Disclaimer: If we owned Atlantis, it would be a very different show.
A/N: Well, le Pen's overjoyed that her Jedi powers worked last time around, but as someone who's never seen those movies, TLI would also like to chip in her thanks to everyone who's reviewed so far. We hope you enjoy the next chapter :)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Chapter Five
After that night, which he still didn't fully understand, Rodney's days slowly started to melt into one another. He barely saw any of his former teammates, only catching the barest glimpses of them during repair operations in the gym and other designated training areas.
After two consecutive mornings of fumbling and stuttering his way through unfamiliar progress and team mission reports, Rodney had retreated from the arena of the briefing room, leaving that – like so much else – to Zelenka to handle. Doctor McKay's talents were of much more practical use in the laboratory, and after a week of being 'grounded' to base, Rodney had gotten more done than he would have in a month.
The worse thing was, though, that during the rare times he thought about it, nobody seemed to mind. Sheppard hadn't sought him out after the... that night. Not that Rodney was really expecting anything from Teyla or Ford – but still. It would have been nice.
Zelenka seemed to be coping with all the new pressures that came with basically doing Rodney's old job on top of his existing duties, and as a result had even less time for bickering and bantering with his boss than he had before.
And aside from Elizabeth and Carson – who were busy themselves doing their own things almost as much as Rodney himself, he didn't really know anyone else in Atlantis well enough to care that they were ignoring him.
Every so often he remembered to remind himself that he didn't care, but those moments were increasingly few and far between. Every two minutes, it seemed, somebody somewhere was damaging some ten thousand year old piece of equipment, or crashing twenty-first century hardware, or else doing something so inexplicably idiotic that Rodney was invariably called on to sort the problem out.
And in doing so time in, time out, he found that, for the first time in his life, he was glad to be surrounded by idiots, as work left him too busy to keep up the self-analysis thing for more than a few minutes at a time. Any longer than that, and he might have started to actually get into – shudder – sentimental territory. He hadn't done that at the SGC, he sure as hell hadn't touched on it in Russia, so the hell was he going to start in the Pegasus Galaxy.
Case in point for the idiots, one Brendan Gaul. Despite Rodney's continued insistences to the contrary, he'd been tinkering with some of Atlantis' dormant systems for nearly a month now, labouring under the delusion that a single naquada generator could provide the same power quotient as a full ZPM. As a result, around twenty-six percent of Rodney's assignments revolved around the small lab Gaul had claimed as his own centre of operations.
And today just happened to be the third time in four days that some piece of equipment in Gaul's laboratory had 'malfunctioned'. Toolbox swinging from one hand, Rodney strode through the open door.
Almost immediately Gaul's head popped up from behind a console. "Doctor McKay! That was quick!"
"Well, what would you know but my schedule was magically empty this morning," Rodney grumped, dumping the toolkit on a table. "So what's the problem this time?"
Gaul pulled a face and pointed to the smoking remains of what looked like...
"You brought me here, away from who-knows-how-many useful assignments to fix your iPod?!" Rodney demanded.
"That's actually a side-effect of the power supply to the long range sensors overloading," Gaul offered as Rodney made no effort to go over and pick the offending piece of broken technology up.
Rodney blinked at him. "We don't have long range sensors," he pointed out.
"Hence the overload," Gaul grinned. He reached out to Rodney. "Come here, I think I have something."
"Other than a monopoly on wasting my time?" Rodney muttered to himself.
Gaul ignored that comment, instead pointing to the monitor. "Just have a look at these readings. Please?"
He sounded like an overexcited kid, and reluctantly Rodney leaned in over the other scientist's shoulder.
"Do you see it?" Gaul asked excitedly. He pointed at a couple of the lines of adjacent scrolling Ancient and English language data.
Rodney squinted, trying to make sense of the different sets of numbers. "There's something there," he murmured. He squinted some more. "In our solar system..."
Gaul nodded quickly. "Something large – not a planet, it's not in that kind of orbit. Possibly geosynchronous to one of the outer planets, but its movements don't match that, either. See, there and there -" He jabbed at one set of Ancient equations, "- there's absolutely nothing in any of that to indicate natural movement."
Rodney twisted his head to stare directly at Gaul. "So it's unnatural movement."
"It looks that way," Gaul replied, "but I can't tell for certain – and won't be able to get a closer look at it without long range sensors functioning at at least ten percent capacity."
Pausing for a moment, Rodney glanced back at the figures on the screen. "That's not going to happen, given we're running on five naquada generators, but I might be able to give you five percent."
Gaul grinned widely. "That would be great!"
"I'll just – get right to it, shall I?" Rodney asked, only mildly acerbically.
Gaul turned back to the monitor, obviously already lost again in the numbers. "If you wouldn't mind..." he muttered.
Rodney scowled and pulled a scanner out of his toolbox. Settled himself in front of one of the open cavities in the wall behind the main computer console and got to work.
o o o o o
The next morning, Rodney was safely ensconced in the laboratory, working on some equations for the naquada generators, when Sheppard bounded through the open door, stopped in the middle of the room and looked around. Glancing up, Rodney scowled. "What do you want?" he asked. "I'm very busy, and I'm sure it's only a matter of minutes until someone in here breaks something. So whatever it is, it had better be import -"
"Actually, I was looking for Zelenka," Sheppard interrupting, barely sparing Rodney a second glance as he looked around the lab again. "Do you know where he is? I need him for a briefing with Doctor Weir..."
Rodney closed his mouth, feeling oddly hurt, but just as quickly brushing the feeling away. "Well, use your eyes," he snapped back. "He's obviously not here, is here?"
"Well, then," Sheppard drawled, turning back to face Rodney's work station again. "Where is he?"
Rodney stared up at him. "What am I, his keeper? Go find him yourself."
Sheppard shot Rodney an odd look. "Alright then, I will. Later, McKay," he threw back over his shoulder, already halfway out of the lab again.
Rodney watched the door close behind the major, and when he looked away, he caught Simpson staring at him. "What are you looking at?" he snapped.
Raising her eyebrows, Simpson pointedly returned to analysing the data she'd been given by Bates' team a couple of days before.
A few seconds later, feeling uneasy for reasons he didn't entirely understand, Rodney returned to his own work, but somehow his heart wasn't as in it as it had been before Sheppard's intrusion into the lab.
o o o o o
That same afternoon, Bates and his team returned from the planet they'd already secured a trade deal with, and Rodney received a radio call from Corporal MacKenzie to check out the targeting systems on the Puddlejumper they'd taken. It was the work of less than ten minutes to isolate and repair the offending circuitry. Shutting the Jumper's hatch behind him again, Rodney noticed for the first time that Jumper One was missing from its usual "parking space" directly opposite Jumper Three, Bates' ship of choice.
Still frowning, he left the Jumper bay, and took the staircase down to the control room, where Elizabeth and Grodin were watching the empty Stargate.
Rodney glanced at the 'gate as well. Just because. "So, is it just me, or is the Stargate especially pretty today?" he quipped.
Grodin shot him a withering look. "Major Sheppard has just left on a mission," he replied.
"Brendan Gaul discovered a satellite in the outer reaches of our solar system," Elizabeth added, turning to face Rodney. "The major's taken Doctors Zelenka and Gaul, as well as Joshua Abrams, to check it out."
Any reply Rodney might have had died on his tongue. He looked at the Stargate again. "Nobody said anything..." he said quietly, mostly to himself.
On the periphery of his vision, he caught Elizabeth giving him the strange look this time; Rodney decided to elaborate. "I fixed the power systems for Gaul to figure out what the anomaly past the seventh planet was..."
Elizabeth frowned. "Doctor Zelenka is obliged to fill you in on any major developments brought up in the briefing sessions," she said gently.
Rodney stared at her. "Well, he obviously forgot to this time around," he replied curtly. "I have to get going. Work to do, peons to correct."
"Okay," Elizabeth nodded, though she didn't look convinced.
Grabbing his toolkit – which was fast becoming a fifth limb – Rodney strode away from the control room without another look at the Stargate.
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