but Rodney found his gaze being drawn back, again and again, to the profile of John’s face, the slope of his long nose, the way his eyebrows were unconsciously bobbing up and down with every leap of the school. These days, that look of honest-to-god, unguarded contentment in John’s eyes, no matter how fleeting, was a million times more captivating than any alien wonder. Rodney felt that he could study it for hours, days, the rest of his life.

Looking at John like this was barely a conscious choice for Rodney; these days it was more of an inevitability. The most he could do was make sure to keep it surreptitious. What with how engrossed John was right now, utterly lost in the moment in a way that Rodney hadn’t seen since Teyla had been taken, it wasn’t very hard.

When Rodney thought about John, after - after, this tended to be the first memory that swam up into his consciousness. It wasn’t the last time he and John had seen or spoken to each other, obviously. It wasn’t even the last time the two of them had been alone together. In the days that followed, leading up to that last fateful trip through the Stargate, they’d had meals together, attended tense tactical meetings together, gone on fruitless recon missions together. All of it had been a formless blur of stress and sleep deprivation that Rodney couldn’t pull apart in his memory afterwards no matter how hard he tried - and he did try. 

For years afterwards, Rodney tried to fill in the blanks of their last day together. They would have had breakfast together, he was sure, and John would have laid out the details of the planet he and some of his other Marines were going to check out that day. Rodney strained to remember the last words he would have said to John. It was probably something inane, throwaway, forgettable. Maybe they’d agreed to grab lunch together once John got back. Had Rodney wished him luck? For the life of him, he could never remember. Ever since that day, Rodney had been trying to forgive himself for that.

Nearly thirty years later, under clear Prague skies, Rodney thinks he might be close.

Chapter Text

The sombre twinkling of piano notes lilts through the living room. They seem almost to swell to fill all the empty spaces, steady and deliberate as a heartbeat. Slowly, they begin to quicken, building up a shivering intensity as they climb and swirl around each other -

Clang.

“Oh, fuck off and die.”

Rodney rears back from where he’s hunched over the piano, scowling as he flexes his fingers. He’d been so sure he’d had it this time. He’d sailed through the first half of the song, barely even having to glance at the sheet music. It’s the last leg that keeps tripping him up. He doesn’t even have the satisfaction of blaming poor craftsmanship; the piano had, admittedly, been a bit of a splurge. Definitely the most expensive thing he’s bought in years. But hey, he has the money to spare, and Radek had been just as enthusiastic. 

Not even the growing evidence of the fact that Rodney’s prodigious pre-pubescent talent has apparently not weathered the decades has put him off. “Now who is the decrepit old man?” he says delightedly when Rodney stumbles over a key change, but always seems content to sit and listen while Rodney is plinking away, and afterwards he’ll wordlessly bring over a heat pack for Rodney’s aching fingers. 

“You are too ambitious for your own good,” he’ll say as well. “Start with something easier.” That advice has ensured that Rodney will persevere with his favoured complex pieces for as long as his fingers can play out of sheer stubbornness. Of course, by now Rodney can recognise Radek’s comments as one of his little reverse-psychology mind tricks, carefully constructed in order to goad Rodney into not giving up. So, ultimately, they’re both getting what they want.

Still, Rodney can’t quite resist the lure of the back-and-forth. “Don’t say a word,” he calls.

When he gets no response, he twists his head around to see that the living room is empty. How long has he been playing to an audience of zero? He checks his watch. Oh, of course, Radek will be out in the courtyard by now. Freezing his ass off, no doubt, thanks to the cold snap that blew in this morning, overpowering even the spring sun.

He’d been debating whether or not he should give Liszt another crack or give himself a break, but that realisation has made the decision for him: the both of them are surely in dire need of a coffee. 

Groaning and stretching as he pushes up from the piano bench, Rodney scoops up his sheet music, shuffling it into a semi-neat pile and meandering over to the bookshelf to slide it into its waiting folder. He’s come into a new appreciation of neatness too. There’s something incredibly appealing about having control over one’s surroundings now that they’re no longer being ruled by more pressing commitments. It’s a habit that Radek isn’t quite as enthused by, but considering it’s taken a good deal of the cleaning chores off his hands, he doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on.

Slipping the pages for Lento Placido into their folder and placing it back where it belongs on the shelf, Rodney lets his eyes drift upward on a predictable path, up to where a photo frame sits on the third shelf.

Staring back at him, unassuming in their position beside a stack of books and another photo of a clutch of pigeon squabs, are the faces of Teyla, Ronon, Elizabeth, John, Carson, and a younger Rodney. Ronon’s birthday party, circa 2005.

Rodney would be telling a bald-faced lie if he said that he never thinks about The Work. it’s always there - lingering feels too ominous of a word. It’s present, but in softer undertones. How could it not be? Rodney will never stop wondering, because the truth is that he’ll never know with complete certainty that his plan worked. There are a million variables that can go wrong, and in every way possible they are out of Rodney’s hands. 

So he wonders. He gives himself five minutes a day. In that time, he lets himself imagine how things might be different in the timeline that may be. He wonders what kind of mother Teyla would have been, and how Ronon would look with crow's feet and grey in his hair. He debates whether Sam would have bitten the bullet and finally married General O’Neill. He lets himself imagine Carson, out of stasis and healthy and happy. He imagines Jen happy too - sometimes with him, sometimes without him, but always happy. He imagines John, soaring over the Lantean ocean in a cloaked Jumper under darkening skies, alien wonder reflecting in his eyes. In Rodney’s mind, every time, John turns to him and smiles.

Rodney gets five minutes, but the rest of the time he gets life. And right now, he has coffee waiting in the kitchen and Radek waiting outside.

He adjusts the folder of sheet music so that it’s slid in all the way and heads to the kitchen, where the coffee maker is keeping the brew from that morning nice and warm. Pulling two mugs out of the cupboard above the counter, Rodney begins the near-spiritual ritual of preparing the perfect cup: straight black for him, a splash of milk for Radek. When he puts the carton back into the fridge, a note stuck to the front flutters off, and Rodney lets out a curse. He’s not quite old enough to make bending over to pick things up an ordeal yet, but he’s certainly old enough to complain about it. He sticks the note back where it was, giving it a cursory look over: it’s the passive-aggressive reminder he’d written for himself to pick up the bourbon Lorne likes and the meatless sausages that Jeannie and Kaleb can eat in time for next weekend; none of which he’s done yet. Radek would be nigh unbearable about it, Rodney suspects, if it isn’t for the fact that he was the one who’d forgotten to buy the literal entire roast they’d been planning to serve last year, and the knowledge that Rodney will hold it over his head for eternity if he decides to be a little shit about Rodney’s shopping list now.

There’s a spare pen on the counter, and Rodney uses it to add another emphatic line under the “MUST BUY BEFORE APRIL 5” portion of the note. That should do the trick.

The rhythmic rumble of purring from over by the window draws Rodney’s attention back to the present. Newton is perched on the windowsill, utterly transfixed by the outside view - and Rodney has a feeling it isn’t Radek’s pottering around that has her so interested. Those damn birds must thank their lucky stars every day that Newton is an indoor cat.

Rodney picks up each mug, walking slowly to avoid spilling scalding liquid all over his hands, and makes his way over to the sliding door leading out to the courtyard. Newton, perched on the windowsill, doesn’t stir as Rodney approaches her, only twitching slightly and giving a sluggish turn of her head when he makes a “psspsspsspss” sound in her direction. Rodney has had his suspicions about her going deaf for a while now, and this only strengthens them. It strikes a twinge of worry in his chest - but, to be fair, his cat is also engrossed in the all-encompassing task of staring at the pigeons right now, so maybe she just has more pressing things on her mind that paying attention to him.

She seems to prove Rodney’s point by stretching her jaw open and licking her lips while very egregiously flashing her teeth. Rodney snorts. “I admire your perseverance,” he tells her solemnly. “But a deal’s a deal.”

Newton isn’t molified by that, and she returns to her vigil. Rodney follows her gaze, picking out Radek’s shabby silhouette as he shuffles around the aviary and carefully tracking his every move. Last November, Radek had been going out to feed the birds when he slipped on the thin sheen of frost that had built up on the flagstones. Miraculously, it had only cost him a bruised hip and a bruised ego, but that hadn’t stopped Rodney from yelling at him all the way to the hospital about how his shoes clearly don’t have a good enough grip, and what if it had been worse, and what if Rodney hadn’t been there? Ever since then - during the winter months at least - Rodney accompanies him for the daily feedings. Spring has been warming their backs for a good month now, so Rodney isn’t so fretful about it, but it doesn’t hurt to keep a close eye on things.

Inside the aviary, Radek glances up towards the window and raises a hand when he sees Rodney. In response, Rodney raises a mug of coffee, and Radek’s face splits into a massive smile. Nudging the sliding door open with his hip, Rodney makes his way outside and over to the open door of the aviary. Rodney is far less dubious of the pigeons than he’d been the first time he’d met them, but he draws a line at drinking beverages in the same place that they shit. Thankfully, Radek takes the hint and steps outside to claim his coffee.

“Jak je Liszt?” Radek asks, cupping both hands around his mug and sighing appreciatively. 

Rodney rolls his eyes. His Czech has been passable for a while now, but Radek still delights in testing him. “Ach, vynikající, pokud máte rádi …” He wiggles his fingers, racking his brain for a moment and then accepting defeat. “Carpal tunnel.”

Radek smiles knowingly into his cup. Rodney glances behind him at the aviary and its open door. “Any sign yet?” he asks with a touch of apprehension. Radek had let the newest batch of weaned youngsters out for their first loft-fly a few hours ago, and so far none of them have made a reappearance. 

Radek shakes his head. “Is normal,” he reassures Rodney. “They get first taste of freedom and they go wild. They will be back soon.”

Rodney nods tensely. Radek has been offering the same reassurances all day, and Rodney has no reason not to believe him. The thing is though, Dostoyevski - Rodney’s secret favourite - is one of the birds who’d gone out today.

He takes a bracing sip of coffee - but before he can even finish his sip, Radek is tapping his shoulder excitedly, lifting his hand to point at the sky.

“What did I tell you?” Radek says happily.

Rodney looks up and is met with the sight of three dark blobs, then four, then five, flapping against the twilight sky. The blobs become shapes, and then they become shadows, and then they become birds, cruising contentedly along. From this distance, Rodney can make out the patterning on the pigeon leading the pack: a fierce pink wrapping around its throat, standing out against the rest of the charcoal grey feathers. It’s Dostoyevsky, Rodney notes, and he can’t deny the swell of pride.

The pigeons are coming in fast now, and Rodney can hear their coos - Rodney doesn’t speak pigeon like Radek does; he doesn’t know if they’re coos of excitement, or boastfulness, or if they’re just saying hello, but whatever it is, they’re making one hell of a ruckus. Radek nudges him, and they both shuffle back from the door to the aviary, leaving plenty of flight space. 

The two of them stand together, savouring the warmth leaching from their coffees and each other, and watch the steadfast flapping of wings as the pigeons find their way home.