Summary/Rating/Disclaimer - please see first chapter

Photographs

Part 4 – Rodney McKay

Rodney didn't have any pictures of his family on his walls.

His parents were fair enough, there was no way he was going to have a picture of those bigoted bastards who'd controlled his childhood and sent him off to school in the deepest recesses of the French forest and disowned him for going into physics.

Jeannie though, well, several people have asked him if they could see him a picture of her and every time he'd had to fob them off.

Because there was no way they could ever look at the only picture he'd managed to smuggle in.

He stared at the picture in his hand. The two of them, beaming happily, adorned in pale blue robes, waving furiously at the camera, a camera with no one behind it, on the day their results came out.

Jeannie with her all O NEWT results and Rodney with the same for his OWLs, naturally. Fourteen though, instead of the usual ten. But since his incredibly short-sighted government had refused to give him a time-turner he'd had to do the studying for the other four on his own and then just show up for the exams and demand they test him.

When they'd found out what he'd done they'd made him drop at least one, he'd picked Divination, though it pained him to admit it he'd never been any good at it, prophetic ability would have been useful around here though.

He looked at the picture again. Picture Rodney had stopped waving and was currently in the process of turning his sister's hair the same colour as her robes, with violent pink polka dots.

Piled up on top of her head there was no way she could have noticed but that didn't stop her from spinning quickly and hitting him with a spell to change his skin green. Even with Rodney's modifications the camera could only capture about thirty seconds of activity so as Rodney geared up to shoot another spell it looped and Rodney and Jeannie were waving at the camera again.

Jeannie… the sister who had sat him down and explained to him very carefully that it didn't matter what results he had, what he was expected to do or even that he was being head-hunted by the Department of Mysteries, he could do whatever it was he wanted.

He'd faked some credentials, taken the books he'd been secretly collecting and applied to all the best universities in America the next day, the one place his parents would never dream of looking for him.

Except for possibly Atlantis that was.

A place even more magical that the world he had left which had been filled with vice, corruption and hatred, so much hatred.

But it was hard enough even here having to keep up on culture references from his teenage years that he really should recognise without having to explain why the people in his photographs moved.

Besides, there was no way anyone else here would understand.

Fin, unless I can come up with anymore ideas

Crossover with Harry Potter