Hey there, kiddies. Sorry I didn't respond to any reviews from last chapter, apparently the site was being a bitch and didn't even register that I'd gotten any reviews for chapter two until recently.
I'm gonna try to stick with the Monday/Thursday update schedule, but while I have a fairly detailed outline for the next few chapters- as opposed to the vague 'this is where I wanna go and how I wanna get there' that counts as my normal outline- they're not actually written. The next two chapters at least will focus almost solely on the team learning to be a team. They will also go into more detail about the infrastructure of Elizabeth's network, which means introducing other characters. The next few chapters will also flesh out more of the various ways the power works for different people- in other words, all exposition type stuff. The fun stuff will start up again soon, I just need to build a foundation.
Also, the cut-scene-style writing in regards to Jeannie's visit was an experiment. The stuff needed to be included but I couldn't work it in any other way.
disclaimer: me no own.
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Chapter Three- Safety- in which Rodney's power decides it doesn't much care for intruding wild powers
Keepers were, as explained in a tag-team manner by McKay and Teyla, a rare and powerful lot. A good, well-established Keeper was worth his weight in gold a thousand times over. It took years to reach the proper level of power to be called a Keeper and seconds to destroy it. Strong in one way, dangerously fragile in another, Keepers were considered to be hands-off in the little semi-pretend game of war the various networks had going on. There were only about a dozen in North America; estimated world-wide total, somewhere around one fifty. A large percentage of them lived in- of all places- Poland. Go figure.
All of this, of course, did absolutely nothing to prepare John for the hell that was actually getting through the front door.
An outsider might have viewed it as the funniest damned thing they'd seen in years. John figured, given enough time, he could come to consider it amusing. At the moment, however, he really didn't care for Keepers. Or McKay. Or Ronon, that smirking bastard. Or much of anything, come to think of it.
McKay's house itself wasn't really a house so much as a mansion. It was far from city limits and set way off the road. It wasn't even in a gated community. It was just its own island of wealth and security with nothing around for miles. When John commented on the twelve-foot gate surrounding the place, McKay pointed out that it would be very hard to feel safe in a middle-class suburban two-story with only easily picked locks and shoddy sensors in the ways of security. John had to give him that.
Once they reached the gate McKay got out to fiddle with something. As he was sliding back into the driver's seat the gate swung open. McKay put the rental SUV back in gear and proceeded to creep forward half a foot before putting on the brake again.
The rear view mirror was angled in such a way that John, still stuck in the back row, only had to lean over slightly in order to see McKay's face. He found himself watching the Keeper. If he was going to be living here for a while, he would need to challenge McKay to a few hands of poker- there was no way he could lose against an opponent whose every thought was written on his face.
He watched as that clear blue gaze flicked back and forth between the steering wheel and the open gate. Steering wheel. Gate. Steering wheel. Ronon. Quick glance over his shoulder at the road behind them. Quicker glance at Teyla. Gate. Steering wheel. Teyla again, getting nervous now. He let the vehicle roll forward another eight inches, then stomped on the brake. Put it in park, let it idle as he stared at the gate. Put it in reverse and backed up a few feet. Put it in park for a second, then back in drive. Rolled forward six inches, brake, reverse for six inches.
"Is anyone else getting seasick?" John asked innocently.
"Out," McKay ordered. When his passengers hesitated, he made shooing gestures at them. "Out. Get out. I don't want this thing going past the gate. We're walking."
For a Keeper to be any good, they had to feel safe. If McKay didn't want the SUV near his house there was nothing to be done about it except leave it behind. He chased his reluctant guests out; once they were a fair distance away he swung the SUV around and parked it on the shoulder, facing away from the gate. John took advantage of this brief respite to study Ronon. Six three, maybe six four, probably two twenty pounds of pure muscle. John's first impression of him had been a grizzled old soldier; his second had been of a world-weary kid. Now he saw Ronon was a blend of both.
He had inherited his power, the meaning of which fairly easy to figure out. There was a story there, John thought, a long and bloody and disturbing story. He didn't plan on asking about it.
As McKay walked over to them, John suddenly realized both Ronon and Teyla were staring at the open gate as if it was a beach at Normandy. They were visibly preparing themselves for some difficult task. Not a good sign. John had a decent grasp of how this Keeping thing worked but didn't have even the faintest idea of the mechanics of it; watching them was not making him feel good about this whole thing. The gate opened to a long expanse of front yard. There was nothing special about it- no shimmer, no sparkle, no feeling of gathering power.
Because it wasn't gathering, he saw suddenly. It was already there, settled and steady and familiar. It was a thick blanket hovering under the sky and wrapping around the gate, and it felt as if it belonged to that place, as if that piece of land wasn't complete without it, and suddenly John understood. He understood what Teyla had been trying to explain. He understood why this bossy, demanding, impatient, arrogant son of a bitch was so important to so many people.
A Keeper was more than just a protector of physical objects. A Keeper was proof, reassurance. There was still magic in the world, even if those who used it didn't like calling it that, and people were still helping others simply because they needed help. Everything was going to be all right in the end, no matter how fucked up it got in the middle, because no bedtime story ended badly. It was an unscheduled recall to the worry-free days of childhood. That, John realized, was the true power of a Keeper: safety.
"I'm sorry, are we going to go in or just stand here and admire the view?"
John shook himself and looked at McKay, standing several feet in front of them with arms folded and scowling darkly. This probably should have broken the spell but somehow didn't, which made it all the more impressive. He glanced at the other two, shrugged, and stepped into the thick fog-bank of power.
Which promptly tried to kill him.
A few minutes later, when conscious thought returned, he found himself laying flat on his back. It took another few minutes before he heard something other than the freight-train rush of noise. There were still purple dots dancing in front of his nose, though, so he stayed still. It would probably be a few hours before he felt up to moving again, assuming the pain was misleading and he hadn't really just shattered every bone in his body.
Something dark interposed itself between him and the sky. It turned out to be Teyla's head.
"John? Are you all right?"
"Stupid question," McKay snorted from somewhere nearby. He sounded unsteady.
"What happened?" John asked carefully. He ran his tongue along his teeth and tasted blood. His lower lip had been split.
"Sit up, it'll feel better," the Keeper answered. John took a risk and pushed himself upright; surprisingly, McKay knew what he was talking about. The pain seemed to drain out of his body as he moved, although there was a moment of gripping nausea. He reached up a hand to feel his head for lumps and stopped to stare at his arm.
Teyla had been busy, it seemed. There were four new symbols scrawled on his left arm, as well as- he did a brief scan of his entire body- two on his right arm, one on his right knee, two on his shirt, and one on his left hand.
"Very interesting, watching her draw all over you without actually touching you," Ronon told him.
"Nice," John muttered, rubbing a thumb over the marks on his knee. The red lines looked like half-dried blood stains on the denim.
"I've never had a wild power around here before," McKay babbled, face pale and hands flitting around uselessly, reaching out to touch John but recoiling inches from contact. "Well, except Ronon of course, but his power was stable long before he got here. I had no idea that was going to happen, it shouldn't have happened, I let you in the same way I let everyone else in-"
Teyla interrupted with one of her ward-words and the red ink decorating John lit up like a string of Christmas lights. "Try it again," she advised, and John let out a hard bark of laughter. Try it again? Did she want him dead for some reason?
He pushed himself to his feet- neither Teyla nor McKay moved to help him- and stared at the gate. There was about fifteen feet of driveway between it and him. Ronon was inside, smirking a challenge at him.
"What are you grinning at?" John muttered darkly. The smirk grew.
"I like it here."
"A ringing endorsement. I'll have to remember to put it on the brochure." McKay, it appeared, was never going to want for a snappy comeback. It was a good thing the guy didn't leave his house much because with a mouth like that he was simply begging for trouble. With the long-suffering air of the unwillingly experienced, Ronon ignored him.
John took a deep breath and headed forward again, pausing only slightly as he reached the gate before stepping through. There was a slow, steady pressure pushing on every inch of his body and the air was forced from his lungs in one rush. Then he was through and it was just like the other side except he was on the safe side of the gate and there was a little voice in his head that was saying you're safe now nothing's going to hurt you ever again. Which was a blatant lie, but a little bit of denial could sometimes be a good thing.
They then began the long cold march up the driveway. Rodney spent most of the walk rattling off an endless spiel of complaints, starting with how cold it got in December, working its way through how he'd had to leave his own car behind, all the way up to how bad they were at rescuing people, what with power going berserk and his would-be killer escaping and whatnot. Ronon was rolling his right shoulder and massaging his bicep with his fingers as if his arm had fallen asleep. Teyla spent most of the walk trying to head Rodney off, then gave up and drifted over to walk silently beside John.
When they reached the house, however, the relative peace was shattered yet again.
"No-no. No no no. Don't even think about it." McKay, in three large strides, planted himself between John and the house, arms folded and jaw set. John blinked at him. It had been an odd day, to say the least, and from his stomach's complaints he hadn't had a thing to eat since dinner last night. Not to mention he felt like he'd run a couple dozen miles without stopping and his muscles felt like overcooked spaghetti. If he had ever been in less of a mood for McKay's bluster, he couldn't recall it.
"McKay, move," he ground out warningly.
"Excuse me? Did you just- do you think I'm one of your Air Force flunkies you can just order around? This is my house and you're not coming in until you do something about that filth."
"Rodney!" Teyla had evidently lost her patience. So had John, though he managed to set his jaw and let her take the lead.
"Oh, don't act all high-and-mighty, you won't even touch him!" Rodney shot back. Then his eyes went wide and his postured changed in one heartbeat from aggressive to defensive, as if he expected her to hit him. He started to say something, changed it to something else, changed that to something else, then gave up. Teyla merely watched him, disapproval radiating off her in waves.
"Want me to go get a hose?" Ronon offered mischievously.
"For Christ's sake, I'm not a dog!" John exploded. "And I'm not even that bad. I took a shower this- well. Probably not this morning, I was kinda busy being shanghaied, but I took one yesterday morning."
"It has nothing to do with you physically," McKay explained shortly. "It's not physical, it's more spiritual, if you will. Think of the Catholic church- sins and confessions and whatnot."
"And whatnot." John echoed tonelessly. Something told him McKay was not a religious man. Then again, neither was John.
"Some people seem to think that it's connected to life's various hardships. You know, the more difficult your life, the more it stains. It's a load of bull. No one really knows why some people are just filthy, that's just the way it is, and you are really, really bad." He wrinkled his nose in disgust. "Warders and Keepers are more sensitive to it than most. Unfortunately it spreads easily and if you go in my house as you are now, I will seriously have to replace the carpet and burn everything you touch. So, you're not going in."
"Warders are sensitive to it, huh?" John mused. He glanced at Teyla, who nodded once. "So what do I have to do?" he asked finally, since McKay appeared to be uncompromising. The Keeper assessed him with a long look, then turned to the Warder. He started talking quickly, words slowing noticably as she glared at him.
"Can we just- with the hose? It'll take two minutes and we'll take him inside right after, he won't get that cold- fine. This way." And he started to lead them around the side of the house. Teyla rewarded his acquiescence with a brilliant smile and followed. John turned to Ronon.
"Am I really that bad?"
"Can't feel it," he shrugged. "Not my thing." And he headed into the main house with another smirk. John sighed and followed the other two. If he was really that offensive to them, then the least he could do was humor them.
This plan backfired horribly once they reached the pool house. McKay greeted him with a one-word order.
"Strip."
"Uh, what?" All right, scratch that idea.
"Your clothes. Take them off." McKay drew out the words as if trying to explain a difficult concept to a small child. When John failed to respond, the Keeper gave an agitated growl and snapped his fingers at him. "Clothes! Off! Bad enough you're filthy and I'm letting you in anyways, you're not going in there with clothes that reek of wild power and warding ink!"
"I'm not putting on a strip show on your front yard either," John snapped back. He had just about had it with this guy.
"No one is asking you to. And what Rodney is trying to ask is if he brings you some clean clothes, would you be willing to change in the front hall?" Teyla rested one hand, lightly, on John's forearm and one on Rodney's shoulder.
"Sure," he said finally, because when she put it like that there wasn't really a different answer. McKay grumbled to himself and headed into the house.
You're doing it wrong.
John's head came up and he looked at Teyla and found her gone after McKay. He was by himself.
"Doing what wrong?" he asked slowly. With all the other weird shit happening around here, was it so odd that he was now hearing voices?
Rodney. You're not taking the right approach with him. The way you're doing it now, the only thing he's going to do is dig in his heels and fight that much harder. Rodney McKay has broken stronger people than you that way.
"Right. Any suggestions on how I should handle him, or are you just gonna tell me what I'm doing wrong? Which, by the way, isn't really all that helpful."
No answer. Figures. John shrugged it off and slowly, carefully stepped through the pool house's front door. Teyla had deactivated the wards on the walk up here; they flashed once, briefly, as he stepped over the threshold. Other than that nothing happened. Mindful of McKay's fits, John wrapped his arms around himself and pointedly avoided touching anything.
"Here," that sharp voice snapped at him suddenly, and he turned just soon enough to catch a bundle of fabric with his face. McKay was sullen and sulky and glaring at John as though he were personally responsible for everything that had ever gone wrong since the dawn of time. John sorted through the fabric that had just been lobbed at him and found himself holding a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt. For a moment he merely stood there, waiting. Then he cleared his throat, shifted his weight, and jerked his chin towards the hallway door.
"What? Oh! Oh, right, going away now." And McKay did exactly that. John allowed himself a small smile at that. Maybe... a little patience, a lot of tolerance, as much sarcasm as he could manage... maybe the voice was right.
The wards on his clothes didn't want to let go of him. The one on his knee was particularly stubborn; John literally ran himself into the wall trying to pry his leg free. He finally had to call for help, which was really one of the most humiliating things ever, especially since it took Teyla all of two seconds to fix the problem- she pulled out that evil marker and drew a line through the glyph. The only high point in that entire scenario was that McKay hadn't been around to see that.
He was going to start carrying around his own marker after this.
The clothes fit decently well. Stuffed into one pocket was a balled-up pair of socks, which he put on despite the instantaneous- and doubtless immature- desire to go barefoot just to see McKay twitch. Then there was about ten minutes of patiently waiting, ten more minutes of not-so-patiently waiting, and twenty minutes of exploring the house. The Keeper himself John found in what looked like a home office. He was carrying some sort of long plastic rod, like a conductor's baton, and waving it around aimlessly as he paced. John didn't quite duck fast enough to avoid taking a jab to the throat, although he considered it worthwhile since McKay shrieked and jumped when the stick made impact.
The stick was glowing subtly, a soft crystal-white light. It put John in mind of angler fish and other such deep sea glowies; it had the same hypnotic beauty. When McKay put it down the glow faded, and John found himself suddenly yearning to pick it up, to make it light up bright as the sun, and refrained from doing so only because the Keeper was fingering a paperweight in a decidedly unfriendly manner.
He was ushered up to a guest bathroom and told, repeatedly, to touch only what he absolutely must and nothing more. When he finally managed to convince McKay that he got it, he was handed a shampoo bottle that had nothing remotely resembling shampoo in it. The second John touched the container he yanked his hand away and stared at it as though the pastel-green plastic had just bitten him.
"What is that?" he demanded.
"Stuff," McKay answered shortly. "Cleaning stuff."
"So, it's soap?"
"If it was soap I would have said soap. It's a conglomerate of various chemicals and raw minerals that, with the inclusion of controlled doses of Alchemic power, compounds to form a low-grade Purge inhibitor that cleanses both your physical and, for lack of a better term, spiritual body."
"Huh. You said Alchemic power, right?"
"Yes."
"So... it's magic soap."
John didn't know of any word in the English language that most aptly described the look McKay gave him at that. 'Withering' probably came closest, although it did no real justice.
"Use all of it," the Keeper ordered, and John had the feeling that he had just been written off as a total idiot.
"Towel?" he asked after a quick glance around. For a long moment it looked as though he were going to be ordered to do without- he was going to be paying for that magic soap comment for a long time- then McKay sighed and headed back into the hallway.
When he came back, John was holding a travel-size bottle of body lotion. He turned it so McKay could see it. "You don't strike me as the Lavender Mist type, Rodney," he said, drawing the man's name out. Something in McKay's face went hard and he took the little bottle carefully, rolling it across his palm.
"Probably my sister's," he muttered, more to himself than John. He glanced up and John rocked back on his heels. He looked lost and scared and lonely, like a little kid who didn't understand why his parents were screaming at each other, and John had to fight off the desire to do something immensely stupid like pull him close and kiss that sadness away.
Oh, hell. Not going there, John, remember? Not. Going. There.
And then the moment was over, because McKay was back to studying the little bottle and saying something about how his sister had visited recently. John took the towel, tugged it away from him, and gestured towards the door. McKay got the point and left.
You see, Sheppard? a dark voice laughed in his head. This wasn't the same one as earlier. This one had plagued him for years. It's not really all that safe here in the Keeper's domain. Even the Keeper himself knows that.
Yeah, well, that was McKay's problem. John intended to get his feet under him, figure out what the hell was going on, and get gone.
There was a pink loofah sitting in one of the corners of the shower stall. Somehow, the sight of it made him feel guilty. He picked it up by the cord and tossed it into the small trash can tucked discreetly beside the toilet.
Not going there. Not today, not ever.
He picked up the magic soap, shivering at the power he could feel in it. It was a different kind of power than that he'd seen so far. Maybe he ought to rethink his plan- there was a whole new world out there and he was woefully unprepared for it.
"Alchemic, huh?" he said to the bottle. Alchemy he had heard of. Lead to gold, philosopher's stone, Sir Isaac Newton. He grinned at the bottle.
"Cool."
---
The first night she stayed at her Uncle Meredith's house, Madison Miller did not have a nightmare.
At this point in the story, the audience might grant the storyteller a blank look of the sort made famous by dairy cows. They might also ask if this is unusual, if the girl was prone to nightmares or had seen something that frightened her, and the confusion would only increase with the repeated answer of no. This would be doubly true if the storyteller in question was Madison's Uncle Mer, who could maybe tell a story in a linear manner with no distractions or digressions if his life depended on it, but only maybe.
As it was, the point behind this emphasized lack of a nightmare was thus: somewhere around one in the morning, Madison and her mother made the long, cold trek between the pool house where they had been set up and the main house where Uncle Mer lived. As a Keeper, he was well aware of everything that was happening on his property, and had had the porch light on and back door open long before they reached it. Madison, upon seeing him, had bolted from her mother and wrapped herself around her uncle's waist like some sort of blue-eyed octopus and began babbling about some bad dream she had had.
The catch, of course, being that children with power rarely dream and have no nightmares whatsoever.
Madison's Uncle Mer had given his sister a long, cold glare, filled with the special sort of hatred only siblings could evoke. Madison's mother had only shrugged and smiled. Meredith Rodney McKay was a lot of things. A bad uncle was not one of them. He had herded the two girls into the house and told Madison to pick her new room but just don't touch anything and calmly informed his sister that he hated her and she was all sorts of evil for using her daughter to score her own room in the bigger house. Jeannie merely kissed his cheek and told him that, while he would never really understand people, at least he got adorably flustered in the process of failing. She said 'adorable' in a way normally used to refer to teddy bears and shar-pei puppies.
At that point Madison's Uncle Mer gave up and went back to bed.
-
For all his protests over the two females making themselves at home in his house, Rodney was surprisingly tolerant of it. Jeannie unceremoniously booted him out of the master bedroom, pointing out that he spent more time in his basement lab anyways and by the way, she's a woman, she needs the big bathroom. Rodney, after a few token protests, let her have it and moved into the small bedroom in the basement.
Jeannie's realm soon expanded to include the kitchen. Before it had been a clean, almost sterile place. Rodney went in there to make coffee, heat up frozen pizzas and microwave dinners, and store leftover takeout in the fridge. This lead to an understandable lack of kitchenware that Jeannie found appalling. The first morning there she left for the store almost as soon as she got up. She returned four hours later loaded down with everything she thought a kitchen could possibly need.
She made good food, though, so he hadn't complained too much. He did call her a classic example of the domesticated housewife. She retaliated by trading out his French roast with that hideously cheap store-brand coffee. He accused her of trying to sabotage his work by means of exhaustion and added a parting comment about Madison's recommending her chocolate chip pancakes. She recognized the apology for what it was and gave him his real coffee back. That was just the way it worked with them.
If Jeannie was a slow invasion, Madison was full-scale nuclear war. The second he let her in she managed to get everywhere. He found crayon shavings ground into the carpet in the family room. A tube of glitter somehow got poured onto a blanket which then found its way into the wash, so he now had several shirts that shimmered pink. A brand new container of tiny hair clips spilled onto the bathroom floor and Rodney immediately developed the fun habit of finding the sharp-edged little bastards with his bare feet. The orderly handful of magnets on his fridge had a population explosion; the chrome front could barely be seen between plastic letters and gaudy tourist-trap magnets. One of the things Rodney objected most to was when the TV began to betray him as well- replacing Battestar Galactica and Star Wars with SpongeBob SquarePants and Finding Nemo. Rodney calmly informed his sister that there was no way in hell her daughter's viewing choices weren't rotting her brains. Jeannie's answer was that Madison is five, for god's sake, let her watch her cartoons, and by the way, exactly how is his viewing selection educational?
By the end of day five in a seventeen-day visit, the girls had made themselves right at home and Rodney, who honestly expected to have snapped long before now, found himself letting them.
-
Two solid days of SpongeBob and the sibling snark-fest turned out to be more than any of them could bear and Jeannie dragged all three of them back to the mall. She and Madison spent the afternoon stocking up on Christmas decorations since Uncle Mer was sadly lacking. Rodney spent the afternoon saying things like put that down! and treating everything Christmas-related as if it were a loaded weapon. The next field trip was devoted to buying presents, which meant Rodney had to spend the entire shopping trip staring at the ceiling so as to not be accused of peeking.
On day eight Jeannie declared herself sick of playing tourist in her home town and told Rodney to take Madison by himself. This triggered a panicky rant on how children were fragile and easily misplaced and he really didn't like kids to begin with. Five minutes later he was sitting in the car, studying his niece as he tried to decide what to do now.
"Little girls like horses, right?" he asked, and she nodded solemnly even as her eyes lit up.
They staggered back to the house sometime that evening. Madison was full to the brim of tales of white horses and white whales and fancy Italian restaurants. She was also dragging a stuffed beluga whale as big as she was. Jeannie gaped at her daughter's prize for a long moment, then sent her to put it in her room and turned a gimlet glare on her brother.
"I didn't even misplace her once," he told her, and he sounded so proud of himself she had no choice but to laugh.
-
It had been almost as though time wasn't really passing, as if they were on an island outside its reach. Two and a half weeks was certainly far longer than either of them had expected, but Madison acted as something of a buffer between them, preventing their arguments from reaching any real intensity. They both had their taboos- Rodney didn't mention Kaleb's lack of power or brains or anything in general that made him worth marrying, Jeannie didn't make any comments about the network that seemed to have abandoned her brother except when he was convenient to use.
All good things, however, must come to an end. At least this time they ended amiably. Rodney had been getting antsy, wanting to get back to spending large chunks of his day barricaded in the basement lab. Madison was starting to get whiny in the familiar way of a homesick child. Jeannie noticed both, and when Kaleb started calling two or three times every night 'just to chat', she decided to pack it in.
Rodney drove them out to the airport and escorted them to the terminal himself. He stood by one of the big bay windows and watched the plane take off. Then he went back to his quiet, empty house and simply hovered in the doorway for several long minutes before taking a sharp left and heading down to the basement.
The next three days were lost in a haze of coffee and sleep deprivation and work. When he finally reemerged from his lab he was in desperate need of a shower and a nap, except when he walked into his room he was hit in the face by a wave of nostalgia triggered by his sister's perfume.
After a nap in the guest room, Rodney set about the long and lonely business of de-girl-ifying his house. He vacuumed up crayon shavings and glitter. He picked the few remaining intruding magnets off the refrigerator and put them in a drawer. He stripped his bed down to the mattress, washed the sheets and blankets, and shoved them into the far back corner of the linen closet. Ignoring the temperature outside, he opened his bedroom windows to let it air out. The stuffed beluga whale, which had been too big for the plane and he had promised to mail to them, was boxed up and sent on its way. Food he wouldn't eat or that would spoil was pitched out. The Christmas decorations he had said he'd put up when the holiday got closer were relegated to boxes which he put in the storage half of his garage.
Rodney McKay was a man on a mission. He intended to purge every shred of evidence that there had ever been anyone other than himself in the house. It took three days, but finally he walked through every room in his house and saw not one hint of Jeannie or Madison. He stopped in the living room in triumph...
… and was promptly smothered by a gripping loneliness he had experienced too many times before.
He left the house then, needing human contact even if it was with total strangers. He didn't inform Bates he was leaving and ignored Lorne's increasingly frantic phone calls. When the Genii woman had put her knife against his neck a small part of him had been tempted to laugh and tell her to go ahead and kill him.
Then Ronon Dex had melted out of the shadows, armed with that lovely gun of his, and everything suddenly got loud and busy again.
---
Rodney held the Lavender Mist body lotion tight in his fist. He hadn't bothered to look in the pool house; Jeannie had only spent a few hours there. He considered heading to the bedrooms to see what else his sister had left behind.
In the bathroom, water started running. Rodney glanced at the door.
"Magic soap," he scoffed. One hand came up to rest just shy of the door and the wood began to glow the soft blue-white light that had made Sheppard think of phosphorescence. "Make it cold," he said to the house, to the power it was soaked in, and the glow rippled away from his hand and faded into the walls. A moment later Sheppard started to curse.
Rodney merely tightened his grip on the small bottle in his hand and smiled.