Reminder:
"This is spoken English."
"This is spoken Czech."
This is a thought.
Previously: Anna's preparing for Radek's birthday (chapter 65, 69-70). Radek's been doing team-things (since chapter 66).
Chapter 71. Krásně a Nonstop.
Radek always slept in on his days off. Sometimes he actually got to sleep in, because sometimes Doctor McKay didn't call him with some invented emergency. February 7th was a special day, and Atlantis seemed to know. It was eight-thirty in the morning, now.
Anna leaned back on the couch and watched the ceiling while she bowed the strings on her violin. This just wasn't sounding right at all. Of course, it had been a long time since she'd heard the song or seen the sheet music. She committed it to her little twelve-year-old memory for whatever reason, even though the song was older than she was.
That suddenly didn't seem so long, actually.
She wasn't even sure if it sounded right. She didn't remember what it was supposed to sound like.
The door must have slid open and shut without her noticing because Radek spoke up a second later. "Was that supposed to be 'Nonstop'?"
Anna spun on the couch and smiled. So it didn't really sound like it. But it sounded like it enough, apparently. "You could tell?"
"Well, it was recognizable." He chuckled and came out into the room.
Anna wasn't sure if that was a compliment or what. "I was going to play it for you later, but I can't get it to sound right. So… um, všechno nejlepší k narozeninám?" *
"Thank you. It's been years since I heard that song."
Anna laughed. "I imagine it will be a few years more until you do."
"It wasn't so bad," he mumbled.
She sighed. "You're a physicist, not a musician."
He shrugged, like that was a good point. But he still didn't look like he was happy with her self-assessment. Michal David was one thing. But if he wanted to hear something by Tchaikovsky, it would be fine.
"I was learning to play it a long time ago from one of those pop music books mom gave me for fun. When I played it for her, she told me it reminded her of you. And so… I don't know, I always associated it with you," she explained. It was a fair miracle he could tell what it was, much less remember the name of it. There was a long time between 1983 and now. "Anyway, I didn't commit so much of it to memory, so that's why it sounds awful." There was also the issue of it being popular music on a violin with limited arrangement.
He seemed a little amused by that, but didn't say anything else.
"At least there's fruit dumplings?" she offered.
He slid his glasses off and cleaned them with the little cloth he kept in his inside jacket pocket. "At least there's that..." He glanced up, hopeful. "Wait, really?"
Anna pointed toward the little stove and the dumplings that were only ten minutes cooled. Dumplings cooled fast, but she made sure that the blueberries had the consistency and temperature of magma, so she was pretty sure that they were still good. Besides, powdered sugar made up for a multitude of sins.
Then she noticed he was wearing his uniform.
She jumped up off the couch. "You're not going to the lab, are you?" There went her plans for the rest of the day… She cast a glance toward the little box next to the dumplings wrapped in the brightest-colored fabric she could find. Not a lot of paper on Atlantis.
"Rodney apparently found something interesting on his mission last night." Radek shrugged, a grin on his face. He was going to work on his birthday. People did not look so happy about that. "An Ancient warship called the Aurora."
"An Ancient warship...!"
"Don't get too excited. It was destroyed," Radek went on. "But they were able to upload the schematics and other information from its database. Rodney wanted to talk about it this morning, split the work. Do you want to see?"
Anna nodded. She set her violin carefully on the counter. She never would have done that last year, but this was a world of alien warships. Her violin didn't seem so important. Who wouldn't want to take a look at alien warship schematics on their birthday, anyway? Probably better than her plans.
Except… "Dumplings first?" she asked.
"I haven't had fruit dumplings since I left home."
Anna couldn't help her small smile at his referring to the Czech Republic as home. Maybe dumplings had a way of reminding someone where they were from… alien warships or not. She took the plate he handed to her and dabbed her finger on the sprinkled sugar. She licked her finger and then pointed to the box.
"And that's for you."
He glanced at the box wrapped in what looked like a curtain. Maybe it used to be. "You didn't have to…"
"Yes, I did. Sorry about the wrapping job. You wouldn't believe how low-priority wrapping paper is around here." She sat on the floor in front of the couch while he brought over the box and his plate of dumplings.
He smiled, eying the box. He looked somewhat concerned about its existence. Like he wasn't sure what to do with a gift. He untied the string holding the fabric wrapped around the box, and lifted the cover.
Pretty much exactly the reaction Anna expected he'd give to receiving a particularly violent-looking knife as a birthday present. It was the shining black knife Ronon gave her. It looked a bit on the dangerous side for Radek… but, then again, he was on the dangerous side what with going offworld and everything.
"Oh my," he mumbled. He looked afraid to touch it.
"You're going offworld now. You need to know how to defend yourself up close, right?" Anna took the knife out of the box for him and showed him how to hold it. "I can teach you."
He looked less interested in that than he did in the Ancient warship. Expected. He looked sad somehow, like maybe that was the last thing in the galaxy he wanted to be doing on his birthday. She carefully put the knife back in the box and wondered what in the world else she could have done for his birthday.
Math puzzles. She could have tried her hand at making a math puzzle.
That was stupid. She'd never come up with something that would stump him… Except for the knife. That pretty well puzzled him. Maybe she should have waited to give him the knife for April Fool's day… except she really did want to teach him how to use it.
"Or," she added, "we don't have to."
He cleared his throat and cut one of the dumplings on his plate in half. "No," he said quietly. "No, I'd like to do that. Thank you." He took a bite of the blueberry dumplings, and nodded appreciatively. "These are amazing," he said. "Your mother made them just like this."
Anna smiled a little. "Well, she did teach me how to make them."
"You learned well."
He seemed to be in a hurry to leave, so she hurried through eating, too. Couldn't keep those warships waiting, after all. She couldn't believe he wanted to go to the lab on his birthday, but she wasn't going to argue. It was his birthday, after all. They could play chess later.
"There you are," Doctor McKay said irritably when they walked into his lab. "For a while, there, I thought you weren't going to show up."
"Sorry," Radek said, joining him at his console.
Anna frowned at his sudden obsequiousness. Maybe he should skip everything and learn knife defense. Doctor McKay might think twice in the future. "It's his birthday," she snipped. "And his day off. You're lucky we're here." With that, she dragged a chair over to watch the schematics fly by.
"Hm." Doctor McKay looked from Anna to Radek. "Happy birthday. You're older than me, right?"
Anna glanced between them for a moment. If Radek was thirty-eight…
Radek sneered at Doctor McKay. "If your behavior is any indication, yeah."
"Only by a year." Both of them looked at Anna with surprise. "A year and two months."
Doctor McKay was probably surprised, because she knew when his birthday was. His birthday was in April, a year after Radek's and what felt like a universe away. Because Radek was right. Doctor McKay was a child. Anna decided to find out everyone's birthdays after talking with John, and she figured she couldn't just let slide Doctor McKay's now… Or maybe she could make a protest of it. She knew his birthday, and she wasn't celebrating it. Thank you very much.
Radek was probably surprised that Doctor McKay was only a year younger than he was. Because, once again, Doctor McKay was a child. Lest anyone forget that important bit of information.
"Oh, really?" Doctor McKay caught Radek in a glare. "A whole year."
"You're still a child," Radek said.
"And yet," Doctor McKay sighed in satisfaction, "still smarter than you."
Radek took a moment to blink at Doctor McKay as if deciding how to respond. Finally, he didn't. He spun to look at Anna. "Anna. You had other plans for today? Because I think McKay knows what he's doing." Radek slid from the seat he'd taken.
"To je frajer teda," Anna mumbled sarcastically. She headed for the door. She half-expected Radek wouldn't follow her. To her eternal surprise, he did.
"Ježiši." Radek chuckled. "Já s těma hercema nemůžu dělat."
"Oh, come on," Doctor McKay groaned, slapping two laptops shut and picking up a tablet. For some reason, he trailed them out into the hallway. "It's bad enough when he does it. Do you both have to?"
Anna whipped around to grin at Doctor McKay. "No, jo. Proč ne?" **
Radek looked pleased. Maybe this was the best birthday present ever.
"Well, where are you going to go now?" Doctor McKay asked.
Radek looked down at the box in his hand, pulled the lid off it. He showed it to Doctor McKay. "Anna is going to teach me how to use this." He looked at Anna, and joked, "Probably so I can kill him later?"
Anna smiled and shook her head. "I don't think that would be a very good idea."
Doctor McKay immediately halted his steps, apparently imagining their plotting his demise by the very shiny black knife. He might even have recognized it from Ronon's stash. But probably not. "Okay, um…" he mumbled. "Well, have fun. Happy birthday."
"Thank you, Rodney. See you tomorrow."
#
Anna made a good fruit dumpling, and an even better goulash. The day was almost over, a miraculous and legitimate day off, and he still couldn't believe that Anna had gone to such trouble as to put together a birthday celebration. He never thought he'd hold a knife for anything more than chopping ambiguous vegetables for the rare home cooked meal. But today, he had for almost three hours. And, to his surprise, he knew a few good places to cut a human body now.
Radek Zelenka, physicist, knew where the femoral and brachial arteries were. Wonders never ceased.
The strangest thing of all was that he was neither disturbed nor disgusted by his sixteen-year-old daughter explaining a variety of methods of dismembering attackers with a single knife and a few good strikes. Well, as a human being, he was a bit disturbed and disgusted. As the father of that teenaged daughter, he was at least assured that she could defend herself against unwanted attention.
In a pinch, he supposed he could do it. Or at least, assuming her amore lived on Atlantis, treat anyone dating her to very, very cold showers until such a time as they decided to break it off.
He never had such violent thoughts accompany thoughts of romance before. It was probably just part of the father-of-a-teenaged-daughter territory. He watched her carefully put away all the pots and pans… and knives… He didn't envy any boy who noticed how beautiful she was.
"Well, I hope that wasn't too terrible a birthday," Anna said. She went to sit by the window with her violin. She started plucking the strings. Trying to pick out "Nonstop" again, apparently.
However inaccurate it would be to say he liked the song, it would be equally unfair to say he didn't. It was an easy song to find in the world of retro radio, and had once been Eliška's favorite song. At least, that's what she told him their first night she dragged him out to dance. Come on, Radek, I love this song. Please? Hushing his internal objections, he trailed her to the floor and suffered through. Well, he couldn't quite call watching Ela dance suffering, could he? Besides, the next song turned the lights low, and he held her close for three minutes and twenty-one seconds. Best night of his life.
Yes, he loved that song.
"You'll have to tell me what your favorite thing to eat is," Anna said suddenly. "We'll have that next year."
"Blueberry dumplings," he said. "I think you got it."
She smiled happily up at him for half a second before going back to the violin. "Good. I think the only Earth fruit we have here are strawberries and blueberries. And…"
"You're allergic to strawberries," Radek said softly. He couldn't believe he'd forgotten that.
"Well, so are you." And she hadn't forgotten that? Must have been listed in his personnel file.
Yeah, right. Right underneath his birthday, it listed his allergy to strawberries. "It doesn't come up often."
Anna smiled and shook her head. Then she went back to plucking the strings of the violin.
He was just going to listen and try to enjoy it. Try to remember when Eliška was alive, they were together, and life was more-or-less beautiful. Always less beautiful than he imagined it, maybe. And these things always ended long before he thought they would. Or should.
Anna sighed and sat up straight, away from the window. "It wasn't a horrible birthday, was it?"
He chuckled, shook his head. The first legitimate birthday celebration he'd had in years. Last year, he gave Collins a beer but didn't say why. It didn't really matter, either. "No, it was lovely. Thank you."
"Good." She looked a little bit ashamed as she bowed the strings once. She suddenly stopped. "I hope the gift wasn't horrible. I know you probably don't like knives…"
He shrugged. He was no knife aficionado, and that was obvious from their lesson today. He came away not only knowing how to hold a knife, but how to give it to somebody else. Blade-first.
She wanted to teach him more tomorrow.
"I don't think I dislike them…" he said.
"Alright, good. Well…" Anna put her violin under her chin. "I'll give this a shot. Hold all your applause. And your jeering. Because this is going to be really bad, even if it is just the melody line."
He leaned back on the couch and listened to the clear notes from Anna's violin. It didn't really sound anything like the song that he knew, but that was fine. Just so long as she never heard the truth about the knife.
He'd lied. He hated knives. He hated anything that could hurt anyone. He used to, anyway. Now that he shared a galaxy with life-force vampires, he thought differently. He even thought a little bit differently when he lived on Earth, and learned that there were malevolent worms and self-replicating robots bent on enslaving humans and destroying their planet. That was the first time in his life he could see himself being pleased designing a series of railguns to put on a spaceship.
Alright, he might have appreciated that under other circumstances.
Railguns on spaceships. It didn't get much cooler.
The situation demanded it and he legitimately enjoyed arguing with the other scientists—or, rather, listening to the other scientists argue, since he was so self-conscious about his English—about the best places to put those guns. He just never wanted to see them in action.
Knives were different. He never wanted to get close enough to get someone's blood on his hands. Didn't want to think about how to position the knife to do maximum damage with minimum spray. That was physics. Just not his kind of physics.
But he didn't just "not dislike" that knife.
He loved that knife.
Probably the most beautiful birthday present he could think of. It wasn't so much the knife… no, he was pretty sure he didn't want one of those. He didn't want to know how to hold one, much less how to use one. He could think of a few things he wanted to know above which arteries to cut to lead to an attacker bleeding out as fast as possible. He could go the rest of his life without knowing that, actually. Could go the rest of his life without knowing his daughter knew that, too.
She was right, though. He had to know how to defend himself offworld. She wanted him to be safe.
That was the best birthday present.
Czech Things
The title means "beautifully and nonstop," and is from the 1983 song "Nonstop" by Michal David. Not sure what it means, because I'm bad with interpreting lyrics when it's a language I know… But it's apparently a song you might still hear around even today, according to this article I read. Maybe a little too old for a twenty-something to consider their favorite, but, as a twenty-something, I still like to hear songs I knew when I was sixteen? I don't know; it seemed reasonable, okay? I still hear "She Will Be Loved" in the grocery store and that song is, like, 15 years old. So? That's the extent of it.
I feel like I'm overthinking this.
* Všechno nejlepší k narozeninám = basically "happy birthday." I think it's something like, "many happy returns of your birthday" or something along those lines.
** To je frajer teda = What a guy or Way to go, man (Thank you, Irresistible) / Ježiši, já s těma hercema nemůžu dělat = Jesus, I can't work with these actors. (Thank you, The Brotherhood) (uh… lol?) / No, jo. Proč ne? = Well, yeah. Why not? (Thank you, Google)
Thank Yous and Etc.
missmeow1968- I'm glad you enjoyed that. Whoa, you're right though; Eureka/Atlantis crossover? That sounds awesome. I should... I should not write a story for that. This story is a handful on its own. Supernatural/Avengers sounds awesome, though! Thanks for continuing to read!
Next time: I feel like I've been waiting for this forever… a month in about nine chapters forever…
