The Strange Encounters of Rodney McKay
by Soledad
Author's Note:
This is a series of loosely connected individual scenes, each of which describes one of Dr. McKay's encounters with another SG-1 or SGA character. These encounters range from friendship through unresolved romantic feelings to purely physical relief and back again. The general rating, which you see in the header, is R, for later parts. This part is rated G, suitable for all readers.
Spoilers: 48 hours
Chapter 01 – Carter
Rodney McKay's first encounter with Major Samantha Carter, an Air Force pilot and theoretical astrophysicist, was quite a shock.
Of course, he'd heard about her at Area 51. All scientists who'd ever worked with her spoke about her in the highest tones. Especially Dr. Murphy's drooling was disgusting, but the others weren't much better, either.
He'd seen photos of her, of course, and had she been ugly, or a wallflower at best, with thick glasses and a long, pointy noise, all the gushing wouldn't have annoyed him half as much. Her being ugly would have made up for her being brilliant. Or, to be more accurate, it would have made her so-called brilliance more believably.
But a pretty blonde who was supposed to be brilliant was an anomaly. Everyone knew that pretty blondes were dumb. They didn't need brains. Relying upon their boobs and upon legs that went up to their chin was enough to get everything they wanted. Or everyone. Unjustly enough, no one of them ever wanted him.
He arrived at SGC full willing to hate her and to reveal her as the pretender tat she definitely was. Bah! Her theories were full of mistakes, and her dialling interface for the Stargate had caused numerous unnecessary situations, any of which could have ended in catastrophe. Why couldn't anyone see that?
He only wanted to give her an honest analysis, for the sake of pure science and the security of the entire base. The Stargate was never meant to be used without a DHD. Even the Tok'ra – arrogant bastards that they were – had admitted that much. Carter's computer system ignored two hundred and twenty of the four hundred feedback signals the Stargate could emit during any given dialling sequence.
Not that she'd listen to her, of course. Military types never did. They took a look at him, assumed he was some sort of hippie, just because he liked to wear his hair a little longer than your usual military jarhead – really, just a compensation for a slightly receding hairline, but why should he offer any explanations? He was a civilian, dammit, and if he wanted to have hair that covered his ears, it was nobody's damn business and gave nobody the right not to take him seriously!
He hated the very idea of coming to the SGC to begin with. Working in the desert of Nevada wasn't the quintessence of creature comfort, either, especially not for someone as claustrophobic as he was, and the food was awful, too. But at least there was only sand above their heads, not tons and tons of massive granite. Merely being twenty-eight levels under Cheyenne Mountain worsened his claustrophobia exponentially. So he instinctively chose to be rude and arrogant to her – and to everyone else, as it was his wont every time he felt vulnerable.
Besides, they'd all deserved it. They were ignorant fools, and he was wasting his valuable time with them.
She was furious with him, of course. She couldn't understand that the situation was hopeless. That the crystals were wiped clean by an unstable vortex of a forming wormhole. That there was no way to establish an event horizon without the vortex. That even if they managed to create a viable event horizon without connecting to a wormhole, they'd never get the wormhole to reintegrate the alien whose energy patterns had been trapped in the Stargate. That resuming normal Gate operations was more important than saving one person who was beyond any help already.
Even if said person had been her friend and team-mate for the last four years.
She didn't understand, of course. She accused him of sabotaging her efforts to save her friend. He tried to point out to her that one couldn't simply ignore the laws of thermo-dynamics. That the crystals wouldn't retain their energy patterns permanently. But she wasn't listening to solid quantitative evidence.
She was guessing wildly, like she always did. No matter that more than a third of the energy pattern the Gate required to reintegrate a person whose pattern were stored in it was already gone. That even if something would come out of it, it wouldn't be more than a lump of disfigured flesh and bones. Like after a Star Trek transporter accident.
He didn't spoke out loud that last argument, of course. Instead, he called her a dumb blonde who let her emotions rule her actions. But deep inside, he was envious. He wished someone would feel such an absolute loyalty towards him, too. That someone would risk everything to save him. Even listening to the advice of a Goa'uld and risking that the whole Gate would explode.
But he knew that wouldn't happen any time, soon. Never, most likely. He didn't do close, and he didn't have friends.
Hell, he didn't need friends. He had his work and his colleagues, whom he could intimidate into obedience with his superior intelligence, and he had his work to provide said intelligence with proper challenges to prove his brilliance again and again. What else would he need? Socializing with anyone would only take away valuable time from his important work.
She'd called her a certifiable whack job, whose judgement is being clouded by her personal feelings. He couldn't believe the military types would let her carry out her harebrained scheme that could have killed them all. Yet they did.
And sitting on the plane that took him to his Siberian exile, Rodney McKay dreamed of eyes blue like the summer sky, and hair shimmering like the golden sunlight, and of a radiant smile that was never directed at him in the two days he'd spent at SGC.
TBC