The Lemon Lie by WolfenMoondaughter [Reviews - 4]
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Category: Slash Pairings > McKay/Sheppard
Characters: Jennifer Keller, John Sheppard, Other, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex, Teyla Emmagan
Rating: PG
Genres: Angst, Character Study, Drama, Episode Related, Friendship, Hurt Comfort, Pre-slash, Team, Vignette
Warnings: None
Series: None
Word count: 2397; Completed: Yes
Summary: Rodney's falling ill on a mission prompts John to consider their relationship -- and Jeannie to reveal an uncomfortable truth about McKay's childhood.
Story Notes:
Quasi-episode tag for the 5th season ep, "The Shrine", written a month pre-airing and insired by vague spoilers. Perhaps a tad melodramatic, too. ;) And thoroughly "jossed" by the airing of the episode, so it doesn't fit with Wright's tale at *all*. LOL
"Rodney!" John snapped, snagging the powerbar from a confused McKay's hand. He felt a pang at the hurt in his friend's eyes, but he wasn't sorry for what he'd done; his hand shook as he took in the word "Lemon", written in neon yellow on the silvery wrapper. "What the hell is the matter with you?! Are you trying to kills yourself -- or give me a heart attack?!"
"I ... is a powerbar, right? Something ... something you eat, right?" Rodney asked uncertainly, glancing at his sister pleadingly.
Confused now himself, John held the bar up so that the label was visible. "This one's not edible for you, though, Rodney! Lemon?!"
Rodney's expression seemed all the more lost. "I ... i-is that ... yours? I-I didn't know, Teyla didn't say any of them belonged to anyone specific. Oh wait, is it Ronon's?" he asked, throwing a pensive glance at the warrior watching him from across the room. "I'm not going to eat yours, okay? I'll find another!" raising his voice as he assured the warrior. McKay then looked inside the bag and pulled out another, which John immediately recognised as apricot. "Can I have this one?" Rodney asked, looking like he was afraid for John's reaction. "I-I'm really hungry ...."
Jeannie and Keller looked back and forth between the scientist and John, their eyes worried as they stared at Rodney and questioning when they met John's, reflecting his own concern back at him.
They had recently come to realise that Rodney was afflicted with a Pegasus condition known as "Second Childhood", an Alzheimer's-like illness that regresses the afflicted into a child-like state. If it wasn't reversed soon, it never would be. And as if that weren't enough, it looked like he'd lost his knowledge of what was dangerous to him! They were going to have to watch him like a hawk. Well, like a babysitter ....
John swallowed bile at the thought of the close call. "Uh ... yeah, buddy, but I think you'd like the chocolate one better. I'm, a ... I'm sure there's one in there."
"Chocolate?" Rodney asked, grinning like a delighted child. It was a rare expression for the cantankerous man. Any other day, and it would have made John giddy, but the dropping of his stomach this time wasn't the kind he felt when his friends were happy, or when he was pulling Gs; it was the kind that went hand-in-hand with a mission gone wrong, a seed of dread blossoming and taking root in his gut.
While the man was hunting through the pack, Keller hovering over him, preparing for another round of examination, John walked over to the Satedan. "Ronon--" he began.
"I'm on it. I won't let him out of my sight," the warrior assured him, and John felt the knot in his throat loosen a little. "I've seen this before," Ronon rumbled, unusually chatty for him, his now-glassy eyes still on McKay. He looked sad. Sad was a rare expression on Ronon, and John didn't like it any better than Rodney's smile just now. "My grandfather had it. They called it a gift, but I didn't think it was ...."
John nodded, the knot back. A healthy McKay would be horrified at the idea. It wasn't fair. All the things they had gone through and they were going to lose him like this? Alive, sure, but no longer the brilliant Rodney McKay? Far away from home, no lab to find a cure, no time to save him -- just enough hours to watch him lose himself?
Teyla was off scouting; he wished he hadn't asked her to go, missing her calming influence already.
He glanced to the side and saw Jeannie standing with a hand over her mouth, as if to stifle her own scream, her other arm clenched tightly to her abdomen. He walked over to her and wrapped his arms around her, resting his chin on top of her head; she leaned into hum gratefully. John wasn't a touchy-feely kind of guy, but right now, he needed to hold onto something as much as she did. Needed to hold a (former) McKay, even if she wasn't ... what? The one he wanted to hold?
It wasn't the first time he'd felt like the world was ending because it seemed as though Rodney were lost to them somehow. No, the first time was when Rodney has walked into the black energy cloud; John's reaction, the fear that had frozen him in place, had shocked John more even than Rodney's heroic actions. He'd barely know the man at the time, but the idea of losing him before he'd even gotten a chance to know him had felt deeply wrong, like someone had rewritten the ending of what was supposed to be a good story and ruined it. And each time Rodney had nearly died since, that sensation had just gotten progressively worse, in relation to John's having come to know him.
Of course, John couldn't imagine life without Teyla or Ronon either -- he knew he'd be gutted if he lost either of them, too, more even than the way he'd been when he'd lost Mitch and Dex, and Aiden and Elizabeth. But somehow it would be so much worse to lose the cranky astrophysicist. He'd had a recurring dream, where Rodney was again asking him to be allowed to feed himself to Todd, in order to save Jeannie; in the dream, Wallace wasn't there. Sometimes John chose Ronon, or Teyla, to feed to the Wraith with. Sometimes he just let Jeannie die. And though it broke his heart to sacrifice his friends -- his family, more than his blood kin had ever been -- or even Jeannie, and left him feeling sick upon waking, he knew he would never let Rodney sacrifice himself in their stead. John knew that, as much as it sickened him, he could choose between them, if he had to.
He just didn't know why.
He wasn't gay, wasn't attracted to Rodney in that way. But John liked just hanging out with Rodney, something he couldn't do quite as easily with Ronon or Teyla -- and when the guy wasn't around, the world was a little colder, a little lonelier. But it was more than that, wasn't it? Why else did John find himself seeking out the man's company, when he had no shortage of friends around the city? Why else would he have chosen such an unfit candidate for field work to be on his team, why put up with McKay's huge ego, when he certainly didn't have to? How was it that Rodney could upset him more than anyone else in two galaxies? What reason other than some sort of unnamable bond that went beyond even a familial or sexual relationship?
What word was there for someone who was more than a brother or lover to you, whose fate seemed inexplicably, intricately, and irrevocably intertwined with yours?
The older Rodney basically said that the universe needed John Sheppard. Well, at the risk of swelling his own head, John supposed that he couldn't deny that fact-- the reality of Teyla and Torren being safe, the hybrids converted, and Michael on the run instead of slaughtering millions now was proof of that, like it or not. But the way John saw it, the universe needed both of them. Rodney had been the one to make John's return possible, as well as Teyla's rescue. John might well have been the key, but Rodney had been the one to guide that key and turn it in the lock. If Rodney had been the one who'd been sent into the future, John wouldn't have been able to do anything to save him -- but Rodney could have saved himself. And if Rodney had been killed before he'd set up the hologram or did the calculations necessary to send John back, their timeline would have been doomed.
But none of that was why John couldn't live in a universe without Rodney, either.
"He's not allergic to lemons, you know." Jeannie said, her words muffled by his chest.
John jerked back, and she met his eyes with wistfully-sad ones. "What?" he asked, scowling. Truth be told, he'd long suspected the fact, but it still stung. Had Rodney lied to him?
"Oh, he thinks he is," she continued quietly. "And for once, it's not his hypochondria at fault for that; our mother told him that he was, but she was lying."
John felt the familiar flash of anger he generally felt whenever Rodney mentioned his parents. He supposed he shouldn't complain -- the things they'd done to damage their son had also helped to shape him into the man he'd become, the brilliant mind that had saved them time and time again. But that didn't make their behavior any easier to swallow. "Why?" he asked, the word laden with four years of condensed bitterness that surely outdid any bottle of Real Lemon.
Jeannie sighed, watching her brother as she spoke. "He was four years old, and had gotten into a lemon meringue pie she'd made for a party later that night. Ate about half of it." John heard Ronon snort behind him. "She was furious," Jeannie continued. "And of course he wasn't feeling too well. So she got this idea to tell him that he was allergic to lemons and wasn't supposed to have any. Told him his throat was going to close up so that he couldn't breathe, and that he was going to die soon. She freaked him out so badly, he worked himself into a panic attack; he started to hyperventilate, which of course he assumed meant he really was dying. Now, he really is allergic to bee-stings, so she took his epinephrine shot from his kit and stuck his arm with it -- she just didn't actually inject him. And thanks to that night, she figured out how to keep him away from a lot of other foods she didn't want him touching when she wasn't around: by widening the allergy from "lemon" to "citrus" in general. That all happened before I was born, though -- I spent the first several years of my life believing, like him, that he really would die if he ate anything with citrus in it."
And here John thought he couldn't hate Rodney's parents any more than he already did .... "So ... h-how did you ....?"
"Find out the truth?" Jeannie asked, looking uncomfortable.
Keep it a secret from him, he'd actually meant, but nodded.
"I was helping her make dinner. I was six, I think. I saw her putting lemon in a sauce, and when I asked what she was doing, she laughed and said she was going to poison Mer. I was angry with Mer at the time -- I don't even remember why now -- so I didn't say anything before dinner. And I ... well, I almost told him, but I was too afraid of my mom -- I was afraid she might kill me next. Instead, I watched him eat the food -- and not have an attack. It was one of those foods where you can't really taste the lemon, and don't realise that it's in there, so he never knew. I asked her about it at bedtime that night, when she tucked me in. She laughed and told me the story -- seemed really proud of having put one over on Mer all those years." Jeannie faced John again, eyes glassy with unshed tears, her expression pleading. "She was always saying such horrible things to him; even when I was old enough not to be afraid of her anymore, how could I tell him one more way that she had hurt him, lied to him? Our mother's gone now -- don't ask me to make his memories of her worse than they already are."
John fought down his anger and nodded, understanding. He didn't think Rodney's mother deserved to be let off the hook for what she'd done, but he didn't want to hurt Rodney any further either. And it would me more than telling him that his mother had played a lifelong joke on him -- it would hurt Rodney that Jeannie, whatever her reasoning, had kept him in the dark while their mother had laughed at him the entire time, and while everyone else in his life had laughed at him as well. John would find another way for Rodney to learn the truth -- arrange for him to consume something with citrus and then find out well after the fact that the item contained lemon juice or something. Then maybe Rodney could believe that his mother had simply been wrong, and the possibility of accidentally consuming citrus on an alien world would be one less thing for Rodney to live in fear of.
"I suppose this thing that's happening to him ... it's letting us see a Mer that I hardly remember and no one else ever saw. Trusting, kind, not bitter from all the things that my parents and playground bullies did to him ... I guess that's why they call it a gift?" Jeannie asked quietly, her eyes locked on her brother.
John stared at her, in shock. "You can't possibly think that--"
"No, no," she assured him, shaking her head. "I just ... it's something I wished for him when we were growing up -- wished that he'd known a childhood more like mine. Did his being brilliant really require he suffer so much?"
John couldn't escape the fact that Jeannie was as brilliant as her brother, but with a far better nature. Still, as much as he too would have wanted Rodney to be happier, this wasn't the way he wanted that to happen! And really, he'd grown fond of Rodney's irascibleness.
As John watched Keller examine Rodney, he thought of all the times that they'd beaten unbeatable odds before. Rodney would come through this latest crisis too, hale and whole in mind and body, John told himself; fate still needed them both, as a team. Then someday, when they were very old men, Rodney and John would share a pitcher of lemonade on an Atlantis balcony, watching the sun set over the city they had spent a lifetime protecting -- together.
- Text Size +
Category: Slash Pairings > McKay/Sheppard
Characters: Jennifer Keller, John Sheppard, Other, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex, Teyla Emmagan
Rating: PG
Genres: Angst, Character Study, Drama, Episode Related, Friendship, Hurt Comfort, Pre-slash, Team, Vignette
Warnings: None
Series: None
Word count: 2397; Completed: Yes
Summary: Rodney's falling ill on a mission prompts John to consider their relationship -- and Jeannie to reveal an uncomfortable truth about McKay's childhood.
Story Notes:
Quasi-episode tag for the 5th season ep, "The Shrine", written a month pre-airing and insired by vague spoilers. Perhaps a tad melodramatic, too. ;) And thoroughly "jossed" by the airing of the episode, so it doesn't fit with Wright's tale at *all*. LOL
Author's Chapter Notes:
Updated 7/31/08, to edit/alter story as per feedback (thanks, May!), and to make some clarifications in the endnotes.
"Rodney!" John snapped, snagging the powerbar from a confused McKay's hand. He felt a pang at the hurt in his friend's eyes, but he wasn't sorry for what he'd done; his hand shook as he took in the word "Lemon", written in neon yellow on the silvery wrapper. "What the hell is the matter with you?! Are you trying to kills yourself -- or give me a heart attack?!"
"I ... is a powerbar, right? Something ... something you eat, right?" Rodney asked uncertainly, glancing at his sister pleadingly.
Confused now himself, John held the bar up so that the label was visible. "This one's not edible for you, though, Rodney! Lemon?!"
Rodney's expression seemed all the more lost. "I ... i-is that ... yours? I-I didn't know, Teyla didn't say any of them belonged to anyone specific. Oh wait, is it Ronon's?" he asked, throwing a pensive glance at the warrior watching him from across the room. "I'm not going to eat yours, okay? I'll find another!" raising his voice as he assured the warrior. McKay then looked inside the bag and pulled out another, which John immediately recognised as apricot. "Can I have this one?" Rodney asked, looking like he was afraid for John's reaction. "I-I'm really hungry ...."
Jeannie and Keller looked back and forth between the scientist and John, their eyes worried as they stared at Rodney and questioning when they met John's, reflecting his own concern back at him.
They had recently come to realise that Rodney was afflicted with a Pegasus condition known as "Second Childhood", an Alzheimer's-like illness that regresses the afflicted into a child-like state. If it wasn't reversed soon, it never would be. And as if that weren't enough, it looked like he'd lost his knowledge of what was dangerous to him! They were going to have to watch him like a hawk. Well, like a babysitter ....
John swallowed bile at the thought of the close call. "Uh ... yeah, buddy, but I think you'd like the chocolate one better. I'm, a ... I'm sure there's one in there."
"Chocolate?" Rodney asked, grinning like a delighted child. It was a rare expression for the cantankerous man. Any other day, and it would have made John giddy, but the dropping of his stomach this time wasn't the kind he felt when his friends were happy, or when he was pulling Gs; it was the kind that went hand-in-hand with a mission gone wrong, a seed of dread blossoming and taking root in his gut.
While the man was hunting through the pack, Keller hovering over him, preparing for another round of examination, John walked over to the Satedan. "Ronon--" he began.
"I'm on it. I won't let him out of my sight," the warrior assured him, and John felt the knot in his throat loosen a little. "I've seen this before," Ronon rumbled, unusually chatty for him, his now-glassy eyes still on McKay. He looked sad. Sad was a rare expression on Ronon, and John didn't like it any better than Rodney's smile just now. "My grandfather had it. They called it a gift, but I didn't think it was ...."
John nodded, the knot back. A healthy McKay would be horrified at the idea. It wasn't fair. All the things they had gone through and they were going to lose him like this? Alive, sure, but no longer the brilliant Rodney McKay? Far away from home, no lab to find a cure, no time to save him -- just enough hours to watch him lose himself?
Teyla was off scouting; he wished he hadn't asked her to go, missing her calming influence already.
He glanced to the side and saw Jeannie standing with a hand over her mouth, as if to stifle her own scream, her other arm clenched tightly to her abdomen. He walked over to her and wrapped his arms around her, resting his chin on top of her head; she leaned into hum gratefully. John wasn't a touchy-feely kind of guy, but right now, he needed to hold onto something as much as she did. Needed to hold a (former) McKay, even if she wasn't ... what? The one he wanted to hold?
It wasn't the first time he'd felt like the world was ending because it seemed as though Rodney were lost to them somehow. No, the first time was when Rodney has walked into the black energy cloud; John's reaction, the fear that had frozen him in place, had shocked John more even than Rodney's heroic actions. He'd barely know the man at the time, but the idea of losing him before he'd even gotten a chance to know him had felt deeply wrong, like someone had rewritten the ending of what was supposed to be a good story and ruined it. And each time Rodney had nearly died since, that sensation had just gotten progressively worse, in relation to John's having come to know him.
Of course, John couldn't imagine life without Teyla or Ronon either -- he knew he'd be gutted if he lost either of them, too, more even than the way he'd been when he'd lost Mitch and Dex, and Aiden and Elizabeth. But somehow it would be so much worse to lose the cranky astrophysicist. He'd had a recurring dream, where Rodney was again asking him to be allowed to feed himself to Todd, in order to save Jeannie; in the dream, Wallace wasn't there. Sometimes John chose Ronon, or Teyla, to feed to the Wraith with. Sometimes he just let Jeannie die. And though it broke his heart to sacrifice his friends -- his family, more than his blood kin had ever been -- or even Jeannie, and left him feeling sick upon waking, he knew he would never let Rodney sacrifice himself in their stead. John knew that, as much as it sickened him, he could choose between them, if he had to.
He just didn't know why.
He wasn't gay, wasn't attracted to Rodney in that way. But John liked just hanging out with Rodney, something he couldn't do quite as easily with Ronon or Teyla -- and when the guy wasn't around, the world was a little colder, a little lonelier. But it was more than that, wasn't it? Why else did John find himself seeking out the man's company, when he had no shortage of friends around the city? Why else would he have chosen such an unfit candidate for field work to be on his team, why put up with McKay's huge ego, when he certainly didn't have to? How was it that Rodney could upset him more than anyone else in two galaxies? What reason other than some sort of unnamable bond that went beyond even a familial or sexual relationship?
What word was there for someone who was more than a brother or lover to you, whose fate seemed inexplicably, intricately, and irrevocably intertwined with yours?
The older Rodney basically said that the universe needed John Sheppard. Well, at the risk of swelling his own head, John supposed that he couldn't deny that fact-- the reality of Teyla and Torren being safe, the hybrids converted, and Michael on the run instead of slaughtering millions now was proof of that, like it or not. But the way John saw it, the universe needed both of them. Rodney had been the one to make John's return possible, as well as Teyla's rescue. John might well have been the key, but Rodney had been the one to guide that key and turn it in the lock. If Rodney had been the one who'd been sent into the future, John wouldn't have been able to do anything to save him -- but Rodney could have saved himself. And if Rodney had been killed before he'd set up the hologram or did the calculations necessary to send John back, their timeline would have been doomed.
But none of that was why John couldn't live in a universe without Rodney, either.
"He's not allergic to lemons, you know." Jeannie said, her words muffled by his chest.
John jerked back, and she met his eyes with wistfully-sad ones. "What?" he asked, scowling. Truth be told, he'd long suspected the fact, but it still stung. Had Rodney lied to him?
"Oh, he thinks he is," she continued quietly. "And for once, it's not his hypochondria at fault for that; our mother told him that he was, but she was lying."
John felt the familiar flash of anger he generally felt whenever Rodney mentioned his parents. He supposed he shouldn't complain -- the things they'd done to damage their son had also helped to shape him into the man he'd become, the brilliant mind that had saved them time and time again. But that didn't make their behavior any easier to swallow. "Why?" he asked, the word laden with four years of condensed bitterness that surely outdid any bottle of Real Lemon.
Jeannie sighed, watching her brother as she spoke. "He was four years old, and had gotten into a lemon meringue pie she'd made for a party later that night. Ate about half of it." John heard Ronon snort behind him. "She was furious," Jeannie continued. "And of course he wasn't feeling too well. So she got this idea to tell him that he was allergic to lemons and wasn't supposed to have any. Told him his throat was going to close up so that he couldn't breathe, and that he was going to die soon. She freaked him out so badly, he worked himself into a panic attack; he started to hyperventilate, which of course he assumed meant he really was dying. Now, he really is allergic to bee-stings, so she took his epinephrine shot from his kit and stuck his arm with it -- she just didn't actually inject him. And thanks to that night, she figured out how to keep him away from a lot of other foods she didn't want him touching when she wasn't around: by widening the allergy from "lemon" to "citrus" in general. That all happened before I was born, though -- I spent the first several years of my life believing, like him, that he really would die if he ate anything with citrus in it."
And here John thought he couldn't hate Rodney's parents any more than he already did .... "So ... h-how did you ....?"
"Find out the truth?" Jeannie asked, looking uncomfortable.
Keep it a secret from him, he'd actually meant, but nodded.
"I was helping her make dinner. I was six, I think. I saw her putting lemon in a sauce, and when I asked what she was doing, she laughed and said she was going to poison Mer. I was angry with Mer at the time -- I don't even remember why now -- so I didn't say anything before dinner. And I ... well, I almost told him, but I was too afraid of my mom -- I was afraid she might kill me next. Instead, I watched him eat the food -- and not have an attack. It was one of those foods where you can't really taste the lemon, and don't realise that it's in there, so he never knew. I asked her about it at bedtime that night, when she tucked me in. She laughed and told me the story -- seemed really proud of having put one over on Mer all those years." Jeannie faced John again, eyes glassy with unshed tears, her expression pleading. "She was always saying such horrible things to him; even when I was old enough not to be afraid of her anymore, how could I tell him one more way that she had hurt him, lied to him? Our mother's gone now -- don't ask me to make his memories of her worse than they already are."
John fought down his anger and nodded, understanding. He didn't think Rodney's mother deserved to be let off the hook for what she'd done, but he didn't want to hurt Rodney any further either. And it would me more than telling him that his mother had played a lifelong joke on him -- it would hurt Rodney that Jeannie, whatever her reasoning, had kept him in the dark while their mother had laughed at him the entire time, and while everyone else in his life had laughed at him as well. John would find another way for Rodney to learn the truth -- arrange for him to consume something with citrus and then find out well after the fact that the item contained lemon juice or something. Then maybe Rodney could believe that his mother had simply been wrong, and the possibility of accidentally consuming citrus on an alien world would be one less thing for Rodney to live in fear of.
"I suppose this thing that's happening to him ... it's letting us see a Mer that I hardly remember and no one else ever saw. Trusting, kind, not bitter from all the things that my parents and playground bullies did to him ... I guess that's why they call it a gift?" Jeannie asked quietly, her eyes locked on her brother.
John stared at her, in shock. "You can't possibly think that--"
"No, no," she assured him, shaking her head. "I just ... it's something I wished for him when we were growing up -- wished that he'd known a childhood more like mine. Did his being brilliant really require he suffer so much?"
John couldn't escape the fact that Jeannie was as brilliant as her brother, but with a far better nature. Still, as much as he too would have wanted Rodney to be happier, this wasn't the way he wanted that to happen! And really, he'd grown fond of Rodney's irascibleness.
As John watched Keller examine Rodney, he thought of all the times that they'd beaten unbeatable odds before. Rodney would come through this latest crisis too, hale and whole in mind and body, John told himself; fate still needed them both, as a team. Then someday, when they were very old men, Rodney and John would share a pitcher of lemonade on an Atlantis balcony, watching the sun set over the city they had spent a lifetime protecting -- together.
Chapter End Notes:
Brad Wright said that part of the tragic nature of the episode in question is that people would like McKay being "nice" and therefore not notice the change in him until it seemed too late to reverse it. And I had to wonder -- was his gettng nice because he was forgetting all the things that had made him bitter as a child? And if he forgot those things, what else might he forget? Hence what I saw as the perfect opportunity to have McKay go to eat something lemon-y -- he doesn't know he can't, but John still certainly knows. And since Jeannie's supposed to be in the ep too, it was the perfect opportunity to reveal the "truth" John couldn't otherwise be privy to ....
It should be noted that I actually do favour Rodney and John being in a sexual relationship -- I see them as bi, at least with each other, but otherwise prefering women. I just don't think John would be thinking of Rodney in that way yet at this point, and see their relationship as being based on a bond that supercedes a physical attraction -- ie, that they would eventually get intimate/become attracted to each other in *that* way *later*. I doubt I will do a sequel to this, though, as I'm sure it will get quite jossed by the episode when it airs ....