A/N Next part of 'Wavelength'. I've bumped up the rating for some mentions of nasty things that I won't spoil for you -) Also there's a little bad language in this chapter. Nothing frequent or heavy. Thanks very much for everyone for the feedback so far! Hope you enjoy this part...
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Sheppard stared sadly down the motionless body on the stark white bed, a bed that was too big for the kid. He looked lost in it, thin and wasted, eyelids sunken over his closed eyes, face deathly pale.
Do I look like that now? Sheppard wondered, grimly. Is my body already wasting away like this poor kid's?
Rodney's parents – the angry father, the cold-eyed mother – were staring at him.
"Are you a doctor?" the father demanded, in a hostile voice.
"We'd like to be left alone," the mother added, in a tone that could've cut glass. Sheppard hesitated a moment, glancing behind him. He saw the young Rodney standing in the corner – the seven year old who had accompanied him, not the even younger version of before. Apparently they had jumped back to the day where Jimmy got switched off. Rodney was pale and angry-looking, but showed no sign of recognising Sheppard.
Man, this is getting confusing. The ego's voice beside him made him jump.
"Grim bunch, aren't they?"
"Their son is dying!" Sheppard snapped back. Ego-McKay gave him an odd, nasty smile. It was almost…Wraithlike. Sheppard was definitely starting to despise this freak. This was Rodney's conscience? No wonder the guy was unpopular.
"Get out," McKay senior was glaring at Sheppard with an intensity that felt like it could burn, a startling contrast to his wife's icy gaze.
"Wait!" it was Rodney-the-kid again, pushing between his parents to stand in front of Sheppard, looking up at him. His face was wet with tears.
"I don't care if you're a doctor or not, tell them they can't do this!" he turned frantically to his parents. "How can you give up on him like that? You can't switch him off like he's a computer or something. He's a human being…he's alive…he's breathing…" the boy clenched his fists at the uninterested expression on his mother's pale face, the blatant disgust on his father's. He burst suddenly into tears.
"Stop snivelling," the older man snapped, and turned back to his dying son.
Sheppard had been too startled for a minute by the young Rodney's words – the exact words his older self had said to Beckett in the infirmary - to say anything. Pulling himself together, he looked down at the sobbing kid half-crouching at his feet, and felt a swell of anger. This felt like a memory, something that had really happened, not just a nightmare…how could they treat their kid like that?
He grabbed McKay senior's arm and turned him roughly. The man was shorter than him but bulkier, and his fury at being manhandled looked about to explode into full-blown blind rage.
"Get your Goddamn hands off me! And get the hell out of this room. My son is fucking dying here, you understand me?"
"Don't let him turn off the machine," young Rodney said, quietly. His voice was very calm now. It was almost a command. Behind Sheppard, the ego snickered. Not the ego…Sheppard should have noticed straight away. This was a different beast. He was…darker, deeper, as though there was a blackness wrapped around him. He seemed almost dim. A more primeval part of Rodney's subconscious…the id. And he was enjoying this. Enjoying watching these people suffer. Even himself.
"You have a really sick mind, you know that?" Sheppard told the id.
McKay senior apparently thought the Major was talking to him, because a thick fist connected suddenly with the side of Sheppard's head. Stunned, he fell, prompting a terrified shriek from child-Rodney and a titter from his id.
"Hit him back!" the boy cried out, pleadingly. "Don't let him near the switch! Don't let her either," he added, pointing to his mother.
"Yeah – hit him!" the id put in, sounding ecstatic at the prospect.
"Shut up!" Sheppard told the creature – but he did as it suggested. He tackled McKay senior, who was going for the life-support machine, brought him to the ground. Wrestled with him there, trying to keep him away, hold him back…he knew he only had to do it for a few minutes.
"I saw his eyelids flicker," a voice said behind him. It was a deep adult voice, like the id's, but the tone was that of a child. It sounded like Rodney as Sheppard knew him – but a very scared and bewildered Rodney.
"I saw his eyes move," he went on, in a hushed, frightened voice, "and I knew he was going to wake up. They wouldn't listen. They turned it off. Just when he was coming back. Just a few minutes…and everything would've been okay."
Sheppard looked up, saw McKay standing over him, wearing his blue scientist's shirt and uniform pants. Their eyes met, and Rodney repeated sadly,
"Everything…"
Child-Rodney and the loathsome id were gone. Rodney's parents were gone. Sheppard got slowly to his feet. He and Rodney stood alone in the hospital room – alone except for a young boy on a clinical white bed, who was slowly opening his eyes.
McKay went to the bedside and gently took the boy's hand.
"It's okay now, Jimmy," he said, softly. "You're coming home."
Sheppard backed away towards the door. He couldn't watch this. His throat hurt. He slipped outside and found himself in the long corridor where all this had begun.
"Jesus, what the hell was that?" he muttered. "Invasive psychoanalysis? Heightmeyer's going to kill me. I guess I've probably broken all the rules." Would it help Rodney, breaking that nightmare? Maybe it would – but it certainly hadn't helped Sheppard's cause any. He tried to be annoyed about that and found he couldn't be. "You ass, why didn't you just talk about it?" he wondered. "I'd've listened…"
"You're really fucked now, right?" the id's voice startled Sheppard for the second time that day.
"What're you doing here?"
"Helping," Id smirked.
"You aren't interested in helping me. You're only interested in helping yourself."
"Helping you is helping myself," Id replied, with a horrible grin. He reached out to touch Sheppard's chest lightly. "Trust me on this. You think I want you dead? Don't be stupid. There're lots of reasons why not."
"And are you going to tell me what they are?"
"I thought I'd let you figure that one for yourself," Id told him. "Come with me."
Sheppard, not having a better idea, decided to follow, as much as he hated this thing. Rodney's subconscious seemed to get worse the further in one went.
"Where are you taking me?"
"To my home," Id responded, with a leer. "You'll like it there."
"Why do I have the feeling that isn't going to be true?" Sheppard sighed.
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He was right – he didn't like the Id's pad at all.
Sheppard had half-expected an apartment with a massive TV, snacks in every room, the universe's biggest computer, and Sam Carter running around naked. What he found was worse.
The place was awful. Dark, dank, and cold. There were stains of blood on the floor. No windows, little furniture except for a thing that looked disturbingly like a torture device of some kind.
Sam Carter was there …locked in a small room, naked, bound, gagged and covered with her own blood. She'd been raped and brutalised repeatedly – this the Id told Sheppard proudly.
The Major had almost killed the thing outright when he found a facsimile of Teyla in another room, treated much the same way.
"You sick freak!" he hissed.
"I'm a part of your friend's mind. Still want him on your team, Major?"
"Rodney isn't like this. You're…you're the worst parts of his subconscious, buried somewhere beneath the decent parts of him. Even he probably doesn't know you're here."
"Uh-huh. I figured that's what you would want to tell yourself. Anyway, aren't you interested in knowing how I can help you?"
"Not until you tell me why you want to," Sheppard growled back, convinced the creature was trying to trick him. He forced himself to look Id in the eye, while struggling not to throw up. The sight of dream-Teyla so hideously abused and tortured had disgusted and pained him, made him furious, but seeing this foul twisted beast wearing McKay's face was almost worse. Rodney was harmless, dammit! Egotistical, true, selfish, sure, infuriating when he wanted to be – but not this. Nothing like this horror that currently stood before the Major, offering him his life back. In exchange for what…? Sheppard wondered.
The Id gave a childlike sigh. "Okay. Since you're so desperate to know…reason one why I'm going to help you: if you die, I'm going to be even more in the firing line. I'm going to be more at risk. You currently provide a kind of buffer between me and all the things that want to kill me. With you dead, I'm less likely to survive the Wraith, for example, and all the other Pegasus nasties.
"Reason two: with you dead, we're all more likely to die. You're pretty much the best chance the Atlantis expedition has of surviving."
It grinned. "There may be another reason too, but I'm going to keep that one to myself for now. Suffice it to say you're a direct route to some of life's greatest pleasures. So – do you want to know how to get out of this situation alive and with body intact?"
Sheppard stared at the Id, tried to determine whether it was serious, telling the truth, or manipulating him for its own gain. It looked back, smiling that horrible smile.
"Tell me," he said, slowly.
"What you need to do," the Id began, sounding disturbingly like Rodney as it expostulated, "is to create a bang so big right here in the depths of the subconscious that when my erstwhile host – if you like to call him that – wakes up, he'll not only remember it but realise it couldn't have come from his own mind."
It was Sheppard's turn to smile unpleasantly. "You reckon I could do that by killing you?"
Id cocked his head. "That would be a bad idea."
"What, then?" the Major snapped. "I'm running out of time. If you're not going to give me anything…"
"Wait, wait. Don't get your underwear in a twist on my account. The stuff you did with Jimmy, that was great – but it was too conscious. You need to find something so deep he doesn't even remember it. Fire it up and set it going."
"That could hurt him," Sheppard told Id, flatly.
"You want to live?"
"Yes, of course I do, but I'm not willing…"
"Oh, you're willing. Come with me. I want to take you to the place where I was born again," the Id leered, "as it were."
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It was another memory, but not a memory. Like the Id itself, this place was shrouded in darkness, enveloped in a thick grey mist. Sheppard could barely make it out.
They were in a room, a richly and tastelessly furnished drawing room. A man of maybe sixty sat in a chair reading a newspaper. Rodney's father, a few years down the line.
"Watch," Id said, softly. It was grinning.
Sheppard sank onto his haunches. McKay senior obviously couldn't see him – this part of Rodney's mind seemed to be observation only.
"How is this going to work? I'm not even interacting…"
"You'll see. Wait."
A few moments past. Sheppard became impatient…and then the door opened, and Rodney McKay came into the room.
He was perhaps twenty, still thickset, his hair longer and slightly lighter in tone than Sheppard remembered from the future. He wore jeans and a loose-fitting white shirt with a black leather jacket. And he looked seriously pissed about something.
"Father." The voice was icy with restrained fury. The man in the chair didn't look up immediately, but finished what he was reading, folded up the paper, and set it down before raising his eyes.
"Rodney. Welcome home, son." The tone was deeply sarcastic.
"You've gone too far!" Rodney snapped back. "Too far this time, Dad. I'm not letting you get away with this. You can't do a damn thing to me anymore, but I won't stand by and let you treat Jeanie the way you treated…"
"Shut up." McKay senior said, calmly. "You chose to leave this house. This family is no longer any of your business."
"My sister is my business; you and Mother can rot in hell for all I care. Jeanie wrote to me. She told me what you…"
"Then I'll deal with her later."
"Oh, no. No, you won't. You won't deal with her ever again."
The older man got to his feet, slowly, his gaze never leaving his son's face, red and puffy with anger.
"Are you threatening me, boy?"
"I'm taking her out of here. She's coming home with me. Where is she?" he headed for the door. "Jeanie! Where are you?"
"She's not here," McKay senior purred. "She and your mother are out."
"Where? Where, you old bastard?"
"Shopping," the man replied, with a smile. Rodney strode right up to him.
"Then I'll wait," he spat.
"As you please. But she won't leave with you."
"You think?" it was Rodney's turn to smile. "We have everything arranged. You can't stop us. And if you try…I'll go to the police."
McKay senior laughed aloud. "Police! You fool, what do you think they'll do about it?" he coughed abruptly, rubbed his chest as a grimace of pain passed briefly over his face.
"What you did to her was disgusting."
"I'm allowed to discipline my own daughter when she behaves inappropriately."
"You filthy piece of shit," Rodney growled, his face reddening further, "how the hell does 'discipline' equal beating the crap out of a fifteen year old girl?" he leaned into his father's personal space, their foreheads almost touching. "You're a wretch. A disgusting, pathetic, old coward who has to take out his frustrations on his kids because the rest of the world's too big for him to deal with. That's your problem, isn't it? That everyone's done so much better than you? That's why you always had to put me down, take away from everything I ever achieved."
That did it. McKay senior's temper was severely up. He rose to his full height, grabbed his son's shirtfront, almost pulling him off his feet.
"You damned little puppy…how dare you speak to me like that in my own home…" his face was livid, furious, his eyes bulging from his head, wheezing the words out.
"I'm not a kid anymore. And I'm bigger than you. Touch me and I'll wham your ass." Rodney told him, coldly.
"You tell 'im, Rodney," muttered Sheppard.
"Little freak!" McKay senior snarled. "Always thinking you're better than me…" his breath was coming in gasps now; his face was red as a beet, and he clawed at Rodney's shirt. "It should've been you," he gasped out. "Not…brother…not…Jimmy…should've…been you."
Rodney drew back and let the old man fall to the floor. He lay, gasping and shuddering, his hand pressed to his chest.
He didn't speak for a moment. Then he struggled to get the words out.
"Heart…get doctor…"
Rodney didn't move. He simply stood, looking down at his father's shaking body, his face grimly expressionless but his jaw tight. And slowly, the old man died. Sheppard stared in disbelief as Rodney simply stood and watched. His father cursed him to the last, his malignant gaze fixed on the young man until he drew his last, agonised breath…and fell still.
Only then did Rodney cross the room and pick up the telephone.
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