Unidentified, Part 1b
Jul. 9th, 2007 12:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiercelydreamedTitle: Unidentified
Details: PG-13, ~30,000 words, McKay/Sheppard. An SGA AU inspired by the documentary Unknown White Male.
Summary: Fourteen years, eight months, and seven days after John and Rodney meet, the clock starts all over again.
Notes: Very vague spoilers through season 3. See the index post for full headers and thank-yous.
[Go to previous part] [Index post]
[1992. August.]
The afternoon sun is pounding Pasadena into submission, and the air conditioning in the Residence Life office is losing both the battle and the war. John runs a hand over the back of his neck and smiles at the girl behind the counter. He really wishes the kid to his left would quit yelling.
"So I guess I should've sent in that housing form, huh," John says.
"Mmm. That probably would've been wise." The girl flips to the next page in the stack of papers and keeps typing. "You didn't get the reminder notices, I take it?"
"No," John says, squinting. He'd spent most of the summer lifeguarding at the Y, getting drunk with the other guys on the football team, and logging flight hours toward his pilot's license. Everything except the flying is fuzzy and hard to remember. "No, I think I probably did."
"Oh come on, that policy is completely moronic, which I distinctly remember explaining to you people when I received the denial of my housing request," snaps the kid. He's leaning halfway across the counter, one hand planted for balance while he jabs the index finger of the other at the desk blotter. The woman sitting across from him looks like she's about ready to wrap the phone cord around his neck and start pulling.
"Really?" John asks. "No dorm rooms?"
"Nope," the girl says, and hits the space bar for emphasis. "Record admission this year -- they've been turning doubles into triples and everything." She points to the double doors behind John. There's a kid about John's age sitting in one of the chairs, surrounded by bags covered in customs stickers and staring at the floor like he's waiting for a pit to open at his feet and swallow him whole. "Be glad you're not that guy. He missed a connecting flight and it took him thirty-three hours to get here from Scotland. Then he finds out his housing form got lost in the mail."
"Listen, I realize that my superior intelligence must be very confusing for you, but I swear to god, I am eighteen." The guy to John's left digs a passport out of his pocket and brandishes it in the woman's face. "I am here to work on my dissertations, not to take some kind of predatory sexual advantage of undergrads who are, wait for it, my own age or older. Now would you please stop wasting my time and find me a godforsaken dorm room?"
The woman gives him a look of deep hatred. "I'm going to have to check with a supervisor. This could take a while." She heads into the back at the deliberate pace of someone who intends to be gone for as long as possible. The kid throws his hands up in disgust and stomps over to the nearest chair, slumping down into it and rubbing at his forehead.
He's probably a dick, but John kind of feels for him. He spent the last night at the Motel 8, and while it wasn't that bad, he's not relishing the idea of going back there. He wonders where he can find a local paper, and whether anyone'll take him without a rental history. If not, maybe he can talk his boss at the Y into lying for him. He really doesn't want to have to call his parents. "Got any suggestions?"
The girl frowns off into space, her hand going still on the keyboard. She snaps her gum decisively. "Listen," she says. "I'll make you a deal. My step-dad owns a house on the edge of campus, and the guys who were living there just got booted for making crystal meth in the chem labs. I'll give you his number and tell him to knock a couple hundred bucks off the deposit, but only--" she points toward the sulking kid-- "if you take that guy with you."
Freshman year is not starting off like he pictured it. "Really? Him?"
"He's been here forty-five minutes already, and I know Andrea's going to make me deal with him if he doesn't leave soon." She grabs a pile of papers and taps them against the desk, then bends to slide them into a drawer. "It'll be cheaper than living on campus and you can still walk to your eight AMs -- also, you won't be homeless. Take it or leave it." She starts clacking away at the keyboard again, clearly communicating that the offer's on the table and she couldn't care less what he wants to do about it. John thinks that if the girls back home had been like her, he would've gotten his ass kicked a lot more often at strip poker.
"I'll take it," he says, and she grins and hits the enter key twice before swiveling her chair to reach for a pad of paper.
"Great," she says, "I'll write down the details while you go introduce yourself to your new roommate." John dips his head, acknowledging via smirk that he's been outmaneuvered. She waits until he's turning away to add, "Oh, and take the Scottish guy, too. He seems nice, plus I think he's going to cry if someone doesn't find him somewhere to sleep soon."
Rolling his eyes, John shoulders his duffel and studies the other guys for a few seconds before heading for the one by the door. "Hi," he says, and the kid jerks his head up, startled. "I'm John Sheppard."
He holds a hand out, and the guy clambers to his feet to shake it. "Carson -- Carson Beckett. Pleasure to meet you, John." He's got a farmer's build and deep, worried circles under his eyes, and he delivers the pleasantry with the earnestness of someone who's too frayed to do more that hope he's telling the truth. "Are you out of luck on bed and board, too?"
"Well, I was," John says, and Carson's eyebrows jump to attention. There's something about him John likes immediately, an air of doggish constancy. He's got a solid handshake, which counts for a lot, and the rumble of his accent is strange but appealing. Yeah, John thinks, I could live with this guy. "But I think I might've found a place. You mind living off campus?"
"Not as long as I'm living somewhere," Carson replies hopefully. "But you don't know me from Adam, are you sure--?"
"Yeah, no problem," he says. Carson breaks into a smile and falls back into the chair, looking relieved and totally exhausted. John clears his throat. "Only catch is, we're also supposed to bring that guy."
He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. Carson leans out to peer around John, eyebrows raised. He frowns, considering, and then shrugs. "Honestly? If I've got a roof over my head and it's not attached to an airport, I don't think I'll really care who's sharing it with me."
John grins. "All right then. One down, one to go."
He drops his bag next to Carson's pile and takes a fortifying breath, then ambles across the room. The kid looks up warily when John drops into the chair next to him. "So," John says, after a moderately awkward pause, "sounds like you're having some housing trouble."
"Words cannot express," the guy groans, and then immediately continues, "but oh my god, I am maybe eight minutes from just beating my head against the wall so that they'll have to find me a room or risk a liability suit. First they turn me down for a spot in graduate housing -- which is especially ridiculous when you consider how much money the aid office ponied up so I'd go here instead of MIT -- and now they're telling me because I'm a grad student, I can't stay in the undergrad dorms. Well, that and something about there not being any rooms left, but I'm pretty sure that they're just holding out on me because really, Caltech's supposed to be one of the premier schools in the world for higher math -- do they honestly expect me to believe their administrators can't project a damn acceptance-to-admittance attrition curve?"
John, who's been transfixed by the continuousness of the guy's delivery, blinks and says, "You know, you've got a point there. That really is just Algebra 2 and a graphing calculator."
The kid slices one hand through the air. "Thank you," he says, quite sincerely, "I mean it, you have no idea how long I've been waiting for someone to acknowledge the basic stupidity of the situation. Of course," he slumps way down in the chair and lets his head roll back against the wall, "I'm expecting this moment of gratification to be relatively short-lived, followed by a) an extended period of waiting, then by that harpy either b) handing me a mattress and shoving me in a closet or c) bringing back a supervisor and/or actual physical proof that all the rooms are taken, so," and he draws a humongous breath and hisses most of it back out in frustration, "I'm pretty much screwed either way."
Listening to him is like being on a really well-designed rollercoaster: high climb, fast plunge, a series of twists and turns and just when you think it's pretty much run out of momentum, a blind three-sixty that spits you out, slack-jawed, back at the start. John's fascinated, even as he thinks he's never met anyone whose social abilities could have benefited as much from a bottle of cough syrup. "What's your name?"
The guy raises the hand draped over his eyes and peers up at him. "Uh, Rodney. McKay."
"I'm John Sheppard." He twists in his chair and sticks his hand out. Rodney blinks at it, like he's not used to other people offering him this, then he reaches out slowly and shakes John's hand. His palm is smooth and clammy, and he fumbles a little when he pulls away.
"If you're looking for a place to live, my friend Carson and I are going to check out a house later," John says, nodding to where Carson's sitting. "We could use a third person."
Rodney draws himself up, frowning. "What are you talking about, I just saw you introducing yourself to him all of two minutes ago."
John shrugs, amused. "What can I say, I've got a good feeling about him."
Rodney's eyes flicker over John's face, fast as a shutter clicking in a camera, then he snorts, low and surprisingly bitter. Hunching forward, he steeples his fingers on top of his knees. "You seem like a surprisingly decent human being," he says, staring at the floor, "but the thing is, John, for some reason most people tend to hate me on sight, and the few who don't will usually acquire the taste for it after prolonged exposure."
A minute ago, John would've bet ten bucks that you couldn't actually shut this guy up, but he's closed down like a storm cellar. The lines of Rodney's face have rewritten themselves, mobile mouth pressed tight, eyebrows slanting down.
"I don't think that's going to be a problem, actually," John says.
Rodney sneers. "What, you've got a 'good feeling' about me, too?" But he glances back a second later, like the first look was for show and he's trying to sneak this one in under the wire.
Rodney's thin and sharp-faced, the kind of pale you get from staying away from the windows year round, with bony wrists and messy hair curling over his forehead. Something about him, the long brows and the arch of his cheekbones, reminds John of the old paintings the teacher showed them in history class: this is what one of those guys would look like if you pulled him out of the Sistine Chapel and sent him to school to get shoved into lockers and have jocks dump piss in his chemistry experiments.
He thinks back to the guys he went to high school with, their broad grins and their broad hands wrapped around the necks of their beer bottles, their cheerleading girlfriends, hair-sprayed and interchangeable. He'd told a couple of his teammates about Caltech, and they gave him these loose-hinged smiles, like they were waiting for the punchline; when there wasn't one, they stared at him like he was a stranger. He stopped telling people after that.
Here he is now, in Pasadena, where no one cares if he was first- or second-string quarterback, no one gives a shit which girl he didn't take to the prom. He's got one duffel, the stub from a one-way Greyhound ticket, and only a vague idea of what the hell he's doing. But he's learned the names of two people so far: Carson Beckett, who knows how to shake hands, and Rodney McKay, who's guarded and belligerent and watching John out of blue eyes that are like one-way mirrors set the wrong way round, facing in instead of out.
"Yeah," John says, and he smiles, slow and easy. "Yeah, you know, I think I kind of do."
---
[Go to part 2 ...]
Details: PG-13, ~30,000 words, McKay/Sheppard. An SGA AU inspired by the documentary Unknown White Male.
Summary: Fourteen years, eight months, and seven days after John and Rodney meet, the clock starts all over again.
Notes: Very vague spoilers through season 3. See the index post for full headers and thank-yous.
[Go to previous part] [Index post]
[1992. August.]
The afternoon sun is pounding Pasadena into submission, and the air conditioning in the Residence Life office is losing both the battle and the war. John runs a hand over the back of his neck and smiles at the girl behind the counter. He really wishes the kid to his left would quit yelling.
"So I guess I should've sent in that housing form, huh," John says.
"Mmm. That probably would've been wise." The girl flips to the next page in the stack of papers and keeps typing. "You didn't get the reminder notices, I take it?"
"No," John says, squinting. He'd spent most of the summer lifeguarding at the Y, getting drunk with the other guys on the football team, and logging flight hours toward his pilot's license. Everything except the flying is fuzzy and hard to remember. "No, I think I probably did."
"Oh come on, that policy is completely moronic, which I distinctly remember explaining to you people when I received the denial of my housing request," snaps the kid. He's leaning halfway across the counter, one hand planted for balance while he jabs the index finger of the other at the desk blotter. The woman sitting across from him looks like she's about ready to wrap the phone cord around his neck and start pulling.
"Really?" John asks. "No dorm rooms?"
"Nope," the girl says, and hits the space bar for emphasis. "Record admission this year -- they've been turning doubles into triples and everything." She points to the double doors behind John. There's a kid about John's age sitting in one of the chairs, surrounded by bags covered in customs stickers and staring at the floor like he's waiting for a pit to open at his feet and swallow him whole. "Be glad you're not that guy. He missed a connecting flight and it took him thirty-three hours to get here from Scotland. Then he finds out his housing form got lost in the mail."
"Listen, I realize that my superior intelligence must be very confusing for you, but I swear to god, I am eighteen." The guy to John's left digs a passport out of his pocket and brandishes it in the woman's face. "I am here to work on my dissertations, not to take some kind of predatory sexual advantage of undergrads who are, wait for it, my own age or older. Now would you please stop wasting my time and find me a godforsaken dorm room?"
The woman gives him a look of deep hatred. "I'm going to have to check with a supervisor. This could take a while." She heads into the back at the deliberate pace of someone who intends to be gone for as long as possible. The kid throws his hands up in disgust and stomps over to the nearest chair, slumping down into it and rubbing at his forehead.
He's probably a dick, but John kind of feels for him. He spent the last night at the Motel 8, and while it wasn't that bad, he's not relishing the idea of going back there. He wonders where he can find a local paper, and whether anyone'll take him without a rental history. If not, maybe he can talk his boss at the Y into lying for him. He really doesn't want to have to call his parents. "Got any suggestions?"
The girl frowns off into space, her hand going still on the keyboard. She snaps her gum decisively. "Listen," she says. "I'll make you a deal. My step-dad owns a house on the edge of campus, and the guys who were living there just got booted for making crystal meth in the chem labs. I'll give you his number and tell him to knock a couple hundred bucks off the deposit, but only--" she points toward the sulking kid-- "if you take that guy with you."
Freshman year is not starting off like he pictured it. "Really? Him?"
"He's been here forty-five minutes already, and I know Andrea's going to make me deal with him if he doesn't leave soon." She grabs a pile of papers and taps them against the desk, then bends to slide them into a drawer. "It'll be cheaper than living on campus and you can still walk to your eight AMs -- also, you won't be homeless. Take it or leave it." She starts clacking away at the keyboard again, clearly communicating that the offer's on the table and she couldn't care less what he wants to do about it. John thinks that if the girls back home had been like her, he would've gotten his ass kicked a lot more often at strip poker.
"I'll take it," he says, and she grins and hits the enter key twice before swiveling her chair to reach for a pad of paper.
"Great," she says, "I'll write down the details while you go introduce yourself to your new roommate." John dips his head, acknowledging via smirk that he's been outmaneuvered. She waits until he's turning away to add, "Oh, and take the Scottish guy, too. He seems nice, plus I think he's going to cry if someone doesn't find him somewhere to sleep soon."
Rolling his eyes, John shoulders his duffel and studies the other guys for a few seconds before heading for the one by the door. "Hi," he says, and the kid jerks his head up, startled. "I'm John Sheppard."
He holds a hand out, and the guy clambers to his feet to shake it. "Carson -- Carson Beckett. Pleasure to meet you, John." He's got a farmer's build and deep, worried circles under his eyes, and he delivers the pleasantry with the earnestness of someone who's too frayed to do more that hope he's telling the truth. "Are you out of luck on bed and board, too?"
"Well, I was," John says, and Carson's eyebrows jump to attention. There's something about him John likes immediately, an air of doggish constancy. He's got a solid handshake, which counts for a lot, and the rumble of his accent is strange but appealing. Yeah, John thinks, I could live with this guy. "But I think I might've found a place. You mind living off campus?"
"Not as long as I'm living somewhere," Carson replies hopefully. "But you don't know me from Adam, are you sure--?"
"Yeah, no problem," he says. Carson breaks into a smile and falls back into the chair, looking relieved and totally exhausted. John clears his throat. "Only catch is, we're also supposed to bring that guy."
He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. Carson leans out to peer around John, eyebrows raised. He frowns, considering, and then shrugs. "Honestly? If I've got a roof over my head and it's not attached to an airport, I don't think I'll really care who's sharing it with me."
John grins. "All right then. One down, one to go."
He drops his bag next to Carson's pile and takes a fortifying breath, then ambles across the room. The kid looks up warily when John drops into the chair next to him. "So," John says, after a moderately awkward pause, "sounds like you're having some housing trouble."
"Words cannot express," the guy groans, and then immediately continues, "but oh my god, I am maybe eight minutes from just beating my head against the wall so that they'll have to find me a room or risk a liability suit. First they turn me down for a spot in graduate housing -- which is especially ridiculous when you consider how much money the aid office ponied up so I'd go here instead of MIT -- and now they're telling me because I'm a grad student, I can't stay in the undergrad dorms. Well, that and something about there not being any rooms left, but I'm pretty sure that they're just holding out on me because really, Caltech's supposed to be one of the premier schools in the world for higher math -- do they honestly expect me to believe their administrators can't project a damn acceptance-to-admittance attrition curve?"
John, who's been transfixed by the continuousness of the guy's delivery, blinks and says, "You know, you've got a point there. That really is just Algebra 2 and a graphing calculator."
The kid slices one hand through the air. "Thank you," he says, quite sincerely, "I mean it, you have no idea how long I've been waiting for someone to acknowledge the basic stupidity of the situation. Of course," he slumps way down in the chair and lets his head roll back against the wall, "I'm expecting this moment of gratification to be relatively short-lived, followed by a) an extended period of waiting, then by that harpy either b) handing me a mattress and shoving me in a closet or c) bringing back a supervisor and/or actual physical proof that all the rooms are taken, so," and he draws a humongous breath and hisses most of it back out in frustration, "I'm pretty much screwed either way."
Listening to him is like being on a really well-designed rollercoaster: high climb, fast plunge, a series of twists and turns and just when you think it's pretty much run out of momentum, a blind three-sixty that spits you out, slack-jawed, back at the start. John's fascinated, even as he thinks he's never met anyone whose social abilities could have benefited as much from a bottle of cough syrup. "What's your name?"
The guy raises the hand draped over his eyes and peers up at him. "Uh, Rodney. McKay."
"I'm John Sheppard." He twists in his chair and sticks his hand out. Rodney blinks at it, like he's not used to other people offering him this, then he reaches out slowly and shakes John's hand. His palm is smooth and clammy, and he fumbles a little when he pulls away.
"If you're looking for a place to live, my friend Carson and I are going to check out a house later," John says, nodding to where Carson's sitting. "We could use a third person."
Rodney draws himself up, frowning. "What are you talking about, I just saw you introducing yourself to him all of two minutes ago."
John shrugs, amused. "What can I say, I've got a good feeling about him."
Rodney's eyes flicker over John's face, fast as a shutter clicking in a camera, then he snorts, low and surprisingly bitter. Hunching forward, he steeples his fingers on top of his knees. "You seem like a surprisingly decent human being," he says, staring at the floor, "but the thing is, John, for some reason most people tend to hate me on sight, and the few who don't will usually acquire the taste for it after prolonged exposure."
A minute ago, John would've bet ten bucks that you couldn't actually shut this guy up, but he's closed down like a storm cellar. The lines of Rodney's face have rewritten themselves, mobile mouth pressed tight, eyebrows slanting down.
"I don't think that's going to be a problem, actually," John says.
Rodney sneers. "What, you've got a 'good feeling' about me, too?" But he glances back a second later, like the first look was for show and he's trying to sneak this one in under the wire.
Rodney's thin and sharp-faced, the kind of pale you get from staying away from the windows year round, with bony wrists and messy hair curling over his forehead. Something about him, the long brows and the arch of his cheekbones, reminds John of the old paintings the teacher showed them in history class: this is what one of those guys would look like if you pulled him out of the Sistine Chapel and sent him to school to get shoved into lockers and have jocks dump piss in his chemistry experiments.
He thinks back to the guys he went to high school with, their broad grins and their broad hands wrapped around the necks of their beer bottles, their cheerleading girlfriends, hair-sprayed and interchangeable. He'd told a couple of his teammates about Caltech, and they gave him these loose-hinged smiles, like they were waiting for the punchline; when there wasn't one, they stared at him like he was a stranger. He stopped telling people after that.
Here he is now, in Pasadena, where no one cares if he was first- or second-string quarterback, no one gives a shit which girl he didn't take to the prom. He's got one duffel, the stub from a one-way Greyhound ticket, and only a vague idea of what the hell he's doing. But he's learned the names of two people so far: Carson Beckett, who knows how to shake hands, and Rodney McKay, who's guarded and belligerent and watching John out of blue eyes that are like one-way mirrors set the wrong way round, facing in instead of out.
"Yeah," John says, and he smiles, slow and easy. "Yeah, you know, I think I kind of do."
---
[Go to part 2 ...]