If I Die

Chapter Fourteen - Drifting

There was someone else.

McKay lay in semi-darkness, drifting in and out of consciousness, hands twitching against the blood that slicked his fingers.

There had been voices, earlier, but a gray cloud had drowned them out and now he floated, ignoring the pain in his side or the hitch in his chest.

Couldn't see, couldn't hear. Just… drifted.

There was someone else.

Tom Wellsby. His roommate in college. A nice guy, generous with his cash, but only half as bright as the rest of his course and under immense pressure from his parents to succeed. That pressure turned to resentment and when the two men had chosen similar PhD topics accusations of plagiarism were flung recklessly, shattering the friendship.

At the time he'd been surprised. It was the first, the first man he'd considered to be a friend. At college, where intelligence was something to be respected and admired. Not shunned in the hierarchy of high school. But he'd been wrong.

He was rarely wrong, but it seemed to McKay that when he was, he was always very badly wrong about something important.

And he'd been wrong about Tom Wellsby, and everything Tom represented. His peers would resent him and outsiders would dismiss him.

A professor had once told him, "McKay, the human brain is simply not suited to hold so many ideas at one time. Genius is border to insanity, and insanity drives the sane away." And then given a theatrical sigh, and lit another in a long chain of cigarettes.

He'd written it on a scrap of paper, and tucked it into the back of a notebook, and kept it long after the other pages had been torn out or scrawled across in favor of new ideas.

This was a theory he'd stuck to. A mantra, a life motto. He had planned to have it as his epitaph, before Atlantis.

Here lies Doctor Rodney McKay. He drove the sane away.

Then there had been Sheppard, and Ford and Teyla and Elizabeth and Zelenka and Grodin and the rest. And he was beginning to wonder whether his motto was wrong, and whether he could risk replacing it with something better. Something more life-affirming.

He'd driven her away.

It had been a science course, some conference avoided by all but those professors whose funding depended on it, and the rest sent their doctoral students in a gesture of goodwill. He'd gone with a group, then been left in the hotel bar alone after they'd been drawn to the glamour of alternative night spots.

"Hey. You."

And a finger had poked him in the chest.

She'd been drunk, although she would deny it later. Wormed her way into his bedroom despite hiccups and repetitive prods.

"How drunk are you?"

"Drunk enough to want to do this. Not so drunk as to mean you'd be taking advantage."

She'd been dumped, nano-magnetics for theoretical particle cosmology. Invited herself up to his hotel room and fallen asleep, fully clothed, on the bed.

He remembered… waking with a scream, and taking a moment to realize it wasn't coming from him.

"What happened to my room?"

"What?" through a mouthful of sleep.

"The window should be on the other side! And the tv doesn't go there! And those aren't my trousers!"

Embarrassment had escalated when she'd found herself without a key, and he'd only asked her to get breakfast coffee because they had both missed the first lecture.

Sheppard would mock him for it, had he known. Even when it was offered to him on an attachment-free plate, Rodney McKay had failed to get any. But for a while, he got something more.

Not the only woman he'd ever said those three words to, but the only time he'd meant it.