Speak No Evil by casspeach [Reviews - 4]
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Category: Slash Pairings > McKay/Zelenka
Characters: None
Rating: PG
Genres: Pre-relationship
Warnings: None
Series: None
Word count: 3625; Completed: Yes
Summary: Originally written for the Zelenka ficathon.
"Should we get a medical team on standby, do you think, sir?" Ford asked as they jogged steadily back to the Gate.
"No need," was John's curt reply, and they all looked at one another when it was the only one.
The silence was new and strange, only the whistling of legs through grass and steady breathing, instead of the diatribe he'd been unconsciously expecting, although whether it would be about how vitally important McKay was to the mission or about the shocking waste of resources that having Beckett's team on standby when there was no major injury represented, he wasn't entirely sure. John shook his head as they ran; he couldn't believe how much he was missing the sound of McKay's whining.
He did radio ahead, once the gate was open, to ask that the infirmary be ready to receive them - no serious injuries, no catastrophes, just a minor problem, - and then they were piling through. By the reception they received in the control room, he may as well have radioed through to say they were all dying, Beckett was present along with what would appear to be most of the infirmary and scientific staff.
"Well, you all look okay," Elizabeth said, walking down the stairs wearing her serious leader's expression, "what happened?"
"I did say it wasn't a catastrophe," John complained, getting an irritated snort from McKay. "Well, okay, Rodney thinks it's a catastrophe."
"Not that he's actually said that," Ford added with a grin.
"What seems to be the problem?" Elizabeth asked, fixing McKay with an inquiring look that quickly transformed into a frown when he didn't answer.
"Dr McKay has been rendered incapable of speech," Teyla offered, sounding sympathetic.
"And we're counting this as a bad thing?" someone muttered from within the assembled throng, but John couldn't tell exactly who it had been, so he settled for glaring in the general direction of the crowd, just in case it had been one of his men.
Elizabeth faltered for a moment.
"Okay then, people," she said. "Debriefing. Unless you want to take Dr McKay for some tests, Carson?"
"I'd not know where to start without knowing what happened," Beckett mused aloud, eyeing McKay in a way that made it clear that a lot of blood tests and various other uncomfortable proddings were looming large in his immediate future.
They sojourned to the meeting room to debrief. Not that there was much to say.
"So you were granted an audience with their wise-woman?" Elizabeth recapped, one eyebrow raised as she looked around the table.
"Individual audiences," John clarified.
"What did you do, Rodney?" Beckett chided.
McKay just held his hands out and shrugged, managing to portray an aggrieved innocence that no one in the room believed.
"Was Rodney the only one of you to actually have an audience with the woman?" Elizabeth asked, and it was John's turn to feel put out.
"Of course not," he said. "I went first, in case it was a trap."
"And?"
He shrugged, forcing himself to sit with one arm slung insouciantly over the back of the chair.
"She was some kind of love doctor or something," he said, only blushing very faintly, in counterpoint to the way the colour drained from McKay's face. "Wanted to offer me advice on my sex life."
McKay shook his head frantically but was ignored.
"So, maybe she thought Dr McKay's love life would improve if he'd stop talking." Ford offered, still grinning.
"Perhaps this would be a good time for me to take Rodney to the infirmary, do some tests, see if we can work out exactly what this woman has done to him," Beckett suggested, after McKay made it clear that he was still capable of gesticulating, quite eloquently.
The two men left first, Beckett already asking questions that were carefully formulated to require only yes or no as an answer, so McKay could nod or shake his head, and the rest of the group filed out afterwards. Elizabeth called John back as he got to the door.
"Do you want to tell me exactly what happened, in your meeting with the wise-woman?" she asked. "I thought maybe the audience here might have put you off."
John gave her a tight smile and sat back down. He didn't want to, not really, and he couldn't see that it would be overly helpful. If the woman had wanted to say the same thing to all of them, why insist on seeing them separately? Although he was grateful no one else had been privy to his turn.
"Yeah, it was kind of weird. She was in this dark little room, sitting at a table, it reminded me of a palm-reader's tent at a fairground." He studied Elizabeth's face for a moment, before continuing. "She put her hand on my forehead, and said...and said, I wouldn't find love until I let people get close to me. Crazy, huh? I mean she'd known me for all of five seconds, I'd barely spoken to her."
"Did it feel..." Elizabeth folded her hands in front of her, and spoke in her most diplomatic voice, "did it feel accurate? Could we be dealing with a race of telepaths or something?"
"It felt, yeah, it did, but they do, don't they? Horoscopes and palm readings and stuff. I don't know how they do it, but they always seem to find something that seems to fit, that seems uncannily right, so you'll believe everything else they say."
There was silence for a long moment.
"I didn't think she was a threat to security here. You don't think she's taken stuff out of Rodney's head? They seemed like a bunch of hippies, but then I guess the Genii seemed like a bunch of hicks."
"We'll change the codes on the IDC's, and ask Bates to post a sentry at the infirmary and then Rodney's quarters when Carson releases him. Speaking of which...."
John nodded, in what was a salute by another name, and they went to the door. As they got there he paused.
"She asked me if I wanted help," he said. "I said no."
***
Beckett couldn't find anything wrong on McKay's exam or blood tests, although the Ancient version of a PET scan did reveal a few quiescent areas of brain tissue that should have been lighting up. They were all in language centres.
"A stroke?" Elizabeth asked but Beckett shook his head.
"It's too many separate areas to be a stroke, and it seems unlikely that several small ones would appear in these areas. It's far too precise."
McKay gesticulated wildly, and Elizabeth shot him a sympathetic glance, patting him on the arm for support. He shook her hand off irritably, snapping his fingers at Beckett until he handed over his coffee cup, McKay's notes, and finally, his pen.
McKay, face screwed up in concentration like a small child practicing his letters managed to draw on the back of his notes with the pen. He shoved the cardboard-bound volume back at Beckett and folded his arms triumphantly.
Beckett and Elizabeth exchanged glances with John.
"Um, this doesn't say anything, Rodney," Beckett said, and McKay scowled, snatching the notes back, and scribbling something else, more easily this time.
It was a little stick figure of a man with glasses and unruly hair, which McKay added to when they didn't immediately understand.
"Dr Zelenka?" Elizabeth suggested and McKay beamed. "You want us to get Dr Zelenka?"
Zelenka was summoned from where he'd been working on the desalination tanks. He looked disturbingly like his portrait had, right down to his hair, which was even more untidy than usual because of the salt, and he was clearly unimpressed at being called away from his work.
He stood in the infirmary, looking irritably from Beckett to Elizabeth to John to McKay until they realised that he hadn't heard the news. Beckett filled him in, right up to the point when McKay had asked that he be sent for. Zelenka opened his mouth to speak, but McKay was scribbling again and motioning Zelenka to look at what he'd drawn, and whatever had crossed his mind wasn't voiced. If he spotted the drawing of himself, he didn't react, although he did run a hand through his salt-stiff hair absentmindedly a few times.
"You are thinking nanovirus again?" he asked McKay, when McKay stopped actually drawing and started merely pointing to things already on the piece of cardboard with increasingly tetchy jabs of the pen.
Beckett shook his head.
"I've already looked. There's no sign of any nanotechnology in your blood, and no extra EM field in your EEG. We recalibrated the machine," he explained mainly to Elizabeth, "so we could pick the wee things up more easily."
McKay visibly deflated, and Zelenka put a hand on his shoulder. It wasn't shaken off.
"Sorry," Beckett said sincerely.
"I too am sorry," Zelenka said. "This is disaster, and not only for Rodney."
McKay drew another stick figure; this one had long hair in a ponytail, was much taller than Zelenka's figure and had a prissy expression on his stick face.
"Yes, well, Kavanagh is an idiot," Zelenka said. "He just can't see past the fact that he's not going to be called on his mistakes to the importance of not making mistakes in the first place."
"Is there any chance it will just wear off?" Elizabeth asked after a short silence and all four men shrugged in unison.
"Without knowing what it is, it's impossible to say," Beckett shrugged.
"Then I guess we have to find out what it is. Major, take your team back. See if we can't get this curse lifted," Elizabeth said, ignoring McKay's scoffing.
The team, consisting of John, Teyla and Ford backed up by Markham, Stackhouse and Bates, was away for five days. They returned with a simple enough message.
"What does this mean?" Zelenka asked, presumably on McKay's behalf, since he'd thrown the notebook he now communicated with by drawing in across the room in frustration the first time he'd been told. "If 'he knows what he must do', surely he'd do it."
McKay gesticulated from under his desk as he retrieved the notebook, pointing at Zelenka with the clear message of 'what he said' in the gesture.
John shrugged.
"That's what the lady said, okay? I'm just telling you what she said. She wouldn't tell us what it was he had to do, just kept smiling at us."
As John was leaving, Zelenka turned to McKay, who was studiously ignoring him, and working on something on his laptop.
"Do you know, Rodney?" Zelenka asked. "What it is you must do?"
McKay continued to ignore him, so John wandered off.
***
A week later the scientists had almost got used to having a silent department head. Productivity had dropped; partly because Kavanagh and his cronies had less problem ignoring Rodney's irritated stick drawings that he tore out of his notebook and stuck on their desks when they'd done something wrong, and partly because Rodney could still spot the errors in the work going on, but communicating what it was, other than pointing repeatedly at the problem area on a schematic was hard. He usually ended up taking it over himself until he'd worked through the error, and then handing it back, which meant that his team weren't learning. Radek knew from past experience that, for all his love of being top dog, there was nothing Rodney enjoyed more than imparting his brilliance to others.
One day Radek found him with Dr Simpson nearly in tears as she tried to work out what Rodney was trying to tell her in increasingly frustrated and indecipherable pictographs. They had schematics for the climate control patch-in spread over the desk.
"It's no good just drawing the same thing over and over, Dr McKay," she was saying. "I know where it's wrong, I just can't work out what to do to fix it."
Rodney threw the pen down, and put his head in his hands.
"I'm sorry," she said, and she sounded like she meant it.
Radek put a hand on her shoulder, and she looked up with something like gratitude in her expression, alongside the regret and frustration already writ large.
"I'll come back later," she said, "maybe a break would help. I might be able to see it later."
"So, I have thought of a solution to Kavanagh," Radek said, apparently oblivious to Rodney's still having his head in his hands. In fact he had a nasty feeling Rodney was either crying or on the verge of doing so, and he had no idea how to handle a full-blown tantrum from his friend, so he was ignoring the feeling in the hope that it would go away.
Rodney looked up from the desk, hands still twisted in his hair.
"I think it is the public nature of humiliation that is missing. So I have made something for you, instead of those little reprimands you leave him."
He gestured out of the door to Rodney's office to where a large board, the same size as the ones warning people not to touch the naquadah generators, festooned with Radek's, rather more artistic, impression of one of Rodney's dressings down was propped against Kavanagh's desk. Unlike the increasingly tiny scraps of paper Rodney had been leaving, there was no way anyone could miss its meaning.
Rodney laughed. There was a very faint edge of hysteria to it, but it was so good to see him laughing instead of looking like he might punch something in frustration that Radek joined him for a moment, glad to have helped, if only a little. Then he sobered.
"Whatever it is, this thing you must do. It can't be worse than this," he said. "Can it?"
Rodney just looked at him, and then away.
Three days later they were sitting at breakfast, chatting one-sidedly in the manner that most of the base had now become accustomed to.
"This reminds me of my childhood," Radek said, after he'd exhausted the previous day's research progress and the coming day's plans. "We had my mother's mother living with us. At the time she just seemed evil, but in retrospect I suspect she was quite severely demented."
Rodney glared at him from over his oatmeal.
"I'm not suggesting that you're losing your mind, Rodney," he said reasonably. "She just, sometimes she found it very frustrating too, she couldn't find the words she wanted, couldn't make herself understood." He popped the last mouthful of his toast into his mouth and smiled. "She was very crabby too."
Rodney's gesticulatory response was lost as the klaxons sounded and the mess hall emptied. It turned out to be an error in Simpson's calculations for the environmental settings, not actually the one Rodney had spotted but been unable to communicate but a different one, that people seemed to have expected him to have seen, from what Radek had heard around the city.
Either way, it had left them with an Atlantis that thought it was in the depths of a Siberian winter and the heating set at full power. Given that it was, in actual fact, summer, the amount of heat the city was capable of generating through the solar panels was quite terrifying. Radek had just climbed out of his third shower of the evening, eschewing clothing for the damp towel around his waist, and settled down to run through the options for heat exhaustion from the city for easily the fifteenth time, when he heard a knock at the door.
Running a hand through his damp hair he went to answer it. Rodney stood at the threshold, looking somewhere between furious and perplexed, which seemed to be his standard expression of late. It wasn't much of a surprise to Radek to see him. They worked well together, and this problem needed fixing, and quickly. He gestured Rodney into his room, belatedly realising his own near nakedness, and reluctantly accepting the need to get dressed, swiftly, before the effect a hot and irritated Rodney induced in him became too obvious. He snagged up a pair of pants and the thinnest shirt he had brought with him to Pegasus and bolted back into the bathroom. He stood behind the door for a long moment, willing his errant body to behave. This had been a terrible day for Rodney, who had taken a lot of the blame, both spoken and otherwise, for the problems everyone was suffering, quite apart from the difficulties of the past two weeks. The last thing he needed was for Radek to step outside the bounds of propriety now, when he was practically the only person left in the city still on friendly terms with him. Radek had tried to make people understand how hard silence had been on Rodney, that mistakes were bound to happen because Rodney thought by talking, but he'd gone unheeded. He didn't want Rodney to think it had all been merely a ruse of some kind, a desperate attempt to get into his pants.
He jumped when Rodney banged on the bathroom door, hammering his frustration in a manner that was reminiscent of the way his grandmother had demanded attention when he'd been a child by beating her cane on the floor. He struggled into his clothes - the thought of his grandmother had taken rapid care of his unwanted erection, if nothing else - and stepped back out into the bedroom.
Rodney was pacing, fanning himself with his one of his ubiquitous notebooks, his other hand clenching and unclenching into a fist as he walked. Radek had the sudden thought that Rodney knew Radek had been carrying a kind of pathetic torch for him ever since they'd arrived in Atlantis and was going to punch him. He had time to wish Rodney had done it while he was still of a scientist's physique and then the notebook was flying across the room, and Rodney was bunching both hands up in Radek's thin shirt and pushing him against the wall next to the bathroom door. The impact made a horribly loud noise in the quiet of the room, and knocked the breath out of Radek.
He braced himself for the punch but instead of the fist he was expecting, dry, faintly chapped lips met his. It wasn't a great kiss, by any stretch of the imagination. Radek was frozen in place by the shock of it, and his glasses were digging into the side of his nose and, he strongly suspected, into Rodney's face too.
"That's what I had to do," Rodney said, and his voice sounded exactly like he hadn't used it in a fortnight.
He stepped back a little, his hands still holding Radek to the wall but more in a way that suggested he thought Radek might hit him if he could get a good enough swing in.
"I can understand your reluctance," Radek choked out, still feeling the sense memory of the kiss, his head still reeling from it.
Rodney just stared at him, his expression, for the first time in weeks, totally unreadable to Radek.
"That was sarcasm," Radek clarified gently. "I cannot believe the thought of kissing me was so awful, that you preferred to be mute."
"Not the thought of kissing you," Rodney argued, and Radek wanted to kiss him again, just out of sheer joy at hearing his voice, possibly a little because he just wanted to kiss him again anyway. "The thought of you hating me for it. We're...well, I think we're friends. I don't have a lot of friends, and even fewer in the same field as me. It's so rare for me to find someone I don't feel like repeatedly punching because of how stupid they are, but you, you get me. I didn't want to lose that."
"You know for very intelligent man, you can be very stupid."
"You're okay with this then?" Rodney asked, still looking askance at Radek, like he didn't believe it.
"No. I am not okay with the fact that I had to be baked half to death before you came to your senses."
"But we can go back to how we were before?"
"Why would we want to do that?" Radek asked, leaning forward as much as Rodney's hands on his chest would allow and kissing him as he spoke. "I think for the good of the city we need to keep doing this, just like your wise-woman suggested."
Rodney's arms bent a little, pulling Radek towards him more than pushing him away now.
"She only said I had to tell you how I felt," Rodney explained. "And she'd help me by stopping me from being able to say anything else until I had."
"So tell me."
"Well, um, I, well, I think..."
Another kiss stopped the halting response.
"Actually English is not my first language," Radek smiled, laying on his accent and grinning hungrily, "perhaps would be better if you show me."
- Text Size +
Category: Slash Pairings > McKay/Zelenka
Characters: None
Rating: PG
Genres: Pre-relationship
Warnings: None
Series: None
Word count: 3625; Completed: Yes
Summary: Originally written for the Zelenka ficathon.
"Should we get a medical team on standby, do you think, sir?" Ford asked as they jogged steadily back to the Gate.
"No need," was John's curt reply, and they all looked at one another when it was the only one.
The silence was new and strange, only the whistling of legs through grass and steady breathing, instead of the diatribe he'd been unconsciously expecting, although whether it would be about how vitally important McKay was to the mission or about the shocking waste of resources that having Beckett's team on standby when there was no major injury represented, he wasn't entirely sure. John shook his head as they ran; he couldn't believe how much he was missing the sound of McKay's whining.
He did radio ahead, once the gate was open, to ask that the infirmary be ready to receive them - no serious injuries, no catastrophes, just a minor problem, - and then they were piling through. By the reception they received in the control room, he may as well have radioed through to say they were all dying, Beckett was present along with what would appear to be most of the infirmary and scientific staff.
"Well, you all look okay," Elizabeth said, walking down the stairs wearing her serious leader's expression, "what happened?"
"I did say it wasn't a catastrophe," John complained, getting an irritated snort from McKay. "Well, okay, Rodney thinks it's a catastrophe."
"Not that he's actually said that," Ford added with a grin.
"What seems to be the problem?" Elizabeth asked, fixing McKay with an inquiring look that quickly transformed into a frown when he didn't answer.
"Dr McKay has been rendered incapable of speech," Teyla offered, sounding sympathetic.
"And we're counting this as a bad thing?" someone muttered from within the assembled throng, but John couldn't tell exactly who it had been, so he settled for glaring in the general direction of the crowd, just in case it had been one of his men.
Elizabeth faltered for a moment.
"Okay then, people," she said. "Debriefing. Unless you want to take Dr McKay for some tests, Carson?"
"I'd not know where to start without knowing what happened," Beckett mused aloud, eyeing McKay in a way that made it clear that a lot of blood tests and various other uncomfortable proddings were looming large in his immediate future.
They sojourned to the meeting room to debrief. Not that there was much to say.
"So you were granted an audience with their wise-woman?" Elizabeth recapped, one eyebrow raised as she looked around the table.
"Individual audiences," John clarified.
"What did you do, Rodney?" Beckett chided.
McKay just held his hands out and shrugged, managing to portray an aggrieved innocence that no one in the room believed.
"Was Rodney the only one of you to actually have an audience with the woman?" Elizabeth asked, and it was John's turn to feel put out.
"Of course not," he said. "I went first, in case it was a trap."
"And?"
He shrugged, forcing himself to sit with one arm slung insouciantly over the back of the chair.
"She was some kind of love doctor or something," he said, only blushing very faintly, in counterpoint to the way the colour drained from McKay's face. "Wanted to offer me advice on my sex life."
McKay shook his head frantically but was ignored.
"So, maybe she thought Dr McKay's love life would improve if he'd stop talking." Ford offered, still grinning.
"Perhaps this would be a good time for me to take Rodney to the infirmary, do some tests, see if we can work out exactly what this woman has done to him," Beckett suggested, after McKay made it clear that he was still capable of gesticulating, quite eloquently.
The two men left first, Beckett already asking questions that were carefully formulated to require only yes or no as an answer, so McKay could nod or shake his head, and the rest of the group filed out afterwards. Elizabeth called John back as he got to the door.
"Do you want to tell me exactly what happened, in your meeting with the wise-woman?" she asked. "I thought maybe the audience here might have put you off."
John gave her a tight smile and sat back down. He didn't want to, not really, and he couldn't see that it would be overly helpful. If the woman had wanted to say the same thing to all of them, why insist on seeing them separately? Although he was grateful no one else had been privy to his turn.
"Yeah, it was kind of weird. She was in this dark little room, sitting at a table, it reminded me of a palm-reader's tent at a fairground." He studied Elizabeth's face for a moment, before continuing. "She put her hand on my forehead, and said...and said, I wouldn't find love until I let people get close to me. Crazy, huh? I mean she'd known me for all of five seconds, I'd barely spoken to her."
"Did it feel..." Elizabeth folded her hands in front of her, and spoke in her most diplomatic voice, "did it feel accurate? Could we be dealing with a race of telepaths or something?"
"It felt, yeah, it did, but they do, don't they? Horoscopes and palm readings and stuff. I don't know how they do it, but they always seem to find something that seems to fit, that seems uncannily right, so you'll believe everything else they say."
There was silence for a long moment.
"I didn't think she was a threat to security here. You don't think she's taken stuff out of Rodney's head? They seemed like a bunch of hippies, but then I guess the Genii seemed like a bunch of hicks."
"We'll change the codes on the IDC's, and ask Bates to post a sentry at the infirmary and then Rodney's quarters when Carson releases him. Speaking of which...."
John nodded, in what was a salute by another name, and they went to the door. As they got there he paused.
"She asked me if I wanted help," he said. "I said no."
***
Beckett couldn't find anything wrong on McKay's exam or blood tests, although the Ancient version of a PET scan did reveal a few quiescent areas of brain tissue that should have been lighting up. They were all in language centres.
"A stroke?" Elizabeth asked but Beckett shook his head.
"It's too many separate areas to be a stroke, and it seems unlikely that several small ones would appear in these areas. It's far too precise."
McKay gesticulated wildly, and Elizabeth shot him a sympathetic glance, patting him on the arm for support. He shook her hand off irritably, snapping his fingers at Beckett until he handed over his coffee cup, McKay's notes, and finally, his pen.
McKay, face screwed up in concentration like a small child practicing his letters managed to draw on the back of his notes with the pen. He shoved the cardboard-bound volume back at Beckett and folded his arms triumphantly.
Beckett and Elizabeth exchanged glances with John.
"Um, this doesn't say anything, Rodney," Beckett said, and McKay scowled, snatching the notes back, and scribbling something else, more easily this time.
It was a little stick figure of a man with glasses and unruly hair, which McKay added to when they didn't immediately understand.
"Dr Zelenka?" Elizabeth suggested and McKay beamed. "You want us to get Dr Zelenka?"
Zelenka was summoned from where he'd been working on the desalination tanks. He looked disturbingly like his portrait had, right down to his hair, which was even more untidy than usual because of the salt, and he was clearly unimpressed at being called away from his work.
He stood in the infirmary, looking irritably from Beckett to Elizabeth to John to McKay until they realised that he hadn't heard the news. Beckett filled him in, right up to the point when McKay had asked that he be sent for. Zelenka opened his mouth to speak, but McKay was scribbling again and motioning Zelenka to look at what he'd drawn, and whatever had crossed his mind wasn't voiced. If he spotted the drawing of himself, he didn't react, although he did run a hand through his salt-stiff hair absentmindedly a few times.
"You are thinking nanovirus again?" he asked McKay, when McKay stopped actually drawing and started merely pointing to things already on the piece of cardboard with increasingly tetchy jabs of the pen.
Beckett shook his head.
"I've already looked. There's no sign of any nanotechnology in your blood, and no extra EM field in your EEG. We recalibrated the machine," he explained mainly to Elizabeth, "so we could pick the wee things up more easily."
McKay visibly deflated, and Zelenka put a hand on his shoulder. It wasn't shaken off.
"Sorry," Beckett said sincerely.
"I too am sorry," Zelenka said. "This is disaster, and not only for Rodney."
McKay drew another stick figure; this one had long hair in a ponytail, was much taller than Zelenka's figure and had a prissy expression on his stick face.
"Yes, well, Kavanagh is an idiot," Zelenka said. "He just can't see past the fact that he's not going to be called on his mistakes to the importance of not making mistakes in the first place."
"Is there any chance it will just wear off?" Elizabeth asked after a short silence and all four men shrugged in unison.
"Without knowing what it is, it's impossible to say," Beckett shrugged.
"Then I guess we have to find out what it is. Major, take your team back. See if we can't get this curse lifted," Elizabeth said, ignoring McKay's scoffing.
The team, consisting of John, Teyla and Ford backed up by Markham, Stackhouse and Bates, was away for five days. They returned with a simple enough message.
"What does this mean?" Zelenka asked, presumably on McKay's behalf, since he'd thrown the notebook he now communicated with by drawing in across the room in frustration the first time he'd been told. "If 'he knows what he must do', surely he'd do it."
McKay gesticulated from under his desk as he retrieved the notebook, pointing at Zelenka with the clear message of 'what he said' in the gesture.
John shrugged.
"That's what the lady said, okay? I'm just telling you what she said. She wouldn't tell us what it was he had to do, just kept smiling at us."
As John was leaving, Zelenka turned to McKay, who was studiously ignoring him, and working on something on his laptop.
"Do you know, Rodney?" Zelenka asked. "What it is you must do?"
McKay continued to ignore him, so John wandered off.
***
A week later the scientists had almost got used to having a silent department head. Productivity had dropped; partly because Kavanagh and his cronies had less problem ignoring Rodney's irritated stick drawings that he tore out of his notebook and stuck on their desks when they'd done something wrong, and partly because Rodney could still spot the errors in the work going on, but communicating what it was, other than pointing repeatedly at the problem area on a schematic was hard. He usually ended up taking it over himself until he'd worked through the error, and then handing it back, which meant that his team weren't learning. Radek knew from past experience that, for all his love of being top dog, there was nothing Rodney enjoyed more than imparting his brilliance to others.
One day Radek found him with Dr Simpson nearly in tears as she tried to work out what Rodney was trying to tell her in increasingly frustrated and indecipherable pictographs. They had schematics for the climate control patch-in spread over the desk.
"It's no good just drawing the same thing over and over, Dr McKay," she was saying. "I know where it's wrong, I just can't work out what to do to fix it."
Rodney threw the pen down, and put his head in his hands.
"I'm sorry," she said, and she sounded like she meant it.
Radek put a hand on her shoulder, and she looked up with something like gratitude in her expression, alongside the regret and frustration already writ large.
"I'll come back later," she said, "maybe a break would help. I might be able to see it later."
"So, I have thought of a solution to Kavanagh," Radek said, apparently oblivious to Rodney's still having his head in his hands. In fact he had a nasty feeling Rodney was either crying or on the verge of doing so, and he had no idea how to handle a full-blown tantrum from his friend, so he was ignoring the feeling in the hope that it would go away.
Rodney looked up from the desk, hands still twisted in his hair.
"I think it is the public nature of humiliation that is missing. So I have made something for you, instead of those little reprimands you leave him."
He gestured out of the door to Rodney's office to where a large board, the same size as the ones warning people not to touch the naquadah generators, festooned with Radek's, rather more artistic, impression of one of Rodney's dressings down was propped against Kavanagh's desk. Unlike the increasingly tiny scraps of paper Rodney had been leaving, there was no way anyone could miss its meaning.
Rodney laughed. There was a very faint edge of hysteria to it, but it was so good to see him laughing instead of looking like he might punch something in frustration that Radek joined him for a moment, glad to have helped, if only a little. Then he sobered.
"Whatever it is, this thing you must do. It can't be worse than this," he said. "Can it?"
Rodney just looked at him, and then away.
Three days later they were sitting at breakfast, chatting one-sidedly in the manner that most of the base had now become accustomed to.
"This reminds me of my childhood," Radek said, after he'd exhausted the previous day's research progress and the coming day's plans. "We had my mother's mother living with us. At the time she just seemed evil, but in retrospect I suspect she was quite severely demented."
Rodney glared at him from over his oatmeal.
"I'm not suggesting that you're losing your mind, Rodney," he said reasonably. "She just, sometimes she found it very frustrating too, she couldn't find the words she wanted, couldn't make herself understood." He popped the last mouthful of his toast into his mouth and smiled. "She was very crabby too."
Rodney's gesticulatory response was lost as the klaxons sounded and the mess hall emptied. It turned out to be an error in Simpson's calculations for the environmental settings, not actually the one Rodney had spotted but been unable to communicate but a different one, that people seemed to have expected him to have seen, from what Radek had heard around the city.
Either way, it had left them with an Atlantis that thought it was in the depths of a Siberian winter and the heating set at full power. Given that it was, in actual fact, summer, the amount of heat the city was capable of generating through the solar panels was quite terrifying. Radek had just climbed out of his third shower of the evening, eschewing clothing for the damp towel around his waist, and settled down to run through the options for heat exhaustion from the city for easily the fifteenth time, when he heard a knock at the door.
Running a hand through his damp hair he went to answer it. Rodney stood at the threshold, looking somewhere between furious and perplexed, which seemed to be his standard expression of late. It wasn't much of a surprise to Radek to see him. They worked well together, and this problem needed fixing, and quickly. He gestured Rodney into his room, belatedly realising his own near nakedness, and reluctantly accepting the need to get dressed, swiftly, before the effect a hot and irritated Rodney induced in him became too obvious. He snagged up a pair of pants and the thinnest shirt he had brought with him to Pegasus and bolted back into the bathroom. He stood behind the door for a long moment, willing his errant body to behave. This had been a terrible day for Rodney, who had taken a lot of the blame, both spoken and otherwise, for the problems everyone was suffering, quite apart from the difficulties of the past two weeks. The last thing he needed was for Radek to step outside the bounds of propriety now, when he was practically the only person left in the city still on friendly terms with him. Radek had tried to make people understand how hard silence had been on Rodney, that mistakes were bound to happen because Rodney thought by talking, but he'd gone unheeded. He didn't want Rodney to think it had all been merely a ruse of some kind, a desperate attempt to get into his pants.
He jumped when Rodney banged on the bathroom door, hammering his frustration in a manner that was reminiscent of the way his grandmother had demanded attention when he'd been a child by beating her cane on the floor. He struggled into his clothes - the thought of his grandmother had taken rapid care of his unwanted erection, if nothing else - and stepped back out into the bedroom.
Rodney was pacing, fanning himself with his one of his ubiquitous notebooks, his other hand clenching and unclenching into a fist as he walked. Radek had the sudden thought that Rodney knew Radek had been carrying a kind of pathetic torch for him ever since they'd arrived in Atlantis and was going to punch him. He had time to wish Rodney had done it while he was still of a scientist's physique and then the notebook was flying across the room, and Rodney was bunching both hands up in Radek's thin shirt and pushing him against the wall next to the bathroom door. The impact made a horribly loud noise in the quiet of the room, and knocked the breath out of Radek.
He braced himself for the punch but instead of the fist he was expecting, dry, faintly chapped lips met his. It wasn't a great kiss, by any stretch of the imagination. Radek was frozen in place by the shock of it, and his glasses were digging into the side of his nose and, he strongly suspected, into Rodney's face too.
"That's what I had to do," Rodney said, and his voice sounded exactly like he hadn't used it in a fortnight.
He stepped back a little, his hands still holding Radek to the wall but more in a way that suggested he thought Radek might hit him if he could get a good enough swing in.
"I can understand your reluctance," Radek choked out, still feeling the sense memory of the kiss, his head still reeling from it.
Rodney just stared at him, his expression, for the first time in weeks, totally unreadable to Radek.
"That was sarcasm," Radek clarified gently. "I cannot believe the thought of kissing me was so awful, that you preferred to be mute."
"Not the thought of kissing you," Rodney argued, and Radek wanted to kiss him again, just out of sheer joy at hearing his voice, possibly a little because he just wanted to kiss him again anyway. "The thought of you hating me for it. We're...well, I think we're friends. I don't have a lot of friends, and even fewer in the same field as me. It's so rare for me to find someone I don't feel like repeatedly punching because of how stupid they are, but you, you get me. I didn't want to lose that."
"You know for very intelligent man, you can be very stupid."
"You're okay with this then?" Rodney asked, still looking askance at Radek, like he didn't believe it.
"No. I am not okay with the fact that I had to be baked half to death before you came to your senses."
"But we can go back to how we were before?"
"Why would we want to do that?" Radek asked, leaning forward as much as Rodney's hands on his chest would allow and kissing him as he spoke. "I think for the good of the city we need to keep doing this, just like your wise-woman suggested."
Rodney's arms bent a little, pulling Radek towards him more than pushing him away now.
"She only said I had to tell you how I felt," Rodney explained. "And she'd help me by stopping me from being able to say anything else until I had."
"So tell me."
"Well, um, I, well, I think..."
Another kiss stopped the halting response.
"Actually English is not my first language," Radek smiled, laying on his accent and grinning hungrily, "perhaps would be better if you show me."