The Verge of Memory and Forgetfullness
Apr. 22nd, 2006 04:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caitDoes anyone remember, like a million years ago, when I told everyone in chat that I had written a lame ass sequel to Pru's very brill fic, Edges?? Well I finally found it buried in the middle of polisci notes. I really wanted to email it to her first, but I could not find her email - I'm sorry Pru! Take this as a public exultation of my love!
Um. It's a Grey's Anatomy crossover and if anyone has a better title please tell me.
'Zelenka' Rodney said, as Izzie came in to check his chart, 'John's dead.' Dr. Zelenka jumped up from where he was sitting in the corner reading the card that General Carter had sent, putting his hands on Rodney's shoulders. 'Yes Rodney, I'm very sorry - '
'He flew into a Wraith Hiveship.'
Dr. Zelenka's hands drifted off Rodney's shoulders and he looked at Izzie. Izzie could only stare down at the chart, her eyes burning.
'I never got to tell him - never mind, we have to get this working.' Rodney turned away and started pulling at his bedsheets.
The Verge of Memory and Forgetfullness
It had taken two months after the Stargate reveal before anyone in the hospital had put two and two together and realized that the John Sheppard who had quietly died in their hospital had been the same John Sheppard that was a hero of the galaxy and a protector of mankind.
It was Dr. Sheppard who realized it, right in the middle of a surgery. He looked up and only got out the first half of an "Oh my God" before the patient had started seizing and he had to concentrate before he died on the table.
*
There were dozens of books published by the people of Atlantis. Science and anthropology, books on military tactics and brilliant new charts and maps of the universe. Most of them went unread, and very few of them actually made it into any mainstream bookstore. They were too technical and much too brilliant. It was easy to talk about bold leaps in science and to describe the intricate workings of the ZPM but most people would never understand enough to understand that it was too advanced for them to even comprehend. People clamored for stories of Atlantis, the thrilling heroics of it all, but very few truly cared about the work that had happened there.
*
Izzie Stephens had married an elementary school teacher and had moved with him to Vancouver when she was twenty-seven. She was a popular obstetric surgeon at Vancouver General Hospital, and though her face was creased with lines, people still craned to look past her for the doctor when she walked into the room. VGH was nothing like Seattle Grace – VGH was a labyrinth of twists and blind corners, the waiting room separate from the treatment areas, special entrances and even elevators for different departments. Izzie had worked at VGH for over twenty years and still could only recognize a handful of the staff in the cafeteria. So it was a testament to the exoticness of Rodney McKay that Izzie even learned he was in the hospital at all. Even her patient, grunting with pain during a hard labour, had perked up when the nurse had mentioned that Dr. McKay was in the building. The ambulance had bypassed the ER completely, the nurse whispered, and Rodney had been brought straight up too palliative care where he would wait to die. His mind had finally given out, silent after years of over activity, and he had been in a coma two days before his housekeeper had found him slumped over a book on his dining room table.
*
It is difficult to comprehend the magnitude of events as they are happening. The Stargate Program, as vast and central as it felt, did not change the lives of most people in any meaningful way. It was a shock to realize that the night sky was just a new kind of horizon and that they were no longer alone in the universe. But people still had work and family and it is difficult to conceive of things sight unseen. During the first few years of the Stargate Program’s unveiling there was an old Hollywood glamour about it. The government never did release the whole story of the Stargate Program. Life sucking was still the provenance of vampires and nobody knew of the thousands of new ways that they could be killed in their sleep.
*
Rodney was brilliant – it was inescapable and undeniable. He lived in a world bright flashes and the harmony of ideas spreading across his mind waiting to be plucked, one by one, like music notes. But over time, the flashes grew dimmer and dimmer, the symphony fell out of tune, and Rodney’s mind broke.
The previous occupant of Rodney’s hospital room had left behind several bouquets of flowers and Rodney threw them out the window right after the doctor left – he was allergic anyways and after a prognosis Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis of he might as well live out his last days in peace. It wasn’t that he hadn’t known something was the matter, he had been dropping coffee cups and having what he thought were pins and needles in his hands and legs, but he had put off going to a doctor until the term was finished, his book was finished, he stopped remembering the look on John’s face when the doctor told him he was going to die.
Elizabeth and Radek, Sam and Carson phoned him regularly, visited sometimes, with enough time between each call so that he knew they had coordinated. Even Major Lorne and General O’Neill phoned him once in a while, careful words and gentle recollections whitewashing how much of son of a bitch he’d been on Atlantis and afterward. All of them had noticed the thick speech and slurred words but it just seemed like another symptom of John’s death. Rodney had slowed down, had stopped moving forward without John, walked rather than flew.
*
The Stargate Program didn’t bring all of Earth together as one people. Scientists crowed that it proved that religion was only a pretty fantasy and hard core clerics provided new rationales that explained away the Stargate history. People started no longer caring about the environment – the argument being that it would be easy to find a new earth if we used up this one. Countries scrambled to establish treaties with different planets and major corporations struck out to find natural resources that wouldn’t be covered by previous settlements. The old debate of globalization was suddenly a hot topic again, with each country struggling for offworld commercial dominance. On the whole, the Stargate Program reopened up old rifts between cultures and initiated new disputes between countries. It was a culture war on the grandest scale.
*
It was hard to even see Dr. McKay’s room through the throng of gawking people. Izzie pushed her way through the crowd using seniority and dirty looks and added her name to the list of doctors on the chart. At the quirked eyebrow of the technician she snapped “I’ve treated him before, when I worked in Seattle.” It was a lie, of course, it hadn’t been Rodney who was sick, but she remembered the pleading in his voice when he asked if John was doing any better.
Rodney was awake now, but a mess. His arms jerked and stuttered, a bitter parody of his sweeping and expressive hand gestures. He was speaking, his voice slow and garbled, and Izzie glanced down and her chart and saw that the ALS had brought on advanced Alzheimer’s.
Izzie didn’t know much about Atlantis – her husband was a bit of a Pegasus buff – he collected memorabilia he bought on ebay and read even the things he couldn’t understand – so it took her a while to understand what Rodney was talking about. His voice was loud, but garbled and Izzie had to strain to understand what he was saying. When she did realize, she sent all of the gawkers and hangers on away because this was not just staring at a celebrity, it was having his memories splayed open for anyone to see.
Rodney shouted at her that she had to disable the power couplings, and screamed at her for flying into the belly of a wraithship. He ranted and tears streamed down his face as he fought against things that only he could see. It was worse, when he came back to lucidity. He would be talking about the shields, or firing a gun, or asking Sheppard for a powerbar when he would turn and really look at Izzie and ask her where he was, and where John was when he would remember. It happened dozens of times and Rodney would say “cancer” or “stupid flyboy, the radiation” and would sit on his hospital bed, a broken man. It was a relief when his friends came. Izzie’s family had asked excitedly what it had been like to meet the famous Dr. Elizabeth Weir and Dr. Carson Beckett but it was impossible to describe the look in Dr. Weir’s eyes as she sat weeping outside of Rodney’s room. Izzie had nearly come undone herself when Rodney had escaped, wandering through the hospital looking for John’s hospital bed, becoming more and more frantic when he couldn’t find him.
*
Everyone knew that the Stargate program was a milestone of epic proportions in global history, but no one knew where to classify it in human history. It was widely felt that students should not only learn the history of earth but the history of the Jaffa and the Athosians and the rest of the galaxies. But no one could decide when and where to teach it. Universities tentatively offered classes in Pegasus 101, with months of study on the Atlantis expedition, two weeks on the history of the Athosians, and a week on everything else. But it was hard enough teaching earth history in high schools; there wasn’t even enough time for the last five hundred years. In the end, the Stargate Program was included in the last two weeks of world history, following Kosovo and preceding nine-eleven. It was written in the textbook: “In the last years of the twentieth century, scientists discovered a means of interstellar travel to other planets. The people of earth proved, through their bravery, decency and integrity, that we are capable of great goodness without benefit to ourselves. The Stargate program reaffirmed that human beings are explorers, seeking knowledge and enlightenment, and the original Stargate expeditions contributed all that they had towards this goal, risking individual safety for the betterment of mankind.”
*
Izzie tried to check on Rodney a couple of times each day, timing her visits to allow Dr Weir and Dr. Zelenka to escape together to the cafeteria. Izzie was often tired and she always had too much to do at home but she couldn’t forget those days in the hospital in Seattle, how Rodney had known the hospital’s ebbs and flows, what times to ask nurses questions, and exactly how to get around normal visiting hours. She never forgot the lines around Rodney’s mouth and sometimes it was easier when he fell into his memories, at least there he was sometimes happy. Sheppard had been her first assisted death and Izzie had cried in the locker room because back then, every patient had been important and every death a failure. McKay had looked old when they had taken the breathing tubes out of John's slack mouth and he had looked older still every time he had to relive John’s death.
After weeks in the hospital Rodney no longer looked like the pictures they had of him on the TV, giving guest lectures or accepting yet another Nobel prize for his work - everyone of which he dedicated to the scientists who had lost their lives on Atlantis. Izzie still came to visit Rodney, although, by this time, he was completely paralyzed.
One spring morning, Izzie brought in a TV docudrama on Atlantis that she had recorded, thinking that Rodney might enjoy hearing how much of a hero he was. The docudrama was one of a million programs about Atlantis – the same old shaky clips of the original expedition smiling and waving at the cameras. Later, Elizabeth Weir would tell the press how they had been in the middle of a crisis when this was filmed, but they took a day off so that they could leave something happy behind. The expedition had filmed themselves at one of the piers, and there were shots of John and Rodney, looking impossibly young, sitting on the ground laughing at the antics of someone off camera. It was impossible, a trick of the light, but Izzie swore she could see Rodney smile at the sound. Izzie turned back to the television to keep watching the clip of John Sheppard laughing on Atlantis, but monitors started beeping and Izzie flashed back to the first time she had stood helpless at a do not resuscitate. She held Rodney’s hand as he died, watching old videos of Rodney and John smiling in the sunlight.
Um. It's a Grey's Anatomy crossover and if anyone has a better title please tell me.
'Zelenka' Rodney said, as Izzie came in to check his chart, 'John's dead.' Dr. Zelenka jumped up from where he was sitting in the corner reading the card that General Carter had sent, putting his hands on Rodney's shoulders. 'Yes Rodney, I'm very sorry - '
'He flew into a Wraith Hiveship.'
Dr. Zelenka's hands drifted off Rodney's shoulders and he looked at Izzie. Izzie could only stare down at the chart, her eyes burning.
'I never got to tell him - never mind, we have to get this working.' Rodney turned away and started pulling at his bedsheets.
The Verge of Memory and Forgetfullness
It had taken two months after the Stargate reveal before anyone in the hospital had put two and two together and realized that the John Sheppard who had quietly died in their hospital had been the same John Sheppard that was a hero of the galaxy and a protector of mankind.
It was Dr. Sheppard who realized it, right in the middle of a surgery. He looked up and only got out the first half of an "Oh my God" before the patient had started seizing and he had to concentrate before he died on the table.
*
There were dozens of books published by the people of Atlantis. Science and anthropology, books on military tactics and brilliant new charts and maps of the universe. Most of them went unread, and very few of them actually made it into any mainstream bookstore. They were too technical and much too brilliant. It was easy to talk about bold leaps in science and to describe the intricate workings of the ZPM but most people would never understand enough to understand that it was too advanced for them to even comprehend. People clamored for stories of Atlantis, the thrilling heroics of it all, but very few truly cared about the work that had happened there.
*
Izzie Stephens had married an elementary school teacher and had moved with him to Vancouver when she was twenty-seven. She was a popular obstetric surgeon at Vancouver General Hospital, and though her face was creased with lines, people still craned to look past her for the doctor when she walked into the room. VGH was nothing like Seattle Grace – VGH was a labyrinth of twists and blind corners, the waiting room separate from the treatment areas, special entrances and even elevators for different departments. Izzie had worked at VGH for over twenty years and still could only recognize a handful of the staff in the cafeteria. So it was a testament to the exoticness of Rodney McKay that Izzie even learned he was in the hospital at all. Even her patient, grunting with pain during a hard labour, had perked up when the nurse had mentioned that Dr. McKay was in the building. The ambulance had bypassed the ER completely, the nurse whispered, and Rodney had been brought straight up too palliative care where he would wait to die. His mind had finally given out, silent after years of over activity, and he had been in a coma two days before his housekeeper had found him slumped over a book on his dining room table.
*
It is difficult to comprehend the magnitude of events as they are happening. The Stargate Program, as vast and central as it felt, did not change the lives of most people in any meaningful way. It was a shock to realize that the night sky was just a new kind of horizon and that they were no longer alone in the universe. But people still had work and family and it is difficult to conceive of things sight unseen. During the first few years of the Stargate Program’s unveiling there was an old Hollywood glamour about it. The government never did release the whole story of the Stargate Program. Life sucking was still the provenance of vampires and nobody knew of the thousands of new ways that they could be killed in their sleep.
*
Rodney was brilliant – it was inescapable and undeniable. He lived in a world bright flashes and the harmony of ideas spreading across his mind waiting to be plucked, one by one, like music notes. But over time, the flashes grew dimmer and dimmer, the symphony fell out of tune, and Rodney’s mind broke.
The previous occupant of Rodney’s hospital room had left behind several bouquets of flowers and Rodney threw them out the window right after the doctor left – he was allergic anyways and after a prognosis Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis of he might as well live out his last days in peace. It wasn’t that he hadn’t known something was the matter, he had been dropping coffee cups and having what he thought were pins and needles in his hands and legs, but he had put off going to a doctor until the term was finished, his book was finished, he stopped remembering the look on John’s face when the doctor told him he was going to die.
Elizabeth and Radek, Sam and Carson phoned him regularly, visited sometimes, with enough time between each call so that he knew they had coordinated. Even Major Lorne and General O’Neill phoned him once in a while, careful words and gentle recollections whitewashing how much of son of a bitch he’d been on Atlantis and afterward. All of them had noticed the thick speech and slurred words but it just seemed like another symptom of John’s death. Rodney had slowed down, had stopped moving forward without John, walked rather than flew.
*
The Stargate Program didn’t bring all of Earth together as one people. Scientists crowed that it proved that religion was only a pretty fantasy and hard core clerics provided new rationales that explained away the Stargate history. People started no longer caring about the environment – the argument being that it would be easy to find a new earth if we used up this one. Countries scrambled to establish treaties with different planets and major corporations struck out to find natural resources that wouldn’t be covered by previous settlements. The old debate of globalization was suddenly a hot topic again, with each country struggling for offworld commercial dominance. On the whole, the Stargate Program reopened up old rifts between cultures and initiated new disputes between countries. It was a culture war on the grandest scale.
*
It was hard to even see Dr. McKay’s room through the throng of gawking people. Izzie pushed her way through the crowd using seniority and dirty looks and added her name to the list of doctors on the chart. At the quirked eyebrow of the technician she snapped “I’ve treated him before, when I worked in Seattle.” It was a lie, of course, it hadn’t been Rodney who was sick, but she remembered the pleading in his voice when he asked if John was doing any better.
Rodney was awake now, but a mess. His arms jerked and stuttered, a bitter parody of his sweeping and expressive hand gestures. He was speaking, his voice slow and garbled, and Izzie glanced down and her chart and saw that the ALS had brought on advanced Alzheimer’s.
Izzie didn’t know much about Atlantis – her husband was a bit of a Pegasus buff – he collected memorabilia he bought on ebay and read even the things he couldn’t understand – so it took her a while to understand what Rodney was talking about. His voice was loud, but garbled and Izzie had to strain to understand what he was saying. When she did realize, she sent all of the gawkers and hangers on away because this was not just staring at a celebrity, it was having his memories splayed open for anyone to see.
Rodney shouted at her that she had to disable the power couplings, and screamed at her for flying into the belly of a wraithship. He ranted and tears streamed down his face as he fought against things that only he could see. It was worse, when he came back to lucidity. He would be talking about the shields, or firing a gun, or asking Sheppard for a powerbar when he would turn and really look at Izzie and ask her where he was, and where John was when he would remember. It happened dozens of times and Rodney would say “cancer” or “stupid flyboy, the radiation” and would sit on his hospital bed, a broken man. It was a relief when his friends came. Izzie’s family had asked excitedly what it had been like to meet the famous Dr. Elizabeth Weir and Dr. Carson Beckett but it was impossible to describe the look in Dr. Weir’s eyes as she sat weeping outside of Rodney’s room. Izzie had nearly come undone herself when Rodney had escaped, wandering through the hospital looking for John’s hospital bed, becoming more and more frantic when he couldn’t find him.
*
Everyone knew that the Stargate program was a milestone of epic proportions in global history, but no one knew where to classify it in human history. It was widely felt that students should not only learn the history of earth but the history of the Jaffa and the Athosians and the rest of the galaxies. But no one could decide when and where to teach it. Universities tentatively offered classes in Pegasus 101, with months of study on the Atlantis expedition, two weeks on the history of the Athosians, and a week on everything else. But it was hard enough teaching earth history in high schools; there wasn’t even enough time for the last five hundred years. In the end, the Stargate Program was included in the last two weeks of world history, following Kosovo and preceding nine-eleven. It was written in the textbook: “In the last years of the twentieth century, scientists discovered a means of interstellar travel to other planets. The people of earth proved, through their bravery, decency and integrity, that we are capable of great goodness without benefit to ourselves. The Stargate program reaffirmed that human beings are explorers, seeking knowledge and enlightenment, and the original Stargate expeditions contributed all that they had towards this goal, risking individual safety for the betterment of mankind.”
*
Izzie tried to check on Rodney a couple of times each day, timing her visits to allow Dr Weir and Dr. Zelenka to escape together to the cafeteria. Izzie was often tired and she always had too much to do at home but she couldn’t forget those days in the hospital in Seattle, how Rodney had known the hospital’s ebbs and flows, what times to ask nurses questions, and exactly how to get around normal visiting hours. She never forgot the lines around Rodney’s mouth and sometimes it was easier when he fell into his memories, at least there he was sometimes happy. Sheppard had been her first assisted death and Izzie had cried in the locker room because back then, every patient had been important and every death a failure. McKay had looked old when they had taken the breathing tubes out of John's slack mouth and he had looked older still every time he had to relive John’s death.
After weeks in the hospital Rodney no longer looked like the pictures they had of him on the TV, giving guest lectures or accepting yet another Nobel prize for his work - everyone of which he dedicated to the scientists who had lost their lives on Atlantis. Izzie still came to visit Rodney, although, by this time, he was completely paralyzed.
One spring morning, Izzie brought in a TV docudrama on Atlantis that she had recorded, thinking that Rodney might enjoy hearing how much of a hero he was. The docudrama was one of a million programs about Atlantis – the same old shaky clips of the original expedition smiling and waving at the cameras. Later, Elizabeth Weir would tell the press how they had been in the middle of a crisis when this was filmed, but they took a day off so that they could leave something happy behind. The expedition had filmed themselves at one of the piers, and there were shots of John and Rodney, looking impossibly young, sitting on the ground laughing at the antics of someone off camera. It was impossible, a trick of the light, but Izzie swore she could see Rodney smile at the sound. Izzie turned back to the television to keep watching the clip of John Sheppard laughing on Atlantis, but monitors started beeping and Izzie flashed back to the first time she had stood helpless at a do not resuscitate. She held Rodney’s hand as he died, watching old videos of Rodney and John smiling in the sunlight.
