Part 3 – McKay's choice
Six months earlier
A wave of panic surged over him when he fully understood just how deep the trouble was that he was in. The concern on the face of the doctor was almost comical as his heart rate and blood pressure had shot up and his breathing had become ragged and forced.
"You never seen an anxiety attack before huh, huh?" he yelled as forcefully as he could. Nausea, panic, suffocation and fear all fought for the upper hand. He'd been about to really lose it when Sora came back to his side. He remembered so clearly how she looked when she came back to sit next to him, how she had stroked his forehead, held his shoulders and ordered him to look at her, to focus on her, to calm down. He had managed to steady his breathing staring into her eyes until he managed to ask the question, "What do you want with me?" She had told him not to think about that – all he needed to concentrate on was getting better – they had put a lot of time and effort into fixing him up and didn't want him to undo it.
"What do you mean not to worry – you're a bunch of psychos!" he tried to shout the words but ended in a pathetic whisper.
That earned him a wry smile, "I can understand your view point, but you are wrong and also not very tactful but I remember that from before." He had ranted on for a few more minutes until he felt the little strength he had draining from him. He settled down to a quiet fret and was finally given a sedative by the doctor when it became apparent that he would not rest any other way. She had sat with him and he had watched her from beneath the swath of bandages covering the right side of his face. One hand gently rested on his uninjured arm as she waited for him to fall asleep.
He woke several hours later and felt the panic rise again. He looked around and saw that she was still there, asleep in the chair besides him. His panic subsided and he relaxed back into sleep again wondering why her presence made him feel better – was it because she had tried to curb the worst of Kolya's excesses back before the hurricane hit? He let go of the thought as sleep reclaimed him.
The present
"I was there for another three days wondering what the hell they wanted with me – no-one would tell me anything - then Cowen finally came to see me to present me with his offer." He broke off, wondering how much he should say and how much he should leave unsaid. Finally he stood up and walked over to the window and stared out over the sea. "I say he made me an offer but it was more that he presented me with a choice," he shook his head and stared at floor. "He explained to me that you thought me dead…," he hesitated and then corrected himself. "No. He told me that you had left me for dead, that no-one would come looking for me and that either I agreed to be integrated into Genii society and help them developing weapons and defences against the Wraith or they would interrogate me until they had all the information they thought they could get from me and then they would kill me."
He turned around and looked at the faces of his friends. Elizabeth looked horrified; John angry, Caldwell implacable. He didn't want to see their expressions turning to the contempt he was expecting and so he turned to stare out of the window again. "I hope that you don't think less of me for the choice I made," he said in a small voice. "I'm not, I mean I don't, I, er..." McKay stopped and then drew a deep breath and started the sentence again. "What I mean to say is that I knew that under interrogation I would probably give away the fact that we hadn't destroyed Atlantis. I couldn't risk that." He smiled a crooked smile his thoughts lingering on the events of the Genii invasion of Atlantis and gently rubbed the scars on his left forearm. "I think I'd made up my mind before he'd finished speaking but he gave me a week to think about it. They weren't in a rush, they had all the time in the world as, ah, I wasn't going anywhere." He stopped and leant his forehead against the window and stared out across the ocean lost in his own private reverie.
He started violently as a hand gripped his shoulder. It was Sheppard. "Jesus, McKay," he whispered, his hand squeezing McKay's shoulder almost painfully as he tried to convey the strength of his support for his friend. He stared at McKay and wondered how much the scientist's confession had cost him. McKay turned his head and looked directly into Sheppard's eyes. Sheppard could see pain, regret, fear and self contempt in McKay's eyes. "You made the right choice, Rodney. Can't you see that?"
McKay's gaze dropped to the floor and Sheppard slowly let his hand drop from McKay's shoulder and he walked back to his seat. McKay sighed deeply and he too returned to sit down at the conference table, picking up the pen in front of him and playing with it, turning it end over end over end.
He decided he wouldn't tell them more, he wouldn't tell them of the harsh words exchanged between him and Cowen. He did tell them what the Genii leader believed; that Atlantis was destroyed, that the remnants of the expedition were living in refugee camps, hiding in the fleet of puddle jumpers they evacuated the city in. He could still hear Cowen's persuasive words in his head and, as he closed his eyes, he could see Cowen leaning towards him, arms outstretched in one of his expansive gestures, hand chopping at the air as he reinforced his point.
Six months earlier
"Can't you see what we are offering you? We are offering you the chance to strike back at the Wraith. You will have a whole team of scientists and engineers to help you, you will have somewhere relatively safe to live, you will have food, water, warmth and you will have a chance to belong somewhere." Cowen leaned forward in his chair holding McKay's silent blue gaze.
"I need to be with my own people," McKay stared sullenly at Cowen. "I want to go back. Let me go."
"We can't do that," Cowen answered. He corrected himself, "We don't want to do that. Can't you see what happened, your people left you to die – it was only by chance that we were there to find and rescue you. We saved your life and we did it for a reason. We need you Doctor McKay and we need your knowledge – we have lost so much to the Wraith and you can help us get back to what we were. You can do so much more with us than you ever could now with them and perhaps you can even atone for the damage your people did awakening the Wraith."
"Well I was doing a pretty good job of striking back at the Wraith before I even met you and I think we're doing a hell of a lot better at it than you are," McKay snapped back. "And as for atonement…"
Cowen interrupted him. "When you had Atlantis yes, but now? What can you hope to achieve as a refugee? We are offering you a chance to continue your fight."
"And my oh my, what an offer!" McKay snapped back at Cowen feeling the anger welling up inside him; anger at his friends for abandoning him, anger at the Genii for exploiting him, anger at his own helplessness, physical weakness and fear. "So let me just paraphrase this offer, huh? Make sure I've understood? So choice number one is that I live out my life as slave to the bunch of psychotic lunatics who have tried to kill me and my friends a couple of times so far, teaching them how to blow things up bigger and better than ever before. Yes? Choice number two is that I have the current whereabouts of my friends beaten out of me by your tame rottweiler Kolya so you can send him and a pack of his trainee psychos to go and steal what little my friends have left?" He was half sitting up in his bed and waving his good arm in expansive gestures of his own. "Is that about right? Huh?"
Cowen sat back in his chair and smiled. "Not quite how I would have put it but that's more or less it."
As she had during all their exchanges Sora stood in the background, her eyes lingered on McKay's face a slight frown creasing her brow.
McKay lay back on the bed, closed his eyes and turned his head slightly towards the wall. "I am tired, we can talk tomorrow."
Cowen laughed to himself. "You are such an arrogant man, Dr McKay ordering me around from your bed like that but I think that we will work well together." He stood up to go. "Concentrate on getting better. You are going to need your strength. I'll come back in a week to hear your answer," and with that he left. McKay closed his eyes against the hot sting of tears of rage and frustration and concentrated on calming himself down so that he could think.
The present
"I started working with them two weeks later when I was discharged from the hospital. I was given my own quarters and my very own private guard. They didn't trust me you see even though I said I would give their integration programme a try."
He dug around in his jacket and pulled out some sheets of paper. "This is all that I've helped them with. Give it to Zalenka – he'll figure out how to handle it. You did give him my job didn't you?" He looked up questioningly. Elizabeth nodded mutely. "Good. He deserves it. He's brilliant although not quite in my league." An echo of the legendary McKay arrogance came through in that statement. However, he seemed to lose his momentum and sat there quietly, pondering how to continue.
