Part Sixteen: Satori, Nirvana, Etc.

This time it was different. No explosions. No terror or despair. McKay found himself in the chair once again, quite alive.

"I'm listening," he said, without sarcasm.

McKay stopped the chatter between his ears, because he wanted to take a moment or the rest of his life—assuming that he was still alive—to consider what Atlantis was saying and how she was saying it. This time he would still himself. Breathe. If he loved her, he would do just that without the ego bullshit and the sex bullshit and the bullshit that said he had to get her to submit to him. It was quite the other way around, actually. He lived within her, gestating there by her largesse. She reached out to the galaxy through him, through Sheppard and Elizabeth and Teyla and all of the others—with the gene and without--who had come such a long way.

The chair deactivated, gently righting itself. McKay realized that he was being nudged off the seat, so he rose, quivering and spent, and lay down upon the platform on which the chair stood.

He waited for the inevitable alarm. But none came. An hour passed. He dozed and came back, rolled to his side and struggled to sit up, leaning his shoulder against the side of the chair. Placing his hand on its sculpted surface, he sighed contentedly.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you," he whispered.

…..

The device glowed briefly, then settled. Zelenka noticed this. He had been watching the object for quite a while, sitting with his feet propped up on a console with the thing lying in his lap, hoping to detect activity of whatever sort that would indicate the rematerialization of the last two holdouts, Rodney McKay and Carson Beckett.

At the same instant as the device's momentary reawakening, a life sign appeared in the area of the chair room. Simultaneous to that, the grey dust in another storage pod disappeared. Radek stared at the pod, uncertain but hopeful that he had witnessed the return of a colleague, not the death of one.

Zelenka tapped his headset.

"Rodney? Dr. Beckett? Can you hear me? This is Zelenka. Please respond."

He expected the silence he received in return. Moving to the next logical step, Zelenka tried his comm again.

"Elizabeth, are you awake?" he said gently, collecting equipment with which to survey the chair room.

Weir had left Zelenka's lab some hours ago, having been up most of the previous night and all the next day with this situation. Zelenka called to her again, in case she had slept through his first transmission. In time, she responded, her voice heavy with sleep.

"Zumph?"

He smiled a bit. The woman delighted him on so many levels.

"I believe that someone has been, uh, reconstituted in chair room. I will accompany a search and rescue team, if you wish."

"Yes, coordinate this with Colonel Sheppard, please." He could hear the muffled sounds of Elizabeth pulling a shirt over the com still mounted on her ear. Charming. "I will…" she sighed, obviously gathering her thoughts. Radek could almost feel her breath against his ear and shivered slightly. "I will meet you and the others at the transporter in ten."

"Understood."

…..

They found him slumped against the chair, in the place where he'd experienced his revelations about Atlantis, under his figurative Bodhi tree. McKay didn't hear the voices that tried to rouse him, or feel the hard knuckle bruising his sternum or the gentle hands placing him on the cot.

He was dreaming of a stunningly beautiful woman, lovelier than any he'd ever met, Sam Carter included. They were in the south pier hallway, leaning against the wall, and her voice was coming through that wall, explaining about the city, about her love for the Ancients and the humans that lived within her. She was so beautiful and he loved her so much because of all the things that she so willingly shared.

Then she changed. "Rodney McKay, you don't come into this house as if you own it. This is my house and, God damn it, you don't own a square inch of it!"

He could live with both. She was like himself in some ways. Generous on occasion, an asshole when it took too much effort to be anything else.

She was patient, she was kind. She was a bitch at times, as well. Rodney knew nothing about how to handle people in general, let alone how to finesse the city. But he would try a little harder. Maybe someday, it would come more easily to him.

The darkness around him lightened, sharpened, gave itself color and form until McKay realized that he was awake again. Alive again, or maybe for the first time.

Now he felt it, the tiredness that had been waiting on the sidelines for him to leave the game. It plundered every part of him so that he could scarcely move, let alone speak coherently. A tremendous thirst arose, one so strong it almost made him cry. For the first time ever, he was glad to feel the cool swab of an alcohol prep and the painful slide of an IV cannula up his vein.

"Dr. McKay," someone said at the far periphery of his hearing. "You're going to be fine. Just rest for as long as you need to."

More welcome words had never been spoken. He gave up trying to keep his eyes open and, with a deep, peaceful breath, flew away.