NB: Sorry about the longish period between this update and the last. Had a very bad week at work. Why is it that the richer a person gets, the greedier they get, and when a person ascends the career ladder into higer management, they lose all sense of reason and common sense? Sorry, enough whining...
If I Die
Chapter Sixteen - Voiding the Warranty
Alien database or no alien database, getting to his feet had been a really bad idea.
He knew he was a hypochondriac. He knew of Carson's frustration every time he stuck his head around the infirmary door, gripping a burnt finger, or limping from a stubbed toe. The Scotsman was easy to read, particularly when exasperated, and worse, Rodney knew when he was driving the man to distraction and still couldn't help himself.
But he wasn't entirely stupid. Prone to panic, yes, but also able to recognize a broken ankle from cramp, to hear alarm bells rather than his own paranoia.
Able to feel a sense of clinical detachment whilst slowly bleeding out from a gunshot wound on the cold floor of an alien lab.
His mother had not had the same ability. Headaches and pills and clasped foreheads, gin and tonics at noon and long lie-downs.
Childhood was a lonely, messy affair. He'd been the mistake, the mid-life crisis, born into his sister's life at a time when the last thing a thirteen year old girl wanted was to look after her little brother – particularly when he would use her lipsticks as crayons or, older, dismantle her stereo to see how it worked.
It didn't matter that he could always put it back together again. It was enough that he'd touched her stuff, and, as his father reminded him, voided the warranty.
A scientific mind was less useful in an eight year old than in a civilian genius assigned to the military.
His parents had never been quite sure what to do with him.
His father had largely ignored him, aside from those moments when it was impossible – dismantling the stereo had been one of them. There had been no real sense of neglect, since he'd never known any different, and from what he could tell, neither had his sister.
It had only been a matter of time before his father flew the nest in a more literal sense. He had never been a family man, spent his life in his work, and avoiding the home he resented. His mother had ignored her husband's affairs, since love had never played a role in the lifestyle she had planned for herself. The only luxury she could do without. Bringing up a genius, a boy who at age six knew how the toaster worked, and at age eight was arguing against his science teachers and scoffed at his Sunday school lectures in biology – that hadn't been part of her design.
As he'd been quick to point out to the shrink his parents sent him to, after he'd blown up his own tree house in the name of physics – he had it easy. Many kids, he knew, suffered far worse. He'd seen documentaries, led by well meaning, overly earnest journalists, in a time slot his parents disapproved of. No violence, no yelling, not much of anything, and he knew no different.
The shrink had frowned, and said that there were other forms of abuse. It had been their last appointment.
He'd never been a friend of shrinks. Being patronized as a child had led only to hostility, and not much had changed since. Even with Heightmeyer, he suspected it felt like drawing blood out of a stone.
Not everyone could be like Aiden.
He'd never met anybody so… open. Ford's emotions were always at the very surface, and a year ago he might have considered such a person to be superficial, but not now. The Lieutenant seemed to see no reason for keeping his thoughts bottled up, unless the situation demanded it. But outside of military protocol, Aiden seemed to love talking about anything and everything. Within a matter of weeks McKay knew the names of Ford's brothers and sisters, his grandmother's favorite daytime television show, the last three stations of his parents, the name of his dog and how long it had taken his second cousin to learn how to ride a bike.
He still couldn't understand why Aiden was so comfortable with everyone knowing the ins and outs of the Ford family, when he had to be on his death bed before admitting he even had a sibling. And he wasn't sure why he remembered all the tiny details of Aiden's family life that in a previous life he might have tuned out.
There was a lot he didn't understand about life on Atlantis, and the people he shared his with.
There was a lot he didn't understand about people, full stop.
It was her suggestion for him to get a cat. She'd said that if he could love a pet unconditionally, he might do better with his own species.
It had been an off-hand comment during a fight, and it was only months later, alone in the dark on the couch, befriended by late night Twin Peaks repeats and stale pizza, that he'd remembered. Opted for an adult male, the loner, rejected over the smaller bundles of big eared, wide-eyed joy that other homes preferred. One lonely tom cat sat in a cage.
The first night in the apartment it had thrown up on his bed and eaten the middle page spread of the latest National Geographic.
Theirs had been a love-hate relationship.
