Reminder:
"This is spoken English."
"This is spoken Czech."
This is a thought.
Last time: After an adventure offworld, Radek might have overreacted a bit and put Anna on protective house arrest (chapters 37-41). Anna isn't happy, but she'll get over it. Now, Radek's being called offworld for a mission. Hopefully there are no Wraith darts involved.
Chapter 43. Moving On...
The irony was not lost on Radek. After lecturing Anna on the danger of 'gate travel and laying down the law that she wasn't allowed to go anywhere for quite some time… here he was. About to go offworld.
This was his job. Nothing to explain and he was in precious little danger.
Yes, of course, "little danger." Did he really lie to himself that often?
There was always danger in going offworld, just like there was danger in living on Atlantis. Anna hadn't talked to him this morning… After last night, did he just expect today to be a blank slate? Should he talk to her about it?
What in the world would he say if he did?
He peered into the infirmary for a moment before walking in. She wasn't here. Collins said she was when he came earlier. Radek heaved a sigh and stepped into the room. Project Arcturus was so large and important that the science team members were required to give blood beforehand, to get a baseline. Who knew what sorts of "radiation and whatnot," as McKay put it, they'd dig up on the planet.
Doctor Keller noticed he was there before he was ready to be noticed. She approached slowly, her hands behind her back, like she was looking at an exhibit in a zoo or something. "Doctor Zelenka?" she ventured.
"Hello, Doctor Keller," he answered. Wringing his hands, he took a few quick steps further into the infirmary.
"You want to give me some of your blood, too?" Doctor Keller asked jokingly. She seemed too young for the title, but Radek thought that of quite a few members of the expedition. Or maybe she was older than she looked. He tried to ignore her deft, delicate hands picking up two gloves, a syringe, and four tubes.
"Um, 'want'…? No, I'd rather keep it all. It's required, though, so I suppose… yes." Radek sat on the bed when Doctor Keller indicated he should and took off his jacket. The infirmary was always so damned cold, wasn't it? Didn't cold make blood vessels smaller? He didn't need that kind of stress.
"Don't worry, it won't take but a minute." Doctor Keller got all her instruments of pain and torture together and snapped on her gloves. She laughed lightly when she came to his side. "No need to be nervous, Doctor."
"Nervous." Radek chuckled. Or, rather, tried to. He sort of ended up snorting and choking on his own breath, drawing a sympathetic smile from the young Keller. "I'm not."
Nice recovery. He rolled his eyes at his own obviousness.
"I'll be quick," she said.
And it didn't help that she was treating him like a child, either. Maybe because she was actually a child. Very close, anyway.
"Don't trouble yourself," he mumbled and rolled up his sleeve.
Doctor Keller tied an elastic blue strip around his arm and pulled his elbow close. She squinted at the bend in his arm, tapping the vein there with two gloved fingers. "Do they usually take blood from this arm?" she asked, sounding a little uncertain.
Radek sighed and shrugged. "All the doctors tell me my veins are impossible."
Keller giggled. "No wonder you hate this." She rubbed the disinfectant on his arm and picked up her syringe. "Ready?"
Just get it over with. He smiled, instead. "Yes." He looked at his arm, where in a few moments a sharp steel needle would be stuck under his skin. It was really just a prick, but most of the medical personnel, even Atlantis's practiced and professional team of doctors, sometimes had to dig around for a vein. Bloodwork usually left a four-day bruise.
Doctor Keller didn't have to dig, though. "There."
Radek just nodded and didn't look. Truthfully, he hated the sight of blood—especially his own—and had a low threshold for pain. She was far better at this than Doctor Cole, though, apparently. Or else just lucky.
"Are you faint at the sight of blood or something?" she asked.
"Not sure," he said. "I don't think I've ever looked long enough." Being poked, prodded, and dissected vial by vial was one of the more unpleasant parts of 'gate travel. Near intolerable. He'd gotten out of it so far by only going offworld once, and that to a rather uninteresting planet.
Doctor Keller obviously picked up on his obvious discomfort. "Why don't you try thinking about something else?" she asked. "I'll be just a couple more seconds."
"Think about something else," Radek muttered to himself.
It wasn't as hard as he imagined it would be. "Is that…" He looked around the infirmary for something tropical-looking. Maybe a fruity donation from the botany department. "Is that mango?" he asked, glancing at Doctor Keller to see if she smelled it, too.
Doctor Keller blushed. "Oh, I think that's my shampoo."
"Oh." He contemplated that for a few seconds. He'd forgotten shampoo could smell like things. But now that he thought about it, that explained why he smelled cherry blossoms around Anna so frequently. "It smells nice."
What? Why did he say that?
Doctor Keller blushed even more fervently. "Um, thank you."
"Not that, I mean…" Radek couldn't figure out how to explain himself out of that weird comment. "Not that I have ever smelled your hair on purpose." Good god. Just shut up.
Doctor Keller was kind enough to pretend he didn't just say that. "I should probably switch shampoos. Strong scents were never allowed when I worked in hospitals, because people can be allergic to them."
"I wonder if Rodney is allergic to the smell of lemon…" Maybe it could be Rodney-repellant. He realized at Doctor Keller's baffled look that probably didn't make much sense if she didn't know… "Because Rodney is allergic to citrus."
"Oh." Doctor Keller giggled and shrugged. "I'm not sure."
"All done," she said a moment later. She stabilized his arm with her hand, gauze pad at the ready. She withdrew the needle, and caught the stray dribble of blood with the gauze. "That wasn't so bad, was it?"
"All things considered," Radek said, "you're not too bad at stabbing people." Alright. Time to just stop talking. Maybe forever.
"I think I just got lucky this time." Keller looked just as confused as Radek felt. "They said that the doctors on Atlantis do everything. I didn't realize they meant everything."
"What do you mean?"
"On Earth, doctors don't draw blood."
On Earth, physicists didn't concern themselves with plumbing, but just this morning Radek fixed a problem with the showers in the quarters in the Central Tower. Colonel Sheppard was uncharacteristically grumpy about it.
"Hold this. It'll just be about five minutes. In the meantime, we can get your brain scans done."
Radek pressed on the temporary dressing while Doctor Keller marked the vials with Radek's name. He was surprised she didn't even have to ask him what it was. Spelled it right and everything.
"So how's Anna?" Doctor Keller asked.
Right, Anna. That was a much better conversation topic than stabbing and blood and... hair that smelled like mangoes. "I don't know," he answered. "You probably see more of her than I do."
Doctor Keller smiled fondly. "She's a sweet girl."
"I had nothing to do with that." And continued to have nothing to do with it.
After wrapping the gauze to his arm, Doctor Keller directed Radek to the huge Ancient machine that they used for head and full-body scans. Radek had no idea how it worked. That felt closer to the realm of of a doctorate in physics than plumbing, but, well, there it was.
"I don't know," Doctor Keller mused a moment later as she set the apparatus next to his head.
"Don't know what?" Radek asked.
"You were involved in the first seven or so years of Anna's life, weren't you?" Keller asked.
"Oh." Involved. Well, that was a funny word. If living in the same house passed for involvement, then yes. He was. Radek nodded absently until he realized that Keller was trying to get a scan of his brain. "I suppose I was. A little." Those days sometimes seemed like yesterday. And then he thought of the teenager living in the next room and they couldn't have seemed more distant.
"I guess you did miss some important things. Broken arms, broken hearts, birthdays, crushes… But there's still plenty of time for all that. Read this out loud, please." Keller handed Radek a tablet with a stock paragraph in Czech about paper production.
He tried to concentrate on reading so that the brain scan would show correctly, but his mind ran away with him. Crushes? That wasn't necessarily going to be a problem here on Atlantis, considering the shortage of kids her age. On the other hand, Radek had already established that Anna saw Keller a great deal more than she saw him. Did she know something he didn't?
That almost went without saying.
He finished reading the paragraph and handed it back.
"What makes you say?" he asked.
"What makes me say what?" Keller asked.
"Has Anna told you something…?" He didn't know how to phrase that without seeming nosy. He shrugged and took the tablet from Doctor Keller when she handed it back. This time it had a logic puzzle he assumed he was supposed to solve. "Never mind," he mumbled and got to work.
He decided to ignore it for the time being. But Keller was right. Radek missed a lot and Anna was older. Much older than that seven-year-old who thought that boys were disgusting creatures to be avoided at all costs.
That seven-year-old was correct. But that didn't mean she was coming back.
#
"What are you reading?"
Anna looked up over the top of her book. Radek sat in the chair across from the couch, even though she was sitting on the floor in front of it, with his own book. It looked considerably less interesting, and definitely more Czech. "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams," she answered. Colonel Sheppard said she would like them—since it was really several books in one volume—and that it was perfectly apt for their situation. He said even Doctor McKay would agree.
The next day he gave her a bath towel.
"In English?" he asked, peering at the book cover.
"Yeah."
He looked impressed and nodded.
"It isn't hard," she said.
"I wouldn't spend my leisure time reading something in English," he said. "It seems too much like work." He looked down at his folded hands, tapping his fingers one after the other. She closed her book and waited for him to say whatever it was he sat down to say.
"You know about Project Arcturus, yes?"
Anna nodded. She knew this was coming. "You're going offworld. Probably for a long time."
"Yes. Well, not at first." Radek looked apologetic. "At first we'll just be deciphering logbooks and trying to figure out what it is."
She nodded and opened her book again. "Watch out for the wild dogs."
He chuckled, half-heartedly. She was surprised when he didn't get up and walk away after that. He didn't even move. He just sat staring at his hands like he hadn't seen them in ten years.
Anna could only guess he was trying to figure out a way to say something. She couldn't imagine what. It was too late for her to go to Arkos with Iskaan, and she doubted that his going to another planet was going to give him a change of heart, anyway. She went back to her book.
"How is life?"
Anna looked back up. "What?"
"Are you happy?"
Two ridiculously unexpected questions in only so many seconds. "I guess so. Why?"
She wasn't unhappy, anyway. Not by any means. Most days she could get by without being bored, and she was almost getting used to the constant brainwork. She had Ronon and Teyla to teach her bantos fighting, and that was entertaining in its own way. Colonel Sheppard was taking her marksmanship (or lack thereof) personally. Jennifer was fun to talk to and Elizabeth was patient in teaching her English. Collins was good at translating everything she wanted to know about Atlantis into everyday English, and fun to talk to besides.
She wouldn't have called any of them friends, per se. But they were tolerant of her being there, which was more than she could usually say for Doctor McKay.
He shrugged and spoke slowly. "I worry that you regret coming to Atlantis."
Anna had regrets, but coming to Atlantis wasn't one of them. "I don't regret coming to Atlantis."
"There is no one your age here for you to talk to, and I will be gone for probably many weeks. I'll be back now and again, but I will be gone the majority of the time."
Which wasn't all that much different from usual. "I'm fine," she said.
He sighed and nodded. She got the sense there was a lot more that he wanted to say, but he didn't say it. He just stood up and turned to his room. "We leave early tomorrow morning. I probably won't see you for breakfast."
"That's fine."
He hesitated. "Alright." He went to his room.
Anna watched the door for a while after it closed. She probably should have been more specific about her regrets. But regrets didn't change anything. They were just a way to dwell on things that no longer made any difference.
Moving on. That was how Atlantis worked. And probably everywhere else, too, but she just didn't know it. So she moved on from Arkos and tried to move on from something so silly as being angry about that. She wasn't really angry about that anyway… Not anymore.
She had a feeling that she could get there if she tried hard enough. She had a bath towel now.
A/N: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I highly recommend it. Hilarious book. I think there was a film, too. And a radio show? Stuff. Anyway, I guess my Hitchhiker's references are only an episode or two late. There wasn't time in Duet. (Ha?)
Also, my beta told me he wished I would change this chapter, or, at the very least, I should apologize for the cringe. I refuse to pretend that the whole "he's always telling me how nice my hair smells" thing didn't happen. (But, you know, I'm sure Zelenka's a very good person. He's the best.) So this is me, not apologizing.
I would also like to use this ever-expanding author's note to thank everyone who leaves reviews! You make my day. I treasure each of them and try to make every adventure better than the last for you guys. It just takes a while... On that note, see you all next week!
Next time: But what do I have to be grateful for?
