I CAN'T LET ANYONE suspect.
They wouldn't understand. Hell, I don't understand it, and I'm the one experiencing it.
Being different isn't different for me. I'm the guy who gets along with everyone but that nobody really feels any ties to. I get invites to the parties and a minute or two of conversation, and then it's on to the next person. To really talk. People like me; they just don't feel close to me.
I used to think it was the math thing. The way I could always see computations and solutions without even trying, or knowing how I did it. In school, they called me 'prodigy' and took me out of all the regular math classes. Even in the advanced classes, I didn't fit in. The teachers hated it when I could spot their errors before they finished writing them on the blackboard, and the kids—the older kids—all hated that I was smarter than them. Than all of them. Combined.
So I hid my light under a basket. Blamed it, and blamed needing to hide it, for why others just pulled away. I had this special, freakish ability and it marked me.
Except there's a lot of people, a ton smarter than I am, here at Atlantis, and I still don't fit in. Don't make a connection.
Not with anything human, anyway. But the instant we captured Steve, there it was.
He looked at me and I sensed it. There was respect in his eyes. We were equals, in some fashion. And I craved that connection, that instant acceptance of who I am, in a manner that sickened me even as it completed me. That's why I could never take a shift 'guarding' him. I didn't trust myself. It was the kind of fascination you see with something dangerous, like a cobra or other predator. You find you want to test yourself against the other, to see who would win. To see if one of you could win. It's why I was always finding my feet dragging me back to the cell, to taunt, to battle him with wits because we couldn't do it with fists.
Maybe it's the damned gene. But I'm not the only one here who has it, and I do seem to be the only one who feels this way. Maybe it's the strength with which I utilize it. Maybe I am some throwback to the Ancients, designed in my DNA to fight the Wraith with every cell in me. Maybe I can blame that.
And maybe there's still something in the back of my head that whispers to me of how different I am, how outside it all, how nobody looks at me and truly sees me.
Nobody except Steve. Even through his own taunting and insults, I could sense it. On some level I could not explain, I understood him.
And he understood me. The only one in my entire life I've felt ever did.
That scared me almost more than losing him did.