East Coast Gazette

Someone once said that I give great Psycho Boyfriend McKay (ironically, in regard to a story that is technically gen), but in another tick for the “…so pretty much like the actual show, then” column, is this picture that Dogeared posted:

And really guys? I think that all this indicates is that I’m not doing anything — Rodney McKay’s Psycho Boyfriend instincts are a living breathing entity — manifesting even in this seemingly innocuous photograph of David Hewlett and Joe Flanigan, where Hewlett. Where Hewlett, probably without even understanding why, is giving the “DON’T YOU TOUCH MY MAN, I WILL CUT YOU — DO YOU HEAR ME? I WILL CUT. YOU,” look to the masses while John does his abashed smile. It’s amazing — I’m fanning myself with my girly hands going full-force, ya’ll.

And also:

Shift, pt 3/?

*

John recognizes that being freaked out by Safeway is a bad sign. But he also recognizes that after years of trying to figure out new and non-nauseating ways to cook tava beans, it’s not his fault that he’s frozen, wordless and kind of horrified in the produce aisle. He has a hand at his ear in a heartbeat, the other fisted tight around the handles of the grocery basket, but he’s not wearing a radio and he’s purposefully left his cell phone in his car.

This is, John thinks weirdly, with people walking all around him, the most alone he’s been in a very long time.

He ends up buying milk and eggs and bacon and things, stuff he recalls by sheer memory. John is already through the checkout line with expensive coffee and amaretto creamer before he remembers the only person he knows who drinks coffee with froufy half-and-half is McKay—who calls him halfway through the drive home, after John and thrown the creamer away in a garbage bin outside the grocery store, feeling stupid and useless and reasonlessly hurt.

“You just can’t lay off the evil aliens, can you?” Rodney snaps.

Sheppard puts the phone between his shoulder and his ear and drags the car across two freeway lanes. “I missed you, too, McKay,” he says.

“Colonel,” Rodney says, annoyed and sort of high-pitched, “you’d think that once you were out of the targets of the vampire catfish from Pegasus, you’d learn to steer clear of other alien civilizations suffering a serious psychotic break.”

John smiles at that: this is how McKay cares. It’s sweet, in a psychotic sort of way, and John wondered what Rodney would say about his new apartment, and if he would bite his tongue or blow up completely in true McKay style.

The SGC relocation specialist had given John a thick packet with apartment rental information and a few poorly-written guides, and John had selected one at random. It was easy-access to the freeway and near enough to the mountain for emergency late night calls, and the parking lot was lined with laurel trees, their enormous, waxy-green leaves shading the row after row of SUVs. It was a box, with beige carpet and beige walls, a tiny, poured-cement patio and a view of the swimming pool, where half of Colorado College’s sorority population apparently camped 24 hours a day—their mostly-naked silhouettes backed by the looming spires of an Evangelical megachurch.

“Hey, they found us,” he says honestly. “They matched our somewhat bland descriptions with those of some rumors apparently floating around those parts of Taur’i interested in finding information about the Orii and bought us a round and offered to trade secrets.”

John figures it’s probably prudent not to mention that he’d suggested the drinking to stave off the pain of not being able to acquire Bambus as a pet, which had eventually lead to drunken admissions—a diplomatic method of which Rodney has been disapproving since it’d resulted in audio files of him singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” on the Atlantis intranet.

“Oh, and what did they want for them? A pound of flesh?”

“Actually,” John says with relish, “they wanted the botanist.”

There’s a long silence on the other end of the line, and John imagines the sheer disgust on Rodney’s face. “You’re kidding,” Rodney says finally.

“Apparently,” John goes on, laughing and trying to remember H’Rong’s drunken rambling, “he is considered a great beauty on that planet and would have sold for a high price at any of the many flourishing slave markets to a family that would treat him well and adorn him with only the finest sterling jewelry and piercing. I’ve never seen anybody duck behind me that quick before.”

“Not even me?” Rodney asks.

John thinks about Rodney: the weight of his hand on John’s shoulder, along the back of his arm until Rodney’s fingers curled around John’s elbow—thinks about Bambus’ skinny fingers digging into his shoulder, his tac vest.

“You’re not as big a coward as you like to think, McKay,” John tells him.

John doesn’t know the words for what he wants to say, and what he used to be able to translate into a look or a half-hearted punch, sending Rodney chainmail and spam at four in the morning doesn’t work in syllables and consonants. So he just juggles his cell phone and house key, fumbles at the doorknob instead.

“Yes, well,” Rodney says, annoyed. “Hey, where are you living now?”

John tosses the keys on the kitchen counter, watches them slide off and clatter to the floor, and sighs as he sets down the grocery bags and pulls open the freezer door, stuffing chicken fingers and Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese inside. He remembers being an adult once upon a time, with a shopping list and regular bills, doctor’s appointments and credit cards, and now he can barely wrap his mind around having to buy and put away food. Everything is harder than he remembers, like functioning in a haze of Novocain—full body detachment and numb, nerveless fingers.

“Apartment out in Colorado Springs,” John tells Rodney, sighing, because he can imagine Rodney firing up Google Maps already, getting a satellite image of John’s building, checking for structural damage. “There’s an evangelical church in my backyard.”

“What?” Rodney says, horrified. “No.”

“What yes,” John says. “The worst part is the singing.”

John stares at a head of broccoli and wonders if it goes into the crisper—and then he wonders what the hell he’s going to do with broccoli and why he has it. They were selling three heads for a dollar at the store, and John tore off a produce bag and slipped three heads in, green and nubby florets squeaking under his fingertips. It’s weird what he knows and doesn’t, how he can recognize a good vegetable sale when he sees one and spent the morning staring helplessly at an automatic sink.

He sticks the broccoli in the fresher.

“It wakes me up every weekend,” he adds.

“You’ve been there two weekends,” Rodney reminds him.

John leaves the bacon out on the counter, since he can’t think of anything else he wants to eat tonight and he doesn’t even have fliers for pizza places yet.

“It stands to reason,” John tells Rodney, digging two eggs out of the carton before putting them in the fridge on the second shelf, “that those inspired by Jesus to celebrate the Sabbath day with song will continue to celebrate the Sabbath day with really loud song.”

They sing hymns John remembers from Sunday mornings as a kid and hymns they played at Cadet Chapel early mornings, when the sun fractured off of its geometric corners and soaring architecture, broken like fragments of glass. John doesn’t actually mind the hymns—they fill up the empty rooms of the apartment with voices, and even if John doesn’t believe, he loves that they sing.

“What do they sing?” Rodney asks. “Low country spirituals?”

Rodney spent all his time in Colorado either in Boulder or at the mountain, and John can’t help but think that Rodney’s understanding of geography belies his claims of being a genius. One day, he’s going to show McKay a map of the U.S. and explain what the Mason-Dixon line is, and in which situations stereotypes are allowable.

“Don’t jinx it, Rodney,” he warns, and he can’t help but smile, because it’s Rodney and this entire conversation is as ridiculous as any they ever had hiking through the back forty of an unknown planet. Even if space and time and matter can’t seem to stay constant in the context of the Stargate program, it’s nice to know that Rodney—as a collection of these things—can. John can navigate by it. “It’s mostly been hymns but now they’re going to start.”

There’s a long pause before Rodney snaps, “Do you even have furniture?”

John thinks about telling Rodney that in his move-in package, they’d included a catalog for IKEA, and a friendly reminder that the SGC had arranged for a generous twenty percent off discount for employees—but Rodney sounds like the kind of angry he’d sounded the last time somebody broke one of John’s fingers, and even John knows better than to joke in the face of Rodney’s protective instincts.

“I have a chair,” he finally says. “I have to go buy a couch tomorrow,” he lies.

He’s got a sleeping bag and a guitar and a job he hates and with all the music pouring through his back windows like sun across his beige carpet, there doesn’t seem to be much room for anything else in his life. John can’t believe that he ever played den mother to a scientific expedition in another galaxy: he can’t handle groceries, he can’t handle highways. At some point, he’s going to have to get an oil change and new tires and worry about making doctors’ appointments, and the enormity of all the things he needs to do now closes his throat up, and he wonders if this sour sharp panic is what lemons taste like on Rodney’s tongue.

Horrified, Rodney demands, “You don’t have a couch? What have you been sitting on?”

“Well, I’ve been doing a lot of standing,” John says, jamming six Lean Cuisines into the freezer. “And I said I had a chair.”

“God,” Rodney huffs, and John can just imagine his red-faced annoyance here, “prison chic.”

John’s hand freezes on the handle of the refrigerator and he stares out the window over his sink.

“Well,” he manages, scraping it out of his throat, “if the shoe fits.”

Rodney’s quiet on the other end, so John just makes himself say, “I’ve got to go. I think I forgot to buy milk at the grocery store,” before he hangs up.

There’s a vanity line of trees out back before the soaring, post-modern spires of the megachurch interrupt the blue sky and clouds, block out the sound of distant traffic with the praising of Jesus, and all through the day and night there’s always some music, some noise, some reaching for heaven and stars and something more.

He thinks that in a weird way he understands Evangelism, the need to tell everybody about Christ and streets paved with gold, to bring everybody there with you—because he wants to tell everybody about Atlantis and a city that rolls beneath your fingers, purrs like a cat under your palm. But John’s no saint, and he’s jealous with what he has—had, he reminds himself—and if the angels and the Ancients fought for John’s soul, he’d side with the Ancients and bring Rodney with him—Atlantis would feel empty and endless without the sound of Rodney’s complaints, like hymns, echoing off of all the walls.

TBC