Landfall
By Dragon's Daughter 1980
Disclaimer: Other than being a fan, I have absolutely nothing to do with Stargate: Atlantis in any way, shape or form.
Author's Note: In meteorology, a landfall occurs when a hurricane or typhoon hits land. I thought it an appropriate metaphor for this story.
Spoiler Warning: The Shrine
"You're in a good mood tonight."
Kaleb Miller wrapped his arms around his wife's waist and pressed a kiss on her cheek. She hummed happily as he continued, leaving a trail of kisses down the side of her neck to her collarbone.
"Yes," she responded rinsing off the stack of soapy dishes in the sink, "One of Meredith's emails came today."
"Oh?" he tried to sound nonjudgmental, but Jennie Miller née McKay was certainly no one's fool. She sighed quietly, looking down at the serving platter she held in her hands, and said resignedly, "It's not his fault."
Rather than rehashing their months-long argument, he swallowed back his sharp words and choose hug her briefly instead, "I know. I just…" still have nightmares about losing you, he added silently as he held her, still need to make sure you don't vanish in the middle of the night.
"It won't happen again." He let go of her and picked up a dry dish towel instead, drying off each plate as she handed it to him.
"You can't promise that," he told her softly. She hesitated for a second before she rinsed off the next dish.
"There's something I didn't tell you."
"What?" he asked, sharper than he intended, his mind already conjuring a wide variety of possible scenarios, all of them worse than the last.
"Afterwards," she confessed quietly, picking up a plate, "he talked me into getting a transmitter implanted… so if someone tries again, they'll know where I am and get me out."
He exhaled, letting go of a breath he wasn't even aware that he was holding. Kaleb mulled the situation over in his mind, and he had to say, he didn't exactly like it. There were half a dozen responses he had on his tongue, but he kept his silence. If the knowledge that she had a quick escape in any dangerous situation helped her sleep better at night, he wasn't going to ruin that for her by pointing out the loopholes in the plan or the possibility she placed herself at increased risk for kidnapping. After all, the transmitter would allow anyone with a receiver to track her movements, wouldn't it?
"What, like 'beam me up, Scotty'?" he asked, trying to keep the conversation light and hide his worry. They could talk about his fears another time, when the memories of her kidnapping weren't still so fresh in their minds. She smiled a little, "Well, there would have to be something to beam me up to, but yes, something like that."
"So what was in that email then? Did he verify your calculations?"
She shook her head, "No, he was just nice."
"Nice?"
"Yes Kaleb," she said. Rather than being offended on her brother's behalf, she sounded more amused and fondly exasperated than anything. "Meredith is perfectly capable of being nice. He just forgets sometimes. As a matter of fact," she added, "he likes you."
"Oh really?" Kaleb raised his eyebrows in skepticism, "Because I seem to remember that I'm the 'irresponsible idiot that knocked you up' and ruined your potential to change the world."
She rolled her eyes as she washed her hands and dried them on a towel, "That was before he met you and Madison. Besides, I have proof."'
"May I see it?" he half-teased her, knowing that she probably couldn't show the email to him, national security and all that. After putting the cooking pot in the sink and adding a little soap, he turned on the hot water and fished out the sponge from its little holder. He let it soak for a few minutes before he began to scrub at the food stains.
"In fact," she said, "you can." Jeannie went over to her laptop and turned it on.
"So how is your work going?" he asked as she sorted through her computer's hard drive for the letter. She frowned a little, "It's getting there. The review process is a little tedious and while my brother's insufferably arrogant sometimes, he doesn't have a monopoly on being insufferable or arrogant."
"Just on being both?"
"Sadly, no, but it's almost over, thank goodness."
"And then?"
"And then I submit the article to a couple of journals and hope someone decides to publish it."
"That's it?"
She nodded, hitting a few buttons on the keyboard, "That's it."
"But you left out the part where you win the Nobel Prize in Physics and because this famous groundbreaker physicist with a handsome husband and a pretty daughter." He washed his hands of the soapy sods and dried them.
She laughed, "We'll see."
He went over to where she was standing and kissed her, "Well, in my humble opinion, the smarter McKay should get that prize first, and then the two of you can share the next one."
"You're impossible," she teased fondly, kissing him this time. "Madison's in bed?"
"Yeah."
"I'll go up and check," she said, drawing away from him. "Just hit save and close when you're done."
"Anything I shouldn't read?" he asked, half-joking. She shook her head, "No. There's a section in there about my work, which I barely understand so…"
He grinned in self-deprecation, "So I don't have a chance."
"If you figure it out, let me know, Mr. English Professor," she responded with a smirk, "but anything else, I deleted for you."
"All right," he clicked on the document window, bringing up onto the screen. "I'll be right up then."
She left the room, leaving him alone with her brother's email. Kaleb sighed, still wondering just she meant by "nice" (because for as long as he could remember, Rodney McKay didn't do 'nice.' He did awkward, apologetic, caustic, flippant and cautious, but he just didn't know the concept of just being 'nice'—which was a really vague word, now that Kaleb thought about it) before that he really need to let the evidence speak for itself. He read through the email, one that was clearly written over the course of several days. If there was one thing he could say for his brother-in-law, it was that the man was chatty, which was a marked turnaround for the frigid silence from him for the first four years of Jeannie's marriage and Madison's life.
Dear Jeannie,
Yes, we're all alive, and no, none of us are locked up in the infirmary. Have I ever lied to you? (Barring that incident with the radiator when you were six—and really, stealing my chocolate bars in revenge was childish, even for you.) Anyway, it's been a quiet week. After the attempted drowning a few days ago, Pegasus hasn't set out to kill us recently. We found Dr. Nichols and his entire research team yesterday in a network of small caves just barely above the floodplain and the waterline, hungry, bedraggled and wet as shipwrecked rats. A couple of the scientists are still frozen, but Jennifer assures me that her voodoo will get them all back on duty by the end of this week. That ought to cheer Geology up; Carstairs (head of Geology, in case you're lost) is throwing little fits. You'd think this was a major crisis, but he was the one who urged me to let them do the fieldwork and put Nichols in charge of it all. Anyway, pretty much half of the department's on sick leave from colds and whatnot, so I'm short minions. I'm never assigning so many people again to any project. I can't afford for half a department to up and go look at pretty rocks and then end up getting caught in a rockslide that sidelines them all. Still, I guess this will, at least, keep half of the department from running around and making my life miserable with unreasonable requests.
The added bonus to all of this is that Nichols' arrogance has suffered a healthy blow. I guess even a man with his ego can't stand up to what Pegasus can reduce a person to. At least he's competent enough that he got his entire team and escort away from the glacier and onto high ground (relatively speaking) before the ice dam broke and tried to drown them all. But I already told you about that. In other news, the newest scientists actually are competent. At the very least, they seem to know what they're doing, and none of them have tried to blow up the city, though I suppose with so many of them in one place, it's only a matter of time. But Radek and the rest of my minions are as competent as ever, which besides my genius, is why we're all still in one piece. (And if you tell anyone this, I'll say that you're just making it up and deny it to my dying breath. And Jeannie, I'm fine. Seriously.)
How are Madison and Kaleb? Why yes sister of mine, I do possess some measure of social graces (and no, Teyla did not beat them into me, as you may have 'suggested' to her during your last visit! I'm onto you!) Madison's my niece, and I appreciate having a hand in raising the next genius in the McKay family (the little fighter plane was totally Sheppard.) Kaleb's important to you, and he's Madison's father, and all of that counts for something. He's a better father and husband than Dad ever was, and I'll ever be. He's around for both of you, which is more than I can say for Dad, and he pretty much ripped my head off after what happened-you-known-when, which Dad would've never done. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you had to pick a man to marry, I don't think you could've picked a better man than Kaleb.
He stared at the end of the document for a few minutes and then closed it before shutting down his wife's laptop. That had been almost…surreal.
Every time he thought he had his brother-in-law figured out, the man would turn around and say or do something completely jolting and turn all of Kaleb's notions upside. Meredith Rodney McKay was impossible sometimes, probably never spared anyone's feelings in his entire life and competitive as hell, but there was a gentler side to the irritable genius. Kaleb supposed that normal human interactions and social graces fell by the wayside when a person had a distant mother, an even colder father and an intellect the size of a small country. The stories that Jeannie told him about her childhood—how her big brother got beaten up every day by bullies ('He stated treating the bruises like they were badges of honor, like proof he was right about everything.') and how no one really cared except her, about the science fair ('Mum was angry, Dad was furious, he was terrified that he was going to disappear, and none of us did anything about it. He was twelve years old, and I was scared I'd never see him again.'), their parents' cold indifference (' I don't think they knew how to handle someone like me, much less someone like Mer.'), how she made herself play second-best ('I made mistakes on purpose, so people wouldn't think I was as smart as Mer. I think he knew, but he never really said about it. I guess he thought that it was better for me that way. He always took the blame for me when he could.')— made Kaleb grateful every day that Jeannie was as happy with her life as she was. Her childhood had enough events in them to emotionally paralyze a person several lifetimes over. There were moments when he marveled at how out of all the people on this green Earth, she choose to marry him and raise a wonderful daughter and live a completely ordinary life. These past two years had been some of the happiest months of her life, he knew, mainly because she was slowly letting go of her past and reconciling with her brother. It was trying on Kaleb's patience sometimes, especially when Rodney came to visit, but both of them tried hard to get along, for Jeannie's sake, if not Madison's.
There was something off, though, in Rodney's email, especially the last few paragraphs. The tone didn't quite jive with Kaleb's memories of the man, but then again, maybe it was easier for Rodney to be nice on paper than in person. Something, though, told him that didn't sound right. It didn't sound like Rodney. It sounded like someone trying to be Rodney, but not quite pulling it off. He wondered why that impression would come to mind.
He shook his head. He'd probably spent one too many hours in his office chewing out students for plagiarism this academic year and reading too much into a simple email home from a man who didn't know what to say to his formerly estranged sister. Turning out the kitchen lights, the English professor put all disquieting thoughts out of his mind and went upstairs to join his wife in bed.
